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

Social Research, Summer, 2003 by Courtney Jung

In anticipation of the need to comply with Convention 169, Mexico created the Commission of Justice for Indian People (CJPI) to draft a proposal to amend Article 4 of the Mexican constitution (Ewen, 1994: 36). The CJPI undertook an extensive series of opinion surveys and consultations in 1989 and 1990 to prepare the ground for legislation on the indigenous population. The consultation consisted of 136 meetings with both indigenous and nonindigenous groups, but no indigenous rights activists were consulted, and the commission did not include a single indigenous representative. Even with this fairly conservative background, the proposal to legislate indigenous rights met with considerable opposition in the Congress--not only over the content of the reform, but also over the location of the reform within the constitution. After significant delays, the initiative proposed by the president--to confer cultural rights on indigenous peoples--was passed unchanged (Hindley, 1996: 232-236). For the first time, "Indians" were formally recognized by the Mexican government. The first paragraph of Article 4 of the constitution has been amended to read:

   The Mexican nation has a multicultural composition, originally
   based on its indigenous peoples. The law will protect
   and promote the development of their languages, cultures,
   uses, customs, resources, and specific forms of social organization
   and will guarantee their members effective access
   to the jurisdiction of the State. In the agrarian judgments
   and procedures in which they are a part, their juridical
   practices and customs will be taken into account in the
   terms established by the law.

Many pundits saw the amendment of Article 4 as a sop to those who opposed the reform of Article 27 (Ewen, 1994: 36). The government sought to directly replace the guarantees of land provided to Mexican peasants by Article 27, with the guarantee of cultural protection for indigenous people. Indigenous groups nevertheless opposed the amendment from the start. Article 4 is located in Chapter 1 of the first section of the constitution, entitled "Of Individual Guarantees," rendering explicit the point that it does not recognize the collective rights of indigenous groups but limits its guarantees to individuals. Moreover, the article does not use the word "rights" at all: it pledges to protect and promote the culture and language of indigenous people, but not the people themselves.

The recognition of different cultures and languages nevertheless represented a marked departure from the ideal of mestizaje, and an explicit rejection of the revolutionary project of indigenous assimilation and integration. And the use of the word pueblos is drawn directly from the language currently favored at the international level and by indigenous rights groups themselves.

The Mexican Indigenous Rights Movement

Mexico's nascent indigenous rights movement prefigured, and had an important effect on, the Zapatista movement that emerged in 1994. The Zapatistas in turn have played an important role in raising the domestic and international profile of indigenous rights, and of expanding the political space within which demands for indigenous rights are played out and heard. Although important political differences exist among the various strands of the indigenous rights movement, including the Zapatistas, here I focus instead on the capacity of political actors to establish new political subject positions and, in particular, on where they locate such positions. In Mexico at least, indigenous identity is intended to perform many of the same functions as peasant identity, and is perceived as a challenge to existing patterns of inequality and exclusion. (2) Indigenous rights activists hope that indigenous identity will succeed, where peasant identity failed, in forcing a fundamental reorientation of state-society relations.