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BEARING CULTURE, WIELDING CULTURE:
POWER, INDIGENEITY AND ‘MULTICULTURALISMS’ IN A MIXTEC VILLAGE

By

Holly Dygert

A DISSERTATION
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
Anthropology

2008

ABSTRACT

BEARING CULTURE, WIELDING CULTURE:
POWER, INDIGENEITY AND ‘MULTICULTURALISMS’ IN A MIXTEC VILLAGE

By
Holly Dygert

In recent years, indigenous rights activists have impelled the Mexican government
to claim a ‘multicultural’ approach toward indigenous populations in lieu of its
longstanding assimilation approach. Situated within this context, this dissertation
investigates formulations of indigenous culture in contemporary Mexico. I examine
conceptions of indigenous culture within two projects devised to stake out divergent
futures for indigenous communities: the Mexican development program IMSS-
Oportunidades and Mixtec cultural revitalization efforts. Through a community-centered
approach, I investigate how residents of a Mixtec-speaking village targeted by both
projects encounter, interpret and deploy these conceptions in their everyday contests with
one another.

Multicultural claims notwithstanding, IMSS-Oportunidadcs programmers and
providers regard indigenous culture as an impediment to modemity. Mixtec cultural
revitalizationists’ efforts to realize a vision of modernity grounded in the valorization of
Mixtec culture diverge markedly. Nonetheless, developers and revitalizationists share a
common perception of indigeneity as the antipode of modernity. This oppositional
framing accords with modernist perceptions of indigenous subjects who lack modern
training as ill-equipped for modernity. Accordingly, developers and revitalizationists

alike target their efforts toward youth who have acquired training in the requisite modem

skills and knowledge (e. g., literacy, Spanish facility) through the formal educational
system.

In the village, youth interpret the constructions of indigenous culture they learn
through their encounters with developers and revitalizationists in ways that correspond
with these modernist polarities. They interpret ‘negative' and ‘positive’ constructions
alike as evidence of the backwardness of those people, practices and perspectives most
associated with indigenous culture. Among villagers, women with limited to no formal
education are widely regarded as bearing an especially true expression of indigenousness.
These women bear much of the suffering meted out in the process of deni grating
indigeneity, and they enact a crucial front—line politics as they combat the denigration of
indigenousness in their daily lives. As youth wield these fomiulations of indigenous
culture in their everyday contests with ‘culture-bearers’, they spur the denigration of
indigenousness. This dynamic evidences the pemiciousness of ‘multicultural’
formulations ofindigenous culture, which predicate claims ofthe value ofindigenousness

to modern life on the exclusion ofthe quintessentially indigenous.

Copyright by
HOLLY DYGERT
2008

For the people of Pueblo Verde.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am extremely grateful to my ever wise and nit—picky advisor, Dr. Laurie
Kroshus Medina. I entered the program with at least as much mistrust and skepticism as
most students, if not a great deal more. Despite my doubts and protestations, Laurie
always insisted on teaching me how to do things correctly. I doubt that many students
experience the privilege, pain and growth such committed mentorship can provide. Over
the last decade, Laurie has taught me to patiently and carefully craft my often jumbled
and always partially—formed insights into arguments. By doing so, she has helped me

give voice to my inner life. I cannot imagine a greater gift!

Likewise, I have enjoyed exceptional mentorship and support from members of
my Guidance Committee. Dr. Anne Ferguson and Dr. Rita Gallin have been extremely
generous with their time and assistance during the many years they have served on my
Committee. Along with Laurie, Anne and Rita generously dedicated countless hours to
guiding me through seemingly endless drafts of my written works. They helped me
dCVeIOp keener thinking skills while teaching me the more banal details of learning how
to Wfitfi In equal measures, 1 am grateful for their direction and humbled by their
Commitment.
Dr. Brandt Peterson joined the Committee near the end of this process.
NonetheleSS, his insightful observations and suggestions have greatly influenced this
work- Moreover, I look forward to continuing to explore the avenues of thought he
opened up for me in the years to come. I would also like to acknowledge Dr. Linda Hunt,
who also SBWCd on the Committee for multiple years. Dr. Scott Whiteford also served on

the C0 '
mmittee for multiple years before moving to Arizona State University. He

vi

 

provided me with invaluable assistance with the practicalities of actually arranging and
carrying out work in Mexico. Finally, I drew great inspiration from Dr. Bill Derman in
his classes, as he shares an infectious passion for critical interrogation.

The Wenner—Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research and the Fulbright
International Institute of Education supported the fieldwork for this research. Dr. Robert
Hitchcock, current Chairperson of the Department of Anthropology, and Dr. Lynne
Goldstein, former Chairperson, provided me with support during the data analysis and
writing stage of the dissertation. In addition, I thank the Women and Intemational
Development Program, and the Center for Advanced Studies in International
Development and the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at Michigan State
University for supporting the language training and preliminary research that made this
project possible. Thanks also to Ubaldo Lopez Garcia, Gabriel Caballero Morales and
Marcos Cruz Bautista, my Mixtec language instructors.

Dr. Jack Corbett and Dr. Ramona Perez served as wonderful contacts and support
to me while I carried out the research in Mexico. I am very thankful to both of them for
their assistance. Marcos Cruz Baustista generously offered me his time and assistance in
making the contacts that facilitated the village level research: Ku ta 'vi xeensa ta sku ’leru.
The IMSS-Oportunidades supervisors and staff of the Tlaxiaco district also very
graciously and generously provided me with time and assistance that greatly helped me
carry out this research.

I am especially grateful to the research participants who shared their personal time
and insights with me, including the Oportunidades staff, Mixtec revitalizationists and the

peOple of “Pueblo Verde.” The villagers, in particular, taught me crucial lessons about

vii

 

humanity, shared experience and difference. I am incredibly grateful to them for their
willingness to share their spaces and thoughts with me.

My family has been a huge support for me throughout this process. I must first
acknowledge my father, who has generously supported me and given me encouragement
and advice through the toughest of times. I never could have even dreamed of embarking
on this journey without his interventions many years ago, and his help has been crucial
once again in completing it. My mother has provided a listening ear through some of the
most difficult moments of this decade-long struggle, when I was at my wits end. Lin,
too, has encouraged me through this process. Finally, my wonderful sister, Paula, has
been my greatest cheerleader and my best friend — thank you!

Lastly, my own wonderful little family — Ruben and Grace. Rube’n’s commitment
and sacrifice has not only made this journey possible, but enjoyable. And, my precious
little Grace Italu has enriched this process beyond what words could say. My little family

has made this work part of a marvelous life joumey!

viii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF TABLES ............................................................................................................ xii
LIST OF FIGURES ......................................................................................................... xiii
INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................................... 1
The idea of ‘culture’ ............................................................................................................. 4
Organization of the dissertation ........................................................................................... 7
CHAPTER ONE: THE POLITICS OF ‘CULTURE’ ....................................................... 10
‘Culture’ and its critique .................................................................................................... 10
The transforming fields of ‘culture’ politics ...................................................................... 16
“Situatedness” and the politics of representation ............................................................... 20
Beyond participation: The cunning of ‘culture’ ................................................................. 25
Conclusion ......................................................................................................................... 30
CHAPTER TWO: POWER AND INDIGENEITY IN MEXICAN HISTORY ............... 32
Colonial rule ....................................................................................................................... 34
The shifting criteria for reckoning difference ........................................................ 40
The early Mexican nation-state .......................................................................................... 44
Citizenship and land rights ................................................................................................. 45
Education ............................................................................................................... 47
The twentieth century Mexican nation .............................................................................. 51
Incorporation through education ............................................................................ 53
Incorporation through development ....................................................................... 55
Power and control in post-revolutionary Mexico .................................................. 57
Culture and the neoliberal turn in late twentieth century Mexico ..................................... 59
Neoliberal reform and the genealogy of Oportunidades ........................................ 59
Conceptualizing shifting modes of power in neoliberal Mexico ........................... 63
Indigenous activism and the genealogy of Mixtec revitalization .......................... 65
Mexican cultural politics at the beginning of the twenty-first century .................. 67
CHAPTER THREE: THE RESEARCH PROCESS ......................................................... 73
Pueblo Verde ...................................................................................................................... 75
Working in Pueblo Verde ...................................................................................... 77
Oportunidades .................................................................................................................... 78
Oportunidades in Pueblo Verde ............................................................................. 80
Oportunidades research methods ........................................................................... 81
Mixtec revitalization .......................................................................................................... 81
Mixtec revitalization in Pueblo Verde ................................................................... 83
Mixtec revitalization research methods ................................................................. 84
Data analysis ...................................................................................................................... 85
CHAPTER FOUR: CULTURE, POWER AND PATHOLOGY IN
OPORTUNIDADES .......................................................................................................... 88
ix

Shifting modes of power and the emergence of psychosocial development terrain .......... 88

The genealogy of IMSS-Oportunidades Human Development ............................. 90
Human Development and neoliberal reform .......................................................... 92
Enculturing self-govemance .............................................................................................. 93
The psychosocial analysis ...................................................................................... 98
Research into practice: A cultural justification for self-govemance ............................... 102
Human Development training for IMSS-Oponunidades personnel .................... 104
Concretizing human development in IMSS-Oportunidades practice .............................. 1 1 1
Culture and Human Development in practice: Making healthy adolescent selves .......... 113
Gender, culture and justice: The disempowered indigenous woman .................. 119
Conclusions ..................................................................................................................... 1 25
CHAPTER FIVE: CULTURE AND POWER IN MIXTEC REVITALIZATION ........ 128
Mixtec culture as communalism ...................................................................................... 129
Education ......................................................................................................................... I32
Establishing commonality through difference via linguistic analysis ............................. I35
Brotherhood and its limits ................................................................................................ 139
Embodying communalism in congresses ............................................................. 142
Power, authority and difference in Mixtec revitalization .................................... I44
Conclusions ...................................................................................................................... 147
CHAPTER SIX: MOVEMENT AND MEANING IN PUEBLO VERDE ..................... 153
Movement in Pueblo Verde ............................................................................................. 154
Movement and meaning ................................................................................................... 161
Gender, sociality and community .................................................................................... I63
Community-building and pride in vikos .......................................................................... I67
Transcending difference to celebrate community in the programu ..................... 170

The dark side of bearing indigeneity ............................................................................... 173
Verdean gate-keeping conventions ...................................................................... I75
Absence, doubt and betrayal ................................................................................ I78
Conclusions ...................................................................................................................... l 80
CHAPTER SEVEN: THE CHANGING VERDEAN FAMILY ..................................... 182
Family in Verdean history: Age, gender and power ........................................................ 183
The changing economic context ...................................................................................... 189
Gender and generation in the restructuring of the Verdean family ................................. I92
Hints of discordant desires in villagers’ changing perceptions of ideal family size ........ 196
Renegotiating gender, power and romance ...................................................................... 199
Women’s honor, sexuality and monogamy ..................................................................... 202
Policing young women’s honor: Gender and generation in contests over unions ........... 203
COrielusions ...................................................................................................................... 205
CHAPTER EIGHT: ENCOUNTERING OTHERS WITHIN ......................................... 206
The Value of large families in Pueblo Verde ................................................................... 206
Unreasoning and silencing ............................................................................................... 210
EduCating youth ............................................................................................................... 215

x

Conclusions ...................................................................................................................... 217

CHAPTER NINE: VALORIZING ‘CULTURE’ IN VERDEAN

CULTURAL CONTESTS .............................................................................................. 219
Culture and the uneven enculturation of selves in Pueblo Verde .................................... 220
Adopting ‘culture’ in Pueblo Verde: Juana, Adriana and Sylvia ..................................... 225

Juana .................................................................................................................... 225

Adriana ................................................................................................................. 231

Sylvia ................................................................................................................... 234
‘Culture’ in cultural processes in Pueblo Verde .............................................................. 237

‘Culture’ and familial contest: Beatriz and Sylvia ............................................... 238
The modem/traditional paradox of revitalization ............................................................ 243
Conclusions ...................................................................................................................... 244
CONCLUSION: THE POLITICS OF ‘CULTURE’ REVISITED ................................. 246
Dialogue ........................................................................................................................... 248
Travel ............................................................................................................................... 250
Difference ........................................................................................................................ 253
Conclusions ...................................................................................................................... 254
REFERENCES CITED .................................................................................................... 256

xi

LIST OF TABLES

Table 1. Age and gender characteristics of village interviewees ........................................... 86

Table 2. Gender distribution of villagers by age group ........................................................ 156
Table 3. Villagers’ income-generation activities ................................................................... 158
Table 4. Importance of family .............................................................................................. 182
Table 5. Family size preferences according to age .............................................................. 196
Table 6. Live births according to age .................................................................................... 197
Table 7. Unions among married villagers .............................................................................. 200

Table 8. Changes in marital status in villagers twelve years old and older,

1990 to 2000 .......................................................................................................................... 201
Table 9. Advantages of large families .................................................................................. 207
Table 10. Familiarity with costumbre concept according to age ........................................... 221
Table 11. Costumbres identified according to age ............................................................... 222
Table 12. Importance of Mixtec language according to age ................................................. 223

xii

LIST OF FIGURES
Figure 1. Map of Mexico ................................................................................................... 73

Figure 2. Map of Oaxaca ................................................................................................... 74

xiii

INTRODUCTION

When I began conducting research in a small Mixtec village in southern Mexico,
Pueblo Verde,l I was struck by the varied and often flexible and complex family forms I
observed. While preparing for the research, I had expected that the vast majority of
villagers would form their families in similar ways and would maintain their marital
commitments throughout their lives. Based on these presumptions, I considered that it
might be prudent to withhold details about my split family from the community, as
negative assumptions about split families could lead some villagers to perceive me
poorly. Nonetheless, my observations of Verdeans’ diverse families assuaged my
concerns. Thus, I shared with my hosts — Na Beatriz and Ta Rodolfo2 — that my mother
and father were divorced, that he had remarried, and that both parents had raised my
siblings and me.

One afternoon, while Ta Rodolfo and I finished the meal of tortillas and black
b6ans Na Beatriz had served us, they asked me more about my family. I was surprised to
find from their queries that they had not understood my situation in the terms that I had
asstuned. Instead, they asked me — quite contemptuously — How could my father have
“4’0 Women? I explained (again) that he and my mother had divorced thirty years earlier,
and that both of them were content to be apart from one another. I assumed that 1 had
clarified the apparent misunderstanding during the momentary silence that followed my
explanation, but Na Beatriz proved me wrong when she broke the silence, and asked me

vWhether my mother was angry. As we continued to discuss my family, I repeatedly told

 

 

I
2 I SUbstitute pseudonyms for the name of the municipality and all informants.
Na and Ta are Mixtec terms of respect for older villagers, similar to Mrs. and Mr.

them that the divorce was a positive resolution to both of my parents’ desire to terminate
the relationship, and that the new families worked well. They maintained their
interpretation that my father had abandoned my mother and her children to pursue a
relationship with his “fia ’an an”, second woman. Repeatedly, they mulled over what 1
said and then asked me additional questions that signaled that I had failed to persuade
them to adopt my perspective. In the end, my host got up slowly from the table,
chuckled, and said, “Dos ng'eres!” — Two women! He nodded his head smiling as he
walked out of the door. My hostess also nodded her head while she concluded the
conversation, but with a stern look of concern and disapproval concluded, “Nda ’vi
Hana/u.” — Your poor mother.3
During the year I worked in Pueblo Verde, this is the only topic that moved my
hOSts to argue with me. According to them, a man and a woman cement the formation of
their family when they have children. In doing so, they make a lifelong commitment to
r eThain together and carry out their complementary duties in ensuring the wellbeing of
thfiiir family. Their responsibilities as husband and wife to one another, as well as to their
Children, remain even in cases where the couple separates. I was utterly unsuccessful in
my attempts to convince them that the divorce was beneficial, and they continued to refer
to my stepmother as my father’s fia 'an an.
This uniquely lively discussion dizzied me, especially our glaring inability to
reConcile our different opinions. As I reflected on the interchange in the days that

fOllowed, I reasoned our impasse in terms of cultural incommensz”ability. The idea that

 

 

3
Quotes that have not been translated to English reflect the language employed by the speaker. In this
dlsocussion, Ta Rodolfo and Na Beatriz spoke to one another in Mixtec, Ta Rodolfo drew from his Spanish

agency to converse with me in that language, and Na Beatriz, who lacks Spanish language skills, spoke in
lxtec.

a particularly wide cultural gulf precluded my hosts from understanding my family as 1
do seemed fitting. Accordingly, I reasoned that my hosts’ unwillingness to adopt my
understanding reflected the relative homogeneity of family forms in this seemingly
‘traditional’ “out-of-the-way-place” (Tsing 1993), and that this lack of familiarity with
different kinds of families circumscribed their ability to comprehend my family in my
terms. Although I struggled to understand my hosts’ apparent ignorance of the diverse
familial arrangements 1 had already encountered in the village, I concluded that their
insistence on the idea that a married couple is joined forever reflected their rootedness in
family values ofa passing era in village life.
As the research progressed, however, my hosts’ intimate engagement with the
diversity of expressions of family in the village challenged me to rethink my
assumptions. I watched as their own family was torn apart over a conflict between them
and their adult daughter when she became pregnant and decided not to formalize her
Partnership. When that occurred, I learned that their family had been repeatedly
reconfigured by conflicts and reconciliations associated with my hosts’ efforts to force
their adult children to live by these ideals. My hosts pursued varied strategies to impose
this ideal vision of the family on non—family members, as well. They promoted
“traditional” marriages to young people; they supported the efforts of a young couple to
many by taking the role of their absent parents in sponsoring the union; they pursued
legal and social channels to force absent husbands to return on behalf of women whose
hquands had lefi them. In short, my hosts were deeply and passionately entangled in
OngOing contests over the ideal family. As I continued to carry out the research, I learned

that these contestatory entanglements are not anomalous to my hosts. My interviews with

 

 

 

 

 

 

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villagers indicate that disputes over the family have been the norm throughout recent

history, and date back at least to when the oldest villagers were forming their unions.
During the moments when I conducted the research, these contests largely revolved
around questions of monogamy, serial monogamy, and struggles over forrnalizing

commitments, which were linked with women’s ongoing struggles to negotiate

relationships that they found more beneficial.

Within this context, our ‘dispute’ over family was unremarkable, excepting my
failure to register it as a dispute. My hosts openly contested my conception of my family
because it conflicted with their opposition to serial monogamy. Nonetheless, I initially
drew from assumptions that my hosts and I inhabit different cultural spheres to conclude
that my hosts ‘failed to grasp’ my family, and to construe the conversation as a failure in
COmrnunication. This explanation resonates with widespread assumptions that the
CUItural spheres inhabited by indigenous peoples are especially different from their

Western counterparts, particularly owing to the homogeneity and stagnancy of
indigenous cultural forms. Reconceptualizing the discussion as a dispute required
rethinking these assumptions to consider my hosts and me as inhabiting a common

Cuh‘ural realm and sharing a basic level of understanding therein.

The idea of ‘culture’

The traditional conception of culture posits easily definable groups whose
members share common practices, values and beliefs. Roy Wagner (1975) advanced a

COmpelling critique of the concept over three decades ago in Inventing Culture. In this

work, Wagner described the distinctiveness of the vantage point the traditional

anthropological conception of culture affords to anthropologists, as he observed,

The New Guineans see the anthropologist’s creativity as being his interaction with them,
rather than resulting from it. They perceive the ficldworker to be “doing” life... For his
part, the anthropologist assumes that the native is doing what he is doing, namely

“culture”. [1975226, Emphasis in original.]

Wagner affirmed the consequentiality of the adoption of the perspective that people ‘do
culture’, as ‘culture’ presumes “a very basic kind of difference between [people],
suggesting that there are different varieties of the phenomenon of man” (197522).

Many anthropologists have rejected the culture concept during the three decades
that have intervened since Wagner made these observations. Yet, at the same time,
ordinary people have widely adopted the concept as a frame for reckoning who they are
and where they fit in the world. The culture frame provides a map for conjuring the
Similarities individuals share with some and the qualities that differentiate them from

Others. My own experience suggests the pervasiveness and profundity of ‘culture’s’
influence on people’s everyday lived experience: the concept profoundly shaped my
initial interpretations in Pueblo Verde even though I came of age as an anthropologist in
the wake of a sustained and thorough ‘culture’ critique.

This study examines the politics ofthis popularization of ‘culture’. I approach the
COneept as a real and consequential anthropological invention. Quetzil Castaneda (1996)
has insightfully captured how this starting point challenges common perceptions of ideas
as inventions that (necessarily) fall short in capturing the real practices they are intended

to narrate. Rather, Castaneda asserts the realness of ‘culture’ (1996217):

The real pattern, the “lived—in culture,” is an abstraction embodied in its own
representation of an imagined world and not in the supposedly real world outside of its

reification. [Emphasis in original.]

I adopt this starting point to investigate how ‘culture’ is “embodied” as a true and
consequential invention in everyday social life. I am especially interested in analyzing
how contemporary articulations of ‘indigenous culture’ influence the subjects perceived
as bearing the truest expressions of the notion, whom I refer to as culture bearers. I
employ a tri-pronged approach to evaluate the politics of contemporary formulations of
‘indigenous culture’ from this vantage point:

First, I examine the (re)formulation and (re)deployment ofnotions of indigenous
culture with widespread purchase within two current political projects, the Mexican
development program Oportunidades and indigenous Mixtec cultural revitalization
efforts. I examine how Oportunidades workers and Mixtec revitalizationists interpret

indigenous culture and its salience as they design strategies to realize their goals.

Second, I analyze Oportunidades employees’ and Mixtec revitalizationists’ efforts

to Carry out these strategies. I highlight the subject-making efforts in which they teach
iIidividuals ‘culture’ as a frame for reckoning the ways in which they resemble and differ
from those around them. I refer to the subjects who have adopted the culture frame as
Wielding culture.

Third, I examine how the differential dissemination of ‘culture’ shapes Verdean

SOCial life. In particular, I examine how the divergence between those who wield culture
and those who bear culture shapes villagers’ ongoing cultural contests, focusing on
cOntests over the ideal Verdean family.

As the vignette above suggests, and as discussed in greater depth below, critical

analyses of culture readily focus attention on the concept’s contributions to shaping

encounters between ‘groups’. In this study, I aim to provide an additional eye onto the

politics of ‘culture’ by privileging the family as a dimension of cultural life. Because of
the great divergence in the burdens women and men bear in relation to biological and
social reproduction (Browner 2000, 1986; Ginsburg and Rapp 1995; Greenhalgh 1995),
the family provides an excellent vantage point for analyzing how conceptions of cultural

difference contribute to transformations in villagers’ relationships with one another, as

well as with other ‘groups’.

Organization of the dissertation

I situate the research questions within anthropological and feminist debates about
culture and scholarly ethics in Chapter One, “The Politics of ‘C ulture’”. Chapter Two,
“Power and Indigeneity in Mexican History” situates the investigation within historical

Context. I trace changing orientations toward indigenous culture and forms of rule
through the history of New Spain and Mexico. In Chapter Three, “Research in Context:
Methodology and Settings”, I introduce the community and populations under
exarnination, and detail the research methodology.
Chapters Four and Five examine articulations of indigenous culture in the two
‘DI‘Oj ects’ under investigation in this study: Mexican development and Mixtec cultural
revitalization. As I examine how Oportunidades employees and Mixtec revitalizationists
c0nstrue culture in these chapters, I consider how they differentially position indigenous
people in relation to culture. In Chapter Four, “Culture, Power and Pathology in
OPortunidades”, I examine how Oportunidades program designers and service providers
Conceive of indigenous culture and utilize these ideas in designing and carrying out

P rogr am initiatives. Chapter Five, “Culture and Power in Mixtec Cultural Revitalization”

examines how revitalizationists conceive of Mixtec culture and its salience for their
efforts, and how they have drawn from these ideas in devising revitalization strategies.
Chapters Six, Seven, Eight and Nine focus on Pueblo Verde. Chapter Six,
“Movement and Meaning in Pueblo Verde” examines Pueblo Verdean social life in the
context of widespread short- and long-term migration. In this chapter, I foreground the
struggles of ‘the women who remain’ — namely women with limited wealth and formal
education — as they work to enforce social and cultural continuity in this context. I
highlight the concerns and conflicts that have arisen as some villagers adopt derogatory
perceptions of local experience. In the process, I analyze how the differential adoption of
the culture concept among villagers — those who wield ‘culture’ versus those who are
perceived as bearing ‘culture’ — shapes Verdean contests. Chapter Seven, “The Changing
Verdean Family” situates villagers’ ongoing contests over the ideal family within this
Context. I examine in more detail how power relations grounded in gender, generational,
edUCational and economic differences shape Verdean social and cultural processes.
Chapters Eight and Nine examine how villagers engage with developers’ and
reVitalizationists’ conceptions of indigenous culture within ongoing contests over the
ideal family. In Chapter Eight, “Encountering Others Within” I examine how villagers
engage developers’ conceptions of indigenous culture as they contest ideal family size
anlong one another. I observe that IMSS-Oportunidades’ efforts affirm and contribute to
the distinctions between those who wield ‘culture’ and those who bear ‘culture’ examined
in Chapter Six. Next, in Chapter Nine, “Valorizing ‘Culture’ in Verdean Cultural

Contests,” I examine villagers’ adoption of revitalizationists’ perspectives. I contend that

YWitalizationistS’ perspectives on Mixtec culture shape Verdean contests in ways similar
to those of developers.

I return to consider and synthesize the findings of the dissertation in relation to
politics of culture and the ethics of anthropological scholarship the final chapter, “The

Politics of ‘Culture’ Revisited.”

 

 

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CHAPTER ONE: THE POLITICS OF ‘CULTURE’

‘Culture’ and its critique

Throughout much of the history of the discipline, anthropologists have conceived
of the diversity of human experience as universally structured by an underlying entity
called culture. During the first two-thirds of the 20’h century, in particular,
anthropologists shared a solid grounding in the idea of culture, even while debating the
nature and substance of this entity. The claim of ‘culture’s’ universality enabled
anthropologists to explain seemingly incomprehensible ideas and practices not only as
reasonable, but also as part and parcel of a common human experience (Povinelli 2002;
see especially Chapter Two). Anthropologists distilled the ethical posture of cultural
relativity from the concept’s precepts, arguing that the ultimate incommensurability of
cultures — each one can only be properly understood and justly evaluated from within its
own cultural context — necessitated ‘intercultural’ respect.

Notwithstanding many anthropologists’ zeal to explain human difference in ways
that promoted human understanding, beginning in the 19705, anthropologists and others
began to identify ways in which the field has contributed to the colonial and postcolonial
processes that marginalize the subjects of anthropological inquiry. The publication of
EdWard Said’s Orientalism in 1978 greatly influenced this critical introspective turn, as
he analyzed how Western scholars constructed difference while claiming to represent it.
SPt’Ciflcally, he examined how ‘Orientalists’ constructed Arabs and the East as the

‘Other, a I ' .
SamSt which the West defines itself. Said’s work raised the specter of

IO

anthmpologists’ collusion with colonial and postcolonial forces of marginalization, as
anthropologists claimed to render ‘others’ intelligible to a Western self.

As anthropologists turned a critical eye toward anthropological scholarship, they
identified ways in which, indeed, the process of ‘explaining difference in terms that made
sense to a Western audience’ often entailed creating, affirming and fomenting
assumptions about alterity (e. g., Abu-Lughod 1991; Clifford and Marcus 1986; Fabian
I983; Trinh 1989; Rosaldo 1993 [1989]; Wagner 1975). For example, Johannes Fabian

(I983) implicated the rhetorical conventions anthropologists employed for fortifying
presumptions about the alterity of anthropological subjects. Fabian argued that these
conventions contributed to the production of a time-space continuum wherein the
geographic distance separating anthropological subjects and the audience of
anthropological accounts corresponded with a temporal plane. The anthropological
subjects of distant regions exemplified living history — the primitive ‘other’ — in contrast
to the Western audience of anthropological works, who occupied the modern here and
now.

While Fabian analyzed how some of the taken-for-granted anthropological
conventions contributed to the construction of the alterity of anthropological subjects,
many Others scrutinized the field’s key conceptual tool — culture. Critiques of the
conCept’s contribution to exclusion and domination are grounded in observations of the
differential application of ‘culture’ in practice. That is, despite claims of the universality
Oficuhure,’ anthroPOlOgists have uniquely used the frame to reason the experience of
non-WCS’em SUPJects (Rosaldo 1989 [1993]; Tsing 1993). As Renato Rosaldo (1989

t 1993]) ob
S c , . . .
erved, culture has consequently acquxred salience as an essence or a trait

ll

 

 

 

.- — . . o. . . e . .
. . t . . .
. . . . . , ~ ‘ . . . .
. .. . . . . — . .
F I a. l p .t h I n
. . . .. . , _ a . . .. __
. . . . ..
. .. —. _ _ t ,. . .. ‘
. . a . ~ . .

 
 
 

 

 

 

uniquely born by non—modem, non-Westem ‘others’. The concept bears key assumptions
associated with this specificity of application, reflecting assumptions about the traits
perceived to differentiate anthropological subjects from the modern Western self, namely
a lack of differentiation within ‘groups’ and a lack of agency. The ‘culture’ analytical
approach contributes to these assumptions, as it entails analyzing the ideas, values and
practices that individuals express and carry out in their daily lives as manifestations of a
coherent, systematic, reasoned and hidden symbolic realm. This approach entails
interpreting individual action as a product of the force of this hidden realm and
emphasizing practices held in common. Consequently, anthropological subjects emerge
from ‘culture’-based accounts as undifferentiated, lacking in agency and governed by
external forces (Abu-Lughod 1991). These anthropological subjects diverge from and
affirm the distinctiveness of the Western subject, self-identified as the unique subject of
freedom, individuality and agency.

The assumptions about the alterity of anthropological subjects that interpolate
‘culture’ shape the power-laden fields within which anthropologists and the intended
audiences of anthropological works engage with anthropological subjects. Yet, the
territorial dimension of ‘culture’ helps to obscure these relationships. ‘Culture’ presumes
that anthrop0108ical subjects reside in territorially-attached, seamlessly bounded semantic

realms that contain meaning and social relations (Gupta and Ferguson 1997). In drawing
from these assumptions to craft ‘culture’-based accounts, scholars have depicted
anthropOIOgical subjects as residing in geocultural fields detached from the West, and

their so '
eial processes as generated and contained from within (e.g., Redfield I960).

12

Anthropologists have often depicted indigenous people as bearing the ‘truest’
expressions of cultural difference — ‘pristine’ forms of alterity uncompromised by
contaminating Western influences. As a result, assumptions about the difference and
distance of anthropological subjects have often been particularly pronounced in writings
on indigenous people (Appadurai 1988). Yet, while anthropologists analyzed indigenous
peoples’ ‘cultural distinctiveness’ as a product of internal ‘cultural mechanisms’, these
subjects were suffering massive dislocations caused precisely by the links that connected
them to others: victimization by state-led development schemes that appropriated their

resources and mandated relocations (Tsing 1993, 2005), forced assimilation projects
(Povinelli 2002); settlers’ continued encroachment on their land and other resources
(Collier 1994; Sponsel 1997); and continued violence and even genocide (Gordon and
Douglas 2000; Menchu 1983).

Robert Gordon and Stuart Sholto-Douglas (2000) provide a compelling critique of
anthropological complicities in these colonial processes in their investigation of the
Struggles of the ‘Bushmen’ during the 20'h century. Gordon and Douglas juxtapose
anthroDOIOgists’ and others’ repeated depictions of the San as residing in an autonomous
EQOCultural realm of alterity with evidence of the exploitation, proletarianization,
conscription into war and even genocide they suffered throughout the 20th century.

While culturalist assumptions about the San often legitimated this exploitation, Gordon
and DOuglas make a compelling Case that these assumptions have greatly facilitated
exploitation by obscuring these processes.

' A 1’ ather self-evident ethical stance toward ‘culture’ emerges from these critical

reflections ‘
one Of rejection. Accordingly, many anthropologists have abandoned the

13

 

 

 

 

concept. Indeed, Lila Abu-Lughod ( 1991; also 1993) has promoted “writing against
culture”: that is, writing about and representing people’s lives in a way that circumvents
the construction of difference. Abu-Lughod focuses on the particularities of everyday
experience in order to subvert culture. She explains (1 993127),

By insistently focusing on individuals and the particularities of their lives, we may be
better able to perceive similarities in all our lives... The dailincss, by breaking coherence
and introducing time, trains our gaze on flux and contradiction; and the particulars
suggest that others live as we perceive ourselves living — not as automatons programmed
according to “cultural” rules or acting out social roles, but as people going through life
wondering what they should do, making mistakes, being opinionated, vacillating, trying

to make themselves look good, enduring tragic personal losses, enjoying others, and
finding moments of laughter.

Abu-Lughod ’s explicitly ethically-motivated rejection of culture and focus on the
particularities and felt experience of individuals’ lives converges with other post
structural desires to theorize meaning without an underlying entity or force called
‘culture’. Post—‘culture’ approaches to meaning share an emphasis on the processuality,
contestedness and territorial unboundedness of meaning. At the very least, processual
approaches unsettle the notion that meaning is generated by an underlying entity (e.g..
Watanabe 1992). At best, they regard meaning as existing only as fragmentedly
articulated in process, as actors negotiate it within concrete and always shifting power-
laden Contexts (6.g., Stewart 1996). Furthermore, the severing of meaning from its
territorial bounds has prompted a focus on how “global flows” form these power-laden
conteXtS (Appadurai 1996; see also Tsing 2005).

In addition to devising post-‘culture’ anthropological approaches to meaning,
some Scholars have tackled ‘culture’s’ production of alterity by laying bare the power-

laden ['0
c . . . . .
p eSSeS through which particular articulations of the concept take form. In this

14
‘

vein, Quetzil Castaneda (1996:25) promotes the deconstruction of existing notions of

cultural difference as an “ethical style of research”:

In this ethical style of research, the ethnographer consciously intervenes with an explicit
(versus implicit) political and practical agenda in the politics of knowledge in which a
cultural community is situated. The difference between this and a patemalist ethic typical
of colonialist anthropology... is that the goal here would be to reveal the political
dimensions of and the power relations underlying the representations of culture that are
produced in and through ethnographic practices.
Thus, through the critical introspective turn in anthropology, anthropologists have
devised new approaches to meaning and strategies for combating the apparent hegemony
of culturalist assumptions in broader social life. In no small part, a desire to devise an
ethical approach congruent with the desires, interests and struggles of the subjects of
anthropological accounts has led this shift.

Nonetheless, Juan Julian Caballero, a leading Mixtec cultural revitalizationist, has
identified precisely these innovations on ‘culture’ as hindering their efforts forjustice.
He writes,

Among the problems we must face are some scholars who not only do not value

indigenous cultures, but disqualify our work in favor of cultural spec'i'fic'iries. [Julién
Caballero 2001 b222; my emphasis-l

Juan Julian Caballero’s concerns beckon transformations in the meanings of ‘culture’ that
wer . . .
e underway even as anthropOlogists elaborated these critiques of the concept. Below,

I exa ° . . . .
mine how these transformations have unsettled understandings of the politics and

Ethics Of ‘Clllture’ .

15

The transforming fields of ‘culture’ politics
While anthropologists have identified many ways in which ‘culture’ and those
who wield it have contributed to the marginalization of those perceived as bearing it, in
recent decades, members of groups marginalized by the denigration of cultural alterity
have embraced cultural distinctiveness and promoted it as a thing of value in their efforts
to fight marginalization. This culture-based strategy has been particularly important in
indigenous rights activism, and especially among indigenous rights activists working
through networks that articulate with the transnational level (Brysk 2000). These
activists draw from the deep and widespread resonance indigenous culture gained
through the colonial and postcolonial periods, even while fighting particular designations
of indigenous culture as inferior. The corresponding culture-based efforts reverberate in
two critical directions. First, celebrations of indigenous culture provide common footing
for the establishment of communities with a sense of commonality and shared interests.
Second, activists capture wider support for their efforts as they promote celebrations of
indigenous culture that appeal to a wider audience. The effectiveness of these
reverberations for advancing activists’ aims depends on activists’ adeptness in utilizing
Channels with familiarity while concomitantly remaking these channels in ways that
diverse audiences find compelling and that contribute to their aims.
The recent adoption of the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples by the
United Nations on September 13’“, 2007 attests to their success. By gaining affirmations
0ftheir rightS at the multilateral level activists ' b h k '
, gain enc mar s that they can press their

nation-
states to conform to (Donnelly 2003). These efforts have effected a widespread —

16

if uneven and fragmented — codification of ‘multicultural’ principles, which ground
affirmations of indigenous peoples’ rights in their cultural distinctiveness.

The critiques of culture that scholars elaborated during the 19805 and 19903 seem
ill-equipped to address the shifting terrain of ‘culture’ politics that culture-based
indigenous activism and the related efforts to institutionalize multicultural principles
beckon. While Lila Abu-Lughod’s (1991) exhortation to ‘write against culture’ may
combat the marginalization of anthropological subjects, it may just as easily undermine
one of indigenous activists’ most successful foundations for combating this

marginalization. ‘Kay Warren (1998) has drawn from her work with pan-Maya activists
in Guatemala to illustrate the dilemmas that emerge between ‘culture’-critiquing
anthropologists and their ‘culture’ wielding informants. Warren recounts that she entered
the field armed with critical perspectives positing culture as an invention, only to find
that the Maya activists she worked with relied on essentialist depictions of Maya culture
for their political efforts. Moreover, she observed that a critic of the pan-Maya
movement deployed the same constructivist understandings of culture she subscribed to
as a tool for undermining and discrediting pan-Maya activists’ efforts (1998241).
Observations that the culture critique can and has undermined indigenous
p60ples’ efforts have reinvigorated anthropological debates over the politics of culture
and the ethics of scholarly representations. In response, many scholars have identified
the Critique as ethically wanting, and sought alternatives. For example, Edward Fischer
(2001, 1999) advanced a theoretical approach to ‘culture’ that he claims responds to
anthropologists’ critiques of the concept while still supporting activists’ aims. He

grounds hi .
S analytical framework in the notion of generative cultural principles,

l7

underlying principles that drive change in ways that produce cultural continuity.
Fischer’s approach effectively addresses critiques that the traditional culture concept’s
emphasis on how underlying structures produce continuity precludes understanding of
change. Nonetheless, his focus on how underlying structural forces drive change
conforms with the approaches to culture that have produced images of anthropological
subjects as lacking individuality and agency. Fisher’s proposal also fails to address
concerns about how ‘culture’ contributes to the creation of hierarchies of human
difference by disseminating the notion that there are ‘different varieties of man’, to
paraphrase the early observations of Roy Wagner (197522).
More recently, Charles Hale (2006) has promoted a different tack. Hale
(2 006:104) charges that the culture critique errs — in the final instance — in its privileging
of scientific and academic goals:

Cultural critique, and the approach to ethnography it has spawned, is politically
posmoned, with primary (or even exclusive) commitments to the institutional space from
which it emanates.

Although Hale gestures to the political and ethical concerns motivating the ‘culture’
critique, he ultimately characterizes critiques of culture as waged with primary concern
f - .

0r screntific goals. He asserts (2006:101),

Proponents of cultural critique, driven by the search for ever-greater analytical

Egg/Plenty and sophistication, object to. the politically induced analytical closure that

criti ‘3‘ {escarch oftenrequires. The crmCism that. follows from this position ofcultural

that (ilt F 15_n0t that activ1st research lacks objectiVity or that it has become pohtrcrzed but
13 S‘lmplistic, unproblematized, and undertheorized.

In contr
as ,9 cc ' ' ‘9 ' '
t, he advocates an “engaged form of activrst research , in which scholars who
Work With - .
1ndlgenous activists adopt a commitment to producing work that contributes to

aCthiSts’ _
goals. In the face of continual change — which shifting meanings of ‘culture’

I 18

exemplifies — Hale claims that this strategy enables scholars to contribute effectively and
appropriately to indigenous peoples’ ongoing struggles against marginalization.

In depicting the culture critique as a narrow reflection of (elite) academic
concerns, Hale taps into more widespread criticisms of an apparent disconnect between
academic works and everyday life, a critique that scholars have waged most boisterously
against post-structural works. Other scholars working with indigenous people have also
recently charged critics of culture with a reckless imperviousness to real world concerns.

For example, Richard Lee (2006:471) recently cautioned anthropologists that

There are signs of a dangerous disjuncture between anthropologists’ views and those of

indigenous people. Currently some anthropologists seem to be more interested in the
constructedness of indigenous histories and identities, at the expense of focusing on their

hopes and aspirations.

These characterizations of the ethics of the culture critique turn on assumptions
that indigenous rights activists’ strategies benefit ‘indigenous people’. This claim, in
turn, rests on the assumption that indigenous people have shared interests that indigenous
activists willingly and effectively gauge and promote on behalf of all. C ontrastingly,
evidence of differences among indigenous people, and of the complex and varied ways in
Which these differences articulate with ongoing ‘group’ struggles, raise questions
r egar cling to which indigenous people anthropologists should lend their support.
Further-mol- e, the complex, shifting, dialogically—constructed terrain of culture politics
raises questions regarding the extent to which actions that contribute to one’s interests are
Self—eVident- In the rest of this chapter, I analyze the implications of difference and the

dialogical
nature of politics for the politics of ‘culture’ and scholars’ efforts to stake out

an ethic
a1 approach to the concept-

l9

“Situatedness” and the politics of representation

Most of the anthropological critique of ‘culture’ 1 synthesized above implicates
the concept for inventing group difference. Recent trends suggest that this dimension of
culture’s inventiveness may contribute to subaltem peoples’ efforts to combat
marginalization. Yet, feminist critiques also implicate ‘culture’ for obscuring difference.
Indeed, feminist scholars have assembled a massive body of work challenging claims that

‘groups’ share common interests. This dimension of ‘culture’ poses more intransigent

dilemmas for cultural politics.
Feminist analyses of how forms of power and inequality with salience within and
between ‘groups’ intersect to shape individuals’ experiences (e. g., hooks 2000; Mohanty
1988; Narayan 1997; Nelson 1999) provide a particularly relevant and compelling
challenge to assumptions that indigenous leaders promote commonly-held interests. In
these works, feminists analyze how the different kinds of power relations we treat as
isolated in theory interweave in practice, and shape individuals’ experiences in the
process. Owing to the multiple determination of these experiences of marginalization,
SUbal tern women have often been forced to struggle against the denigration of their group
Iidentities even while engaging in broader alliances to promote their gender interests
(hooks 2000; Merry 2005; Mohanty 1988). Likewise, they often encounter gender-based
marginalization while collaborating to fight for ‘group’-based interests (Afl<hami 2001;
Hemandez Castillo 1997, 1994; Moghadam 1994; Narayan 1997; Speed et al. 2006).
Feminist scholars have elaborated approaches to the politics of knowledge and
representation grounded in these observations of the particularities that shape individual

experienc
es, In one particularly compelling and influential analysis, Donna Haraway

20

(1988) observes that all knowledge is “situated” within particular contexts, and that all
claims to knowledge are consequently “partial”: partial in the sense of the term as
incomplete as well as in the sense of the term as subjective (see Harding 1991 for a
different approach). This approach challenges scholars to consider the specific ways in
which all knowledge claims inhere a partiality shaped by speakers’ social locations.
Interestingly, Charles Hale (2006: 100) references this work in laying out the

justification for his ‘activist anthropology’ approach. He writes,

Once we bracket objectivity and affirm the intersubjectivc character of social science
research, one might expect the floodgates to open to a growing interest in activist
research methodologies and their endorsement as legitimate scholarly activity within the
discipline. For those who affirm the idea that knowledge is produced through a dialogue
among politically situated actors, it would seem a relatively easy and logical step to
incorporate this process more integrally into one’s research method—especially when

one shares a political alignment with the subjects of study.

Yet, Haraway’s insistence on the partiality of all knowledge unravels Hale’s
characterization of a singular plane of politics based on ‘groups’ of indigenous people, as
she directs attention to the forces that multiply and fracture interests and the alignments
they correspond with. Hale’s “political alignment” entails an unacknowledged
Prioritization of fields of struggle that simultaneously subjugates other planes of struggle,
SUCh as those related to gender, class and age. Thus, Hale employs a superficial — a
partial — reading of Haraway’s n0tion of “situatedness” to interpret the concept as
illuminating a path toward his approach.

SOl'ne recent works have indicated the salience of these insights into how multiple
Planes of poWCT and inequality interweave to shape people’s experiences of
marginalization for indigenous activism. These works illustrate how the diversity of

SubJeCtS’ soc1al locations and experiences frames divergent interpretations of

21

‘

 

their interests, and grounds engagement on varied fronts and in diverse forms of struggle.

In these contexts, presumptions that the particular goals and strategies pursued by

indigenous rights activists are the sole legitimate vehicle for indigenous rights struggles

can contribute to the suppression and marginalization of other forms of struggle. So

observes Kaushik Ghosh (2006) in his analysis of indigenous rights struggles in India.

Ghosh describes the marginalization of a long-standing history of locally-situated rural

indigenous peoples’ political contest as movements articulating with the transnational
indigenous rights movement have been privileged as the sole legitimate medium of
indigenous activism. To make matters worse, Ghosh observes that elites and those
indigenous people who have participated in the incorporative schemes of the Indian state
have been especially well-positioned to take advantage of the opportunities the
transnational indigenous rights movement has provided. Ghosh’s account illustrates how
assumptions that transnationally—articulated indigenous rights activists pursue the
interests of ‘indigenous people’ contributed to the marginalization of those whom
academics and others typically imagine as the ultimate beneficiaries of indigenous rights
efforts.

Maria Elena Garcia (2005) has described a somewhat similar dynamic in her
examination of indigenous rights efforts in Peru. Garcia describes discrepancies in how
urban indigenous rights activists in Peru and the rural indigenous populations they aim to
‘empower’ Conceive of their interests, and the contests these discrepancies produce. The
Urban aetiviStS Promote an intercultural educational project whose cornerstone is the
teaching of indigenous languages in indigenous communities. Through the educational

projeCt, ur . .
ban actwrsts aim to reverse denigrations of indigeneity produced through

22

 

colonial and postcolonial histories and promote the recognition and affirmation of
indigenous culture as a thing of value in and for modern life among rural indigenous
people. Yet, many of the intended subjects of these ‘empowerment’ initiatives reject the
imposition of an intercultural educational project, regarding it as something that will
consign their children to a life of poverty and exclusion in a wider racist social context.
Indigenous rights activists regard these sentiments as evidence that a colonial false-
consciousness has seduced rural people into rejecting their culture. Garcia describes the
coercive strategies activists deploy, including drawing from the authority and threat of
the state, as they work to impose this ‘empowerment’ on rural indigenous people.

Consequently, in this case, too, a front and form of culture—based indigenous struggle

with widespread legitimacy contributed to the marginalization of more locally

contextualized struggles.

Feminist scholars’ observations of the gender politics of formulations of ‘culture’

raise additional cautionary flags for facile claims that indigenous rights activists’
interpretations of culture benefit ‘indigenous people’. Feminist scholars analyzing

Contex ts in which formulations of culture have provided a basis for mobilization have
repeatedly described how male movement leaders uphold notions of culture in the name
Ofgmup interests that simultaneously affirm their own authority and diminish women’s
power (Afkhami 2001; Moghadam 1994; Narayan 1997; Papanek 1994). Women active
in the Maya Zapatista movement have fought these tendencies by taking advantage of the
p OlitiCization of indigenous culture to challenge so-called traditions that negatively

inlIUen
ce them (Hernandez Castillo 1997, 1994; Speed et al. 2006). In many cases,

23

however, women’s exclusion from these formalized political spaces circumscribes their

opportunities to influence activists’ cultural constructions.

