Purhépechas in Tarecuato and Chicago

Abstract

The organization of indigenous Purhépecha migrants from the northwestern Mexican state of Michoacán to Chicago has benefited from the ability they have developed to adapt to different political and cultural contexts in Mexico. The Purhépecha community of Tarecuato has managed to combine indigenous culture and the administrative structures imposed by the nation-state to confront the discrimination and assimilation strategies of the mestizo municipality of Santiago Tangamandapio. In Chicago, the migrants from Tarecuato have organized themselves into a hometown association, the Club Tarecuato, and this has made it possible for them to negotiate development projects in the home community with the mestizo municipal president when he visits them in Chicago. Thus the transnational engagement of these indigenous migrants has produced a shift in the political power structure, giving them a voice in local decision making and increasing their influence in the predominantly mestizo municipality.

La organización de migrantes purépechas originarios del estado de Michoacán, en el noroccidente de México, y ahora residentes en Chicago se ha beneficiado de su capacidad de adaptación a diferentes contextos políticos y culturales en México. La comunidad Purhépecha de Tarecuato ha logrado combinar la cultura indígena y las estructuras administrativas impuestas por el estado-nación para hacer frente a las estrategias de discriminación y asimilación del municipio mestizo de Santiago Tangamandapio. En Chicago, los migrantes de Tarecuato han creado un club de oriundos, el Club Tarecuato. Esto les ha permitido negociar proyectos de desarrollo en la comunidad de origen con el presidente municipal mestizo cuando les visita en Chicago. Es así que el compromiso de estos indígenas migrantes transnacionales ha producido un cambio en la estructura del poder político, otorgándoles participación en la toma de decisiones locales e incrementando su influencia un municipio predominantemente mestizo.

Keywords

Indigenous migrants Hometown associations Cultural brokers Transnational spaces of negotiation

Asked about the transnational organization of the Purhépecha community of Tarecuato, the coordinator of migrants’ affairs for the municipality Santiago Tangamandapio said, “This is one of their strengths, that they keep on helping each other even though they are far away. That’s something we should admire and take as a good example, because the organization they have is very good. Not everybody has this kind of good organization.”¹ In contrast to the indigenous community, the capital of the municipality of Santiago Tangamandapio (which bears the same name) is currently a mestizo town. Located in the northwestern part of the Mexican state of Michoacán near the city of Zamora, the municipality has a high migration rate; people have traditionally migrated to California and more recently to Illinois. Tarecuato is the only community in the municipality that has a hometown association in the United States.

Indigenous people organize differently from their fellow countrymen, and this organization helps them to deal with problems they face in migration. Studies of indigenous migration from Mexico to the United States have shown that, although indigenous migrants experience discrimination and exclusion from political and social rights in their home country as well as in the United States, they “bring with them a wide range of experience with collective development, social justice, and political democratization, and these repertoires influence their decisions about how to . . . build their own organizations in the United States” (Fox and Rivera-Salgado, 2004: 5).

Indigenous communities in Mexico have experienced cultural, political, and socioeconomic discrimination by the state since colonial times; this discrimination was diminished neither by national independence in the early nineteenth century nor by the Mexican Revolution 100 years later (Gledhill, 2012). Notwithstanding the efforts of the central state to integrate them into national administrative structures and assimilate them into national mestizo culture, many indigenous groups have managed to maintain their usos y costumbres, their traditional forms of organization (Aguirre Beltrán, 1953; Gamio, 1916). Indigenous groups in Mexico have learned to adopt political and cultural forms imposed by the central state and at the same time conserve their indigenous languages, their festivities, and their own ways of organizing (Lomnitz, 2001). Because migration is accompanied by exclusion and ethnicization (Besserer, 1999: 218), this ability to adapt to dominant political and cultural environments and simultaneously reassert their own ethnic identity helps indigenous people to retain their cultures and to organize in host societies. As Michael, points out, the discrimination and exclusion that indigenous migrants experience in the host society lead to a greater consciousness of their own ethnic difference and open new opportunities for collective action (Fox and Rivera-Salgado, 2004: 11–13; Kearney, 1988; 1995).

