Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-sjtt6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-06-17T02:26:28.128Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Reassertion of Indigenous Identity: Mayan Responses to State Intervention in Chiapas

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 October 2022

June Nash
June Nash*
Affiliation:
City College of the City University of New York
Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Core share and HTML view are not available for this content. However, as you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

In the early hours of 1994, a few hundred men and women of the Ejército Zapatista Liberación Nacional (EZLN) blocked the Pan American Highway between Tuxtla Gutiérrez, the state capital of Chiapas, and San Cristóbal de las Casas and the road to Ocosingo, declaring war on Mexico's ruling Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI). This move signaled to the world that indigenous populations intended to make themselves heard at home and abroad as Mexico restructures its economy according to the neoliberal model promoted by President Carlos Salinas de Gortari. The rebels captured and briefly held the municipal buildings in San Cristóbal, Altamirano, Las Margaritas, and Ocosingo. Speaking for the rebels, Subcomandante Marcos declared that their war was “a final but justified measure”: “We have nothing, absolutely nothing. Not a decent roof, nor work, nor land, nor health care, nor education.”

Type
Research Article
Information
Latin American Research Review , Volume 30 , Issue 3 , 1995 , pp. 7 - 41
Copyright
Copyright © 1995 by the University of Texas Press

Footnotes

∗

Research funds from the National Science Foundation permitted me to carry out field investigations in the summers of 1990 and 1991. I benefited from the presence of students participating in the Research Experience for Undergraduates, some of whom accompanied me to the townships in the region. Some students also collaborated in articles cited herein, among them Pedro Farias, Robert Martínez, Gina Peña Campodónico, Kathleen Sullivan, and Luz Martín del Campo. I am also grateful for the inspiration in the field of Melissa Castillo, Brenda Currin, Liliana Fasanella, Courtney Guthrie, and Christine Kovic, who participated in an exchange program I directed in the spring of 1993, supported by the International Studies Program at City College. Earlier versions of this article were improved by critiques from participants in the discussion group on indigenous movements, including Hugo Benavides, Gina Peña Campadónico, and Hernán Vidal. Kay Warren also provided helpful comments, and I have relied on her publications as well as those of Ricardo Falla, Susanne Jonas, Beatriz Manz, Carol Smith, and others to explicate the Guatemalan indigenous presence in Chiapas.