These observations attest to the relevance of calls for attention to particularity for
current anthropological conversations about the ethics of indigenous cultural politics.
The definition of ‘progressive’ politics varies among indigenous populations, as
individuals’ particular social locations shape their determinations of their interests, the
struggles they engage in and how they engage in these struggles. Thus, a recognition of
the particular ways in which factors such as gender, rural/urban residency, nation,
socioeconomic status, class, education, age and other locally salient dimensions of social
difference shape how indigenous people are situated is a necessary precursor to devising
ethical approaches that contribute to the struggles and aspirations of ‘indigenous people’.
Finally, there is an important degree of correspondence between the
anthropological culture critique’s call for attention to particularity to subvert the
construction of ‘group’ difference, and feminists’ call for attention to how conceptions of
‘gr Oup’ difference obscure the particularities of experience. The emphasis on
Particularities Lila Abu-Lughod (1993,1991) develops in her call to ‘write against
culture ’ is also responsive to feminist observations of how the particularities of social
10cation differently shape experience and interests. Both of these critical approaches
Shar e an inherent danger, as their focus on particularity undermines a ground of
COmmonali ty that facilitates collective action. Nonetheless, the explicit ethical concerns

guidin ‘ .
g thls Pursuit of particularity and a recognition of the situatedness of all knowledge

claims
(Haraway 1988) provide a measure of insulation from this danger.

24

In sum, despite claims of the ethical imperviousness of the culture critique, I
arrive at the critique through a feminist and anthropological route driven by explicitly
ethical concerns. The interweaving of multiple salient dimensions of difference in
shaping people’s experiences and interests makes ethics a complex and differentiated
field. Consequently, I regard attention to particularity as a prerequisite for staking out
ethical approaches. My approach in this work is explicitly partial — I analyze the politics

of culture by examining how formulations of indigenous culture influence a particular

group of rural, Mixtec-speaking indigenous women.

Beyond participation: The cunning of culture

Just as difference complicates the politics of culture, so, too, do the intricacies of
political contest. Critiques of the politics of representation — of which the preceding
discussion is part —— direct attention to unequal access to important fora in which actors
articulate interests, translate them into concrete strategies and pursue these strategies.
These critiques typically rest on uncomplicated understandings of politics: individuals
gauge their own interests and promote them when afforded the opportunity, and success
arrives in the form of institutional capitulation to their demands. They hinge on the claim
that if only effective strategies for creating a truer, more representative articulation of
inter eStS Were invented, changes that respond to the interests of the diversity of

l'11di en a '
g ous people could be realized. Indigenous people could force the state to
imp]eme . . . . . .
nt more responswe meaSures, which would gain material form as codifications

of indi
genous People’s rights. In this progressive political process, (good) affirmations of

25

the rights of indigenous people would dislodge existing (bad) orientations towards
indigeneity and obstructions to these rights.
‘Progressive’ readings of political change as a product of ‘good’ politics

motivated by subaltems, or ‘bad’ politics driven by the state may be persuasive in their

broadest outlines. Nonetheless, these readings eschew the dialogical nature of political

contest. Even the most dramatic moments of political change are well analyzed as
multiply-determined momentary accommodations in the context of ongoing struggle (see,
eg, Joseph and Nugent 1994). lmportantly, the accommodations these struggles produce
bear the stamps of the multiple parties engaged in these ongoing struggles. This
distinctly dialogical productivity necessitates a more careful consideration of how
particular changes can reflect and contribute to the struggles and aspirations of
indigenous people, while simultaneously frustrating those same struggles and aspirations.

Transnationally-linked indigenous activists’ articulations of indigenous alterity

readily evidence the dialogical nature of ‘culture’ politics. These activists owe much of
their success to their adeptness at remaking and redeploying received notions of
indigeneity. They have seized existing conceptions of indigenous cultural difference, and
reinterpreted and redeployed them as a foundation for their efforts. Kay Warren (1998)
emp 10y ed GaYatri Spivak’s term “strategic essentialism” to describe these creative and
inventive Processes in her analysis of Maya cultural revitalization in Guatemala. For
many, the term Pegs an aura of frivolousness to indigenous activists’ cultural claims.

Yet, this ’ ' -
‘3 Invention in an analytical sense, one deeply-situated and thus constrained by

historic
a1 and contemporary understandings. As Tania Li [20003151] notes,

-.-a . . . . . . . . . .
neitgroupi’ Self-identification as tribal or indigenous 18 not natural or 1ncv1table, but
er 18 it Simply invented, adopted, or imposed. It is, rather, a positioning which draws

26

upon historically sedimented practices, landscapes, and repertoires of meaning, and
emerges through particular patterns of engagement and struggle.

The notions of indigenous cultural alterity that transnational indigenous rights

activists have adopted, refigured and deployed in their efforts resonate precisely because

they play on historical and contemporary understandings with widespread currency.
These ideas gain currency because they ‘fit’ with what we know about the world. They
seem right and they feel right. While the contextual contingency of meaning challenges
readings of indigenous activists’ strategic essentialisms as frivolous and unauthentic, it
simultaneOUSly raises cautionary flags for the politics of contemporary formulations of
indigenous culture: What historical understandings doformations of indigenous alterity
summon?

The discourses valorizing indigenous culture with the most widespread resonance
build on assumptions that the indigenous subject is exterior to the modern world.
Indigenous rights activists frequently contend that this exteriority positions indigeneity to
address the wants, ills and dilemmas of modern life. Most profoundly, fantasies of
indigenous alterity play on Western desires to escape modern life. In addition,
indigeneity Can offer solutions to a whole host of modern dilemmas: indigenous people
are better environmental stewards (Conklin and Graham 1995; Muehlebach 2001); they
have more just social relations; they lack social differentiation and contest; etc. In short,

indigenouS cultural alterity becomes a metonym for better environmental stewardship,
better social subjects, better economic models, or a more moral just version of modernity.
In 1' efleeting on these dynamics, Beth Conklin and Laura Graham have critiqued

how
pr eva ' ' . . . . . . . . .
11mg understandings of indigenous alterity Circumscribe the discurswe fields in

‘. 27

which indigenous activists articulate their demands. Conklin and Graham (19952701)
assert,

In Amazonian identity politics, Indians’ power — to the extent that they have any —
derives not from traditional forms of money, power or patronage, but from Westerners’
ideas about Indians.

These authors rightly critique the power relations constraining indigenous activists’
strategies, though they most certainly overstate their claim. Indigenous activists have
reformulated articulations of indigenous alterity in undeniably powerful ways. Activists
have reformulated indigenous culture in ways that provide themselves and those they
seek to represent with a prism for the understanding of self and other that challenges the
historical denigration of the indigenous self. In the process, they have laid a foundation
upon which groups of people with shared interests have been and are being formed.
Finally, activists have deftly elaborated the substance of indigenousness in ways that
Support their political claims, particularly rights to self-determination and land
(Muehlebach 2001).

Recent critiques of multicultural political reforms also evidence the over-
determination of cultural politics, and its significance for gauging the politics of
‘positive’ formulations of culture. Elizabeth Povinelli (2002) and Charles Hale (2005,
2002) have recently elaborated critiques of multicultural reforms that challenge
Perceptions 0f multiculturalisms as facile capitulations to indigenous activists’ demands.

The capitulation vantage point obscures the channels for coercion and constraint
multicultural reforms invariably create, even as they create new opportunities for
Indigenous People to ward off these forces. Both Hale and Povinelli argue that the

multlcu 1
tural 1’ eforms they examine pose dangers to indigenous people, as elites have

- 28

 

formulated and utilized them in ways to ensure their own rule. Povinelli describes how
leaders of the Australian nation-state used multicultural reform to disarm the critique of
the Australian nation-state’s colonial relations. Settlers devised multicultural reforms,
which they claimed provided a more expansive space for the indigenous other within the
Australian nation. Crucially, this process did not involve a devolution of control. For
Povinelli, the “cunning of recognition” is that within the multicultural nation, indigenous
people must learn to maneuver these settler constructions of alterity, which includes
knowing when and how to approximate and distance themselves from certain (valorized

and repugnant) symbols of alterity. Povinelli observes (2002249),
At the most simple level, no indigenous subject can inhabit the temporal or spatial
location to which indigenous identity refers — the geographical and social space and time
of authentic Ab-originality... Producing a present-tense indigenousness in which some
failure is not a qualifying condition is discursively and materially impossible.
Ultimately, rather than providing a greater space for indigenous participation in the
Australian nation, Australian multiculturalism redefines the mode and terrain of
government. Somewhat similarly, Charles Hale (2005, 2002) argues that Central
American leaders have devised a circumscribed multicultural project to disarm the threat
indigenous peoples’ claims to self-determination pose to the neoliberal project. For Hale,
“multiculturalism menaces” because it marginalizes those indigenous subjects who
pursue more radical projects demanding self-determination. Thus, the dialogical nature
Ofindigenous ‘eulture’ politics unsettles facile distinctions between ‘positive’ and
‘flegative’ readings of indigenous culture, along with the translation of these readings into
multiculmral reforms.
The examination of multicultural reforms intimates a final consideration. To the

eXtent th
at these ideas ‘work’, they travel. Indeed, they only work through travel, as they

29

¥

 

are formulated into policies and projects that are adopted and imposed in different places.
These processes, too, are dialogical, but the “dialogue” here occurs within a much more
expansive frame, within the diverse contexts in which projects and policies are devised
and carried out. This study targets this understudied area of cultural politics. How do
these ideas travel? What meanings do they beckon and acquire in the processes that

Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing (2005) describes as “friction”?

Conclusion
Even in this apparent ‘multicultural’ age, where many scholars have urged
anthropologists to abandon the culture critique, there are multiple reasons to linger on the
politics of culture, as I do in this study. First, the emergence of ‘positive’ readings of
indigenous cultural alterity associated with ‘multiculturalism’ does not necessarily signal
the disappearance of ‘negative’ readings. Second, difference and the dialogical nature of
politics give cause for approaching even ‘positive’ readings of indigenous cultural alterity
cautiously and critically. Differences among indigenous people intimate that culture
Politics influence them differently. The dialogical nature of politics can introduce
“menace” and “cunning” into apparently positive discursive articulations and
multicultural reforms,
If Calls for an ethical approach to ‘culture’ index a desire to contribute to
indigenous people’s struggles against exploitation and their efforts to negotiate better
CircumStanCeS, responding to these questions about the politics of culture is essential. I
engage these questions through the analysis I develop in the pages that follow. I examine

Contem
p or ary formulations of indigenous culture, analyze the social processes through

- 30

 

which these formulations travel, and emphasize the implications of these processes for
those among indigenous people who are perceived as bearing the most authentic
expressions of indigenous culture. A key moment that Roy Wagner (1975) directed
attention to in his critique of ‘the invention of culture’ over thirty years ago lies at the
heart of the ensuing analysis: the adoption of culture as a frame for reckoning similarity
to and difference from others. While Wagner noted how the adoption of the culture
concept provided anthropologists with a unique vantage point, I analyze the social
processes through which ordinary people are “incited” (Povinelli 2002: l 3) to view
themselves and others — in. varying degrees — as culture-bearers. In turn, I analyze how

the differential dissemination of the concept influences relations among those whose

experience the concept is used to narrate.

31

 

CHAPTER TWO: POWER AND INDIGENEITY 1N MEXICAN HISTORY

The distinction between Indian and settler acquired singular importance with the
colonization of “New Spain” in 1521. This distinction has taken different forms during
the almost five centuries that have transpired since, as elites and indigenous people have
renegotiated its meaning and its significance for shifting strategies of rule. This chapter
examines these shifting configurations of indigenousness and strategies of governance in
the history of New Spain and the postcolonial Mexican nation—state. I analyze four
periods: colonial rule; the early nation-building period of the 19'h century; the post—
revolutionary early and middle years of the 20‘h century; and the period of crisis and

neoliberal reform that began in the last quarter of the 20‘h century.

Two of the most significant transformations in this history occurred with the
transition from New Spain to Mexico: the dismantling of colonial rule and the rise of the
liberal model of the Mexican nation. A few short decades after Mexico had gained
independence, elites advocating a liberal Mexican nation triumphed during the middle of
the nineteenth century. They implemented a series of reforms aimed at ushering in a
form 0f government grounded in the free, equal and self-determining individual.

The demise of colonial rule and the rise of liberal societies symbolize a great

oral shift in Western conSCiousness: post-colonial nation builders created jZISI liberal

nati - . o o O o 0 I
on states in the wreckage of the unjust colonies. In this historical rendering, above all
else, t - . . . . . . .
he cI‘eation of separate institutions With distinct logics of rule for the government of

settl - .
ers and indigenous people symbolize the immorality of the colonial state. The

POStcol - .
onial liberal nation-state, grounded in the ideal of the free and equal individual,

32

¥

appears in marked contradistinction and as solution to this unjust colonial organization of
government.
Nonetheless, in surveying the history of indigenous people in Latin America,
Hector Diaz Polanco (1997) observes that a distinctly colonial mentality of “indigenism”
has guided Latin American governance strategies throughout colonial and postcolonial

rule. He writes,
...indigenism... involves policies that have been thought out and designed by non-Indians
to be applied to others. [Indigenism] does not assume any consideration of the points of
view and interests of those others. Rather, it assumes a more or less blatant denial that
these others have anything to say about their own affairs and destiny. [1997223]
The continuity of indigenist govemmentalities through colonial and post-colonial forms
of rule reflects the modeling of the individual subject deserving of the rights necessary
for self-determination in the liberal state on the modem European individual, itself
construed in contradistinction to the indigenous. In this context, the spaces mestizo (of
Spanish and indigenous heritage) elites afforded to indigeneity reflect what Elizabeth
Povinelli (2002: 12) describes as the shifting boundary that demarcates the “limits of
tolerance” and sequesters “repugnant” expressions of alterity. During the earliest
moments in which elites articulated a liberal imaginary of the Mexican nation, they
afforded no place to indigenousness therein. Thus, liberal elites saw indigenous people
as requiring leadership to acquire the willingness, desire and ability to participate in this
rigl'lts‘based nation. These limits shifted importantly from the nineteenth to twentieth
Centuries, and again beginning in the latter decades of the twentieth century. I examine
these Shifts below, and analyze the opportunities they provide for indigenous people and

the new
dangers they create. I begin by examining how ‘indigenousness’ gained form

and how r .
1 ts SIgnificance shifted throughout the period of colonial rule.

33

 

Colonial rule

The colonial imposition wrought an unparalleled disaster on the lives of the
indigenous people of the land newly designated New Spain. The initial violence of the
conquest yielded to a series of epidemics that ultimately diminished the indigenous
population to a fraction of its pre-Conquest size. William Taylor’s (1972:17-8)
estimation of population decline in the Valley of Oaxaca is indicative: he estimates that
3 50,000 people lived in the Valley at the time of the conquest, and that this number had
declined to 40,000-45,000 by 1630.4
In the context of this monumental decline, the indigenous people of the land faced
severe social and cultural dislocations. The colonizers remade the indigenous social
hierarchies that had provided the basis for meaningful social engagement, reducing
indigenous social differentiation to elite rulers and commoners. Concomitantly, they
forbid the indigenous people of the land from carrying out many of their everyday
cultural practices. The colonists were particularly zealous in their intolerance for
indigenous religion: they outlawed indigenous religious rites and destroyed sacred sites
and other material artifacts related to the practice of religion. Even as the indigenous
inhabitants of the land watched their communities dwindle and their social and cultural
worlds disintegrate, their tribute burdens multiplied. Faced with this severe, multi-

f . . . . . . - ‘ ' ‘
ronted dislocation, many committed suiCide. Others Simply ‘wandered off in despair’,

aba ' . . .
“domng their communities.

 

4
In fact
a de . . . . . .
C O’lgrega 6.1.0? Opf-‘latlon prompted Spanish administrators to institute a program of resettlement, or
n, In Which they relocated indigenous populations into more centralized and populous

C0mm - -
enacimlt'es during the late 16th and earl 17th centuries (Ouweneel 1995-762' see also Perkins 2005a
ano 2000 y ' 9 9

34

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Yet, many communities survived. Those that did encountered the imposition of a
colonial system with two primary goals: the extraction of the colony’s wealth and the
Christianization of indigenous people. The Crown devised a dual ‘republic’ system to

pursue these goals, establishing a Republica de indios and a Republica de espanoles.

“Racial” group determined membership in these republics, and, in the process,
determined individuals’ rules, rights, and obligations to the colony. The dual republic
system of government of New Spain provides a good example of what Kaushik Ghosh
(2006:508) has deemed “exclusive govemmentalities” — logics of rule in which
assumptions about the alterity of indigenous people underwrite the imposition of separate
and distinct modes and structures of government.

The Crown implemented colonial rule relatively quickly by recognizing and
formalizing the rights of indigenous rulers, who were designated caciques. In short
order, the colonizers imposed an additional government structure that functioned
alongside of cacicazgo. The new cabildo or town-council system of governance included
elected leadership positions responsible for governing local politics. In contrast to the
strict hereditary requirements of cacicazgo, the cabildos were meant to function without
regard for heredity. Nonetheless, caciques regularly occupied the highest cabildo
positions, gobernadores, in practice (Ouweneel 1995).5

Ronald Spores (1967:120) has observed that cacicazgo provided a great measure

of Continuhy in everyday villagers’ experiences in the earliest years of colonial rule.

Even
S . . . .
0, Caczcazgo was a cruCial technology of colonial rule: caczques served as key

s\\

Tetra '
Clan . . . . . . .
that OCCurreo (2000) identifies the declining status of women rulers as a major transformation in governance

denominated With the establishment of cabildos in Mixtec communities. Although colonial administrators
WWI men ‘Xtec women rulers as cacicas in recognition of their rule over Mixtec communities along

, I I I O o v I I

Omen were not afforded Similar status in the new political institutions.

-| 35

 

intermediaries for the administration of colonial rule. Thus, Michael Ducey (2001 :527)
aptly characterizes cacicazgo as “Janus-faced: on the one hand, it was part of the
administrative system of New Spain, and, on the other, it was one of the few institutions

staffed by the Indians themselves” (2001:527). The contradictions stemming from

c a c iques’ dual loyalties to the communities they represented and the colonizers they

S el-ved made the cacique-community relationship rife with conflict.

While indigenous nobles had collected tribute in goods and labor on their own
b e half prior to the conquest, as caciques they were also charged with ensuring that their
C Q mmunities met the requisite tribute and labor demands of the colony. Thus, caciques
Q’ Q l 7! ected tribute on behalf of the Crown, in addition to on their own behalf. In addition,
th e encomienda system placed a major burden on indigenous peoples’ labor and
ré S Qurces during the early years of the colony. The Crown devised the encomiena’a
S 3’s tern to reward those who had played an important role in the conquest; encomienda
gave these individuals the right to exact tribute in goods and labor from particular
Q Qlinmunities. The system was revamped in short time because of recurring reports of
abUSeS by encomenderos (Diaz-Polanco 199728). The changes established a system of
1 albor draft called repartimiento in which demands on indigenous peoples’ labor were
I"Egularized and divided among encomenderos, the Crown, clergy and others. The new

SB’Stem required those making demands on indigenous people’s labor to compensate them
(~ibid.). Nonetheless, Hector Diaz-Polanco (l997:8) rightly emphasizes that even as the
Changes made the system less susceptible to the whims and abuses of individual

e”C'omendos, they institutionalized the exploitation of indigenous labor.

36

Encomenderos were eventually replaced by Alcaldes mayores, Crown—appointed
administrators who oversaw indigenous communities (Taylor 1979: 15). Alcades majl’ores
b enefited from the reparto de efetos, through which they enjoyed a monopoly on
p roviding certain goods to the communities whose administration they supervised. The
reparto de efetos often led to an illicit practice, wherein alcala’es mayores supplied
C ornmunity members with raw materials to produce goods, which they purchased back at
ex ceptionally low prices. In response, the Crown eventually outlawed the reparto de
e‘2‘33103 in 1790 (ibid.). Nonetheless, it continued in many places, often through the
Q Qllusions of Alcaa'es mayores and caciques (Chance and Taylor 1985).
The Crown provided institutional mechanisms for indigenous people to fight the
ab Uses of Spanish administrators, settlers and indigenous elites. Indigenous people were
d i rect subjects of the Crown, and laws established and regulated the extent to which
0 th ers could make demands on their labor and resources. Moreover, indigenous people
11 ad their own tribunals to press their claims. These mechanisms help measure the power
9 f other members of colonial society, while also importantly corresponding with the non-
e Conomic motivations of colonization associated with the proselytizing agenda of the
Ql’lurch. William Taylor (1979:18-9) provides a useful reminder that the missionary aim

was not simply a facile way of legitimizing the colonial enterprise, but a key agenda that

i t‘nportantly shaped the colonial experience:

Iberian Catholocism was in the sixteenth century was a component of the government —
not a separate compartment but an all-pervasive influence on the formation and

implementation of state policy.

Accordingly, even as the Crown devised a colonial system aimed to exploit the labor and

reSources of the indigenous population, the Crown continually sought to ‘protect’

indigenous people:

37

Royal paternalism carried with it a view of sedentary, converted Indians as perpetual
minors, “nifios con barbas” (children with beards), as an eighteenth-century priest put it,
who needed special protection and consideration in order to learn the ways of Christian

civilization and the obligations of royal vassals. Royal laws frequently enjoined “looking

out always for the welfare of the Indians” and “giving greater protection to the Indians.”
[Taylor 1979:17]

Indigenous people quickly learned to navigate these opportunities to press their claims in
c: O lonial society. Indeed, most of the existing indigenous accounts of colonial life and life

1:) ri or to the conquest reside in court records.6

Indigenous people used the courts to pursue different kinds of struggles. For

e >< ample, cabildo officials used these channels to fight abuses by Alcalde mayors
(Terraciano 2001 :150). Yet, as noted above, relations between communities and
C‘ Qciques were often particularly conflictual (Perkins 2005b; Ouweneel 1995; Terraciano
2 000. Kevin Terraciano (2000) and Arij Ouweneel (1995) contend that the colonial
re Q onstruction of indigenous leadership sewed the seeds of caciques ’ decline. Both
au thors argue that the Crown dismantled the ground of reciprocity — upon which pre-
1‘1 i Spanic rule was based — in the process of transforming indigenous leaders into
C‘Clciques. This reciprocity had been contingent on leaders’ fiilfillment of key obligations
i I1<:luding providing protection and religious services. Although the Crown
i l"‘lStitutionalized indigenous leaders’ rights to exact tribute, caciques were not provided

with the spiritual and material resources to reciprocate in a way that legitimated their rule

in the eyes of those they ruled.

Given these circumstances, some communities complained to Spanish authorities

about abusive caciques and refused to pay tribute beginning in the 16th century
\

6
FOr example, in his study of Mixtec history during colonial rule, Kevin Terraciano (2001 :9) notes. “Most
of the surviving sources were used as evidence in local civil and criminal disputes adjudicated by the
SDanish alcalde mayor in a given administrative and legal jurisdiction, or alcaldia mayor”

38

 

A.)
by.

 

 

(Terraciano 2000:33). Moreover, some subject towns sought independence from their
cabeceras as early as the 1550s (Terraciano 2001 :124). Disputes between caciques and
those they represented became especially pitched during the 18‘h century, when the
recovery of indigenous populations placed increasing stress on limited resources
( Ouweneel 1995:763; Chance 2003). In this context of increasing land scarcity, conflicts
arose as caciques sold lands to Spanish settlers that community members had regarded as
their own (Chance 2003). Complaints against caciques surged after 1700 in the Mixteca,
and many subject communities sought independence during the 18'h century (Terraciano
2 000:34). In acquiring independence, these communities ended their tribute burdens and
d i Sputes with caciques over rights to land (Monaghan et al. 2003: 143; Perkins 2005b).
Yet, while many communities sought secession from municipal seats to rupture
t h eir relationships with their caciques, caciques and communities often did come together
t (3 defend interests emerging from a sense of shared community (Perkins 20053:29). In
fact, caciques occasionally ceded lands to subject communities (Monaghan et al.
2 003:134) and purchased lands for the community (Perkins 2005az25). Communities
a1 So sometimes sought and acquired the help of their caciques and former caciques in
Clefending their property, which was often needed to demonstrate historical attachments
to land (Perkins 2005a129; Monaghan et al. 2003). Thus, John Monaghan and his

clolleagues (2003) report that some communities sought ‘replacement’ caciques when

th€=ir leaders died leaving no one to inherit the position.

Ostensibly, the colonial hierarchy created two racially-distinct groups: indios and

espafioles. Yet, studies of cacicazgo provide a more complex and often contradictory

39

picture of how colonial hierarchies shaped conceptions of group identity and individual

loyalties. I examine changing colonial conceptions of group difference below.

The shifting criteria for reckoning difference
Caciques unsettle the notion of a colonizing settlement of espafioles with rights to
the labor of a separate settlement of indios. The special place of indigenous caciques in
t he colonial hierarchy hints at how the practicalities of rule shaped the actualization of the
C Olonial caste ideology into a system of govemance, even at its inception. Likewise,
d i Stinctions among espanoles became pivotal in the earliest years of the colony, as
p ehinsulares (espafioles born in Spain) claimed privileges not enjoyed by their erio/lo
( QS‘panoles born in the colony) counterparts.
Although the dual-republic system only recognized indios and espafioles, another
group importantly shaped the conceptions of human difference that emerged in the
i l:lterplay of received colonial categories and everyday experience — Africans. Spanish
Q 0 lonists initially enslaved indigenous people of the new land, but the decline in the
i 1”‘lcligenous population prompted them to bring African slaves to the colonies (Diaz
I)(Dlanco 1997:24-5, 32). As the colony aged, processes of ‘miscegenation’ among negros
( Blacks), indios and espanoles further undermined the facile distinctions underlying the
ClHal-republic system.
Beginning in the 16'h century, ‘racial’ mixing prompted the elaboration of an even
more detailed racial taxonomy. In addition to peninsulares, crio/los, indios and negros,
the emerging classification included mestizos (those of espafiol and indio parentage),

"lulattos (those of espafiol and negro parentage), and zambos (those of indio and negro

40

parentage) (Katzew 1997:4). Later, in the seventeenth century, castizos (light-skinned
meslizos) and morizcos (light-skinned mulattos) were added to these categories (ibid.).
The result was a detailed racial caste system in which peninsulares occupied the most
privileged position, followed by criollos, the “castas” of mixed parentage, indios and
negros. Ilona Katzew (1997) rightly observes that elites’ ongoing anxieties about how
1:) hysical expressions failed to match the racial hierarchy prompted their ongoing
S truggles to capture and order the physical expressions of difference into a hierarchical
C aste system. As Katzew argues, the “casta paintings” elites created during the
e i ghteenth century provide an especially compelling view into this elite panic over the
a Qtual physical blurring of ‘race’ in a system of racial hierarchy. Casta paintings usually
i he luded a series of sixteen paintings in which parents of different ‘racial stock’ were
D i C tured along with their offspring, who were labeled and categorized.
In addition to the inadequacy of the racial hierarchy to capture actual physical
Cl i fferences effectively, the cultural criteria increasingly used to read places within the
Fae ial hierarchy further threatened the racial hierarchy. Katzew (199728) observes,

The eighteenth century in Mexico saw the increasing blurring of social boundaries as the
necessary consequence of racial mixing, but also of the change in the distribution of
wealth. In addition to the frequency of intermarriage, which legitimized interracial
liaisons, Mexico's society was marked by a more frequent "passing" of one racial/social
category to another.

In part, this was influenced by the economic growth of the 18’h century:

The great economic expansion in Mexico during the eighteenth century allowed a number
of families from lower social groups-descendants from Indians and slaves-to amass great
wealth and buy their way into the elite by purchasing certificates of legal "whiteness"
called gracias a] sacar (thanks for letting out).

Ultimately, ‘miscegenation’ and economic transformations greatly shaped a shift toward

‘he use of cultural considerations for navigating difference.

41

The distinction gente de razon, or people of reason, gained widespread salience in

the context of this system of ‘racial’ privilege that increasingly relied on cultural

i dentifiers of status. William Merrill (1997) reports that the distinction was initially used
to identify non-Spanish members of “castas” who were not indigenous and spoke the
S panish language (see also Vigil 1973). This early usage indicates that key cultural
S ytnbols acquired importance for determining the status of individuals within the ‘racial’
h i erarchy. The culture—based hierarchical reasoning opposed gente de razo'n who
(1 ominated key Spanish cultural practices to their indigenous counterparts. Thus, in time,
trhe term gente de razon came to include Spanish speakers, as well, and was used
13 'ri marily to designate non-indigenous people from their counterparts according to

Q: 11 ltural considerations. The growing salience of a cultural hierarchy signaled by gente de

I”. I . . . . . .
Q2011 suggests a multidimensmnal change in reckoning difference.

In Oaxaca, Spanish and mestizos did not often settle outside of the cabeceras, or

h e ad towns, within the Indian towns. William Taylor reports (1979227):

The administrative and commercial cabeceras of Oaxaca generally were more
Hispanicized and had more non-Indian residents that their sujetos politically subordinate
communities, but even the cabeceras — Teposcolula, Nochixtlan, Tlacolula, Zimatlan and

Ocotlan — were still largely composed of Indian peasant farmers.
Thus, ‘miscegination’ was not a great influence on notions of difference shaping these
COtnmunities. Nonetheless, these shifts in reckoning difference likely exacerbated the
tensions contributing to cacique-community conflicts. As discussed above, the colonial
Cacique system created an indigenous elite with contradictory accountabilities to colonial
r1llers and their communities. In addition, caciques were the vanguard in the adoption of
goods, styles and skills of Spanish distinction. For example, in his study of the Mixtec

eXperience during colonial rule, Kevin Terraciano (20012203) reports,

42

In general, most native yya [caciques] owned furniture and a variety of European and
native goods in the colonial period, whereas ordinary fiandahi [commoners] possessed
very few European items and kept mainly native goods in their huahi [home].

M oreover, elite members of indigenous communities were among the first to adopt
S panish surnames:

Yya [caciques] and toho [nobles] were the first to be baptized and the first to adopt

Spanish names after the conquest. By 1550, most yya [caciques] and toho [nobles] had a
Christian baptismal name and a calendrical last name. [Terraciano 2001: 151]

I :1 addition, many native nobles learned the Spanish writing system by the second half of
t he sixteenth century:

European priests taught alphabetic writing to the sons and grandsons of native nobles
who had practiced the art of writing on dcerskin. [Terraciano 2001215]

I:-

Ossession of these goods, styles and skills of Spanish distinction conferred even greater
S tattus on caciques.

Indigenous modes of rule depended on and enforced a gulf between the nobility

and commoners prior to the imposition of colonial rule. Nonetheless, caciques ’ use of
St)anish goods, styles and skills as sources of distinction within the colonial ‘racial’

1“ ierarchy — which subordinated the indigenous to the Spanish — introduced a thorny edge
of betrayal to this gulf. As the colonial period matured and eventually yielded to the
post-colonial Mexican nation-state, and the cultural reading of the ‘racial’ hierarchy
gained sway, indigenous elites identified themselves with greater ease as genre de razon,
along with others who spoke the Spanish language and used Spanish-inspired styles of
dress, and in contradistinction to the indigenous commoners they had governed. This

fUl’ther complicated the ambiguities of caeique loyalties. In doing so, it undoubtedly

flll'ther incited commoners’ mistrust of and conflicts with caciques.

43

 

 

3'1

 

The early Mexican nation-state

In the beginning of the 19th century, native—born criol/o elites disaffected by the
privileges afforded Spanish-born peninsulares generated a movement for independence
from Spain. They struggled for over a decade (1810-1821) before claiming victory in
l 821. The victory was bittersweet, however, as it inaugurated a period of extreme

i n stability and disarray that lasted throughout most of the century. Repeated coups, the
l 055 of extensive territory to the United States, and the recolonization of the country by
the French during the 19‘h century attest to the problems elites encountered in establishing
Control in the new country. Conflicts over the kind of government that should provide
‘3 he bedrock for the new nation greatly contributed to this instability. These conflicts
d i Verged along a conservative-liberal axis: conservatives sought to maintain the structures
Q fpower and privilege of Spanish rule, along with the integration of church and state,
While liberals promoted a new model based on the individual liberties of the equal
Q i tizen, the rule of law, and the separation of Church and state.
Despite the divergences in liberals and conservatives’ aspirations for the fledgling
I‘lation, they shared a common perception of the indio as inadequately prepared to
C Ontribute to a modern nation. Indeed, the trends toward a culturally inflected bi-modal
racial hierarchy that were evident in the colonial period continued during the early
1\’lexican nation-building period of the nineteenth century. Yet, while the genre de razo'n
hierarchy utilized cultural characteristics to synthesize the frenzied differentiation of
I"c‘tcial categories that occurred during the latter part of colonial society into indios and
nOn-indios, early Mexican nation-builders reinvigorated the racial underpinnings of this

distinction. They identified the mestizo offspring of the indigenous inhabitants of the

44

land and the Spanish colonizers as the essence of the emergent Mexican nation (de la
Pefia 2006; Stavenhagen 1998).

Liberals triumphed toward the middle of the century, and enacted key pieces of
legislation to ground the emergence of the liberal state. Most importantly, they created
the Ley Juarez (1855), which established equal citizenship and terminated the special

privileges enjoyed by members of the Church and the military, and the Ley Lerdo (1856),
which privatized corporate landholdings. Moreover, they established individual civil

I :iberties in the Constitution of 1857.

Citizenship and [and rights
The privatization of corporate landholdings in liberal reforms posed a great threat
to indigenous people, as it included the lands the Crown had allotted for indigenous
C ommunities. In addition, liberal reforms brought less obvious threats to indigenous
people. Kaushik Ghosh’s (2006) analysis of how institutional contexts in India have
Sliaped the strategies indigenous adivasi people have devised and utilized to resist
marginalization and pursue their interests is useful for understanding the consequences of
l i beral reform in Mexico. Even as early liberal reforms in Mexico promised to rid the
Q ountry of the scourge of colonial rule, they threatened to foreclose important channels
Where indigenous people exercised control in colonial society. Consequently, indigenous
13 eople repeatedly refused to relinquish certain colonial norms and institutions, even while
embracing some of the opportunities the reforms provided.
' I:Or example, the shift to a citizenship-based polity institutionalized in the new

aym’amientos provided indigenous communities with the much-desired opportunity to

45

 

 

 

 

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get rid of Alcaldes mayores (Ducey 2001). Nonetheless, as Michael Ducey (2001)
observes, the ‘racial’ criteria for participation in the colonial Republic de indios had
ensured a degree of control. Thus, the shift also brought with it the potential to
undermine indigenous political control. Moreover, while the liberal strategists who
drafted the Ley Lerdo were especially intent on dispossessing the landholdings of the
Church, the law also mandated the privatization of the corporate landholdings of
indigenous communities. The privatization of indigenous lands had a great potential to
deleteriously influence indigenous people. It led in many cases to a great dispossession
of indigenous lands and the creation of a landless peasantry. Nonetheless, the disarray
that characterized most of the 19th century limited leaders’ ability to enforce these
measures, and the impacts of the measures were uneven. In this context, the ability of
indigenous communities to manipulate colonial and postcolonial legal norms and their
Corresponding ideas about the place of indigenous peoples in the new nation was often
consequential in determining their fate.
Thus, many indigenous people fought the deleterious consequences of post-
C Olonial government by refusing to relinquish the norms and institutions of colonial
government. For example, Michael Ducey (2001:531-2) describes how some indigenous
C 0mmunities rejected the imposition of the ayzmtamiemo and instead maintained system
of governance they had used within the colonial Republic-a de indios. Thus, in
QC)mmunications with state officials, they referred to themselves as representatives of the
‘ C‘omun de indios ’, and retained governing positions that were not recognized as part of

th e new liberal Mexican government (ibid). At the same time, these communities

46

appropriated liberal ideals of citizenship that had acquired salience to pursue their
interests and claims including the critique of slavery (2001 :532-3).
Jennie Pumell (2002) provides a similar description of how Oaxacan villagers
de ftly deployed colonial and postcolonial norms to fight the privatization of their lands
legislated by Ley Lerdo. She describes how individuals claimed both individual (i.e.,
1i beral) rights and communal (i.e., colonial) rights while pursuing resolutions to their
di sputes over land-holdings. Indigenous peoples’ struggles to maintain their lands also
contributed to the endurance of cacicazgo into the postcolonial world as communities
relied on caciques to demonstrate their land rights (Monaghan et al. 2003). In examining
these contests and others like them, Jennie Pumell (2002) and F rancisca Mallon (1994)
affirm how indigenous people successfully negotiated the meaning of liberal reform and

the Mexican nation through these disputes.

Education

Although liberals and conservatives shared a common perception of indigenous
people as ill-suited for participation in a modern Mexico, liberals argued that proper
guidance would ‘cure’ indigenous populations of these ‘impediments’ (Mallon 1994:88).
They identified the educational system as a key strategy for preparing indigenous people
to participate in the modern nation. Francisca Mallon (1994) describes some of the
C()nflicts these early educational efforts generated in her analysis of these efforts in the
h ighlands of the state of Puebla during the late 1860s and early 18705. She reports that
V illagers throughout the region initially pursued schools eagerly, as they anticipated that

education would provide youth with the skills necessary for successfully achieving their

47

goals. The realities of education dashed these aspirations, however, as parents’
educational goals conflicted with those of educators and officials. Mallon (1994282)
reports,

as it came to be practiced in this region over these years, the expansion of schooling
also became a way of teaching people how to march to the state’s tune. Children needed
to be schooled in the ways of ways of “civilization”: getting to school on time, learning
respect, making school a higher priority than the agricultural calendar or the family
economy. Almost immediately, questions of enforcement and surveillance surfaced, as
teachers experienced the frustrations of poor attendance and seeming nonchalance toward
learning. In this context, education was no longer a popular aspiration to progress, in
forms and with calendars that the people controlled. It became instead a potentially
authoritarian and racist discourse about the need to force ignorant or religious villagers,
almost without exception Indian, against their own judgment and for their own good, into
the enlightened sphere of “science.”

111 response, frustrated parents frequently rebelled against the schools, and some pursued

e f‘forts to establish private schools as an alternative (Mallon 1994:84). Where these

0 Onflicts over the methods, substance and goals of education arose, educators and

officials explained them as evidencing parents’ ignorance. Mallon (1994:88-89)

eXplains,
Indian peasants, in this context, were not ready to participate in the public sphere; they
put their family interests and their religious beliefs before their civic duty to educate their
children. Racism became, in this context, a nested discourse of control: local, regional,
and national intellectuals of liberal persuasion had the obligation to educate the masses in

spite of themselves. The liberals were to create the citizen, through a process of
education and surveillance.

C onflicts over the agenda of educational efforts have arisen repeatedly throughout the
postcolonial era, as parents have fought educational strategies that conflict with their
aspirations for their children.
.7716 imposition of authoritarian rule

Porfirio Diaz (1876—1911) established centralized control and stability for the first

time in Postcolonial Mexico by strictly imposing order and brutally repressing contests to

48

that order. In large part, he relied on jefes politicos, or political chiefs, to enforce order
and pursue his program of economic modernization (Falcon 1994). Diaz deemed
indigenous communal lands vacant and seized them, forcing the newly landless people to
Work in the mines and haciendas (Barry 1995:16). Consequently, the consolidation of
indigenous lands that liberal reform had prompted accelerated during his rule. Most of
the ZOO—400% increase in private land holdings that occurred in Oaxaca during the 19th
Century occurred during Diaz’s rule (Chassen-Lopez 19982101), primarily in lowland
areas of the state (Clarke 2001 :34). The marginalization of much of the Mexican
population through land expropriation contributed to Diaz’s downfall. Over ninety-six
percent of people in the countryside lacked land by the time a revolutionary movement
0llsted Diaz in 1911 (Cockroft 1983:91). Revolutionary leaders including Emiliano
Zapata rallied against the Porfirian expropriation and consolidation of lands with their
calls for tierra y Iibertad, land and liberty, which animated the seven year Revolution
( 1 910-1917).
Francie Chassen-Lopez’s (1998) account of a contest over landholdings in
Pinotepa Nacional — the major urban center of the Mixteca Baja region of Oaxaca — that

i ntersected with the revolution sheds light into how the entrenchment of the division

between gente de razo'n and indios intersected with the expropriation and consolidation of
l andholdings. Chassen-Lopez reports that liberal legislation had led to vast consolidation
of landholdings in the region under study, which provided the context within which
M ixtec-speaking landless peasants attempted to take back the lands of a sizeable class of
ranchers with relatively extensive landholdings. A chronicler of the events that unfolded

who identified the ranchers according to ‘race’ characterized half of the ranchers as

49

“Mixtec” (1998:105). Nonetheless, they self-identified as gente de razon in the contest

that unfolded, aligning themselves with the other large landholders struggling to maintain
their vast landholdings against Mixtec-speaking peasants who self-identified as “gente
indygena” or “naturales Thus, Chassen-Lopez (1998:105) notes,

By the second half of the nineteenth century, however, the definition of an indio, of
ethnicity, indicated cultural (language, dress, and customs) preferences far more than
phenotype. Despite themselves having indigenous or African ancestors, as did mestizo or
ladino middle classes throughout Spanish America, the Costefio ranchers felt no
contradiction considering themselves white and assuming a denigrating attitude toward
indios and Afro-Mexicans.

Chassen-Lopez’s reflections indicate that the process of realigning identities to a racially-
i1iflected cultural hierarchy that had begun in the colonial period was very developed by
the beginning of the twentieth century. In contrast to the racial hierarchy originally
grounded in a distinction between espafioles and indios, in the conflict in Pinotepa
Nacional, people identified themselves and their interests according to cultural indicators
th at differentiated indios from gente de razon.

Given the major place of concerns over lands in galvanizing support for the
revolutionary movement, observers would anticipate that intersection of the conflict with
the revolutionary struggle would aid the landless peasants. The revolutionary forces, did,
in fact, adopt the side of the Mixtec-speaking landless peasants initially. Ultimately,
however, they realigned and gave their support to the ranchers. This realignment proved
disastrous for the landless peasants: the revolutionary victory enabled the ranchers to
regain control of local government, and they persecuted those who participated in the

upI’iSing for years to come thereafter (Chassen-Lopez 1998:116-7).
Nonetheless, the revolutionary victory generated institutional transformations of

more far-I‘eaching consequence for landless peasants, as it led to the institutionalization

50

of agrarian ideals in the Constitution of 1917. Article 27, in particular, collectivized land
ownership through the establishment of ejidos, communally-based land rights provided to
peasants. Moreover, Article 27 provided for the restoration of communal lands to

indigenous people as comunidades agrarias.

The twentieth century Mexican nation
Twentieth century Mexican nationalists strived to end factionalism and foment
unity by promoting the mestizo as the cornerstone of the emergent Mexican nation, much
as their nineteenth century counterparts had done following the war of Independence.
N Otwithstanding this similarity, perspectives on indigeneity and orientations toward the
D 1ace of indigenous people in the Mexican nation changed dramatically following the
reVolution. Post-revolutionary national architects celebrated indigeneity as imbuing the
mestizo nation with unique character and value. Nation-builders used archeological
eVidence to support the image of a distinctive Mexican nation with a glorious indigenous
past (Gonzalez 2004), and commissioned music, literature, artistic works and
architectural monuments to celebrate the combined indigenous and Spanish national
heritage (De la Pefia 2006:293).

This indigenista7 incarnation of the Mexican nation, however, included a
decidedly circumscribed space for indigenous people to participate in. the nation. Mestizo
elites celebrated indigeneity to the extent that doing so contributed to their efforts to
create a cohesive nation with a distinctive character that distinguished it from other

modern nations. Although they celebrated indigenous people and their own indigenous

 

 

‘ Observers commonly characterize the celebration of indigeneity and concomitant purSUlt 0f the
flagsimrlatr on’ of indigenous people into the Mexican nation that predominated during the 20'h century as
m [gen/sic, or indigenist.

51

roots as imbuing the Mexican nation with a distinctive flair, much like their nineteenth
century forebears, they aimed to devise a modern Mexico modeled on European forms of
nationhood, and they regarded most of the lived distinctiveness of indigenous people as
contrary to this effort.
President Lazaro Cardenas’s (1934-1940) reflection on the ‘Indian Problem’
conveys the orientations toward the place of indigenous people in the Mexican nation that

emerged in this context. He asserted,

Our Indian problem is not to maintain the Indian as Indian, nor of Indianizing Mexico,
but it lies in how to Mexicanize the Indian [while] respecting his blood, preserving his

emotion, his love for the land, and his unbreakable tenacity. [Quoted in Gonzalez
2004: 143]

C érdenas’s references to “Our Indian Problem”, “Indianizing Mexico” and “Mexicanize

the Indian” clearly designate the limits of indigenous peoples’ place within this
indigenista nation. This nation was mestizo, and it was indigenist in Hector Diaz
Polanco’s sense of the term. Indigenous people were not rights-bearing subjects,
empowered through liberal channels of citizenship to self-determination, but problems

for mestizo subjects to solve.

Just as for the liberal elites of the nineteenth century, twentieth century nation-

builders’ ‘problem’ was to find effective interventions for transforming indigenous
subjects who lacked the desire and skills to participate in this nation into effective self-
goveming liberal subjects (Foucault 1991; Gordon 1991; Lemke 2001). Yet, the nation
building of the 20th century added a further dimension to this ‘problem’ — nationalists
aimed to create indigenous people who preserved certain traits perceived to add value and

diStiHCtiOn to the nation. Thus, the law that created the National Indigenist Institute in

1948 includes the following claim:

52

These indigenous groups maintain cultural characteristics that can be utilized to the
benefit of national culture, as they will continue giving the country the features that
distinguish it from other communities in America and the world [Diario de Debates 24
de diciembre de 1948, cited in Hernandez Castillo 2001 :29; my translation]

With successfully designed interventions, indigenous people would relinquish the cultural
Characteristics that impeded them from participating in the modern Mexican nation, but

retain characteristics that would confer greater distinction on the nation.

Incorporation through education

During the early post-revolutionary period, nation-builders reset their sights on a
t‘ederal education system as a means for creating this modern nation. The Secretary of
Education (SEP) was established in 1921, and J ose’ Vasconcelos, a leading proponent of
the modern mestizo nation and author of the influential book La Raza Cosmica, 1925,
Occupied the directorship of the organization during the first half of the 19205 (Lewis
2001 :61). Vasconcelos worked to disseminate modern, “civilized” values throughout the
country in his post as Director of the SEP during the first half of the 19203. Stephen

Lewis (2001 :63) reports that Vasconcelos began this effort in 1922 by sending out
" ‘missionaries...to study the socioeconomic and cultural conditions of the people, to
i nterest community members in education, and to recruit prospective teachers.” He

continues,

...these educators were expected to emulate the first Franciscans who arrived in Mexico
almost exactly 400 years earlier. This time, though, the "good news" was overtly secular,
emphasizing community development, modernization, and "incorporation" into the
national mestizo mainstream through the dominant language, Spanish.

53

The “missionaries” and the educators that followed them were charged with
teaching indigenous people the ‘civilized’ knowledge, orientations and skills required for
participating in the modern Mexican nation. A teacher clearly articulated the civilizing

aim of these efforts while reporting on the progress of his work. Stephen Lewis
(2 001 :64-5) reports that the teacher related that

a few ethnic groups in the state "have forgotten their prior life and now dress well, speak
Spanish and have acquired some culture"—such as the Zoques and the C hiapanecas who
inhabited the western lowland regions along the Grijalva River. The Mam, who lived
along the Guatemalan border, were also "more or less civilized"; only the absence of
schools had stunted their "development." The highland Maya, however, were "indifferent
to progress" and "live[d] like savages." "The race possesses the great virtue of its love
for work, they have good souls, and they are noble, obedient, [and] very respectful," he
wrote. However, "among their defects is their exaggerated ignorance, their apparent
denial of ideals, and their love of liquor."

The imposition of the Spanish language was one of the first priorities in this “civilizing”
ef fort. Yet, the educating mission was not confined to the classroom. Teachers
implemented vaccination and delousing campaigns, built basketball courts, led national

feStivals, and led movements for prohibition of alcohol in the communities where they
WOrked (Lewis 2001:66-7).

Not surprisingly, indigenous people often rejected this project, along with its
rIiessage of inferiority and the interference in daily life by outsiders. In recognition of
th is, ideas about the place of indigenous languages in the Mexican nation began to shift
Wi thin the SEP in 1940, as strategists identified indigenous languages as important to the
c i Vi lizing mission. By that time, however, the effort to incorporate indigenous people

‘nto the nation had shifted from the educational system to a newly created sector of

g0V'ernment dedicated to addressing the ‘Indian Problem.’ Anthropologists would lead

the Se efforts.

