Think Locally, Act Globally
Varese, Stefano
WHEN I ARRIVED AT THE MODEST HOME A few blocks from downtown Fresno, California, I was thinking about the Mixtec Indian villages I'd seen in Oaxaca, Mexico. In the High Mixtec region, nestled in...
...These are the people who supplied the seasonal labor force for public works, haciendas, plantations and mines...
...A sign in front announced, "Casa del Mixteco...
...9. See the studies of Henry Lefebvre, L'Etat (Paris: Editions 10/18, 1974...
...Resistance, Rebellion, and Consciousness in the Andean Peasant World, 18th to 20th Centuries (Madison: Univ.of Wisconsin Press, 1987...
...This class structure spawned an equally intricate panorama of native organizations and political platforms, reflecting different levels of ethnic and class consciousness...
...A N OLD LATIN AMERICAN SAYING HAS IT that, "If you've seen one Indian, you've seen them all...
...The intellectuals, most of them urban, slowly became a depen- dent and literate aristocracy, one which invented a new historical memory for its new identity...
...2. This estimate is based on a number of micro studies and conversations with academics who are following the subject...
...The dilapidated home I saw was also a metaphor, a pathetic illustration of the solitude of poverty in the heart of one of the wealthiest regions in the world...
...31 (Aug...
...Here in the United States, on the other hand, they consider themselves to be Mixtec or Zapotec, members of a larger social grouping, of an ethnicity.' Their specific ethnic identity is recuperated as a sense of nationality, with the political awareness that they are discriminated against because they are Indians, not only by the Anglo population, but by Mexicans and Mexican-Americans as well...
...Indians organized in unions, such as miners, factory workers, petty bureaucrats, bilingual teachers, agricultural workers and the urban underemployed...
...Mexican and Andean indigenous organizations in the United States may bring similar surprises...
...Alberto Flores Galindo, Buscando un Inca: Identidad y Utopia en los Andes (Lima: Institato de Apoyo Agrario, 1987...
...William Taylor, Drinking, Homicide, and Rebellion in Colonial Mexican Villages (Stanford: Stanford Univ...
...HistoriVOLUME xxv...
...Ethnicities and Nations: Processes of Inter-ethnic Relations in Latin America, SoutheastAsia, and thePacific(Austin: Univ...
...15, 1991...
...In 1990 alone 328,000 people left Peru, of whom 132,000 came to the United States...
...The incorporation of indigenous ethnicity into the international division of labor gave form to class differences within ethnic groups, as well as to the inequalities among them...
...What do we do with an entire community of Mixtecs who own pick-up trucks, have parabolic antennae on their roofs and VCRs in the kitchen next to the comal...
...Even as indigenous people are forced to migrate across national borders, and as transnational corporate capital moves into the heart of Indian territory-or perhaps because of these phenomena-Indians have emerged on the stage of regional politics, overturning the common wisdom that they and their cultures are doomed to perish in the face of modernity...
...1991...
...This Indian nationalism, encouraged by the Bourbonic reforms and infused with the ideals of the Enlightenment, was occasionally capable of linking the affronts to indigenous elites with the injustices suffered by the peasantry, thus bridging the gap between the metropolitan aspirations of the former and the parochial perceptions of the latter...
...See Latin American Weekly Report, no...
...In which of the boxes of anthropological taxonomy do they fit...
...WHEN I ARRIVED AT THE MODEST HOME A few blocks from downtown Fresno, California, I was thinking about the Mixtec Indian villages I'd seen in Oaxaca, Mexico...
...World Bank, Infonne sobre el desarrollo mundial 1991...
...But once they come to the United States, they quickly become politicized and "panIndianized," transformed by the direct and brutal experience of economic exploitation and ethnic discrimination they all encounter...
...St6fano Varese, La Sal de los Cerros: Una Aproximacion al Mundo Campa (Lima: Retablo de Papel, 1973...
