Monday, August 27, 2012

Indigenous Identities in 20th Century Mexican Political Parties




The Uses of Indigenous Peoples in Mexican Political Groups

            Indigenous peoples of Mexico have been appropriated and exploited in multiple ways by different revolutionary organizations and political groups during the 20th century. The Partido Revolucionario Institucional, the Jaramillistas, and the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional used the image and exploited Indian identity, culture, and history in different ways that reveals a paternalistic attitude toward indigenous groups. Though varying in levels of paternalism or exploitation, each of the aforementioned political groups and revolutionary organizations, with the only exception of the Jaramillistas, has contributed to the postcolonial legacy of paternalism and racist exploitation of the Indians.
            The PRI has been the most explicit oppressor and manipulator of Indians in Mexican history. Even under Lázaro Cárdenas, the great PRI president in the 1930s who brought some agrarian reform continued the exploitation of indigenous communities. Although Cárdenas remained incredibly popular with campesinos across Mexico, some of the reforms instituted under his administration actually subverted indigenous communities by infiltrating Indian communities with new government officials who centralized political and economic power among bilingual young men, especially in the Chiapas highland communities of Tzeltal and Tzotzil Maya.[1] The new government program, the Departamento de Protección Indígena, under the leadership of Erasto Urbina, recruited bilingual young men to be the escribanos, or scribes and eventually only working with bilingual municipal presidents within the indigenous communities, thereby weakening the control of elders in their own communities.[2] These Chiapas indigenous groups had created a system of power in their communities that relied on elder monolingual males to act as municipal intermediaries between the community and the ladino state in order to ensure a smaller chance of betrayal by their representatives.[3] Prior to the establishment of DPI and the infiltration of indigenous communities, elders had to have completed a career in the religious and civil offices of the community before he could represent his village.[4] However, the DPI did do some positive things for indigenous communities by creating a government union for Indian laborers. The union, Sindicato de Trabajadores Indígenas, unfortunately controlled by the increasingly conservative government after 1946, did required landowners to hire unionized Indians, improved labor conditions, and negotiated on their behalf.[5] Of course this also demonstrated government paternalism and exploitation of Indian populations, who did not have any control of the union and were only used by DPI to subordinate the landowners of Chiapas to the national party. Thus, the rather weak agrarian reform and paternalistic approach to the Indian land problem in Chiapas was a repeat of colonial legacies, despite initially good intentions. After Cárdenas left office in 1940, the national party leaned more and more to the right, completely turning its back on agrarian reform and supporting private agriculture more than the communal ejidos.
                        In addition to PRI paternalism in Chiapas, the party generalized indigenous history and ignored the present to export it for the tourist industry in the 1960s. Indians were promoted as authentic Mexico and sold abroad as exotic culture for the mostly American tourist industry.[6] PRI appropriated elements of various indigenous and mestizo dances for the Ballet Folklórico, which was marketed as national culture for tourists, and promoted murals using romanticized Indian imagery to sell indigenous culture.[7] The Museum of Anthropology also appropriated the ancient past of indigenous groups, ignored the enormous differences between these ancient cultures, and promoted that as authentic Mexican history while completely ignoring the indigenous present.[8] Thus, Indians were appropriate for selling Mexico to tourists, but only through a generalized ancient past and exotic dance and dress. Instead, Indian demands of cultural and political autonomy and reforms in agriculture and class oppression were overlooked or actively resisted by the now conservative PRI of the 1960s.
