CHAPTER 8 NATIVE MESOAMERICANS IN THE MODERN ERA 329his candidacy for the presidency, although he later withdrew from the contest prior
to the election itself.
Mobilization by the native Mesoamericans in the face of these recent neoliberal
developments in Mexico and Central America has taken a violent turn at times (es-
pecially in Mexico), but for the most part, it has led to the more peaceful form of pro-
tecting, and expanding, indigenous rights and ethnic and national identities. This
last section, then, will be devoted to a description of the complex ethnic and na-
tional identity movements engaged in by the Mesoamerican Indians of Mexico and
Central America. In order to simplify the account, these diverse forms of ethnic and
national nativism are classified into three types according to their sociogeographical
scope as follows:
- Local Ethnicity, the persisting Mesoamerican local (community) cultural identities
that exist by the thousands in the region. - Hegemonic Nationalism, the sovereign nation-state cultural identities, with emphasis
on the influence that native Mesoamericans have had on the formation of state na-
tionalisms. - Multiculturalism, the growing tendency by native Mesoamericans to emphasize re-
gional ethnic cultural identities and to elevate them to autonomous “nation” status
within the broader state organizations.
A fourth type, not discussed in this chapter, might be termed “Transnational-
ism.” Transnationalism here refers to the ethnic and national cultural identities cre-
ated by native Mesoamericans who have immigrated to other countries but return to
their home communities and countries with new ideas about indigenous identities.
This last type will be discussed in the chapter to follow on “Transnationalism and
the Political Economy of Mesoamerica.”
Local Ethnicity
The local or community type of ethnicity (which Aguirre referred to as being
“parochial”) has dominated native Mesoamerican ethnicity since the beginning of
Spanish colonization. The intricate processes by which the Indians adapted Spanish
and later creole and mestizo cultural features to their own elaborate Mesoamerican
cultures has been the subject of numerous studies by anthropologists. This persistent
type of local Indian identity calls into question the argument by some scholars that the
Mesoamerican cultures were destroyed by the Spanish “conquest” and that the Indi-
ans themselves were absorbed into the emerging Mexican and Central American na-
tion-state identities. Recently, the historian Matthew Restall (2003) has argued that
among the many myths promulgated about the Spanish invasion and colonization of
Mesoamerica is the myth that “the Conquest reduced the Native American world to
a void.” Instead, he points out, the “native cultures displayed resilience, adaptability,
ongoing vitality, a heterogeneity of response to outside interference” (p.xviii).
This kind of local cultural resilience has continued in thousands of Indian com-
munities in Mexico and Central America, and even today it probably provides the