Indigenous and mestizo Mexican migrants have different cultural backgrounds and have organized in different ways; indigenous migrants have even founded their own organizations in the United States (Domínguez Santos, 2004; Maldonado and Artía Rodríguez, 2004; Martínez Saldaña, 2004; Rivera-Salgado and Escala-Rabadán, 2004; Stephen, 2007; Velasco, 2008). This article focuses on the participation of the migrants from Tarecuato in the predominantly nonindigenous Michoacanan federation of hometown associations, the Federación de Clubes Michoacanos en Illinois (FEDECMI), based in Chicago. Since the 1990s, hometown associations have become the most common form of organization for Mexican migrants in the United States. There are studies that compare mestizo and indigenous hometown organizations and federations (Rivera-Salgado and Escala-Rabadán, 2004), but the presence of indigenous groups in mestizo hometown associations has been little examined.

In Chicago, the migrants from Tarecuato first organized themselves into a hometown association, the Club Tarecuato, in 2004 and shortly thereafter became part of the FEDECMI, which has coordinated the work of the Michoacanan clubs in Illinois since 1998. Originally, the hometown associations were cultural and social organizations, preserving the cultural habits of the migrants (for example, their hometown fiestas) and keeping up their bonds with their home communities (Bada, 2003). Today the work of the hometown associations is focused more and more on fundraising for public works in the communities of origin (Fox and Rivera-Salgado, 2004: 13–14). Through the organization and support of public works they maintain close contact with their home communities.

Mexican migrants in the United States have long maintained their positions as participants in the public life of their home communities through the remittances that they send for public works and—in the case of indigenous communities—through their participation in the traditional governance or cargo system. Yet, the important role that migrants have played in the local economies of Mexican communities has become more visible in recent years through their participation in hometown associations and state-level federations. The increasing importance of migrant hometown associations, indigenous as well as mestizo, as transnational actors has led the Mexican government to create special programs for migrants (Rivera-Salgado and Escala-Rabadán, 2004: 167). In the state of Michoacán, the migrant hometown associations based in Chicago have gained recognition, especially through the Three-for-One Program created by the administration of President Vicente Fox (2000–2006).² The official goal of the program, whereby every dollar sent home in remittances is matched by a dollar each from the federal, state, and municipal governments, is to support community development in rural areas, but it has also become a tool for the Mexican government to communicate and negotiate with Mexican migrant groups in the United States. As Michael Kearney (2004: 343) puts it, these are “official programs and projects of government agencies to maintain hegemony over their nationals abroad.” At the same time, the Three-for-One Program involves migrant groups in negotiations with Mexican political authorities and gives them a new position as negotiation partners.

This article focuses on the new spaces of transnational negotiation built by Purhépecha migrants from Tarecuato. I argue that their ability to adapt to different political and cultural contexts in Mexico, combining the traditional system of governance with the official political system imposed by the nation-state, helps them to organize in the context of migration. In the first two parts of the article I show how the community of Tarecuato manages to combine indigenous culture with the administrative structures imposed by the nation-state and how it confronts discrimination and assimilation. In the third and fourth parts, I describe how the political power structure encompassing the indigenous community and the mestizo municipality has shifted through the transnational engagement of indigenous migrants, highlighting the way in which participation in a hometown association and in transnational projects has empowered migrants from Tarecuato to negotiate directly with the municipal government.

This study is part of a broader ongoing research project adopting a multisited approach (Marcus, 1998) in which ethnographic fieldwork was conducted in Chicago and in Michoacán between 2005 and 2009. First, the different spaces of migrant transnational participation were observed. In Chicago, these included events organized by the hometown associations and the federation involving participation of government officials from Mexico, as well as meetings between Mexican politicians and local migrant groups and between Mexican migrants in Chicago and U.S. government officials. In Michoacán, I investigated social development projects sponsored by Mexican migrants in Chicago in conjunction with the Mexican government’s programs and met with officials who dealt with migrant issues (for example, the Secretaría de Desarrollo Social, 2013). As a second step, I conducted interviews in both Michoacán and Chicago with participants in transnational projects and Mexican migrant organizations. As in previous studies on the topic (Goldring, 2001; Zamudio, 2005), the majority of the interviewees were men (37 men, 8 women). For the research presented here I interviewed the municipal president of Santiago Tangamandapio, the local coordinator of the municipal migrants’ affairs office, and local members of the Three-for-One Program committee in Tarecuato as well as migrants who participated in the Tarecuato hometown association in Chicago.