...The growing ethnic-national politicization of indigenous migrants from Mexico and Central America is a relatively new phenomenon, dating only from 1980, when large numbers of peasants from Indian regions entered the labor market of the agro-industries of northern Mexico and the United States...
...There are Indians living in both the cities and their communities of origin, moving back and forth according to the farming seasons...
...No serious social analyst would have thought that a series of fragmented "tribal" bands, without a significant proletariat or a bourgeoisie, and with a tiny intelligentsia, could have woven a complex transnational network of local organizations capable of addressing a gigantic and powerful enemy...
...Javier Lajo Lazo, "Ni Utopismo Andino, Ni Socialismo MAlgico: Descolonizacion Abora," Winay Marka (Barcelona), no...
...In other words, neither with respect to demographics nor cultural assimilation have native peoples been defeated...
...It is ironic that a lesson in political clarity and longterm perspective comes from a coalition of Indian horticulturists from the Amazon...
...The new realities of indigenous peoples suggest that their politics cannot be understood within the old spatial, historical and structural framework of the nation-state...
...Such interpretations tend to assume the inevitable success of capitalism...
...Today, of the several million REPORT ON THE AMERICASundocumented workers who periodically cross the MexicoU.S...
...The image it gave was partial and narrow, certainly, but it truly reflected the existing conditions of oppression and injustice...
...Because the various Indian nationalist movements of Latin America emanate from marginality rather than from direct historical involvement in state management, they are less conditioned by the legacies of the old liberal nation-state, and more reflective of the multiple Indian civil societies long hidden from view...
...This was particularly true for the agrarian peoples of the Andes and Mesoamerica, and moderately the case for those in the Amazon and other tropical lowlands...
...They become "modern," leaving behind their ethnicity, perceived by theoreticians of modernization as an obstacle to entrepreneurial individualism, and by Marxists as an impediment to proper politicization, that is, class consciousness...
...7. There has been a long native tradition of criticizing the Euro American academy's approach to historical and cultural studies...
...As capital flows to "freer" regions-indigenous territories, among others-where local environmental restrictions and labor organizations are nonexistent or weak, state-Indian relations seem bound to become increasingly internationalized...
...Alicia Barabas, Utopias Indiacts: Movimientos Sociorreligiosos en M(xico (Mexico: Grijalbo, 1987...
...A few miles to the north, in Livingston, another group of Mixtec migrants founded the Organization of Exploited and Oppressed People (OPEO...
...The leaders of the Casa del Mixteco know that ethnic sovereignty and political autonomy are not achievable in either Mexico or the United States without a strategy for economic development that can give them a margin of independence, a certain freedom from the slavery of rural wage labor...
...The specific ethnicity of each native people is viewed as a precarious identity that will vaporize as soon as the society joins the modem world, even under conditions of subordination and exploitation...
...2 (1979...
...15 (mayo 1991...
...in California's Central Valley, the other in the Indian township of San Juan Mixtepec in Mexico...
...Generic "Indianness" encouraged by the colonial state quickly became the principal form of identification for the native nobility of the Andes and Mesoamerica...
...Not only have they created a multinational organization to defend their rights, but they also take their demands directly to international bodies, such as the World Bank, IMF and Inter-American Development Bank, or to the United States government, rather than addressing only regional states...
...In the High Mixtec region, nestled in the Sierra Madre mountains, even the poorest houses, made of logs or adobe with palm or tile roofs, have a certain dignity...
...Two ideological currents have threatened to tear apart each native political organization over the past two decades...
...Yet this ambiguous and contradictory relationship has been part of Indian community life for more than a century, and it is essential to understanding the history of political resistance and cultural tenacity of native peoples...
...Obviously, this is a problem that worries academics and development specialists a lot more than it does Indians...
...Filem6n L6pez, a Mixtec Indian from Rio Timbre in Mixtepec, Oaxaca who works as a migrant farmworker, is the president and founder of this community center, a meeting place for some of the thousands of Mixtecs who work in California's Central Valley...
