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

Social Research, Summer, 2003 by Courtney Jung

The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) represents the pinnacle of Salinas' economic liberalization program. NAFTA's central feature is the removal of trade barriers and tariffs between the United States, Canada, and Mexico. The hope of NAFTA for Mexico is that it will encourage foreign investment by companies that want to take advantage of the lowest labor costs within the NAFTA region (Weiss, 1996: 66). Part of the logic of opening up a free-trade area is the rationalization of production and consumption. Assuming full employment, noncompetitive producers will have incentives to move into other sectors of the economy, maximize productivity, and clear the market. The model collides with the reality of very high rates of unemployment and underemployment, which means that farmers who are forced out of agriculture are unable to move to another sector. They shift instead into the ranks of the permanently unemployed--or they move to Texas.

For Mexico, the production of corn has been the single most sensitive tenet of the NAFTA agreement. The United States annually produces roughly 20 times the amount of corn produced in Mexico. Mexican farmers yield an average of 30 bushels an acre, as compared with 134 bushels produced per acre in the United States. Mexican production costs are roughly 30 percent higher (Wollock, 1994: 53). The production of 1 ton of corn in eastern Chiapas can take up to 300 days of labor, measured in man hours. The Mexican average is 8 days, and the average in the United States is 0.15 days (Chiapas en Cifras). Clearly, the United States holds the productive advantage, and under the terms of NAFTA the Mexican market has been gradually opened up to American corn, cutting the cost for Mexican consumers ("Floundering," 2002: 30).

For the 3 million Mexican farmers who currently produce corn on small inefficient fields without access to irrigation, and who with their families represent nearly one-quarter of all Mexicans, NAFTA is a disaster (Wollock, 1994: 53). Not only is there no alternative work they could productively move on to, but corn, and farming, is at the center of the communal life, not just the livelihood, of Mexico's rural population. Rigoberta Menchu describes the depth of the crisis by explaining that "Maize is the center of everything for us. It is our culture" (La Botz, 1995: 25).

It was the repeal of Article 27 of the Mexican constitution, however, which ultimately spelled the demise of the peasant as a political subject position in Mexico. Article 27 has governed land tenure in Mexico since the end of the Revolution in 1917, linking access to land directly to government patronage and thus establishing very strong ties between the peasantry and the PRI (La Botz, 1995: 25). Article 27 obliged the state to redistribute land in the form of ejidos--an area comprised of individual plots and communal property that could not be sold, rented, or used as collateral--to petitioners who fulfilled the necessary legal requirements. Together with a small number of designated "indigenous lands" (comunidades agrarias), ejidos account for almost one-half of all the land in Mexico, although most of it is of poor quality and under-capitalized. In Chiapas, ejidos and comunidades agrarias make up 57 percent of all exploitable land--the highest percentage in a Mexican state (Russell, 1995: 16). One-third of Chiapas' total population of 3.5 million people live on ejidos (La Botz, 1995: 25). The majority of the 2,000 ejidos and comunidades agrarias in Chiapas are located in the Lacandon rain forest, which is notoriously ill-suited to sustained agriculture, and where land tenure is additionally threatened by environmental campaigns for the protection of the rain forest (Harvey, 1994: 22-23).