The Essence of Being from Tarecuato

According to Enrique (November 27, 2008), “the essence of being from Tarecuato, of being Purhépecha—one carries that inside. It does not matter how you dress or how you eat; the real important thing is that you feel that you are in Tarecuato. Its fiestas, its traditions, they are something special, and we really appreciate that. Well, that is how we feel.” For people from Tarecuato, being Purhépecha is a feeling of belonging. The Purhépechas are the largest indigenous group in Michoacán,³ mainly inhabiting the central and northwestern part of the state. Traditionally, the Purhépecha territory in Michoacán has been divided into four subregions: the Ciénega de Zacapu, the Lago de Pátzcuaro, the Cañada de los Once Pueblos, and the Meseta Purhépecha (Kemper and Adkins, 2004; Leco Tomás, 2003: 310–311). Tarecuato is one of the approximately 43 indigenous communities of the Meseta Purhépecha. While the municipalities in the central region of the Meseta are mainly indigenous, Tarecuato is located in one of the western, predominantly mestizo, municipalities (Dietz, 2001: 5). In the municipality of Santiago Tangamandapio, to which it belongs, only 30 percent of the population identify themselves as Purhépecha (Navarro Ochoa, 2003: 337). Although the population of the capital town of the municipality was originally Purhépecha, today only 0.9 percent of the inhabitants speak the indigenous language, in contrast to 72 percent of the villagers in Tarecuato (Ventura Patiño, 2003: 11).

In the official censuses, the main criterion for identifying the population of the municipalities and communities as indigenous has generally been language (Kemper and Adkins, 2004: 235). Although the people of Tarecuato consider the indigenous language a very important cultural identification category, the above quotation shows that the external, observable attributes by which outsiders have classified indigenous people are not the main source of feeling Purhépecha. For the people of Tarecuato, the essence of being Purhépecha is their religious and social life. The traditional forms of social organization distinguish them from mestizo communities. In her study of the local government of Tarecuato, María del Carmen Ventura Patiño (2003: 34–36) describes el costumbre (custom) as the specific cultural norms that identify the people of Tarecuato as an ethnic group, as Purhépecha, while distinguishing them from other indigenous communities. It is by the negotiation and redefinition of custom that the people of Tarecuato maintain their ethnic identity in relationship to others.

Civil and religious public life in Tarecuato, as in the majority of Mexican indigenous communities, is organized through the cargo system. In order to be part of the community every household has to fulfill cargos, offices in the local government and the church that are usually held for a term of one year. The main task of the cargo holders is to cover the cost of the community fiestas; therefore migrants also have the possibility of participating in the cargo system by sending money. Tarecuato is organized into five barrios (neighborhoods) named after the local saints—San Miguel, Santiago, San Pedro, San Juan, and Las Vírgenes. In the barrios the leading cargo holders, the cabildos, organize the ceremonies of their respective saints and control the fulfillment of the cargos of each household. The cargo system organizes not only religious life but also the political administration of the community, including the nomination of the candidates for the local government (jefatura de tenencia) (Ventura Patiño, 2003: 50–51).

Therefore, the traditional cargo system and the local government structure imposed by the nation-state are interwoven in Tarecuato, as Ventura Patiño (2003: 108–114) points out. The local government officially is an administrative subdivision of the municipal government of Santiago Tangamandapio; according to state law its functions are to execute the orders of the municipal presidency and preserve the public order. In Tarecuato, officeholders not only carry out the functions delegated by the state but also perform important traditional offices (cargos)” (Ventura Patiño, 2003: 112).

