The Model Indian: Negotiating Worlds in Nineteenth-Century Chiapas (original) (raw)
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History of the impact of the economic and demographic crises since the mid-1970s on the Tsotsil and Tseltal (Tzotzil and Tzeltal) communities of Highland Chiapas. Dependent since the late nineteenth century on seasonal migratory labor on the plantations of Chiapas’s tropical lowlands, when the plantations began to fail, and with them their demand for indigenous migrant workers,communities throughout the highlands were forced to reorient their economies to urban and tourist labor markets, and to shed population Among the side effects of these processes are the massive migration to the Lacandón Jungle since the 1970s, the increasing urbanization of the Tsotsils and Tseltals, and profound changesin the social and political organization of the communities in the region of San Cristóbal de Las Casas. KEYS Tsotsil (Tzotzil) economic history, Tsotsil (Tzotzil) social history, Chiapas economic history, Chiapas social history, Indigenous undocumented migration to the US, Chiapas-urbanization, Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN), Chiapas rebellion of 1994, San Juan Chamula, Chiapas-economic crises since 1970s, Protestant religious conversion
Chiapas tells the old story of peasant Indians used by urban intellecturals
Reason , 1994
Share on FacebookShare on TwitterShare on RedditShare by emailPrint friendly versionCopy page URL The anonymous masked leaders of the rebellious Zapatistas, as well as a number of sympathetic Mexican analysts, have attempted to portray the Chiapas revolt as a spontaneous, grassroots reaction to the constitutional and market-based economic reforms instituted by the Salinas administration. In the wake of the revolt, these people have called for a repudiation of the very policies that have energized the Mexican economy and set the stage for a more fully functioning democracy. While the Mexican intelligentsia has largely toed the left-of-center line, there are significant exceptions, such as commentators Arturo Warman, Enrique Krauze, and Héctor Aguilar Camín, who are attempting to articulate a more balanced understanding of the crisis. The leftist interpretation of events, they point out, is lacking both nuance and an understanding of regional history. Perhaps the highest-profile dissenter among Mexican intellectuals is Octavio Paz, the 1990 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. He finds it significant that the Chiapas revolt and the assassination of the PRI's Luis Donaldo Colosio, though probably unrelated to one another, coincide with a Mexican political climate that has reached levels of discord unseen for over half a century. Paz lays much of the blame for that climate at the feet of Mexican intellectuals, many of whom keep writing outmoded "apologies for the use of violence." They have, says Paz, forgotten the great political lesson
2010
Several of the chapters (especially 2, 4, 5 and 6) also grew out of larger, multiresearcher projects. In those cases, I benefitted not only from my colleagues' help in developing the questions and methodology, but from their suggestions as the studies went on, and then their acute comments on my texts. For Chapters 2 and 4, support was provided by the National Science Foundation (SBR-9601370,-Rapid Social and Cultural Change in Southeastern Mexico‖), in collaboration with George Collier, Jane Collier and Diane Rus. For Chapter 2, I also inherited the 1974 economic survey forms of my original collaborator, Robert Wasserstrom, which proved invaluable. Chapter 5 was undertaken while I was a visiting fellow at the Center for US-Mexico Studies of the University of California, San Diego (2002-03), and continued with summer support in 2004 from the Centro de Investigación y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social (CIESAS), and then from 2005 to the present from the Centro de Estudios Superiores sobre México y Centroamérica (CESMECA) and the Instituto de Estudios Indígenas (IEI), both of San Cristóbal. In addition to Diane, Ian Zinn worked on the project with us in 2007. For Chapter 6, Diane and I were partially supported for two summers by the Jacobs Fund of Bellingham, Washington, and then in collaboration with James Diego Vigil of the University of California, Irvine, by a pilot grant from University of California/MEXUS and the UCLA Center for the Study of Urban Poverty. Polly Vigil and Carlos Ramos also participated in this second period. Finally, the two oldest chapters (1 and 3) were developed while I worked for the Instituto de Asesoría Antropológico para la Región Maya, in San Cristóbal. Beyond my immediate collaborators, there are many to thank in the community of vii scholars and activists in San Cristóbal for support, advice, or comments on all of my work during the years when these chapters were written. Chief among them are the late Andrés Aubry and Angélica Inda de Aubry, colleagues in the Instituto de Asesoría Antropológica para la Región Maya, where Diane and I worked full-time in the second half of the 1980s, and continued to have a home during the summers from 1990 through 2007. Together with Andrés we developed the model of collaborative community research that we used as long ago as the 1970s. Although as a Campesinista and Zapatista Andrés was firmly opposed to the urbanization and long distance, off-farm migration that are the subject of several chapters hereand constantly questioned us about whether in studying them we were not somehow legitimizing and perhaps encouraging themhe continued to offer support and careful readings of drafts until the end of his life.