54

Incorporation through development

Although the civilizing effort was focused on the educational system during the
l 9205 and into the 19305, Mexican anthropologists had claimed that the anthropological
CXpertise best suited them for directing this work (de la Pefia I996; Walsh 2004). The
articulation of this claim by Manuel Gamio, considered by many to be the founder of

Mexican anthropology, was especially influential. Gamio asserted,

Anthropology in its true and widest conception should be basic knowledge for the
carrying out of good government because through anthropology one knows the
population which is to be governed and for whom the government exists... [In Latin
America] a minority made up of people of belonging to the white race, and whose
civilization is derived from Europe, has been concerned only with its own progress,
leaving aside the majority of indigenous race and culture. The obvious ignorance (even
on the part of those who have wished to better the situation of the majority culturally and
economically) is due to the fact that the majority indigenous population has not been
studied in a sensible manner. [Quoted in Walsh 20042142]
Gamio thus promoted a key anthropological role in the creation of a nation:
anthropologists would facilitate “good government” by devising and conducting research
on indigenous people, which policy-makers and program designers would utilize to
generate policy that effectively reaches its goals. He put this vision into action as
Director of the nation’s first anthropological dependency, the Direccion de Antropologia
( 1 918-1934), which carried out research on indigenous people (Walsh 20042130).
Gamio thus well positioned anthropologists to lead the civilizing mission when it
Was taken out of the educational system and established as a sector of governmental
administration in its own right. The Lazaro Cardenas (1934-1940) administration took

this step in 1935, when it established the Department of Indigenous Affairs, charged with

Coordinating, overseeing and implementing state policies for indigenous communities.

55

 

A leading anthropologist, Alfonso Caso, directed this organization. The National
Indigenous Institute (INI) took over these activities in 1948 (de la Pena 2006:282).

Alfonso Caso again occupied the directorship of this organization. INI developed
Indigenous Coordinating Centers (CCIs) in regions with large indigenous populations.
The first of these was established in the highland region of the state of Chiapas, in San
Cristobal de las Casas. Shortly thereafter, in 1951, CCIs were established in eight states,
including Oaxaca (Gaillard 2004:258). As the Program expanded in the decades to come,
there were fourteen in indigenous regions of Oaxaca in 1975 (Clarke 2001:170). The
CCIs developed and implemented strategies for providing services aimed at

“incorporating” indigenous people into the nation, including Spanish language education,
health services, and training in industrial agriculture and tourist arts (Gonzalez
20042143). Learning from the failures of the early mestizo-led education efforts, these
Centers employed bilingual “promoters” from the communities they were aimed to serve
beginning in the 19505 (Julian Caballero 2002:50).

Another anthropologist, Gonzalo Aguirre Beltran, greatly influenced the direction
tl‘le incorporation mission took as it matured. Aguirre Beltran directed the INI from
1 970-1977. In his work Regiones de Refugio (Regions of Refuge), 1967, he argued that
the history of colonial and postcolonial exploitation had trapped indigenous communities
into ‘regions of refuge’ by failing to provide them with the resources and skills to escape.
Consequently, indigenous communities were left to the exploitation of the unscrupulous
Capitalists who took advantage of them as a labor pool that lacked other possibilities. In

thi S reading, indigenous culture became not only an impediment to the modem

56

aSpirations for the nation, but also a manifestation of colonial rule and a tool of

exploitation.

Power and control in post-revolutionary Mexico

As discussed above, the early post-Independence period of the 19th century was
marked by extreme instability, as the mechanisms of control and order constructed and
imposed by the Crown were dismantled. The most important of these strategies of
government had included gaining the complicities of indigenous elites and playing
different interest groups — including indigenous commoners, caciques, peninsulares and
criollos — against one another. In addition, the threat of violence and force always
remained for those who failed to comply. A period of extreme instability began after
these mechanisms were dismantled in the early 19th century. Order was imposed
unevenly both geographically and temporally throughout the nineteenth century, and

interludes of order imposed by strong arm rule punctuated the disarray.

In the twentieth century, corporatist channels became pivotal for gaining popular
Quiescence to governmental initiatives (Grayson 2007). The Cardenas administration
( 1 934-1940) created these channels (1934-1940). Cardenas organized people into
interest groups, including, most importantly, peasants (National Peasant Confederation)
and workers (Confederation of Mexican Workers) (Grayson 2007:287-8). These unions
Were incorporated into the government, which staffed them and became responsible for
reSponding to their needs. Through this organization, the ruling party, the Partido
Revoluciario lnstitucional (PR1), channeled resources to peasants, workers and others as

necessary to quell unrest and foment quiescence to state initiatives. The PRI utilized this

57

structure to maintain authoritarian rule for over seventy years, until President Vicente
Fox won the presidency in 2000.

Jan Rus (1994) has analyzed how these channels transformed the relationship
between indigenous people and the state and the nature of indigenous communities
themselves, focusing on transformations in the highlands of Chiapas. Rus (1994:267)
asserts that indigenous communities in the region maintained the kind of internal
orientation associated with closed corporate communities prior to the Cardenas era.
Following Eric Wolf’s (1955, 1957, 1986) influential argument, this internal orientation
and reticence toward outsiders protected them from the influence of ladinos (of Spanish
heritage). Ladino elites often employed overt modes of coercion — including violence —
to force indigenous people to assent to work demands and other aims. During the
Cardenas era, however, politicians effectively dismantled many of these protections.
They did so by contracting local youth to convince other community members that
participation in the union would help them pursue their interests. Moreover, politicians
placed these youth in local leadership positions as bilingual scribes, and increased the
import of these positions by empowering the scribes with access to resources.

As community members lent their support to the union, the politicians at the helm
did, indeed, pursue initiatives in their interest. They supported takeovers of extensions of
land belonging to large landowners, and implemented worker protections. Yet, the
populist sensibility of the Cardenas administration ended with the Cardenas sexenio.
When a new political era began, the politicians aligned with the large landowners now
occupied the leadership positions in these organizations created to pursue workers’

interests. The indigenous people populating the ranks of the union now supported these

58

leaders — even as they implemented initiatives that explicitly conflicted with their
interests.

Twentieth century Mexican leaders devoted most of their work with indigenous
populations to two ends: finding ways to exploit facets of indigenousness perceived as
potentially contributing to the modern aspirations for the nation-state, and ridding
indigenous people of characteristics perceived as frustrating these aspirations.
Nonetheless, Alexander Dawson (1998:280) rightly emphasizes the importance of how
twentieth century nation-builders “acclaimed [indigenous people] for the first time as an
integral part of the nation.” Indigenousness marked the undesirable other during four
centuries of the history of New Spain and Mexico, from the moment colonists invented
the distinction during the imposition of colonial rule, through the first century of the
Mexican nation-state. In and of itself, this deep historical context marks twentieth
century nation-builders’ celebration of indigeneity as remarkable, even though mestizo
nation-builders did not interpret this acclaim as legitimizing self-determination for
indigenous people. More importantly, this celebration of indigenousness has provided
the bedrock upon which indigenous activists have more recently pursued self-
deterrnination. I turn to examine more recent transformations in government and

orientations toward indigeneity in the final section of this chapter, below.

Culture and the neoliberal turn in late twentieth century Mexico
Neoliberal reform and the genealogy of Oportunidades
During the middle years of the twentieth century, especially the 19505 and 19605,

successive administrations focused investment on large producers and manufacturers in

59

urban regions and in the north, while largely neglecting small-scale producers and
enterprises in the rural and southern parts of the country (Barry 1995). The resulting
inequalities prompted growing unrest during the latter years of the 19605. Increasing
tensions ultimately demonstrated the limitations of the corporatist mode of rule, which
required ever-greater investments to quell dissent, and helped usher in a major
transformation led by neoliberal principles.

President Luis Echeverria (1970-1976) responded to this growing unrest by
reviving Cardenas’ populist approach. Echeverria revived land redistribution, funded
social programs to combat poverty and implemented large infrastructure projects while
continuing to invest in manufacturing for export. The administration financed these
investments through foreign loans, which lenders provided based on massive oil
discoveries during the 19705. Consequently, Mexico’s foreign debt rose from 3.2 billion
dollars in 1970 to over 100 billion in the 19805 (Otero 199626). When interest rates rose
and oil prices fell in mid-1981, and sources of foreign loans disappeared, Mexico entered
into an acute economic crisis and became unable to pay the interest on its debt. In
response, the lntemational Monetary Fund (IMF) negotiated a loan with outgoing
President José Lopez Portillo (1976-1982), which was conditioned on the implementation
of austerity measures and a program of economic restructuring aiming to reorient the
economy under neoliberal principles.

Policy-makers devise neoliberal reforms to reorient national economies to a
global economy. They draft measures with two particular goals: to avail international
investors to national markets and to propel national producers to participate in the global

economy in the areas where they are most competitive internationally. Thus, measures

60

 

 

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are taken to increase the attractiveness of foreign investment, including allowing the
currency to float and acquire its value on the international market, depressing wages and
deregulating industry. In addition, reforms dismantle trade barriers constructed to protect
producers from goods produced more cheaply by outside producers. They also dismantle
state programs that support producers, such as subsidies for inputs. Finally, state
enterprises and services are privatized, simultaneously opening them to investors,
providing capital for governmental expenditures, and reducing the cost of the government
and the social sector.

Although Mexican leaders undertook early reforms under the pressure of the
possibility of defaulting on their loans, they have more openly embraced neoliberalism
since. In 1986, Mexico entered into the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade
(GATT). A few years later, President Carlos Salinas de Gortari (I988-l994)
implemented a series of neoliberal reforms aimed at preparing the country to enter into
the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Salinas privatized Mexico’s
banks and sold off parastatal enterprises, opened the stock market to foreigners, removed
restrictions on foreign investment and ownership, removed restrictions against foreigners
holding land by the coast or border regions, and removed agricultural supports (Hellman
199725). By far, the most important reform measure the administration instituted was the
reform of Article 27 of the 1917 Constitution. The Constitutional reform ended land
redistribution and enabled the privatization of ejia'o lands (Stephen 1994). President
Salinas signed the NAFTA in 1992, and it entered into force on January I”, 1994.

- The early implementation of neoliberal reforms in Mexico was devastating.

Governmental supports for producers disappeared at the same time that the peso lost its

61

 

 

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value, prices of imports skyrocketed, and social services were dismantled. As Judith
Adler Hellman (1997:3) observes, the reforms produced particularly harsh consequences
because the state had been propping up industries with limited productivity. While
opportunities to generate income and many social services disappeared, the costs of even
the most basic goods rose, and the consumption of basic grains fell 30% during the 19805
(Stephen 1997az9—10). These extreme social consequences intimate important political
consequences, as well, since politicians had depended on their ability to dole out
resources in order to garner support. Indeed, neoliberal reforms dismantled the social
programs that had facilitated rule through much of the 20"1 century.

The Carlos Salinas de Gortari administration (1988-1994) devised a program to
address both of these deficiencies upon taking office, the National Solidarity Program
(PRONASOL). The Solidarity Program was designed to combat the negative effects of
neoliberal reform on the most disadvantaged sectors of the population, it created new
corporatist channels as it did so. Potential recipients of Program funds were required to
form Solidarity Committees, through which they directly solicited the government for
funds to carry out public works projects. The executive branch of the administration held
discretion over the doling out of these funds. Consequently, analysts contend that the
Program was ultimately designed to quell dissent and foment support for the governing
party (Pastor and Wise 2005:152-3; Piester 1997).

Mexico entered into a severe economic crisis once again when President Ernesto
Zedillo (1994-2000) took office in 1994. Moreover, Salinas had left the presidency
scarred by a particularly abhorrent display of corruption. In this context, in 1997, the

Zedillo administration devised a new program to fight poverty, called Programa de Salud,

62

 

 

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Educacion y Alimentacion (Health, Education and Nutrition Program), or PROGRESA
(Pastor and Wise 2005: 1 52-3). In contrast to the executive branch’s clientelist
channeling of resources through the Solidarity Program, PROGRESA was designed to be
free from political interference. Population-level poverty indicators are used to identify
communities for participation in the Program. Thereafter, censuses are conducted
throughout recipient communities to collect information determining household
eligibility for participation in the Program. Moreover, the designers of PROGRESA
wrote an extensive process of evaluation into the Program bylaws, including external
reviews by the lntemational Food Policy Research Institute (see Adato, Coady and Ruel
2000). The Fox administration (2000-2006) expanded this program, renaming it
Oportunidades.

Development officials associated with important transnational institutions,
including the World Bank, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development
and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), have praised the Program, promoting
it as a model for other countries to emulate. In response, twenty countries have
implemented programs based on the Oportunidades model. Moreover, early this year
(2007), New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg met with Oportunidades officials in

Mexico for assistance in designing a similar program in that city — Opportunity NYC.

Conceptualizing shifting modes of power in neoliberal Mexico
The establishment of strict predetermined quantitative indicators for participation
in Oportunidades and the intensive review process are aimed to make the Program less

subject to coercion, and thus move Mexico in the direction of “good governance”. To the

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extent that Oportunidades is successful in this effort, it suggests a shift toward the more
diffusive forms of power Michel Foucault analyzed as characteristic of modern
“rationalities of government”, or “govennentalities” (1991; Gordon 1991; Lemke 2001).
Foucault developed his analysis of modern forms of power from his examination of
transformations in government that occurred in Europe between the sixteenth and early
nineteenth centuries. While he observed a decreasing reliance on carrot and stick forms
of government during this period, he also noted the emergence of a new, more diffuse
form of power associated with the rise of liberal govemmentalities (Foucault 1991;
Gordon 1991). Thus, while proponents of liberal modalities of government have
celebrated them as a form of government in which coercive state forces retract to
facilitate a greater measure of freedom for the individual, Foucault asserted that only the
diffusion of government facilitates this retraction of overt forms of state coercion.

This modern form of power revolves around what Foucault called “technologies
of the self’ (cited in Lemke 2001 :1 l), the strategies devised to teach people the requisite
orientations and skills for governing themselves in ways that correspond with and
facilitate liberal democratic modes of government. As Nikolas Rose (1996:45-6)
observes,

Liberal strategies of government thus become dependent upon devices (schooling, the
domesticated family, the lunatic asylum, the reformatory prison) that promise to create
individuals who do not need to be governed by others, but will govern themselves, master
themselves, care for themselves.

Thus, modern modes of government are expressed in all of the spaces wherein people are
taught to adopt the practices and orientations that correspond with the aims of
government, such as in schools and welfare programs (Cruikshank 1999). They are also

expressed in the scholarly institutions that produce the knowledge that informs the

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creation of these technologies of the self. Finally, and perhaps most importantly,
governed individuals themselves are key sites of modern forms of government: as they
adopt the aims of the state as their own, they discipline their own compliance. Foucault’s
definition of government as “the conduct of conduct” (cited in Burchell 1996:19)
captures this diffuse form of modern power.

Observers have drawn from Foucault’s insights to analyze the much more recent
shifts in modes of power associated with the rise of neoliberalism. The pursuit of a
further retraction of the state within neoliberal reform suggests an even greater
reformation of the terrain of government (Bryant 2002; Ferguson and Gupta 2002; Lemke
2001). I situate the ethnographic analysis of Oportunidades I develop in the ensuing

chapters within this context of shifting forms of rule.

Indigenous activism and the genealogy of Mixtec revitalization

During the increasing social discontent of the 19603, many indigenous
professionals who had acquired formal education through the incorporating mission
began to challenge the denigration and marginalization of indigeneity in the Mexican
nation (de la Pefia 2006:284). These challenges contributed to the emergence of a
broader transnational movement promoting the rights of indigenous people, which came
into force during the 19703 (Bonfil Batalla 1981). In these struggles, indigenous activists
made the extremely salient move of adopting the celebration of indigeneity — greatly
influenced by mestizos’ 20th century brand of Mexican nationalism — as the foundation
for their demand for self-determination. Activists fingered the incorporation mission as

an ethnocidal project, and began to promote different kinds of approaches that would

65

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build on, rather than destroy, their cultural distinctiveness. Moreover, they began to
elaborate alternative models of a Mexican nation that could encompass self-
determination, and develop strategies for pursuing these ends. For example, indigenous
activists founded the National Alliance of Bilingual Indigenous Professionals
(ANPIBAC) to promote an indigenous education that was not only bilingual but also
bicultural (Julian Caballero 2002137).

Anthropologists sympathetic to indigenous activists’ cause resounded the critique
of the incorporation mission, implicated anthropologists and developers for their
complicity in this ethnocidal project and promoted ethnodevelopment as an alternative.
Another leading anthropologist of the time, Guillermo Bonfil Batalla, was at the forefront
of this effort. He aligned with other leading anthropologists, including Salmon Nahmad
and Rodolfo Stavenhagen, to devise a governmental program that would contribute to
activists’ aims (Nakamura 2000: 18). They devised an educational program in
ethnolinguistics to train indigenous professionals to direct development in their own
communities in ways that resonated with their cultural distinctiveness (Nakamura 2000;
Vargas Collazos 2001). Fifty-four young professionals from Maya, Mixtec, Nahua,
Otomi, Purépecha, Totonaco and Zapotec-speaking communities participated in the three
year program the first time it was held, from 1979-1982 (Nakamura 2000230). Three
current leaders of formal Mixtec revitalization efforts were among the fifty-four
participants. Their formative training in the Ethnolinguistics Program places Mixtec
cultural revitalization efforts at the heart of the incipient indigenous rights movement in

Mexico.

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Mexican cultural politics at the beginning of the twenty-first century

Indigenous activism has flourished in the decades that have intervened since
formal, transnationally-articulated indigenous movements emerged in the late 19603, and
activists have won many successes. Both the Salinas and Fox administrations revised. the
Mexican Constitution in 1991 and 2001 in response to indigenous activists’
mobilizations. Article Four now reads,

The Mexican nation has a multicultural composition originally founded in its indigenous
peoples. The law protects and promotes the development of their languages, uses,
customs, resources and specific forms of social organization and guarantees their
members effective access to the full range of the state’s legal authority (jurisdiction). In
the agrarian judgments and legal proceedings they are part of, their own legal practices
and customs shall be taken into account in establishing the law. [Quoted in Stephen
2005:135]

Likewise, state institutions charged with realizing development goals convey these
changing orientations towards indigenousness. For example, the Secretary of Social
Development, Josefina Vazquez Mota, introduced the National Social Development
Program, 2001-2006, with the assertion that development goals “. . .will be realized with
respect for the rights and dignity of people, including ethnic and cultural diversity...”
(SEDESOL 2001). In addition, the Program’s seventh strategy establishes the primary
goal of development efforts in indigenous communities as “strengthen[ing] the
development of indigenous pueblos with equity and respect.” It reads,

Today, indigenous pueblos are identified as a group with one of the highest indices of
poverty and that represents a high proportion of the population in the most marginalized
localities. Indigenous Mexicans demand a viable alternative to achieve recognition and
be considered and respected as integrants of national society, in the context of their
cultural diversity. In this sense, the objective of the social policy will be oriented to
confront the causes and conditions of exclusion, the backwardness and the marginality
that confront indigenous communities, respecting their identity, their customs and
culture, as well as their ecological systems which they develop around them. [SEDESOL
20012105]

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The General Director of IMSS, Mario Luis Fuentes Alcala, also signals respect for
indigenous culture as a fundamental principal guiding the Institute’s work:

...The Institute has applied a holistic health care model that privileges voluntary and
organized participation in indigenous communities with actions that contribute to the
improvement of their health and well-being, with respect for culture, human rights, ethnic
dignity, and the self-determination of indigenous peoples. [IMSS-Solidaridad 2000:5]

Thus, affirmations that cultural difference is a basis for respect are increasingly central in
how government functionaries working with indigenous peoples frame their aims.

It seems paradoxical that indigenous people have gained affirmations of their
rights precisely when neoliberal reforms have dismantled social programs. Francisca
Mallon argues that neoliberal reforms have contributed to this simultaneity by
dismantling the mechanisms through which leaders gained quiescence to their initiatives.
Mallon (1992:52) argues:

At a very general level, the postrevolutionary state was built on an implicit contract, in
which the payoff for suffering the authoritarianism of political mestizaje would be social
and economic redistribution, plus an indigenista model of development. During the
19803, however, the privatization of the state sector and the complete opening of Mexico
to markets and capital in the United States have jettisoned the principles of redistribution
and economic nationalism, development and indigenismo that defined the original pact.

Thus, neoliberal reforms exacerbated the conditions contributing to dissent among
indigenous people.

Charles Hale reads the simultaneity of neoliberal reform and multicultural accords
in a different way. Hale (2005, 2002) identifies a ‘neoliberal project of neoliberalism’ in
which elites attempt to manage indigenous activists’ demands in ways that dissolve the
threat these demands pose. Hale (20021519) asserts,

At least officially, the PAN [Guatemalan governing party] defends the individual’s rights
to identify as Maya free from discrimination, celebrates the presence of Maya culture in
contemporary Guatemala, and even endorses certain collective practices aimed at the
preservation and valorization of Maya culture, especially in a folkloric sense, but also, in
the preservation of Mayan languages, diversification of educational curricula and respect

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for Maya spiritual sites. These are the rights of neoliberal multiculturalism. On the other
side of an imaginary line stands a different conception of rights, associated with
collective Maya self-assertion and empowerment.

That is, leaders recognize a more expansive celebration if indigeneity than that which
predominated during most of the 20th century, but in the process, sever it from the
demand for self-determination. Hale contends that the resulting ‘safe’ expressions of
multiculturalism that are codified in neoliberal multiculturalism have a “menacing”
potential, as they contribute to the marginalization of expressions of forms of indigenous

cultural politics that have greater potential for change. He asserts,

The increasingly prominent discourse of multiculturalism among diverse groups of
dominant actors and institutions in Central America has the cumulative effect, I contend,
of separating acceptable demands for cultural rights from inappropriate ones, recognizing
the former and foreclosing the latter, and thereby creating a means to ‘manage’
multiculturalism while removing its radical or threatening edge. [2002:507]

Hale’s analysis provides a useful cautionary reminder to those who read
multicultural affirmations as simple state capitulation to indigenous people’s demands.
Nonetheless, at the very least, his attribution of a ‘neoliberal menace’ to state-sponsored
multiculturalism reduces the complexity of factors that produce these affirmations.
Furthermore, Hale’s contention that those who support these multicultural affirmations
contribute to their menacing affects minimizes the importance and effectiveness of
indigenous peoples’ agency (c.f., Garcia 2007). The history of indigenous struggle in

New Spain and Mexico provides ample evidence that ladino or mestizo desires do not

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Mitchell Dean’s (1999:66) characterization of the dynamics of contest through
which governmental programs are produced provides a useful reminder of the complexity
of factors that contribute to the creation of policies and programs:

...govemmental programmes are produced by diverse agencies in complex relations of
antagonism and collusion with one another [thus] politics should be regarded as a matter
of struggle between such agencies whose outcome depends upon these agencies’ capacity
to mobilize intellectual and material resources, and on their tactics and strategies.

Multicultural and neoliberal reforms came together most explicitly in Mexico during the
Salinas de Gortari administration. Salinas implemented constitutional reforms
recognizing the rights of indigenous people within the multicultural nation while
implementing a host of neoliberal reforms in preparation for the NAFTA, including the
reform of Article 27, which ended land reform. In this context, Salinas undoubtedly
hoped the multicultural measures would stem criticism of the reforms. In addition, the
multicultural recognition certainly included the less radical kinds of culture-based rights
Hale identifies as part of neoliberal multiculturalism.

Nonetheless, Mexico’s multicultural embrace has been more half-hearted than
that of its Central American neighbors. Shannon Speed (2005) notes that the recognition
of indigenous peoples’ rights within the constitutional reforms of 2001 constitute a retreat
from the multicultural principles government negotiators agreed to when signing the San
Andrés Accords in 1996. Speed compellingly argues that this retreat occurred because
the government perceived the Zapatista vision of autonomy as posing too great of a threat
(Cf. Stephen 1997b).8 Speed (2005) also notes that Mexican leaders frequently make

claims to individual rights in order to circumscribe recognitions of group rights. In recent

 

8 These same circumstances prompted Oaxacan leaders to codify more expansive definitions of
multicultural rights (see Stephen 2005:137-138), in this case to stem the likelihood that a similar uprising
would erupt in Oaxaca.

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years, concerns over indigenous women’s rights, in particular, have become particularly
contentious, and have provided many with justification as a basis for challenging the
rights of indigenous peOple.

Finally, more fortuitous circumstances have also contributed to the creation and
maintenance of some of the key spaces within which indigenous activists pursue their
aims. For example, Guillermo Bonfil Batalla and his colleagues’ pursuit of an
Ethnolinguistics Program appealed to the administration because it coincided with the
recent expulsion of the Summer Language Institute (ILV), which had carried out the
study of indigenous languages until that time (Nakamura 2000:18). The graduates of the
Ethnolonguistics Program could fill this void by carrying out this work. The longer-term
support graduates of the Program have received reflects similarly fortuitous
correspondences in interests. In addition to the three-year period of training, the
visionaries of the Ethnolinguistics Program devised a Program to support these
professionals in their pursuit of studies of indigenous culture and language following
graduation. While the training Program was discontinued after two classes graduated,
resources continue be made available to assist these professionals in their efforts to
research and document their cultures and languages. The desires of Mixtec
revitalizationists to direct education in their communities correspond in an important way
with politicians’ efforts to decentralize governmental programs in the name of neoliberal
reform.

This is the somewhat contradictory field of Mexican cultural politics within which
I investigate the politics of formulations of indigenous culture in the pages that follow. I

now turn away from the most formal realm of politics that I have analyzed in this chapter,

71

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to examine the politics of these formulations of culture within everyday life. By way of

introduction, I provide a brief overview of the research methods and process below.

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CHAPTER THREE: THE RESEARCH PROCESS

I conducted ethnographic research for the dissertation during seventeen months
between June 2003 and December 2004.9 I began the research period by stationing
myself in the Oaxaca state capital, Oaxaca City, where I conducted research on IMSS

Oportunidades and Mixtec cultural revitalization for five months.

Figure 1: Map of Mexico

 

MEXICO State of Oaxaca

ET

I lived in Pueblo Verde thereafter. Pueblo Verde is a small, rural Mixtec-
Speaking municipality located in the Mixtec region of Mexico. La Mixteca encompasses
the Western part of Oaxaca, the eastern side Guerrero and southern Puebla, and includes

the Mixteca Alta (‘High Mixtec’), the Mixteca Baja (‘Low Mixtec’) and the Costa Chica

\

9 -
Thls formal research period built on training and research I had conducted in Oaxaca, Mexico during the
summers of 2000, 2001 and 2002.

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(‘Little Coast’) sub-regions. Pueblo Verde is located in the mountainous Mixteca Alta
region. From Pueblo Verde, I intermittently traveled to regional delegations of IMSS-
Oportunidades and to national headquarters in Mexico City to conduct research on the
Program, as well as to different regions in Oaxaca to observe Mixtec revitalization

events .

Figure 2: Map of Oaxaca

Al

Mixteca Alta

*Tlaxiaco

 

OAXACA

Pueblo Verde’s economic indicators reflect the marginalization that motivates
economic development specialists and community leaders and members alike to pursue
‘development’. The average annual income is $933 dollars, in comparison with the
national average of $7495 (INEGI n.d.). The national human development scale, a

ranking that quantifies indicators of health, education, economic and literacy, places the
municipality in the second to worst of the five categories, medium low (ibid.). Thus, the

municipal IMSS clinic implements IMSS-Oportunidades in the village.

74

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In addition, Pueblo Verde’s geographical location — about twenty miles from the
major c0mmercial center of the Mixteca Alta, Tlaxiaco — locates villagers in close
proximity to formal revitalization efforts. Pueblo Verde is relatively unique in its
preservation of key characteristics associated with indigeneity in the context of facile
intercourse with urban, predominantly mestizo centers. For these reasons, Pueblo Verde
provides an excellent place in which to study how the subjects of these ‘indigenous

culture’ laden projects respond to these perspectives.

Pueblo Verde
Experience in Pueblo Verde revolves around movement. A paved road connects

the village to two regional centers, Tlaxiaco, and Chalcatongo, and people are constantly
traveling to and from these locations and beyond. The abundance of transportation
services attests to the ubiquity of movement. Among these services, the bus is most
economical and the transportation of choice. It passes through Pueblo Verde on its way
from Chalcatongo to Tlaxiaco every forty-five minutes, and return trips leave with equal
frequency. On daily bus trips to Tlaxiaco, Verdean vendors travel to buy and resell
produce in the regional market, or to sell their own produce; high school students travel
to schools in other communities; teachers travel to the schools they have been assigned to
in other communities, and teachers assigned to Pueblo Verde travel to their homes; and
villagers travel to Tlaxiaco to purchase goods and access services available in the city.
Some villagers return to working or studying in Oaxaca City, while others return from the

capital, Less frequently, but still regularly, people return to and from Mexico City. And,

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occasionally, one encounters Pueblo Verde migrants to northern Mexico and the United
States traveling on the bus to Tlaxiaco.

Few economic opportunities exist in Pueblo Verde, but villagers combine varied
economic projects in their efforts to create a livelihood. Most villagers tend animals such
as chickens, turkeys and pigs for consumption and sale. Most villagers also engage in
agricultural production, typically growing corn and beans on small parcels of about 3
hectare in size. They use the corn and beans for household needs and sell surplus when it
exists. Some villagers with sufficient land and resources plant additional crops for sale,
such as green beans, tomatoes, squash and cilantro. In addition, many women buy
produce and resell it in regional markets. Those with greatest need work as agricultural
laborers: men earn about $5 a day, while women earn about $3.50.

In addition to agricultural activities, most families engage in craft production,
either weaving palm hats or harvesting and spinning silk from silkworms.

Many villagers also sell goods from their homes, including soft drinks, homemade
alcoholic beverages such as aguardiente (fire water), beer and snacks. Several villagers
have opened more formal businesses in the community, including variety stores, a video
rental, phone service, and a business providing intemet service. Some owners have hired
young women to tend their businesses. Young women also provide domestic help to
professionals in the village, often receiving compensation for part of their services in the
form of room and board.

Wealth inequities define the village landscape. While the majority of residents

H We in adobe homes with dirt floors, many have constructed and are in the process of

constructing relatively large cement homes. Most villagers have electricity and running

76

 

 

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enough wealth to purchase luxuries such as televisions with satellite service, telephones,
computers, digital cameras and cars.

Migrants and professionals, such as teachers, nurses, doctors and lawyers, have
accumulated most of the wealth in the village. The ability to speak Spanish is a key skill
facilitating access to the more remunerative opportunities available through migration, as
well as for the formal education required for professional employment. A large minority
of villagers, about 25%, lack these Spanish language skills (INEGI. n.d.). More women
than men face the obstacles posed by lack of familiarity with Spanish: 28% of women in
the community are monolingual Mixtec speakers, in contrast to 18% of men (ibid.).
Migrants have established large communities in Mexico City; rural and urban
destinations in northern Mexico, such as Baja California and Tijuana; and destinations in
the United States, particularly North Carolina, Washington, Minnesota and Florida. Most
professionals lack opportunities for work in the village, and have pursued work
elsewhere. Many maintain a base in the community, but travel to distant communities
during the week for work. A few have been lucky to find positions in local or nearby

institutions.

Working in Pueblo Verde
When I arrived in Pueblo Verde to begin the research, the clinic nurse invited me
to live in an unoccupied room in her and her parents’ home. I accepted that invitation,
and their home and their family became the base from which I learned about family and

comnmnity in Pueblo Verde. I was fortunate to live with a local family, as it provided

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me with the opportunity to observe and participate in local family life. While living with
my host family, I experienced the rhythms of daily life and became accustomed with
many of the multitudinous details of daily life that only strike visitors as noteworthy: who
cooks, when and what people eat, where people sit, how people greet one another, how to
deal with garbage, when people gather together, how to wash clothes, etc., etc., etc.
Living with a family also provided me with a local base from which to learn about
village social life. Informal, mostly unplanned social gatherings comprise much of
Pueblo Verde social life. People come together and chat for a few moments over a soda
or beer on the porches of the several stores in the community, while watching an
impromptu evening basketball game, or more regularly in the homes of comadres and
compadres”). I learned most through ‘hanging out’ in these informal gatherings, where I
listened to gossip and watched and heard how villagers defined and policed unacceptable
behavior. In addition, I attended special social events, including the weekly masses held
at the Catholic Church in the center of town; political meetings; the recurring parties held
to mark birthdays, and the less frequent graduation ceremonies, baptisms and weddings;
gatherings held to mark blessings of new homes; ceremonies held for spiritual cleansings

and to give thanks for the harvest; holidays; and multiple annual festivals.

Oportunidades
Oportunidades is the primary program charged with realizing development

Objectives in Mexico. The Oportunidades model operates through the provisioning of so-

 

 

w COmadres and compadres refer to relationships established through compadrazgo, roughly translated as
gOd‘Parentage, in which villagers sponsor one another’s children. Typically, the most important
compradazgo sponsorship has been that related to baptisms, however, Verdeans establish these

relationships for a myriad of events. Comadres and compadres are the fictive kin relations that are
es tablished between parents and the sponsors of their children.

78

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called conditional cash transfers (CCTs): low-income families receive cash payments
contingent on their compliance with certain actions deemed essential for combating
poverty. The Program recognizes women household heads as Program beneficiaries, or
titulares. In order to receive Program funds, titulares and their families must undergo
annual physical exams at their local health clinic and enroll their children in school;
titulares must attend educational sessions, or platicas, at the local clinic aimed at helping
them improve their own health and that of their families; adolescents in Oportunidades
families must attend educational sessions focusing on sexual and mental health-related
topics; and school age children must attend school. Qualifying families who undertake
these responsibilities receive a basic stipend to help with meeting nutritional needs,
which was about $15 per month during the research period. Pregnant and nursing
mothers, families with young children, and families with members who suffer from
malnutrition also receive nutritional supplements. Finally, payments are sealed in order
to encourage parents to keep their children in school, especially girls.

The national health institutions, the Secretary of Health (SSA) and the Social
Security Institute (IMSS), provide Oportunidades health services through local clinics. In
this study, I focused on the branch of the Program that the Mexican Social Security
Institute (IMSS) implements, IMSS-Oportunidades. Officials working in federal offices
in Mexico City devise IMSS strategies, which doctors, nurses, assistants and volunteers
implement at the municipal level. under the guidance and supervision of state and regional

administrators.

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Oportunidades in Pueblo Verde

IMSS establishes links in communities by hiring local clinic staff to assist the
doctors, and soliciting community volunteers to promote and oversee adoption of the
behaviors the Program advocates. This strategy helps the Program overcome barriers
associated with lack of familiarity with the local context, which can pose a particular
challenge in communities where indigenous languages are spoken. Excepting the doctor,
the service providers at the Pueblo Verde clinic are all villagers. They include two
nurses, a rural health assistant, six health promoters and the twenty four-member health
committee. In addition, community volunteers occasionally attend IMSS workshops on
mental health topics and provide the training to others in the community.

The IMSS clinic in Pueblo Verde lies on the road at the edge of town. Its place
just past the bridge and just prior to the steep ascent in the federal road that marks the
departure from the community distances it from the center of the community. Moreover,
a gated fence surrounds the clinic in the community, providing its personnel and goods
with protection during the night. The clinic includes two consult rooms, a bathroom, a
reception and waiting area. It also includes quarters for the medical doctor’s residence.
A Centro de Asistencia para Adolescentes Rurales (CARA), a Rural Adolescent
Assistance Center, is located behind the clinic — a wooden building with a corrugated tin
roof. As its title indicates, CARAs are intended as special spaces to educate adolescents.
Inside, rows of benches face the front of the room, where a chalk board and didactic
materials are available to assist health professionals. A smaller room located behind the

benches houses a kitchen.

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Oportunidades research methods

I conducted semi-structured and unstructured interviews with Oportunidades
employees working at the national (2), state (2), regional (4) and village (7) levels in
designing, studying, and implementing development interventions in indigenous
communities. In the village, I interviewed the clinic physician, the two local nurses, the
clinic assistant, and three locally elected Program “promoters.” I collected information
about Program objectives and strategies, service providers’ experiences in carrying out
their work, their perspectives on indigenous culture and their perspectives on the ideal
family in these interviews. I also asked those involved in designing, carrying out,
analyzing, or interpreting the Program’s study of indigenous culture and reproduction
about the study. In addition, I observed Program events, including regional training
sessions for personnel and interventions with villagers through the municipal clinic. The
interventions included weekly educational sessions for adolescents and women,
‘community’ work assignments for Program recipients, community days in which the
clinic doctor and the nurses visited people in their homes and in a neighboring
community, activities revolving around the dispensation of Program funds, and
community meetings called to address concerns related to the Program. Finally, I
collected Program documents and literature related to indigenous culture, family,

reproductive health and development.
Mixtec revitalization

- A handful of committed and passionate advocates of Mixtec revitalization can be

Credited with carrying out much of the work that led to the formal establishment of

81

Mixtec revitalization efforts that exist today, especially Juan Julian Caballero and Ubaldo
Lopez Garcia. The current formal Mixtec revitalization organizations, the CID Nuu Savi,
the Center for Mixtec Research and Dissemination, and the Ve’e Tu’un Savi, the Mixtec
Language Academy, ultimately emerged from an encounter at a course on the Mixtec
codices given at CIESAS-Istmo, the Isthmus branch of the National Center for Social
Anthropology, in 1989 (Julian Caballero 2003:] 12). There, Juan Julian Caballero,
Ubaldo Lopez Garcia and others began to discuss founding of an organization dedicated
to conducting researching on Mixtec culture and disseminating the results (Romero Frizzi
2003b1210-2l 1). Shortly thereafter, in 1990, they founded the CID Nuu Savi. Scholars
interested in conducting research on Mixtec culture meet in the organization, which
contributes to the dissemination of their work.

Many of the founders and participants of the CID Nuu Savi were especially
interested in carrying out a Mixtec linguistic project to establish a common Mixtec
alphabet and promote its use among Mixtec people. To this end, they organized a series
of Mixtec Language Encounters through the CID Nuu Savi, in which people working on
writing the Mixtec language began to work together towards creating a unified written
Mixtec language. During the Sixth Encounter, in 1997, they agreed to establish the Ve’e
Tu’un Savi, the Mixtec Language Academy (Julian Caballero 20013:93). Since the initial
Encounter, in which approximately fifty people participated, the Ve’e Tu’un Savi has
grown to include between 300-500 members (Julian Caballero 2001az94).
Revitalizationists have continued the work of creating a written Mixtec language in the

Organization’s annual Congresses. In addition, the Ve’e Tu’un Savi provides language

82

workshops to bilingual teachers, and, as of 2003, they had conducted about fifty
workshops in twenty four communities (Julian Caballero 2003277).

By creating the CID Nuu Savi and the Ve’e Tu’un Savi, revitalizationists have
established networks of like-minded intellectuals with whom they work in a formal
project aimed at creating a unified Mixtec identity. They have communicated their work
to a broader population through extensive publishing associated with the CID Nuu Savi,
but one still limited largely to highly-educated intellectuals. In contrast, the Ve’e Tu’un
Savi’s language workshops have opened channels to communicate their project to

educators, and through them Mixtec youth and ultimately Mixtec communities.

Mixtec revitalization in Pueblo Verde

The IMSS clinic’s obtrusive location on the landscape well symbolizes
Oportunidades’ influence on Pueblo Verde social life. Moreover, the clinic provides a
nexus of social relations through which this influence can be observed, traced and
measured with relative ease. Mixtec revitalization efforts stand in stark contrast, as
revitalizationists cannot even begin to approach the degree of capitalization and
organization of Oportunidades. Accordingly, they lack such a material presence on the
landscape. I initially approached the primary school in Pueblo Verde as a kind of
material corollary to the clinic, since revitalizationists target their efforts to the
educational system. The director of the school informed me, however, that teachers do
not implement a “bilingual Program.” Although federal and state laws mandate bilingual
education for indigenous communities, no corresponding educational programs have been

designed and implemented.

83

Nonetheless, revitalizationists encourage teachers to take on the bilingual
education mission as their own in the workshops they impart, and interviews with
Verdean youth indicate that they have done just that. Thus, despite the fact that
revitalizations’ efforts have not ossified into a readily apparent social organizational
structure on the Verdean landscape, youth reported familiarity with revitalizationists’
ideas with regularity in interviews. Most significantly, young people repeatedly report
having learned about the importance of local ‘costumbres ', or customs, especially ‘el

Mixteca ’, the Mixtec language, from teachers.

Mixtec revitalization research methods

Without knowing it, I first began working with revitalizationists during my initial
trips to Oaxaca to study the Mixtec language and conduct exploratory research during the
summers of 2000, 2001 and 2002. 1 arranged private Mixtec language courses with a
Mixtec intellectual active in efforts to revitalize Mixtec language and culture during the
summer of 2000, Ubaldo Lopez Garcia. I returned the following year to continue
studying with Ubaldo Lopez Garcia and began studying the language with another
leading revitalizationist, Gabriel Caballero Morales. Then, I participated in San Diego
State University’s six-week long Intensive Mixtec Language program during the
summers of 2002 and 2003, which was taught by two other leading revitalizationists,
Juan Julian Caballero and Marcos Cruz Bautista. I initially learned about these leaders’
work and perspectives in these contexts.

In accordance with their intellectual work and educational focus, I was directed

toward similar academic contexts and networks as I became more interested in learning

84

about their work. I attended book presentations, academic conferences and public events
held to celebrate Mixtec culture in which they presented their work. I supplemented
these observations with my own in-depth formal interviews with two leading
revitalizationists and an observation of a Mixtec language workshop given by a leading
revitalizationist. In addition, Maria de los Angeles Romero Frizzi (2003a) has published
interviews with Juan Julian Caballero, Ubaldo Lopez Garcia and others, and Mutsuo
Nakamura (2000) and Monica Vargas Collazos (2001) present detailed information on
the history of Mixtec revitalization in their theses. Finally, revitalizationists have utilized
print media to disseminate their perspectives on Mixtec culture to others. I conducted
most of my “participant observation” on revitalization by reviewing and analyzing these

abundant written materials.

Data analysis

I wrote field notes on my observations daily — on some occasions multiple times a
day. In addition, I used multiple formal data collection methods to collect ethnographic
data. I hired two local assistants during the research to assist with structured data
collection, including a census and general interviews. In the census, we collected data on
household size, names, ages and relations of household members, and wealth status
indicators. I used the census to select a ten percent random sample of villagers over the
age of fourteen for in-depth interviews examining ideas about family, culture, community
and development. Nonetheless, the resulting sample reflected distortions in the
population structure of the community stemming from migration trends, where young

men are especially underrepresented and older women overrepresented. Thus, I

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reselected the sample, stratifying it so that it included equal numbers of men and women
(30 each) from the following age groups: 15-18, 19-35, 36-49, 50-64, and over 65.
Sixteen people from the original sample did not provide interviews, either because they
had left the community between when I conducted the census and when I conducted the
interviews, or because they declined. Men were both most likely to have left the
community in the interim and to decline interviews. In the end, I interviewed 44 villagers

in the general sample, with the age and gender characteristics signaled in the table below.

Table 1. Age and gender characteristics of village interviewees

 

 

 

Age Grog) Female Male Total

# % # % # %
15—19 5 l l 3 7 8 18
20-34 6 14 5 1 1 l 1 25
35-49 6 14 2 5 8 19
50-64 5 l l 3 7 8 18
65 + 3 7 6 14 9 20
Total 25 57 19 44 44 *

 

 

 

 

 

 

* Note: Percentages add to more than 100% because of rounding.

Following the participants’ preferences, my assistants translated fifteen of the interviews
into Mixtec, while I conducted the other twenty-nine in Spanish. With the permission of
the interview participants, 1 tape recorded the interviews. Two villagers preferred not to
have their interviews recorded. In both cases, I noted participants’ responses to the
questions during the interviews, and entered those notes into the computer. Finally, I
interviewed key informants in the village, including the Municipal President and the

Priest in the local Catholic Church.

86

 

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My assistants transcribed Mixtec interviews directly into Spanish, and I later
checked the translations with a third Mixtec speaker. I personally transcribed the Spanish
language tapes when I returned from the field. I reviewed the data and entered the
interview data and my field notes into N Vivo. I used the Program to categorize the data
according to the underlying themes guiding the original research questions as well as
themes that emerged from my observations while I collected and reviewed the data. For
example, I coded perspectives on and observations related to family, development,
community, and culture. I also coded more specific themes, such as ideas that large or
small families are beneficial. Then, I used these categories to examine similarities and
differences in how research participants discussed the topics.

After examining the qualitative data, I created categories to examine trends in
villagers’ perspectives and experiences more systematically in Excel. I examined
whether and how villagers’ perspectives and experiences diverge in relation to locally-
salient dimensions of social difference, focusing on gender, age, wealth indicators,
linguistic status, educational background. I used this data to examine divergences in
villagers’ perspectives of family. Then, I returned to the qualitative data for evidence
explaining the emerging patterns. As I worked to elaborate my emerging hypotheses, the
qualitative data repeatedly presented me counter-evidence that challenged me to
reconceptualize my hypotheses. My observations of how the perspectives on indigenous
culture and family conveyed in Oportunidades and Mixtec revitalization efforts intersect
with those of villagers in the rest of this dissertation reflect this iterative analytical

process.

87

CHAPTER FOUR:
CULTURE, POWER AND PATHOLOGY IIN OPORTUNIDADES

This chapter examines formulations of indigenous culture in IMSS-
Oportunidades. ” I analyze how IMSS-Oportunidades programmers and service
providers have construed indigenous culture and its significance while devising and
carrying out new kinds of psychological strategies for pursing their objectives during the
19903. I situate this entrée into psychology in relation to broader transformations in
power linked with neoliberal reform. In this manner, the analysis offers insights into
neoliberal incarnations of ‘indigenous culture.’

I begin by linking developers’ concerns with psychological states to broader
transformations in power. Thereafter, I analyze how IMSS-Oportunidades researchers
and program designers construed indigenous culture while devising psychological and
more traditional kinds of strategies for pursuing their objectives with different subsectors
of indigenous communities. Finally, I examine how service providers conceptualize the
significance of indigenous culture as they carry out their work, and how they incorporate

these ideas into daily IMSS-Oportunidades interventions.

Shifting modes of power and the emergence of psychological development terrain
Michel Foucault (1991; Gordon 1991; Lemke 2001) has described the apparent

retraction of the state characteristic of liberal democratic and neoliberal modes of

government as a process that generates new modalities of rule. Thomas Lemke (2001 :12)

depicts this as a “re-coding of social mechanisms of exploitation and domination on the

 

n In 2000, lMSS-Solidaridad was renamed IMSS-Oportunidades. For the sake of clarity, I refer to the
Program as IMSS-Oportunidades throughout.

88

basis of a new topography of the social domain.” That is, as neoliberal reforms shrink the
formal state sector, they contribute to shifts in sites of government from state to social
domains. “Technologies of the self” (Foucault, cited in Lemke 2001:] 1) through which
experts teach individuals to see themselves as certain kinds of subjects with certain
interests, and to police their own behavior accordingly, are key to these transformations.
Through these technologies, experts and everyday individuals alike become crucial
agents of power and control in this govemmentalization of the social.

Barbara Cruikshank (199924) has drawn from these insights to analyze the
Californian self-esteem movement as one such ‘technology of the self’ — a “technology of
citizenship,” in her words. The California state assembly launched the self-esteem
movement when it created the California Task Force to Promote Self-Esteem and
Personal and Social Responsibility in 1983 (1999:88). Cruikshank describes how, from
then on, the Task Force promulgated the idea that poor self-esteem causes ‘social ills’,

6“

including chronic welfare dependence’, alcoholism and drug abuse, crime and violence,
academic failure, teenage pregnancy, and child abuse” (1999:92). Accordingly, experts
devised self-esteem based strategies for healing and reforming ‘offenders’ in order to
combat these ‘social ills’. The self-esteem approach is designed to induce changes in
how individuals conceive of and relate to themselves, with the goal of prompting
individuals to adopt the behaviors that the state promotes ‘voluntarily’. Cruikshank

(1999290) writes,

Working toward self-esteem is a way to subject citizens in the sense of making them
“prone to” or “subject to” taking up the goals of self-esteem for themselves and their

. vision of the good society... Transparency is established between the individual’s goal of
achieving self-esteem and the social goal of eliminating child abuse, crime and welfare
dependence. Those who undergo “revolution from within” are citizens doing the right
thing; they join programs, they volunteer, but most important, they work on and improve
their self-image.