References

AGUIRRE BELTRAN, GONZALO 1979 Regions of Refuge. Washington, D.C.: Society for Applied Anthropology.Google Scholar
AMERICAS WATCH COMMITTEE 1985 Guatemala Revised: How the Reagan Administration Finds “Improvements” in Human Rights in Guatemala. New York: Americas Watch Committee.Google Scholar
ARIAS, JACINTO 1985 San Pedro Chenalhó: Algo de su historia, cuentos y costumbres. Tuxtla Gutiérrez, Chiapas: Subsecretaría de Asuntos Indígenas.Google Scholar
ARIZPE, LOURDES, PAZ, FERNANDO, AND VELAZQUEZ, MARGARITA 1993 Cultura y cambio global: percepciones sociales sobre la deforestación en la selva lacandona. Mexico City: Centro Regional de Investigaciones Multidisciplinarias.Google Scholar
BRICKER, VICTORIA REIFLER 1981 The Indian Christ, the Indian King: The Historical Substrate of Maya Myth and Ritual. Austin: University of Texas Press.Google Scholar
CANCIAN, FRANK 1965 Economy and Prestige in a Maya Community. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
CANCIAN, FRANK 1992 The Decline of Community in Zinacantán: Economy, Public Life, and Social Stratification, 1960–1987. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
CANCIAN, FRANK, AND BROWN, PETER 1994 “Who Is Rebelling in Chiapas?” Cultural Survival Quarterly 18, no. 1 (Spring):22–25.Google Scholar
CARMACK, ROBERT 1987 Harvest of Violence: The Maya Indians and the Guatemalan Crisis. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.Google Scholar
CASTELLANOS, ALICIA 1988 Notas sobre la identidad étnica en la región Tzotzil Tzeltal de los altos de Chiapas. Iztyapalpa: Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana Iztyapalpa.Google Scholar
COLBY, BENJAMIN N. 1966 Ethnic Relations in the Chiapas Highlands. Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico Press.Google Scholar
COLLIER, GEORGE A. 1975 Fields of the Tzotzil. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
COLLIER, GEORGE A. 1990 Seeking Food and Seeking Money: Changing Productive Relations in a Highland Mexican Community. UNRISD working paper. New York: United Nations Research Institute for Social Development.Google Scholar
COLLIER, GEORGE A. 1994 “Roots of the Rebellion in Chiapas.” Cultural Survival 18, no. 1 (Spring):14–18Google Scholar
COLLIER, GEORGE A., QUARATIELLO, WITH ELIZABETH LOWERY 1994 Basta! Land and the Zapatista Rebellion in Chiapas. Oakland, Calif.: Food First.Google Scholar
COMAROFF, JOHN, AND COMAROFF, JEAN 1992 Ethnography and the Historical Imagination. Boulder, Colo.: Westview.Google Scholar
COUTINO FERRERA, M. ARTURO 1987 “Incendios forestales, conflictos agrarios, colonización sin freno y atosigamiento de PEMEX.” Perfil 1, no. 5 (Nov.–Dec.):22–23.Google Scholar
DAVIS, S., AND HODSON, J. 1982 Witnesses to Political Violence in Guatemala. Boston, Mass.: Oxfam America.Google Scholar
DE LA FUENTE, JULIO 1989 Educación, antropología, desarrollo de la comunidad. Fourth edition. Mexico City: Instituto Nacional Indigenista (first published in 1964).Google Scholar
DIAZ-POLANCO, HECTOR 1992 “Indian Communities and the Quincentenary.” Latin American Perspectives 19, no. 3:6–24.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
DIENER, PAUL 1978 “The Tears of St. Anthony: Ritual and Revolution in Eastern Guatemala.” Latin American Perspectives 5, no. 3 (Summer):92–116.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
DISKIN, MARTIN, ED. 1983 Trouble in Our Backyard: Central America and the United States in the Eighties. New York: Pantheon.Google Scholar
EARLE, DUNCAN 1994 “Indigenous Identity at the Margin: Zapatismo and Nationalism.” Cultural Survival Quarterly 18, no. 1:26–31.Google Scholar
EBER, CHRISTINE 1994 Before God's Flowering Face: Women and Drinking in a Tzotzil Maya Community. Austin: University of Texas Press.Google Scholar
EHRENREICH, JEFFREY DAVID 1989 “Lifting the Burden of Secrecy: The Emergence of the Awa Biosphere Reserve.” Latin American Anthropology Review 1, no. 2 (Winter):49–54.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
