History in Person: Enduring Struggles, Contentious Practice, Intimate Identities

8 Class and Identity The Jujitsu of Domination and Resistance in Oaxa California

8 Class and Identity The Jujitsu of Domination and Resistance in Oaxacalifornia Michael Kearney Among the most enduring struggles in world history is that of indigenous peoples of the Americas against nonindigenous peoples and their institutions and against forms of identity that arrived in the Western Hemisphere after 1492. This chapter examines the sociocultural dynamics of the contemporary phase of this long saga for indigenous peoples from the state of Oaxaca in southern Mexico, with special attention to the growth and actions of an organization that represents them, the Frente Indígena Oaxaqueño Binacional, often referred to as the Frente.1 My basic questions are these: Why do many Mexican indigenous peoples, such as those represented by the Frente, continue now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, to endure as distinct identities within the greater Mexican nation-state? And why are some such identities now becoming more intensely lived and more extensively organized? Until recently, the great master narrative of modern Mexican nationalism was one of the leveling of residual postcolonial cultural differences as indigenous and nonindigenous peoples presumably melded into an emergent modern, mestizo nation. But two trends are 247 notable in the present moment. One is the resurgence of indigenous identities at a time when indigenous peoples’ “assimilation” into “modern ” national societies and cultures was widely assumed to be inevitable. Now, however, after almost five centuries of this “civilizing project” in Mexico, such differences are still deep, and indeed, new politicized cultural differences are emerging along the divide of indigenous and nonindigenous identities. The most noteworthy is the uprising of the Zapatista National Liberation Army, or EZLN, in the Mexican state of Chiapas in 1994, in which the Zapatistas presented themselves primarily as a movement of indigenous peoples rather than as peasants or workers (Harvey 1998). Indigenous peoples thus have a contemporary prominence in national and international political arenas at a time when many anthropologists and others had predicted their demise.2 In addition to the Oaxacan case and that of the Zapatistas, there are numerous other examples of such emergent indigenous presences throughout the Americas (Kearney and Varese 1990; Van Cott 1995; Warren 1998, this volume). Another notable feature of the present conjuncture is that the Mexican state, after a long-term policy of nonrecognition of indigenous peoples and of incorporating them into the national mainstream, is now, in significant ways, reversing this policy. Through various constitutional reforms and policy initiatives, the Mexican state appears to be supporting the viability of indigenous communities and cultural institutions even as it seeks to contain them by doing so. One way of regarding such a policy shift is to see it as a capitulation to the politics of multiculturalism. However, the analysis presented here suggests that it is instead a subtle means of reproducing class inequality in Mexican society, albeit an inequality that manifests itself as ethnic differences. In brief, I argue that the resurgent expression of ethnicity (a form of identity) in the Oaxacan case is largely a cultural expression of and a proxy for a partial consciousness of subaltern class positions in fields of unevenly distributed value. Class consciousness has proved a poor basis for mobilization in postrevolutionary Mexico and, indeed, in most of contemporary Latin America and elsewhere. But a recent deterioration of living standards for millions of Mexicans, associated with neoliberal reforms and a falling peso, has stimulated a variety of protests that have taken the form of “new social movements”—NSMs—the first of which MICHAEL KEARNEY 248 exploded onto the political scene in the wake of the great 1985 Mexico City earthquake (Escobar and Alvarez 1992; Foweraker and Craig 1990). Most of the theorists and activists discussing NSMs in Mexico see them as viable alternatives to class-based politics. But whereas NSMs tend to be formed around specific issues and identities—such as urban services, the environment, debtors’ rights, women’s needs, and gender politics—ethnicity as a base of mobilization tends to encompass a broader range of political objectives.3 Even though ethnicity has the potential to bring together multiple issues, however, its potential social base is limited by the sociocultural specificity of its membership. Nevertheless, indigenous peoples who present themselves as such may have the power to enlist broad support from other groups and sectors, and often from ones abroad (Brysk 1996). The second part of the thesis is that once ethnicity is out...