Singing for the Dead: The Politics of Indigenous Revival in Mexico

5. Meeting at the Family Crypt: Social Fault Lines and the Fragility of Community

5 Meeting at the Family Crypt Social Fault Lines and the Fragility of Community The church is his bin Laden. —Alberto Prado speaking about his brother Heriberto Prado Two Brothers, Two Projects, and the Politics of Revival This chapter considers what the Sierra’s two revival projects—the Mazatec Indigenous Church and the Day of the Dead Song Contest (and its associated activities)—can tell us about the politics of ethnic revival when viewed on an intimate scale. I first discuss the contentious position the Mazatec Indigenous Church occupies in the Sierra. Objections other people have launched against the Mazatec church demonstrate how its practices and ideologies commit its members to waging war not only against the Catholic Church but also against local society more generally. These high social costs are, in turn, directly related to the project’s limited popular appeal.When examined alongside the popular success of the Dayof the Dead Song Contest, the Mazatec church throws into relief certain aspects of the song contest. The reverse is also true.Viewed in tandem, however, the complementarity and mutuality of the two movements come to the fore. Furthermore, reading these two revival projects as symbiotic rather than opposed—despite the ways they are constructed by local people as conflicting—provides insight into the potential revival projects have to create social change while illuminating the substantial limitations revival projects face in realizing social transformations. While my analysis is grounded in community-­ wide arguments about the Mazatec church, I also maintain focus on the two Prado brothers who have been so centrally involved in the development of these two revival projects. I discuss the positions the brothers have taken on the nature of community Meeting at the Family Crypt 175 and the “authentic” Mazatec person who makes community possible. While the brothers’positions are in someways diametricallyopposed, in other ways they are reciprocally reinforcing. Their differing attitudes toward a range of religious and political issues link them to social fault lines that cut across the Sierra, factionalism that in various forms haunts minoritygroups throughout Mexico and other countries around the world. This pair of cases reveals the constraints under which revival movements labor in balancing local expectations against engagement with national institutions and discourses. Showing how such disputes ricochet within families sheds light on their lived stakes. The focus on key individuals in this case shows how people live their daily lives in the shadowofdeep social rifts while also searching for ways to transcend them—through, for example, enacting such moments of détente as occur annually during Day of the Dead celebrations , when even feuding members of families meet in the cemetery and set aside their differences, if only for the day, to honor the dead. ​ “Ska-­ le” (He’s Crazy): Religious Divisions and the Stakes in Arguments about Them The Mazatec Indigenous Church emerged from some of the most shocking recent events in the social life of the Sierra Mazateca, and its founding constituted a pivotal moment in the history of the large extended family, the Prados , at the epicenter of those events. Within the family, as within the region as a whole, the often bitter arguments surrounding the emergence of the Mazatec church explicitly concerned religious difference. However, as the arguments unfolded, they pulled into their wake a numberofother hotlycontested issues: competing ideas about tradition, modernity, authenticity, language use, indigenous identity, and even the meaning of community itself. Thus, arguments about religion were almost never only about religion.While they often expressed localized concerns and differences, they also came to both condition and exemplify a broad range of pressing social issues with which Sierra residents grapple, as do indigenous people throughout the hemisphere. Religious affiliation in Nda Xo has become a symbol of difference as well as its substance. The different forms of religious allegiance at issue in this case entail adherence to divergent views about social solidarity, indigenous belonging, and modern life in Mexico. Furthermore, such views are linked to conflicting ways ofacting on those ideas, through practices that recursively inscribe difference in the activities of everyday life. 176 Chapter 5 As we have seen, what members of the Mazatec Indigenous Church claim they do (or should do) and what they do in daily life are often at odds: the gap between stated ideology and quotidian practice can be considerable. The resistance church members encounter in trying to narrow this divide is tied, in turn...