POLITICS AND MEMORIES IN RURAL CHIAPAS: LANGUAGES OF POWER AT THE DAWN OF THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

Abstract

The configuration of politics consists in unfinished and negotiated processes. This appears clearly in regions where the advent of governmental institutions has occurred under a weaker centralised surveillance. Among the Tojolabal population in Chiapas, Mexico, state institutions like the ejido and rural schooling have had an important presence. However, the “integration” of this population into national society was different from that characterising other areas and has opened up a vast field of dispute between diverse organizations. In addition, this population reproduces a particular understanding of a social world rooted in its dependency on cultivation of the milpa. This understanding is expressed in ritual practices (as ways of coping with uncertainty in seasonal corn cultivation) and special narratives (about harm, disease, death, hunger, and rain, and about witches and entities like the lord of the underworld). Ritual and narrative are analyzed as foundations of an idiom for recalling social tensions and allowing for the articulation of explanations and memories of broader social events (such as Nation-State formation). Rather than a coherent worldview, symbolic system, or structure of values, what we find here is a varied and ambiguous language of power, an idiom to talk about power differences and their contradictions. Such language generates not a closed social theory but an open, flexible field of expression that is reproduced because the world is experienced, both in the finca and in the ejido, as a hierarchical yet changing and contested space, filled with constant dangers and struggles, characterized by scarcity and need.

Key Words:

• power
• state
• integration
• politics
• ritual
• narrative
• Chiapas

This article draws on parts of my doctoral dissertation Contemporary Politics in Rural Chiapas. An Ethnographic Approach to Power. I gratefully acknowledge the feedback from colleagues at the Anthropology of Power seminar regularly held in San Cristóbal de Las Casas, Chiapas: Astrid Pinto, Sonia Toledo, Gracia Imberton, Anna Garza, Patricia Ochoa, Carolina Rivera, Antonio Gómez, and Rebecca Englert. I am also grateful to Alejandro Agudo Sanchíz, Alejandra Navarro Smith, Tim Trench, and Niels Barmeyer, as well as Jonathan Hill and the editors and reviewers of Identities, for their comments on this paper.

Notes

1. The PRI was created in 1929, following a period of armed rebellion and political infighting. Its purpose was to build a political apparatus aimed at solving the conflicts between the cliques resulting from the “Revolution,” as well as to set out its expected social transformations (as epitomized especially by the new Constitution of 1917). Initially established as the National Revolutionary Party, it became the Party of the National Revolution under President Lázaro Cárdenas (1934–1940), who expropriated the country's oil industry from foreign companies and redistributed the largest share of land. It was under President Miguel Alemán (1946–1952) that the party took on its present-day designation.

2. Social policies have been designed to reduce the role of the government as provider while placing greater responsibility on beneficiaries. This is specially the case with the Oportunidades program, by which women receive cash transfers conditional on their children's school attendance and their participation in workshops on health and nutrition.

3. The ejido is a unit of territory composed of lands granted by the government and held in communal trust by peasant beneficiaries. Dating back to the 1910–1920 Revolution, land reform was legally terminated by constitutional amendments introduced in 1992.

4. Twentieth-century indigenismo was one of the cornerstones of governmental intervention in regions with indigenous populations. Its aim was twofold: to curb the relations of subordination that kept such populations marginalized (in a “caste-like society”) and to incorporate them into national society (i.e., a “class society” [Aguirre 1953]).

5. The INI went on financing these programs until 2003, when it was converted into a national committee for the development of indigenous peoples. Already in the 1990s, INI policies had shifted away from social assistance schemes and toward participatory and co-responsibility led schemes, by granting credits to be paid back to the government or aid conditional on the beneficiaries' input in work or in cash.

6. There are detailed studies on social life in the fincas of Chiapas in Spanish. On those in the Highlands see Pinto (1999) and the references to relationships between indigenous peoples and fincas in Garza´s work on the village of Chenalhó (Garza 2002). On the fincas on the margins of the Highlands, see Toledo's (2002) study of the Simojovel region (northern Chiapas), Montagú’s work on Ocosingo (1970), and the memories of Tojolabal peons in Gómez and Ruz (1992). Agudo Sanchíz’ contribution to this issue provides information about the relationships between the fincas and indigenous populations in other regions of Chiapas.

7. See the accounts of former finca peons in Gómez and Ruz (1992).

8. Stephen (2002) studied the historical formation of those communities in the Lacandon Jungle in which the population developed a deeper and longer commitment with Zapatista movement.

9. See Van der Haar (2000, 2001) and Stephen (2002) for a detailed study of these events.

10. A paradigmatic case is that of Chamula, described by Jan Rus as the “Institutional Revolutionary Community” (paraphrasing the name of the PRI party). Dramatically transformed over the period 1930s–1960s, Chamula experienced most directly the social integration policies. Already in the 1930s, there appeared a new generation of young literate leaders who would participate in labor organization and programs for the promotion of health and education. In the long run, and after attaining onerous and prominent offices within the traditional authority system, which amalgamated municipal government tasks with religious-ceremonial obligations, these youngsters would displace old authorities as they established links with the PRI party (Rus 1994). On variants of this process in other communities of the Highlands, see Viqueira and Sonnleitner (2000) and Sonnleitner (2001). Contrasting developments are analyzed for northern Chiapas by Toledo (2002) and Agudo Sanchíz (this issue).

