Construction of Mexican Identity (Lopez, 2002) (original) (raw)
Related papers
This thesis contributes to our understanding of contemporary Mexican national identity by charting the role indigeneity has played in instituting the dominant ‘Mestizo’ identity, as well as the efforts of indigenous peoples to secure social, cultural, and political recognition through the construction of an indigenous identity outside the Mestizo frame. Marxist, sociological, functionalist and deliberative approaches to this domain of inquiry furnish us with many useful insights, but they also suffer from some problematic features, in particular, economic reductionism, determinism, subjectivism and foundationalism. Drawing on the Essex School of Discourse Analysis and Lacanian psychoanalysis as articulated in the ‘logics approach’ (Glynos & Howarth 2007) I seek to synthesize key elements of these approaches (while also avoiding some of the pitfalls) in a detailed study of the way indigenous peoples and movements have deployed culture in their efforts to resist and contest the dominant ‘Mestizo’ identity frame. The substantive part of the thesis comprises four chapters. I show, first, how contemporary, dominant Mexican national identity is a product of concerted efforts over extended periods of time to transform a heterogeneous country into a unified and homogeneous ethnic nation. This hegemonic identity – ‘Mestizo’ identity – articulates elements from Mexican post-revolutionary discourse, including associated indigenous symbols. However, I go on to show how the mobilisations and events spearheaded by the EZLN from 1994 to 1996 crystalized a moment of possibility because it created a space in which indigenous peoples could contest the Mestizo regime and articulate distinctive political demands for recognition and representation. Indigenous peoples started to develop a set of local, autonomous and independent cultural practices from the ‘bottom up’, with the aim of securing social, cultural and political recognition. The final two chapters comprise a detailed qualitative case study of one such practice of resistance. Access to the Ñomndaa indigenous group in Guerrero has made it possible for me to chart the development of a specific type of cultural resistance exercised primarily through radio broadcasting in a municipality of Guerrero, showing how this spurred broader counter-hegemonic efforts to contest the Mestizo imaginary. Central to this resistance movement were practices enacting logics of cultural re-valuation and consciousness-raising, which in turn elicited harsh governmental counter-tactics. In the final chapter I show how the indigenous people sought to embed these logics of re-valuation and consciousness-raising into the local provision of elementary school education. In sum, I argue that a critical analysis of national identity discourse and indigenous practices of resistance as a function of logics can help us better draw out the social, political, and ideological dimensions of national identity construction processes.
2019
Even when both the indigenous and Spanish cultures are essential components of miscegenation, the widely spread stories about the Conquest do not grant a clear and positive position to the Indigenous nor to the term Indian. On the contrary, in the case of the word Indian, we are aware that it is devaluated, while the word indigenous has been proposed to bring a positive value to that culture and past. We can state that these social objects: Indian and Indigenous are linked to the ideology of our culture. Our study aims at exploring the words and ideas associated with these terms: Indian and Indigenous, as well as the values associated to each one of them within the social thinking of the surveyed groups. Furthermore, we asked ourselves whether those ideas are a social or collective representation, to the extent that they are strongly linked to the country’s ideology.
RACE AND ETHNIC RELATIONS IN MEXICO (Vigil and Lopez 2004)
Journal of Latino-Latin American Studies, 2004
Recent research is beginning to reexamine the conventional wisdom in Mexico that a "mestizocracia" reflects the nation's racial and cultural heritage, and not the separation that exists between urban "European-appearing" elites and Indians or darker mestizos from a low income background. Challenging the common belief that race problems and racism were solved over a hundred years ago in the aftermath of the colonial era, this paper explores some of the key issues in the debate and shows that there are still many entrenched racist attitudes and practices that persist from that time period, affecting both Mexicans in Mexico and the United States. The creation and promotion of a mestizo ideology by government officials is offset by the recent surge of racial pride and ethnic nationalism among Indians, particularly in light of the Zapatista movement. National "identity" politics include psychological elements and intra-group racism denoting the striving for a positive self-image.
Nuevo mundo mundos nuevos, 2008
The way the inhabitants of two communities of Nahua origin in southwestern Tlaxcala in Central Mexico perceive their own and each other’s identities defy categorizing these towns as “indigenous” or “Mestizo”. In the Mesoamerican culture area at large, situations such as these far outnumber those of regions such as the Chiapas highlands with a clear caste-like ethnic divide. This is so in part because of the massive and rapid language shift in the twentieth century that took place in tens of thousands of Mesoamerican communities that were repúblicas de indios during the colonial period, consequent to a nation-state building project based on Spanish monolinguism. In this paper I criticize how anthropologists have used the “indigenous” and “mestizo”. Instead of centering on how that policy has caused massive re-identification, ethnicity and identity studies are equated with identity politics. By paying more attention to state than to local categories, anthropologists have ignored important social processes and have contributed to the Mexico´s twentieth century state building and forced identity change project. Emphasis is placed on the role of the cargo systems in defining membership in communities that in the colonial period were “repúblicas de indios” or “pueblos de indios”.
Forging Common Origin in the Making of the Mexican Nation
Genealogy, 2020
The Mexican nation was built by the state. This construction involved the formulation and dissemination of a national identity to forge a community that shares common culture and social cohesion. The focus of the article is to analyze the myth of the origin of the nation, mestizaje, as this is a long-lasting formula of national integration. After more than a century of mestizaje, real or fictitious, Indigenous and Afro-descendant peoples have begun to question the capability of this common origin since it invalidates the origins of many other ethnic communities, especially in the current phase of the nation state, which refers to the recognition of cultural diversity. The myth is propagated by official means and is highly perceived by society, due to its high symbolic content that is well reflected in popular pictorial representations. The final part of the article will refer to the mestizo myth in the imagination of some Indigenous intellectuals and students, who hold their own ethnic myths of foundation or origin.