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That is, experts devise self-esteem interventions to reconfigure and realign individuals’
conceptions of their selves and their interests in ways that lead them choose to act in

ways that correspond with state aims.

The genealogy of IMSS-Oportunidades Human Development
IMSS-Oportunidades began to engage psychological states as key terrain for
pursuing their objectives in changing youth’s reproductive behaviors during the mid-
19903. This work blossomed into the current Human Development approach, in which
service providers carry out interventions targeting values, self-esteem, decision-making,
social relations, assertiveness and gender. The connections IMSS-Oportunidades
programmers made between pathological psychological states and pathological
reproductive patterns (namely ‘early pregnancy’) correspond with those made by experts
engaged in the Californian self-esteem movement. These similarities reflect common
webs of influence and communication.
The webs linking the Californian self-esteem movement that emerged in the early
19803 with IMSS-Oportunidades’ adoption of psychological strategies in their work with
adolescents in Mexico during the 19903 travel through an organization called the Center
for Population Options.'2 The Center’s founders created the organization in 1980 to fight
‘early pregnancy’ in the United States. At the same time that Californian experts were
d€Vising self-esteem based interventions to combat a host of ‘social ills’ in California,
experts working at the Center designed a similar assemblage of techniques for combating

‘early pregnancy’ in the United States. In 1985, the Center released the first iteration of
\

12 . . .
The Center for Population Options has srnce been renamed Advocates for Youth. It IS located m
aShington, DC.

90

this program, which they deemed Life Planning Education (Hunter-Geboy 1995; CPO
1989). The Program targets how adolescents conceive of themselves and their
relationships to those around them through activities that address individual identities,
values, gender, goal setting, decision making, parenthood, sexuality, communication,
employment and HIV/AIDS (CPO 1989).
Experts at the Center have revised the Life Planning Education program multiple
times since they created the initial version. The first revision, in 1989, reflected a
broadening of the Program’s agenda from its narrow focus on ‘early pregnancy’ to
incorporate strategies for fighting HIV/AIDS (CPO 1989). The Center’s personnel have
also contributed to the internationalization of the approach by forming international
collaborations to produce versions of the Program for non-US. populations. A Mexican
organization called the Center for Adolescent Orientation (CORA) was one of the earliest
international collaborators. In 1987, the Center began to collaborate with the Center for
Adolescent Orientation and the lntemational Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) to
devise a version of Life Planning Education for Latin American youth (CPO and ADC
199022). This work led to the production of a version of the Program specifically geared
toward Latin American youth, called Como planear mi vida (CPO and ADC 1990).'3
The Center for Population Options’ collaboration with the Mexican Center for

Adolescent Orientation created a line of influence that shaped perspectives on how to
address adolescent reproductive patterns in Mexico. Indeed, the first workbook that

details Human Development interventions for IMSS-Oportunidades service providers —

\

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The Costa Rican Demographic Assocxation co-authored this Latin American versron of the Program thh
the Center for Population Options,

91

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Los caminos de la vida (AF LUENTES 2000)l4 [The Paths of Life] — cites, closely

resembles and in some instances mirrors the activities laid out in Como planear mi vida.

Human Development and neoliberal reform

As I discussed above, Foucauldian scholars have argued that neoliberal reforms
transform the terrain of rule in ways that make self-govemance strategies crucial modes
of government (Foucault 1991; Lemke 2001). Considered in relation to these
observations, the close temporal correspondence between the emergence and
entrenchment of neoliberal reform and the emergence and transnationalization of this
psychological approach is suggestive. This close correspondence also holds true in the
particular case of Mexico: IMSS-Oportunidades programmers incorporated the
psychological approach into the Program’s repertoire of interventions on the heels of the
Salinas de Gortari (1988-1994) administration’s deep embrace of neoliberal reform (see
Chapter Two, especially pp. 60-65).

In my analysis of lMSS-Oportunidades’ Human Development below, 1 signal
ways in which the subjects of Human Development bear the marks of this neoliberal
context. In the broadest sense, they reflect the imposition of a market logic on all of
social life that Foucault identified as a distinguishing characteristic of neoliberalism
(Lemke 2001). That is, participants of Human Development learn to become

“entrepreneurs of the self” (Lemke 200129) who regard themselves as works in progress
and continually act upon themselves to craft better, more productive selves. Secondly, to

the extent that Human Development training incites participants to adopt a sense of

\

l
4 This workbook was a collaborative effort that included the support of the World Health Organization, the
epartment of Health, the Department of Education, IMSS-Oportunidades and a Mexican non-
gOVemmental organization called Afluentes.

92

 

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responsibility for social phenomena formerly regarded as the purview of the state (Lemke
2001 :12), Human Development responds to the deficits of care that neoliberal reforms
generate by defunding social programs.

In addition to drawing these links between neoliberalism and the subjects of
Oportunidades, I analyze how IMSS-Oportunidades programmers and service providers
have construed the significance of indigenous culture for this neoliberal subject-making.
I begin below by analyzing how IMSS-Oportunidades social, psychological and
anthropological experts researched and analyzed the significance of indigenous culture

for this Human Development terrain.

Enculturing self-governance

1n the late 19903, IMSS-Oportunidades embarked on a research investigation to
examine how indigenous culture influences practices and perspectives that impinge on
fertility rates. '5 One of the lead investigators on the research team explained to me that
they chose to focus on indigenous culture because they supposed that it was an important
factor contributing to differences between indigenous and mestizo communities’
reproductive health indicators. She recounted,

So, the problem we had, well, that we still have, is that indigenous populations, in
comparison with the rest of the population, have the lowest indicators, almost half of the
mestizo population, no? So, for example, in number of children, indigenous populations
practically double the number of children that urban women have. The maternal
mortality also is practically double, infant mortality - that is, they are in totally adverse
conditions To explain this situation, which in addition to what we already know
about social conditions, economic conditions, and the social disadvantages in the country,
we also considered that surely there must be cultural questions too, no? Because it isn’t
just the educational lag, or economic lag, or social lag, there was also a part — we also

' supposed that there were cultural questions, no?

x

l

s I MSS undertook the investigation with the assistance of the Population Council, an international NGO
de=Clicated to conducting research on themes linked with population control and reproductive health. The
01‘ ganization is headquartered in New York City.

93

In her explanation, the researcher stopped short of claiming that a ‘cultural lag’
contributes to poor development indicators in indigenous communities. That claim
would have explicitly conflicted with the critique of indigenismo that gained force during
the final quarter of the twentieth century, its challenge to the modernist denigration of
indigenous culture and assimilation efforts, and the rise of a multicultural ethic of
appreciation for cultural difference. In fact, she rewrote the history of ‘indigenous
culture’ in Mexican development as she suggested that scholars have historically focused
on social and economic factors to the neglect of culture, and characterized this inquiry
into ‘indigenous culture’ as something novel. Nonetheless, her claim that indigenous
culture fi'ustrates the pursuit of development objectives corresponds well with the
modernist perceptions that prevailed throughout most of twentieth century Mexican
development.

So motivated by the sense that cultural forces contribute to differences in fertility
patterns, a research team composed of specialists in sociology, anthropology and
psychology assembled to explicate these forces. The researchers were especially
interested in delineating how cultural forces influence youth’s reproduction- and
sexuality-related perspectives and practices. The prioritization of youth corresponds with
the primary role youth’s behaviors will. play in determining the fertility trends of the near
future. Nonetheless, when I asked why the study targeted youth, the researcher cited age-

based differential enculturedness:

It’s more difficult for an adult to change — they do change, but it’s much easier for an
adolescent or a young person, no? That’s why we focused on youth, because they are
the ones with whom it is easiest to modify a series of habits.

94

That is, in comparison with adults, youth’s more tenuous enculturedness enables them to
change with greater ease. Notwithstanding this primary concern with youth, the
researchers perceived adults’ perspectives and practices as important influences on those
of youth, and so included them in the investigation. Thus, investigators’ perceptions of
differences in how indigenous people relate to indigenous culture — or differential
enculturedness — importantly influenced their early determinations of which populations
to include in the study and why.
The research team selected the six largest indigenous populations in Mexico to
include in the study, and each of the lead sociological, ethnographic and psychosocial
investigators developed techniques to study how cultural forces shape reproductive
patterns. The head of the sociological approach designed a questionnaire targeting
knowledge, beliefs and attitudes related to reproduction, which was administered to 3490
individuals in 70 localities within the six indigenous populations (lMSS-Solidaridad
2000:23). The investigators applying the psychosocial approach conducted forty-eight
focus groups in the six populations. In the focus groups, they solicited participants’
descriptions of and orientations towards puberty, gender, unions, sexual and reproductive
health, health services and recreation (IMSS-Solidaridad 2000: 137).

For their part, the lead ethnographers selected a municipality from each of the six
p0pulations for three and a half month stints of intensive ethnographic research. They
Chose Pueblo Verde as the ‘representative’ Mixtec community for inclusion in the study.
Regional IMSS supervisors familiar with each the communities underwent training in

ethnographic research methods and subsequently carried out the ethnographic research.

They employed observation and interview techniques to collect an abundance of data

95

related to the communities’ settings, social relations, economies, and other broad
characteristics, along with more focused information about norms and practices related to
gender, sexuality and reproduction. One of the researchers explained in an interview that
the unwieldy amount of data prohibited them from using an ethnographic data analysis
program to analyze the data as they had originally intended. Nonetheless, the researcher
asserted that the lack of an analysis program did not encumber their analysis, as
important patterns in the data were readily discernible.

In the final report on the research findings, the authors present the data generated
from the sociological questionnaires to illustrate how factors such as age, sex, linguistic
status and education influence knowledge of and orientations toward family planning and
reproductive health among the populations included. They organize the psychosocial
focus group data in two forms. First, they present findings according to age and ethnic
group. Then, they present characterizations of each of the six cultures, which include
what the authors claim are “the determining repercussions of the local culture in
participants’ commentaries” (lMSS-Solidaridad 20002137). Finally, the ethnographers
contribute summaries of each of the communities, which include broad descriptors of the
social, cultural, economic, political and geographic context, along with more detailed
discussions of particular practices related to sexuality and reproduction. The
ethnographers also evaluate the cases across the six communities, and examine

Orientations and practices related to reproductive trends that the six populations hold in
Common. Most of these commonalities relate to gender roles and sexuality; for example,
the authors identify concern for women’s virginity and the high value placed on

motherhood as commonalities shared across the groups.

96

In Chapter One, I noted how anthropologists have contributed to modernist
depictions of indigenous culture as fixed, static and agentless, and to indigenous people
as trapped therein (see page 13; also Appadurai 1988). The authors’ depiction of
indigenous culture corresponds closely with modernist characterizations. For example,
they reference their own research findings to support their claim of the fixity of the
‘indigenous cultures’ under investigation:

Here one must recall the results of the previous anthropological studies of the same ethnic
groups in relation to some aspects of sexuality such as virginity, marriage and
procreation, which are examined in the chapter on background and justification. After
more than two decades they continue to be in force, as this study brings forth. This
indicates above all else that certain values and practices are above any questioning and
remain unaltered, among constant changes generated, as already signaled, by
acculturation. [IMSS-Solidaridad 2000.: 147]

The authors implicitly contrast this ‘traditional’ fixity with modern mestizo society,
which, when afforded the opportunity, incites change through contact and acculturation.

Despite these correspondences between traditional anthropological depictions of
culture and the culture of the final report, the culture of the final report diverges in a
crucial regard: the fixity of traditional culture is not agentless, but rather a product of
selfish and unscrupulous adults who impose cultural conformity on others in pursuing
their own interests. The authors intimate this characteristic injustice of indigenous
culture when describing how indigenous culture shapes behaviors that impinge upon
fertility patterns. They write,

The customs relating to union and early childbearing are profoundly embedded in deeply-
rooted traditions about which if the majority of adolescents are against, the intense social
pressure obliges them to accept them, if they do not wish to be rejected. Social

marginalization acts consequently as an important force repressing change. [IMSS-
Solidaridad 2000: 138]

The introduction of a moral tinge to the different positions subjects occupy in relation to

indigenous culture is an especially salient notion that shapes the researchers’ analysis of

97

 

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indigenous culture and its relevance for their development strategies. Thus, in a similar
passage, the authors of the report clearly position the (modern) forces of acculturation on
the side of the youth-victims who are struggling to free themselves from the (traditional)

bounds of indigenous culture. They write,

The generational gap is notable between parents and adolescent children in relation to the
concept and practice of sexual and reproductive health, especially in that which concerns
the use of family planning methods, but it is also true that when there are conflicts
between what the indigenas consider convenient and the ‘must do’ indicated by the
beliefs and customs, the latter prevail and determine the conduct to be followed, as occurs
for example with maternity directly following marriage. [IM‘SS-Solidaridad 2000:146]

In another passage, the authors implicate these power-laden generational differences for

hindering program objectives. They state,

As the information presented in the previous chapters suggests, acculturation has
occurred at a rhythm more accelerated among adolescents and youth, in comparison with
that which is observed among adults, especially those who within their nuclear families
retain the authority. This is important because — in agreement with the ethnographies —
they are the ones who assign, transmit and contribute to modifying the social patterns of
conduct that mold family members and the indigenous community. [IMSS-Solidaridad
20002144]

In short, the researchers construe indigenous culture as tool adults impose on youth in
pursuit of their own interests. In the process, adults prohibit youth from pursuing their
own best interests, and frustrate modern national aspirations. The psychosocial experts
further develop these assumptions in elaborating their analysis of how indigenous culture
impinges on development by shaping the perspectives, practices and psychological states

Of indigenous people.

The psychosocial analysis
The conclusions of the psychosocial experts have had an especially important

influence on programming. In their analytical approach, these experts utilized the text

98

and observations of participants’ behaviors recorded during the focus groups to identify
psychological pathologies; they returned to this data for indications of cultural forces; and
then deduced the cultural forces that cause these pathologies. Many of the conclusions
they generate regarding ‘pathologies’ and ‘culture’ seem ill-substantiated, but the
analytical strategy they employed to deduce links between particular ‘pathologies’ and
cultural dynamics are particularly tenuous. Nonetheless, the authors implicate a litany of
indigenous cultural patterns for producing psychological pathologies that cause
individuals to behave in ways that impede development. In the analysis, the pathological
products of these cultural patterns become, in turn, cultural patterns themselves that
contribute to mal-psychological and -economic development. Some of the most
important cultural characteristics they identify include inadequate parenting; excessive
fertility; pregnancies in too rapid succession; low self~esteem; affective emptiness;
codependency among women; poor unions; men’s lack of concern for their families; a
preference for male children; and a reliance on children for labor.

The psychosocial experts position indigenous people differently in relation to the
cultural forces they identify as causing development-impeding pathologies. In its broad
contours, their explanation mirrors the morally-tinged generational analysis of differential
enculturedness described above. Thus, the authors argue that deficiencies in indigenous
styles of parenting create psychological pathologies in indigenous youth that lead them to
perpetuate their disadvantaged social positions by forming unstable unions and having

too many children. They assert,

The precarious communication within the family and the inadequate relationship between
parents and children transform into the search for affect and for loving bonds among
indigenous adolescents, which, because of social conditions ends, often, in poorly
sustained unions and undesired pregnancies. [IMSS-Solidaridad 20002139]

99

Moreover, the authors implicate excessive fertility as a key contributor to these
inadequate parent-child bonds. They argue that high fertility contributes to the precarious
communication in the family because it precludes mothers from establishing close and
healthy emotional connections with their children. They explain,

In effect, a basic foundation present in most of the groups was the necessity to fill the
affective emptiness with which they grow. This emptiness has its basis in the mother-
child relationship, which is formed inadequately. Among other causes, frequent
pregnancies disallow the strengthening of this bond... [IMSS-Solidaridad 20002139]

This emptiness ultimately contributes to a vicious cycle of poverty, as youth attempt to
fill their void by forming partnerships while young, and subsequently begin their
reproductive lives prematurely. Premature fertility leads to excessive fertility, which
precludes youth from investing their time and resources in preparing themselves to
contribute more gainfully in the economy.

This explanation corresponds with the cultural analysis as it pits especially
encultured adults against their less encultured youth counterparts. Yet, the psychosocial
experts devise a more complex sketch of conflict by integrating gender into this analysis.
They identify men and fathers as wielding most of the power within the family, and
characterize them as imposing their will on others in conformity with their own interests,
and with indifference for the wellbeing of others. They assert,

The absence and little participation of married men in the focus groups, despite the
alternatives that they were offered, evidences the apathy and indifference towards the
health and development of their family, which results paradoxical if one considers that
they are really the ones who make the decisions about the family size and the woman’s
body. [IMSS-Solidaridad 2000:139]

100

In another passage, the authors criticize men for harming their children by failing to
create close emotional attachments with them and failing to participate in their

socialization. They state,
It is striking that the paternal figure as a formative element that provides security and
transmits to children an ethical code and social values, is little involved in the
construction of affective relations and the establishment of norms of conduct within the
family. [IMSS-Solidaridad 20002139]

Men’s lack of engagement in these areas of family life supports the authors’ contention
that indigenous men are indifferent to the needs of others.

In contrast, the authors depict women’s position as complex and paradoxical,
because women enforce cultural compliance while simultaneously being bound and

subordinated by these same forces of compliance. They write,

It is very important to note that when the woman breaks with the cultural pattern that
corresponds with sexuality, she is socially marginalized. Unfortunately, it is the women
themselves who contribute in an important way to perpetuating gender inequity. In the
six ethnic groups under study, the woman in her position as mother or mother-in-law
inculcates in her children patterns of behavior that discriminate against the female sex
and take the social function of enforcing their proper behavior. In other words, the
woman learns to adopt as her own norms of conduct that are afterwards applied against
her. [IMSS-Solidaridad 2000:148]

In contradistinction to their male counterparts, the women of the authors’ portrayal are
extremely concerned with ensuring the wellbeing of the family. In fact, women’s
concern for others appears as a pathological tendency in the report. The authors contend
that adult women seek to fill their own affective emptiness by serving others, and that
indigenous girls become co-dependent as they observe and repeat their mothers’

codependent ways:

In the particular case of the indigenous girl, the maternal model is a mirror in which the

_ girl acquires her identification as a woman. This model suggests to her that the affective
shortcomings can be filled in relation to the other; in this learning, the woman becomes
accustomed to give more than she can receive, giving more value and respect to others
than to herself, which contributes to give her life meaning. [TMSS-Solidaridad 2000: 139]

101

Thus, women occupy an ambiguous middle-ground in this analysis. The authors
characterize women as fully encultured subjects who victimize those with more tenuous
linkages to culture — youth — by enforcing cultural compliance. At the same time, these
same cultural forces victimize women. Women lack sufficient awareness of how
indigenous culture impinges upon them: they suffer from false consciousness.

Notwithstanding the authors’ consideration of gender differences, youth occupy
an unequivocal position as victims in the report. The authors write,

In the situation of the boy, the manifest paternal and maternal preference for male
children could lead one to incorrectly assume that he is afforded a privileged position in
the home. In reality, he is considered an additional support for the family economy.

[ibid.]
Thus, the IMSS-Oportunidades report locates men as cultural perpetrator-aggressors,
positions women in an ambiguous position in which they oscillate between victims and
aggressors, and depicts youth as victims. This analysis of indigenous culture as a
medium through which men dominate women and children, and cause psychological
pathologies and inadequately defined selves in the process, generates a clear moral
imperative to save indigenous women and children from the bonds of indigenous men

and culture.

Research into practice: A cultural justification for self-governance

The research project closely shadowed lMSS-Solidaridad’s nascent work with
psychology-oriented development strategies with youth under the rubric of Educational
Communication. In explaining how the research findings influenced Program practice, a
lead researcher indicated that there was an iterative relationship between the research and

programming. The investigator recounted,

102

We were already working on some of the things with communication, sexual education
and everything. But, the study gave us more elements to work on — you know, more
detail, no? But this work was already in process for like a year. Around when we began
to work with the study, this same year we began Educational Communication in relation
to these sexuality themes, no? We could say that it strengthened the work that was being
done as Educational Communication and grew into Human Development.

The research supported the Program’s launch into the psychological realm of human
experience by legitimating the shift with expert knowledge, on the one hand, and with an
analysis of the particularities of experience in indigenous communities, on the other.

F ittingly, the authors of the final report contend that its findings evidence the need to
expand the Program’s work beyond the biological focus. They assert,

[this] more precise knowledge about the level of human sexuality-related information
and patterns of behavior among the indigenous people studied obliges a holistic approach
which transcends the biological sphere to also include the psychological and the social
spheres, and the system of values, beliefs and customs that govern conduct within the
community. [IMSS-Solidaridad 2000.: 151]

This expansion into the psychosocial realm, of course, was already well underway.

Still, the research findings helped Program designers elaborate the Educational
Communication approach into the current Human Development approach, and the
recommendations the authors lay out in the report correspond closely with the current
strategy. The authors make the following recommendations:

Given the shortcomings identified in the study, strengthening the knowledge, attitudes
and abilities of the participants is plainly justified in relation to: the anatomy and
physiology of human reproduction; the health risks and harms linked to the sexual
sphere; the strengthening and redirection of values; the strengthening of self-esteem and
in particular the knowledge of oneself; the ability to make decisions and to negotiate
when necessary; the capacity to relate with others, in particular with the family and with
other adolescents, and to establish equitable relations between women and women, in the
exercise of their rights and obligations. [IMSS-Solidaridad 2000.: 152]

In addition to calling for the provision of more information about sexuality and
reproductive health to youth, the authors recommend interventions targeting youth’s

values, self-esteem, decision-making skills, relationships, and gender relations. These

103

recommendations correspond closely with the primary foci of IMSS-Oportunidades’
Human Development approach, which include values, self-esteem, interpersonal
communication, decision-making, violence, and gender equity. The authors propose this
psychological package of interventions to free youth from their culturally-induced
psychological pathologies, and enable them to gauge and act in their best interests. In
doing so, these interventions will rid the nation of key impediments to development.
The desire to transform youth’s subjective experience is central to IMSS-
Oportunidades’ Human Development approach. The report’s authors convey this
primary concern with youth’s subjective experience as they advise service providers to
address Human Development themes in a way “such that adolescents, without any
pressure and with conviction...identify the necessity to change their lifestyles and decide
to implement these changes” (IMSS-Solidaridad 2000:153). Programmers’ targeting of
the internal, subjective psychological environment that frames how individuals make
choices distinguishes Human Development as a mode of power that works through self-

governance.

Human Development training for IMSS-Oportunidades personnel
IMSS-Oportunidades Program designers have created workshops and written
materials to guide service providers as they embark on this new psychological
development terrain. I participated in a training workshop that regional supervisors
provided to Rural Health Assistants in order to prepare them to impart Human
Development training to adolescents in their communities. The workshop closely

followed the activities laid out in the Manual para el F omento del Desarrollo Humano de

104

la Poblacio’n Indigena y Campesina (IMSS-Solidaridad 1999), and participants were
expected to use the Manual as a guide in their Human Development work with
adolescents in their communities. The authors of the Manual synthesize the links
between Human Development and the Program goals of changing behaviors in a manner
that closely parallels the perspectives conveyed in the research report. Most importantly,
they identify psychological pathologies among youth as key impediments to their mental
health, and cite these pathologies as simultaneously impeding national development
aspirations. They write,

In realizing work together with the poorest population in the country, we have found that
the psychological aspects that intervene in people’s health must be dealt with if one
desires for this population to improve their life conditions.

From there a project focused on strengthening the human development of youth and
adolescents has been conceived, which emphasizes, among other themes, the valorization
of the self, aware as we are that a high self-esteem is necessary in the search for paths of
self-realization and the practice of more healthy lifestyles.

The main challenge of this new institutional work consists of working, in a focused
manner, with adolescents and youth of both sexes in indigenous and campesina
communities, with the fundamental goal of strengthening the development of their

personal potential, improving their personal relationships and encouraging responsible
decision-making. [lMSS-Solidaridad 1999:] 1]

The concluding reference to “responsible decision-making” gestures toward the criteria
programmers aim for individuals to adopt and use to navigate and determine the limits to
their own choices.

The Human Development training workshop was held in Tlaxiaco, a small city
located about an hour from Pueblo Verde. Most of the approximately forty workshop
participants traveled from communities scattered throughout the region to participate.
Over three quarters were women; their ages ranged from teenagers to their forties, with

most in their 205 and 303. We sat in a large semi-circle, an arrangement that enabled us

105

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to see one another and the workshop leaders at the front of the room. The workshop
leaders, trainers in Human Development, guided us through many of the individual and
group activities contained in the Manual. They interspersed the activities with occasional
short introductory lectures. Over the course of the three days, we engaged the themes of
human development; values; self-esteem; decision-making; social relations and
assertiveness. ‘6 Upon return to their communities, participants were charged with
organizing groups of about twenty adolescents for two-hour long sessions, in which they
would teach the twenty-seven Human Development activities elaborated in the Manual.

To begin, the training includes a series of activities aimed at reconfiguring how
individuals conceptualize of their own unique sense of selflrood in relation to those
around them. Some of these activities aim to isolate and strengthen participants’ sense of
individual uniqueness. For example, we reflected on and wrote accounts of the day we
were born; we thought about our names, where they came from, and whether and how
they fit us. In other exercises, the trainers encouraged us to cultivate this sense of
individual uniqueness by attaching it to particular qualities and desires. For example, we
wrote ten sentences about ourselves, beginning with “I’m a person who. . .”; we wrote
what we like and dislike about ourselves; we selected kinds of animal and minerals we
would choose to be if we could, and explained why; and we imagined who we would be
if we could be anyone for a day.

In addition, multiple exercises pinpoint and strengthen how participants
distinguish their own interests from the interests of those around them. This process

involves conjuring of a realm of “authentic selfhood.” Thus, the group leader informed

 

'6 The Manual also includes activities addressing gender equity, although we did not cover this theme in the
workshop.

106

participants that our families and communities instill most of our values in us, and
suggested that these values may often disagree with our “authentic selves.” Then, she
directed activities in which participants critically reflected on their own values, where
they came from, and whether or not they resonate with their own unique individuality. In
one, we each created a family shield with symbols representing family activities, ideals
and values. In the ensuing discussion, the trainer encouraged participants to consider
which of these family practices, ideals and values they liked and could be applicable to
their lives, and which did not have a place in their lives.

During the exercises, the group leaders repeatedly tasked participants with sharing
their reflections with the group. The kinds of reflections the trainers directed us to share
challenge many local conventions of social intercourse. They pressed participants to
share positive and negative qualities about themselves that would typically be deemed
prideful or shameful in community contexts. The leaders also challenged participants to
identify negative qualities about other group members and share them, a kind of open
expression that is widely discouraged. The training provides participants with a safe
context for experimenting with these techniques and in which to begin to address the
barriers to adopting them. This component of the training strengthens the redefinition
and realignment of self in relation to others by grounding the realigned subjectivities in
new modes of social engagement.

While the group leaders encouraged participants to draw, strengthen and tighten
boundaries that distinguish them from some, they concomitantly encouraged participants
to reconceptualize the significance of the connections they do make, situating them in a

sense of social commitment and ‘responsibility’. As an organizing framework,

107

‘responsibility’ communicates a framing of a greater good that corresponds with a
particular social alignment, and it provides individuals with a body of criteria for
navigating their choices and determining the ends of their own freedom. Thus,
‘responsibility’ is a key discursive tool that connects Human Development with
contemporary modes of power that work by realigning subjectivities in ways that incite
people to govern themselves.

The ‘responsibility’ of Human Development effects multi-scalar alignments:
leaders urge participants to take personal actions that contribute to the betterment of the
family, the community, the nation, and the world. In accordance with this dimension of
the Human Development’s subjective reconfigurations, all of the participants of the
workshop I participated in came to identify ‘helping others’ as an expression of their
newfound appreciation for their unique sense of self. As Thomas Lemke (2001:12)
signals, this personal sense of responsibility is responsive to the neoliberal deficit of care.

Furthermore, Human Development training promotes a conceptual shift toward
regarding setting and striving toward goals as a vehicle for the expression, development
and realization of the self. Thus, while leaders urged participants to translate the intimate
experience of selflrood into unique qualities and desires that symbolized one’s
individuality early in the workshop, they directed participants to express this individuality
as aspirations for the self, school, family and the world as we neared the close of the
workshop. Moreover, the training provides participants with multiple tools — including
estimating, calculating, quantifying and modeling their daily experience — for acting on
their daily lives in ways that facilitate the achievement of their goals. For example, one

exercise presses participants to consider whether the activities to which they dedicate

108

themselves in their daily lives assist in working toward their personal goals. As we
created pie charts representing how we use our daily time for this exercise, the workshop
leader informed participants of “the importance of taking advantage of every second
because it is not coming back.” In another exercise, the workshop leader directed
participants to analyze our attendance at the conference as a successfirl instance of setting
and reaching goals, and to consider what had to occur for us to participate. This facet of
the training encourages participants to become the analysts, directors and gatekeepers of
their daily lives, delineating priorities and blocking interferences that would impinge on
these goals (Lemke 2001).

The lectures and activities of Human Development training target three
dimensions of selflrood: they encourage participants to redraw the boundaries that
differentiate themselves from others; to articulate this newly defined terrain of the self
with interests; and to adopt a new conception of themselves and their lives revolving
around identifying and striving toward goals. In interviews, IMSS personnel who had
participated in Human Development training repeatedly expressed the linkages the
training makes between individuality and personal goals. Indeed, they described striving
towards personal goals as an expression of the valorization of the self. For example, a
regional supervisor asserted that

People become capable of reaching their goals once they have learned to accept
themselves and love themselves.

Similarly, Adriana, a clinic nurse, described working towards goals as an expression of
individuality:

Personal development is something very personal. Very personal because each person
has a different vision of her future. A person studies and trains each day more in
agreement with her necessities - and she keeps climbing.

109

Among the providers I interviewed, Juana, Pueblo Verde’s Rural Health Assistant, most
clearly articulated the connections the training draws between self-valorization, the
management of daily experience, and contributing to making a better world. She
reflected,

Yes, every time that I attend the course, they give us all of this information. So, it also
helps us give ourselves value. It makes you feel like you have much to do in life, and,

they tell us there also that, like, now that I know, I must teach others... I realized I can
do so many things. And I can help my people.

These reflections indicate that Human Development training greatly influences how
IMSS personnel conceive of themselves and how they relate to those around them.
Yet, IMSS-Oportunidades programmers devised the Human Development
approach with more transcendental aims: to spur youth Program recipients to adopt the
behaviors they advocate. Indeed, IMSS-Oportunidades programmers identify youth’s
voluntary adoption of the behaviors they advocate as the sole reliable evidence of their
degree of Human Development. In this regard, the authors of the final report write,

It must be emphasized that the knowledge must go further than simple information,
because it has been proven that it is not sufficient in and of itself to generate adequate
sexual attitudes and behaviors. This also requires an understanding of the topics
addressed, so adolescents can appropriate this knowledge and apply it to their own
benefit. This must be reflected in the adoption, by them, of new life styles and forms of
behavior that contribute to reducing early pregnancy, sexually transmitted diseases and
maternal and infant mortality, and contribute to making a sexually healthy and
satisfactory life a reality for men and women. [IMSS-Solidaridad 20002151]

Just as Barbara Cruikshank (1999) observes in her investigation of the Californian self-
esteem movement, the proof is in the pudding: participants’ adoption of the behaviors
that the Program promotes provides indicates their psychological health. Service
providers promote these behaviors by concretizing ‘psychological health’ and

‘responsibility’ into particular perspectives and behaviors in everyday practice.

110

Concretizing Human Development in everyday IMSS-Oportunidades practice

Although the Human Development training providers receive focuses entirely on
promoting subjective transformations, the leaders and participants of the workshop
deviated from the guide in at least two instances to concretize the subjective
transformations they were discussing in actual behaviors. These spontaneous deviations
accurately reflect how IMSS-Oportunidades personnel reckon diffiJse discussions of
subjectivity in relation to specific behaviors.

Significantly, in both of these cases, workshop participants made sense of
discussions of dysfunctional selfhood by grounding them in the extremely salient
Program concern of regulating fertility. In one instance, the group leader queried
participants about the causes of early pregnancy. Participants responded by claiming that
youth who form their families young do so because they lack love and communication in
the home. In this interchange, the leader astutely incorporated the group participants’
active participation to identify a delay in the onset of first pregnancy as an indication of
psychological health. In another instance, while discussing self-esteem and decision
making, group members attributed low self-esteem to women with many children, and
argued that these women’s low self-esteem prohibits them from making decisions. In this
case, the trainer affirmed the observer’s contention, and tasked group members with
helping youth learn to make their own decisions. The links here closely resemble those
in the first instance: low fertility symbolizes psychological health.

These deviations demonstrate the pivotal role context plays in shaping how
participants translate diffuse discussions of responsibility and psychological health into

particular behaviors. In her analysis of the self-esteem movement in California, Barbara

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Cruikshank (1999:90) describes this as the processes through which “Transparency is
established between the individual’s goal of achieving self esteem, and the social goal of
eliminating child abuse, crime and welfare dependence.” This concretizing occurs often
in everyday practice, as providers intenningle Human Development training with
educational and medical interventions in their work with youth.

Although IMSS-Oportunidades personnel train providers to impart Human
Development training as a course to youth in their communities, a lack of interest among
community members beleaguers these efforts. In fact, around the same time that I
participated in the Human Development workshop, a Pueblo Verdean young adult
participated in a similar workshop in preparation to provide Human Development
training to pre-adolescent youth. Reportedly, poor attendance hampered his efforts to
reproduce the course in Pueblo Verde. Difficulties findings individuals who are capable,
available and willing to impart courses, as well as individuals who are willing to
participate, limit the frequency and reach of this form of Human Development training.

Nonetheless, programmers interweave discussions of Human Development
themes into the health and educational interventions that comprise the bulk of the
Program’s everyday work with youth. The Guia para e] C uidado de la Salud:
Adolescentes de 10 a 19 Afios (IMSS-Oportunidades 2003), an informational pamphlet
provided to adolescent recipients of care at the clinic, reflects and propels this
interweaving. The guide serves dual purposes: it provides youth with information they
can read at leisure to learn about their own health, and alerts them to the main concerns
their providers should address during their consults. The guide combines the Human

Development foci of family communication, decision-making, values and self-esteem,

112

with information aiming to promote particular behavioral changes related to family
planning, sexually transmitted diseases, addictions, accidents and physical activity.

Moreover, the Introduction to the Manual used for training Program personnel in
Human Development, Manual de Desarrollo Humano Organizacional para la Calidad
(IMSS-Solidaridad n.d.z7), advises all IMSS-Oportunidades personnel to impart the
training as they carry out their daily work with youth:

This Manual aims to orient and stimulate health workers to apply some simple and new
strategies, as well as to extend and diversify the application of knowledge and abilities
that already exist in the operation of the Program, with the end of taking advantage of
them in their everyday activities.

Thus, while the participants of the Human Development training course discussed above
deviated from the course material to ground the subjective psychological states of Human
Development in particular practices, namely fertility, this concretizing interweaving
constitutes part and parcel of how service providers carry out programming in everyday

practice.

Culture and Human Development in practice: Making healthy adolescent selves

In my analysis of the IMSS-Oportunidades study and the changes in programming
it occasioned, l signaled the ongoing salience of modernist orientations toward
indigenous culture that depict indigenous culture as a hindrance to modern development
aspirations. Nonetheless, the researchers characterized indigenous culture in novel ways
as they framed its significance for the psychological terrain of Human Development.
They construed indigenous culture as a source of psychological pathologies that
indigenous subjects differentially experience and bear. The researchers drew from these

arguments to promote the expansion of psychologically-oriented interventions with the

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indigenous subjects they depicted as least culturally encumbered — youth. Ultimately,
this expansion led to the current Human Development approach, which includes
interventions aimed to treat the psychological dysfunction that programmers claim
indigenous culture produces.

Despite the important role modernist assumptions about indigenous culture have
played in shaping Human Development, ‘culture’ per se is not part of the Human
Development training program. Nonetheless, in practice, service providers repeatedly
invoke ‘indigenous culture’ while imparting Human Development training. In the
process, they ground the subject of Human Development in the modernist dichotomy
distinguishing modern and indigenous subjects. The resulting logic closely mirrors that
prevailing in the study report, as it distinguishes the modern selves of Human
Development from their indigenous culture-bearing counterparts. Adolescents learn that
small families symbolize the healthy and responsible modern subject, while large families
evidence the pathological, irresponsible, indigenous culture-bearing subject. To the
extent that this modernist dimension of practice contributes to the realignment of youth’s
affinities, it simultaneously contributes to the Program’s multi-scalar realignments in
relation to ‘responsibility’.

In the Pueblo Verde clinic, the nurses typically provide adolescent educational
sessions, and they do so on a monthly basis while school is in session.'7 They usually

hold the sessions in the CARA, the Center for Rural Adolescents, located directly behind

 

'7 In practice, talks were often cancelled due to poor attendance, because the nurses are otherwise occupied,
or for unanticipated interruptions.

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mt

 

the clinic. Occasionally, they hold the sessions inside the clinic to take advantage of the
TV/VCRl8 to watch videos addressing relevant themes.

At the time I conducted the research, the package of educational sessions intended
for IMSS-Oportunidades adolescents included the themes of adolescence and sexuality;
family planning; addictions; sexually transmitted diseases; HIV/AIDS; gender and health;
and family violence. I observed sessions on gender and health, adolescent sexuality and
family planning. Only one of these sessions explicitly dealt with family planning.
Nonetheless, service providers repeatedly discussed family planning topics during these
sessions. In fact, group leaders’ preoccupation with family planning led them to
misinform participants about techniques that protect against sexually transmitted diseases
(STDs) during the session on adolescence and sexuality. In this instance, the clinic
doctor and primary nurse were using a board game to teach adolescents about sexuality.
One of game’s questions challenges players to name methods that protect against STDs.
In response, clinic personnel and youth alike identified techniques for avoiding
pregnancy, including IUDs and vasectomies, which do not protect against STDs. Group
leaders very clearly established family size as an indicator of the psychologically healthy
modern subject through these constant reminders.

At the same time that providers grounded healthy subjectivities in small families,
they often simultaneously deployed the symbolism of especially encultured adults to
illustrate pathological behaviors, orientations and selves. The connections the clinic
nurse drew between culture, contraceptive use, and the Human Development theme of
gender equity illustrate these linkages. In a session on gender and health, the nurse ’

grounded healthy and pathological orientations toward gender in perspectives on

 

'8 The Program participants had contributed to funds to purchase the television.

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contraceptive use: favorable stances toward contraceptive use reflect healthy and just
gender orientations, while aversion to contraceptives evidences a pathological unjust
gender orientation. Moreover, she went a step further to ground her illustrations of
pathological unjust gender orientations in especially encultured subjects. The nurse thus
overlaid modernist dichotomies on these pairings of fertility with subjective and
psychological states.

In the session, the nurse reported that men with one or two children used to feel
belittled and emasculated, but that people no longer subscribe to this notion. Deploying
the discourse of ‘responsibility’, she claimed that people understand that men want to
have only as many children as they can provide a good life for. Then, she referenced
residents of a neighboring community where fewer people speak the Spanish language
and more people don ‘traditional’ dress, and said that those villagers do perceive the use
of contraceptives as emasculating, and they prohibit their wives from using
contraceptives. The nurse deployed the symbolism of these especially encultured
subjects to convey her point with clarity: modern people do not believe that using
contraceptives makes men less masculine. In a way that shadows the multi-scalar
realignments discourses of ‘responsibility’ evoke, modernist discourses promote
subjective realignments by cultivating affinities between youth and the modern.

Significantly, the Verdean nurse used the symbolism of people from a
neighboring community to demonstrate the salience of indigenous culture to the
subjectivities that correspond with healthy and unhealthy gender orientations. Villager-
providers also deployed symbols of especially encultured subjects of the same

community. Nonetheless, program designers and non-villager IMSS-Oportunidades

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personnel more typically depicted encounters between educated clinic staff and the
culturally embedded communities where they work.

For example, in one of the vignettes enacted on a video19 youth viewed during a
session on family planning, a young man’s padrino, or ‘godparent’, approaches a young
woman’s father to ask for her hand in marriage on behalf of his ahijado, or ‘godson’.

The father rejects the offer, citing concerns that the suitor will force his daughter to use
contraceptives. The father believes using contraceptives would kill his daughter. Rather
than using contraceptives, the father proclaims that women should have children naturally
— ‘as God gives them.’ The father and the padrino go to the clinic to speak with the
doctor to settle the matter, and the doctor informs them that contraceptive use will
actually save the woman’s life. The clinic doctor thus channels modern reason to combat
older men’s decidedly harmful ignorance.

The multiple vignettes in the video were designed to demonstrate the ill-effects of
early and high fertility in rural communities, to approximate barriers to family planning
in these communities, and to illustrate paths for resolving these barriers. The
representations of indigenous culture these vignettes contain convey assumptions about

generational and gender differences in how individuals experience culture that closely

 

‘9 The video, Los caminos de la vida, is a companion to the initial workbook provided to IMSS-
Oportunidades service providers to familiarize themselves with the psychological approach: Los caminos
de la vida: Manual de capacitacio'n sabre sexualidad e infecciones de transmission sexual para jovenes
campesinas y campesinos (Rodriguez and Mayen 2000). A Mexican non-govemmental organization called
Afluentes took the lead in developing both of these materials. Although Afluentes specifically designed the
materials for use in rural, mestizo communities, they are used more broadly in IMSS-Oportunidades.
Indeed, in his brief introduction to the Los caminos de la vida manual, the then director of IMSS-
Oportunidades, Javier Cabral Soto asserts:

. One of the key characteristics of this manual is that its possibilities are not limited to specific
groups; the contents and exercises can be used as complementary elements of educational

programs that promote health and the prevention of harms. [In Rodriguez and Mayen 2000:7]

Particularly when used in these broader contexts, personnel play a crucial role in interpreting the meaning
of the materials.

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resemble those the researchers articulated in their report on the study findings.
Specifically, they depict older adults and men as agents who impose cultural conformity
on women and youth to their detriment. As a symbol of cultural difference, arranged
marriages effectively condense a reading of culture as an imposition that elders impose.

In the discussion following the film, the resident physician asked the group
members whether they knew anyone who believed that contraceptives are dangerous, like
the father portrayed in the film. In doing so, she incorporated the group members into an
educated ‘us’ that she contrasted with their culturally-embedded older adult family
members. Moreover, when participants affirmed, the doctor pleaded with them to help
by educating these misinformed villagers. I examine how realignments such as these are
influencing Verdean social life in my analysis of culture in Pueblo Verde later in the
dissertation.

The program materials and providers iterated one of the most historically
entrenched constructions of indigeneity in these sessions: the idea that indigenousness
equals ignorance, and that both are the antipode of modern reason. In fact, personnel
repeatedly described culture as a hindrance to indigenous peoples’ ability to “understand”
the need to adopt the practices the Program advocates. For example, when I asked
Sylvia, the primary clinic nurse, whether she encountered barriers to her work, she
identified costumbres arriagadas, or deeply-rooted customs. She replied,

...customs — some deeply-rooted ones, like for example people who say, ‘I can’t make a
chimney because my house is too small.’ It isn’t that they can’t; it’s that they’re
accustomed.

Personnel working in different capacities in the Program repeatedly conveyed this notion

that Ia cultura arraigada, the deeply-rooted culture, impedes Program efforts. In one

118

instance, a regional supervisor conveyed these sentiments along with frustration and
disbelief as he reflected on people’s reticence to adopt the practices the Program
promotes. He claimed,

You can tell people to stop drinking atole [a com-based drink], but they aren't going to.

Same with the cuetes [fireworks] that people use at fiestas. People have burned to death
from them! You can suggest ways of making their use safer, but you can't make people
get rid of things that are part of the cultural rootedness.

As programmers and providers drew from these assumptions to incorporate symbols of
ignorant culturally embedded villagers into their Human Development training, these

representations served as symbols of antipathy that demonstrate for youth how not to be.

Gender, culture and justice: The disempowered indigenous woman

A key figure that recurs consistently throughout Human Development training is
the wounded and disempowered woman. For example, one of the scenarios in the
Caminos de la vida video portrays a young woman who becomes pregnant shortly after
marrying, and barely survives childbirth. Afterward, the midwife tells her that she is too
young to have babies, and that she should wait before having another. In the discussion
following the video, one of the adolescents in the group noted that one of the points of the
video is that women should not have children before 25 years of age. The doctor
supported her observation, affirming that the ideal age to have children is from 25 to 35.
Moreover, she informed the group that having children in close succession is bad for
women, and that parents should space their children at least two years apart. The nurse
made a similar claim in the session on gender and health. She reported that having many

children is bad for women, and that having children in close succession harms women

119

because it fails to provide sufficient time for the uterus to shrink back to size between
pregnancies.

This figure of the wounded woman echoes the depictions of gender presented in
the findings of the investigation into culture and reproduction that I examined above.
Patriarchy causes this symbolic woman’s ailments. In particular, careless and callous
men harm her by imposing their desires for large families on her without concern for her
well-being or the well-being of any others. To make matters ever worse, this woman’s
lifelong experience of subjection renders her blind to her own oppression.

IMSS-Oportunidades programmers and service providers deploy this figure in
multiple ways in the pursuit of multiple ends. In one particularly salient formulation,
when integrated into the substance of adolescent training, the disempowered woman
symbolizes indigeneity and the opposite of modern desires. For example, in the gender
and health session examined above, the nurse cited men in a neighboring community who
refused to allow women to use contraceptives as a symbol of indigenous cultural alterity.
This impotent, violated, encultured subject stands in contradistinction to the modern self-
directing subject that young women should aspire to be. When used in this way, the
symbol of the disempowered woman condenses a particular reading and appraisal of
certain practices and subjects — that is, large families and subordinated women — as
negative markers of local distinction. Thus, the figure of the disempowered woman
demonstrates to youth who and how not to be.

This figure imbues the family planning agenda with a moral cause, one that
training in gender equity best symbolizes. Nonetheless, training in gender equity is a tool

designed to facilitate the achievement of the Program’s objectives. Accordingly, the

120

extent to which strategies for empowering women contribute to particular program
objectives of changing behaviors determines the bounds of concern for gender equity.
Adriana, a Verdean clinic nurse, referenced this limit during an interview. She remarked,

Adriana: the woman is very discriminated against here — in every way. The woman is
very rejected in all aspects. And especially when they live with their husbands. They
think that the husband has to give the final word, although she can really do it. I hope
that [the women] learn to decide for themselves, learn to make decisions about their own
bodies, that husbands no longer manipulate [wives], and that he is no longer deciding for
her. Because, I’m talking here about contraceptive methods because here the people like
to wait for the final decision of the husband. For example, in family planning, if the
husband says that the woman is not going to protect herself from having more children,
and the woman, she doesn’t want any more children, but he says yes, she also says yes!
Women need to protect themselves to take care of their own bodies; they must not wait
for the man’s word, because if they continuing doing that, we are going to be very bad
off. Very bad economically and socially, because bringing children into the world —I
think that people must not bring children into the world just to bring them. [Children]
need the necessary care so they can grow and can have a good education... There is so
much machismo, and machismo does not permit women to develop as, as women.

1112,: You work with contraceptive methods, but, do you work more broadly in
promoting women’s ability to make their own decisions?

Adriana: That they learn family planning. That is the intention.

ill: Also, that women have more power?

Adriana: Yes, that they have, that they feel — how can I put it? — that they have the
capacity to decide for themselves.

Adriana clearly articulated how fertility reduction marks the periphery of the Program’s
concern with women’s empowerment.

In fact, while programmers have drawn from the links they established between
fertility and patriarchy to challenge gender inequalities while working with adolescents,
in other instances, these same links provide the justification for efforts to channel
women’s disempowerment so it contributes to program aims. That is, programmers and
providers appeal to men’s control over women’s fertility and attempt to harness this
control to their efforts to reduce family size. This is evident in the first family planning
scenario from the Caminos de la vida video that I discussed above, in which the older

men go to the clinic to settle their dispute about the detrimental health consequences of

121

contraceptives. In this case, the doctor borrows the symbolism of planting to
communicate why pregnancies in rapid secession negatively influence women’s health.
He asserts that “women are like the soil,” which yields small fruits when sown year after
year. The doctor thus appeals to the men not to ‘plant so many seeds.’ In a similar vein,
in the discussion that followed, the resident doctor asserted that men should show their
love for their wives by delaying and spacing out pregnancies.

