Reading a Silence: The "Indian" in the Era of Zapatismo

Hasta que guarden silencio no podemos empezar.

—Comandante David, Oventic, Chiapas, 27 July 1996

Politics is possible because the constitutive impossibility of society can only represent itself through the production of empty signifiers.

—Ernesto Laclau, Emancipations (1996)

The guest editors of this special issue of Nepantla on colonial modernities have asked the contributors to consider what is at stake in the conjoining of colonial with modernity: What “marks of difference” and which “lineaments of power” are elucidated through such conjunction? I would like to rephrase the question: What “marks of difference” were engendered by colonialism, and in what ways do such differences continue to inflect the “lineaments of power” within the modern nation-states?

For three centuries, Spanish colonial governmentality in the Americas successfully articulated processes of exploitation with procedures of cultural formation to produce racial and ethnic differences. These differences in turn have structured modern national identities in most of Latin America. It is in this sense that I will explore here the productive conjoining of “colonial modernities,” the two terms tipping forward, as it were, with colonial modifying modernity. For, arguably, the Spanish colonies, though well within the world-system, were neither modern nor capitalist.¹ But modernity in Latin America, including all of that modernity's thriving alternative varieties, bears the imprint of Spanish colonialism. It is with such an understanding of modernity that I reexamine the figure of the “Indian” as a colonial creation, and interpret Zapatismo's iteration of an Indian silence as the basis for alternative representations within modern nationalism.

Colonial Modernities and “Indian” Issues

In my discussion of colonial modernity, the indigenous populations of Mesoamerica are particularly salient. For those characteristics that today seem truly authentic attributes of Mesoamerican indigenous culture still bear the insignia of colonial exploitation. Take, for example, the formation of Indian townships, thousands of which dot the landscape from the valley of Oaxaca to the highlands of Guatemala. Each town has its own council of elders as it highest normative authority, its own system of assembly and decision making, its particular religious obligations, rituals, and saints, its unique “traditional” costume, its distinctive language, and its central plaza around which social and market life is organized. Indeed, during the first round of negotiations between the Mexican government and the Zapatistas² on “Indian Rights and Culture” in 1995, the latter sought communal autonomy—rather than regional autonomy—in Chiapas, recognizing the form of the township as the basis for Indian identity and for the organization of indigenous life. Yet the Indian town as the organizing complement of indigenous life is the engineered product of Spanish colonial governmentality and economic exploitation (Díaz Polanco 1997, 24).

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Spanish Crown perfected ways of managing its most valuable asset in the New World: indigenous labor. It established institutions for the subjugation of the indigenous population and for the rationalization of its exploitation. The most pervasive and successful of these institutions centered on the atomized Indian town, with its set of specific cultural traits. In the first half of the sixteenth century, the Crown's encomienda system assigned conquistadores individual Indian communities, which provided servants and laborers for their haciendas and mines. Rewarded with this “guardianship” for his exploits on behalf of the Crown, the encomendero also collected tribute for the Crown from Indian labors (ibid., 29–34).³ Two plagues in the second half of the sixteenth century severely diminished the indigenous population, precipitating its further relocation and concentration.

Under the supervision of the clerics, the Crown introduced the system of congregaciones, or the forced concentration of dispersed Indian populations, and the strategy of reducciones, or the “voluntary” relocation of entire villages once they converted to Christianity (ibid., 52–58). Ostensibly undertaken for medical and evangelical purposes, these congregaciones and reducciones were more effective than the encomiendas in reorganizing indigenous life-worlds...