11. Something similar occurred in another region, Simojovel (in northwest Chiapas). Dominated by fincas until the 1980s, this region underwent a period of peasant mobilization, land takeovers, and violent army interventions. According to Toledo (2002: 77), such violent outbursts owed partly to the weak institutionalization and absence of intermediating agencies in Simojovel.

12. Based on several documents but mainly on interviews with Bishop Samuel Ruiz, Womack (1999) analyzed the central role of the Catholic Church in the development of political and social organization of indigenous regions of Chiapas.

13. The 1974 congress was originally sponsored by the Chiapas government to establish links with groups in diverse regions of the state. However, its organization was left to the San Cristóbal Diocese, which turned the event into an unprecedented space for grass-roots organization. The congress was the result of previous networking with indigenous leaders who attended the conference as delegates in charge of putting forward demands for land, health, and education on behalf of their communities (Harvey 1998; Womack 1999; Stephen 2002).

14. A foregoing experience of this kind took place in 1975, when the federal government established the Tojolabal Supreme Council with the aim to promote the incorporation of the region's agriculturalists into official peasant sectors. However, the council was taken over and employed by a group of Tojolabal leaders to create a wholly indigenous regional government agency (Mattiace 2002; Van der Haar 2001).

15. The PRD was formed out of the defeat of the National Democratic Front in the federal elections of 1988. The Front had brought together diverse left-wing parties around the election campaign of ex-President Lázaro Cárdenas's son, among them the PSUM, which was then incorporated into the PRD.

16. See Stephen (2002) and Barmeyer's contribution to this issue.

17. Agudo Sanchíz, in this issue, follows Nugent and Alonso (1994) in talking about local “selective traditions.”

18. Veracruz and other ejidos in the Tojolabal region are the natal communities of quite a few leaders of regional organizations, some of whom have become municipal presidents or local and federal deputies for left-wing political parties. This owes to the fact that, in the Tojolabal region, political parties and peasant organizations prone to negotiation with the government have had a greater impact than Zapatismo and its discourse of rejection to governmental programs and elections (as noted by Barmeyer, in this issue).

19. For similar ethnographic accounts in Mesoamerica, see referred works of Bricker (1981), Warren (1989), Monaghan (1995), Wilson (1995), and Watanabe (1992).

20. On pilgrimages among the Tojolabals, see Adams (1988), Ruz (1983), Gómez and Pinto (1998), Gómez (2000), Escalona (2001, 2004), and Guzmán (2001).

21. There is also a brief version in Gómez (1995).

22. The sombrerón is depicted as “owner of the land” and lord of the underworld, but assumes diverse images, particularly as a patrón of a finca. Tzuultaq'as among Maya Q'eqchi’ in Guatemala assume diverse interpretations, either as Mayan ancestors that possess the land and give fertility or as Ladino—non-indigenous—figures that impose their domain on land and underworld, as finca patrons do (Wilson 1995). It is also the case of the opposition between Catholic saints and ambitious Maya witz in Chimaltenango, Guatemala, the respective figures representing the contrast between Chimaltecos and the Ladino lords of Earth, when transposed to ethnic identification (Watanabe 1992). Warren, quoting Ricardo Falla, also refers to the image of Juan Noj or Juan el Gordo, described as a Ladino landlord in rural Guatemala (Warren 1989).

23. Revealing in this sense are the accounts of finca workers in the Simojovel region, who explain their participation in the struggle for land as part of a religious interpretation of their mobilization. Some make sense of their situation in terms of the teachings of the evangelization campaign, which also took place in that region; a man even traced his involvement in the organization for land struggle to a dream he had about Saint Michael, just after having unsuccessfully applied for a land endowment grant to the agrarian authorities (Toledo 2002: 197–99).

24. Monaghan (1975) studies sociality among Mixtec population in Oaxaca as embracing not just exchange, gifting, moral obligations, and cooperation in ceremonial and work activities but also envious acts, which implies changes in social organizing and distribution of power. Watanabe (1992: 191–192) says for Chimaltecos that fear of jealousy or envy of others remains a potent force in life. However, this contested meaning of community relations is not totally inserted in the analysis of the uneven and varied processes of production of meanings, since attention is directed to systems of values or symbols.

25. This is very similar to perceptions of the shame or embarrassment (vergüenza) “disease” studied by Imberton (2002) in Chol communities in northern Chiapas. In this case, the diagnosis of disease and the ritual procedures for healing are in a sense reflections and accounts of personal tensions and conflicts, occurring in a context of resource scarcity.