ESCALONA, JOSE LUIS, AND Z., NORMA NAVA 1992 “El derecho a ser.” In FREYERMUTH ENCISO AND HERNANDEZ CASTILLO 1992, 200–205.Google Scholar
ESCOBAR, ARTURO 1992 “Culture, Practice, and Politics: Anthropology and the Study of Social Movements.” Critique of Anthropology 12, no. 4:395–432.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
FABREGAS PUIG, ANDRES 1988 “La antropología social en la frontera sur.” In La antropología en México: Panorama histórica, edited by Puig, Andrés Fábregas. Mexico City: Colección Biblioteca del Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia.Google Scholar
FALLA, RICARDO 1994 Massacres in the Jungle: Ixcan, Guatemala, 1975–1982.Google Scholar
FREYERMUTH ENCISO, GRACIELA, AND CASTILLO, AIDA ROSALVA HERNANDEZ, EDS. 1992 Una década de refugios en México: Los refugiados guatemaltecos y los derechos humanos. Tlalpán, Chiapas: Centro de Investigaciones Ecológicas y Estudios Superiores en Antropología del Sureste (CIESAS), Instituto Chiapaneco de Cultura: Centro de Investigaciones Ecológicas y Estudios Superiores en Antropología del Sureste (CIESAS), Instituto Chiapaneco de Cultura.Google Scholar
GARZA CALIGARIS, ANA MARIA 1992 “La violencia: Guatemala es el ejemplo.” In FREYERMUTH ENCISO AND HERNANDEZ CASTILLO 1992.Google Scholar
GONZALEZ, JORGE R. 1992 “De panzos a el aguacate: Sobre la ruta del Quinto Centenario.” In FREYERMUTH ENCISO AND HERNANDEZ CASTILLO 1992, 119–69.Google Scholar
GONZALEZ CASANOVA, PABLO 1970 Sociología de la explotación. Mexico City: Siglo Veintiuno.Google Scholar
GOSSEN, GARY 1974 Chamulas in the World of the Sun: Time and Space in a Maya Oral Tradition. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press (new edition published in 1984 by Waveland Press, Prospect Heights, Ill.).Google Scholar
GOSSEN, GARY 1986 Symbol and Meaning beyond the Closed Community: Essays in Mesoamerican Ideas. Albany: State University of New York Press.Google Scholar
GOSSEN, GARY, AND LEVENTHAL, RICHARD 1989 “The Topography of Ancient Maya Religious Pluralism: A Dialogue with the Present.” In Lowland Maya Civilization in the Eighth Century AD: A Symposium, edited by Sabloff, Jeremy A. and Henderson, John S. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks.Google Scholar
GREEN, LINDA 1992 “Shifting Affiliations: Mayan Widows and Evangélicos in Guatemala.” In Rethinking Protestantism in Latin America, edited by Burnett, Virginia Garrard and Stoll, David. Philadelphia, Pa.: Temple University Press.Google Scholar
GUITERAS HOLMES, CALIXTA 1985 Los peligros de alma: Visión del mundo de un tzotzil. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura.Google Scholar
HALL, STUART 1986 “The Relevance of Gramsci for the Study of Race and Ethnicity.” Journal of Communication Inquiries 10:5–22.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
HAMILTON, NORA, AND CHINCHILLA, NORMA STOLTZ 1991 “Central American Migration: A Framework for Analysis.” LARR 26, no. 1:75–110.Google Scholar
HARRIS, MARVIN 1964 Patterns of Race in the Americas. New York: Walker.Google Scholar
HARVEY, NEIL 1994 Rebellion in Chiapas: Rural Reforms, Campesino Radicalism, and the Limits to Salinismo. La Jolla: University of California Ejido Reform Research Project, Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies, University of California, San Diego.Google Scholar
HILL, JONATHAN D. 1989 “Demystifying Structural Violence.” Latin American Anthropology Review 1, no. 2 (Winter):42–48.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
JONAS, SUSANNE, MCCAUGHAN, EDWARD, AND MARTINEZ, ELIZABETH SUTHERLAND 1984 Guatemala: Tyranny on Trial: Testimony of the Permanent People's Tribunal. San Francisco, Calif.: Synthesis.Google Scholar
KINZER, STEPHEN, AND SCHLESINGER, STEPHEN 1981 Bitter Fruit: The Untold Story of the American Coup in Guatemala. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday.Google Scholar
