The ‘First Peoples’ of Mexico City: Local Cemeteries, History and Identity in the Urban Pueblo of Culhuacán

Abstract

The term pueblos originarios is increasingly being used to define those settlements and populations within Mexico City with long-term historical and cultural roots in the central Valley of Mexico. The use of this term points not only to the variety of populations and places that make up this complex urban environment but also to the growing political and cultural profile of these populations. At the same time, these pueblos originarios are claiming rights as originarios, nativos, and even indígenas in their fights to protect their traditions, identities, forms of autonomy, and historically important connections to place. This is also leading to changing understandings and conceptualizations of local and even national identities. In the ‘urban pueblo’ of Culhuacán, Mexico City, local struggles revolving around two neighborhood cemeteries are challenging the place of these pueblos originarios within the city as well as their relationship with local authorities and the State. These processes are also impacting on the way that some locals perceive their own histories and rights and how, therefore, they fit into the changing environment of Mexico City.

Keywords:

• Mexico City
• Culhuacán
• pueblos originarios
• neighborhood cemeteries
• indigenous identity

Notes

1. Pueblo originario: literally it means ‘original people, original settlers or original settlements.’ I will use the Spanish term throughout. In referring to people, I will use the term originarios.

2. Mexico's National Institute for Statistics, Geography and Information. Measurements of marginality include income, access to services, education levels and housing quality.

3. Chinampas: ‘floating’ garden mounds surrounded by water.

4. The haciendas were Hacienda San Antonio Coapa, Hacienda San Nicolás Tolentino and Hacienda La Soledad.

5. Ejido: a system implemented after the 1910 revolution that gave communal land usage rights to communities of ejiditarios (users of ejidos) with particular land use and cultivation rights.

6. Mayordomo: a voluntary civic-religious position of great prestige that individuals take on for a 12-month period in order to fund, plan, organize and carry out tasks related to the annual calendar of events for one of the local popular religious activities as they relate to important local saints and celebrations.

7. For accounts of similar processes in Bolivia, see Canessa (2007) and Hertzler (2005).

8. To the delight and surprise of many, this expropriation was authorized by the mayor of Mexico City, Marcelo Ebrard, in late 2008; see Cruz Gonzalez (2008).

9. Mestizo: broadly speaking, the term used to define those born in the Americas of mixed Indigenous and European ancestry. Mestizaje is therefore this process, literally, the ‘mixture’ of races but also the ideological underpinnings of national identity in Mexico.

10. Increasingly, a homogenized and stereotyped version of indigenous people, cultures, and ‘products’ (i.e. crafts, food, music, etc.) are becoming an important national ‘asset’ in the ‘ethnic’ tourism market, of which they usually have little say in or control over.

11. This is the latest official figure derived from the 2000 national census and the total number given in the recent publication from the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) entitled Los pueblos originarios de la Ciudad de México: Atlas Etnográfico.

12. A somewhat paradoxical situation given that the notion of ‘uses and customs,’ as a politico-juridical concept, arrived in colonial Mexico from their original historical usage in Spain.

13. I am in no way suggesting that tourism plays any part in the activities being analyzed here. Culhuacán is not a destination for tourism of any kind and the actions of local residents discussed here are not focused in any way at all at any idea of some imagined tourism potential for this ‘pueblo originario.’

14. For example, most research into pueblos originarios tends to focus on those areas in the southern part of the Federal District – in particular, the delegaciones of Milpa Alta, Xochimilco and Tlalpan. More central and heavily urbanized ‘pueblos’ still struggle to gain similar levels of recognition and scholarly attention.

15. See http://www.pueblosoriginarios.df.gob.mx/