A new Mexican nationalism?

GUILLERMO DE LA PENA

Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropologı´a Social,

Guadalajara, Mexico

ABSTRACT. This article focuses on the recent Mexican controversy about the legal status of the indigenous population and the nature of nationalism, which is linked to recent constitutional amendments and new policy strategies. Changes in legislation and policy are examined in the context of a widespread economic and political crisis of the populist regime after 1982, which radically affected the previous indigenist discourse;

but they are also seen as having been motivated by Indian demands and mobilisations against the official vision of citizenship as a function of cultural homogeneity and mestizaje. The article analyses the implications of the new constitutional amendments and the heated debates that they have provoked among different political actors, including indigenous organisations. In particular, it examines two areas of disagreement. The first concerns the multiple meanings of multiculturalism – as a threat of fragmentation and fundamentalism, a new form of state control or a strategy for indigenous national participation and empowerment. The second concerns the definition and levels of implementation of indigenous political autonomy. Negotiation over such disagreements, leading to inclusive citizenship, constitute a great challenge for ethnic intellectuals and theoreticians of Mexican nationalism.

Mexican nationality and the myth of mestizaje As David Brading (1985) and Enrique Florescano (2001a) have demonstrated, the construction of Mexican national identity has a peculiar history. It began as a discourse of self-affirmation articulated by the criollo (Creole) elite in the late eighteenth century. ‘Creole patriotism’, to use Brading’s term, resulted from the American Spaniards’ quest for social and political identity.1 In this An earlier version of this paper was read at the Nationalism and National Identity Workshop n (Centre of Latin American Studies, University of Cambridge, 1–2 July 2004). I express my gratitude for the comments received from the participants, and in particular to Charles Jones, Montserrat Guibernau and James Mayall. I am also grateful for the comments of two anonymous referees of Nations and Nationalism.

280 Guillermo de la Pena ˜ discourse, the sons and grandsons of Spanish settlers protested against their exclusion from the main offices in the Colonial administration, both civil and ecclesiastical, but they also elaborated the idea of a fatherland different from Spain. The name of this fatherland was ‘Mexico’ – no longer ‘New Spain’.

Two myths were appropriated and refashioned to explain the origins of Mexico: the foundation of Tenochtitlan, capital of the Aztec Empire, inspired by the god Huitzilopochtli, and the miraculous apparition of the Virgin of Guadalupe to Juan Diego, an Indian neophyte, shortly after the Conquest (Brading 1985: 9–14; Lafaye 1974).2 Then, during the period from 1810 to 1820, the Creole leaders of the Independence movement used the image of Guadalupe as well as the idea of the fatherland to bring together criollos, Indians and mestizos against the peninsulares or gachupines.3 Creole intellectuals such as Fray Servando Teresa de Mier and Carlos Marı´ a de Bustamante argued in their writings that there was a line of continuity, from the ‘sovereign Aztec nation’ to the nascent Mexican polity (independent after 1821), which would allow all those born in the fatherland to live as brothers, emancipated from colonial oppression and caste privileges (Brading 1985: 48–55). However, this did not mean that the Aztec culture and forms of government would be reinstated; on the contrary, in the new nation, the indigenous cultures and forms of organisations were thought of as something buried in the past (Villoro 1979). In other words, for the case of Mexico, what Anthony D.

Smith (1991: ch. 2) has called ‘the ethnic basis of national identity’ did not imply the recovery of an ancient collective identity but rather the invention of a new one: a Mexican ‘ethnicity’ nourished by soil, religion, a common history of oppression and the will to join together in a free society.

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a new myth, the myth of mestizaje, allowed for the construction of the idea of commonality of descent as a feature of Mexican identity.4 The mestizo population were the majority;

in addition, as Justo Sierra – a Liberal historian and journalist, and later an influential politician and positivist thinker in the Porfirio Dı´ az’s dictatorship – pointed out, the patriotic armies which had fought against the US invasion in 1847, and then against French occupation in the 1860s, had mostly been made up of mestizos (Sierra 1940; cf. Florescano 2001b: 565–80). Because of their military feats, but also because of new educational and economic opportunities, many mestizos became members of the emergent rural and urban middle classes, and also of the professional and political elites. In 1909, ´ Andres Molina Enrı´ quez, a lawyer and sociologist influenced by social Darwinism, wrote that the predominance of the mestizo ‘race’ was an expression of the law of natural selection; moreover, the history of Mexico had to be understood as a triumphal march towards mestizaje. Since the Indians had suffered four centuries of exclusion and extreme poverty, and their ancient polities had been dismantled and fragmented, they could not provide a solid basis for national identity; in turn, the Creoles had become parasitic and anti-patriotic. Thus, only the mestizos were capable of taking the lead in the process of nation-building (Molina Enrı´ quez 1978). After the Mexican nationalism Mexican Revolution (1910–20), official discourse also promoted the idea of la nacio´n mestiza (the mestizo nation) and la raza co´smica (the cosmic race) as key words for the understanding of the meaning of ‘Mexican-ness’. However, mestizaje was then defined not only in racial, but mostly in cultural terms, thanks to the influence of Jose Vasconcelos, the architect of the postrevolutionary educational system, and Manuel Gamio, the anthropologist who devised the official policy known as indigenismo (Indigenism) (Brading 1984: ch. 3).