...NUMBER 3 (DECEMBER 1991) IL Stefano Varese teaches Native American studies at the University of California at Davis...
...One contemporary Quechua thinker put it this way: "In our analysis, we don't only use class contradictions, but also 'contradictions of civilization'....there are three concentric chains that colonize our people: class oppression, that of the nationalist Creole and acculturated mestizo state, and lastly the oppression of civilization that the West has imposed on the Andean world....We use Marxism exclusively as a valuable tool...
...Their association with the Indian peasant community has at times been distant, ideologized, paternalistic, and even arrogant...
...urban Indians primarily concerned with the ideological debate regarding "Indianness" and class...
...Juan Martinez, the association secretary, is a young Mixtec agronomist, who works in a restaurant to earn a living...
...The Maya of Guatemala flee the terror in their country en masse to Mexico and the United States...
...The principal error that Peruvian socialists commit-a result of the absenceof indigenous cultural identity and the presence of an embarrassing Western cultural identity among the Creoles and mestizos in their ranks-is to confuse the tool with their identity...and even using a foreign ideological tool as a crutch for their identity...
...The unforeseen result was the emergence of a double, contradictory process of ethnogenesis...
...Guillermo Bonfil Batalla, Utopia y Revolucion...
...and even towns of Quechua shepherds from Peru's Central Andes find themselves tending sheep on the farms of Basque ranchers in the state of Nevada, while thousands more Andean Quechuas take refuge from the terror of Peru's civil war in some other niche of the U.S...
...V, no...
...In Latin America today there are nearly 40 million Indians and more than 400 ethno-linguistic groups...
...Some travel thousands of miles one, two or more times a year, from the country to the city and back again, crossing international borders to take advantage of the niches left open by an economic system that is ever less interested in the survival of markets defined by national boundaries...
...A sizeable number of these are probably Quechuas...
...The result of this differential treatment of Indian peoples and regions is a complex class structure that permeates the entire multiethnic configuration of Latin America...
...Juan Santos Atahuallpa, a seventeenth-century Quechua intellectual renowned for his knowledge of international politics and Andean-Amazonian history and culture...
...Even though political independence from Spain and the consequent hegemony of liberal thought dealt a mortal blow to the Indian elite as a class, a small sector of intellectuals and d6class6 continues to exist to this day throughout the Andean and Mesoamerican world...
...The "peasant" and "proletarian" postures emphasize the class content of indigenous social reality and native struggle...
...labor market...
...According to this view, Indians have predictable and mechanical responses to the expansion of the market and the penetration of capitalist ways of life in their societies...
...Their organization, the Benito Juirez Civic Association, has members from as far away as Salem, Oregon...
...Ethnic identity is used strategically and "opportunistically" in each context, Huanca argues...
...ofTexas Press, 1988...
...To be an Indian meant fundamentally to belong to a residential indigenous community located in a marginal rural zone, to be preferably monolingual in a native language, to have a strong communal and ceremonial understanding of life, to show some rejection of the logic of the market economy, and to be satisfied with the repetitive and "traditional" use of antiquated technology...
...References Think Locally, Act Globally I. Carole Nagengast and Michael Keamrney, "Mixtec Ethnicity: Social Identity, Political Consciousness, and Political Activism," Latin American Research Review, Vol...
...Back home, oppression has historically been perceived as coming from neighboring villages with which for centuries they have competed for access to land and ever-scarce resources (threatened continually by landowners, companies, state projects, and most recently by corporate interests...
...The nineteenth-century notion that the state should act as the founder and originator of the nation, giving a sense of unity to a heterogeneous ethnic and territorial space for the benefit of a ruling elite, is giving way, under pressure from the transnationalized economy for a more permeable and flexible state that is less centralized, less homogeneous, less authoritarian, and thus more open to corporate penetration.' This process relieves Latin American states from the burden of having toplay an entrepreneurial role in lieu of passive national bourgeoisies or oligarchies, while at the same time threatening their very existence...
