Ruta Mixteca

Early in 2014 official Mexico was happily engaged in celebrating the twentieth anniversary of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). For some analysts, NAFTA has been a boon to the Mexican economy, mainly because foreign trade increased significantly during these years and direct foreign investment is also leaving its mark on the country. Others are not quite so sanguine, recognizing that foreign trade is not a good measure of economic development, much less of social and personal well-being. A recent study by a team of scholars of the National University of Mexico (UNAM, 2012: 46) reports:

We must especially underline the pronounced decline in the creation of formal or protected jobs and the consequent eruption of open unemployment, which quickly exceeded the figure of two million Mexicans, particularly in the northern areas where a successful pattern of growth based on industrial exports had taken place. It was there that a wave of violence exploded later, attributed to organized crime and the military campaign waged against it.

Based on census data and sectorial and national surveys, the study shows the deep stagnation of the rural sector, including agriculture, forestry, and the livestock industry. This had led by 2010 to the concentration of 60 percent of the country’s extremely poor population in the rural sector and widespread social and regional inequality. More than 20 percent and, depending on definitions, even up to 30 percent of the national population lives in the countryside. The current administration, in place since the end of 2012, saw the need for a specialized National Crusade against Hunger, being forced to recognize that almost half of the country’s population is chronically undernourished. How long this program will take to upset the balance is anybody’s guess.

Among the reasons for this depressing picture are the policies implemented by governments since the 1960s, which intentionally benefited the new rural upper class or rural bourgeoisie that grew out of the deeply flawed and corrupted land reform process of the preceding decades and had hit the peasantry, particularly in the central and southeastern regions, especially hard. These policies were frequently criticized for their negative results; they accelerated the pauperization of the majority of the rural inhabitants and increased economic and social inequality, the destruction of productive natural resources in a good part of the country, and the forced emigration of a large segment of this population to the cities, to the North, and across the border into the United States. They also signaled the shrinking of the domestic market for agricultural products and its derivatives, which were replaced by food imports mainly from the United States. This rural disaster could have been avoided, but the Partido Revolucionario Institucional and Partido Acción Nacional governments decided that they would rather promote business interests than further the well-being of the Mexican people.

The promises of land reform and rural industrialization of the 1930s were betrayed by succeeding governments. That is how Mexico ended up losing its food autonomy and sovereignty. The coup de grace will be no doubt administered by a transnational company that is taking out patents on the genetic make-up of the maize plant, which will put an end to 5,000 years of history and culture as expressed in the Mexican corncob (elote) and the milpa economy (swidden agriculture) (for an early critique, see Reyes, Stavenhagen, et al., 1972).

In order to anchor these changes within the framework of NAFTA, the ruling party carried out a constitutional counterreform in 1992 that opened the door to the privatization of collectively held ejido and communal lands, leaving, as it were, the majority of the peasant population out on a limb. Although this process is not yet complete, it has already led to the renewed concentration of wealth, resources, land, investments, beneficiaries of public policy, and financial assets in contemporary Mexico. There has been, to be sure, some growth in the agriculture and livestock sector, but it is very localized and benefits mostly a minority of the rural population. The UNAM study referred to above reveals that over 70 percent of public subsidies go to the higher income strata. Therefore, intense debates are taking place about alternative policies to address growing problems of inequality. In my view, the perspective cannot be a top-down one as before, because it does not work. It must be a bottom-up approach starting with the battered rural or peasant community, which was at one time the support of México profundo—the notion that all Mexicans carry in their souls, or should at any rate (Bonfil, 1987), not because of nostalgia for a bygone country pastoral but to recover simple human solidarity and denied social justice in memory of Emiliano Zapata’s Mexico of a century ago.

