Whose Culture? Globalism, Localism, and the Expansion of Tradition: The Case of the Hñähñu of Hidalgo, Mexico and Clearwater, Florida

Abstract

The impact on the global movement of people by time and space compressions, the product of current technological advances, has been well studied. The impact of this technological and social change, however, is less understood at the cultural level. The fluid transversality of movement of people and their cultures, despite geopolitical limitations, requires going beyond dichotomous models that limit the analysis of cultural reproduction/reinvention in newly created transnational social spaces. These dichotomous models are based on an either/or system that prevents actors from belonging to, and impacting on, more than one cultural system at the same time. These categories of classification assume and impose a zero-sum analysis in which migrants are expected to ‘shed’ their traditional cultures and become modern and/or cosmopolitan to the detriment of their cultures of origin. Focusing on the Hñähñu of Hidalgo, Mexico and Clearwater, Florida, this article focuses on the recreation and promotion of traditional practices in the new cultural spaces—transnational in nature—created by the migrants' presence and exchanges in Florida and Hidalgo and that transcend geopolitical obstacles.

Ethnic and cultural fragmentation and modernist homogenization are not two arguments, two opposing views of what is happening in the world today, but two constitutive trends of global reality … the contrast in strategies of identity…is not simply a question of cultural difference, but of global position [and the] particular local/global articulations within which they emerge. (Friedman, 1990 pp. 312, 324)

Notes

1. This political activism continues to this date. During our visit in the summer of 2003, a Hñähñu bilingual teacher from Ixmiquilpan had been elected to the state senate. Another young Hñähñu had been elected to the state legislature in early 2000 and headed the state assembly's international migration committee. Both visit the Hñähñu communities in the Tampa Bay area on a regular basis.

2. For a thorough account of how indigenous populations incorporated colonial requirements of their labor into their traditional community offices and cargos, see Stavig, 1999. For other cases, see Hall and Fenelon, 2003; Langer & Muñoz, 2003; Perry, 1996.

3. Funding for this research was provided by the Globalization Research Center of the University of South Florida (now the Patel Center for Global Solutions) as part of a broader project on the connections between economic integration and civic participation of transnational communities and the effects these connections have on the host communities and communities of origin of the Hñähñu, an indigenous group from the Valle del Mezquital in Hidalgo, Mexico.

4. In fact, there is a long tradition of this since the enganche system in the nineteenth century.