Histories and Stories from Chiapas: Border Identities in Southern Mexico

FOREWORD

FOREWORD    R. Aída Hernández Castillo’s Histories and Stories from Chiapas traces the historical vicissitudes of Mexican Mam identity, showing how these people have both disappeared from official view and continued to exist as a self-conscious group. In other words, her innovative study explores the dilemmas of an ethnic group whose very existence has been called into question. The Mexican Mam disappeared from view because of the changes that they underwent in language, dress, religion, and subsistence. These changes made them appear to have vanished as an indigenous minority and to have assimilated into the mestizo majority, thereby losing their collective identity. Official discourse used a rather quaint and folkloric schema to determine whether or not people belonged to an indigenous ethnic group; it made judgments as to the existence or nonexistence of indigenous groups in accord with such criteria as speaking an indigenous language, wearing distinctive costumes, practicing an indigenous or folk Catholic form of religion, and doing subsistence agriculture (preferably cultivating maize, beans, and squash) in a well-defined territory. The Mexican Mames fell outside official definitions of the indigenous when most of them became monolingual speakers of Spanish, stopped wearing their ‘‘native’’ dress, became members of the National Presbyterian Church (and later became Jehovah’s Witnesses), and worked for wages on coffee plantations. Each of the above changes would have seemed a sign of absorption into the national mestizo identity, a process which was regarded a one-way street and irreversible. Hernández herself once Tseng 2001.4.30 17:41 DST:103 6289 Hernandez / HISTORIES AND STORIES FROM CHIAPAS / sheet 9 of 317 x Renato Rosaldo held precisely theview that therewere no Mexican Mames, as she recorded in her field diary and in her Honors Thesis during the late 1980s. Thus her book is at once a personal and more general theoretical reconception of what it is to be a member of an indigenous ethnic group in Mexico. Perhaps where the author most vividly brings home the dilemma of the Mexican Mames is in one of her ‘‘Border Crossings,’’ vivid biographical portraits that deepen her analysis. A Mam man named Pedro brings home the issues that animate Hernández’s study in the following poignant and ingenious observation about the limits of using language as a criterion for determining indigenous ethnic identity: ‘‘I am also Mam, even if I do not speak the language. Because, after all, what is language? I speak English, and I am not gringo, right?’’ Histories and Stories from Chiapas shows that official discourse about what defines an Indian in Mexico has undergone major transformations through time. The appearance and disappearance of the Mames results from the interaction between this shifting official discourse and changes undergone by the Mexican Mames themselves. The shifts in official discourse with regard to indigenous ethnic identity fall into roughly four periods from 1935 to the present. First, the period of 1935–1950 was marked by a policy of forced acculturation and the imposition of Mexican national (mestizo) identity. The Mexican Mames remember it as the time of ‘‘the burning of the costumes,’’ as people were coerced to abandon their ‘‘native’’ garb and dress like mestizos. Second, the period of 1950–1970 was defined by a modernization project that included road construction and the technological development of agriculture. For the Mames this was the time of ‘‘purple disease’’ (onchocercosis), which assumed epidemic proportions among Mam workers on coffee plantations. It was also the period of the first ethnographic field trips through the region inhabited by the Mames. Third, the period of 1970–1989 involved an ideological shift from conceiving of Mexico as a mestizo nation to regarding it as a multicultural nation. Fourth, the Zapatista uprising of January 1, 1994, brought a new definition of what it meant to be Indian in Mexico, whether or not people actively supported the EZLN. If the Mames, to invoke Marx, make their own history, theydo so under conditions not of their own choosing. Their identity is formed and reinvented over and over in a field of power relations in which they occupy a subordinate position. If at one phase of history the Mexican Mames become invisible as an ethnic group, at other phases they reinvent themselves through ethnic dance groups and through agro-ecological cooperative societies.The bordercrossings they negotiate in their lives are at times Tseng 2001.4.30 17:41 DST:103...