The Struggle for Representation: Indigenous Localities and Mestizo Municipalities

At the beginning of the twentieth century the Purhépecha region surrounding Tarecuato was divided among different municipalities.⁴ When the Mexican federal government established the municipalities after the revolution, indigenous regions were intentionally divided in order to integrate them into the nation-state.⁵ The nation-building process in Mexico was guided by a nationalist ideology (Velasco Ortiz, 2008: 8) imagining the mestizo as the basis of modern Mexican identity and assimilating indigenous communities into the national society in the name of progress (Gamio, 1916; Vasconcelos, 1925). Gunther Dietz (2001: 6) explains how the federal government intervened in the Purhépecha regions. Ever since the presidency of Lázaro Cárdenas (1934–1954), Michoacán has been the target of regional integration politics. State agencies have tried to dissolve indigenous regions by dividing communities from each other and including them separately in development projects headed by mestizo towns (Dietz, 2001: 6).

Today local activists from Tarecuato and the neighboring Purhépecha communities are demanding the reorganization of the municipal administrative structures. Although Robert V. Kemper and Julie Adkins (2004: 266) argue that research should abandon the municipality as an analytic unit, they consider municipalities arenas for ethnic revitalization. The local activists from Tarecuato share this notion: their objective is to create an indigenous municipality with Tarecuato as its capital. This new municipality would include Tarecuato, La Cantera, Los Hucuares, Las Encillas, lower Huarachillo, Paso el Molino, and Los Laureles, communities in which the majority of the inhabitants declare themselves Purhépecha and speak the indigenous language (Ventura Patiño, 2003: 202). Enrique explained the local controversy over this project as follows (November 27, 2008):

I think we just don’t identify with each other, because their customs are very different from ours. That’s why we have worked on a project of municipalization, which we haven’t advanced a lot, because there are also people who don’t agree with the new indigenous municipality because of ignorance. We know that if Tarecuato were a municipality it would have its own budget, but it still isn’t decided. We have a great number of people who still speak only Purhépecha and don’t understand Spanish and don’t understand sometimes, because here we still have a traditional government and in Santiago Tangamandapio it is different, and people are afraid that this will change. But we are convinced that the traditional way of organizing will not be lost.

Some people from Tarecuato are afraid of losing their indigenous forms of organization through the creation of a new municipality. Yet proponents argue that constituting a new municipality is a way to counter discrimination against the people of Tarecuato by the majority-mestizo municipality. There is little difference between the numbers of inhabitants of Tarecuato (about 8,000) and Santiago Tangamandapio (about 9,700), and the indigenous community has always been a commercial center for the surrounding communities. In spite of this, the budget of the municipality is not distributed equally. A few years ago the Carretera Jacona–Los Reyes, the road that connects Tarecuato to the nearby city of Zamora, was freshly paved, but the community still lacks infrastructure (streets, electricity, water) and social services (security, health, schooling), as Jesús explained (June 23, 2009):

The municipality of Tangamandapio is much richer; they have more things, more resources. The money that is given to the municipalities to support their communities, I imagine that by law or regulation there has to be some distribution depending on the population, but unfortunately that has never happened. Tarecuato has never been given what it deserves. The municipality is in good shape in education, health, public security, drinking water, electricity—it has all the services and doesn’t lack anything—while Tarecuato is lacking all services. We are a community that has been suffering for a long time in the same way.

The distribution of political power between Tarecuato and Santiago Tangamandapio is also unequal. Ventura Patiño (2003: 110) points out that municipal presidents have always been mestizos from the capital town. As a result, political negotiations between Tarecuato and Santiago Tangamandapio have always been difficult. Though the interviewees still perceive the municipal government as hostile to the needs of their community, migration and the organization of migrants in the United States have changed the economic and political position of Tarecauto and its relationship to the municipal government.

The Club Tarecuato in Chicago

Migration has had a strong impact on rural communities in Michoacán, which has one of the highest emigration rates in Mexico;⁶ Gustavo López Castro (2003: 19) observes that 13 percent of households in Michoacán have at least one migrant. According to interviews conducted in Michoacán and Chicago, between 40 and 60 percent of the original population of interviewees’ home communities live in the United States. Ventura Patiño (2003: 16) estimates that about 2,000 migrants from Tarecuato live in the United States. The biggest community, about 500 persons, is in Pomona, California. My interviewees claim that 30 percent of the original population of Tarecuato has migrated and that about 80 families live in Chicago.