...They were partially uprooted from their communities of origin and partially connected to their new workplaces...
...3 The case of Latin American Indian expatriates in the United States is a dramatic example of the evolution of indigenous society and politics since the 1970s...
...and Canada census.anti-colonial streak, anthropology still suffers from the ideological effects of Eurocentric thinking.' Indigenous intellectuals of course feel no obligation to maintain loyalty to the science and epistemology of their masters, even if they have studied in Euroamerican universities...
...Te6filo Altamirano, Los que sefueron: Peruanos en Estados Unidos (Lima: Pontifica Universidad Cat61ica, 1990...
...Steve Sternm (ed...
...This new sociology of the native peoples of Latin America-transnationalized, urban, proletarian, bordercrossing, bilingual and trilingual, professional-poses a direct challenge to established anthropological tradition...
...This intelligentsia is part of an indigenous petit bourgeoisie: a class of petty bureaucrats, local chiefs, village merchants, teachers, students and professionals...
...There, a house is a metaphor for the relationship of the individual to the community: the roof was raised and the foundation laid by relatives and neighbors in a festive celebration that resounds in the villagers' memory years later...
...MEXICO PERU GUATEMALA BOLIVIA ECUADOR UNITED STATES CANADA CHILE COLOMBIA EL SALVADOR ARGENTINA BRAZIL VENEZUELA PANAMA HONDURAS PARAGUAY NICARAGUA GUYANA COSTA RICA BELIZE SURINAM FRENCH GUYANA URUGUAY TOTAL Estimated Population 10,537,000 8,097,000 5,423,000 4,985,000 3,753,000 1,959,000 892,000 767,000 708,000 500,000 477,000 325,000 290,000 194,000 168,000 101,000 66,000 29,000 19,000 15,000 11,000 1,000 0 39,317,000 % of Total Population 12.4 38.6 60.3 71.2 37.5 0.8 3.4 5.9 2.2 10.0 1.5 0.2 1.5 8.0 3.4 2.5 1.7 3.9 0.6 9.1 2.9 1.2 0.0 5.8 steadily...
...The "Indianist" stance conceives of indigenous political struggle as a national liberation movement, seeking autonomy, self-determination, sovereignty, or limited or absolute independence for each specific ethnic group...
...6 Contrary to the predictions of assimilative policies, native peoples have remained demographically stable, bilingualism has increased without any disastrous loss of native languages, and in some cases there is an unmistakable tendency toward demographic growth...
...TomBs Huanca, an Aymara ethno-historian with a master's degree in anthropology from the University of Florida, believes that cultural change and continuity among Andean peoples should be understood in terms of political strategy...
...13The First Nations The First Nations ",- ", , :tX!+ a . A Kampa from the Brazilian state of Acre in the Amazon...
...Although these elites sought to defend their class interests throughout the colonial period, from the middle of the eighteenth century on they became increasingly involved in popular Indian movements and insurrections, enriching these with ideas about nations, states and independent Indian kingdoms...
...A growing number of native people are learning to manipulate alien and complex cultural contexts, with practically no one noticing that they are Indians, even in environments rife with ethnic and racial tension...
...OPEO Secretary General Rufino Domfnguez maintains that his organization intends to do more than promote the development of their communities of origin in Oaxaca by remitting dollars like most Mexican migrants...
...Press, 1979...
...border, I estimate that more than a quarter of a million are Indians from Mexico, Central and South America...
...A Quichua from the Ecuadorian Andes, Luis Macas, president of the Confederation of Indian Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE), finds it no burden to synthesize in his political activism the most progressive postures of the Catholic church, Andean socialist traditions and a firm respect for Quichua culture...
...See, for example, James Stuart and Michael Kearney, Causes and Effects of Agricultural Labor Migration from the Mixteca Oaxaca to California (San Diego: University of California, Program in U.S.-Mexican Studies, 1981...
