Aboriginal Rights Mexico
Mexico: Indigenous Culture and the Illusion of the Nation-State.
Mexican guest writer Michelle Capistran challenges the Mestizo Myth, and the construct of Mexican nationality.
Mexico is an illusion; it can exist only as a state yet not as a nation. Mexico contains infinite nations, as varied and diverse as its mountainous terrain. Within the borders of the geographical space known as Mexico, charted through centuries of invasions, there are 63 spoken languages with countless dialectical variants and ecosystems that range from arid deserts to tropical rainforests and snow-capped mountain ranges. There is no one Mexico. In such a context, the nation-state can only maintain its hegemony if this diversity is suppressed.
After the Mexican revolution, the new state had to establish control over this varied landscape. Homogeneity had to be established, and it was done so through the myth of the Cosmic Race, engendered by José Vasconcelos. The myth of the mestizo, the universal mexican born of spanish and indian blood. The mestizo became synonimous with the mexican, and all other identities were left aside. The indian had to become a mestizo ("amestizarse") learn to speak spanish and incorporate himself (sic) into the new national agenda. This is tragic, particularly considering that the revolution was fought largely by indigenous people, in order to gain "land and liberty". Although the ideals proclaimed by Zapata, the leader of the revolution in the south, were fiercely anti-colonial, the results of the revolution were a new form of identitary colonization that attempted to make a single nation-state out of a wealth of nations.
This notion of "incorporating" indigenous people into national life was backed by the ideology and institutions of "indigenismo" (roughly translated as "indigenism"), attempted to "modernize the indians" through a series of paternalistic government programs. It didn't work. To this day, indigenous people (10% of the population) are still the most marginalized thanks to a wide range of economic policies that have made their way of life cease to be viable in many cases.
Neoliberalism has made access to land difficult, therefore cutting off the possibility of subsistence agriculture, while making market agriculture impossible. The colonial and mestizo-philic ideologies, along with modernist discourse and practice, have systematically subjugated and undervalued indigenous life-ways.
If these conditions of subjugation are not ceased, little will change. A radical break from hegemonic structures (ideological, economical and political) is necessary for indigenous culture to be maintained with dignity. By this, I mean the shattering of colonialism and modernism, which go hand in hand, and the struggle for self-determination and autonomy.
