From Indigenismo to Zapatismo: Theory and Practice in Mexican Anthropology

Human Organization, Summer 2004 by Gonzalez, Roberto J

The work of Rosalva Aida Hernandez Castillo demonstrates how anthropological theory can be directly informed by engagement in the real world. Drawing upon activism and research among women in "postcolonial" Chiapas in the wake of the Zapatista uprising, her work explores the links between violence, gender relations, and the neoliberal project in southern Mexico in an edited volume titled La otra palabra: Mujeres y violencia en Chiapas antes y despites de Acteal (The Other Word: Women and Violence in Chiapas Before and After Acteal [1998]). More recently, Hernandez (2001) has examined the transformation of indigenous identities with emphasis on Mayan identities in a global context.

Anthropologists working in Oaxaca have also investigated indigenous political mobilizations. Miguel Bartolome and Alicia Barabas (1999) have analyzed the transformation of ethnic configurations in the 1990s and the possibilities for regional autonomy implied by such configurations. Their previous work included collaboration in a collection of documents describing the history and organization of the Coalicion de Obreres, Campesinos, y Estudiantes del Istmo (Isthmus Coalition of Workers, Peasants, and Students, or COCEI) in the predominantly Zapotec city of Juchitan (Campbell et al. 1993).

Anthropology's political influence was made clear in a different way in 1992, when Arturo Warman was appointed to the highest government office ever held by an anthropologist-secretary of agrarian reform-though his position on land tenure issues has made him a pariah among many colleagues. Specifically, his support for the Article 27 reforms implemented in the early 1990s, which effectively ended land redistribution in Mexico and opened the door to privitization of communal lands, drew fire. One of Warman's essays (1994), published in the daily newspaper La Jornada, was widely critiqued and many accused him of blaming the victims when he attributed environmental degradation in the countryside to rural population growth and poor management of land and other natural resources by campesino farmers (Bray 1996). His position was ironic in light of his role during the 1970s in opposing official indigenismo and criticizing the government's urban bias in development. Although this may appear to represent a fundamental shift in Warman's position, it may well be that his political transformation was necessary to maintain his status as a public intellectual connected to the Mexican state apparatus. Such a process appears to be mediated by clique structures and intra-elite networks suffusing academic institutions.

Others have applied anthropology to community development, but outside the conventional bureaucratic channels of government agencies. These anthropologists work as cultural brokers between indigenous communities and NGOs or government agencies. Some of them are native anthropologists, like Jaime Martinez Luna, a Zapotec from the Sierra Juarez in northern Oaxaca, who played a key role in the formation in the late 1970s of the Organizacion para la Defensa de los Recursos Naturales de la Sierra Juarez (Organization for the Defense of Natural Resources of the Sierra Juarez, or ODRE-NASIJ), which drew together 24 communities to challenge the federal government's renewal of logging concessions to private companies (Martinez Luna 1993). After a five-year struggle, ODRENASIJ won in the courts.