Overall, however, the picture after 20 years of NAFTA is bleak. The Center for Economic and Policy Research reports that from 1960 to 1980 real Mexican GDP per person almost doubled, growing by 98.7 percent. By comparison, in the past 20 years it has grown by just 18.6 percent. Mexico’s poverty rate of 52.3 percent in 2012 is almost identical to the poverty rate of 1994. As a result, there were 14.3 million more Mexicans living below the poverty line as of 2012 than in 1994. NAFTA has also had a severe impact on agricultural employment as U.S. subsidized corn and other products wiped out family farmers in Mexico. From 1991 to 2007 there were 4.9 million Mexican family farmers displaced, while seasonal labor in agro-export industries increased by about 3 million. This meant a net loss of 1.9 million jobs (Weisbrot, Lefebvre, and Sammut, 2014).

It is no coincidence that on the very same day that NAFTA became law, the Zapatista insurrection erupted in Chiapas. This is Mexico’s counterimage to globalization. The very poor performance of the Mexican economy has also contributed to a surge in emigration to the United States. From 1994 to 2000, the annual number of Mexicans emigrating to the United States soared by 79 percent. The number of Mexican-born residents living in the United States more than doubled, from 4.5 million in 1990 to 9.4 million in 2000, and peaked at 12.6 million in 2009. In 1993, the year before NAFTA, approximately 3.9 million undocumented Mexican immigrants lived in the United States; in 2009 there were 11.1 million, an increase of almost 300 percent.

Although Mexican migration to the United States had a long history even before the wartime Bracero program during the 1940s, it was only beginning in the 1980s that indigenous Mexicans were represented in important numbers in the growing transmigration flows northward, as Michael Kearney and his collaborators have meticulously shown. Their fieldwork and surveys, which inspired more research in numerous other institutions, led to the enriched concept of transnational communities, transnational citizenship, and other similar terms (Fox, 1994; Kearney and Nagengast, 1989).

Of particular interest to anthropologists are the indigenous migrants from the Mixteca region in the state of Oaxaca, one of the poorest areas in rural Mexico. The term “Ruta Mixteca” has become a referent for the periodic circular migration that involves numerous indigenous communities not only from Oaxaca but also from other areas in the country as well as from Central America (Guatemalans and Salvadoreans, for example) (Varese and Escárcega, 2004). A recent study reports (Mines, Nichols, and Runsten, 2010):

Indigenous farmworkers are the most recent of many groups that have occupied the bottom rung of the farm labor market in California. The U.S. food system has long been dependent on the influx of an ever-changing, newly-arrived group of workers that set the wages and working conditions at the entry level in the farm labor market. The indigenous workers are already dominant in many of the most arduous farm labor tasks (e.g., picking raisin grapes and strawberries). These entry-level conditions have been used to control (and limit) labor costs of the approximately 700,000-strong California farm labor force. The U.S. and Mexican societies continue to be confronted with the social costs of this system of labor utilization. The resolution of this problem has taken on a new complication as the newcomer immigrants are now increasingly indigenous speaking Mexicans with a different history and patterns of migration, with different customs and, of course, different languages. Approaches to facing this old problem now have to accommodate these “new” immigrants.

As we all know, migrants are not taking tourist jaunts, and circular migration is not merely incidental to the dynamics of U.S.-Mexico relations. It is not a simple oversight that NAFTA excludes labor from its conception of free trade (Mines, Nichols, and Runsten, 2010):

As cheap, subsidized U.S. corn goods flooded Mexican markets, millions of rural farmers in Mexico were forced to migrate to urban areas or abroad. Mexican workers watched the purchasing power of their income drop 50% over the last two decades, while privatization, among other factors, led to a marked drop in unionization. The free trade agreement has liberalized the markets while clamping down on the movement of labor, and the one trade-based mechanism designed to hold participating countries accountable for worker rights violations, the North American Agreement on Labor Cooperation (NAALC), has become almost obsolete. The result: labor rights violations abound, an immigration system remains broken, and the link between the welfare of workers abroad and workers at home goes unexamined.

