Histories and Stories from Chiapas: Border Identities in Southern Mexico

Chapter 4 From Mestizo Mexico to Multicultural Mexico: Indigenismo in the Sierra Madre

Chapter 4 FROM MESTIZO MEXICO TO MULTICULTURAL MEXICO INDIGENISMO IN THE SIERRA MADRE The seventies marked a radical turn in relations between indigenous people and the state along the southern border. Integrationist policies shifted, and the nationalist discourse about a mestizo Mexico was replaced by another about a multicultural Mexico. The change in official policies resulted from the confluence of several social forces and from structural transformations in the model of the state, which were starting to be seen under the administration of Luis Echeverría Alvarez. While the inhabitants of Las Ceibas were making their way into the rain forest to found their Paradise on Earth, Mam peasants who remained in the Sierra Madre had a reencounter with the Mexican government. Indigenist officials arrived at ejidal and municipal meetings to promote the ‘‘rescue of Mam culture.’’ This new official indigenism was greeted at first with mistrust and surprise by Sierra inhabitants, who still remembered the violence of forced Mexicanization campaigns during the preceding decades. Yet this new discourse was gradually appropriated by a sector of the local peasantry , who began to define themselves again as Mam. With this newdefinition, the heterogeneous and changing spacewe call ‘‘the state’’ became an arena for confrontations between different conceptions of the future of the nation. Following those who have challenged the unitary and monolithic character of the state, and considering it ‘‘a series of decentralized sites of struggle through which hegemony is both contested and reproduced [and] locations where conflict over power are Tseng 2001.4.30 17:41 DST:103 6289 Hernandez / HISTORIES AND STORIES FROM CHIAPAS / sheet 122 of 317 From Mestizo Mexico to Multicultural Mexico 101 constantly being resolved and hierarchically reordered’’ (Mallon 1995:10), I explore here the contradictions between integrationist and critical indigenists , as well as the way in which such opposed definitions of Mexico have influenced the local projects of the Indigenist Coordinator Center Mam-Mochó-Cakchiquel and the actions of minor officials who were appointed to promote them. Those who have pointed out the need to conceive of state institutions as ethnographic spaces point out that through the action of minor officials ‘‘the state’’ is represented and challenged by its citizens (Gupta 1993). Anthropologists, agronomists, veterinarians, economists, and many other indigenist officials became the incarnation of the populist state for Sierra inhabitants. This study has proceeded on the premise that indigenist policies and actions have influenced the way in which cultural identities are constructed . It is important to acknowledge as well that the state is also formed by everyday actions through which popular movements concomitantly influence the formulation and reformulation of hegemonic projects . The ‘‘everyday forms of state formation’’ include speeches, actions, and rituals through which popular cultures and the state mutually constitute each other (Joseph and Nugent 1994). By means of its indigenist policies , the state established the terms by which the indigenous population would be included in the national project, but at the same time, indigenous and peasant movements took over the indigenist discourse and assigned new meaning to it. Throughout history the Mexican state and popular movements have influenced each other through ‘‘a dialectic of cultural struggle that takes place in a context of unequal power and entails reciprocal appropriations, expropriations, and transformations’’ (Hall 1981:233). Characterizing the Mexican state as corporative has tended to oversimplify the analysis by underlining the state’s capacity to group and control popular sectors. Conventional definitions of Mexican corporatism refer to a set of institutional agreements through which group interests are structured. On these perspectives, corporative structures represent state control mechanisms over groups and subordinate classes (Hamilton 1982; Middlebrook 1995; Garrido [1982] 1991). Although corporative policy rests on the principle that the state decides who are the legitimate representatives of a class or sector of society, its mechanisms of control are not always effective.The very same mechanisms developed by the state to incorporate popular sectors into the hegemonic project can be used by those sectors to develop counterhegemonic practices and discourses (Berzley, English, and French 1994; Mallon 1995; Rubin 1997). A clear exTseng 2001.4.30 17:41 DST:103 6289 Hernandez / HISTORIES AND STORIES FROM CHIAPAS / sheet 123 of 317 102 From Mestizo Mexico to Multicultural Mexico ample of these reciprocal appropriations, expropriations, and transformations between the state and indigenous peoples is the new indigenism...