The first immigration wave that the interviewees recall is the one that took place under the Bracero Program (1942–1964), but there had been labor migration, especially in the agricultural sector, from Michoacán to the United States since the early twentieth century, augmented by the political commotion and violence during and after the revolution (Fernández-Ruiz, 2003: 38). When the U.S. labor force was reduced during World War II, the Bracero Program was developed by the Mexican and U.S. governments as a guest worker program to regulate labor migration. As José Alfredo (November 27, 2008) said,

The migration from Tarecuato is pretty old. To be accurate, there is a record of migration to the United States since the 1940s with the Bracero Program. Here many people joined the program. It was something very significant for the people. After the termination of the program, the people still kept on going. The majority went to California at that time, but lately people have been migrating to other states; now there is a strong group from Tarecuato in the Carolinas, both South and North, and especially a lot of people have migrated to Chicago.

Nearly 200,000 of Chicago’s 2,862,000 inhabitants are Mexicans (Paral et al., 2004: 11), and 15 percent of them are from Michoacán.⁷ Though Philippe Schaffhauser (1994) has studied the migration from Tarecuato to Los Angeles, the migration of Purhépecha people to the U.S. Midwest has been little explored: the only ethnography is that of Warren Anderson (2004) on the transnational migration between Cherán and Cobden, Illinois.⁸ However, several scholars have recently studied the migration of Michoacanans to Chicago, focusing in particular on the founding of the FEDECMI and its transnational engagement (Bada, 2008; Espinosa, 1999; Schütze, 2013).

The Club Tarecuato was founded by approximately 10 families. The participating members in Chicago are mainly men, while the committee in Tarecuato is composed of both men and women. The driving force for migrants’ involvement in hometown associations and their transnational projects is the strong bond to the home community. Luin Goldring (1998: 167) argues that Mexican migrants “tend to continue to orient their lives in part around their place of origin, maintaining transnational spaces and multiple identities.”⁹ Perfecto, a member of the Club Tarecuato, described his motivation to participate in the organization as follows (July 14, 2009):

When the club was founded, Jesús had already heard of the federation. Then one day he told me that we were going to the meeting. At that time, the meetings were held in Progreso Latino, and we went. I was interested, because I think one carries that inside, the wanting to help the community, that is. For me there was never any doubt.

When the Club Tarecuato joined the FEDECMI in 2004 it was still meeting in a community center called Progreso Latino in the center of the Chicago neighborhood of Pilsen, where 90 percent of the inhabitants today are Mexicans and Mexican Americans.¹⁰ In the same year, Casa Michoacán was founded in Pilsen as the headquarters of the FEDECMI, with the support of the government of Michoacán. Since then, Casa Michoacán has become an important community center and the FEDECMI one of the leading state-level organizations of Mexican migrants in the United States.

In 2004 the Club Tarecuato was the only indigenous hometown association in the FEDECMI. Today, other hometown associations with indigenous backgrounds, for instance, the Club Cherán, have joined the federation, while the activities of the Club Tarecuato in the FEDECMI have recently decreased. In his study of young Purhépecha migrants from Tarecuato in Los Angeles, Schaffhauser (1994) points out that indigenous migrants tend to hide their ethnic identity and act as if they were “only Mexican” in public while their indigenous traditions (such as language, food, and rituals) prevail in private space. Whereas the members of the club speak Purhépecha during their own hometown meetings, in the context of the FEDECMI they are one of many hometown associations with no visible indigenous identity. Nonetheless, they are aware of the special exclusion that their fellow indigenous migrants experience in the United States, as Jesús, the president of the club, pointed out (June 23, 2009):

We have worked with the federation. In Michoacán there are a lot of indigenous people who don’t speak Spanish, that don’t speak English. They only speak the Purhépecha or Tarascan dialect. So there have been cases when these people have had an accident, have gotten sick, have had to go to the hospital and there is nobody that can understand this dialect.¹¹ So we are registered as a club, but we also do translations from the dialect to English or Spanish.