According to official surveys, almost 60 percent of Mexico’s labor force (almost 30 million people) are found in the “informal sector,” generally considered underemployed. (These people also do not pay taxes or benefit from social security.) This is the sector most likely to emigrate from the rural areas and increasingly from semiurban and urban areas as well (INEGI, 2014). Without taking this context into consideration, it would be difficult to understand fully the dynamics of the transnational migrations along the Mexican border that have been studied so intensively over many years by Michael Kearney, Carole Nagengast, and their colleagues and students.

The changing ethnic and cultural profile of the new transborder migration has had broad and significant impacts on both the sending and the receiving communities. In fact, these are no longer monosemic concepts, for after a few years the sending communities receive, in return, remittances and their Anglicized, culturally distinct kin and offspring, while the receiving communities begin transferring resources and supplies back home to their sending communities in turn. Although some recent research might indicate that after a generation or two the bonds between the senders and receivers tend to weaken if not dissolve entirely, other research suggests that the links become stronger. In this process, the changing perceptions and uses of ethnic and cultural identities play an important role, as seen, for example, in the growth and development of indigenous human rights and activist organizations (Barabas and Bartolomé, 2011).

Furthermore, the transnational communities are shown to have accumulated political capital in both countries. Politicians from Oaxaca and Michoacán, for instance, visit their fellow Oaxaqueños in California or Michoacanos in Chicago when they run for office at home. Although the absence of significant immigration reform in the United States in recent decades has placed undue burdens on undocumented Mexican migrants and their families in Mexico, the electoral implications of a burgeoning Latino community (now increasingly enriched with indigenous ingredients) has not escaped the strategists of the major contending parties (Kearney, 1995)

On Mexico’s southern border a similar situation has developed over the years, related to the long and cruel wars suffered by the indigenous peoples of various Central American countries, which generated a long-standing “refugee problem.” Thus the evolving relationships between migrant communities (here or there) and the wider society to which they originally belonged or into which they progressively merge constantly create new configurations that are expressed in changing symbolic and subjective narratives (Barabas and Bartolomé, 2011; Fox and Rivera-Salgado, 2005).

One such narrative is the language of human rights, particularly that of indigenous human rights, which emerged in the 1980s and has become an important component of the conceptual toolbox of indigenous migrant activists and their accompanying social scientists (Nagengast, Stavenhagen, and Kearney, 1992). When I was a student of anthropology in the early 1950s, there was much talk about the “Indian problem” in Mexico. After having been variously treated as savages, barbarians, possessed by the devil, uncivilized, and much worse, indigenous peoples had become the object of indigenist policies bestowed on them by the revolutionary governments (as they were called at the time). The objective of these policies was to integrate Indians into the mainstream model of the nation, meaning that they would desist from being Indians—in other words, to de-indigenize the country. This would occur despite the great admiration that the ancient preconquest civilizations had inspired among Mexicans as well as foreigners and the fact that many Mexicans were proud of their Indian ancestry. During Mexico’s century of growth and modernization (that is, the twentieth century) the official doctrine promoted the “Mexicanization of the Indians.” To further this national goal, governments provided schools and rural roads, community development, productive projects, health clinics, and loads of political rhetoric.

Mexico, so stated official wisdom, was a country of mestizos, and its Indian roots were only one of a number of other such roots (European, African), meaning that integration and mestizaje (mixing of races) were the only viable policies for a developing nation. This policy, as applied by the National Indian Institute, did indeed bear some fruit, but it also entailed a high social and cultural cost, mainly the loss of indigenous cultural identities in Mexico. One of the visible contradictions: the National Museum of Anthropology, inaugurated in 1964, is an object of national pride, but surviving indigenous peoples had to submit to plans and projects designed for them by the mestizo and criollo owners of the country.

