6 - FROM BALACLAVAS TO BASEBALL CAPS

Summary

Zinacantán was a closed and conservative indigenous community when Professor Evon Vogt negotiated entry for students with the Harvard Chiapas Project in the 1950s. This became one of anthropology's most “singularly successful” efforts ever to “describe the inside of native culture” (Rus 2002, 240). Fifty year later, aggrieved citizens of the same Tzotzil municipality were among those who most effectively took up the Zapatistas cause and rallied under the banner of indigenous rights. But they weren't advocating class warfare: the region is actually one of Chiapas's most capitalistic by virtue of its booming trade in greenhouse flowers. And they weren't demanding political or economic autonomy: the proximate cause of citizen unrest was that they received too few state resources. They joined the Zapatistas because joining the Zapatistas worked. It drew attention to their grievances and forced the government to respond. Far from the conflict in the Lacandon jungles that was discussed in Chapter 4, this small but well-networked group of Zinacantán Zapatistas essentially seized upon the Zapatista identity. They became citizens of an imagined collective and adopted a novel identity in order to find a new means of protesting harsh treatment by the state. They joined a communalistic group rights organization for partly individualistic and instrumental reasons. Such is the duality of everyday indigenous ethnicity in southern Mexico.