            Unlike PRI, the Jaramillistas, under the leadership of Rubén Jaramillo, embraced campesino identity that was inclusive of indigenous peoples. Centered in Morelos, a state where Indian groups were often not visibly present due to the close and early integration of the state to the Mexican national capital, indigenous groups still actively supported Jaramillo.[9] Moreover, many Jaramillistas were of indigenous descent, although Indian cultures may not have been as obvious with the campesinos of Morelos. Although Jaramillo focused on class and campesino as a class rather than racial group, he acknowledged the racist hierarchy that existed throughout Mexico that placed Indians or indios at the bottom as peasants and lighter criollos or Spanish as elite landowners.[10] The Jaramillista values expressed in the Plan de Cerro Prieto also embraced campesino communal values, which indigenous groups shared, such as respecting elders, supporting agrarian reform, and reinforcing rural patriarchy.[11] The Jaramillistas consequently drew from and included indigenous groups because of the cultural similarities and in many cases, biological descent that made their relationship with indigenous peoples less paternalistic. Indeed, during their period of armed uprising in the 1950s, the Mexican state press attacked them for their supposedly savage Indian background to delegitimize the Jaramillista guerrillas as savage bandits.[12] Their support for political and economic autonomy of campesinos and workers through cooperatives and participatory democracy must have appealed to indigenous groups as well, who were gaining class-consciousness as a result of entering wage labor during this period.
            The ideological successors of the Zapatista and Jaramillista legacy, the EZLN, on the other hand have a more problematic relationship with the descendants of the very same aforementioned indigenous communities in Chiapas. Though ostensibly an Indian group, their leading spokesman is Subcomandante Marcos, who is not indigenous. Also, according to claims about the beginning of the seizure of San Cristobal, Chamula Indians within the city feared the EZLN because their municipal president had expelled Protestants who presumably joined the Zapatista uprising.[13] In fact, many of the Indians within the EZLN were Protestants, influenced by liberation theology, or members of peasant organizations that emerged in the late 1970s and 1980s that were expelled from their original indigenous communities.[14] Some of these kicked out members of Chiapas Indian groups actually went to the city and jungle, and were not traditional at all.[15] These newer groups that constituted the EZLN claimed their movement was based on indigenous culture, but they are Protestants, urban workers, and youths who challenged Catholic rituals and the elders of the same communities, which was the reason they were expelled in the first place. Since the EZLN did not begin within the traditional indigenous groups of Chiapas, the organization has limited potential to truly become a broad social movement, despite their claims to represent Indians. Their lists of demands, however, have more inclusive potential for embracing the Jaramillista tradition of demanding industrialization, education, and regional autonomy, while their specific list of demands for women reinforces rural patriarchy as well for its focus on childcare, cooking, and food.[16] Ultimately, the EZLN shares paternalistic tendencies toward indigenous peoples it claims to serve. Assuming to save Indians by raising consciousness and then stepping aside, the organization falsely claims to have sprung from within the communities but actually approaches them from the same perspective of the PRI as outsiders trying to change Indian cultures.
            Both the PRI and EZLN pursue a paternalistic approach to addressing the problem of indigenous rights. Alternatively, the Jaramillistas reached out to indigenous peoples based on campesino and working class identity that did not endeavor to change the culture or subvert the cultural practices of indigenous peoples in Morelos. In Chiapas, however, PRI undermined the power structures within the Tzeltal and Tzotzil peoples of the highlands, and those societies had to deal with EZLN ever since. Indigenous communities can and did benefit from some of the changes brought by both organizations, but each one show a mutual, negative and stereotypical depiction of Indians that concealed the class differentiation and internal conflicts which made it impossible for the EZLN to truly build a broader movement and end their current stalemate with the Mexican government. The inability of these groups to transcend postcolonial legacies will continue to prevent opportunities for real political change in Mexico with regional autonomy.



[1] Jan Rus, The Comunidad Revolucionara Institucional: The Subversion of Native Government in Highland Chiapas, 1936 1968: 267, 275.
[2] Ibid; 275, 277.
[3] Ibid; 270
[4] Ibid.
[5] Ibid 277
[6] Discovering a Land, 237.
[7] Ibid 242, 244.
[8] Ibid 244.
[9] Tanalis Padilla, Rural Resistance in the Land of Zapata, 21.
[10] Ibid. 96
[11] Ibid, 98, 164.
[12] Ibid. 151.
[13] A Tzotzil Chronicle of the Zapatista Uprising, 657.
[14] Reconfiguring ethnicity, identity and citizenship, 3.
[15] Lecture 10/6/2011
[16] EZLN Demands at the Dialogue Table, 640, 643.

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