Early critical discussions of assimilationist policies took place in the 1970s, and during the 1980s there was already talk about an indigenous movement of a counter-indigenista nature that challenged this model and proposed instead a vision that would recognize Mexico’s cultural pluralism and would be based on the human right to difference. The recognition of cultural diversity led to the reformulation of linguistic and educational policy, particularly the development of bilingual intercultural education (Nahmad and Nahón, 2011). In 1992 the Congress approved a reform of Article 4 of the constitution in which the indigenous population was recognized for the first time as being at the root of the nation’s pluriculturalism. As a result of the Zapatista rebellion of 1994 and the incomplete peace negotiations that followed, the federal constitution was reformed once again with regard to indigenous matters, and now Article 2 recognizes the right of the indigenous to free determination and autonomy, guarantees other rights to lands and resources, and promotes self-government, indigenous legal systems, and the conservation of indigenous languages and culture. This time, however, the constitutional reform was aborted from the beginning by the political parties then in power and has never been implemented.

The indigenous peoples of Mexico, now classified into 67 different linguistic groups with a total population of around 15 million, have been the historical victims of dispossession, exploitation, marginalization, exclusion, and discrimination. For at least the past two decades they have been in the forefront of the struggle for their collective and individual human rights, and they have proposed alternatives to the failed neoliberal model that has been imposed upon them. Among these alternative approaches we may point to the autonomous experiments of the Zapatista indigenous communities in Chiapas and in areas such as the Triqui region in Oaxaca, the community of Cherán in Michoacán, and the rural communities of Guerrero.

The human rights activists frequently have had to pay a high price for their struggle. They are often persecuted by the authorities, the police, the paramilitaries, the landowners, the drug cartels, the mining companies, and others; their activities are criminalized, and the national and international laws that are supposed to protect them are applied with insufficient rigor or interest. A recent study for the United Nations Development Program reports the existence of several major social conflicts between indigenous communities and foreign-owned mining companies over environmental and land tenure issues that involve the violation of indigenous human rights. Local and federal authorities take sides in these conflicts, some cases are taken to court, and the National Commission on Human Rights also takes a stand. Generally, however, the interests of powerful corporations prevail over the rights of indigenous communities (Stavenhagen, 2013). Public opinion was aroused a few years ago by the plight of the Wixarika (Huichol) in western Mexico, whose century-old pilgrimage route to gather the sacred cactus plant was broken into land blocks for the exploitation of minerals. The conflict is not yet resolved. Similar situations simmer in different parts of the country. Amnesty International (2013) reports: “The criminal justice system remained gravely flawed with 98% of all crimes going unpunished. Indigenous Peoples were at particular risk of unfair criminal justice proceedings. Migrants in transit were victims of attacks, including abduction, rape and people trafficking. Several journalists and human rights activists were killed, attacked or threatened.”

Over the years, indigenous social leaders have become increasingly involved in human rights issues locally, nationally, and at the international level. This involvement is made possible through the growing density of the human rights networks in which they take part. Sympathetic scholars (including applied anthropologists) in both the United States and Mexico may have played a significant role in linking local civil society organizations with these networks as Michael Kearney and Carole Nagengast were able to do in “Oaxacalifornia.”

Cooperation between scholars and activists is particularly noticeable in two major human rights hubs, the United Nations family of organizations and the inter-American human rights system. Anthropologists’ involvement with the UN human rights process began in the 1940s, when the American Anthropological Association presented its opinion to the UN on the draft of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted in 1948 (AAA, 1947).