This kind of complicity and collusion with men’s control over women’s fertility
casts a shadow over the gender commitments of the program. Moreover, programmers’
efforts to strike up patriarchal collusions to achieve their objectives to lower the fertility
of especially encultured women attest to the divergences between how these women and
youth encounter the program. In contrast to their adolescent counterparts, the Program
deploys much more overt carrot-and-stick forms of coercion while working with these
subjects. Furthermore, programmers employ these divergent tactics of impulsion to press
youth and women to occupy very different places and fulfill very different roles in the
nation. Youth will stake out the future development of the nation by continually striving
toward self-improvement. Adult women, on the other hand, will carry out much of the
labor needed to meet the nutritional and health needs of their families, a task that the
neoliberal dismantling of social services makes more burdensome.

The Program integrates adult women into this particular role by designating
female head of households as titulares, or official beneficiaries of the Program. As such,
they must fulfill key coresponsabilidades to maintain their and their families’ access to
these benefits. Most importantly, they must attend monthly training sessions in which

they acquire information and skills aimed at strengthening their ability to meet the

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nutritional and health needs of their families. The thirty-five topics providers address in
titulares ’ educational sessions include themes related to basic hygiene, nutrition, illness,
pregnancy, caring for young children, and the ubiquitous fertility regulation. Adriana, the
clinic nurse, explained the salience of women’s familial commitment for the Program as
follows:

Generally the women receive the talks because they are the ones who are the heart of the
family and the woman is the one who cares for the children and she is the one who looks
out for the wellbeing of the family, she is the one who controls the money in the house.
That’s why there is a focus on the woman, because she watches out for everyone.

That is, Oportunidades is designed to harness older women’s familial commitment — the
same commitment that authors of the report on the findings of the indigenous culture and
reproduction investigation construed as pathological codependency — to national
development goals. This effort contrasts starkly with the program’s repeated claims of
concern for and commitment to these women’s empowerment.

Moreover, clinic personnel coerce titulares into carrying out varied activities by
threatening to withhold the financial assistance they receive from the Program.
Technically, titulares ' coresponsabilidades consist of clinic health consults and monthly
educational sessions: upon acquiring three faltas, or absences, they lose Program benefits.
Nonetheless, clinic personnel often threatened participants with faltas if they failed to
comply with other clinic aims. For example, when the clinic held a vaccination
campaign, the staff informed the titulares during their educational sessions that they must
participate in the parade the clinic held to alert the community of the event, informing
each group where they needed to assemble for the event. In addition, the clinic staff
informed them that all of them, except pregnant women, must submit themselves to

vaccination. Similarly, when Program supervisors communicated to clinic service

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providers that all young pregnant women needed to undergo HIV/AIDS screening, the
providers simply informed young pregnant Oportunidades recipients that they must
attend the clinic — that very day — and submit to an HIV test. In another instance, when
Program supervisors imposed numerical targets upon the clinic staff for administering
cervical cancer screenings to villagers, the staff informed titulares that they were required
to attend the clinic and undergo cancer screenings on the clinic’s ‘reproductive health
day’. Clinic staff also coerced Oportunidades recipients to take their animals to the
clinic’s rabies vaccine campaign.20
This coerciveness extended beyond the clinic. For example, the trainer leading
the Human Development workshop for Rural Health Assistants advised participants to
hold a meeting with parents of adolescents upon returning to their communities, to inform
them that they were going to be holding Human Development training sessions with
adolescents. When some of the Assistants raised concerns that parents would not be
willing to attend, the leader asserted that Oportunidades families must attend, or they

‘ In addition, in Pueblo Verde, all of the

may get an absence marked on their cards.2
titulares were ‘required’ to meet in the center of the community once a month to

undertake a community-wide cleaning. A conflict arose when the Rural Health Assistant
reported to her supervisors that the clinic staff was threatening the titulares with faltas if

they failed to carry out the cleaning. Nonetheless, the supervisors did not force the clinic

to stop the forced cleaning. Instead, the municipal government conspired with the clinic

 

‘0 The primary clinic nurse who coerced titulares ’ participation did not take her family’s own puppy for a
vaccination. Her failure to do so hints at the important influence of Program supervisors’ pressure on
service providers to meet targets. That is, her eagerness to vaccinate dogs was a reflection of supervisors’
pressure to meet targets, rather than her concerns about rabies posing a threat to health. Similarly, when
she considered undergoing an HIV test, she reported that she would travel to a medical facility to do so
because the tests they used in the clinic were inadequate.

2‘ In fact, based on her comment, I wrongly understood that Oportunidades youth were required to attend
the Human Development course.

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staff to legislate the cleaning under local law. In a striking extension of this coercive
logic, the Municipal President threatened to intervene with the titulares’ federally
provided assistance if they failed to cany out the monthly cleaning. Thus, like
Oportunidades, the municipal government has strategized to harness titulares’
commitment to ensuring the well-being of their families toward municipal ‘development’
goals.

The coercive logic mirrors the fundamental logic of the Program. Yet, an
expansion of this carrot-and-stick coercive logic is not evident in interventions with other
Program recipients. Service providers’ recurring recourse to these forms of coercion with
titulares corresponds with Program designers’ calculations of the unique ways in which
these recipients’ victimization positions them to contribute to development, in
combination with their assumptions that titulares are engaged in culture in a way that

impedes their ability to “understand”.

Conclusions
The examination of formulations of indigenous culture in IMSS-Oportunidades

that I have undertaken in this chapter does not provide evidence to support recent claims
of a multicultural shift in Mexico. Nonetheless, it does indicate important shifts in
perspectives on the salience and significance of indigenousness. By analyzing these
shifts in relation to new development strategies that have been designed in the context of
neoliberal reform, this chapter offers insights into neoliberal incarnations of culture.

- Programmers construed indigenous culture as a source of psychological pathology

as they devised new psychologically-based development tactics for teaching youth how

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to become the ‘self-goveming’ and ‘self-enterprising’ subjects of neoliberal
govemmentalities (Lemke 2001). Through Human Development training, IMSS-
Oportunidades Program designers seek to reorient youth’s subjectivities in ways that lead
youth to adopt the behaviors they promote voluntarily. Indeed, participants reported that
they found the sessions useful because they learned information that would help them
make choices in the future. The encultured subject, the antipode of modernity, figures
importantly in these efforts. Programmers and providers uphold the ignorant, harmed,
disempowered woman as a symbol of who not to be. Later in the dissertation, I analyze
how this dimension of IMSS-Oportunidades subject-making shapes relationships among
villagers.

In synthesizing Michel Foucault’s perspectives on neoliberal governmentality,
Thomas Lemke (2001 :10) describes the diminishing place of concerns with pathology as
the logic of the market expands and comes to encompass the totality of the social realm.
The neoliberal subject is calculating, not pathological. Nonetheless, in this analysis of
how ‘culture’ has influenced shifts towards neoliberal modalities of governance within
Mexican development, I have observed how programmers construed culture as
pathology. This is the pathology of those who fail to “understand” how to calculate, or,
read in a different way, the pathology of those who refuse to calculate. These
pathologized culture-bearers lie beyond the bounds of self-govemance. Barbara
Cruikshank (1999:4) notes that this transgression prompts the ends democratic modes of
rule:

It is in those cases where individuals do not act in their own self-interest or appear
indifferent to their own development as full-fledged citizens that the limit of the liberal
state at the threshold of individual rights, liberty, and pursuits must be crossed. [1999:4]

126

Accordingly, IMSS-Oportunidades programmers and providers utilize more outright
carrot and stick modes of coercion with these subjects. At the same time, programmers
require encultured subjects to fulfill distinct roles. Titulares are tasked with fulfilling
greater social and health responsibilities at a time that the has recoiled from these

functions.

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CHAPTER FIVE: CULTURE AND POWER IN MIXTEC REVITALIZATION

Mixtec revitalizationists view contemporary Mixtec culture and language as
reflecting and contributing to a distinctive Mixtec cultural orientation. Moreover, they
view them as vestiges of a common history that belie the fragmented and extremely
localized identities of Mixtec communities. Revitalizationists cite the rule of King Eight
Deer during the eleventh century as evidence of the salience of Mixtec peoplehood in
history. The Mixtec King incorporated the Mixteca Alta and Mixteca Baja regions into
the Kingdom of Tututepec during this period, thereby bringing Mixtec people together
under one leader (Jansen 2001; Ojeda Diaz 2002). In recalling this Golden Age of
Mixtec peoplehood, the revitalizationist Balduino Flores y Flores (2002: 100) cites the
words of a Mixtec scholar, Lopez Ramos, to marvel at how people in Mixtec
communities have forgotten their noble essence:

...they have forgotten that they formed part of a grand nation of ancient America... As a
result, the traveler who accidentally travels by the dusty Mixtec roads cannot discover
there in the land but only a fleeting shadow of the majestic past which occasionally
encloses this forgotten region.

In their efforts to redress this situation, revitalizationists have focused on reestablishing
Mixtec peoplehood as a precursor for enabling Mixtec people to identify and defend their
common interests. Juan Julian Caballero, a leading revitalizationist, grounds these efforts
in a deep history as he asserts,

...We must begin by reconstructing the autonomy and the unity of the Mixtec which in
one moment of prehispanic history the legendary Ocho Venado ‘Garra de Tigre’ tried to
consolidate. [Juan Julian Caballero 1998ar438]

128

Moreover, he explains that promoting Mixtec culture, language and identity is necessary
in order to facilitate the empowerment of the Mixtec people, as he reasons,

In the context of the discussion of autonomy and self-determination of indigenous
pueblos, is it possible to propose Mixtec autonomy when the communities and the
municipalities are dispersed, when the Nuu Savi territory is located in three federal
entities, conflicts over land between communities have not been resolved, there are
numerous dialectical variations, there are other indigenous groups with distinct cultures
within the Mixtec zone. . ., the deterioration in identity is growing as a result of migration
and other influences? To propose today the autonomy of the Mixtec pueblo demands on
one end a resignification of our own spaces: territory, language, culture, justice, history,
etcetera, and on the other end undertaking a discussion with those who don’t know or
understand this reality so that they respect the difference. [19982437]

Revitalizationists address these dual demands through their collective efforts by
publishing works on Mixtec culture and history for Mixtecs and non-Mixtecs alike in the
CID Nuu Savi, and promoting Mixtec identity to Mixtec people through language
training via the Ve’e Tu’un Savi.

This chapter examines how revitalizationists have articulated Mixtec culture in
their efforts to define and bring into being a distinct utopian imaginary. I begin by
examining the facets of Mixtec culture revitalizationists highlight in their written works
below, and how they valorize these symbols of alterity as they link them to an alternative
modern project. Thereafter, I examine the conceptions of Mixtecness revitalizationists

employ as they carry out their efforts to realize this project.

Mixtec culture as communalism

Revitalizationists have addressed a wide diversity of themes in their many
published works. Notwithstanding this diversity, a common emphasis on communalism
as a distinctive and valuable Mixtec cultural foundation emerges from these works.

Revitalizationists advance a critique of the isolationism and alienation of mainstream

129

development approaches as they describe the superiority of communalism, and suggest
that a Mixtec culture-based alternative utopian model of the future is grounded in a more
just form of sociality. Thus, Marcos Cruz Bautista identifies communality as an
‘orienting value’ of all Mixtec values (2004az75), and contends that while these values
contribute to individual wellbeing, the “pseudo values” or “disvalues” that predominate
among non-indigenous people lead to alienation and human commodification (2004a:53-
4).

lgnacio Ortiz Cruz, a Mixtec philosopher who co-initiated and now serves as
director of the Mixtec revitalization journal Tu ’un Savi: Palabra de la Lluvia (The
Mixtec Word), has developed more in-depth and nuanced analyses of communalism in a
series of articles analyzing Mixtec sociality. Ortiz Cruz observes that Western societies
reward individual experience while Mixtec communities reward service to community,
and contends that these different reward systems correspond with distinctive Mixtec and
Western worldviews. In one essay, he identifies solidarity as a foundation of Mixtec
sociality that diverges from the competitive foundations of Western sociality. He
explains,

At its foundation, [solidarity] deals with individual progress and not individual
competition. The individual must struggle to get ahead, not through competition, but
through collaboration: improvement — collaboration vs. improvement — competition.
Exacerbated individualism or selfishness will only have a relative place in our worldview
as a foundation for communality, in comparison with the Western individualist
worldview, in which it has more possibilities because it is innate. [Ortiz Cruz 2003:15]

Moreover, Ortiz Cruz observes that Mixtec sociality rewards service to community, while
Western sociality rewards knowledge. He thus concludes that communality constitutes

an organizing foundation for Mixtec social life. He states,

130

For the Western world, a wise person is one who has experience and knowledge; but for
the Mixtec world, the wise person would be one who also has served the community
efficiently and honestly, reaffirming in this way the feeling of communality that matches
his worldview. Precisely because of this, the basis of thought and action is fundamentally
that which is called communality, that is, all that is related with communal life,
corrrmunal power, the communal fiesta. [Ibid.]

In accordance with this primacy of communalism, Ortiz Cruz identifies ‘helping each
other’, is “the greatest expression of [Mixtec] moral practice” (2004b:16). In contrast
with IMSS analysts’ contentions that individuals are forced to forgo their individual
interests to help others in indigenous communities, Ortiz Cruz suggests that helping
others is a distinctive expression of Mixtec selfhood. He reports,

[Helping each other] does not force the individual nor subject the individual to sanctions
on the part of the community. We do not think that we will recuperate what we give,
we do not even keep an account; it is a voluntary thing [. . .] it is spontaneous [. . .] an
expression of good will as is our custom [. . .] it is helping a brother of the people. [Ortiz
Cruz 2004b: 16]

He also challenges the notion that communalism conflicts with individual well-being, and
asserts that individual interests resonate with community interests within communal

sociality. He asserts,

[Solidarity] suggests collaboration, not competition; one is an individual of the
community, not an individual against the community; I am me for the community and the
community is for me; planet earth is not an arena of everyone against everyone, but a
house for all... [Ortiz Cruz 2004a: l 8]

For his part, Juan J ulian Caballero (2002) highlights the importance of work in
Mixtec socialization as a foundation for this distinctive and more just communal
sociality. Following this work, Marcos Cruz Bautista (2004a) has developed a similar
analysis in his Masters thesis. Julian Caballero contends that Mixtec communalism

provides a more just foundation for establishing hierarchy than its Western counterpart,

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as it enables Mixtec community members to place one another ‘exactly where they
deserve to be’ based on their contribution to the community. He argues,

To know how to work responsibly and honestly does not require demanding recognition
from others, as the society observes who carries out their obligations and who does not.
One way of bestowing this recognition is by assigning each person their own place,
exactly where they deserve to be. An act of this recognition is the giving of community
cargos that are assigned in community assemblies, which are exactly what one deserves.
That is, beginning from the recognition of fiilfillment of domestic and community work,
one gains access to political participation. [2002:162]

Thus, although Mixtec foundations for sociality sustain hierarchical relations as do their
Western counterparts, revitalizationists contend that the communal values Mixtec people
use to distribute personal and political power among community members make this form

of sociality more just.

Education

Revitalizationists have directed much attention to indigenista educational efforts
in explaining the forces that have led and continue to lead Mixtec people to reject Mixtec
identity. For example, Gabriel Caballero Morales, a founding member of the Ve’e Tu’un
Savi, argues,

This racist and exclusionary policy extremely damaged the self-esteem and the
conscience of the Nun Savi, as such, and because of this — and with reason — many do not
want to know about the language and the culture, so they do not continue suffering this
social inequality which still is present in our days. [N.d.:2]

For his part, Juan Julian Caballero has drawn from personal experience and ethnographic
research in his natal community and another Mixtec community to publish multiple
critiques of indigenismo (1982, 1989, 2002). In these works, he reports that indigenista

' teachers banned the use of Mixtec not only among youth, but also by adults. They also

prohibited the practice of traditional medicine, the donning of traditional clothing and

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other practices perceived as contrary to the modern Mexican nation indigenista teachers
were charged with realizing (1989243). Moreover, Julian Caballero contends that the
Mexican educational system continues to lead indigenous people to reject indigenous
identities, implicating in particular the Western cultural perspectives and values
embedded in the curriculum. [Marcos Cruz Bautista (2004a) also wages this critique]
Consequently, Juan Julian Caballero notes that indigenous people must hide markers of
indigeneity in educational contexts to avoid humiliation (1998b: 101,103; 1989). He
concludes that, as a result of this educational bias, most professionals learn to reject
Mixtec culture during their training, and that these teachers, doctors, anthropologists,
agronomists and other professionals contribute, in turn, to the rejection of Mixtec culture
in communities.

In response to these concerns, revitalizationists have focused their efforts to
combat the denigration of Mixtec identity and promote a pan-Mixtec identity on
educational reform, especially Mixtec language instruction. Juan Julian Caballero reports
that by promoting the use of indigenous languages in schools in indigenous communities,
they aim to transform education from a vehicle that denigrates Mixtec identity to an
institution that promotes it. He explains,

Until today, the denigration that the Mixtec language and culture have suffered in school
have [led to] the rejection of Mixtec values and traditions. As a result, children begin to
deny their identity and the culture of their parents. In this sense, it has become extremely
important for the school system to facilitate and promote the use of the maternal language
for boys and girls. [2002:166]

As revitalizationists promote the use of the Mixtec language in schools, they fight these
tendencies for schools to contribute to the denigration and fracturing of Mixtec identity

by enforcing the adoption of the Spanish language.

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The linguistic focus has an additional, more transcendental salience:
Revitalizationists intend to use the written language as a foundation for reestablishing
‘the autonomy and the unity of the Mixtec people which in one moment of prehispanic
history Ocho Venado tried to consolidate’, as Juan Julian Caballero describes their aim in
the quote above (1998az438). In part, revitalizationists have prioritized the linguistic
project because they anticipate that the standardized written language will facilitate better
communication among the Mixtec people, enabling communication across existing
dialectical boundaries. In doing so, the language project will help them transcend some
of the historical divides that the imposition of localized political structures during
colonial times initiated (Julian Caballero I998az439). lmportantly, revitalizationists
perceive the language as inhering a Mixtec cultural essence that will bring Mixtec people
together in a uniquely Mixtec cultural frame. Juan Julian Caballero (2001bz8) cites the
words of a Mixe lingristic revitalizationist, Leopoldo Valifias Coalla, to convey this
elemental importance. Valifias (198328-9) asserts,

This alphabet must be seen not as a bunch of letters that would be the solution (to who
knows what problem), but as a holistic graphic system of socialized expression that
permits ethnic identification and ethnic conscientization. This alphabet must be
considered as a weapon of defense and consolidation of ethnicity.

In short, Juan Julian Caballero asserts that in revitalizing the language, they aim to

...recuperate the sense of belonging to a territory with its own history, culture and
language, leaving aside the territorial, political and linguistic barriers reinforced from
outside since over five centuries ago. [2001b:7]

Thus, he describes the Mixtec linguistic project as entailing a “politics of autonomous
vindication of the Mixtec pueblo.” (2001b29)
While revitalizationists organize their efforts to conduct research on Mixtec

culture and publish their findings through the CID Nuu Savi, they direct most of their

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energies for realizing this vision towards the linguistic project through the Ve’e Tu’un
Savi. The organization has established the following priorities:

To standardize the writing, systematize the study of the language from its phonetic,
phonological, morphological, syntactical, semantical and lexicographical aspects, (. . .) To
contribute to defining language policy at the national, state and regional levels. To
propose that the Mixtec language is included in the curricula of schools of different levels
that function in the region, and (. . .) that the [Ve’e Tu’un Savi] is the organization that
revises and determines the criteria for elaborating texts such as grammatical, vocabulary,
dictionaries and literature in this language, in addition to promoting a policy for
developing the language throughout the Mixteca. [Academy de la Lengua Mixteca 1998,
quoted in Nakamura 2000:156]

The Ve’e Tu’un Savi works on two primary fronts: first, revitalizationists work with one
another to devise priorities and elaborate a universalized Mixtec alphabet and
methodology for teaching the language in annual congresses; second, they train teachers
in this knowledge in workshops. They occasionally work on a third front, providing
workshops to other groups. Below, I draw from my observations of this third front to
analyze how revitalizationists build community through linguistic analysis. Although
this particular context diverged from those of teacher workshops and congresses, I focus
here on the details of the linguistic analysis strategy that revitalizationists utilize in their

work on all of these fronts.

Establishing commonality through difference via linguistic analysis

Although revitalizationists carry out most of their efforts to promote the language
in workshops with primary school teachers, they have also occasionally provided training
to communities in response to their requests, as well as to the public. Priests sympathetic
to revitalization goals have facilitated at least some of the programs that have not been

linked to the formal educational system, organizing them through the Catholic Church. I

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attended a session for one of these in November of 2004, a Diplomado in the Mixtec
language. Participants traveled from diverse regions of the state to a monastery in the
town of Teposcolula for two days each month to participate in the Diplomado. Most of
the approximately forty participants were catechists from Mixtec-speaking
municipalities. During the year-long course, they studied the Mixtec orthography
revitalizationists are developing, and they would receive a formal certification of their
training upon finishing.

I had communicated with the revitalizationist teaching the course a couple of
times about attending, and he had agreed. Later, when I called to confirm my attendance,
he was unsure about whether it would be proper for me to participate, and informed me
that he would need to confirm it with the group. His concerns reflected problems that
had emerged when a foreign researcher from the Summer Language Institute attempted to
participate in a community workshop — the participants forced him to leave.22 Thus, the
instructor suggested I attend the Sunday session in order to give him the opportunity to
gain permission from the group. I agreed to arrive with the possibility that I may not be
permitted to observe.

I arrived just before 9:00 on the Sunday of the November session as the instructor
indicated. He introduced me to a couple of people involved in organizing the course and
then showed me to the classroom. The tables were organized in a semi-circle to enable
participants to see him at the blackboard in the front of the room as well as one another.
He gestured for me to sit in a chair he had pulled chair back a couple of feet back from

the tables, and I sat with the others who were waiting for the class to begin. While the

 

2‘ The Summer Language Institute has been widely critiqued in Mexico as evidence of foreign colonization.
Nonetheless, members of the Institute have collaborated with revitalizationists and contributed to the Ve’e
Tu’un Savi congresses (Nakamura 2000:149-50).

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last of the students were trickling in, a priest played songs on his guitar. His simple white
cotton pants and shirt communicated his commitment to Mixtec revitalization,
contrasting with the clerical attire typically worn by Catholic priests. I introduced myself
to the people sitting next to me, who were young adults in their twenties and thirties.
Most of the participants seemed to fall into this age group, although there were also
several men who I guessed were in their fifties. I also noted a rarity within revitalization
events and most other events in the region — there were equal numbers of men and
women participants.

The instructor initiated the session and introduced me soon after. He took care to
establish clearly to me and the others my unique status as a visitor who would not be
participating in the course, something he also indicated when he signaled a place for me
to sit apart from the group. Nonetheless, shortly after the class began the students sitting
next to me gestured for me to join them at the table. Later, as materials were circulated,
they invited me to share their materials to read along with the group exercises they were
carrying out.

The instructor had asked them to write an account from their community in their
dialect of the language, and the first activity was dedicated to analyzing their work. One
by one, the participants took the accounts they had written on oversized sheets of paper to
the front of the room and taped them to the blackboard. Although each participant had
applied the universalized alphabet to write their account, many of the accounts were
written in markedly divergent dialectical forms. The instructor guided each one in a
linguistic analysis, signaling verbs, subjects and pronouns. The analysis demonstrated to

participants that a common grammatical structure connected them linguistically, despite

I37

the dialectical differences. In his descriptions of educational workshops, Mutsuo
Nakamura (2000:166-176) describes the same teaching method, in which instructors ask
participants to contribute a word or account from their particular community and then the
group analyzes it in a way that lays bare a common underlying structure. This approach
teaches teachers and others how to understand and work with the dialectical differences
they encounter inside and outside of the classroom. It also serves as a powerful metaphor
for the underlying forces that revitalizationists contend link participants despite their
distance.

After analyzing participants’ accounts in the Diplomado, the instructor led a
discussion and analysis of the sacred ceremonial language used by elders. He asked
participants for the terms they use for knowledgeable elders, and they gave at least seven
different terms, including tonnisa'nu, racha'nu, teje'nu, tenija'nu, tanisa'nu, tenisa'nu,
and tene'nu. As he had done with the accounts, he took care to write out the differences
in words among participants and signal the underlying structural tendencies that
determined the differences. The instructor focused on two examples to examine this
sacred ceremonial language: one in which an elder was asking for a couple to be their
child's godparents, and another in which an emissary was requesting a woman’s hand in
marriage from her parents. These two examples have significance as practices all of the
participants appear to have familiarity with in their own communities, while not being
recognized as part of modern mestizo society. The jokes that arose as people talked about
the case of asking for a bride evidenced how it made a particularly good foundation for
building a sense of shared experience. One participant quipped, “Oh, what a great offer,

but I have to talk with her family about it.” Another offered, “Why don't you come back

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in like five years and I'll have an answer!” At the same time, the instructor grounded the
discussion in a sense of shared history. He did so as he discussed the sacred language
that seems to be disappearing, and linked this, in turn, to pre-colonial Mixtec history.
Casual observers of dialectical differences in the Mixtec language are typically
struck by the distance they reference. In fact, dialectical differences preclude some
neighboring communities from communicating with one another in the Mixtec language.
These circumstances convey separation in history and continue to contribute to division
in the present. Thus, work focusing on dialectical differences could easily contribute to a
sense of distance. In this case, however, the instructor strengthened a sense of
commonality through his particular approach to linguistic analysis. He did so by
grounding his discussion in the particularities of participants’ everyday experiences,
focusing on experiences that participants share with one another and that are widely
perceived as beyond the boundaries of mestizo modernity. The instructor’s analysis of
underlying linguistic structures and his discussion of a common Mixtec experience in

history strengthened this commonality.

Brotherhood and its limits

When revitalizationists decided to create the Ve’e Tu’un Savi, they debated
whether they should hinge membership in the organization on political commitments or
linguistic skills. Many professionals in communities have the skills required to
contribute to the linguistic project. Nonetheless, as my overview of revitalizationists’
perspectives on education above suggests, they perceive these professionals’ educational

experience to taint their orientations and lead them to counter the political aims of the

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movement. Juan Julian Caballero, in particular, contends that most professionals’
attitudes contradict revitalization goals:

These professionals’ actions are underpinned by their rejection of their ethnicity... This
attitude has contributed to the disindianization of others in their community: youth, adults
and children, above all else. This sector of indigenous renegade professionals tend to be
those who renounce participation in community development activities and they represent
a danger when dealing with creating projects to revitalize indigenous cultures. [1998bz99]

In contrast to the negative orientations towards Mixtec culture Julian Caballero attributes
to professionals, he identifies a desire to defend Mixtec culture as one of the most
important prerequisites for contributing to the project. In this regard, he writes,

The project of writing the Mixtec language system represents, in a certain way, the
politics of autonomous vindication of the Mixtec pueblo. Members of this millennial
pueblo slowly incorporate themselves into this project in different non-conformist tasks.
Not easy tasks, they require an attitude of resistance and defense of everything Mixtec, in
addition to a professional education, in agreement with a specific kind of project. [2003:

83]
Accordingly, Ubaldo Garcia Lopez, also a founding member of the CID Nuu Savi and the
Ve’e Tu’un Savi, recounts that when a regional head of education mandated that bilingual
teachers attend the Ve’e Tu’un Savi’s annual Congress, the organization’s members
responded by restricting membership and prioritizing a commitment to the broader
Mixtec cultural revitalization project (Romero F rizzi 2003b: 231). Nonetheless, most
members of the organization are bilingual teachers most members are bilingual teachers
(ibid.), while most of those who occupy leadership roles have higher degrees, namely in
the fields of anthropology, linguistics and education.

Limiting membership in the Ve’e Tu’un Savi has shaped gender relations in the
organization. Men predominate in the priority setting and strategy defining fora of the

congresses. In part, the disparity reflects gender biases in the higher echelons of higher

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education. In addition, the congresses take place over a period of days at sites that vary
from year to year. They conflict with most women’s responsibilities in the home, and
husbands are typically otherwise reluctant to consent to their wives’ attendance.
Nonetheless, revitalizationists report that women constitute a significant proportion of
participants in the workshops for bilingual primary school teachers, for which regional
educational supervisors mandate attendance. Mutsuo Nakamura made the same
observation in his dissertation study of Mixtec revitalization efforts, where he reports that
most of the participants in the workshops he observed were women, and most were
between twenty and thirty years old (2000:166-167).

Revitalizationists build a sense of commonality as they work in congresses and
workshops by analyzing the particularities of participants’ linguistic and everyday
experience in ways that ground them in common cultural, historical and linguistic
foundations. At the same time, differences in how they incorporate key symbols of
Mixtec culture into these distinct contexts ultimately foment different degrees of
togetherness and establish different kinds of power relations. At least in part, these
differences reflect revitalizationists’ estimations of divergences in how different groups
of Mixtec people relate to Mixtec culture. Thus, revitalizationists have incorporated
symbolic practices of communalism in ways that highlight egalitarian relations in their
work with one another in the congresses, having established that those working in this
arena share common political sensibilities. They have not integrated these symbolic
practices into workshops with teachers, who they perceive as more likely to have adopted
anti-Mixtec culture orientations during their educational training. Revitalizationists

address barriers to the adoption of a Mixtec identity as they work with teachers in

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workshops, and draw from the authority and coercive powers of the state to press
teachers to teach the Mixtec language to their students. I examine these differences in

more detail below.

Embodying communalism in congresses

Revitalizationists meet in annual congresses to forge their work of analyzing the
language and devising a universal alphabet and orthographic system. Juan Julian
Caballero explains that the formalized revitalization organizations have an additional,
more transcendental significance, as they provide a space within which revitalizationists
have begun to delineate a distinctive utopia grounded in Mixtec culture. He reports,

At this moment, the Ve’e Tu’un Savi as well as the CID-Nuu Savi and other
organizations constitute a space of reflection that has been emerging with the work of
those who desire to contribute to the return of their own image to this millennial territory.
In addition, it provides an excellent opportunity to discuss, analyze and propose what
kind of society we want as Nuu Savi. [J ulian Caballero 2001az95]

In this meeting space, participants of the Ve’e Tu’un Savi establish relationships with one
another grounded in symbolic practices of communalism, particularly sharing food and
lodging, and employing kin terms to refer to one another. These symbolic practices
emphasize alterity in their contrast with the individual emphasis prized within mestizo
modernity, while concomitantly emphasizing a particular dimension of this alterity that
revitalizationists have identified as inhering a potential to anchor a better kind of
modernity.

In Mixtec communities, people employ the symbolism of the family and the

intimate social relationships therein to create and sustain the particularly close social

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bonds associated with communalism. Sharing food in communities is an important

practice associated with social proximity, as Juan Julian Caballero notes:

When eating, some families follow the custom of everyone eating from the same plate,
which symbolizes family union; it is not that they lack utensils, but the importance is the
profound significance implied by eating together. When new marriages are formed, the
couple must get used to sharing the same plate of food, water and the tortilla, that is, if it
is the tortilla, the man as well as the woman must eat half and half; if they do so with
enjoyment and happiness, it is a sign that they will understand each other very well...
[20023141]

Similarly, Marcos Cruz Bautista asserts that sharing food and sleeping quarters in Mixtec

communities produces a sense of solidarity and a collective orientation among Mixtec

people:

Sons share a plate with their fathers and daughters with their mothers, and they live and
sleep in the same room. From a young age, this makes the child feel accepted and feel
comfortable sharing the same plate with other children in the house or in the
community’s fiesta. As a result, [notions] of solidarity are installed in children that in
other spaces and times as adults they tend to practice in the name of solidarity. This is
the origin of collective work: tequio, the guetza and mutual help. [2004a:48]

Revitalizationists adopt these practices of sharing meals and accommodations when they

meet for Congresses. They also adopt the practice of referring to one another using kin

terms, as Juan Julian Caballero describes,

In our encounters and reencounters we address each other as fiani [brother] and ku 'va
[sister] to indicate that despite the distance and the lack of awareness of the existence of
the other, we share the same language, the same history, the same poverty, and the same
process of colonization. [2001b:27, note 10]

In his reflections, Julian Caballero describes how these practices, by their particular

nature,

promote and strengthen engagement by fomenting a sense of commonality. At

the same time, by structuring their engagements with one another according to these

symbols of communalism, revitalizationists reaffirm the salience of a facet of Mixtec

culture

that they have held up as extremely significant because of its potential to anchor a

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superior modern project. Thus, Juan J ulian Caballero concludes that their “most
significant [achievement] is the reencounter of the original Nuu Savi as nani [brother]

and ku ’va [sister]” (2001b: 4).

Power, authority and difference in Mixtec revitalization

At the time of the research, a leading revitalizationist estimated that they had
trained between three and four hundred bilingual primary school teachers.23 Typically,
thirty to forty bilingual primary school teachers participate in the language workshops
revitalizationists provide to teachers. Therein, over the course of three or four days,
revitalizationists instruct the teachers on the Mixtec alphabet and how to use it to write
the dialectical instantiations of the language where they work. Based on his interviews
with a workshop leader, Mutsuo Nakamura (2000:153-155) reports that revitalizationists
have devised a four-pronged approach for their workshops. First, they prompt
participants to reflect on how they define their own identities, and Mixtec culture in
relation to these identities, and to analyze the political processes that have shaped their
self-conceptions. Next, they discuss the political importance of writing in the Mixtec
language. Afierward, they distribute and discuss the basic alphabet they have devised.
Finally, they carry out writing exercises in which they learn to employ the alphabet and
orthographic rules to analyze dialectical variations and write them. This final work
occupies most of participants’ time and energy.

Juan Julian Caballero relates that these workshops, like the congresses, provide an

important space for forging broader Mixtec vindication work. He writes,

 

‘3 Here I draw from my interviews with leading revitalizationists; revitalizationists’ published interviews
and essays; and Mutsuo Nakamura’s dissertation research on Mixtec revitalization efforts (2000:166-176).
I cite these published works where relevant.

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The reading-writing in Mixtec workshop (there have been about fifty in communities at
time of writing) has converted into an excellent space for the discussion and analysis of
different problems dealing with Mixtec identity. [It has also provided] the opportunity to
propose new approaches for the development of Mixtec writing, not only linked to
culture, but others of political and economic character in the region. [2001b: 1 7]

Notwithstanding the parallel with the agenda-setting context of the congresses Julian
Caballero implies, the contexts of learning revitalizationists establish in workshops and
the kinds of relationships they establish therein diverge from those of the congresses.
The divergences reflect revitalizationists’ perceptions that teachers and other highly
educated professionals adopt a negative orientation toward Mixtec culture through the
educational process.

Consequently, in Mutsuo Nakamura’s (2000:166-167) observations of workshops
with teachers, he depicts the ‘discussion and analysis of problems dealing with Mixtec
identity’ that Julian Caballero references as occurring within the confines of the
hierarchical relationships created within the workshops. Nakamura reports that in the
course of providing teachers with training in Mixtec linguistics, workshop leaders
emphasized the importance of writing and speaking the Mixtec language, and taught
workshop participants about the forces that lead them and others to reject Mixtec identity
(ibid.). Revitalizationists’ recourse to the threat of state power to press recalcitrant
teachers to implement the Mixtec-language education they promote best evidences the
distinctly hierarchical relations of the workshops, and their marked divergence from the
communal-relations of the congresses. In this regard, one leading revitalizationist
explained in an interview that he directs teachers’ attention to specific legal precedents

that oblige them to teach indigenous languages during workshops, including the Ley

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Estatal de Educacio'n (State Education Law) and the Ley de Derechos de los Pueblos y
Comunidades Indigenas (Indigenous Peoples and Communities Rights Law).

Revitalizationists’ reliance on state channels of power and authority to force
Mixtec people’s participation in their linguistic efforts evidences relatively widespread
opposition to these efforts. Above, I noted that revitalizationists criticize teachers for
adopting derogatory perspectives on Mixtec culture through their educational training.
For their part, however, teachers typically raise concerns about parental opposition to
teaching the language. In fact, sporadic reports intermittently emerge of communities
where angry parents have forced teachers attempting to teach the Mixtec language to
leave. Many parents’ opposition to Mixtec language education stems from their
observations of how Mixtec cultural characteristics and lack of facility with mestizo
practices and the Spanish language have impeded their efforts to access income
generating activities while concurrently making them targets of poor treatment. In this
context, many insist on Spanish language education as essential for preparing their
children to access the best Opportunities available.

Maria Elena Garcia (2005) has observed similar dynamics in her study of
indigenous rights activism in Peru. She describes how activists working in non-
governmental organizations that promote indigenous rights through educational reform
often encounter opposition from parents. Like Mixtec revitalizationists, these activists
regard parents’ opposition to reform as evidence of false-consciousness, and they
perceive differences in orientations towards utilizing indigenous language in the
classroom as reflections of relatively corrupted and uncorrupted vantage points. Within

this context, NGOs promoting multicultural education, like their Mixtec counterparts,

146

draw on the power of the state to impose their views on reluctant community workers and
indigenous families. Thus, Garcia observes the paradox that “these efforts to help
indigenous people ‘chart their own course’ often mean in practice that indigenous people
must follow the course set by the state” (2005:113).

Garcia rejects the false consciousness explanation for these differences in
perspectives, and instead examines how the different circumstances within which parents
and activists estimate the utility of education produce these divergent perspectives.
Understood in this way, parents’ willingness to relinquish practices marked indigenous
reflects their evaluation of how the denigration of these practices in wider society will
impinge upon their children’s opportunities, rather than conveying parents’ own disdain
for these practices. Garcia’s observations of the underlying dynamics that generate these
conflicts affirm the ongoing need to change the attitudes and actions of those who use
indigenousness as a basis for denying access to political power and economic resources.
This work is more difficult and dangerous to carry out than work that places the burden
of change on indigenous peoples. In this context, parents’ objections to Mixtec language
education constitute an important critique of the placement of the burden for change on

indigenous people.

Conclusions

At the end of the Diplomado session I attended, I thanked the instructor for
allowing me to attend, and remarked that I had been especially interested in observing
because it was difficult for me to conceptualize 'how they conduct their work without

seeing it. I was referring to my doubts about how they used a universal orthography to

I47

teach people to write divergent dialectical variations that in some cases revitalizationists
had never encountered or considered. Moreover, I wondered how they could do so in a
way that generated a sense of social proximity. In contrast, he understood my
uncertainties as emerging from the fundamental cultural differences between us, and
replied, “Well, yes, you wouldn’t be able to understand because it isn’t your culture.
They understand because it’s their culture.” His comments and the underlying
assumptions about cultural difference they convey correspond with Kay Warren’s (1998)
characterization of Mayan revitalization efforts in Guatemala. Warren (1998237)
observes,

Mayanists assert there is a culturally specific indigenous way of knowing: a subject
position no one else can occupy and a set of interests no one else has to defend.

This basic notion that fundamental or essential cultural differences differentiate people
into groups is the crux of anthropologists’ critique of ‘culture’.

Nonetheless, Joanne Rappaport (2005) has recently argued that scholars
mischaracterize indigenous activists’ representations by labeling them essentialist. In her
investigation of indigenous rights activism in Colombia, Rappaport foregrounds how
people from diverse circumstances negotiate their differences as they work to advance the
rights of indigenous peoples. By privileging difference, she provides a unique
perspective on the diversity of contexts, perspectives and aims that indigenous activists
and their collaborators navigate in working towards goals that are at least
commeasurable, if not necessarily shared. She draws from her observations of the
complexities in how indigenous rights activists define insidemess and outsidemess to
argue that indigenous activists’ representations are not essentialist. Her observations of

these complexities correspond with my own, though I disagree with her conclusion that

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this complexity challenges the designation of activists’ cultural representations as
essentialist.

When the Mixtec instructor quoted above suggested that as a non-Mixtec I could
not understand their work, he conveyed a dichotomous understanding of Mixtec identity,
presumed to be a primordial byproduct of socialization. His wariness about allowing me
to participate in the workshop and his caution in delineating a space for me apart from the
others when I did attend also conveyed these dichotomous, primordialist assumptions.
Nonetheless, revitalizationists also perceive circumstances as shaping individuals’ ability
to appreciate the value of this Mixtec essence. These understandings combine to
influence the multiple nodes revitalizationists perceive particular subjects as inhabiting in
relation to Mixtec culture. These conceptions importantly influence revitalizationists’
work with particular subjects and ultimately the implications of this work for different
Mixtec villagers.

Revitalizationists perceive the women who carry out what they identify as
women’s “traditional” roles in social reproduction as most intimately engaged in culture,
and as natural bearers and defenders of Mixtecness because of this work. One leading
revitalizationist cited these “traditional” roles and the key role women play in ensuring
the viability of Mixtec culture when I asked him to describe Mixtec cultural values. He
asserted,

A woman who is an authentic Mixtec woman takes care of her children from birth. She
provides everything. She always carries her baby. She sleeps with the baby. The baby is
always with her. From there the child acquires family love.

Moreover, when I asked him whether the family has an important or special role in

Mixtec cultural revitalization efforts, he replied,

I49

Yes, the family is the foundation for ensuring the continued reproduction of the culture.
And the person who has the key, key role is the mom, because she motivates the child.
The mom motivates the child to speak the language. She motivates him to do so. She is
the one who continues broadening and ensuring for the development of the child’s
language. She teaches, evaluates, corrects. The mom is key. Then, siblings, the more
the better. They ensure help.

Josefa Gonzales Ventura (1996), one of a small minority of women who have held
leadership positions in formal Mixtec revitalization efforts, similarly describes Mixtec
women as natural defenders of Mixtec culture.

These perceptions of how gender influences enculturedness hint at other criteria
that revitalizationists identify as important influences on individuals’ relationships with
Mixtec culture. In addition to the concerns about formal educational experience that I
discussed earlier in this chapter, revitalizationists identify migration as a key process
influencing individuals’ orientations toward Mixtec culture. These concerns about
education and migration reflect revitalizationists’ wariness of the educational system,
mestizo lifeways and globalization as especially potent forces that denigrate and corrode
indigenousness. Age-related differences in relationships to Mixtec culture reflect the
influence of these forces. Thus, as Marcos Cruz Bautista (2004b24) differentiates Mixtec
people according to their orientations towards Mixtec identity, he singles out “adults, the
elderly, women and some Mixtec professionals who practice the language and culture
with their children and with the children of their pueblo” from those who “identify with
the culture of the Other, the Spanish or English one.” Despite these forces of
differentiation, Cruz Bautista maintains that “el ombligo recuerda”, the belly-button
remembers. That is, Mixtec youth absorb the Mixtec essence through their connection
with their mothers during socialization, and this essence remains even for individuals

who deny it.

150

 

In sum, revitalizationists employ multiple criteria to estimate the extent to which
certain individuals bear and embrace Mixtec culture, estimations which they draw from
to devise particular strategies for working with particular kinds of subjects. Thus,
political orientations may facilitate or preclude individuals’ participation in revitalization
efforts despite their primordial links to Mixtec culture. I discussed above how
revitalizationists have cautiously limited the participation of those perceived as not
sharing their political objectives. The reverse is also true: non-Mixtec scholars
committed to the goals of Mixtec cultural revitalization participate as members in the
CID Nuu Savi, and the Ve’e Tu’un Savi invites non-Mixtec collaborators to contribute to
congresses.

Moreover, this chapter has examined how these assumptions about the political
sensibilities of different groups of people and the nature of their links to Mixtec culture
shapes the particular strategies revitalizationists utilize to integrate participants into
revitalization efforts in different capacities. The symbolic practices revitalizationists
utilize in the congresses to strengthen shared identification in Mixtec identity correspond
well with their depictions of the more transcendental salience of Mixtec culture, as both
emphasize commonality. In contrast, revitalizationists establish distinctly hierarchical
and coercive relationships in working with individuals they perceive as unlikely to adopt
the perspectives and practices they promote voluntarily. These relationships prove
contradictory when juxtaposed with revitalizationists’ key claim that commonality is the
basis of Mixtec sociality. Within this comparison of different subjects’ places in
revitalization practice, the absence of a final group of subjects whose perceived natural .

links with Mixtec culture make them central to revitalization efforts is noteworthy. The

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perceived natural culture bearers — those who Marcos Cruz Bautista identifies as “adults,
the elderly [and] women” in the quote above - are conspicuously absent from
revitalization practice. I examine this contradiction in detail while examining how
revitalization efforts influence social life in the village in Chapter Nine. First, however, I

turn to examine Pueblo Verde social life.

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CHAPTER SIX: MOVEMENT AND MEANING IN PUEBLO VERDE

As I noted in Chapter Three, Pueblo Verde is a village of widespread short- and
long-term migration. Women, especially those with limited formal education,
predominate among those who remain in the village, as men, youth, and those with more
extensive formal educational training pursue employment and educational opportunities
elsewhere. The ‘women who remain’ undertake much of the work needed to maintain
the social relations that ultimately link Verdeans who are present and absent together.
This chapter examines these women’s struggles to create continuity and foment sociality
in the context of this widespread movement.

In the process, I analyze how the “historically sedimented practices, landscapes,
and repertoires of meaning” that Tania Li (2000:151) identified as contextualizing,
facilitating the emergence of, and informing ongoing articulations of indigeneities shape
Verdean social dynamics. I observe that villagers have been positioned and have
positioned themselves in different ways in relation to denigrations of indigenousness, and
I argue that these differences produce an important social dynamic that shapes Verdean
social life. The women who are most engaged in maintaining everyday social life tend be
regarded as bearers of culture, and, accordingly, they suffer some of the poorest treatment
meted out based on denigrations of indigenousness. Many of these women have
strategized to protect themselves from poor treatment related to denigrations of
indigenous identity by limiting their interactions with the mestizos who typically
propagate them.‘ Nonetheless, some villagers’ adoption of negative orientations towards

indigenousness frustrate these women’s efforts, as villagers increasingly encounter these

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denigrations within the community. I adopt the distinction between those who bear
culture and those who wield culture to analyze this differential dissemination of ‘culture’
and the social dynamics it produces. I pursue this distinction in later chapters, as well, as

a key dynamic in the politics of ‘culture’.

Movement in Pueblo Verde

Pueblo Verdeans’ diverse backgrounds frequently surprised me, as I encountered
things, perspectives, attitudes and practices that conflicted with my expectations for an
‘indigenous community’. For example, at a celebration held to mark the blessing of a
new home, I found myself seated across from a thirteen year-old girl who was wearing a
tee shirt that said “Porn Star”. On another occasion, I encountered a young woman with
bright red hair and an earring in her nose as I walked to the center of town during
festivities for the municipal patron saint celebration. In addition to being antidotes for
romantic notions that indigenous communities are isolated from the rest of the world,
these incongruencies symbolized more subtle and widespread divergences in community
members’ everyday experiences, perspectives and practices. In large part, these
differences reflect great and diverse flows of villagers to destinations near and far in
pursuit of educational and economic opportunities.

In many ways, the floWs of people shaping everyday life in Pueblo Verde
resemble those John Monaghan observed twenty years ago in a rural Mixtec municipality
called Santiago Nuyoo, which is also located in the Mixteca Alta region of Oaxaca.
Monaghan described how the village emptied out in the mornings and came to life as

people returned during the afternoons:

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As I became familiar with the rhythm of daily life in Nuyoo, I came to realize that the
emptiness of the town during the day was typical. Early in the morning, an hour or two
before sunrise, the Centro empties out, as men, and later women who carry the day’s
food, go off to their gardens and fields. Only small children and two or three of the
household’s women stay behind, to prepare the evening meal and to carry out chores.
Then, beginning about three in the afternoon, the Centro begins to fill up once again, as
people return from the agricultural work. By late aftemoon, there are people lounging in
front of each household, children run in the streets, and young men and boys play
basketball on the court next to the Nuyoo church. [198726]

Like Monaghan, I observed how many adults and young adults rose early to complete
tasks outside of the community and returned in the late afternoon in Pueblo Verde, while
many women remained in the community to complete work there. Villagers often
described the activities structuring this rhythm in ways that resonated with Monaghan’s
observations in Nuyoo: men carry out the more arduous agricultural labor while women
make their food and take it to them in the fields. Nonetheless, Verdeans’ travels to
diverse destinations to undertake varied activities for differing periods of time disrupt
these orderly notions of the movements of everyday life, along with the assumptions
about the gendered division of labor that underlie them.