Their membership in the predominantly mestizo federation enables the activists of the Club Tarecuato to act as cultural brokers. They help indigenous migrants to deal with institutions and official procedures in the host society. They also act as brokers between the Mexican migrant organizations and indigenous migrants who are not organized in a hometown association. The Club Tarecuato has few official members, because many migrants, lacking residents’ permits in the United States, are afraid of exposing themselves, as José Alfredo explained (November 27, 2008):

They are very few that are participating in the club. They are the ones who have a little bit more time and who have their papers more or less in order. There are those who participate and those who don’t participate. It’s not that they wouldn’t like to, but they are afraid. They say: “If I participate, they’ll realize that I’m illegal and throw me out!”

The majority of the members of the hometown associations of the FEDECMI and their leaders are legal residents or U.S. citizens and are economically well established today. However, most of them were born into poor families in the Mexican countryside, came to the United States as young adults, and had to fight many years for their legal residency or their citizenship. They are not part of the transnational political elite that is originally from the Mexican middle and upper class with higher education (such as those studied by Smith and Bakker, 2008: 61). The community leaders organize the activities of the hometown associations and invite new members to participate in hometown projects.

Like many of the leaders of the Michoacanan hometown associations in Chicago, Jesús is economically successful. He is the owner of a company that produces Mexican snacks and sweets in Pilsen. His main objective in organizing the people from Tarecuato is the support of educational projects in his community of origin (June 23, 2009):

Our objective is education, more than anything—kindergarten, primary, and secondary school—so that our people of Tarecuato, when they go away to look for a job, they already know something, not as before. When I went away, there wasn’t even a secondary school, and, practically speaking, one couldn’t study well.

Almost all of the community leaders interviewed confirmed that educational projects are most important to them. They want to change the prospects of young people in the Mexican countryside. In the past decade, the main incentive for founding hometown associations has been fundraising for public works in the communities of origin. The most popular projects of the Michoacanan migrants have been paving streets, reconstructing central plazas, renovating churches, constructing schools, and providing computers.

Tarecuato and Chicago: Transnational Negotiations

The negotiation of development projects among Michoacanan communities, Mexican government officials, and Chicago migrant groups has become common in recent decades. State representatives, municipal presidents, and party politicians travel frequently to Chicago to negotiate with their fellow countrymen about the planning of these projects. Many of these projects are financed through the Three-for-One Program, which began operating in Michoacán in 2002.¹² Today it includes public works (e.g., the reconstruction of public plazas and the paving of streets), social projects (e.g., scholarships), and productive projects (e.g., support for small enterprises). The migrants initiate the projects and then negotiate with Mexican authorities to ensure that the municipal, state, and federal government agencies finance the same amounts as the migrant hometown association. The negotiations of the migrant organizations are backed up by local committees of the program in the home communities. In the case of Tarecuato, as in the majority of these cases, the members of these committees are relatives and friends of the migrant group in Chicago.

Although the economic impact of the program is insignificant (just 1 percent of the remittances that migrants send to their relatives in their home communities), it gives migrants the chance to get engaged in local development back home in a visible way and to build spaces of negotiation with government agencies. As Rodolfo García Zamora (2005: 236–239) points out, the most important contribution of the Three-for-One Program is not the economic investment but the possibility for transnational organizations of migrants to become interlocutors with the different levels of the Mexican government. He says that the motivation of the migrants to participate in the program is, first of all, to strengthen their transnational ties and their sentiment of belonging to both Mexico and the United States. Furthermore, migrants can begin to influence local decision making in their regions of origin by participating in transnational infrastructure projects.

José Alfredo, a member of the Three-for-One Program committee in Tarecuato, described the problems that the indigenous migrants had when they first tried to negotiate these projects with the mestizo municipality in Santiago Tangamandapio (November 27, 2008):

Last year, it was my turn to be with the migrants. Actually, I was the speaker of the club, so I handed the applications to Don Jesús so that he could fill them out and negotiate with the municipality. Actually, we couldn’t get a bigger project because of the situation we had, where the municipality said, “No, look, we don’t have the budget!” . . . It has been very difficult, because Santiago Tangamandapio, which is totally mestizo, has nothing in common with the community—very different cultures and rejection for many years, no? This is the well-known paternalism of the municipality’s capital toward the indigenous communities.

