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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