LACLAU, ERNESTO 1990 New Reflections on the Revolutions of Our Time. London: Verso.Google Scholar
LACLAU, ERNESTO, AND MOUFFE, CHANTAL 1985 “Beyond the Positivity of the Social: Antagonisms and Hegemony.” In Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, 93–148. London: Verso.Google Scholar
LAURELL, ANA CRISTINA 1982 “Democracy in Mexico: Will the First Be the Last?” New Left Review, no. 194:33–53.Google Scholar
MACLEOD, MURDO 1973 Spanish Central America: A Socioeconomic History, 1520–1720. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.Google Scholar
MANZ, BEATRIZ 1981 “Refugees: Guatemalan Troops Clear Petén for Oil Explorations.” Cultural Survival Quarterly 5, no. 3 (Fall).Google Scholar
MANZ, BEATRIZ 1983 “Guatemalan Refugees: Violence, Displacement, and Survival.” Cultural Survival Quarterly 7, no. 1 (Winter).Google Scholar
MANZ, BEATRIZ 1988 Refugees of a Hidden War: The Aftermath of Counterinsurgency in Guatemala. Albany: State University of New York Press.Google Scholar
MCCREERY, DAVID 1990 “State Power, Indigenous Communities, and Land in Nineteenth-Century Guatemala, 1820–1920.” In Guatemalan Indians and the State, 1540–1988, edited by Smith, Carol, 96–115. Austin: University of Texas Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
MELUCCI, ALBERTO 1985 “The Symbolic Challenge of Contemporary Movements.” Social Research 52, no. 4:789–816.Google Scholar
MENCHU, RIGOBERTA 1992 “The Quincentenary: A Question of Class, Not Race.” Latin American Perspectives 19, no. 3:96–100.Google Scholar
NAGENGAST, CAROL, AND KEARNEY, MICHAEL 1990 “Mixtec Ethnicity: Social Identity, Political Consciousness, and Political Activism.” LARR 25, no. 2:61–91.Google Scholar
NASH, JUNE 1966 “Social Resources of a Latin American Peasantry.” Social and Economic Studies 15, no. 4:353–67.Google Scholar
NASH, JUNE 1968 “The Passion Play in Maya Indian Communities.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 20, no. 3:318–27.Google Scholar
NASH, JUNE 1970 In the Eyes of the Ancestors: Belief and Behavior in a Maya Community. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
NASH, JUNE 1982 “Implications of Technological Change for Household-Level and Rural Development.” In Technological Change and Rural Development, edited by Weil, P. M. and Eltereich, J., 75–128. Newark: University of Delaware Press.Google Scholar
NASH, JUNE 1993 Crafts in the World Market: The Impact of Global Exchange on Middle American Artisans. Albany: State University of New York Press.Google Scholar
NASH, JUNE 1994a “Global Integration and Subsistence Insecurity.” American Anthropologist 96, no. 2:1–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
NASH, JUNE 1994b “Press Reports on the Chiapas Uprising.” Paper presented to the American Anthropological Association, 24 Nov.–3 Dec. Atlanta.Google Scholar
NASH, JUNE, WITH CHRISTINE KOVIC n.d. “The Challenge of Trade Liberalization to Cultural Survival on the Southern Frontier of Mexico.” In The Challenge of Globalization, edited by Mittleman, James. Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, forthcoming.Google Scholar
NASH, JUNE, AND SULLIVAN, KATHLEEN 1992 “Return to Porfirismo: The View from Mexico's Southern Frontier.” Cultural Survival Quarterly 16, no. 2 (Spring):13–16.Google Scholar
NIGH, RONALD 1992 “La agricultura orgánica y el nuevo movimiento campesino en México.” Nueva Epoca Antropológica 3.Google Scholar
ROSENBAUM, BRENDA 1993 With Our Heads Bowed: The Dynamics of Gender in a Maya Community. Austin: University of Texas Press.Google Scholar
RUS, JAN n.d. “The ‘Comunidad Revolucionaria Institucional’: The Subversion of Native Government in Highland Chiapas, 1936–1968.” Colección Chiapas, Centro de Estudios Ecológicos del Sureste, San Cristóbal de las Casas.Google Scholar
RUS, JAN, AND WASSERSTROM, ROBERT 1980 “Civil Religious Hierarchies in Central Chiapas: A Critical Perspective.” American Ethnologist 7, no. 3:466–78.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
