Because ethnicity and other social categories are not only constructed, but in fact constructed through interaction with government institutions, laws, and norms, the state and the public sphere are never neutral observers in the production of groups. The institutional context in which political identities develop crucially determines the form that they take, and what is at stake in the political claims they make. Once it becomes evident that subjects are formed through exclusionary operations, it becomes politically necessary to trace the operations of that construction and erasure (Scott, 1999).

The fact that the state itself is implicated with the ways identities are constructed implies a very different set of obligations, on the state and on the cultural group, than the assumption that the state is simply faced with, but plays no role in forging, the competing commitments of its citizens. If states, including liberal democratic states, make race and ethnicity and class, and have a hand in who ends up in each of these categories, and in the extent to which such categories determine life chances, then states themselves can be subject to critique and reform.

The following four chapters trace the evolution of indigenous identity in Mexico from the colonial encounter to the rise of the indigenous rights movement in the 1990s. Mexico's native population first acquired indigenous status as an excluded racial group, subject to distinct juridical status and discriminatory social practices, in the colonial period.