...DURING FIVE CENTURIES THE OLIGARCHIC states and societies of Latin America have been based on maximizing the exploitation of a workforce carefully organized along ethnic lines...
...S. Varese, "Multiethnicity and Hegemonic Construction: Indian Plans and the Future," in Guidieri et al., Ethnicities and Nations...
...Similar organizations of Mexican Indians-Zapotecs, Chinantecs, Triques, Pur'epechas and others-have emerged in recent years in San Diego, Los Angeles, the vineyards of Napa and Sonoma, and the Central Valley...
...Native movements, thrust into new roles by the new global division of labor and the advanced appropriation of the environment, seem to have taken a strategic step forward...
...In the midst of this highly technological agro-industrial mecca, the group functions as a truly Mesoamerican Indian institution, based on the tequio (cooperative community labor donated voluntarily to the collective), reciprocity (as the moral basis for the exchange of goods and services), democracy by consensus, and political authority based on the moral weight of age and experience...
...The group's logo is a handshake crowned by a machete and an axe, with the motto, "For the People's Liberation...
...6. See NACLA this issue for population...
...Tfipac Katari, Jacinto Kanek, and Quintin Lame, to mention only a few names from a history yet to be written...
...4 The colonial system denied indigenous societies their ethnic ties and identities in an attempt to weaken the reconstitution of native nationalisms...
...The gap between indigenous elites and the subordi- nated communities, confirmed and reaffirmed by the colonial administration, prompted a growing class differ- entiation between the intelligentsia and the masses...
...These Indians were less conservative in their cultural identity, more adaptable to new environments, and more effective in using ethnicity as a flexible strategy...
...But for millions of indigenous peasants, the residential community, with its colonial socio-political and economic structures, its intense and absorbing ceremonial life, and its fragmented and parochial world-view, became the only mirror of ethnic identity...
...Fora systematic indigenous critique of Eurocentric social science, see: Wanker, Tawantisuyu: Cinco Siglos de Guerra Qheswaymara contra Espaiia (Mexico: Nueva Imagen, 1981...
...The Amazonian Indians in COICA are already acting on this trend...
...And no one is less Aymara or less Quechua for using his or her ethnicity in an intelligent way.' A Quichua from the Ecuadorian Amazon, Valerio Grefa, a bilingual professor and president of the Confederation of Indian Nationalities of the Ecuadorian Amazon (CONFENIAE), has elegantly and efficiently combined his training as a teacher in Ecuador's mestizo society, his militant and committed role as an Indian of the Amazon, his experience as a modern political cadre, and his syncretic intellectual preparation...
...A clear example of this trend is the growing militarization of the drug war in the Andes...
...2 (1990), p. 80...
...Others, "new indigenous peoples," began to emerge from the changing needs of the labor market...
...5. Regarding class formation among native peoples, see Serge Gruzinski, "TheNetTorn Apart: Ethnic Identities and Westernization in Colonial Mexico, Sixteenth-Nineteenth Century," in Guidieri, Remo, F. Pellizzi, andS.J.Tambiah (eds...
...There are indigenous peasant organizations which defend the economic and social rights of farmers...
...Most of them were "students" (a classification more indicative of age than anything else) or "workers...
...forearlierdata on population and language groupings, see Guillermo Bonfil Batalla, Utopia y Revolucidn...
...Of course this multifaceted and dynamic political movement cannot be reduced to a simple and fixed taxonomy...
...Official history books give the impression that conquest and colonization were achieved in a few decades, after which the various indigenous peoples simply adjusted to the demands of their colonial and republican rulers...
...In their communities of origin, native peoples tend to have a parochial view of the world...
...Juan's dream is to get into a master's program in rural development and continue using his knowledge to assist expatriate Mixtecs...
...ethnic federations primarily made up of non-peasant horticulturists particularly interested in cultural rights and ethnic autonomy...