In the 1950s Claude Lévi-Strauss and other anthropologists and social scientists took part in the debates on race and society at UNESCO, which led to the adoption of international legislation on racial discrimination and its prevention. The International Labor Organization adopted a convention on indigenous and tribal peoples in 1957; updated in 1989, it is now known as Convention 169. It introduces the right of indigenous people to free prior and informed consent about any activity or legislation that may affect their human rights, which is today one of the major indigenous human rights claims. Through its Human Rights Council, the United Nations has continued to build up the international system of protection of human rights. Several more recent conventions, such as those related to the rights of women and of children, include paragraphs concerning the rights of indigenous persons. The specialized human rights committees that evaluate the performance of member states and make recommendations have in recent years also given more attention to the rights of indigenous peoples. While a draft declaration on indigenous rights was in preparation in the 1980s, in 1992 the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Declaration on the Rights of Persons Belonging to National or Ethnic, Religious, and Linguistic Minorities, known as the Minorities Declaration. The focus of this declaration is on the rights of individual members of minorities living in states populated mainly by a recognized majority. Indigenous observers at the UN meetings felt that the Minorities Declaration would distract attention from the rights claimed by indigenous peoples as a collective category in contrast to individuals belonging to different kinds of minorities. They maintain to this day that their collective rights as peoples have little in common with those claimed by ethnically distinct minority individuals, except insofar as all human beings have the same universal rights. The argument that indigenous representatives brought to the UN was that they ought to be recognized as peoples having the same collective rights as all the other peoples that have joined the UN. This is not the case, they argue, for individuals belonging to minorities who require protection in states dominated by ethnic majorities.

For over 30 years indigenous activists from all over the world have come to the UN to further their cause. They finally succeeded in convincing the great majority of member states to adopt the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in 2007. Although it is not an international treaty or convention, the declaration carries moral and political weight as did the 1948 Universal Declaration on Human Rights before it actually became international law 20 years later. The principal difference between this newest UN human rights declaration and the Minorities Declaration mentioned before is precisely that this one speaks of the rights of peoples and not solely of individuals. In other words, it recognizes the collective rights of indigenous peoples, particularly their right to self-determination.

The activists who flocked to the UN and danced on the steps of the UN building in New York on that September day in 2007 are now the bearers of a new human rights language that they wield in negotiating with governments, litigating strategically in the courts, speaking to the World Bank, and confronting the multinational corporations that take over their lands, resources, and territories. This new language also leads to new social and political relationships. When they sit on international committees or help draft a piece of legislation, they act within distinct conceptual frameworks that only a few years ago were absent from their daily universe as they were from that of many anthropologists. The Saami of northern Norway now train their own international lawyers, the First Nations of Canada their constitutionalists, and the Mixtec of Oaxaca are not far behind. The Ford Foundation runs a program in Mexico to help move indigenous college students into graduate school. At the local level, the new model of intercultural education is intended to transform a recognized human right into a viable public policy. In Mexico there are now several intercultural universities around the country.

The inter-American system consists of a Human Rights Commission and a Human Rights Court. The commission writes reports, sends out observation missions, and makes recommendations to member states. When governments do not comply readily with their obligations according to the American Convention of Human Rights, the commission may take them to court. The first important case concerning indigenous rights came before the court in 2001. It involved the traditional land rights of the Awas Tingni indigenous community in Nicaragua, which the court recognized. The case was argued on behalf of the commission and the Mayagna indigenous people by James Anaya of the University of Arizona. Subsequently, the court has decided a number of similar cases, and in this way indigenous human rights are now regularly dealt with by the inter-American system. Charles Hale, a professor of anthropology at the University of Texas, and I were called by the court as expert witnesses to provide background information on the arguments presented (Hale, 2006) One Zapatista community in Chiapas, as Shannon Speed (2006) describes it, is reconstructing its indigenous identity in the process of presenting its case for restitution of land rights under Convention 169, to which Mexico is a party. Increasingly, courts obtain anthropological expertise when dealing with indigenous rights cases. This was not something we learned in Anthropology 101—at least not when I was a student. Writing on multiculturalism in a neoliberal world on the basis of three case studies in Central America, Hale (2005: 13) rightly argues that “the nightmare settles in as indigenous organizations win important battles of cultural rights only to find themselves mired in the painstaking, technical, administrative, and highly inequitable negotiations for resources and political power that follow.”

