The U.S.-Mexican War and
the Peoples of the Year 2000

Inputs from Politics:

Oaxaca and indigenous law

Overview

Inputs from History

For a time, early in 1998, the state of Oaxaca was taken as a show-case, a demonstration that it was possible and practical to recognize indigenous identity within the framework of a modern nation. The governor of the state, Diodoro Carrasco, was backing changes in the state constitution that would give greater recognition and autonomy to indigenous municipalities. In earlier times, these Zapotec and Mixtecs -- and others -- would have constituted the "República de Indios." They now sought a collective standing that they had not had since the colonial years, or since the Constitution of 1824 declared all Mexicans equal before the law.

One institution that the new arrangement would support would be the tequio, under which all members of a traditional community were expected to volunteer for collective service. This institution had been anathema to 19th-century liberals in Mexico, as they tried to replace rigid custom with a free, individualistic society. It still ran contrary to the formal ideology of the government party, the PRI, and to the neoliberalism that the PRI has been accepting under recent presidencies.

Now it was a PRI governor who was sponsoring the new or new/old approach, and taking credit for it. Carrasco is himself a spokesman for economic modernization, going out to the wider world to drum up interest and investment. Presiding over a state that has a large indigenous population, he knows that discontent might discredit the project of modernization.

But modernization would mean "integration" of all groups into the society, and integration might mean assimilation or homogenization. Within the state legislature, the governor's reforms could be attacked by those who considered them a disloyalty to the Mexican state. Outside, they were often attacked, with some sadness, by those who found them simply one more way to incorporate Indians into a picture-book equality. The actual meaning of any new indigenous autonomy would depend on how it was administered, and for what purposes.

Activists in the state, and notably around the community of Juchitán, had long worked for an autonomy that would flow from their own efforts. They derived support from a continent-wide indigenous movement that for some time had been formulating model proposals for community autonomy. But they were aware of counter-pressures in the background:

An official "indigenism" had long been patronized on the national level by the PRI, and staffed by do-good social workers and historians.
Proposals had been made for analogous amendments to the federal constitution, but the presidency had offered a watered-down version, and its legislators had dug in their heels rather than go along with radical change.
In negotiations with the Zapatistas of Chiapas, the national government had agreed to the main points of an agreement, and had then refused to implement it.
In Chiapas, government forces were acting to suppress new "autonomous municipalities" that looked like what the Oaxaca changes were supposed to support.
Soon the state of Quintana Roo was moving toward the same moderate adjustment that Oaxaca had undertaken.

The nation-state was deciding whom it would identify as indigenous.

References:

Luis Hernández Navarro, "La ley indígena," La Jornada: Masiosare, 14 June 1998.
Francisco López Bárcenas, "Ley de Derechos Indígenas en Oaxaca: una casa para todos," La Jornada: Masiosare, 31 May 1998.
Gaspar Rivera-Salgado, "Radiografía de Oaxacalifornia," La Jornada: Masiosare, 9 August 1998
Gilberto López y Rivas, Nación y pueblos indios en el neoliberalismo (1995)
Alicia Castellanos Guerrero & Gilberto López y Rivas, El debate de la nación: Cuestión nacional, racismo y autonomía (1992)
Armando Labra M., "Virtud, defecto. Ley indígena en Oaxaca," La Jornada, June 20, 1998.
Diodoro Carrasco Altamirano, "Palabras ... en la Mesa Redonda 'Gobernando de abajo hacia arriba: el papel de los gobiernos estatales en el futuro político de México,'" Harvard University, March 2, 1998, published in official web-site of Gobierno de Oaxaca.
Rafael Doniz, H.Ayuntamiento Popular de Juchitan : fotografias (1983)
Jeffrey W. Rubin, Decentering the Regime : Ethnicity, Radicalism, and Democracy in Juchitan, Mexico (1997)
Zapotec struggles : histories, politics, and representations from Juchitan, Oaxaca, ed. Howard Campbell (1993)

The U.S.-Mexican War and the Peoples of the Year 2000

Inputs from Politics:

Oaxaca and indigenous law

The U.S.-Mexican War and
the Peoples of the Year 2000