Elusive Unity: Factionalism and the Limits of Identity Politics in Yucatán, Mexico

8. The Realpolitik of Yucatecan Multiculturalism

161 8 The Realpolitik of Yucatecan Multiculturalism Historically, tension between unity and discord has characterized each regime of state-sanctioned identity politics experienced by the rural people of Oriente. In the 1920s, the leftist discourse associated with the Socialist Party forged a fragile paramilitary coalition between diverse kajo’ob, but also provided an ideological gloss for factional struggles that fractured this fleeting alliance. In that same decade, the agrarian reform offered an incentive for communities to come together and solicit title to their lands, even as it enabled some dissident factions to stake competing claims that fragmented the population and land base of many older kajo’ob. In the 1930s, schools became monuments of a community’s investment in modernity, even as their foundation often figured in struggles between intra-kaj factions. The schools also instituted a series of “cultural” standards that enabled manifestations of intraDOI : 10.5876/9781607322399:c08 the realpolitik of yucatecan multiculturalism 162 community class distinctions at the same time that they promoted the emergence of a unifying nationalist identity. A similar tension between factionalism and solidarity seems to be emerging in the vernacular discourses on Mayan identity that have developed along with the tourist industry and the emergence of Mexico’s official multiculturalism. In other words, despite what have been significant reformulations of Mexico’s state-sanctioned cultural projects, the everyday politics of Mayan culture in rural Oriente seems to be reproducing the ambivalence of earlier collective labels. This ambivalence, along with the ambiguity about who counts as a Maya person, is contributing to a series of tensions between the expectations of rural Maya speakers and the material benefits that can be derived from ethnic identity politics. As I discussed in the previous chapter, there is not a single and consistently applicable official definition of a “Maya person.” Thus, determining if an individual or group of individuals forms part of the constituency for multicultural politics is more complicated than it was to determine the usufruct rights of peasants to land for participants in the agrarian reform. In this sense, people in rural Oriente who hope to derive tangible benefits from the politics of Mayan identity must tangle with both factional tensions within their communities and the ambiguity of a new set of discourses that is being imposed from the top down. One important aspect of this ambiguity concerns the scope of political concessions that people can expect from the politics of ethnicity. Many rural Maya speakers tend to frame contemporary political events and processes through concepts that they inherited from older regimes of agrarian politics, or by drawing parallels to events that are familiar from the collective memory of the twentieth century. Some invoke a corporatist model of Mayan identity that draws important parallels between older agrarian institutions and the discourse of indigenous rights. Even in “postpeasant ” communities such as Pisté, people often articulate progressivist or patrimonialist ideas of culture to stake territorial claims to major tourist sites, claims that echo the radical redistribution of resources during the agrarian reform.1 But is engaging the state as “Mayas” today necessarily yielding the same kind of concessions that engaging the state as “peasants” and “workers” did in the 1920s and 1930s? This question is a familiar one to students of post–Cold War multiculturalism. In her classic analysis of late twentieth-century political movements, Nancy Frazer (1996) situates multiculturalism within a broad transition away from a “politics of redistribution” to a “politics of recognition.” She argues that the twentieth-century politics of redistribution had been characterized by class-identified subaltern groups clamoring for a radical systemic transformation that would lead to a more equitable distribution of capital and resources. In contrast, recognition-based politics gained prominence after the 1960s, when groups that were identified with different ethnic, the realpolitik of yucatecan multiculturalism 163 sexual, or ideological minorities asserted their own right to be different within an existing system. Frazer’s discussion of the difficulties of reconciling the politics of difference with the desire for a more humane distribution of economic resources is mirrored in discussions of Latin American multiculturalism. Since the late 1990s, authors working in the region have documented a range of cases in which the mobilization of indigenous identity has been appropriated and “domesticated” by neoliberal politicians (Bartra 2002b; Hale 2005). In many cases, indigenous identity politics seems to offer rural communities a means of seeking limited concessions amid the decline of traditional...