Twenty out of the forty-five villagers age fifteen and older that I selected for a
stratified random sample for in-depth interviews had migrated in their lifetime. In
addition, thirty—four of the forty-five interviewees asserted that a direct family member
had migrated, including a total of seventy-six immediate family members. They included
one father, seven husbands, twenty siblings, twenty-eight sons, six daughters, and
fourteen children of unspecified sex. Most former migrants and family members of
migrants in the sample traveled to Mexico City (19), followed by the United States (1 l),
Tijuana (7), Oaxaca City (7) and agricultural destinations in northern Mexico (6). While
many informants did not indicate the sex of the migrating family member, those who did

showed clear gender trends in migration, with thirty-six of forty-two migrants being men.

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In addition, my census data reflects the predominance of men among migrants in the

form of a diminishing percentage of men of working age in the village, as shown below.

Table 2. Gender distribution of villagers in census by age group (N=910)

 

 

Age Group Female Male Total

# % # % # %
5-15 111 12 113 12 224 25
15-20 60 6 62 7 122 13
20-30 65 7 48 5 l 13 12
30-40 66 7 35 4 101 1 1
40-45 37 4 19 2 56 6
45-55 45 5 33 4 78 9
60-70 55 6 36 4 91 10
70+ 49 5 24 3 73 8

 

 

 

Among the vast majority of community members who spend extended periods of
time outside of the municipality in their efforts to generate a livelihood, vendors remain
most engaged in village life. A few professionals (teachers, nurses, doctors, lawyers)
work in the municipality, and a few others work in regions close enough to enable them
to commute daily. Nonetheless, most work in other communities. They commonly leave
the municipality Sunday afternoons or early Monday mornings and return Friday
afternoons. Young adults also frequently reside outside of the municipality during the
week to pursue their education at the high school level and beyond.

In addition to these daily and weekly sojoums, villagers spend longer periods of
time in more distant locations, and some establish themselves in other sites in Mexico
and beyond more permanently. Most migrants travel to Mexico City. The majority of
men working there have found employment in factories and as construction workers,

while most women work as domestic servants. Numerous villagers have also developed

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their professional careers there. Despite Mexico City migrants’ distance, they maintain a
central role in Pueblo Verde life not only through their informal relationships, but also
through their more formalized contributions to the community and political life. In fact, a
long time Mexico City resident held the position of municipal president during the time I
conducted the research. His leadership position reflected the engagement of migrants in
general, and Mexico City migrants in particular, in Pueblo Verde life.

Villagers also frequently migrate to destinations in northern Mexico and beyond.
Many have spent time picking tomatoes and strawberries in the notorious large-scale
agricultural businesses in the valley of San Quintin in northern Mexico. Some
interviewees indicated that their entire families had traveled to take advantage of the
contributions children make to piece work. While many informants reported having
traveled for more limited periods, such as a few months or a year, a substantial Pueblo
Verde community resides in the main destination in the region, Camalt'r. More recently,
young women have found work in urban sites as domestic servants in the United
States/Mexico border region, particularly Tijuana. Villagers also reside in the United
States, where they have found employment in rural and urban settings throughout the

country, especially in North Carolina, Minnesota, Florida, California and Washington.

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Table 3. Villagers’ income-generating activities (N=45)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Activity # %
Agricultural production 41 91
Sale of surplus production 34 76
Straw weaving 32 71
Oportunidades assistance 31 69
Agricultural laborers I8 40
Remittances from migration 17 38
Produce vending at regional markets 7 15
Silk spinning 6 l3

 

 

 

Note: Percentages add to more than 100 because informants
reported multiple income-generating activities.

In the absence of many community members, those who remain undertake varied
activities to generate a livelihood. Agricultural production is a key component of
livelihood strategies for almost all of those who remain in the community. Over ninety
percent of interviewees reported engaging in agricultural production, and seventy-six
percent indicated that they sell surplus at markets. Many villagers also purchase produce
and resell it at regional markets (fifteen percent of informants). Forty percent
occasionally work for pay as “mozos”, or agricultural laborers on local farms, while two
people (out of forty-five) reported generating cash by plowing local fields with their
oxen. In addition, most families either weave straw (seventy-one percent) or spin silk
(thirteen percent) to generate income. Inforrnants also reported a variety of less common
income generating strategies, including operating corn mills, selling tortillas, selling
prepared foods, working at a Tlaxiaco restaurant, performing music and professional
occupations. Most villagers also indicated receiving support from other sources, namely
Oportunidades (sixty-nine percent) and remittances from family members who have

migrated (thirty-eight percent).

158

The family I lived with during the research exemplifies the pervasiveness of
movement in Pueblo Verde. My hosts, na Beatriz and ta Rodolfo, have nine adult
children. The two oldest have established their homes and raised their own families close
to their parents in the San Isidro barrio of Pueblo Verde. They combine a variety of
agricultural and other activities to support their families.

After marrying, two of their daughters moved with their husbands to the urban
destinations where their husbands found formal employment, and they raised their
children. One of these two daughters, Ester, established a home with her professional
husband and children in Oaxaca City, where she raised her family and worked as a
seamstress. She travels occasionally to the village, and her siblings often visit her when
traveling to the state capital. The other of these two daughters lives with her family in
Mexico City and was estranged from her parents during the research period.

Five of Na Beatriz and Ta Rodolfo’s adult children are professionals. The
youngest lives in their household, although she stOpped communicating with her parents
during the research period after a conflict. She was lucky to find professional
employment in the community, although she traveled on weekends to a distant school to
complete her nursing training during most of the research period.

A second professional daughter, Mari, lives directly next to them. Mari’s
husband, Maclovio, works in a restaurant in Seattle, Washington. He returned for a
couple of months during the research period. Mari and Maclovio held a baptism
celebration for their children during his return, before he headed back to inka ladu, the
other side. When I began the research, she had gotten permission for a temporary leave

of absence from her teaching work based on her pregnancy and later her early

159

motherhood. She combined a variety of jobs to generate income to support herself and
their children during this professional leave, including selling clothing in the weekly
market, which required intermittent trips to the nearby state of Puebla to purchase items.
At the end of her leave of absence, she faced the possibility of losing her teaching
position if she did not return. Nonetheless, teaching meant rising early Monday mornings
to travel to a distant community and residing there during the week. She initially took
her youngest daughter with her, but the baby became ill, and Mari attributed it to the poor
living conditions. Ultimately, she left the position.

The second of na Beatriz and ta Rodolfo’s sons, Tomas, is also a teacher. He was
lucky to find work in a school in the neighboring municipality, enabling him to commute
daily. His wife, Luisa, is an administrator at a primary school in a community two hours
away. Luisa is absent most of the time, because she works too far to commute daily. She
leaves for work Sunday evenings or early Monday mornings, and returns Friday
afternoons.

Andrea, a young single mother, is the third of the siblings who works in the
educational system. She rents a room in the nearby city of Tlaxiaco. Nonetheless, during
the week she, her son and a domestic helper live in the distant community where she
teaches. They often return ‘home’ to her parents’ house on weekends. Na Beatriz and ta
Rodolfo’s final daughter, Alejandra, lives and teaches in Tijuana with her husband and
their two children. She returned to Pueblo Verde during the research period for her

nieces’ baptism celebration.

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Movement and meaning

These movements pose dilemmas for sociality, and especially community-
building. In their examinations of community in rural indigenous communities in
Mesoamerica, John Monaghan (1995) and John Watanabe (1992) contend that
community emerges through shared experience in common space. Monaghan (1995)
identifies community as “something decidedly secondary that emerges out of particular
relations and interactions” (14). For his part, Watanabe (1992) examines the “shared
conventions of act and artifact through which people enact their community” (19922xi).
He communicates the importance of cohabitance for community-building in the
following passage:

Together, place and people precipitate commonly held conventional premises about how
to get along in that place with that people... I take the resulting community to represent
the emergent, relatively bounded sociality of individuals who, by virtue of continuity in
time and contiguity in space, come to recognize common commitments and concerns as
well as conventional ways of dealing with those concerns, regardless of how they change
through time. [1992212]

Pueblo Verde community members’ occasional and frequent distance poses barriers to
creating community through the interactions these observers identify with sociality in
small indigenous communities. In addition to the barriers caused by absence, differences
in experiences and the differences in perspectives, preferences, expectations and practices
they cause would seem to pose a significant impediment to creating a sense of
community in moments when villagers do come together in shared space.

Nonetheless, transnational scholars observe that migrants often overcome these
barriers by reenacting symbolic practices to maintain a sense of cultural continuity in
their destination sites, and by contributing to their home communities to maintain their

presence despite their distance (Kearney 1995; Rivera-Salgado 1999). In this regard,

161

Gaspar Rivera-Salgado references how Mixtec communities have transformed notions of
citizenship and community to facilitate migrants’ continued participation in community
life. He contends that, as a result, Mixtec communities divided by distance have

successfully formed single transnational communities:

...through the constant movement back and forth of migrants and the concurrent flow of
information, money, goods, and services, the communities of origin and their various
satellite communities in northern Mexico and the United States have become so closely
linked that in a sense they form a single community, a transnational community.
[1999:1451-2]

Transnational scholars’ observations suggest the declining importance of place, and
particularly of home, in community processes.

Yet, in directing much recent attention towards how migrants maintain
community out of place, scholars .have largely neglected the work that those who remain
‘home’ undertake to create and maintain community in these difficult contexts. Shawn
Malia Kanaiaupuni (2000) seeks to redress this imbalance by illuminating the important
roles nonmigrant women play in this translocal community-building work. She argues,

Deeper analysis reveals the intense effort required to create and maintain family
solidarity and continuity in origins when men migrate elsewhere. Both at home and in
interactions outside the home, nonmigrant women actively construct the symbolic unity
of the family. Constant references to absent members socialize children about their
fathers and prepare them for the upcoming return home. References to dates of departures
and returns are kept explicitly vague, thereby instilling some sense of the migrant’s
presence. For example, “ya viene” could describe a husband returning next week, next
month or during the holiday season six months from now. [Kanaiaupuni 2000:13-14]

In addition to maintaining migrants’ place in the family and community through these
constant reminders, Kanaiaupuni contends that nonmi grant women play an important role
in carrying out the social obligations that determine the status of the household within the
community. She reports,

while her husband is away, a wife sustains the household within a larger domestic
setting -- the community. In this way, important social links established in the

162

community of origin are preserved and solidified over time by women and remaining
household members. [2000:18]

Thus, Kanaiaupuni observes that nonmigrant women play a key role in creating and
sustaining these transnational communities. The symbolic salience of women as symbols
of home (Hendrickson 1995) suggests an additional key way in which nonmigrant
women contribute to transnational communities, through their significance as key
symbols of the home that migrants imagine and to which many repeatedly return.

In addition to these observations of women’s contributions to the particular
symbolic imaginings that sustain transnational communities, in contexts of widespread
male migration, the women who remain in the community carry out most of the everyday
work of social life that transforms “home” from a geographic space into a community
with special import. The rest of this chapter examines how Pueblo Verde women
villagers carry out this work, signaling some of the barriers and triumphs they face in

building community in the presence of such widespread absence.

Gender, sociality and community

In Monaghan’s observations on the Mixtec community of Nuyoo, cited above, he
noted that “Only small children and two or three of the household’s women stay behind,
to prepare the evening meal and to carry out chores” (198726). In Pueblo Verde, older
women and women with limited levels of formal education comprise the majority of ‘the
women who remain’ to maintain the home front, as younger girls and women have
increasingly pursued formal education and professional employment outside of the
community. These women carry out much of the work necessary for establishing and

maintaining the relationships that constitute Verdean sociality, including the especially

I63

important reciprocal relationships of compadrazgo (fictive kin) and guesa (informal
exchange). Through relations of compadrazgo, adults form strong social ties with one
another by ‘sponsoring’ one another’s children. Verdeans establish especially powerful
and reverential bonds through the compadrazgo relationships they create for baptisms,
when adults take on the responsibility for lifelong ‘sponsorship’ of their ahijados
(‘godchildren’). Verdeans also establish a myriad of less powerful bonds in seeking
support — in the form of gifts or other contributions — to celebrate special events, such as
graduations, weddings and baptisms.

Villagers come together frequently for relatively intimate gatherings held to mark
more common important moments, such as birthdays, and for special ceremonies, such as
to bless new homes, give thanks for the harvest, or spiritual cleansings to promote
healing. Through guesa, women exchange help and goods with one another to support
one another’s efforts to mark special occasions with special events. Many of these guesa
exchanges occur within the context of compadrazgo relations. Female family members
and comadres, adults who have established bonds by ‘sponsoring’ one another’s children
through compadrazgo, often assist one another in making the preparations for
celebrations, which often include mole or pozole.24 Nonetheless, on many occasions
guesa exchanges transcend family and compadrazgo relationships, as women not linked
by family or fictive kin relations contribute work and/ or goods for celebrations that will

later be ‘repaid’. Compadrazgo and guesa relations enable Verdeans to come together in

 

2" Mole is a characteristically complex sauce women prepare as an accompaniment for chicken and turkey
dishes on special occasions. The composition of the sauce differs from community to community, and
Verdean women view their red male as a symbol of municipal distinctiveness. In addition to this tomato-
and Chile-based version, they also prepare a black bean-based mole for special occasions, including for
spiritual cleansings and the Day of the Dead festivities. Women also often prepare pozole, a hominy-based
dish, for special occasions.

I64

larger groups to celebrate, at the same time that they frame much of everyday social life
(see Stephen 1991 for a description of these relations in a Zapotec community).

Women sustain these relationships on a daily basis by informally gathering to
visit as they carry out their varied everyday activities. Some of the most important and
common activities include preparing meals, washing the dishes, caring for household
animals, washing laundry, weaving straw, spinning silk, traveling to markets to purchase
household goods, selling household goods, cleaning, working in the milpa, and hulling
corn. During the lulls in the day when the pressures of simultaneously carrying out
multiple tasks abate, these women often gather with their sisters and comadres to offer or
receive a soda or a beer and visit.

My host’s busy day slowed down during the afternoons, between when she
finished preparing the afternoon comida and before family members arrived to eat. In
these quiet moments, she would sit spinning silk on her petate, which covered the dusty
ground, and her sisters and comadres frequently stopped by to visit. They would sit
together, invite one another to a soda or a beer, and talk while weaving straw or spinning
silk. People often gather to socialize in the village’s variety stores, as well, one of which
was located next to where I lived. During the day, women pause there to take a break
from their errands, invite or receive a soda or a beer, and visit for a few moments with
sisters, comadres and others. Through these informal daily encounters, women reinforce
the relationships that sustain the formalized reciprocal relationships that link villagers
together in ways that ultimately support greater sociality, especially compadrazgo (fictive

kin relations) and guesa (mutual exchange).

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Thus, the women who remain in Pueblo Verde play a central role in maintaining
everyday and less frequent sociality. Within these different realms of sociality, many
women also play important roles as cultural gatekeepers, as they attempt to enforce
compliance with certain practices and perspectives and to punish those they perceive as
transgressing important values. In the case of the latter, women who fail to uphold ideals
of propriety for engaging with men are a common target of critique. As women discuss
these transgressions in kuentu, or gossip, individual criticisms transform into a more
extensive circle of shame, ostracism and rejection through which transgressors are
punished for their perceived transgressions. This social critique typically has limited
potential for changing behaviors when directed at the young women who are frequently
the targets of criticisms, because of the young women’s more tentative connections to
these social networks. Nonetheless, gossipers typically direct their critiques to the female
family members of the ‘cultural offenders’ who are engaged in these circles, in addition
to the offenders, and these family members bear the burden of social disapproval.

The nonmigrant Verdean women also play a key role in maintaining broader
sociality by maintaining the nexus of ‘home’ to which Verdeans traveling to destinations
near and far repeatedly return. Through their everyday work, the ‘women who remain’
facilitate the intersections of food, family and social life that constitute this nexus of
home. During the research period, I watched as shifting configurations of people shared
meals in my hosts’ kitchen. Sisters, daughters, sons, sons—in—law, ahijadas,
grandchildren, comadres and compadres, nieces and nephews, and others arrived and
left. Many of the arrivals and departures were predictable, and many were not. When

family and visitors arrived, they visited and ultimately shared a meal as my host urged,

166

“kaani staa”, eat (literally, eat tortilla). The resulting mutual-imbrications of the ‘women
who remain’, home and pueblo is evident in the most celebrated of all aspects of Pueblo
Verde life, the festival. I examine festivals as a point of Verdean unity, and the role of

women within them, below.

Community—building and pride in vikos

In analyzing contemporary problems in Mixtec communities, both developers and
revitalizationists emphasize shame. Developers contend that overly-restrictive communal
social relations cause shame among indigenous youth, while revitalizationists argue that
the denigration of Mixtec identity causes Mixtec peOple to feel shameful about their
culture. Nonetheless, I was struck by villagers’ strong sense of pride when I began
working in Pueblo Verde. On many occasions, my host excitedly informed me of special
social occasions that were occurring, such as weddings, spiritual cleansings, house
blessings, confirmations and graduations, and advised me to take my camera so I could
record the special practices.

Among the facets of life that villagers described as special, they were most proud
of the vikos (festivals), especially those held to honor the patron saints of each of the four
neighborhoods and the municipality. They repeatedly asked me if I would be there for
the viko ka ’nu (big festival), the municipal patron saint celebration held on September
21St each year. They told me that I must attend, and punctuated their own assertions of its
spectacularity with their observations that many migrants return on these dates to enjoy
the celebrations. In fact, the patron saint festivals, especially the viko ka ’nu, are

remarkable moments when Verdeans come together in all of their diversity to celebrate.

167

In reporting on his research on migration in the Mixtec center of Juxtlahuaca, Gonzalez
(1999) also observed the significance of festivals as special occasions when migrants
return ‘home’.

The fiesta is a moment in the cycle of migration in Juxtlahuaca where migrants make
their appearance after many years abroad. Their return during the fiesta is significant
in several ways. Socially, it discloses to community members (and themselves) their
profound links with their home region. Indeed, it may be the only time when they can
feel a definite part of their natal community, as they join kin and friends to celebrate
important village rituals within their religious calendar cycle. It is these ritual ties, which
Michael Kearney and others have stressed, which give rise to the designation of Mixtec
migrants as transnational peoples, maintaining homes, livelihoods and a profound sense
of community on both sides of the border. [Gonzalez 1999:172]

Gonzalez’s contention that festivals in Juxtlahuaca provide a unique space in which
‘community’ coalesces in an inclusive form that incorporates migrants and non-migrants
corresponds with my own observations in Pueblo Verde.

Localized admiration of vikos and more diffusive admiration for many of the
particular practices that occur within them converge in creating the conditions that
facilitate the emergence of this unique space of Verdean community. Within the local
orientations of indigenous communities in the region, festivals hold special significance
as symbols of regional identities. The symbols of localized identities celebrated in
festivals — especially food, clothing and dance — correspond with the limited array of
indigenous cultural characteristics celebrated in national lore as imbuing the Mexican
nation with distinctiveness. Developers and bureaucrats have also capitalized on the
popularity of these images of cultural distinctiveness while promoting tourism. Thus, in
festivals, many migrants encounter one of the few facets of Verdean lived experience that
is celebrated within the broader contexts in which they live. This celebration of
indigeneity starkly contrasts with the pervasive denigrations of indigeneity and “indios ”

within the mestizo social spaces migrants more frequently encounter. This confluence of

I68

forces contributes to migrants’ and non-migrants’ coming together to build community
and celebrate their Verdean identity in festivals, especially the viko ka ’nu.

In Pueblo Verde, a procession through the four barrios of the village marks the
beginning of patron saint festivals. Men advance in front, lighting firecrackers to alert
the community of the procession and the formal beginning of festivities. A band marches
behind them, playing music. Women and girls wearing the ‘traditional’ clothing25 of
long silk enaguas (skirts) in bright colors, white blouses trimmed with red embroidery
and black and white silk rebozos (shawls) follow the band. Many also wear ribbons
woven through their braided hair. They carry bouquets of flowers in their arms as they
proceed, and pause intermittently to dance. Women’s prominence in marking the
beginning of the festival is significant, especially when considering the broader salience
of the festival as a celebration of local distinctiveness within both the regional and
national contexts. Women, with their distinctive clothing, symbolize Verdean
distinctiveness. During the last several years, the procession has changed dramatically in
ways that highlight the women, and the changes have renewed many Verdeans
appreciation for the festivals. The procession used to include a dozen or so young girls,
but has on recent occasions swelled to include hundreds of women. Distinctions among
women within the procession attest to the symbolic resonance of links between women,
their dress, and home. First, women organize and proceed according to neighborhood.

Second, during the 2004 festival, a contingent from Mexico City donned enaguas in a

 

‘5 Villagers describe this clothing as traditional. It corresponds with the clothing donned by older women
who have not adopted Western styles of clothing. At the same time, many Verdeans referred to
improvements in women’s ‘traditional’ clothing as they described the positive changes ‘progress’ has
brought to the village.

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particular style that distinguished them from the other women. Both of these distinctions
create even closer symbolic linkages between the women in the processional and ‘home’.

When the procession arrives at the church of the patron saint being honored, a
mass is held to begin the celebrations. Following the mass, the women and village
officials share a special meal with any others who wish to attend. Thereafter, a basketball
tournament begins. School children and their teachers organize a program of
performances in the evening. Finally, the festival culminates with a social dance at night.
Several days of special events encompass these main activities during the week of the
viko ka ’nu, including daily masses, an exceptionally large market, game booths, and

special activities such as professional dance performances and fireworks.

T ranscending difference to celebrate community in the Programa

Because festivals bring Verdeans together in all of their diversity, they
simultaneously evidence the triumphs of, and barriers to, social engagement and
community building this diversity poses. The educational programs, in particular, bring
the greatest spectrum of people together, as people gather across generational differences
to celebrate with the children. The educational program for the San Isidro patron saint
festival, held to honor the patron saint of the barrio where I lived in the village,
encapsulated some of the diffiCulties the differentiation of experiences among Verdeans
poses for social engagement.

Large crowds of people gathered around the San Isidro basketball court that
doubled as a stage for the event. In the crowds, young children ran around playing in the

festive costumes that were crafted for their performances. Many little girls wore long

170

dresses, some in bright red and others in bright green, colors which salute the Mexican
flag. The little boys along side them wore cowboy outfits, with checkered flannel shirts,
jeans, and big, black felt sombreros. Many of their nearby mothers wore straight, knee-
length, dark skirts; short-sleeved blouses or tee-shirts; and dark, close-toed shoes, a
common outfit among thirty- and forty-something year old mothers in the village. In
addition, some slightly younger women who attended the event with their mothers wore
these fashions, suggesting their orientation to the norms of modesty with currency in the
village. The fathers of the small children were also in the crowds, many socializing with
other men and wearing long-sleeved button-down cotton shirts and black pants or slacks.
Like their female counterparts, some younger men wore similar styles that suggested
their engagement with village notions of style. In contrast, groups of teenagers and
young men and women formed circles scattered throughout the crowd, openly excited
about seeing one another and being seen more than the programa. Many of the young
women donned fashionable clothing styles that were designed in Mexico City, New
York, and other fashion centers in the not-too-distant past, and only appeared in my
fashion-consciousness when I arrived in the village. Young men also donned their finest,
often including jeans, stylish shirts and very nice shoes. Some wore leather jackets. In
contrast, older men observing the events wore palm sombreros, light colored, long-
sleeved button down shirts, dark colored slacks and huaraches, sandals. Most of the
older women wore long enaguas, embroidered blouses, sandals and rebozos wrapped
over their hair and shoulders, which many used to cover much of their face. They
commanded respect in their quiet and deliberate social interactions, although many young

people were too distracted or disinterested to respond appropriately.

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During this programa, the teachers introduced each of the performances over a
speaker system that was often inaudible because of its poor quality. They began with the
youngest children’s performances and continued through those of high school students.
Most of the children performed ‘traditional’ dances in ‘traditional’ clothing, although
many of the dances they enacted and costumes they wore were drawn from state and
national-level celebrations of indigenous culture, as opposed to practice in the
municipality. Teachers pleaded with the audience to ‘show the children how much they
appreciated the performances with a great round of applause’, and seemed bewildered
that observers would only give a lukewarm show of their appreciation. Nonetheless,
applauding conflicts many villagers’ ideals of modesty. In addition, the many
monolingual Mixtec-speaking villagers in the audience did not understand the teachers’
Spanish language pleas. Communication barriers associated with the language and the
sound system also impeded many observers from understanding the comic scenes that a
couple of groups of adolescents enacted, although they did provoke some laughter. The
disjunctures culminated in one of the last performances, which challenged expectations
for modesty in relation to sexuality. Two high school girls in mini-skirts and knee high
boots took their place in the center of the stage waiting to begin, while the teacher who
introduced the performance made some suggestive comments. They danced more
popular music, during which a few drunk men in the audience made cat—calls.

While working in Pueblo Verde, I was struck by these kinds of scenes, in which
Verdeans came together in such diversity. I considered that villagers had developed an
exceptionally open attitude towards cultural differences in order to maintain community

in the context of this diversity. In fact, villagers did demonstrate a remarkable tolerance

I72

for difference in special circumstances such as these, as well as in more quotidian
contexts. Nonetheless, as I spent more time in the village, I learned about the struggles,
frustrations, pain and insecurities villagers experience as they try to reconcile their
desires for cultural continuity, control and community in this context. I examine how
denigrations of indigenousness contribute to these struggles and shape Verdean sociality

in detail below.

The dark side of bearing indigeneity

In festivals, as many villagers don the clothing styles that the majority of the
‘women who remain’ use in their daily lives, they affirm and bask in this celebration of
Verdeanness. Yet, they do so only briefly. Beyond the protective environment of the
festival, the distinctiveness the dress symbolizes makes those who don it key targets of
the worst treatment meted out to denigrate indigeneity and those who symbolize it. Thus,
those villagers who are celebrated as bearing culture in the context of the festival
typically encounter maltreatment when leaving the community.

Many of these villagers claimed that the different styles outside of the community
circumscribed their ability to meet their needs, and thus prohibited them from living
elsewhere. In one instance, Esmeralda, a 42-year old woman who had lived in Mexico
City, claimed that her lack of literacy made leaving the community an anxiety-provoking
proposition. She asserted, “I don’t know how to read and I don’t know how to write and
I’m afraid to leave!” A few women claimed that they would starve if they tried to live
outside of the community because of their inability to find anything to eat. Other women

explained that their lack of Spanish fluency made it impossible to do basic things like

173

using public transportation systems — in multiple cases, women expressed the latter
sentiments to me in Spanish.

I initially interpreted these expressions of insecurities literally, being quite
experienced myself with how lack of familiarity and limited linguistic skills can frustrate
a person’s efforts to function in a new place. In fact, most of the villagers who spend
most of their time in the community have limited Spanish language skills and formal
education, which in and of themselves make navigating life outside of the community
difficult. Nonetheless, imperfect Spanish language skills do enable villagers to meet their
basic needs as they maneuver in mestizo society. At the same time, a faltering
domination of the Spanish language, styles of dress, and other symbols of indigeneity
identify these villagers with the much-maligned “indio ” in mestizo society, and mark
them as targets of poor treatment outside of the community. Adriana, a 27-year old
professional woman, hinted at how a faltering domination of the Spanish language makes
villagers vulnerable to poor treatment when I asked her whether she was proud of her
community. She responded, “Yes, although many people think that we are poor Mixtecs
and we don’t speak Spanish!” Ismael, a young man with strong village ties despite
having lived most of his life elsewhere, also indicated how villagers who lack extensive
Spanish language skills encounter poor treatment when they leave the community. He
explained,

More than anything, when people go other places they feel rejected for being from here.
That is one of the causes of low self-esteem. That they don’t speak Spanish well.

Observing these circumstances, I came to regard these villagers’ frequent references to

practical factors that limit their ability to navigate mestizo society as ways of

I74

communicating more transcendental insecurities produced by the hardships they have
endured outside of the community.

Many villagers vigilantly work to protect themselves from this kind of treatment
in Pueblo Verde by insisting that aspiring community members demonstrate their
willingness to engage in local social life on Verdean terms. These efforts evidence how
broader denigrations of indigeneity shape everyday social life, and accord with Carole
Nagengast and Michael Keamey’s (1990:73-4) hypothesis that the inward focus of many
indigenous communities reflects a response to marginalization within broader relations of

inequality.

V erdean gate-keeping conventions

I hired a local research assistant to help me with my structured data collection
methods, including the census and the semi-structured interviews I conducted with a
stratified sample I selected from the census. Having a local assistant to help me learn
how to approach people and ask for interviews was invaluable. She knew where people
lived and how to approach them and their homes. In addition, people trusted her with
their questions about me and the research, and they felt more comfortable talking with me
because of her presence. She also translated interviews for those who preferred to
conduct them in Mixtec.

We began early in the mornings to try to catch people before they left to
undertake work outside of the home. Invariably, as we approached people’s homes, we

heard the patter of women forming the freshly-made tortillas that they then placed on the

175

comalz" to cook, which was itself placed over an open fire. With my assistant in the lead,
we would begin to approach the home. She would tentatively call “xixi” [she-she], aunt
in Mixtec, or “no ”, ‘grandmother’, depending on whether we were headed to a home
where a middle-aged or older woman lived. In response, a voice would call “ve”, yes.
My assistant would respond, “lyoni?” Are you there? The voice would respond “Iyoli. ”
I am here.

We slowly approached peoples’ homes and she explained the nature of our visit.
Most frequently, we spent a long time just chatting about why I was there, what my
experience was like being there, and their rumors about and experience with the United
States. For many, my efforts to learn Mixtec supported my claim that I was intrigued
about learning about life there. As we sat talking, the women would often offer my
assistant and me a tortilla fresh from the coma]. My assistant would enthusiastically
confide in our host with a mixture of surprise and pride that, ‘Yes, she eats.’ More than
my efforts to speak Mixtec, my willingness to share tortillas suggested the possibility that
I was committed to forming relationships with Verdeans. Often, others would appear for
a brief period to observe my assistant and me. After they interviewed me and I
interviewed my host, my assistant and our hosts would express their cautious approval of
me because I sat on the same chairs and shared the same food as them. They summed up
their appraisals with the conclusion, ‘no es especial.’

Verdeans repeatedly criticized people for being muy especial, literally ‘very
special’. They leveled this critique against those who are unwilling to engage in social
life on the same terms as everyone else, and demanded ‘special’ food and ‘special’

accommodations. Many similarly criticized those who thought they were better than

 

2" A comal is a round cooking implement for making tori/las.

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others with the judgment, se creen. In contrast, villagers expressed approval of those
who demonstrated their commitment to local social engagement with “e'l si come”, (he
does eat), or “ella si habla” (she does talk).

Many Verdeans employ these conventions to ensure that those who engage in the
community do so in a way that accords with local experience, rather than denigrating this
experience as an expression of indigenousness. Moreover, many use these idioms to
warn others of those who reject conventions for local social engagement. Contrastingly,
my own experience in interviews evidenced how villagers also use these idioms to
assuage concerns about certain people who seem likely to denigrate local experience.
Through these gate-keeping conventions, villagers attempt to shield themselves from the
widespread discrimination that many encounter when traveling outside of the community.
Thus, these idioms evidence how denigrations of indigenousness in their multiple
historical formulations shape Verdean sociality.

I was initially pleased to find that all I had to do was eat tortillas to prove my
commitment to the community. Nonetheless, villagers were vigilant in their measured
acceptance of me into the community, and many seemed to doubt whether the
appreciation of Verdean people and life that I professed represented my true feelings. A
nearby store owner and widely-recognized gossip who befriended me often questioned
me about how much I really liked the community. I repeatedly told her what a wonderful
community it was, and how much I enjoyed being there. One day, she accusingly
reported to me that a group of people gathered on her porch burst into laughter when she
asserted that la giiera (the white woman) loved it there, and then considered that I might

return to live there some day. Their laughter made her doubt my sincerity, and left her

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feeling betrayed. Many villagers never trusted me enough to risk these feelings, and took
a more cautiousapproach of repeatedly enjoining me to prove my trustworthiness. As a
result, despite my initial enthusiasm over the seeming ease with which villagers allowed
me to enter the community, I sometimes grew tired of having to prove myself. On a
couple of such occasions, my assistant and I engaged in battles of wills when I grew tired

of eating when I was not hungry. She unrelentingly insisted that I comply.

Absence, doubt and betrayal

Despite my occasional refirsals to comply with these repeating demands for me to
prove myself, for the most part, I respected villagers’ cautiousness. It seemed entirely
appropriate given the historical and ongoing contexts within which non-community
members have typically denigrated aspects of local experience deemed indigenous, along
with the people attached to this experience. I was surprised to find, though, that villagers
commonly utilize the same gate-keeping mechanisms with other villagers. For example,
Sylvia, a young professional Verdean woman, recounted to me how a couple of teachers
derided her one day for declining their invitation to share a drink with them. When she
explained that she did not have time at that moment to stop, they criticized her for
thinking she was too good for them, “se cree,” and for “menospreciando” (undervaluin g)
them by rejecting their invitatiOn.

The use of these conventions among villagers corresponds with widely held
perceptions that youth, migrants and highly-educated villagers increasingly adopt the
negative views of local experience attached to denigrations of indigenousness that many

villagers associate with leaving the community. In interviews and in more informal

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contexts, many villagers voiced concerns about how those who leave the community for
educational and economic pursuits change. For example, Adriana, a 27-year old
professional woman, expressed her disaccord with the ‘inappropriate’ behaviors migrants
to the United States adopt as they take on ‘the culture of the Other.’ She explained,

There are many young people who go to the United States. When they return, they bring
the customs from there with them and they want to apply them here. In reality, these
practices look bad here. It’s seen poorly here. And, they speak, they speak all mixed
together, no? And, they speak even some words, um, very obscene. So, sometimes
they prefer to focus on the Other’s culture, and they are not content with the culture that
we have here, when it’s a beautiful culture. They must not take the culture of the other!

Concerns about migrants’ denigration of local experience comprise a subtext of
Adriana’s complaint that is especially clear when she speaks about how migrants focus
on the ‘Other’ and insists on the value of ‘Verdean culture.’ Teresa, a 58 year old
monolingual Mixtec-speaking villager hinted at these concerns as she commented,

I won'y about how people think differently, especially the way that young people think.
They study and they leave and they begin to change their ways of thinking.

Similarly, Juan, a 29-year old man who spends his days working in the milpa, asserted,

The people, the young people, there are some, oh how they change! Some of those
who leave, well, they think poorly.

When Esmeralda, a 42-year old woman, reflected on this tendency, she heatedly
defended Verdean experience. She reported,

Sometimes people leave and return and say that they don’t like their town because they
leave and say that there is nothing here — they say, and what are we going to eat? Like,
there is nothing if they are lazy. If they don’t work, well, there is nothing because they
aren’t looking for it. But, if you look, well, I think there is. Yes, like I lived with my
son, I tell you, and I went to Tlaxiaco, I went to C halcatongo to find, to sell, even if it
was just a tortilla or an exchange. Yes, there is. Yes.

Tendencies for some villagers to adopt denigrations of indigenousness pose a particularly
great challenge to Verdean community-building, as some refirse to engage in social

conventions precisely because they are social conventions. Moreover, the adoption of

I79

denigrations of local experience by some villagers seems to pose especially poignant
dilemmas for those who have suffered most from perceptions of them as bearers of

indigenousness.

Conclusions

This chapter has examined Pueblo Verde social life within a broader context in
which community members increasingly reside outside of the municipality. In contrast to
the wide current interest in how migrants construct transnational communities out of
place, this chapter examines how those who remain in place work to create community,
most of whom are women. This approach suggests the partiality of migrant-oriented
accounts that celebrate ‘transnational communities’ as evidenced in key events, such as
festivals. In addition to the triumphs of community-building in the face of widespread
migration that festivals indicate, Verdean migration causes great contradictions and
emotional challenges for those who remain. Esmeralda, cited above, communicated the
feelings of pain and abandonment she has suffered while remaining in place as so many
loved ones leave. Through tears, she explained,

No, well, I get sad too, because, everyone left. Well, [my daughter], she was always
around. She was in Oaxaca City, but she would come every month or two weeks to visit,
but now she left and now she doesn’t come anymore. It’s so sad, too. My son says he’ll
be back soon. He only went for a year and he’ll be back, he says. Because, you know,
his wife is here. Well, who knows if he left for a year or who knows. He said that
there was no money, and that’s why he had to leave to work. It was okay because my
daughter was around. She was in Oaxaca, and she brought everything that is in my
house. She said, ‘buy sodas, mom, buy everything you need.’ She brought eggs,
everything this one day, and... and she left and she said she was going there.

A sense of betrayal stands out among the many emotions Esmeralda conveyed in her

often-tearful interview. In fact, concerns about betrayal are recurring themes in Verdean

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gossip, and preoccupations with betrayal prompt many villagers to repeatedly challenge
‘outsiders’ and ‘insiders’ alike to prove their sincerity.

As I have analyzed Verdean sociality in this chapter, I have focused on how broad
denigrations of indigenousness shape the challenges Verdeans confront in their efforts to
build community. I have identified some villagers’ adoption of denigrations of
indigenousness as a central tendency shaping Verdean social and cultural processes.
Villagers’ critiques of those among them who adopt denigrations of indigenousness
evidence the adoption of ‘culture’ among Verdeans. These critiques also affirm the
unevenness of the adoption of the culture concept. In this chapter, I have highlighted the
dilemmas produced by the unevenness in the adoption of ‘culture’ as a conceptual tool
that some villagers wield along with the unevenness of culture as an essence that some
villagers bear. 1 continue to examine this distinction between those who wield culture
and those who bear it as I examine the politics of different representations of
indigenousness in Verdean social life in the rest of the dissertation.

I have focused on struggles between those who remain and those who leave while
providing an overview of Pueblo Verde sociality in this chapter. I provide a closer
examination of how gender, generational, and economic factors shape Verdean social and
cultural processes as I turn to examine struggles over the Verdean family in the next
chapter. This examination of the Verdean family situates my ensuing analysis of how
developers’ and revitalizationists’ conceptualizations of culture shape Verdeans’ contests

to define the ideal family.

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CHAPTER SEVEN: THE CHANGING VERDEAN FAMILY

In interviews, I asked Verdean villagers whether and why the family is important.
Many signaled to me with a smirk that the answers to these questions were obvious, but
struggled to convey the importance of family in words. Ultimately, they explained the
family’s importance in reference to its utility in enabling them to meet their most
elemental social and material needs. As the table below indicates, eighteen respondents

mentioned social needs, while sixteen signaled material needs.

Table 4: Importance of family, N=29

 

 

Importance of family #
Being together 18
Helping each other 16
The place where we learn values 2
To have someone to pass things on to l

 

Note: Many respondents provided multiple responses.

Verdeans’ responses correspond with the key importance of the family in ensuring the
individual’s well-being in recent history. In material matters, individuals have met their
productive (subsistence) and reproductive needs through the gender division of labor in
the family. In the symbolic sphere, male household heads have represented their families
in formal politics, while female household heads have tended to predominate in less
formal social networks and arenas.

Remarkable changes have occurred in Pueblo Verde families during the last
couple of decades, influencing the forms villagers’ families take, and the organization of
work and responsibility within them, as well as the salience of family in everyday life. In

this chapter, I analyze these changes within the context of broader processes of economic

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transformation, examining how families have reorganized their families to accommodate
the exigencies of income-generating opportunities and their desires for access to
increased goods and services. I describe the shifting generational power-relations that
have occurred as some villagers have reorganized their families, along with generational
differences in villagers’ perceptions of the relative importance of wealth and social
relations. Then, I examine how these dynamics shape ongoing familial transformations,
using the example of some women’s contests over gender inequalities within unions as a

case in point.

Family in Verdean history: Age, gender and power

One of the most valuable characteristics of ethnographic research is that
researchers observe what people do in addition to asking them what they do. I was
repeatedly reminded of the importance of this dual approach when I listened to villagers’
depictions of the family. They regularly described the family in idealized ways that
conflicted with my observations of the present. In addition, the vignette I used to open
this dissertation, in which my hosts insisted on the acceptability of only one family form,
demonstrates the politics of representations of the family. That raises dilemmas for my
reliance on oral accounts to characterize the Verdean family in history. Nonetheless,
older villagers’ accounts of their personal life experiences indicate ways in which these
characterizations correspond with as well as conflict with their lived histories. Thus, I
rely on villagers’ personal accounts to suggest that the (idealized) historical sketch of the

Verdean family that I outline below corresponded more with lived experience in recent

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history than it does now. Thereafter, I examine ongoing contests over the family in
contemporary life.

In interviews, two-thirds of Verdean informants over forty years old (15/22)
reported that they began their families through arranged marriages. Many specified that
their in-laws ‘asked for them well, ’ indicating that arranged marriages were the correct
way of forming a relationship at the time. Young men were considered ready for these
unions in their late teens, beginning around seventeen or eighteen years of age, when they
mastered the requisite level of responsibility, maturity and skills. Considerations of their
readiness reflect their responsibility for representing the family in the broader
community, making decisions on behalf of the family, and contributing a distinct set of
labor skills to the family economy. In contrast, girls were considered marriageable when
they reached around twelve years of age. Since they were not expected to make decisions
on behalf of the family, their readiness was determined by the age at which they
demonstrated their ability to carry out the domestic tasks they would be charged with
carrying out as wives and mothers. These expectations for girls’ and women’s place in
Verdean unions correspond with those the leading Mixtec revitalizationist Juan Julian

Caballero describes in his own community of San Antonio Huitepec. He relates,

If the girl has reached 12 or 13 years old, she is considered old enough to form a
partnership with the person who arrives to ‘ask for her hand’, as the only requirement is
that she knows how to work responsibly and has complete knowledge about women’s
own activities, as well as knowing how to conduct herself responsibly in life. [Julian
Caballero 2002292]

The formal courting in arranged marriages occurs between the proposed couples’
parents. In Pueblo Verde, the young man’s parents or an emissary would typically

approach the young girl’s parents on his behalf, and, with gifts in hand, ask her parents

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for her hand in marriage. The process of negotiating these unions could last a year.
Although young men’s parents carried out the process of negotiating on their behalf,
young men influenced, if not determined, their parents’ choice of mates. Girls, however,
were typically not consulted in their parents’ decisions about whether to accept or reject
the suitor’s offer.

In successfully established unions, the newly formed couple constituted a new
family entity in the community. Nonetheless, the husband and his wife typically resided
in his extended family’s homestead, and contributed their energies to the reproduction of
that larger entity. The young man would continue contributing to his family’s
subsistence production by carrying out agricultural-related work in the milpa — work
villagers regard as more physically taxing than women’s work. For her part, the young
girl would carry out the tasks associated with women’s work, which focus more on the
domestic sphere, involving tasks related to raising young children, preparing meals, doing
laundry, and other reproductive tasks.27 Irnportantly, she would now contribute this work
to her new family under the watch of her mother-in-law.

A full third of informants over age forty related that they did not form their unions
through arranged marriages, but instead established their relationships through some kind
of direct encounter. For example, a few respondents reported that they and their partners
decided on their own to marry; a couple of others indicated being forced to marry
because of the kids; one claimed having been pressured by his partner to marry.28

Common law marriage norms have marked couples as married when they begin to live

 

27 Despite the general correctness of these trends, assumptions that women solely engage in reproductive
activities centered on the domestic sphere obscure women’s participation in productive and subsistence
oriented activities.

2" The latter made this claim in relation to his marriage to his wife who had since died. He did so in the
presence of his second wife.

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together, effectively applying the social recognitions and corresponding expectations,
duties, and benefits of marriage to the large proportion of people who did not ‘marry
well’. Thus, Verdeans have recognized families forged through legitimate and
unsanctioned unions as social units with corresponding place in society and contribution
to society.

In a recent work, Marcos Cruz Baustista (2004a), a leading Mixtec
revitalizationist, drew from the comments of an informant from his natal community in
San Juan Mixtepec to explicate the gender differentiated expectations for the skills,
aptitudes and perspectives men and women must master in Mixtec unions. The informant
explained,

If it is a man, he must know how to work the land, that is, know how to realize all of
the activities to make the land produce and care for it, that includes to work, till, make
rows, plant, clean, mound the earth around the plants, pick, clean the field after the
harvest, and know how to raise and care for domestic animals, to know how to cut wood,
which implies having the necessary knowledge of nature and her phenomena. In
addition, he must investigate his social values of which we have been speaking and his
personal values, which are: respect, honor, honesty, loyalty, bravery, prudence,
equanimity, intelligence, etc.

And if it is a women she must know all of the domestic tasks; know how to
gather wood, know how to prepare nixtamal, know how to make tortillas, totopos, atole,
know how to cook and prepare food, know how to sweep, know how to wash clothes and
in relation to her behavior, she must be respectful, honorable, honest, and soon they
investigate her training for collective work; principally in that in that dealing with her
participation in tequios, mutual help, guetzas, and they also investigate her social and
personal values including respect, honesty, honor, loyalty, prudence, equanimity,
intelligence, etc, but above all obedience. If she demonstrates these attitudes and
aptitudes, she is fit. She has the essential experience and knowledge to be a good wife.
To be a good wife is to respond to a commitment of great importance, because the
greatest importance for Mixtecs is to be able to maintain a new family, that is to say, to
have the attitude and aptitude to get food for oneself and one’s family ....” [Eligio
Sanchez, quoted in Cruz Bautista 2004a:68]

His characterization corresponds closely with those offered by many Verdean men and
women. In short, they described women and men as making distinctive and

complementary contributions to the family.

186

This complementary construction of families necessitates ‘working together’ and
thus resonates with multiple villagers’ assertions that one literally cannot survive without
the family. At the same time, Cruz Bautista’s informant references hierarchical
dimensions of men and women’s relationships as he claims that girls fit for marriage
must demonstrate ‘above all obedience’. Women of all ages conveyed their disaccord
with gender inequalities. They did so by complaining about girls’ inabilities to influence
their parents’ choice of their mates in arranged maniages. Many women also criticized
the pervasiveness of domestic abuse. The brutality many women suffer in their
relationships provides a particularly compelling basis for criticizing depictions of
Verdean partnerships as complementary. Thus, it would be misleading to characterize
gender relations as hierarchical or complementary, as Verdean women and men express
different kinds of power in different realms and in different ways.

Recognition of young men as singular representatives of the family in local
political channels establishes gender inequities in formal politics. Upon marriage, young
men receive recognition as comuneros and the corresponding right to participate in the
communal assemblies where local governance decisions are carried out. They also
receive the duty to participate in tequios, or communal work assignments.

Despite men’s dominance in formal political channels, perceptions of male and
female unions as working together to complete a family have predominated in less
formalized arenas of local sociality.29 Moreover, the distinction between these more
formalized and less formalized arenas is less marked than it may seem, as many of these

less formalized arenas of local sociality have facilitated men’s ascent in formal politics

 

29 This trend is suggestive in consideration of Kevin Terraciano’s (2001) observations of how Mixtec
women’s status fell with the imposition of colonial structures of governance.

187

by increasing the prestige of the partnership. Mayordomia, or saint sponsorship, and
compadrazgo are the most important among these. Men and women have both typically
been regarded as contributing mayordomos for the annual fiestas carried out in the saint’s
honor (see Stephen 1991 for a similar observation in a Zapotec community), and as co-
participants in compadrazgo.

In sum, individuals have relied on the family for meeting their most basic material
and social needs. Accordingly, those who lost parents at an early age recounted
especially difficult experiences as youth. Multiple interviewees in their sixties and older
explained that they were unable to attend school because they were ‘orphans’. In most
cases, they lost the economic security needed to support education when they lost one of
their parents. For some men, this meant that they had to contribute to the family’s
livelihood as young boys by working in their own subsistence plots, or working as
laborers in others’ plots. For women, the loss of a parent could signify an arranged
marriage at an especially young age, or worse. Young men not infrequently abducted
mates who attracted them, and those without family to protect them were especially
vulnerable to these attacks. Na Maria, a 72 year old woman, recounted how she was
“stolen” at eleven years old because she was an orphan:30

Assistant: How old were you when my grandfather asked for you?