SAFA, HELEN 1981 “Runaway Shops and Female Employment: The Search for Cheap Labor.” Signs 7, no. 2 (Winter):418–33.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
SELVERSTON, MELINA 1992 “Politicized Ethnicity and the Nation-State in Ecuador.” Paper presented to the Latin American Studies Association, 24–27 Sept., Los Angeles.Google Scholar
SLATER, DAVID, ED. 1985 New Social Movements and the State in Latin America. Amsterdam: CEDLA.Google Scholar
SMITH, CAROL A. 1984a “Labor and International Capital in the Making of a Peripheral Social Formation: Economic Transformations in Guatemala, 1850–1980.” In Labor in the Capitalist World-Economy, edited by Charles Bergquist. Vol. 7 of Political Economy of the World System. Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage Publications.Google Scholar
SMITH, CAROL A. 1984b “Local History in Global Context: Social and Economic Transitions in Western Guatemala.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 26, no. 2:193–229.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
STAVENHAGEN, RODOLFO 1965 “Classes, Colonialism, and Acculturation.” Studies in Comparative International Development 1, no. 6:53–77.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
STEPHEN, LYNN 1994 “Accommodation and Resistance: Ejidatario, Ejidataria, and Official Views of Ejido Reform.” Urban Anthropology 23, nos. 2–3:233–65.Google Scholar
STOLL, DAVID 1993 Between Two Armies in the Ixil Towns of Guatemala. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
SULLIVAN, KATHLEEN 1992 “Protagonists of Change.” Cultural Survival Quarterly 16, no. 4 (Fall):17–20.Google Scholar
TAX, SOL 1937 “The Municipios of the Midwestern Highlands of Guatemala.” American Anthropologist 39, no. 3:423–44.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
TEICHMAN, JUDITH 1992 “The Mexican State and the Political Implications of Economic Restructuring.” Latin American Perspectives 19, no. 2 (Spring):88–104.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
TICKELL, OLIVER 1991 “Indigenous Expulsions in the Highlands of Chiapas.” International Work Group on Indigenous Affairs Newsletter, no. 2:9–14.Google Scholar
TORIELLO GARRIDO, GUILLERMO 1984 “On the Role of the U.S. and Israel.” In JONAS, MCCAUGHAN, AND MARTINEZ 1984, 24–30.Google Scholar
TUROK, MARTA 1988 Como acercarse a la artesanía. Mexico City: Plaza y Valdiacies.Google Scholar
VOGT, EVON Z. 1976a “Some Aspects of the Sacred Geography of Highland Chiapas.” In Meso-American Sites and World View, edited by Benson, Elizabeth P., 119–42. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks.Google Scholar
VOGT, EVON Z. 1976b Tortillas for the Gods: A Symbolic Analysis of Zinacanteco Rituals. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
WALLACE, ANTHONY F. C. 1956 “Revitalization Movements.” American Anthropologist 58:264–81.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
WARMAN, ARTURO 1970 “Todos santos y todos difuntos: crítica histórica de la antropología mexicana.” In De eso que se llaman antropología mexicana. Mexico City: Colegio de México.Google Scholar
WARREN, KAY B. 1992 “Transforming Memories and Histories: Meanings of Ethnic Resurgence for Maya Indians.” In Americans: New Interpretive Essays, edited by Stepan, Alfred, 189–219. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
WARREN, KAY B. 1993 The Violence Within: Cultural and Political Opposition in Divided Nations. Boulder, Colo.: Westview.Google Scholar
WASSERSTROM, ROBERT 1983 Class and Society in Central Chiapas. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.Google Scholar
WATANABE, JOHN M. 1992 Maya Saints and Souls in a Changing World. Austin: University of Texas Press.Google Scholar
WOLF, ERIC 1957 “Closed Corporate Peasant Communities in Mesoamerica and Central Java.” Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 13 (Spring):1–18.CrossRefGoogle Scholar