...indigenous expatriates in the United States, including political refugees (Mapuches from Chile, Maya from Guatemala...
...Amazonian indigenous peoples have formed a multinational body to bring their grievances directly to the World Bank, the IMF and the United States...
...and lastly, international indigenous organizations like the Coordinating Body for the Indigenous People's Organization of the Amazon Basin (COICA...
...Some of the agrarian peoples of Mesoamerica and the Andes closed themselves into local units of production and reproduction: the indigenous community, the village, what was known as the "Indian republic...
...NUMBER 3 (DECEMBER 1991)15 VOLUME XXV, NUMBER 3 (DECEMBER 1991) 15The First Nations ans, Marxist and non-Marxist alike, have tended to paint Indians as people who can only respond to the initiatives of others, not as historical subjects who, though dominated, continually attempt to negotiate their political and cultural autonomy using all sorts of sophisticated strategies...
...Toward the end of the second millennium, there are Indians in nearly all the regions where they lived in the eighteenth century...
...History, however, shows a different face...
...It is a sign that, in spite of an emerging REPORT ON THE AMERICAS Computed from: Enrique Mayer& Elio Masferrer,'La Poblaci6n Indigena de America," Amrica Indi'ena, Vol...
...From this group, as well as from the communal elites (curacas and caciques), came the most prominent Indian political and revolutionary figures of the last five centuries: Tdpac Amaru, a rich eighteenth-century merchant and international trader from the southern Andes...
...He would like to found an agricultural production cooperative with two locales: one VOLUME XXV...
...This simply does not describe a Quechua from the Andes who works on a computer, a Shuar from the Ecuadorian Amazon with a doctorate in pedagogy, a Kuna from Panama who is a doctor, a Tukano from Brazil with a pilot's license, an Aymara or a Zapotec who writes books on sociology and history...
...he found over 60 Andean cultural organizations in the United States...
...The racist brutality of the proverb points to a fact of history brilliantly analyzed by the late Mexican anthropologist Guillermo Bonfil Batalla: Spanish colonialism created and institutionalized a generic definition of "Indians" that negated the historic validity and cultural specificity of hundreds of native nationalities...
...In some cases they have expanded into new territories and established a presence in urban, highly industrialized societies supposedly incompatible with the stereotypical image of indigenous peasants...
...Similarly, the 1990 Indian uprising in Ecuador, that paralyzed the heart of the country for a week, was unexpectedly effective...
...It seeks to defend Mixtecs in California and northern Mexico from exploitation in the workplace and ethnic or racial discrimination...
...the Indians of Mexico periodically escape the economic misery of their regions...
...In Fresno the contrast could not have been greater...
...Are these people not Indians...
...Questions such as territorial and resource preservation, land entitlement, migration, unionization and the operation of foreign enterprises in indigenous territory will become strategic issues of "national security...
...As such, native peoples may be way ahead of the rest of us in articulating the political struggles of the twenty-first century...
...The indigenous peoples who survived the biological disaster of the invasion recovered their numbers extremely slowly, but HOW MANY NATIVE PEOPLE...
...4. Guillermo Bonfil Batalla, Utopia yRevoluci6n: El Pensamiento Politico Contempordneo de los Indios de America Latina (Mexico: Editorial Nueva Imagen, 1981...
...Thousands of Indian squatters occupy the cities of America, from Lima, La Paz and Quito, to Mexico City, San Diego and Los Angeles...
...3. According to Peruvian anthropologist Te6filo Altamirano, at least a thousand Quechua shepherds from central Peru have settled in Nevada...
...8. Tomis Huanca, "Relaciones Interdinicas Andinas: Cotidianeidad de los Grupos etnico-Culturales en Bolivia," (unpublished mss...
...5 A EUROCENTRIC READING OF THE NATIVE history of Latin America has obscured and twisted the many rebellions and political movements that occurred over 500 years of European occupation...
Vol. 25 • December 1991 • No. 3