Na Maria: You know, I didn’t have a mother or father. I was eleven years old.
Assistant: And why did you get married?

Na Maria: I was stolen. [Laughter] It’s true — I was stolen. You know, I didn’t have a
mother or father, or anyone to defend me.

 

30 During these abductions, if a young man successfully held a girl for at least a night, the parents had little
recourse but to recognize the union. In some cases, local authorities assisted with these abductions by
locking the young couple in jail during the night.

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The accounts of the particularly difficult situations those without family suffered attest to

the elemental importance of the Verdean family in ensuring individual well-being.

The changing economic context

I spent most of my time in the village with women. Spending time with men
seemed risky given my single status, and I was wary of upholding stereotypes of Western
women as failing to uphold local standards of modesty. Nonetheless, spending most of
my time with women made me insecure about my perceptions of men’s contributions to
everyday community life. I asked villagers how men spent their days to check whether
the limited informal research time I spent with men was coloring my emerging
assessments. Those I queried always responded by describing to me the gender division
of labor I described above, explaining that men leave early in the morning for the milpa,
while women remain in the home to prepare the meals, taking them to the men in the
fields later in the day. These accounts conflicted with my own observations. Although
many of the men who remain in the community do conduct agricultural activities, many
women do, as well. I frequently encountered women heading for the milpa in the
morning and returning in the afternoon. I also encountered women taking their bulls to
pasture daily.

I returned to my notes from daily observations and my census and interview data
to examine these incongruencies between my own perceptions and villagers’ accounts.
My formal data, in particular, was designed to counter any biases resulting from my own
tendencies to spend time with certain groups in the community. They supported my

sense that men were disproportionately absent. In fact, when I randomly selected a

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sample of villagers over the age of fifteen from the census for more targeted
interviewing, the sample turned up mostly women, reflecting the gender and age
imbalance of the community. It is likely that even the marked gender imbalance
evidenced in the census overstated men’s presence in the community, as I was unable to
locate multiple young men when I returned for interviews. In some cases, they appear to
have left in the interim, although I also noted a tendency among villagers to report absent
members of the family as residing in the household.

The gender discrepancies in Verdeans’ accounts of what they do and what I
observed them to do initially piqued my interest in how villagers perceive of how their
activities resonate and conflict with who they are. As I examined villagers’ descriptions
of Verdean work, I noted a broader tendency among villagers to emphasize agricultural
work and de-emphasize or exclude the rest: they consistently described an idealized
subsistence-based family economy and division of labor, apparently sensing that the other
activities that they engage in do not constitute an authentic expression of what Verdeans
do. Nonetheless, their descriptions of their work histories and my own observations
testify to villagers’ reliance on myriad income-generating strategies, and the long place
these have had in Verdeans’ personal economic histories.

In addition to working the milpa, many older men (sixty years old and over)
reported migrating to different parts of the state and the nation-state to generate capital.
In fact, the eight respondents sixty years old and older when indicated that they had
migrated during their lifetime were all men. They reported traveling to different regions
of Oaxaca to buy and sell regional goods; to the neighboring states of Chiapas, Veracruz

and Puebla to work as hired laborers on plantations; and to Mexico City to work in

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construction. They also typically had acquired some limited formal education, which
gave them some Spanish and literacy skills useful for navigating the greater mestizo
society. All of the interview participants over fifty years old who reported having some
formal educational experience were men. Thus, the interview data suggest that villagers
did more than milpa, and most of the villagers who undertook these additional income-
generating strategies were men.

Verdean women fill in for their absent partners by carrying out the agricultural
work villagers readily describe as men’s work and representing the family in communal
assemblies and tequios. This temporary occupation of male spaces corresponds with
scholars’ observations in other contexts of widespread migration in Mexico (Buechler
2005; Kanaiaupuni 2000). These studies indicate that women’s occupation of these
spaces does not signify a challenge to prevailing gender inequities and a corresponding
change in women’s status. Rather, the exigencies of migration temporarily place gender—
expectations for work in relief (Buechler 2005). Villagers’ denial of women’s occupation
of male spaces in Pueblo Verde suggests how these observations resonate with villager
experience: filling-in does not seem to signify a challenge to or shift in gender relations.
Nonetheless, these migration-linked processes in Pueblo Verde are part of broader
economic transformations associated with villagers’ expanding desires for things and the
shifting avenues available and strategies villagers devise to access them. Within the
broader social and narrower familial transformations these processes have facilitated and
necessitated, women have openly contested inequalities and contributed to shifts in

gender relations in the process.

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Gender and generation in the restructuring of the Verdean family

Women’s efforts to fill in for their partners during their absences indicate how
villagers’ income-generation activities transform their families. At least as influential,
however, are other family members’ declining contributions to subsistence production.
Adult children, in particular, increasingly dedicate themselves to agricultural, factory,
construction, service and professional employment. In addition, younger children
typically direct much of their time, energy and resources towards educational preparation
for these pursuits. These transformations belie villagers’ accounts of the subsistence-
based distribution of responsibilities in their families, as they entail an important shift
from the ideal of men carrying out subsistence and income-generating strategies, and
women carrying out domestic activities and filling in for men in their absence.

Many villagers have redelineated the division of responsibilities within families
according to generation and gender to accommodate these income-generating strategies.
Thus, professional parents often leave their children in the care of grandparents during
their daily or weekly absences. Sometimes grandparents also care for children for
months or even years at a time while parents are working further afield, for example, in
the United States. In addition, many grandmothers prepare meals for their adult children
and their families in order to facilitate adult women’s engagement in income generating
activities. Thus, many families have redelineated the gender-based distribution of family
work along the lines of generation, and older women have taken on reproductive
responsibilities for the entire extended family.

In exchange, adult children contribute earnings to supplement the extended

family’s subsistence strategies. They also provide their parents with access to goods and

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services that they would otherwise be unable to afford. During interviews, older
interviewees identified these goods and services as critical contributions to the improved
quality of life they have experienced during the course of their lives. In fact, these
villagers repeatedly commented on the positive ways in which access to outside goods
and services had improved their lives in response to a question I had devised to query
whether they had perceived negative changes. These villagers responded to my question
about whether there were any changes they had seen during their lifetime that concerned
them by recounting with amazement that they lacked shoes, soap, beds, access to Western
medical care, and other necessities in the past, and passionately emphasizing how access
to these goods and services had improved their lives. For example, when I asked Na
Ilaria, a sixty-two year old woman whether there were changes she had seem that
concerned her, she responded,

We were sadder before. Now there is some milk, and other things — we didn’t used to
have that. Before, instead of using soap we used plants to wash. We used to leave for
Tlaxiaco and Chalcatongo at 2:00 in the morning to sell. There weren’t even sodas or
soap!

Na Eustolia, a fifty-five year old woman, similarly conveyed her summation of these

changes as positive after reflected on them.

Assistant: Has the town been changing?

Na Eustolia: Yes, it has been changing. Like the people of my generation, as you see, I

see from my vantage point still because I am always in front of the fire [cooking]. I’m

humble, in the home lets say, it began to change when people started to leave, but this

hasn’t been going on for a long time. They dress differently, they go traveling getting

some money. Then they build a house, the houses are getting better. And in my case I

don’t go anywhere and that’s why things have remained as they were before.

Assistant: Does it worry you that all of this has been changing?

Na Eustolia: No, on the contrary, I’m happy. On the contrary, the pueblo is improving.
, It the future it will be better. And it’s worse if we are poor. All of the children are

changing. The change is for the good.

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Older men conveyed similar opinions. For example, Ta Eusevio, a sixty-four year old

man, reported,

Before there was no electricity, water, we didn’t have the highway. Everything was dark.
Now there’s light, potable water, we have the highway. I like the changes. I hope we get
more help for more change.

Ta Abraham, a seventy-four year old man, also reflected positively on the changes he had

witnessed during the last couple of decades:

Ta Abraham: The clothing is changing because before people used only the white shorts,
white pants, only sandals — they used to call the sandals we used huaraches de bolla.
And it has been changing. Because the older women used to wear only ugly skirts.
Everything is changing. Everyday there are more people speaking Spanish, this is
changing — there wasn’t any of this a while back. Another thing is that there were people
who traveled carrying baskets, they carried their baskets on their backs. The would go
far, to Tlaxiaco, to Santa Cruz, to San Miguel, but anywhere they traveled they left and
returned carrying their baskets. It’s changing because now no one walks. Everyone
travels by bus now. It used to take three or four days for people to return from their
trips.

Assistant: Do you worry about the changes you have seen?

Ta Abraham: No, no, because we suffered more like that. Like children, they were born
and they would have to carry heavy things on their back, that’s why we got sick, because
there are places where it rains or its very hot and we get hot and drink water and that’s
why we get sick afterwards. Now things are changing and we don’t suffer as much.

I had anticipated that villagers would convey concerns about changing social
relations in response to this question, especially older villagers. In fact, many villagers
did, but older villagers tended to emphasize the positive changes, and even conclude that
it would be best to get rid of local practices that impeded villagers from facilitating
continued change. Ta Abraham arrived at this conclusion in his reflections, implicating
the Mixtec language in particular as an impediment to villagers’ capacities to acquire
goods and services. He reflected,

What is changing is that now there are more houses, now there are more people who
speak Spanish, and everything And its good that the school was established and that it
is still here and hopefully the children are concerned, too, because it will continue to
change. Like the Mixtec language, those who are growing up want to get rid of it

because there are more schools. Well, its better really that it changes truthfully because if

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we only speak like we do here [Mixtec] when we travel and we try to buy something we
can’t find the words to say.

As his reflections intimate, in addition to the way that these villagers’ ages constrain
them from accessing these opportunities, lack of skills, especially facility in the Spanish
language, limit their abilities to generate capital and access these resources. Thus, they
largely depend on their children for access to these goods and services. As I indicated
above, some families have responded by redelineating family responsibilities according
to age and gender, in effect exchanging the reproductive labor, subsistence labor and
limited capital generated by older adults for greater access to goods and services from
their adult children.

In his study of The Decline ofCommunity in Zinacantdn: Economy, Public Life
and Social Stratification, 1 960-1 98 7, 1992, Frank Cancian describes a decline in the
status of older adults within the context of the Maya community’s increasing political and
economic integration with broader economic and political processes. Cancian explains
these in relation to youth’s successful capture of new economic opportunities that arose
in the 19705, as well as the increasing importance of civil offices, in which youth often
predominated. The economic transformations Verdean villagers signal and the ways they
have shifted familial responsibility and cooperation in response to them correspond with
Cancian’s observations of changes in age-based status differentials in Zinacantan. In
Pueblo Verde, these familial shifts signal a relative empowerment of youth and
disempowerment of adults as the latter come to depend on the former for access to
capital. This realignment of power in the family has important implications for ongoing
contests over the meaning of the family in Verdean society and the delineation of power

within.

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Hints of discordant desires in villagers’ changing perceptions of ideal family size

Above, 1 identified ‘working together’ as a basic principle of Verdean families.

In fact, more people working together has often constituted an effective strategy for
generating a livelihood through subsistence production, as more hands could contribute to
labor needs and in doing so help to protect the family against the vagaries of nature and
output. The relatively large families of villagers over forty years old reflect this logic:
these villagers had an average of 6.8 children per family (median 6.5).

Nonetheless, many villagers report that the cost of educating children has shifted
the economics of ‘working together’ in the family. Villagers’ observations of
transformations in the economics of families correspond with John Caldwell’s (1976)
insights into shifts in children’s relative costs and contributions to the family associated
with demographic transitions. As villagers observe, children’s contributions to the family
economy through agricultural and domestic activities have been curtailed, at the same
time that they require additional costs associated with education. In fact, as Table 5
indicates, those informants who had not yet begun their families at the time of
interviewing reported wanting an average of 2.4 children, half of the average 4.8 children

indicated by respondents aged forty and older.

Table 5. Family size preferences according to age, N=38

 

 

Age 1/2 2/3 4 6 Other
# % # °/o # o/o # % # %
15-19 2 5 3 9 1 3 O 0 0 0
20-29 0 0 7 1 8 0 0 1 3 0 0
30+ 0 0 3 9 1 3 2 5 19 50
Totals 2 5 12 36 2 6 3 8 19 50

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Shifting fertility patterns in the village correspond with villagers’ indications of changes
in their familial preferences. As indicated in the table below, only one of the nineteen
people less than forty years old had five children or more, in comparison with twenty-two

of the twenty-four people aged forty or older had five children or more.

Table 6. Live births according to age (N=43)

 

 

No. Age Groups Total

Live 15-19 20-39 40+

Births # % # % # °/o # %
0 7 16 2 5 0 O 9 21
1 0 0 2 5 0 0 0 0
2 0 0 4 9 1 2 5 l2
3 0 0 2 5 1 2 3 7
4 0 0 l 2 0 0 1 2
5 0 0 0 0 3 7 3 7
6 0 0 l 2 7 16 8 19
7 0 0 0 0 6 14 6 14
8 0 0 0 0 2 5 2 5
10 0 0 0 0 2 5 2 5
11 0 0 0 0 I 2 1 2
12 0 0 0 0 1 2 1 2
Total 7 16 12 28 24 56 43 100

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Often, however, villagers seemed not only to be evaluating the changing costs and
contributions of children when they concluded that one can no longer afford having many
children: changing material desires inflect their evaluations of how many children they
can afford. A conversation between two relatively wealthy young professionals during a
festival held in honor of the Patron Saint of one of the barrios evidences these changing
desires. One of the two cousins had returned with his family from Mexico City for the
fiesta, and they both had gathered in the kitchen of one of their parents to eat dinner,

drink beer and chat for a while during the first evening of the fiesta. As they sat at the

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kitchen table, which was housed within a wooden shack with dirt floors, they
commiserated about how much more difficult it was to make ends meet in the current
day. As evidence, they noted that their parents could support ten children in their day,
but that they struggled to meet the needs of two. Nonetheless, the professional son and
his wife own multiple homes, multiple cars and luxury goods including a television, a
stereo and a VCR, which contrast markedly with his parents’ limited material wealth.
Their comments highlight a generational discrepancy in desires: their parents contribute
to the family economy in order to gain refrigerators, shoes and health services, while they
aspire to cars, multiple homes and vacations.

In addition to their different economic desires, an important divergence appears to
be emerging between older and younger adults according to their levels of engagement in
local sociality. These networks typically afford older adults with more prestige and
esteem, and, as a result, they have typically pressed younger adults to uphold social
obligations and social norms to ensure their good standing and that of their family
members. Older parents often press their children to uphold these obligations and norms
with the caution that they will have to rely on them in the future. In addition, older
villagers often use other means to press younger family members to uphold social norms
that would reflect poorly on the family members and jeopardize their positions when they
are transgressed. Nonetheless, while older adults continue to rely on these networks for
economic resources, those younger adults who have successfully accessed more material
wealth through professional employment, migration or other means are not as materially
tied to these networks. Increasing economic security enables some of those who perceive

the social networks as burdensome to escape them. For example, Sylvia held a large

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‘modern’ banquet to celebrate her graduation from nursing school, and commented that
the modern celebrations were much preferable to the ‘traditional’ ones in her community,
because she did not incur the ongoing ‘debts’ associated with the guesa exchanges in her
community. Moreover, this security provides some youth with the ability to maintain
themselves without the contributions of their parents. Thus, for some, a parents’
disapproval of their failure to uphold these networks or of social transgressions does not
necessarily threaten their economic viability. It may, however, do so for their discordant
parents. I examine how these shifting power relations in the family shape ongoing

contests over gender inequalities below.

Renegotiating gender, power and romance

Most revitalizationists argue that Mixtec gender relations are complementary, but
not hierarchical. Juan Julian Caballero expresses these sentiments when he claims that
“everything seems to be articulated in the life of the indigenous matrimony, and it only
appears impeded when one of the partners is of non-indigenous origin” (2002288).
Nonetheless, Verdean women of different ages expressed their disaccord with the
women’s status within the family. During interviews, many women recalled the fear they
felt at having to leave their families and begin a life with people they didn’t know. Na
Mariaelena, a 51-year old woman recounted her reticence to the formation of her union
with her husband when she was fourteen years old:

H.D.: How did you get married, or how did you decide to get married?

Na Mariaelena: Well, I just did it. It wasn’t my idea, because I had to get married. It was
by force because my father and mother told me, “Daughter, someone has asked for you,
so you have to get married.”

H.D.: You didn’t want to?

Na Mariaelena: Well, no! I didn’t want to get married, because I was just a girl. But, the
father decides.

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Not surprisingly, given these sentiments, some girls fought against the unions. In fact,
some wedding madrinas, or female sponsors, counted among their tasks ensuring that the
bride-to-be did not escape. Other girls never reached the wedding ceremony, as they
outwitted their parents and intended suitors by running away during the extended year-
long process of negotiations leading up to the wedding. Migration was not necessarily a
sure way to escape from arranged marriages, though, as several women report having had
their marriages arranged while living in Mexico City. These villagers’ accounts conflict
with revitalizationists assertions that outside interference has generated women’s
disaccord.

Arranged marriages have all but disappeared in Pueblo Verde during the last three
decades. The table below, which summarizes interview data, reflects this transformation:
the vast majority of the villagers who were over forty years old formed their unions
through arranged marriages, while none of those under forty did so.

Table 7. Unions among married villagers (N=4l)

 

 

Age Arranged Other Total
Marriage Union
# % # % # %
Under 40 years old 0 0 18 44 18 44
Over 40 years old 16 39 7 17 23 56

 

 

Youth’s increasing movement within the village and beyond, associated with
increasing levels of formal education and economic transformations, is one of the most
important changes facilitating these trends. Increased movement has reduced parents’
ability to monitor the behavior of youth and impose their expectations, creating spaces
within which young people have sought to rewrite their relationships in ways that

empower them. Villagers observe that growing migration to urban destinations increased

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girls’ awareness of different styles of forming relationships, and, armed with this
knowledge, they increasingly rejected arranged marriages. Women and girls’ ongoing
discontent with gender inequities continues to shape these changes.

These struggles continue to contribute to ongoing trends towards increasingly
flexible and less formal unions. The table below summarizes Mexican census data which
indicates that formal marriage ceremonies dropped ten percent between 1990 and 2000 in
the community, at the same time that free unions doubled from four to eight percent.

Table 8. Changes in marital status in villagers 12 years old and older, 1990 to 2000.

 

 

 

 

 

Year Marital status Total
Single Formal Free Separated/ Widowed
union union divorced
# % # % # % # % # % #
I990 340 33 557 55 41 4 11 I 69 7 1018
2000 421 35 542 45 100 8 18 15 122 10 1203
Change +81 +2 -15 -l 1 +59 +4 +7 +14 +53 +3 +185

 

Data source: INEGI (n.d.) Sistema de Indicadores para el Seguimiento de la Situacion de la Mujer en
México. Electronic resource, www.inegi.gob.mx, accessed November 15, 2006.

Young women address the same kinds of concerns their mothers and grandmothers felt
and sometimes fought against over the limited power they were afforded in their unions
as they struggle to make their current unions better for them. Despite this commonality,
older women’s intimate engagement in and reliance on social networks for connections,
esteem, and resources differently constructs their interests in relation to young women’s
propriety. Consequently, young women frequently encounter their mothers and their
grandmothers as their greatest adversaries as they struggle to remake unions in ways that

afford them more power.

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Women’s honor, sexuality and monogamy

Villagers recount the importance of prohibitions against girls’ and women’s
interactions with boys and men in public in shaping women’s conduct and social status in
history. Nonetheless, changing norms led IMSS researchers to conclude that women’s
virginity and monogamy are not major concerns among Verdeans villagers’ (IMSS-
Solidaridad 2000269). Young people increasingly come together and scope out potential
mates in public spaces, such as at the basketball courts in the evenings, as well as at
dances and at school. I was surprised by this seeming laxity in concern over young
women’s virginity in the family where I resided. Just a few days after I arrived in the
village, a male friend of my host’s single, twenty-eight year old daughter spent the night
alone with her in her large room, which she had divided into a bedroom and a living area.
No one seemed to object to his presence. I was even more surprised the following day,
when another young man arrived, who turned out to be a man she had been dating for
several months. Throughout the duration of the research period, he visited multiple times
each week for overnight stays.

I came to understand that many older villagers’ seeming perrnissiveness reflects
expectations associated with common law marriage norms, which recognize marriage as
a social process carried out over time that includes sexual relations, leads to pregnancy,
and is cemented by a couple living together. In this context, many villagers’ perspectives
on virginity and premarital sex may appear remarkably permissive because they impose
marital norms on relationships that other observers would not consider marriage. Like

these observers, many youth conceive of their encounters as part of ‘courting’, and

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conflicts arise when they do not uphold other villagers’ expectations that they will

formalize their relationship.

Policing young women’s honor: Gender and generation in contests over unions

When Adriana became pregnant, her partner, who was already committed to
another relationship, refused to parent their child. In an interview, she recalled how other
villagers stigmatized her for her single-parent status, and described how many villagers
label single mothers as cualquieras, or whores. Her reflection intimates the social contest
and critique that emerge when women fail to uphold certain standards for propriety in
establishing relationships. As noted in Chapter Five, kuentu, or gossip, is one of the key
forms of social control villagers employ to pressure others to conform to their ideals for
behavior. Gossipers especially criticize young women who fail to uphold these
expectations. For example, Teresa, a 64-year old woman herself criticized by many as a
gossip, critiqued a 15-year old girl’s courting behavior. Teresa criticized the girl not
because she had spent time alone in the milpa with a young man, but because she then
sought another boyfriend. Guadalupe, a 42 year old single mother of three children,
conveyed similar sentiments from her perch on Teresa’s porch, where she reported that
she informed one teenage girl, “If she wanted to go off with a boy then she was old
enough to get married!”

Teresa warned of the consequences of failing to uphold these expectations for
monogamy one day when explaining the scene we happened on, where a man of about
sixty years was beating his partner with a stick in the middle of town during the middle of

the day. Teresa indicated the woman was his third partner, that the man had a history of

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brutal violence, and suggested that he had killed one of his first two partners. After
passersby stopped the attack we witnessed by pulling him off of his partner, he stumbled
over to Teresa’s porch. She refused to serve him, seeking to distance herself from the
spectacle and reasoning that she might somehow be held culpable if she served him
alcohol after what had just happened. Nevertheless, she claimed that the woman had
provoked the beating with her improprieties. She explained,

Well, that woman comes here to work, not to look for men! Just like you. You’re here to
work. Just like me, I’m here to sell firewater, not find a man.

Gossip affects those most intimately engaged in the social networks linking
gossipers and their eager listeners, and others who define their goals and seek esteem in
relation to these networks. The failure of subjects to uphold these expectations in the first
place suggests their likely distance from these norms, and from the associated power of
gossipers. Nonetheless, shame and the marginalization it can cause influence the family
members of subjects of gossip who are engaged in these networks, and whose social
status is intimately bound with these networks.

For example, one afternoon while I sat with a shifting group of about eight
women on Teresa’s storefront, the women began talking about Adan, a young man cited
who had terminated a relationship with his ‘wife’ and begun another. While Adan got
away with an enjoinder to maintain this relationship, the women were less forgiving of
his former ‘wife’, who had terminated the relationship and returned to her first partner.
They vented their discontent by talking at length about the positive qualities possessed by
his new girlfriend in the presence of his old former ‘mother-in-law’, whose cheeks grew
increasingly crimson until she finally got up and left. In a context where these social

linkages ground social status and shape material wealth, the ruptures in these linkages

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caused by gossip have significant implications. As a result, female family members
engaged in these networks often have much at stake in ensuring that their younger family
members uphold expectations for monogamy and formalizing commitments. Given the
high stakes of the shaming in social networks in relation to young women’s
improprieties, villagers involved in these networks have often taken measures to pressure
their family members to uphold their expectations for relationship formation. In one
case, the parents of a teenage girl were so unsettled by their daughter’s unformalized
relationship with a local young man that they enlisted the assistance of the authorities to
force the young couple to marry. The couple still refused. The couple’s refusal aptly
symbolizes how the relative empowerment of youth vis-a-vis their elder counterparts is

contributing to the outcomes of ongoing struggles over the Verdean family.

Conclusion

Villagers of all ages recounted gender-related contests over the family. Their
reflections attest to the salience of these struggles in Verdean history. Moreover, in their
stories, Verdeans indicate how age has influenced villagers’ perceptions of their interests
and, accordingly, the positions they stake out in relation to these contests over the family.
Youths’ increasing economic status vis-a-vis their elder counterparts has shifted age-
based power relations in recent years, propelling transformations in the outcomes of these
gender-based familial contests. In the next two chapters, I examine how Oportunidades
service providers’ and revitalizationists’ efforts intersect with these dynamics to influence

Verdean contests over the family.

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CHAPTER EIGHT: ENCOUNTERING OTHERS WITHIN

In Chapter Six, I argued that articulations of indigenous culture have importantly
influenced Verdean sociality, and prompted a divergence between those who bear
indigenous culture and those who wield it. Thereafter, in Chapter Seven, I examined how
shifts in the context within which villagers engage in ongoing contests over the ideal
family are influencing the outcomes of these contests. In particular, I argued that desires
for goods associated with ‘progress’ and villagers’ different abilities to access these
goods are prompting shifts in generational power relations. These shifts, in turn, are
shaping the outcomes of villagers’ ongoing cultural struggles, including those dealing
with the family.

In this chapter, I turn to examine how IMSS-Oportunidades shapes villagers’
contests over the family, along with their contests over the value of the distinctiveness of
local experience, through family planning interventions. As I do so, I examine how the
Program contributes to the divergence among villagers in those who wield culture and
those who bear it. Moreover, I closely examine how that distinction influences villagers’

relationships with one another.

The value of large families in Pueblo Verde

During interviews, Verdeans cited a wealth of advantages to large families. The
most frequently cited advantage was linked to family economies: more people working
together can produce more wealth and resources. As many observers have noted

especially for agricultural economies, children often contribute essential labor that helps

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the family meet its members’ consumption needs (Caldwell 1981). Informants often
cited this contribution when they remarked that bigger families are advantageous because
people accomplish more by working together. A couple of people, commenting on this
reality, observed that whether or not children pose an economic asset or burden to the
family economy depends on lifestyle: large families are still only economically
burdensome when parents send their children to school. Many villagers also cited the
advantage of large families for family economies outside of agricultural production,
within villagers’ extraordinarily diversified contemporary family economies. In these
cases, one or two siblings may help with local agricultural production, one may help with
selling surplus at regional markets, a couple may pursue professional degrees in other
regions, and others may migrate to Mexico City, northern Mexico, or the United States
for work. Thus, multiple villagers observed that whether or not children contribute to the
family economy or burden it depends on the age of the children: as they grow older they
make greater contributions. Villagers noted other economic advantages of large families,
as well. Most intriguingly, several people noted that parents work as hard as necessary to
ensure that their children’s needs are met. So, as opposed to children draining wealth
from the family through the consumption of resources, they cited having more children as

a wealth creation strategy because it motivated parents to work harder.

Table 9. Advantages of large families (N=27)

 

 

Advantages #
To contribute to family economy 12
To help parents when they are older 8

To share time with others

To help each other out

To get more government sggport

Note: Many respondents provided multiple answers.

t—IKJI\I

 

207

The second most frequently cited advantage of larger families was to ensure that
parents have enough children to take care of them in old age. The fact that elderly people
without children are the population with the direst circumstances in Pueblo Verde today
attests to the acuity of many adults’ concerns with ensuring they had enough children so
that at least one helped in their old age. Informants also often cited larger families as
valuable because they provide a basis for convivencia, or sharing time with others.
Finally, several people mentioned that larger families in general are advantageous
because family members help each other out.

Although villagers young and old ultimately cited an array of advantages of large
families, when I queried about the advantages of small families, almost all of them
responded that small families are preferable because large families cost too much.
Villagers’ praise of small families was remarkable for multiple reasons. First, many
respondents who asserted the superiority of small families had relatively large families:
while thirty-two of the forty-four interview respondents asserted advantages of small
families, half of them had between five and twelve children. In addition, in multiple
cases people who had their children before the introduction of discourses of choice,
control, and planning explained their families with these ideas. For example, a mother of
six explained that she chose to have six because more would have been too many. When
I responded by asking her how she had kept herself from having more, my suggestion
that she employed some kind of technique to keep her from having more children left her

speechless." Even a couple of informants who had clearly suffered because they had too

 

3 1 Older women’s and older men’s responses often indicated that they perceived large families as beneficial
and acted accordingly. Nonetheless, men typically controlled fertility, and gender differences in their
responses suggest that the physical and work burdens of pregnancy, childbirth and childrearing led at least
some women to desire more control over their fertility decisions. Scholars working in other parts of rural

208

few children claimed the superiority of small families. In fact, people often asserted the
superiority of small families with such conviction that I felt compelled to skip the
question that followed, about whether there were advantages to large families.
Nonetheless, I asked all of the questions as a matter of protocol. When I immediately
queried whether there were advantages to large families, many people initially seemed
surprised by the question. After thinking for a moment, they often proceeded to
enthusiastically report on the advantages of large families in their experiences. On more
than one occasion, informants who had just concluded to me the superiority of small
families changed their minds and asserted that people should have large families.
Villagers’ responses to my questions about ideal family size reflect the recent
history and current context of family planning promotion, within which clinic personnel
have promoted the superiority of small families as reasoned and denigrated large families
as unreasoned. In constructing these explanations, providers draw from longstanding
colonial discourses that identified those who spoke Spanish and used Spanish style
clothing as gente de razo'n, or pe0ple of reason, in contrast to indigenous people (see
Chapter Three). Thus, IMSS-Oportunidades personnel often explained large families as
a product of too much cultural enmeshment and its corollary, insufficient education. For
example, the clinic doctor argued that insufficient education leads people in rural areas to
have many children despite inadequate resources to care for them, and indicated that
Oportunidades is meant to redress this educational shortfall. She explained,

Principally the program Oportunidades is in the rural communities because that is
precisely where much of this [family education] is lacking. In the families, and they were
, families that lacked the necessities sufficient to take care of them. They lacked adequate

 

Oaxaca have described women’s extensive knowledge and use of methods for regulating their fertility
(Browner 1986). I did not ask individual respondents whether they used these methods unless they first
broached the topic.

209

education. So, now, the program is working so that everyone knows about family
education. The mothers of families, so that they are aware, no? Of how many children
they should have. How many they want to have. And, methods of family planning are
discussed with each one, and talking seriously about how important the decision that the
woman makes is about in which moment and what methods they want, no?

Others explicitly situated culture within these links between education and fertility,
contrasting the unreasoned cultural approach of ‘awaiting the children God sent’ with the
reasoned planning approach. .For example, when I asked Adriana, the part-time clinic
nurse, whether large families were a part of Mixtec culture, she replied that Mixtec
culture causes large families because it is a “cultura muy arraigada,” a deeply-rooted
culture. As she continued, she linked this deeply-rooted culture with lack of education
and large families: “It was because they lacked sufficient reason, media, and orientation
that they followed this family rhythm.” She signaled these connections in another way
when I asked about the notion that large families are disadvantageous because they
require more money. She replied,

It’s true. For those of us who use reason, who think of necessities. Other people say,
‘Los que mandan Dios’ [Those that God sends].

Thus, providers conveyed perceptions that the effects of culture render especially
encultured sectors of the community immune to reasoning, and to the broader educational

strategies they employ to press these villagers to have smaller families.

Unreasoning and silencing

Villagers’ descriptions of the locally-salient benefits of large families suggest that
those who approached their families by awaiting “los hijos que Dios mandaba”
strategized to have as many children as possible, which contrasts with the

disinterestedness suggested by the interpretation that they awaited ‘whatever God sent’.

210

Nonetheless, villagers widely employ this language to explain shifting perspectives on
ideal family size as a transformation from the unreasoned approach of awaiting ‘whatever
God sent’ to a more reasoned planning approach. For example, in Eustolia’s reflection
on how villagers’ approaches to forming their families have changed in recent history,
she characterizes family creation prior to the introduction of family planning as guided
solely by nature:

Now many people come and teach us. Its like, I don’t know, but I hear people say ‘we
have to take this medicine’. ‘We have to wait a while after having one child before
having another.’ ‘Have two, or up to three, no more.’ But before - nothing. One came
after another and another, until they stopped coming. I had twelve and four died - two
girls and two boys...

Continuing, she cites a local discourse contending that prior to the introduction of family
planning, villagers didn’t know where babies came from:

It’s like they say, we lived between the two of us and we didn’t know how it was that the
babies came and that’s the way it went until they stopped coming.

These discourses negate the locally-salient reasoning underlying large families, and in so
doing denigrate local experience. In interviews, some villagers recounted how clinic
personnel employed coercion and violence to force them to acquiesce to smaller families,
indicating that conflict and violence have surrounded efforts to unreason large families
and denigrate local experience.

Mario, a 70 year old man, captured the top-down approach clinic service
providers used to teach villagers the virtues of small families when he explained, “We
had many children because there was no doctor around to tell us to only have a few.”
Multiple villagers who were unwilling to voluntarily undergo interventions aimed at
ensuring they did not have any more children recount that clinic personnel took

additional measures to gain their compliance. For example, when I asked Esmeralda, a

211

42-year old mother of five, how many kids she had wanted, she responded, “Well, I just
wanted three I was thinking, but, well, .. umm, plus two...” I asked how it was that she
ended up having five children instead of three, but she instead explained that she did not
have more than five because the clinic nurse threatened to impose a fine on her if she
refused to undergo a tubal ligation.

Esmeralda: Well, I had five and the nurse that is here, [Mary] — because she had just
began, no? Or it had been three years since she began — and she said, ‘I’m going to give
you a 500 peso32 fine!’ she said, and I thought, that’s a lot of money! And I did it, I went
to [nearby city]. And then I didn’t have any more kids.

H.D.: Oh, because of the surgery?

Esmeralda: Yes.

H.D.: But, the ‘fine...?

Esmeralda: (laughing) Yeah, she said she was going to give me a fine. Because of that,
to avoid the fine, I went to [nearby city].

H.D.: Was she serious, or was it a joke?

Esmeralda: Who knows, because I think she was serious!

H.D: Oh.

Esmeralda: Because after, well... But I also, I didn’t want to have any more kids because
it’s a lot. And I didn’t have any money either, and my husband was in Mexico City!

Esmeralda’s indications of her doubts about whether to have a tubal are suggestive,
especially when compared to the experiences of other women whose unequivocal desires
for more children were obstructed when IMSS physicians performed tubal ligations on
them without their awareness or consent.

Elena, a 44-year old mother of six, went to the hospital for health care assistance
in delivering her baby and the doctor performed a tubal ligation on her without her
consent. When I asked her how she ended up having six children in an interview, she
explained that she had her last child via cesarean section. I asked, “And after you didn’t
get pregnant anymore?” She responded that she didn’t. “Because you didn’t want to
have anymore children?” She laughed, “Because they didn’t want me to -— the doctors.”

In contrast to many other villagers’ indecisiveness about the relative merits of small and

 

3’ About 50 dollars.

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large families, she had a clear preference for large families. In fact, she is one of the few
informants who did not identify advantages to small families.

Soledad, a 50-year old victim of domestic abuse, also reported that a physician
performed a tubal ligation on her without her consent when she traveled to the regional
hospital for treatment after being beaten by her husband. She had seven pregnancies, but
lost five, more than one due to her husband’s abuse. She explained that she had wanted
many children because she would have enjoyed being together in a big family and
because there would have been more people to help each other out. But, she reflected,
“There were few children — I wasn’t able to have many.” The doctor capitalized on her
request for medical assistance with the wounds she acquired from her husband’s battery
to perform a tubal ligation on her without her consent. In the process, they ended her
hopes of having a larger family.

These accounts suggest that service providers have used threats of withholding
resources to coerce those women who were uncertain about whether they wanted more
children to comply with clinic demands, while resorting to force with those who refused
to comply. Other women observed the violent and coercive means through which
physicians imposed their ideas of ideal family size on some villagers, and as a result
feared family planning. Eustolia, a 55-year old woman, recounted the fear she felt as she
observed how service providers submitted other women to ‘family planning’, and the
hardships she endured as she strategized to avoid exposure to it. She explained,

Na Eustolia: I had 12 children and four died — two girls and two boys. . .. And what
was I going to do if there was no medicine? Not even one pill, there was nothing.

, Just now, when the nurses came along, they said that women go and they cut their
stomachs! And, because of this people certainly had fewer children! The truth is, I was
really scared that they would cut me! So, I had two more children. . ., and they kept
saying and saying that they were going to give me pills. Like, then they would scare us

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by saying that if we didn’t protect ourselves when we had sex we could die. And, well, I
was scared. ..

Assistant: So, you were scared?

Na Eustolia: Yes, I’m scared to go to the doctor. I’m really afraid, even for childbirth.
I’m not going to lie, I absolutely will not go. If my nine months are complete and my
stomach begins to bother me, my medicine will be nothing more than a couple of plants.
I use this and nothing else and that’s how my baby is born. That’s how it’s been with 12
kids; I didn’t take one pill.

The fear na Eustolia so eloquently expressed evidences the power of the threat of forced
sterilization, and the likelihood that this threat led many to deny desiring large families.
In this context, the assertion of local reasonability and the cultural embeddedness it
signified could be a basis for ‘having her stomach cut.’ Moreover, she conveyed her
continued anxiety over the possibility that a provider may perceive her to still be fertile,
as she repeatedly promised that she was no longer capable of becoming pregnant.

Assistant: So, you just stopped getting pregnant?

A Eustolia: Until it stopped. I tell the doctor the same thing — you know how they ask so
much. We have to tell them everything, because we are in Oportunidades and we tell
them everything. I’ve told the doctor the truth. I stopped having kids... Yes, we
stopped. We won’t have anymore. It’s the truth. I’m not going to tell lies claiming to be
on the pill, or something, no. Because I was afraid, that’s why I had all of the kids I had
until they stopped coming.

While a Eustolia passionately conveys her continued fear of being forced to undergo
surgery, other women more quietly conveyed in interviews that they chose not to enroll
in Oportunidades, despite clear indications of their need, because they ‘could not comply
with the requirements’.

To the extent that ‘the women who remain’ symbolize local distinctiveness, their
perspectives could make them targets of forced surgery. Their minds and bodies
constitute a key terrain in ongoing contests over the value of local experience, and

indigeneity. In this context, the forcibly sterilized bodies of some women attest to the

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power propping up the notion that large families are unreasonable, and the underlying

denigration of local experience.

Educating youth

Clinic personnel convey their assumptions of villagers’ differential enculturedness
and its implications for their ability to reason to adolescents in their educational sessions.
Program materials, the clinic physician and the nurses employed symbols of especially
encultured adults to educate youth about incorrect behaviors. For example, during a
session on gender equity, the clinic nurse, Sylvia, anchored her discussion of the
declining significance of fertility in defining masculinity in a neighboring community
that is perceived as especially encultured. She asserted that people no longer subscribe to
the notion that using contraceptives makes a man less masculine. Her observation
thereafter that men in the neighboring community continue to do so and prohibit their
wives from use contraceptives because they fear their wives will be unfaithful would
seem to contradict her original contention. Nonetheless, she drew from the symbolism of
these especially encultured subjects as backward to support her contention that people no
longer believe that using contraceptives impinges on masculinity.

Significantly, Sylvia, a villager and clinic nurse, hinged her reference to an other
on a neighboring community that is perceived as more culturally embedded, where the
Spanish language is less widespread and ‘traditional’ dress is more widely used. In
contrast, the Program material depicts encounters between educated clinic staff and
culturally embedded people within the same community. For example, the video on

family planning discussed in Chapter Seven depicted a father who was considering a

215

 

proposal for marriage on behalf of his daughter. The father initially rejected the proposal
based on his understanding that contraceptives can be lethal, but the clinic doctor
educated him and the padrino that this was a misconception. Significantly, in the
discussion following the film, the resident doctor incorporated the group members into an
educated ‘us’ that she contrasted with their culturally-embedded older adult family
members. She asked the group members whether they knew anyone who believed that
contraceptives are dangerous, like the father portrayed in the film. The participants
affirmed, and the doctor urged them to help by educating these uninformed villagers.

Although service providers clearly cite indigenous culture as a culprit in hindering
reasoning, ambiguities in the relations of causality between education, culture and lack of
reason enable some villagers to focus on educational differences as they adopt these
perspectives to categorize others as different from them in the community. Thus, those
who explained some villagers’ large families as products of insufficient reason
understood this deficiency as a product not of culture, but of insufficient education. The
perceptions Salvador, a 31-year old local neighborhood leader, conveyed in an interview
illustrate. Salvador contrasted reasonable villagers with small families to their
unreasoned counterparts in his account of the changes in how people in Pueblo Verde
approach planning for their families. In his explanation, he echoed the views of clinic
personnel that the educational system provides villagers with reason, thus enabling them
to perceive the advantages of small families.

Well, it used to be that people wanted lots of kids, no? Now I don’t think that young
people think that way. Because, you know how before, because people didn’t have
schooling, they didn’t go to school, and... well, that’s why school is important, because
more than anything it gives reason.

216

Although villagers’ initial responses to my queries about ideal family size suggested that
they had arrived at a consensus over the superiority of small families, deeper probing
revealed villagers’ ongoing divergences over the value of large families and local
experience. An interchange between my 31 year old educated, bilingual research
assistant and Na Eustolia, a 55 year old monolingual Mixtec woman with no formal
education, attests to these ongoing contests:

Assistant: Are there people who say that if we have few children, we’ll live better?

Na Eustolia: There are people who say how lucky you are to have children!

Assistant: What, when there are many?

Na Eustolia: When there are many.

Assistant: But, if there are few children, do you think people would live better?

Na Eustolia: Well, I think a little good and a little bad. But, put my response that it’s best
if there are many children.

Assistant: That it’s good?

Na Eustolia: Yes.

Assistant: If there are few — you say that it’s better why?

Na Eustolia: Well it’s better if there are few because we don’t have enough for our
expenses, but what are we going to do if we already have the children?

Assistant: And if there are many children it’s also good?

Na Eustolia: Well, it’s good when there are many children because we have people to be
together with. If we just have one or two, they leave, and we stay alone and then we
don’t have anyone to talk with.

Although my assistant ultimately conveyed Na Eustolia’s assertion large families are
beneficial, she refused to do so until na Eustolia acquiesced to the idea that smaller
families are better. Na Eustolia’s reliance on my assistant to communicate her
perceptions recalls the shifting generational power relations that are shaping these

COI‘llCSlS.

Conclusion
_ In this chapter, I have analyzed the conceptions of cultural difference
Oportunidades service providers advance to villagers while pressing them to adopt

smaller families. IMSS-Oportunidades designates enculturedness as prohibiting the

217

—‘ — -11.; ‘5‘. J- .-

ability to reason, and providers identify the ‘women who remain’ as especially
encultured. lmportantly, in educational programs, service providers press youth to adopt
their perceptions of certain villagers as more encultured and less reasoned, and to
promote and vigil conformity with Program aims in the community. As they provide
youth with a culture frame for conceptualizing the value of local distinctiveness, they
contribute to distinctions between those who bear culture and those who wield it. The
perspectives and bodies of culture-bearers constitute the terrain of battle in the ensuing
contests over ideal family size, in which villagers simultaneously dispute the value of
local experience. As the perspectives and bodies of the women who remain symbolize
the value of the distinctiveness of local experience, the denigration of their perspectives
and the violation of their bodies by IMSS-Oportunidades personnel and villagers alike

symbolizes a deeper process of deni grating Verdeanness.

218

CHAPTER NINE: VALORIZING ‘CULTURE’ IN VERDEAN CULTURAL
CONTESTS

Thus far in the dissertation, I have argued that perceptions of the ‘women who
remain’ as quintessential bearers of indigenous culture have led them to bear much of the
hardships caused by the denigration of indigenousness. To the extent that observers
deem their experiences as emblematic of culture, these women’s self-defensive acts often
resonate with broader efforts to defend indigeneity. Thus, they would seem to be the first
beneficiaries of revitalization aims. Nonetheless, revitalizationists have largely excluded
this sector of the population from their efforts, as they focus their attention on the
educational system.

The educational focus provides a convenient way for revitalizationists to harness
state resources and authority in pursuing their efforts. It also attests to the firm grounding
of revitalization in modernity. One leading revitalizationist discussed the congruence of
modernity with revitalization goals during an interview, citing the use of computers to
write the Mixtec language to support his claim that the movement is not against
‘development’ and to evidence how revitalizationists draw from modern and traditional
elements. Because revitalizationists often affirm oppositions between indigenousness
and modernity in articulating the value of indigenousness, the modern focus imbues their
efforts with a fundamental contradiction: it excludes those who provide the movement
with symbolic weight from actively participating in it. The investigation in Pueblo Verde
suggests that revitalizationists may contribute to the processes they seek to combat by

empowering youth with ‘culture’ in their ongoing cultural contests and excluding many

219

of the community members who are waging battles that resonate with their aims. I

examine these tendencies below.

Culture and the uneven enculturing of selves in Pueblo Verde

In my examination of the changing family in Chapter Five, I related how older
adults repeatedly responded to the questions I had designed to gauge negative sentiments
over change by affirming the positive changes they had seen. Some of these villagers
were so moved by the positive changes they had seen that they expressed their
willingness, even eagerness, to relinquish practices or behaviors perceived as impeding
their abilities to acquire greater wealth. Thus, the limited ways in which older villagers
conveyed a conception of their everyday practices as having a more transcendental
salience in relation to development typically reflected negative appraisals of these
practices as impeding progress. My efforts to target my questions more precisely towards
their concerns about losing “culture” were no more effective. “Culture” lacked resonance
for villagers over the age of fifty. Like “culture”, costumbre, or custom, objectifies
certain traits and practices, bestowing on them a new dimension of meaning grounded
principally in their inheritance from the past and their distinctiveness from mestizo ways.
Although some of these villagers were more familiar with costumbre, many seemed to
regard costumbre as something that by nature is not lost, an interpretation that preempts
the emergence of concerns about losing costumbres.

By contrast, the perspectives youth communicated during interviews indicated
that they had adopted conceptions of costumbre and culture attached to positive

valuations of these practices. Youth readily discussed culture and costumbre, the value

220

of both and the importance of protecting them. Moreover, they reported discussing these
themes in school. The table below displays the number and percentage of interviewees

in each age group who were familiar with the concept of costumbre. While seventy-three
percent of interviewees under thirty years old indicated familiarity with the concept, only

twenty-four percent of those thirty and older did so.

Table 10: Familiarity with costumbre concept according to age group (N=44)

 

 

Age Familiarity with costumbre
# %

15-29 1 1/1 5 73

30+ 7/29 24

 

There were also clear differences among those who indicated familiarity with the
concept in relation to how they interpreted it. The vast majority of villagers under thirty
years old — eighty percent - identified fiestas as costumbres. Multiple younger villagers
also cited the language, followed in decreasing frequency by the milpa, food and dress.
Although the greatest percentage of older villagers also cited fiestas, only thirty-one
percent did so. Moreover, one third of these villagers qualified their answers by
remarking that although fiestas were a costumbre, they had changed a lot during their
lives. The informant in the older group who cited weddings as a local costumbre
similarly noted changing marital practices. Older villagers also listed a wider array of
costumbres, adding ‘the town history’, ‘eating simply’, ‘drinking firewater’ and ‘taking
care of children’ to those listed above. Finally, one reported that costumbres differ in

every family. Thus, while younger adults conveyed a limited array of practices and

221

objects as costumbres, those older adults who indicated familiarity with the concept
interpreted it in ways that suggest that, as the primary subjects of these practices taken to
symbolize cultural distinctiveness, they drew from their own lived experience to interpret

and qualify the concept. I present these trends in tabular form below.

Table 11: Costumbres identified according to age (N=44)

 

C ostumbres Age
1 5-29 30+

# % # %
Fiestas 12 80 9 3 1
Language 5 33 2 7
Milpa 3 20 5 17
Dress 2 l3 0 0
Food 2 l 3 0 0
Straw weaving I 7 3 10
Tequios l 7 l 3
Weddings 1 7 l 3
Get togethers l 7 0 0

 

 

Note: Many respondents provided multiple responses.

