Politics, Identity, and Mexico's Indigenous Rights Movements by Todd A. Eisenstadt

Author:Todd A. Eisenstadt
Language: eng
Format: mobi, pdf
Tags: Comparative Politics, Social Science, General, Anthropology, Cultural, Political Science
ISBN: 9781139498944
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2011-03-20T18:30:00+00:00

Cambridge Books Online

http://ebooks.cambridge.org/

Politics, Identity, and Mexico’s Indigenous Rights Movements

Todd A. Eisenstadt

Book DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511976544

Online ISBN: 9780511976544

Hardback ISBN: 9781107001206

Chapter

6 - FROM BALACLAVAS TO BASEBALL CAPS pp. 129-156

Chapter DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511976544.007

Cambridge University Press

6

From Balaclavas to Baseball Caps

THE MANY HATS OF “REAL

WORLD” INDIGENOUS

IDENTITIES

Zinacantán was a closed and conservative indigenous community when

Professor Evon

Vogt negotiated entry for students with the Harvard

Chiapas Project in the 1950s. This became one of anthropology’s most

“singularly successful” efforts ever to “describe the inside of native culture”

(Rus 2002 , 240). Fifty year later, aggrieved citizens of the same Tzotzil

municipality were among those who most effectively took up the Zapatistas

cause and rallied under the banner of indigenous rights. But they weren’t

advocating class warfare: the region is actually one of Chiapas’s most cap-

italistic by virtue of its booming trade in greenhouse fl owers. And they

weren’t demanding political or economic autonomy: the proximate cause

of citizen unrest was that they received too few state resources. They joined

the Zapatistas because joining the Zapatistas worked. It drew attention to

their grievances and forced the government to respond. Far from the con-

fl ict in the Lacandon jungles that was discussed in Chapter 4 , this small

but well-networked group of Zinacantán Zapatistas essentially seized upon

the Zapatista identity. They became citizens of an imagined collective and

adopted a novel identity in order to fi nd a new means of protesting harsh

treatment by the state. They joined a communalistic group rights organiza-

tion for partly individualistic and instrumental reasons. Such is the duality

of everyday indigenous ethnicity in southern Mexico.

In December 2003, Zinacantán’s fi rst PRD-led state government shut

off running water to the impoverished Jechvó community in Zinacantán.

Tensions had grown over the winter between that hamlet community and

the much more prosperous municipal seat of Zinacantán, until thousands of

masked Zapatistas were dispatched from the Oventik “Good Government”

Junta to march in Jechvó in April 2004 in support of the waterless local

residents. The Zapatistas’ show of support emboldened local Zapatista

129

Downloaded from Cambridge Books Online by IP 14.139.43.12 on Tue Oct 09 10:07:33 BST 2012.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511976544.007

Cambridge Books Online © Cambridge University Press, 2012

Mexico’s Indigenous Rights Movements

sympathizers, many of whom did not have a history of participation in the

insurgency 1 but had seized upon the symbolic value of being considered

part of the larger movement. Like other second-generation Zapatistas in

Chiapas’s central highlands communities, these citizens were grasping for

new, more resonant means of expressing grievances against the municipal

and state governments.

Unlike the fi rst-generation Zapatista uprising, which concerned the

extravagant failures of federal and state agrarian policies and the landed

elite’s decades-long effort to maintain dramatically unequal wealth dis-

tribution through repression and co-optation, the second- generation of

Zapatista confl icts, such as the one in Zinacantán, concerned the nonex-

istent or inadequate provision of services, political corruption, and local

authoritarianism. As just a group of peasants protesting the shut-off of

their water, the Zinacantáns were powerless. But as Zapatistas, they were

members of an international movement with a history of taking action and

getting results. They could suddenly portray themselves as part of a pow-

erful network that had to be reckoned with.

In addition to simply being necessary for survival, water has been shown

to have a special life-giving meaning for indigenous citizens in Zinacantán

(Burguete 2000 , 72–77).

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.