The politics of indigenous identity: neoliberalism, cultural rights, and the Mexican Zapatistas

Social Research, Summer, 2003 by Courtney Jung

Instead, indigenous identity is the condition of participation in a global political dialogue. Indigenous identity claims a political voice for many of those who have been most marginalized and oppressed by modernity, and asserts for this group the "right to have fights." Indigenous identity has forged new political spaces, strategies, and alliances that insert new political actors into the public discourse. Indigenous identity pluralizes and transforms this discourse, and is self-consciously intended as a challenge to existing hierarchies, exclusions, and patterns of state-society relations.

Indigenous identity arises, moreover, as a condition of politics itself. The condition of an indigenous political identity is not the prior existence of an ancient culture or language, nor is it the distinct set of practices that bound group membership. Indigenous identity develops political resonance only to the extent that it is employed by the state itself as a marker of inclusion and exclusion. The role of government policy in the formation of oppositional identity is the central thrust of Anthony Marx's argument that "states made race," for example, in his seminal study of Black opposition in South Africa, Brazil and the United States (Marx, 1998). Marx's argument about the role of the state in producing the terms of its own opposition was of course prefigured by Gramsci's concept of hegemony.

But why in particular did "states make race" in the 1960s and 1970s in South Africa and the United States in light of the fact that race had operated as the primary marker of exclusion in each of those societies for centuries? And why did "indigenous" fail to emerge as a salient form of political identification until the 1990s, when indigenous people have been excluded from rights in citizenship since the moment of colonization?

I argue that the rise of indigenous identity is implicated with neoliberal economic and political initiatives that have redefined the role of the state. As governments have relinquished responsibility for social and economic well-being, the political leverage of class identities (like peasant and worker) has diminished. Yet almost simultaneously, the international human fights regime has expanded its definition of rights to include not only individual rights in physical and political protection but also collective rights in cultural protection. Indigenous rights in particular have emerged as a central component of the rights regime enshrined by such international organizations as the United Nations and the International Labor Organization (ILO). Activists whose capacity to advance political claims on the basis of a peasant identity that has been eviscerated by neoliberal policies have adopted an indigenous political identity in an attempt to reclaim a political voice and to establish their presence as citizens with "the right to have rights."

It is the existence of a discourse of rights that establishes the precondition of a political subject position. Individuals do not automatically occupy positions from which they can make claims on the state, but carving out a political subject position, or locating oneself within a preexisting position, is a basic condition of political agency. In this paper I develop an account of the formation of the indigenous subject position, and of the attempt of Mexico's rural poor to locate themselves as indigenous people, for the purpose of asserting a political voice. I focus additionally on the role of the Zapatista movement in raising the domestic and international profile of indigenous rights, in expanding the terms of the indigenous subject position, and in linking indigenous rights to an emerging global opposition.