Verdean villagers’ responses to my questions about the importance of the Mixtec
language also reflected age-related differences in the adoption of the culture concept
among villagers. Most younger villagers described the value of the Mixtec language as

residing in its symbolism of their unique cultural heritage. For example, one respondent

222

asserted, “[Mixtec is] very important because it is something original from the
community that no one can take away from us if we don’t stop speaking it.” Another
responded, “Mixtec is important because it characterizes our pueblo, the unique way of
dressing and talking.” In contrast, older villagers located the value of the language in its
utility for communicating. In this vein, many responded that the Mixtec language was
important because they did not speak Spanish, or because “that’s the language we speak
here”. Some respondents who followed the same kind of approach of locating the value
of the language in its utility arrived at the conclusion that Spanish is important. Several
of these respondents asserted the necessity of having both languages to be able to
function effectively within and outside of the community. A few asserted that Spanish
was most important, claiming that without it one cannot eat, and on that basis asserted
that the Mixtec language is not important.

I present data on how villagers described the value of language, either in relation

to its utility or as a symbol of identity, organized according to age in the table below.

Table 12: Importance of Mixtec language according to age (N=42)

 

 

Age Description of importance of language
Mixtec utility Spanish utility Mixtec identity
# % # % # %

15-29 5 12 1 2 9 21

30—49 6 14 0 0 3 7

50+ 12 29 6 14 0 0

 

 

Sixty percent of the youngest villagers interviewed described the importance of the
Mixtec language in relation to its value as a signifier of Mixtec identity. Among thirty to

forty-nine year old villagers, forty percent described the importance of the language in

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relation to Mixtec identity, while sixty percent explained its value in relation to its utility.
Finally, all of the villagers over fifty years old explained the value of language — Mixtec
and Spanish — in relation to its utility.

In sum, villagers’ discussions of language and culture indicate that most younger
villagers have adopted conceptions of local practices as having additional value as
symbols of indigenous cultural difference, while older villagers have not. The latter
generally lacked familiarity with discourses promoting costumbre and culture as bases of
pride. Although a substantial minority of older villagers indicated familiarity with
costumbre, they were typically unsure in their use of the concept and did not explicitly
link it with a political critique of the marginalization of indigenous peoples. In contrast,
younger villagers regard key costumbres as contributing to their own unique worth as
indigenous peoples, and they perceive their links to these practices as lending value to
their selves.

For Mixtec revitalizationists and other indigenous rights activists, the power of
the cultural symbols they advance lies in their ability to reference a broader way of life
and orientation. Nonetheless, Verdeans do not appear to understand these symbols and
their value in the same way. Rather, for Verdean youth and younger adults who have
adopted these concepts, the value of these symbols stems from their inclusion in a
relatively small set of unique expressions of difference that are increasingly valued in the
larger mestizo world. Thus, the significance of the fiesta lies in its appreciation within
the larger mestizo world, and its corresponding ability to bestow value on those
associated with it, not in its harkening of a more diffusive unique cultural essence that

infuses everyday experience in the community. As a result, youth do not interpret these

224

valorizations in ways that challenge the facets of Verdean experience that have been
denigrated on the basis that they symbolize indigenousness. On the contrary, in some
cases youth interpret these valorizations in ways that affirm the denigration of local
experience. Below, I examine these dynamics more closely through a comparison of
three women’s experiences in adopting and making sense of “culture”. I focus on the

three villager-health providers who work at the clinic: Juana, Adriana and Sylvia.

Adopting ‘culture’ in Pueblo Verde: Juana, Adriana and Sylvia

Clinic villager-health providers are compelling subjects for investigating how
revitalizationists’ promotions of indigenous culture intersect with denigrations of
indigenous culture. While villagers with the highest education levels typically have the
greatest exposure to revitalization perspectives, clinic personnel are among the few
highly-educated villagers who spend most of their time in the village. In addition, IMSS
researchers’ and program designers’ implication of indigenous culture as an impediment
to development, and the corresponding strategies providers are charged with carrying out,
typify the kinds of programs indigenous rights activists seek to combat. In this context,
providers’ adoption of “culture” as a positive point of identification provides an excellent
vantage point for examining how people make sense of these two sets of perspectives,

and the possibilities and limitations of these accommodations.
Juana

- Of the three women, Juana, the thirty-six year old Rural Health Assistant, seems

to most typify what one might associate with the valorization of indigenous culture, and

225

her aspirations for her community most accord with those of revitalizationists. She
considers herself an advocate of the community, especially the women she works with in
her talks, whom she refers to as “mi gente ”, or my people. Her deep appreciation of local
experience challenges denigrations of Verdean experience linked with devaluations of
indigenousness. In the course of my interview with her, she mentioned a wide array of
community practices and characteristics that she considers valuable, including forms of
sociality, values, the environment, work styles, the family division of labor and the
knowledge of elders, in addition to the more commonly referenced symbols of
distinction, including the language and ‘traditional’ forms of dress. For example, when I
initially asked her how she would describe the community to someone who had never
been there, she emphasized Verdeans’ welcoming social conventions:

Well, Pueblo Verde is a very tranquil community, very respectful. The majority of
people know the dialecto. They are very simple, also very kind. Any person — when I do
my home visits, ahl, they always give me my tortilla, my soda. I mean, people really
take care of us — it’s very nice.

Later in the interview, she identified how family members work together as a special
dimension of Verdean experience:

People are simple, hard working. Almost everyone goes to the markets; and the
sefioras are those who go. They are very hard workers, [as senoras. And the senores
stay home and take care of the animals. And what I think I like most is how even
children are involved. Parents inculcate them with the notion that they have to work, and
so even then children go to Tlaxiaco and go along with their little carts and there they
have their little cilantro, there, and they also sell their vegetables. The little ones.

Finally, she intimated her deeper appreciation for the distinctive knowledge of the
community through her assertion that they “must take care of the [older generation],”

adding, “We learn so much from them.”

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J uana’s aspirations for the future correspond with her valorization of local
experience. When I asked her what changes she hoped to see in the next twenty years,
she initially remarked on the need to find new ways of generating income, and grounded
her claims of this need in the recollections of older villagers who had most suffered from

want. She responded,

It would be to educate people, orient their so they change their ways, so that in time they
have a better life than the one they are living now. Because before, the great-
grandparents — oh my! They lived so sadly. Terribly! For example, my mom said that
they walked from here to Chalcatongo, which is almost a day and a night to get to
Chalcatongo. To buy their corn and everything, they had just a few tortillas to eat -— I
mean, one tortilla for each child, no more! And nothing more than a tortilla because there
was no food. So, now, well, thank God we do have, like there is water, people learned to
work the field, we grow a little food, and now we feed ourselves.

After establishing the need and desire for new income- Ienerating opportunities, Juana
described a vision of the future that builds on the local distinctiveness of the community.
In this vision, she emphasizes the need to provide education to villagers to enable them to
improve their agricultural production techniques, as well as providing them skills in other

select areas. She continued,

I think my hope would be that the people change their way of living so they would be
able to do a wider variety of jobs, like, for someone to come and give a course on
construction, or agronomy, more than anything to change the way they work the land, so
they produce more, for example. Because now people use many chemicals so the milpa
produces. It’s very artificial. But I think people can change, eh? They can change. It’s
a question of whether we help one another.

H.D: And, you didn’t mention bringing businesses here for —

- Ay, no! No, I don’t want businesses to come here. They would harm people.

When I further queried her about what would need to happen for these changes to occur,
she focused mainly on education, and included the talks she provides to Oportunidades
recipients as part of this education.

People need to study a bit more. I mean, all of the people should study, and the talks we
give, they should think about them so they can change. Because we give talks, we give
talks, but they enter in one ear and go out the other. So, they need to retain them and

227

understand them. They would change, too. I mean, if they understand the talks, they will
change. Yes, because if I tell them to sweep their houses every day, they can do it... But
there are people who don’t do it. So, people need to be more educated.

In her response, Juana clearly communicates an assumption that villagers sometimes fail
to grasp or act in their best interests, which resonates with more widespread denigrations
of some villagers as lacking reason. Nonetheless, she stands out among the three women
for her appreciation for local distinctiveness, and she conveys this appreciation as she
delineates a vision of a better future grounded in grounded in the current Verdean

experience. Thus, she concludes,

They need to have more varied ways of living, but they must not leave the countryside.

Because the countryside is so beautiful, and from there we can get everything. It’s just a

question of working it.

J uana’s perspectives on the value of local experience and those who embody it
have led her to clash with other members of the clinic repeatedly. One of the more recent
aggravations she complained about in the interview was how the other members of the
clinic staff hold impromptu meetings and threaten Program recipients with the possibility

of losing funds if they do not attend. She related,

Another thing that I don’t like and that bothered me is that they don’t give us prior notice.
I mean, they should notify us, no? Say ‘after the community cleaning people will have to
stay because there is going to be a meeting’. But, they don’t inform us. Instead, at the
last moment they say, people who don’t stay for the talk will get an absence. That — no —
that isn’t the way to do things. I mean, the peOple do understand, and what if at the same
time they had another appointment? But, they stay because it’s the law! It shouldn’t be
that way. For example, if you say, I want a certain amount of people here. Well, tell
them. Tell them —- send them a reason. ‘You know what? People will have to stay
because we are going to vote for representatives.’

In addition to this complaint, Juana successfully advocated on behalf of the Program
recipients she works with, who live in an outlying rancho about fifteen minutes away
from the town center, to reduce their requirements for participating in the monthly

cleaning of centro. Their required participation was reduced from monthly to bimonthly.

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Moreover, she successfully petitioned her supervisors for the right to hold these women’s
educational sessions in a building in the rancho, ending the requirement that they travel
to the clinic. By far most contentiously, Juana complained to her supervisors about other
staff members’ misrepresentation of the Program as requiring participation in the
monthly cleaning. She explained her critique in the interview:

The truth is that they came up with the idea once again to hurt people, because, in the
Program Guidelines, it doesn’t say that we have to sweep. We have to sweep only when
we have the desire to do so because it’s our community. This is what we have to make
people understand, that they need to understand how to do it, but to force them to do it —
no - it’s voluntary. We need to work on behalf of the community, no? But, most people
don’t understand. Well, think about it — ‘we’ll give them an absence!’ That’s what we
do!

Juana was unsuccessful in her efforts to end the ‘mandatory’ cleaning.

J uana’s defense of local experience, her challenging of denigrations of local
experience and those taken to embody it in her own work, and her locally-situated
aspirations for the future correspond closely with the perspectives and aims of
revitalizationists. Nonetheless, she understands “culture” and efforts to promote it in a
way that has no relevance for her defense of local experience.

Juana claims the right of communities to protect their distinctive cultures,
asserting “Every community has their culture, their traditions, and, well, it shouldn’t be
lost.” Nonetheless, her conception of culture and traditions does not encompass the local
experience she defends in her daily life. Rather, like other community members who
have adopted the culture concept as a point of pride, Juana identifies as culture particular
symbols that have been celebrated as exotic emblems of distinctiveness in a broader
worldgthat increasingly prizes these symbols. She cites the language and the ‘traditional’
dress as especially important symbols. She emphasized language when I asked her if she

had encountered revitalizationists’ promotions of local culture in the community:

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Um, the only thing I have heard is what the teachers say.

H.D.: The teachers?

Yes, the teachers. Because there are not any signs or anything, and nobody has come to

talk about how we should protect the culture. The only thing I have heard from the

teachers is that I think they now give classes in the dialecto. I mean, they are also

concerned about [protecting the language].

H.D.: They probably work with the importance of protecting the culture and the

language?

Yes, and the language.
Her reference point of observing teachers’ promotion of the language led her to
emphasize this as a dimension of local experience to be appreciated for its distinctiveness
and preserved accordingly. Significantly, her reflections indicate that she did not
understand teachers’ promotion of the language as attached to a broader defense of
culture.

Juana signaled the special dress Verdean women don during the pilgrimages they

make during patron saint festivals as a particularly valuable tradition. She asserted,

I really like the regional dress. I love it. Have you seen when they do the pilgrimage?
[van de madrina?] They look beautiful!

In fact, when I asked her what part of the culture was most important to her, she indicated
the dress. While virtually all villagers speak Mixtec, relatively few don the long enaguas
and blusas on a daily basis, predominantly older women. [See Hendrickson (1995) for a
study of women, dress and the construction of identity in a highland town in Guatemala]
Nonetheless, the dress becomes available to all women during the patron saint festivals,
as I described in Chapter Five. During these moments, the dress and those who wear it
symbolize both the distinctiveness and the beauty of Pueblo Verde. Consequently,
donning the dress and participating in the pilgrimages constitute a special way for women
to embody and affirm their Verdean distinctiveness. Juana does not participate in the

pilgrimages and don the dress; her failure to do so undoubtedly both reflects and

230

contributes to her ambivalences surrounding Verdean culture, and especially her
relationship to it. Thus, in addition to understanding Mixtec culture as located in a very

circumscribed array of symbolic practices and objects, her own link to these practices is

 

unsure. Not surprisingly, she does not describe her defense of local experience as

relevant to Mixtec culture and revitalizationists’ efforts.

Adriana

 

Adriana, the twenty seven year old part-time clinic nurse, has not only
participated in the pilgrimages, but took on a leadership role organizing a group of
women for the pilgrimages for the patron saint festival during the year I conducted
fieldwork. In correspondence with her active engagement in the fiestas and the
pilgrimages, she is a passionate proponent of Verdean culture. She waxed poetically
about Verdean culture during our interview:

...[Ours] is a very beautiful cultura. It’s something marvelous Something very
special. I think the cultura is very beautiful, and I hope the young people think that it’s
important, conserving tradiciones. They shouldn’t take other culturas. They should
accept the costumbres that we have. And yes, I would like the cultura here to continue.
Because the truth is, everything — the cultura, the fiesta, the food, the language — it’s
something special.

While she cites key symbols other villagers often identify as positive symbols of Verdean
distinctiveness — including fiestas, the language, and food - she also extends this
appreciation for cultural difference to include the orientations and social conventions of
older people. Thus, she lamented the changing orientations and social conventions of
youth:

The older generation is very joyful. They get together often. They are very accessible
for whatever one wants. But, the younger people are a little proud. They don’t have
much respect. They’ve lost the value of sharing time together. The older women, they
dance and smile...

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She also directed a more pointed critique at migrants for denigrating local experience
when they return to the community, reporting,

.. There are many young people who go to the United States. When they come back, they
want to use the costumbres that they have in the United States here. Like, for example,
something that you can see is the clothing. They don’t want Mexican clothing anymore.
They prefer foreign clothing. And they act as it they could care less. When, really,
that looks bad here. It looks bad. And they talk, their talk is all a mixture, no? And, they
even use some words, um, very obscene words.

So, [migration] is one of the reasons why sometimes [young people] prefer to focus more
on outside culturas, and not be content with the cultura we have here.

In congruence with her more expanded interpretation of culture, Adriana decries migrant
youths’ changing ways of speaking and styles of dress — the more commonly cited
symbols of cultural distinctiveness — while also referencing broader attitude changes and
the denigration of local experience.

Nonetheless, Adriana conveyed the limits of her appreciation for Verdean
costumbres and culturas later in the interview, as she discussed the importance of
preserving culture. She asserted,

I say it is important for people to keep maintaining the same culturas, the same
tradiciones, the same costumbres that the community has. Although yes there are some
costumbres that sometimes affect the community. For example, machismo and inequity,
gender inequity, right? These are some of the customs that affect the community a lot.

Her suggestion that people should preserve ‘culturas ’ and ‘costumbres’ as long as they
do not ‘affect the community’ indicates a circumscribed conception of culture that
conflicts with revitalizationists’ aims of using Mixtec culture as a foundation for
envisioning a different kind of development.

Multiple scholars have examined the complex processes through which women
participating in the Zapatista movement have worked to affirm the value of Mayan
cultural distinctiveness while challenging interpretations of that distinctiveness that

reaffirm gender inequities (Hernandez Castillo 1997, 1994; Speed et al. 2006). I initially

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understood Adriana’s comments in a way akin to these descriptions of Zaptista women’s
challenges of ‘traditions’ that affirm gender inequities. In fact, like the Zapatista women,
Adriana engages in rights-based struggles on multiple fronts in her everyday life,

including her defense of “culture” and her defense of women’s rights. Nonetheless, as

 

Adriana talked more specifically about offending customs, she indicated that customs that
impeded family planning goals, rather than women’s rights, were the primary issue. She

elaborated these ideas when I asked her about changes she would like to see in the next

 

twenty years. She responded,

Well, I hope that in twenty years people have a different vision of their health and
themselves. . .. Because here the woman is very discriminated against in every way. In
all aspects the woman is very rejected. And more when they live with their husbands.
They think that the husband has to give the final world, although she also could do it.
And I hope that they learn to decide for themselves, Ieam to decide about their own
bodies, so that the husband is no longer manipulating her and speaking for her. Because,
I’m talking about contraceptive methods because here the people, they like to wait for the
final word of the husband. For example, in family planning, if the husband says that the
woman is not going to use contraceptives so she won’t have children, and the woman
says [that she doesn’t want more children], and he says yes, she also says yes. And what
I h0pe is that they learn to decide for themselves. So they take good care of their bodies,
[I hope] that they no longer wait for the husband because if they continue like this we are
going to be very bad off. Very bad economically and socially because bringing children
into the world, I think they shouldn’t be brought just to bring them. They need necessary
care so they can grow and have a good education... There is so much machismo, and
machismo does not let women develop as women.

H.D.: You work with contraceptives, but do you work more broadly in promoting
women’s abilities to make their own decisions?

Adriana: Learning to plan the family. That is the intention.

H.D.: Is it also that she gains power?

Adriana: Aha. That she has, um, that she has, that she feels, - hmm , how could I
explain? — so she gains the capacity to decide for herself.

Conflicts between Adriana’s views of the defense of women, the defense of “culture”,
and her professional work may suggest that she is in an early stage of making sense of
these ideas. Nonetheless, she ultimately established the limits of appreciation for cultural

difference at the point where they interfere with Program aims.

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Adriana’s expanded sense of the realm of culture suggests possibilities in terms of
the potential for culture to develop into a valorization of local experience to challenge
denigrations of that experience. Nonetheless, she defines culture in a way that diffuses its
ability to disrupt the Program’s and her own denigrations of indigenousness and those
who embody it, and the coercive strategies pursued in accordance with these beliefs.
Correspondingly, throughout the research period, she continued to draw from the idea
that some community members lack sufficient reason in coercing them to change their
behaviors and in supporting Sylvia’s coercive measures. In short, her interpretation of
culture rests comfortably alongside of devaluations of Verdean culture based on

denigrations of indigeneity.

Sylvia

Sylvia enthusiastically self-identifies as a modern Mexican woman. On one
occasion, she proudly announced, “Soy muy Mexicana y muy modema!” [I’m very
Mexican and very modeml] In drawing from her modern sensibilities, she has often
concluded that local experience lacks value. For example, she expressed her discontent
with the offerings of the community as she lamented to her friends, “No hay nada aqui!”
[There’s nothing here!] In accordance with Sylvia’s appreciation for things modern, one
of her coworkers predicted that she would need to build her life elsewhere, and claimed
that she was destined for greater things.

In marked contrast with Juana’s praise of social conventions in the community,
Sylvia often suggested that the practices associated with indigenousness were inferior to
mestizo ways, which she referred to as “Mexican”. Thus, when Sylvia, (like Adriana)

gained the distinction of being one of the first women to hold a position in the local

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government, the municipal president was constantly harassing her for failing to comply
with her duties. Her failure to carry out her duties reflected her perception of duties
associated with her unpaid political position as secondary to her income generation
efforts. She also complained about guesa relations of mutual help as burdensome, and
chose to hold a formal banquet-style celebration in a neighboring city to mark her
graduation from nursing school to avoid guesa obligations. At the celebration, she
informed me, “This is how we do things in Mexico,” and asserted that the banquet was
superior because it enabled her to avoid all of the ‘debt’ incurred in village celebrations.

Although Sylvia reasoned the superiority of “Mexican” and “modern” ways of
doing things, she unwittingly conveyed her shame about local practices on one occasion.
I had noticed that her father hung a bulb of garlic in her doorway, which she removed as
soon as she saw it. Her face turned pink when I asked her what it was for; she dismissed
my question, claiming ignorance about its meaning and purpose, and quickly turned on
her heel and walked away. Her momentary lapse in composure indicated how broader
denigrations of indigeneity have shaped her estimations of the value of local experience
(or lack thereof), and have informed her efforts to disassociate herself from Verdean
identity.

Nonetheless, like the other women, Sylvia identified her Verdean identity as a
salient part of her self-concept. She reflected, “My roots are here, and there is pride in
knowing where I come from.” In fact, Sylvia has encountered discourses promoting
indigenous pride as distinctly modern, and has incorporated them into her frame of
reference accordingly. She reflected that when she observed broader interest in local

culture among teachers and others who arrive in the community, it peaked her own

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interest, and prompted her to consider, “Why not me?” Thus, she asserted that rescuing
costumbres is important, and reported that she plans to speak Mixtec with her child. She
also reported that she has been considered creating a radio program talking about local
culture.

Sylvia’s familiarity with revitalization discourses has done little to disrupt her
perceptions of the lack of value in local experience. On the contrary, she arrived at the
same conclusions of villagers’ inadequacy in evaluating her own community in relation
to ‘modern’ promotions of cultural pride. She critiqued,

People here aren’t interested. We aren’t noticing that it’s being lost. Parents don’t make
their children speak Mixtec. They aren’t interested in conserving the language.
Costumbres have been lost, as well. We aren’t worried about it.

While Sylvia derided herself and fellow villagers for lack of interest in protecting the
culture, during other moments she questioned assumptions that villagers’ distinctiveness
is of the same ilk as that which is more widely valued. In fact, when I asked her how she
would describe Mixtec culture to someone who knew nothing about it, she offered a
textbook-like description with traditions that were not evident in Pueblo Verde. She
reported,

There are seven regions in Oaxaca — the Mixtec is the most mountainous. The ground is
not very fertile. The Mixtec region has important traditions, like the jarabe mixteco,
which is a Mixtec dance. The region has a very unique form of traditional dress,
including a skirt with a black wool border, a bordered blouse, and huaraches. The region
has traditional comidas... The climate is templado.

Her definition unsettles Pueblo Verde’s engagement in Mixtec culture; indeed, Verdeans
do not use the ‘traditional dress’ she describes. Moreover, at times, Sylvia drew from
these valorizations of Mixtec culture to denigrate Verdean practices. For example, when

I attended her parents’ annual ceremony giving thanks to the earth for the harvest, she

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laughed at the fact that they gave thanks to Saint Christopher, claiming that the religious
impositions were ridiculous in comparison with the old, ‘true’ Mixtec deities.
Interestingly, Sylvia seems to be the only woman among the three who
understands culture as a more transcendental entity that includes not only key symbolic
practices, but also broader orientations and ways of being. In that sense, her
understanding of culture most closely resonates with that of revitalizationists. Their
views also correspond to the extent that they recall an authentic Mixtec subject.
Nonetheless, Sylvia draws from these notions to further denigrate local experience. As in
Adriana’s case, Sylvia’s engagement with culture resonates with rather than conflicts
with the assumptions underlying her coercive work with Program recipients. In fact,
interviewees implicated Sylvia for some of the most egregious examples of coerciveness,

including threatening to fine a woman if she failed to undergo a tubal ligation.

‘Culture’ in cultural processes in Pueblo Verde

Although I have focused here on IMSS villager-health providers, Adriana and
Juana’s circumscribed understandings of culture correspond with more general trends in
the community. So, too, does Adriana and Sylvia’s interpretation of culture in ways that
do not unsettle their devaluation of local experience and those taken to embody it. The
perspectives of Francisco, a thirty-one year old rancho representative, evidence this
correspondence. Francisco remarked,

I’m interested in rescuing the culture, because if it gets lost, well, I think it would be, I
don’t know, a sad pueblo, because nobody would speak Mixtec. I think it must be

. rescued when it’s possible. And, because of that I think that rescuing is important,
rescuing the languages, the cultures, the fiestas, because in this way more than anything
else the culture lives. If we stop doing this, for me it would be sad. Then there wouldn’t
be any fun, any togetherness. That’s why I think fiestas are important.

237

His circumscribed conception of culture and the value it provides to the community
enabled him to make these claims despite having explained large families as a product of
older people’s insufficient reason moments earlier.

In fact, I often noted that younger villagers affirmed the value of Verdean cultural
distinctiveness while concurrently applauding the triumph of reason over the ignorance of

older villagers. I found this perplexing, as I assumed that revitalization discourses would

 

most empower the especially encultured subjects perceived to symbolize indigenous
difference. On the contrary, not only did younger villagers often interpret these
discourses in ways that failed to disrupt underlying denigrations of indigenousness, but

they also drew from these discourses to affirm these denigrations in cases, as Sylvia’s

 

comments illustrate.

‘C ulture ' and familial contest: Beatriz and Sylvia

Empowering youth with ‘culture’ also appears to contribute to broader trends
empowering younger villagers with more formal educational experience vis-a-vis their
older and less formally educated adult counterparts. For example, Sylvia drew from
discourses celebrating indigenous culture to support her position in the dispute that arose
between her and her mother when she refused to establish a formal commitment with her
partner. When she initially told me that she was pregnant, I asked Sylvia whether her
decision not to get married would bother her parents. She claimed that although her
parents would prefer that she marry, they knew that as a 28-year old woman Sylvia made
her own decisions. Nonetheless, it became clear as her mother’s silence grew during the

days that followed that she was, in fact, very unhappy about her daughter’s decision not

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to marry. Sylvia and her mother’s mutual miscalculation of the meaning of Sylvia’s
relationship reflects ambiguities surrounding the significance of dating-related behaviors.
Sylvia read her parents’ non-interference in her romantic life as a showing of their regard
for her autonomy. Her parents, however, afforded her this freedom with the expectation
that she would ultimately conform to their expectations. The misestimation ultimately
caused great pain, suffering and division in the family.

A strong sense of betrayal on both sides of the conflict was only intensified by the
fact that, according to all accounts, Sylvia had been the object of special treatment as the
youngest of the family. In fact, she and everyone else initially became aware that her
mother was unhappy with her decision not to marry when her mother stopped serving her
first, and stopped reserving the best foods for her. Later, Sylvia reflected on her mother’s
anger and expressed her own feeling of betrayal in language that echoes similar
sentiments expressed in a myriad of distant places: “I guess I let her down. I didn’t know
she expected a white wedding from me!” Sylvia responded to her mother’s silence by
enlisting the support of her older sister. Shortly, all communications between the two
sisters and their parents ended.

In the context of the escalating conflict, Sylvia’s father expressed his
bewilderment one morning when I came into the kitchen and asked where everyone was.
“Who knows! They don’t even talk anymore” he said. He continued, signaling the path
running through the family solar, "3 which is the most direct way from Sylvia’s house to
her sister’s house, where they now shared meals: “They don’t even walk through here.
Who knows what they talk about down there! Did they say anything to you? I think the

older one is the one who is causing the trouble. Why is she involved? What is she angry

 

’3 Garden within the household compound.

239

 

 

about?” On other occasions, he expressed his anger over how he felt Sylvia had betrayed
him after he had given her so much support.

Nonetheless, her mother’s feeling of betrayal and her resulting bitterness were
much more intense. In fact, Sylvia’s father deceived his wife and got together with his
daughters on a couple of occasions. Na Beatriz occasionally gave indications of the
depth of her rage. For example, when I suggested on one occasion that she needed to see
a nurse for her cough, Na Beatriz said, “There is no nurse. The nurse is dead!” And she
laughed harshly. On other occasions, especially after having several drinks, she broke
down and expressed her hurt, sense of betrayal and grief over the ruptured relationship
with her daughter.

The intense anger, betrayal and grief both women felt when Sylvia decided not to
formalize her relationship and Na Beatriz responded negatively to her decision reflects
the extent to which both women’s interests were intimately tied up with Sylvia’s
decision. Sylvia was especially wary of making a formal commitment because she feared
becoming dependent and suffering in her relationship as she had witnessed her mother.
Given these aims, her mother’s disaccord symbolized her lack of concern for her well-
being, which deeply wounded her. F or her part, Na Beatriz withstood her husband’s
battery because she perceived that good women did just that. Her recompense has come
to her in the form of prestige as an older woman. Her daughters’ actions threatened this
prestige with scandal and shame. As such, her daughters’ actions similarly symbolized a
lack of concern, in this case for the circumstances that have afforded her mother power

and prestige as an older woman.

240

In their extended conflict, Na Beatriz and Sylvia used the strategies at their
disposal to express their anger with one another and attempt to force one another to
acquiesce to their positions. Na Beatriz initially expressed her anger and disapproval
through the food she served Sylvia, as she quit serving her daughter the best foods first.
Sylvia lacks the time and skills for carrying out reproductive labor, including meals, that
her mother possessed, as well as her mother’s social status. Nonetheless, Sylvia’s wealth
enabled her to adjust to the consequences of her mother’s actions, and to counter those
actions with her own. She countered the critique her mother waged in the form of food
by setting up her kitchen elsewhere: Sylvia, her sister and her sister’s family began to
prepare and share meals together, adding insult to injury with the implication that her
mother’s cooking was not acceptable. Sylvia also reclaimed the refrigerator that she had
provided to the family kitchen, leaving her parents with no way to preserve food. For her
part, Na Beatriz attempted to use her social status to interfere with Sylvia’s sponsorship
of a young girl for her graduation. Before the conflict, Na Beatriz had facilitated the
sponsorship and urged her daughter to take on the role. Afterwards, Na Beatriz attempted
to convince the mother of the girl to replace Sylvia with a new sponsor. The mother
refused.

In short, the disagreement over Sylvia’s decision prompted an extremely
damaging dispute between extremely strong-willed women who had at their disposal and
deployed very different kinds of resources. Na Beatriz’s efforts to press Sylvia into
acquiescing to her position correspond with her position in the family and the
comm-unity. Although she continued providing her daughter with meals, Na Beatriz

began providing Sylvia with meals perceived of less quality. In addition to intervening

241

on this most basic material level, Na Beatriz attempted to interfere in her daughter’s
social standing by as she attempted to convince the ‘sponsee’ to choose a different
sponsor. Lacking Sylvia’s wealth, most other young women are unable to support
themselves without the assistance of a partner, let alone family members, and the threat to
their social standing would have further jeopardized their future economic security.
Nonetheless, Sylvia’s wealth enabled her to establish her kitchen elsewhere, and she
brought her sister into the conflict in the process. They paid Na Beatriz’s sister for
tortillas, and hired a domestic assistant to help Sylvia’s step-niece in carrying out the
domestic chores.34 Moreover, Sylvia’s wealth undoubtedly influenced her ‘sponsee’s’
loyalty to her. Thus, Sylvia’s wealth enabled her to wage and withstand attacks and
counter-attacks that she would otherwise not have been able to do. Thus, changes in
wealth importantly configured the path the conflict ultimately took.

Sylvia also deployed modernist conceptions of indigenous culture within the
contest. For example, when she stopped eating at her mother’s kitchen, she reported that
the food her mother prepared was insufficiently healthy for a pregnant woman. In doing
so, she claimed a superior scientifically-legitimated knowledge-base, and juxtaposed that
with her mother’s ‘ignorance’. In addition to utilizing modernist denigrations of
indigenous culture, Sylvia deployed affirmations of indigenous culture to the same end.
In justifying her decision, she asserted that she would follow the “local tradition” of

- 35
common law mamage.

 

3’ Sylvia’s sister, Mari, acquired step-children when she married, as the mother of her husband’s first two
children abandoned them. Mari’s husband, Maclovio, spent most of his time working in the United States.
The hardships his two children experienced in Mar‘i’s ‘care’ attest to the continued importance of the family
in ensuring villagers’ well-being.

35 Her use of tradition was ironic in multiple ways. Firstly, she employed revitalizationists’ promotions of
culture to characterize and legitimate a practice that they regard as anti-tradition. Secondly, villagers have
used common law unions to impose expectations of commitment on partners who failed to make a formal

242

The modern/traditional paradox of revitalization

Villagers interpret revitalizationists’ defense of culture in a way that curtails their
ability to use the concept to challenge the ongoing denigration of certain practices, people
and things perceived as embodying indigenousness. Although conflicting with
revitalizationists’ perspectives and aims in certain ways, these interpretations resonate
with an important assumption embedded in denigrations of indigenousness that
revitalizationists do not challenge: the idea that expressions of indigeneity only have
relevance when they are grounded in modernity. Revitalizationists oppose this
assumption in words, as they locate the salience of Mixtec culture in its detachment from
modernity. Here, the value of Mixtecness for contributing new utopian possibilities
resides in its detachment from modernity, which makes Mixtec culture fertile ground for
imagining superior non-Westem ways of envisioning the future. At the same time,
however, revitalizationists’ prioritization of the educational sphere and their particular
focus on establishing the written language as a vehicle for creating a pan-Mixtec identity
from which participants will imagine the future excludes those especially encultured
Mixtec subjects who provide the movement with its symbolic force. In this regard,
revitalizationists’ efforts are consistent with a modern view of those without formal
education as irrelevant for, if not posing hindrances to, the work of imagining the firture.
From this vantage point, it seems more accurate to explain villagers’ and
revitalizationists’ understandings of culture as diverging in relation to their different

weightings and designations of the particular modern and traditional elements that should

 

commitment, while Sylvia advocated common law marriage to support her efforts to avoid this
commitment.

243

contribute to the project of imagining a better future for Mixtec people, rather than

explaining villagers’ interpretations as opposed to revitalizationists’ efforts.

Conclusion

Renee Sylvain (2005) has described how some San groups have acquired better
access to resources and representation by deftly representing themselves in ways that
correspond with essentialist portrayals, while, in the process, affirming essentialist views
that further entrench the exploitation of others. She asserts,

The Omaheke San illustrate the consequences of these instrumentalizing and
essentializing trends. When the idea of culture becomes instrumentalized in the struggle
for resources, then, in situations of extreme marginalization and class inequality, it easily
becomes another instrument for continued exploitation. [Sylvain 20052366]

Thus, Sylvain identifies the differential positioning in relation to material resources as a
key factor that produces divergences in how essentialist views of culture influence the
subjects of these discourses.

My examination of how Mixtec revitalizationists’ conceptions of culture
influence villagers also indicates that ‘positive’ essentialist views of indigenous culture
empower some while disempowering others. In this case, I link these differential
consequences to the differential positioning of villagers in relation to Mixtec activists’
promotions of culture - some as subjects who wield culture and some as subjects who
bear culture. Thus, the empowerment of youth with “culture” contributes to ongoing
trends disempowering older adults and those with limited formal education vis-a-vis their

younger and more educated counterparts.

244

In the next and final chapter, I synthesize the insights gleaned from my
examination of ‘indigenous culture’ in Pueblo Verde. I draw from the conclusions I have

made throughout the dissertation to reflect on the politics and ethics of ‘culture’.

245

CONCLUSION: THE POLITICS OF ‘CULTURE’ REVISITED

Indigeneity acquired singular salience with the Spanish imposition of colonial rule
in the land newly designated New Spain. Remarkably, even while ongoing struggles and
shifting strategies of rule have transformed perceptions of the substance of indigeneity
during the five centuries that have passed since then, the singularity of this salience has
persisted. In New Spain, the colonizers articulated indigeneity as the antithesis of
civilization, and crafted a dual system of governance based on this idea. The overturning
of colonial rule during the first half of the 19‘h century precipitated a major remaking of
indigeneity. Liberal leaders intent on creating a modern nation depicted indigeneity as a
barrier to modern nationhood. Nonetheless, they regarded indigenousness as curable:
through proper intervention, indigenous people could become modern Mexican citizens.
The rise of the mestizo during the 20‘h century led to a further remaking of
indigenousness. Twentieth century nation-builders promoted ‘indigenous culture’ as an
important foundation of national identity that imbued the Mexican nation with
distinction. Nonetheless, like the liberal nation-builders that preceded them, they sought
to emulate the modernity of European societies as they worked to create a decidedly
modern nation. As they designed programs to prepare indigenous peoples to participate
in this modern mestizo society, they attempted to divest indigenous peoples of the
distinctive traits that they perceived as conflicting with the modern vision.

More recently, indigenous rights activists have contributed to the emergence of
more expansive understandings of the value of indigeneity and its place in modern life.

In Chapter One, I argued that the anthropological critiques of culture that came into force

246

during the 19805 are ill-equipped for the terrain of culture politics these recent
transformations have created. In particular, evidence that critics of indigenous rights
movements have deployed critical perspectives on culture to undermine indigenous
people’s struggles unsettles the ethics of the ‘culture’ critique. Nonetheless, rather than
dismissing the critique, I argued that three dimensions of politics justify a return to the
question of the politics and ethics of ‘culture’: the dialogic construction of politics, the
processes through which meanings travel, and difference. To conclude, I return to
consider the study findings in relation to these three dimensions of political practice.
From there, I distill some final observations on the politics and ethics of contemporary
formulations of cultural difference.

Before doing so, however, I want to pause briefly to reflect on the salience of
‘negative’ interpretations of indigenous culture in Mexican development. My
investigation of orientations toward indigenous culture within contemporary Mexican
development indicates the ‘menace’ of a neoliberal incorporation mission in Mexico.
These findings diverge from Charles Hale’s (2005, 2002) observations of the “menace”
of “neoliberal multiculturalism” in Central America. The staunchness of ‘negative’
readings of indigenous culture in Mexican development during this apparent multicultural
moment is striking. Importantly, the ‘negative’ readings of indigenousness identified
here are not fragments of the pre-multicultural sensibilities of an earlier era. Rather,
IMSS-Oportunidades researchers have construed indigenous culture in a way that
corresponds with efforts to create the self-managing, self-enterprising and responsible
indigenous subjects that facilitate the retraction of the neoliberal state (Lemke 2001).

The novelties in how researchers conceptualized indigenous culture while devising new

247

 

development strategies in the context of neoliberal reform evidence the
contemporaneousness of these formulations of indigenous culture. Like Hale’s neoliberal
multiculturalisms, these conceptions of indigenousness are products of the ongoing
struggles through which people reckon indigenousness in relation to shifting modes of
power.

The marked salience of ‘negative’ readings of indigenous culture in Mexican
development undermines assumptions that ‘negative’ readings of indigenousness yield to
‘positive’ ones, as it indicates ways that multicultural and assimilationist modes of power
co-mingle. This co-mingling is pivotal to the meanings of ‘positive’ affirmations of
indigenous culture, as it conditions the contexts within which people encounter and
interpret these understandings. This point returns me to the three dimensions of the

politics of culture that this study revisits:

Dialogue

In Chapter One, I suggested that the dialogical tacking back and forth of politics
challenges facile determinations of ‘progressive’ and ‘regressive’ ‘sides’ in culture
politics. This dialogical constitution is most obvious within the most formal political
domains. For example, representatives of key constituents of multicultural accords often
gather in high-profile meetings to negotiate policy, and the resulting accords typically
bear obvious indications of their multiple constitution. In other kinds of contexts,
however, this mutual constitution is less readily evident. Such is the case with
indigenous activists’ discursive strategies, which leads many observers to treat them as

autonomously generated. Yet, indigenous rights activists’ discursive strategies are as

248

 

dialogically constituted as political accords tacked out in tense negotiations. The need for
intelligibility, in particular, crucially constrains activists by forcing them to formulate
their strategies within contemporaneous and past understandings. Because of the colonial
roots and colonial and postcolonial histories of ‘indigeneity’, the need to frame
indigenousness intelligibly imposes crucial limitations on these discursive strategies.

This study demonstrates how the dialogical contingency of Mixtec
revitalizationists’ discursive strategies influences the politics of their culture claims.
Alterity has been the crux of indigeneity since the colonial imposition of the concept.
Rather than challenging assumptions about the alterity of the indigenous subject, Mixtec
revitalizationists reframe this alterity as something of value to the modern world in order
to press their demands for inclusion. They contend that the alterity of ‘Mixtec culture’
uniquely positions them to contribute novel solutions to address the deficiencies of
modernity.

This strategy has proven very powerful: indigenous rights activists have generated
widespread support for their efforts, and, with this support, have successfully negotiated
new spaces for them within the nation and the world. Nonetheless, revitalizationists’
contradictory claim predicates indigenous people’s place in the modern nation on their
absence from it. The positioning of the indigenous subjects revitalizationists deem as
most encultured in relation to revitalization efforts evidences the consequentiality of this
contradiction. Revitalizationists celebrate women with no formal educational training as
repositories of indigenous culture. These women provide revitalization efforts with much
of the-symbolic significance that invigorates their work. Yet, by definition, the same

conditions that lead revitalizationists to designate these villagers as bearers of the Mixtec

249

 

essence — their lack of engagement with ‘modern’ forces — precludes their participation in
the decidedly modern project revitalizationists aim to realize.

This dynamic illustrates the fallaciousness of the claim that critically evaluating
indigenous rights activists’ cultural claims undermines the interests of ‘indigenous
people’. The need for intelligibility forces indigenous rights activists to frame their
“positive” interpretations of indigenous culture in terms that make sense within a history
of colonial and postcolonial understandings. Consequently, these ideas are not
revitalizationists’ alone. Rather than making autonomous assertions that self-evidently

contribute to the interests of indigenous people, indigenous rights activists’ claims are

 

contingent twists on received understandings that have themselves been tacked out
through histories of ongoing struggle. While the recent transformations in orientations
toward indigenousness activists have prompted provide important new spaces for
indigenous people to participate in the nation, in the process, they affirm and entrench

deeply held assumptions that indigenousness conflicts with modern aspirations.

 

Travel

In Chapter One, I also suggested that the processes through which meanings
travel complicate the politics of ‘culture’. The concern with how meanings travel
highlights a particular dimension of the dialogical nature of politics — the resonances
meanings acquire as people interpret and negotiate them in diverse contexts and
circumstances (Arce and Long 2000; Tsing 2005). Thus, the analysis of travel brings into

view the particularities of the meanings that emerge in specific locales. It can also

250

illuminate important logics and contradictions embedded in original meanings, as my
analysis of interpretations of culture in Pueblo Verde indicates.

The gente de razo'n discourse evidences how the colonial history of denigrations
of indigenousness has shaped and continues to shape Pueblo Verde experience. As I
explained in Chapter Two, the distinction of gente de razo'n emerged in a colonial context
of increasing ‘racial miscegenation’ that compromised the race-based colonial hierarchy.
The ascent of the gente de razor: hierarchy signified a marked rise in the salience of
cultural indicators for determining social status. Ultimately, the distinction of gente de
razon came to distinguish ‘people of reason’ from their culture-bearing indio counterparts
at the bottom of the racio-cultural hierarchy.

ln Pueblo Verde, young, highly educated villagers deploy the discourse of gente
de razo'n to reckon indigeneity and position themselves, others and local experience in
relation to it. As read through its opposition to gente de razo'n, indigenous culture gains
local purchase as dimensions of local experience considered irrelevant or contrary to
modern aspirations. Thus, villagers who use the gente de razon idiom do so to critique
and distinguish themselves from the culture-bearers among them. This twist on the gente
de razo'n hierarchy —— indigenous people deploying culture to distinguish themselves from
other indigenous people — likely gained force during twentieth century incorporation
efforts.

The investigation of the neoliberal subject-making efforts of IMSS-Oportunidades
offers insights into a key contemporary social field that contributes to the remaking of
this distinction. IMSS service providers depict culture as the antithesis of reason in their

training sessions with youth. While youth utilize this training to mold themselves into

251

 

 

reasoned subjects, at the urging of IMSS service providers, they also draw from it to
teach the culture-bearers among them. Models of culture politics that pit postcolonial
elites who malign indigenousness against indigenous self-defenders cannot capture the
muddied field of culture politics this dynamic produces. The indigenous subject of
neoliberal Mexican development wields denigrations of indigenous culture against the
culture in him and herself as well as in others. This dynamic directs attention instead to
the technologies through which people are incited to adopt certain orientations toward
culture, and the implications of these technologies. Like the dialogic contingency of
indigenous activists’ discursive strategies, this mode of culture politics challenges
assumptions that certain actors pursue certain interests.

In this account, I have foregrounded how formulations of indigenous culture
shape the experiences and struggles of the women perceived as culture-bearers. Verdean
women with limited formal educational experience are widely treated as bearers of
cultural difference. Consequently, they have suffered the poor treatment meted out in
denigrating indigenousness more often than other Verdeans. They deploy varied
strategies to fight this denigration, such as restricting their movement to the village as
much as possible, carefully monitoring entrance into the community, and using their
social networks to punish those they perceive as disrespecting local norms. In a context
in which many villagers have adopted deni grating orientations toward indigeneity, these
women’s efforts to ward off denigrations of themselves and their experience place them
in a difficult and contradictory position. To the extent that they restrict their movement
to the village, they become dependent on others for access to the material goods they

desire; many of those they depend on adopt disparaging orientations toward local

252

 

experience and those taken to bear it. I analyzed developers’ and revitalizationists’
formulations of culture within this context of struggle, discord and contest.

The study demonstrates how IMSS-Oportunidades contributes to the
disempowerment of villagers presumed to bear culture. As symbols of culture, these
women’s minds and bodies are targets of reform and discipline by IMSS-Oportunidades

service providers and reformed villagers alike. Remarkably, revitalizationists’ efforts

 

contribute to, rather than challenge, the denigration of indigenous culture that contributes

to the disempowemrent of the Verdean ‘women who remain’. Verdeans who

 

encountered revitalization efforts did understand them as celebrating something special
about local experience. Nonetheless, Verdeans did not read revitalization discourses as
valuing those dimensions of local experience that had been maligned as indigenous, and
hence irrelevant and contrary to social life. Much to the contrary, Verdeans read
revitalizationists’ claims in ways that affirmed their perceptions of the irrelevance and
contrariness of most of the distinctiveness of local social life. Villagers’ interpretations
of revitalization efforts capture the contradictions inherent in revitalizationists’
orientations toward culture. In revitalization, as in Mexican development, culture-

bearing subjects appear as superfluous to modern aspirations.

Difference

Feminists have long claimed that a focus on gender provides pivotal insights into
social life. So, too, is the case here. Because the ‘women-who-remain’ symbolize
cultural distinctiveness, their experiences and struggles offer crucial insights into the

heart of culture politics. If it is true that these women bear much of the burden of

253

negative formulations of indigeneity, to the extent that they do so, they symbolize in
material form the denigration ofthe essence ofindigenousness itself. That is, as symbols
of indigenous culture, these women are targeted by efforts to manage and control all that
is distinctive about indigenous people.

The evidence of how ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ readings of culture collude in
marginalizing these women illuminates crucial limitations and perils of the idea.
‘Indigenous culture’ is a colonial distinction grounded in the assumption that
indigenousness is contrary to modernity. IMSS-Oportunidades program designers and
service providers disseminate this colonial distinction as part oftheir efforts to root out
barriers to modernity. Revitalizationists have effectively created and claimed broader
spaces for participation in the modern nation by affirming this distinction. Nonetheless,
this study suggests that inclusion is predicated on wider exclusions of locally salient ways
of living and reasoning. What ethical postures should scholars adopt in relation to
dimensions of local distinctiveness that have not been designated as valuable to modern
desires? Here again, facile distinctions between ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ readings of
culture obscure important dimensions of the politics of contemporary formulations of

‘culture’. In doing so, they impede efforts to stake out ethical stances toward the concept.

Conclusions

The findings of this study have broader implications for how scholars approach
indigenous people’s struggles. Observers almost universally regard formal indigenous
rights movements with attachments to transnational circuits as the center of indigenous

people’s struggles against marginalization [see Ghosh (2006) for an exception]. This

254

study illuminates how women deemed bearers of culture struggle against marginalization
in the intimate contexts oftheir daily lives. These women’s daily struggles emerge as a
crucial political front in ongoing contestations against the marginalization of indigenous
people. Considering indigenous politics as enacted in multiple fields and on multiple
fronts further complicates our understandings of indigenous politics, since, as this case
demonstrates, struggles carried out on different fronts and with different tactics can clash.
This context makes the ethics of scholarly alignment much more involved, and trickier:

With which indigenous rights struggles should scholars align?

255

 

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