Even as indigenous human rights defenders use the knowledge and methods that anthropologists can provide, so also anthropologists have learned from their indigenous activist friends how to apply their science to strengthen and promote human values of fairness and justice beyond the accumulation of knowledge as their principal objective. However, not all social scientists are equally so inclined. Some of you may remember a notorious case 50 years ago when social scientists working in Chile were invited to join a U.S.-army-directed research project known as Project Camelot intended to counter revolutionary insurgencies in Latin America. The use of anthropologists for warfare does not seem to have diminished in the contemporary period. The U.S. army employs them all over the world. But, as David Price (2002: 5) has recently written, “As anthropologists we have a duty to serve the populations we study by shifting political and media-driven frames of analysis and advocating for the safety and independence of peoples around the world.” The American Anthropological Association is reported to have expressed similar concerns.

In Latin America as elsewhere, it is not only indigenous migrants who require protection and solidarity, although they are probably the most vulnerable. For many indigenous Central Americans, passage through Mexico may become a death trap. In the framework of drug-related violence, hundreds of so-called illegal migrants have lost their lives. At least the Mixtecs of the Ruta Mixteca are received by their kin and peers at both ends of their journey. Not everybody can be that lucky. In Chiapas the Zapatistas maintain their pursuit of autonomy against the institutions of the state, because they cannot trust what they call the mal gobierno (bad government). Some sectors of the current government still play with the possibility of tinkering with the legal system, but indigenous peoples have lost trust in them. If there is to be a new state policy on indigenous matters in Mexico it must retrieve the San Andrés Accords of 1996 between the Zapatistas and the federal government and build a new relationship with indigenous peoples based on the recognition of their human rights as these are formulated in international law. This may require yet another constitutional reform that would guarantee fully the right to free determination and the other rights that derive from it. Only last year (2013) the Federal Electoral Tribunal reaffirmed the right of an indigenous community in the state of Guerrero to elect its own authorities by traditional customary procedures instead of the polling booth. Many municipalities in Oaxaca have long practiced the same tradition.

The problems faced by indigenous peoples are also shared by mestizo peasants, migrants, and marginalized urban populations, and the new paradigm that ought to be built, based on a reconceptualization of the national problematic, must include the vision of a multicultural Mexico that respects its diversity and its human rights within a framework of equality, collective well-being, and equitable development. The human rights approach is not limited to a single disciplinary or theoretical perspective, although its legal and social science components stand out. As far as indigenous peoples are concerned, the debate involves not only individual and collective claims to unfulfilled freedoms and liberties guaranteed by law but also a new vision of nation and society to be worked out with other population groups—however defined—and negotiated with the existing political entities known as “states.” In Latin America, Bolivia and Ecuador have both enacted new constitutions in which these issues are dealt with, but they have in no way been resolved to everyone’s satisfaction. Bolivia, which elected its first indigenous president in 2005, now finds itself divided among those indigenous people who support President Evo Morales and those who question his legitimacy. Although the constitution of Ecuador of 2008 proclaims as one of its major principles the right of sumak kawsay or el buen vivir (living well), most indigenous Ecuadoreans are still far from being able to enjoy it. Guatemala failed to implement the peace accords signed in 1996 after a brutal 36-year-long civil war. In Mexico the dominant establishment feels that it has enough power to ignore its own timid advances in this area undertaken during the past two decades. And NAFTA as an institution has decided that it has no need for indigenous rights. The debate goes on, and therefore the struggle. In one of my last reports to the UN Human Rights Council in 2007 I suggested that the problem was not insufficient legislation on human rights but rather the implementation gap due to insufficient political will between the letter of the law and its realization in practice.

Over 40 years ago I had the honor of addressing the Society for Applied Anthropology for the first time. On that occasion, I recall that I made a case for a decolonized applied social science and ventured a call for a radical, critical, and committed anthropology. Here and today, I wish to reaffirm this position.