The great social divide between Spanish speaking ladinos and non-Spanish speaking Indians, a long held division reaching back to Mexico"s colonial period around San Cristóbal de Las Casas fueled distrust and complaints of maltreatment and exploitation of the laboring class of Indians. Indians labored under the double burden of ethnicity and class, dialogues between Indians and ladinos existed throughout the decades in the nineteenth-century over issues of labor, land and pay. On the heels of a violent race war (1867-1870) between Indians and ladinos, the state government sought to allow Indians more opportunities to redress legal issues in order to prevent future rebellions. Beyond aggressive tactics by elites to suppress revolting Indians, government officials opted to reinstitute the colonial office of protector de indios in an attempt to address inter-ethnic issues. Indians used the opportunity to contest and negotiate long held grievances. A study of the legal culture in San Cristóbal de Las Casas and the re-introduction of the protector of indios proved precipitous in the two decades prior to the rise of the agro-export industry. The use of the protector de indios eased tensions between Indians and ladinos. Moreover it offered a short period of legal empowerment in the daily lives of individual Indians as they engaged, contested and actively participated in shaping their relations with the ladino elite thus demonstrating the dynamic relationship between Indians and ladinos in the state of Chiapas on the cusp of momentous change in the late decades of the nineteenth-century. 1
At the beginning of the 1970s the population of San Cristóbal, Chiapas, was less than 30,000, virtually all Spanish-speaking ladinos. The city was also the regional center for the surrounding Chiapas Highlands containing 14 indigenous municipios with approximately 150,000 Tsotsil and Tseltal Mayas. Just over 40 years later, we find a city of some 200,000, almost half now Mayas who inhabit some eighty colonias. Superficially, the only difference between this urbanization and that of other Latin American regions is that the Chiapas highlands came relatively late to the transformation, becoming perhaps the last in the continent to urbanize. A closer look, however, reveals sharp distinctions. Most striking is in spite of their extreme poverty, San Cristóbal’s migrants have been highly organized since they arrived in the city, making it if still a conflictive place, one open to negotiation between ethnic groups. The migrants, most of whom at the beginning were Protestant and Liberation T...
Ethnohistory, 2005
In this age of commemoration, it is fashionable to celebrate and even recreate pioneering expeditions. This volume, spawned by a 1997 centenary conference, is more celebration and critical reexamination than recreation (in contrast to the more recent ''Harriman Revisited'' expedition). Morris K. Jesup, chief financier of the expedition, was in 1897 president of the American Museum of Natural History and seeking to promote big projects tackling important problems. His young assistant curator, Franz Boas, had one: a five-year, multidisciplinary intercontinental investigation to settle the question of Native American origins and links to Northeast Asia. So began the Jesup North Pacific Expedition (JNPE) and the rise of Boas. Although monumental in scope and ethnographically fruitful, ultimately the JNPE failed to produce a grand synthesis or even a final summary of the project's results. Was it because Boas lost interest, became increasingly wary of grand comparative theorizing, or concluded that more studies (a Jesup 2?) were needed before a credible synthesis could be promulgated? These and other issues are taken up in this volume and its companion, Gateways: Exploring the Legacy of the Jesup North Pacific Expedition, 1897-1902 (Contributions to Circumpolar Anthropology, 1, edited by Igor Krupnik and William W. Fitzhugh). The twenty essays are organized into four parts. Part one, the strongest, evaluates the ''intellectual legacy'' of Jesup from the perspective of
A product of the conquest of an Arawakan population byTupí-Guaraní migrants,Chiriguano societyo?ers a clear instance of ‘‘indigenous hybridity’’ that hasreceivedinadequatescholarlyattention.Wesuggestthattheassimilationofthe Chiriguano case to Tupí-Guaraní sociopolitical models demonstrates a process of ‘‘Guaranization’’ that has influenced scholars as much as—if not more than—the Chiriguano themselves. By means of an ethnohistorical analysis of the Chiriguano politicalsystem,weattempttorecovertheArawakanheritageofthistrulymestizo societyinwhichdi?erentculturaltraditionsarebothcounterposedandcombined. The reading we o?er of the ‘‘Chiriguano case’’ is a new one, oriented specifically to the ethnically diverse frontier territory of the South American Gran Chaco but having broad comparativevalue.
Reviews the contributions of Tsotsil (Tzotzil) oral history to the history of the community of San Juan Chamula – and of the Tsotsils in general – in two senses. First, as a detailed view “from the other side” of Chiapas’s common history: who were the Tzotzil actors, what ends did they pursue, etc. And second, as a demonstration of the continuity of a uniquely Tzotzil self-consciousness, of a Tzotzil intellectual tradition, from remote times to the present in communities like Chamula. [Considera las aportaciones de la historia oral tsotsil (tzotzil) a la historia de la comunidad de Chamula, y de los tsotsiles de los Altos de Chiapas en general, en dos sentidos. Primero como visión detallada del otro lado, de actores tsotsiles,a la historia general. Y segundo como demostración de la continuidad desde tiempos remotos de una tradición intelectual propia en comunidades de habla y cultura como Chamula.] KEYS Tsotsil (Tzotzil) language and linguistics, Tsotsil (Tzotzil) oral history, San Juan Chamula-history and ethnohistory, Highland Chiapas-history