Most of the indigenous population lives in municipalities in poor states which have low indices of social and human development. In these regions, families frequently rely on subsistence agriculture amid unforgiving surroundings, where the land does not feed the family, forcing people increasingly to emigrate, including to foreign counties, to meet their necessities.
Rodolfo Stavenhagen, 2003263
Indigenous people in Mexico speak sixty-two different languages, which places the country second in linguistic diversity behind India, with its sixty-five languages. In 1970, 3.11 million Mexicans over age four spoke one of these indigenous languages. By 2000, that number had reached
6.04 million, a 94 percent increase. This was very close to Mexico’s total population increase of 102 percent during these same years and far greater than the 24 percent increase in the rural population. At more than 10 million, Mexico’s indigenous population is the largest in Latin America.264
Mexico’s Indian population is in the population growth phase of the demographic transition with its high birth rate and sharply declining death rate. The completed fertility rate for indigenous
Women is 7.5 children, well above the national rate. The Indian population would have grown even more rapidly if out-migration and assimilation to outside society had not reduced its size.265
The indigenous population has migrated from their communities more rapidly, in percentage terms, than the rural population as a whole due to a combination of environmental degradation (especially soil loss), poverty, and population increase. More than 1 million of these migrants have settled in Mexico City, where they are among the poorest residents. Seasonal migrants harvest sugar cane in Morelos and raise commercial crops in northern Mexico. A politically active community of Mixtec agricultural workers has formed in the San Quintin Valley of Baja California. Still other indigenous workers continue on to the United States, where they receive lower pay and less desirable jobs than mestizos. In California, radio programs in Mixtec and Triqui address the sizable population of Mexican migrants speaking those languages.266
Extensive work experience outside one’s community, more years of schooling, and television have increased knowledge of Spanish and urban ways. The indigenous population has converted to non-Catholic Christian faiths more rapidly, in percentage terms, than the Mexican population as
A whole.267
Between 1970 and 1976, to further its indigenista goals, the National Indigenous Institute (INI) expanded its network of coordination centers in Indian areas from twelve to sixty-four. The INI budget increased by more than 700 percent during this period. Another twenty-one centers were opened during the Lopez Portillo (1976—1982) administration. As part of this effort, schools and clinics were built and roads were extended into Indian areas.268
During the 1970s and 1980s, indigenous leaders began to demand a much greater role in the design and implementation of policy affecting Indians. The number of Indian protests rose dramatically in the 1970s and was still higher during the 1980s. Beginning in the 1980s, Indian demands were two-pronged. Some concerned solutions to concrete problems such as the freeing of political prisoners, the removal of abusive municipal authorities, and an end of repression by caciques, landowners, and government officials. A second set of demands concerned modifying the institutional relations between the nation and the Indian population.269
Indigenous organizing efforts were bolstered by NGOs, progressive elements of the Catholic Church, and critical anthropologists who denounced the injustices Indians suffered and the ethnocidal consequences of the government’s assimilationist policy. During the 1980s, Indians not only formed their own groups but integrated them into such national organizations as the National Union of Autonomous Regional Peasant Organizations (UNORCA), where they gained valuable experience organizing at the regional and national level.270
Factors leading to this increased Indian politicization include the impact of neoliberal economic policies on rural areas, increased population, Guatemalan indigenous activist Rigoberta Menchu’s winning of the Nobel Peace Prize, and indigenous activism in other Latin American nations such as Nicaragua. Finally, the commemoration of the five-hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s arrival in the New World brought to the forefront questions such as the role of Europeans in New World and the current status of the Indian.271
During the 1980s and early 1990s, old assumptions concerning assimilation vanished as the government decided it was better to accept ethnic differences than to suppress them. While the nature of government discourse shifted, Indians suffered the same hardship as other rural people when the government, in its effort to service its foreign debt, reduced programs in rural areas. Indians also suffered because there was a 51 percent reduction in spending by the INI.272
The Salinas administration (1988—1994) responded to increased indigenous activism by once again increasing the INI budget. Through the Solidarity program, his administration also distributed funds to a wide variety of projects run by and benefiting indigenous people. Finally, during his administration Article 4 of the Mexican constitution was amended to include the following:
The Mexican nation has a multicultural composition originally based on its indigenous peoples.
The law will protect and promote the development of their languages, cultures, uses, customs,
Resources, and forms of social organization and will guarantee them effective access to the
Jurisdiction of the state.