In the following pages I shall attempt to examine Indigenism as a bold but finally unsuccessful strategy to recover and reinterpret Mexico’s indigenous past in order to construct a modern, ‘revolutionary’ national identity (Smith 1995). The failure of this strategy was to a large extent caused by the government’s gradual abdication of the revolutionary ideals of social justice and democracy. But it is my contention that it was also a consequence of the vision of Mexican citizenship as a function of cultural homogeneity, which ignored the demands of Indian peoples for cultural and political recognition, thus thwarting their participation in the public sphere. In practice, the ideal of mestizaje functioned as a mechanism of exclusion. In the last sections of the article I shall discuss the emergence and consequences of new indigenous social movements, consider recent legislation, which now defines Mexico as a multicultural nation, and delineate the challenges implicit in the construction of such a nation.

Multiculturalism has become a fashionable discourse, which extols a new kind of ‘imagined community’ (Anderson 1983): the nation not as mestizaje (or ‘melting pot’) but as a mosaic of peoples, each with its distinct cultural manifestations. The ubiquitous debates on globalisation have only exacerbated this discourse. Moreover, international agencies, as well as many academics, have defended cultural diversity within and beyond the nation as a valuable strategic resource–a reinforcement of biodiversity and a repository of historical memory vis-a-vis predatory capitalism and dehumanising mass media (Arizpe 1996; UNESCO 1998; Dietz 2003). In contrast, other voices point to its problems and perils: political fragmentation, inequality, ‘ethnic cleansing’ and violation of human rights in the name of cultural privileges (Sartori 2001; Barry 2001).5 Concomitantly, certain authors have regarded the recent adoption of multicultural policies by the Latin American states as an alibi for the abandonment of social policies in favour of neoliberal orthodoxy (Favre 1996). There has been, in fact, a peculiar (neoliberal) defense of cultural diversity which emphasises the need for governments to ‘transfer functions’ to ethnic organisations and accept certain minority rights (such as bilingual education), yet to do all this without touching the political structure of the nation (Hale 2002; Hernandez et al.

2004). Indigenous movements, however, have construed a vision of multiculturalism as a tool for self-empowerment as well as for social and political reform. In their perspective, a multicultural nation does not simply entail tolerance for different customs in the private sphere but the creation of new forms of public space, participation, representation and government (see Assies et al. 1999; Van Cott 2000; Sieder 2002; Postero and Zamosc 2004;

Yashar 2005). In the case of Mexico, the struggle over the meaning of the concept of indigenous autonomy among ethnic and political actors reflects contradictory visions of multiculturalism.

The rise and fall of indigenismo Indigenist policies sought to solve a major problem created by the official definition of Mexican identity: what to do with the persisting, often rebellious, and still numerous indigenous population. In the nineteenth century, the answer of Liberal politicians had been that the Indians qua Indians did not exist anymore; they had become citizens equal before the law (Hale 1968: ch.

7). Liberal legislation disavowed all privileges granted by the colonial authorities to indigenous communities, which had included a limited form of self-government, collective landed property and special courts of law. With the dismantling of communal property, the Liberals hoped that a host of new opportunities would be available to the Indians, so that they could become prosperous private farmers; but in fact a great deal of their land was absorbed into haciendas (large private landholdings, mostly owned by Creole families), prompting violent uprisings and, occasionally, sophisticated forms of passive resistance (Reina 1984 and 1997; Falcon 2002).6 Later, after 1915, post´ revolutionary legislation recognised certain types of collective property – the ejido and the comunidad agraria – since a crucial banner of the Revolution had been the devolution of land to villages; but indigenous communities were not legally acknowledged as such; furthermore, neither the word ‘Indian’ nor the word ‘indigenous’ was even mentioned in the 1917 Constitution.