CHAPTER 8 NATIVE MESOAMERICANS IN THE MODERN ERA 343abandoning the worn-out idea of “mestizaje” (racial and cultural mixing), replacing
it with a modern form of multiculturalism that encourages the development of diverse
Mesoamerican literatures and languages. Gutierrez (1999:204) notes, however, that
the door is closed on the possibility of self-rule by the native Mesoamerican groups.
It would seem that the state’s weak version of multiculturalism, and even that of the
educated Indians themselves, rules out real political empowerment of the Indian
peoples of Mexico.
(Box 8.7 provides a description of how one sector of the native Mesoamerican
population, the Mixtecs of Oaxaca, Mexico, were able to create an expanded ethnic
“nation” in the context of neoliberal Mexican economic and political policies.)
Box 8.7 Mixtec Ethnicity in MexicoThe anthropologist Michael Kearney (1996) describes the processes by which the Mixtec Indians
of Oaxaca, Mexico, have reacted to developmental and neoliberal forces in Mexico by creating
a greatly enlarged ethnic “nation” of their own.
Kearney narrates how in the 1960s, indigenist development projects were initiated in the Mix-
tec region in an attempt to “modernize” the Indians and integrate them into national life. But de-
velopment failed to occur, and the result was “constant environmental deterioration and economic
stagnation” (p.175).
In the face of increasing neoliberal pressures, the Mixtecs began to migrate to more de-
veloped areas in order to find wage labor opportunities. In large numbers, the Mixtecs became
farm laborers in the extensive irrigated fields of Northwest Mexico and California (at one time,
as many as 50,000 Mixtecs were working the California fields). Within these new settings, the
Mixtecs suffered widespread exploitation and economic insecurity. Attempts to organize their own
unions or join larger Farm Workers unions largely failed. As Kearney explains: “... for the Mix-
tec on both sides of the border, the proletarian route to political empowerment has proven no
more successful than the peasant route” (p.176).
Many Mixtecs also migrated to urban areas such as Mexico City and Tijuana, where they
found work as laborers at the bottom of the informal service sector. In such settings they some-
times attemped to organize urban squatter associations in order to better their living conditions.
The more powerful Mexican mestizo classes, however, limited the Mixtecs’ ability to improve
their economic and social conditions.
A major reason why it has been so difficult for the Mixtecs to assert themselves has to do
with the family and social fragmentation associated with moving from one area, or even country,
to another. The Mixtecs found it difficult to remain unified in the context of the constant move-
ment back and forth between their local communities in Oaxaca and the fields of Northern Mex-
ico and California, as well as the cities of Mexico and the United States.
Thrown together in agricultural camps and urban shantytowns, and subjected to discrimi-
nation for being “Indians,” the Mixtecs began to shed the imposed identities as poor Indians or
lower-class workers. Instead, they identified themselves as Mixtec peoples belonging to an ex-
panded ethnic identity that included all Mixtec Indians. Inspired by the new multiculturalism
gaining ground in Mexico, they soon established relationships with other Native American “na-
tions” from Oaxaca, such as the Zapotecs, Chinantecs, Mixes, and so on.
As Kearney (1996:180) explains, ethnic nationalism is an “identity suitable for the dispos-
sessed, the exiled, those in diaspora, the marginal, the migrant, the diverse.” And, of course, most
appropriately for the native Mesoamericans of Mexico.