This amendment to Article 4 represented an explicit reversal of the post-revolutionary goal of creating a culturally homogenous nation.273
The 1994 rebellion in Chiapas made it clear to the world that past policy had failed to meet the material needs of indigenous people or to guarantee them the rule of law. The rebellion led to unprecedented Indian activism and protests throughout Mexico. Finally, even though Indians had been discussing autonomy among themselves, the rebellion brought that notion to the forefront of discussion concerning Indian rights.274
The key elements to autonomy are: 1) a defined territorial base for each indigenous group, 2) Indians exercising judicial and administrative power within the territorial base, 3) national unity (autonomy does not imply separation from Mexico), 4) equal treatment for all individuals, 5) equality of social groups within the autonomous unit (some groups such as the Zapotecs are perceived to have had a privileged position over other indigenous groups, just as the Sunni received preferential treatment in twentieth-century Iraq), 6) Indians deciding which groups have a population mass sufficient to warrant the creation of an autonomous region, and 7) solidarity and fraternity among various ethnic groups in the nation (meaning the wealthy part of the nation cannot simply ignore the poor but has a positive duty to assist their development). Proponents of autonomy in Mexico seek structures analogous to those created for the Inuit in Greenland and northern Canada. Most advocates of Indian autonomy foresee the creation of a fourth layer of government, between the state and the municipality, which would administer Indian autonomous regions. Such regions under one autonomous administration would roughly parallel the regional pre-Conquest Aztec administrative entity known as the aitepeti.275
Even though the notion of autonomy was embraced by almost all indigenous groups, many anthropologists, and most political progressives, it generated widespread opposition. Many consider drawing workable boundary lines around indigenous areas as an insurmountable problem. There are, for example, major concentrations of Nahua, the most numerous indigenous group, in eight different states. An acceptance of autonomy can be seen as coming at the expense of respecting individual rights. Others feel that autonomy is a step to succession or that it undermines the nation state, already assailed by globalization. Historian Hector Aguilar Camin noted, “The Indians who have done the best are the ones with the most, not the least, contact with the rest of society.” He also noted that the million Indians living in Mexico City had more access to electricity, running water, and hospitals than Indians in isolated areas.276
One of the reasons that autonomy has received widespread support is that past experience indicates that policy made for Indians rather than by Indians has yielded such unsatisfactory results. Indigenous people constitute roughly 10 percent of the population, but 35 percent of those in extreme poverty. A third of those who speak Indian languages are illiterate, more than three times the national average. Finally, Indians have been marginalized politically. At the close of the twentieth century, there were only fourteen indigenous members of the Chamber of Deputies, a fifth of what there would have been if Indians had been represented in proportion to their population.277
For a fleeting moment, the twenty-first century seemed to offer the promise of autonomy for indigenous peoples and a peaceful settlement to the stand off in Chiapas, where Zapatista rebels had remained since the 1994 uprising. On the day he took office, December 1, 2000, President Fox ordered a troop withdrawal from more than fifty positions the military held around the rebel-controlled area. On December 5, he sent to Congress the agreements concerning autonomy for Indian areas that had been negotiated with the rebels during the Zedillo administration.278
In response to Fox’s overtures, the Zapatista rebels made a dramatic 3,000-mile march to Mexico City in 2001 to present their case to the Mexican nation. The march, nicknamed the Zapatour, traveled through twelve states and arrived in Mexico City where more than 100,000 provided a tumultuous welcome. Zapatista Comandante Ester, a small, frail indigenous woman, presented the Zapatistas’ case to Congress in broken Spanish, in full view of the national media.279
Once the Indians went home and the issue was no longer on the front pages, momentum on the proposed Indian law was lost. Even though Fox presented the proposed autonomy law to Congress, as had been agreed in negotiations with rebels during the Zedillo administration, members of Fox’s own party felt the agreement ceded too much federal power and so watered it down. When finally passed, the reform lacked several key provisions that Indians had hoped for. Autonomy for indigenous people was defined at the municipal level, not the regional level. Soil, subsoil, and water rights remained vested in private interests, upon which autonomous indigenous communities would have little leverage. Individual states, whose commitment to indigenous autonomy was often questionable, were charged with interpreting and implementing much of the legislation. The revised legislation, which was passed by Congress and incorporated into the constitution, did recognize Indian communities had the right to form autonomous municipal governments.280
The Fox administration disbanded the INI, which had facilitated government efforts on behalf of the Indian. It was replaced with the National Commission for the Development of Indigenous People (CDI), headed by a successful Otomi businesswomen Xochitl Galvez. Rather than implementing programs, as the INI had, the CDI focused on coordinating programs administered by health, education, and other government departments. Not only was the Commission headed by an indigenous woman but indigenous representatives were given a greater role in program design. There was a change in emphasis, with more effort directed toward cultural development and elevating the status of women within the indigenous community.281
The creation of the CDI inevitably was questioned by those who felt that its programs did not differ substantially from those of its predecessor, since it involved the government providing top-down assistance to Indian communities. They also cited the financial limitations of the CDI, even after its budget rose to 19.6 billion pesos in 2004. That resulted in spending roughly $200 per Indian per year, which is neither enough to pull individuals out of extreme poverty nor to offset the negative impact of neoliberal policies on farming communities. Not surprisingly, in late 2005, the former Bishop of Chiapas Samuel Ruiz declared that the situation of the Indian had not changed since the uprising in 1994.282
The 1994 Chiapas uprising failed to pave the way for the type of autonomy many Indians and their supporters sought. However, it did pave the way for changing non-Indians’ outlook on Indians as political actors. During the five centuries following the Spanish Conquest, non-Indians formulated detailed plans on how to save Indians from heathenism, poverty, malnutrition, and exploitation. However, it was only as the twentieth century wound down that Mexican society accepted Indians as intellectual actors who could, on their own initiative, address these problems.283
World History
