Diversity, difference and nation: Indigenous peoples on Mexican screen

Abstract

This article draws on constructivist theories of identity that regard the self as coming into existence through interaction with the other. It investigates the discursive formation of Indigenous people in the forging of Mexican national identity. The aim of this article is to show how difference has been managed and deployed in the establishment of national Mexican identities from independence until the present. This is done with reference to visual culture and film and illustrated with examples from the ‘Golden Age’ as well as ‘the New Mexican Cinema’.

Keywords:

• nationalism
• diversity
• Mexico
• film
• identity

Notes

1. Although their rationale and efficacy is much debated, many states now enforce university and/or police quotas for members of ethnic or religious minorities. Such is the case in Canada, New Zealand, Brazil, China, Malaysia and in the United Kingdom, Northern Ireland.

2. To Doreen Massey ‘coevalness concerns a stance of recognition and respect in situations of mutual implication’, especially regarding to sharing space (Massey, 2005, p. 69).

3. On the recent de-nationalisation of the state, see Saskia Sassen's account of the privatisation of government functions and of much of the formerly public realm in a number of countries, including Mexico, following the onset of neoliberalism (Sassen, 2008, pp. 222–71).

4. In Spanish, ‘criollo’ is thus different from the English ‘creole’, which implies hybridity.

5. On hybridity more generally, see Bhabha (2004) and also Kraidy (2005).

6. Inaugural speech by then President Adolfo López Mateos, 17 September 1964.

7. For a detailed account on the relevance of popular culture for the formation of nation-states, with examples drawn from the United Kingdom, see Hall (2006). And for the role of the other aspects of popular culture, such as mariachi music in Mexico, see Mulholland (2007).

8. Along with the films depicting Indigenous minorities, other films focused on Mexican immigrants to the United States, then derogatorily referred to as ‘pochos’ and later as ‘Chicanos’. Simultaneously claiming the Mexican identity and the American identity that was, until the 1990s, its discursive opposite, Chicanos, like Indigenous peoples, put into question the fit between the political and the territorial unit that nationalism struggles to create (De La Garza, 2009).

9. The batch included paintings of hers by Diego Rivera. One of them, commissioned for a film and significantly entitled Mother, cannot leave Mexico as it is regarded national heritage.

10. For a discussion on what the reforms entailed, see Hamnett (1999, pp. 285–7); González Gómez (1998, pp. 37–65).

11. Although the rationale provided for the making of Eréndira by director Juan Mora-Catlett is its relevance for present day Indigenous peoples in that ‘the Purépecha are a living culture … this is why I did not think it would be right to use actors from Mexico City … I came to Michoacán and filmed the landscape there’ (Caballero, 2007). The film was also first shown there rather than in Mexico City.

12. Frida Kahlo was the daughter of German photographer, Guillermo Kahlo, and Matilde Calderón, a mestiza from Oaxaca.