In Tarecuato several projects were planned, but at first the municipal president would not work with the migrants’ club and its committee in Tarecuato. Its membership in the FEDECMI gave the club new recognition by government officials, as Perfecto pointed out (July 14, 2009): “Now they consider us more, because sometimes they come here to ask for our help, and then they realize that Tarecuato is part of the organization FEDECMI. So now they consider us a little more and respect us.”

In 2008, the newly elected governor of Michoacán, Leonel Godoy, invited the municipal president of Santiago Tangamandapio to visit the United States and meet with Michoacanan migrants. The Club Tarecuato was the only hometown association from the municipality in Chicago, and the municipal president was very proud to be able to introduce it to the governor. José Alfredo spoke of the visit as follows (November 27, 2008):

They handled it like a diplomatic visit. He is the first municipal president, he has had a very good relationship with the governor, and the governor is a person who is very concerned about the migrants. So he invited Miguel [the municipal president], and he gladly accepted and went, and the meetings they had and all the events were something that was really recognized. It had such a good impact that the Michoacanan authorities remember them. Look, the people have lost confidence in the authorities, so if a president in fact takes the time to visit them it makes them trust again. I have talked to them, and they believe that this administration will help them with their applications.

In Chicago, the mestizo president of the municipality of Santiago Tangamandapio met with the indigenous people of Tarecuato. Symbolically, the visit of the municipal president was very important to the migrant group. It was able to build a new relationship based on trust with the municipal government that would enable it to negotiate about development projects that it wanted to carry out in Tarecuato. The Chicago migrant group, together with the Three-for-One Program committee in Tarecuato, managed to negotiate several development projects: the reconstruction of the portico in front of the sixteenth-century church,¹³ the construction of classrooms for the secondary school, and the acquisition of 40 computers for local schools.

Participation in the hometown association, in the FEDECMI, and in the Three-for-One Program opened the possibility for the Tarecuato migrant group to get involved in negotiations with different state authorities. This interaction and communication brought together the members of the Club Tarecuato in Chicago and the interested inhabitants of the home community, on the one hand, and the administrative authorities of the community and municipality and regional and federal government agencies in Mexico, on the other.

Conclusions

The case of the Club Tarecuato demonstrates that the transnational space opened possibilities of negotiation between historically unequal partners and enabled power shifts in the traditional relationship between an indigenous community and a mestizo municipality. Mexican indigenous communities face multiple forms of discrimination. For centuries they have been subjected to the Mexican government’s efforts to integrate them culturally and administratively into the project of a mestizo nation-state. Local state dependencies such as municipal governments have marginalized indigenous communities by limiting their budgets and disrespecting their traditional forms of organization. The case of Tarecuato shows that indigenous people have managed to maintain their traditional form of governance as a flexible form of political and cultural organization. This ability to adapt has helped them to survive and to organize in the context of migration. The founding of the Club Tarecuato in Chicago is a vivid example.

In migration, indigenous people have to deal with exclusion both for being Mexican and for being indigenous. They are discriminated against not only by the host society but also by their nonindigenous countrymen. Yet, the Club Tarecuato in Chicago has succeeded in organizing itself within a mestizo federation. Since the club leaders are aware of the discrimination that their fellow indigenous people experience, they see their work in the hometown association as cultural brokerage, supporting indigenous migrants in their everyday lives. In addition, in Tarecuato migrants have also played an important role as brokers between their community and the municipality. The difficulties of communication between the municipal authorities and the indigenous community had initially kept migrants from negotiating effectively about development projects that presupposed the financial support of the mestizo municipality. Through their participation in the hometown association and in the state-level migrant organization they developed a power base outside the municipality and the structures of the Mexican state. This gave them an opportunity to negotiate with the mestizo municipal president when he visited them in Chicago. Thus, through their transnational participation, they gained a voice in local decision making and increased their influence in the predominantly mestizo municipality.

Footnotes

Notes

Stephanie Schütze is a visiting professor in the Núcleo de Estudos de Gênero Pagu of the Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Brazil. Her work centers on political culture, transnational and transcultural processes, gender, and interethnic relations. Since 2004 she has been researching Mexican migrant organizations in Chicago and their transnational political participation.

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