Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-dlnhk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-27T11:14:34.540Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Mixtec Ethnicity: Social Identity, Political Consciousness, and Political Activism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 October 2022

Carole Nagengast  and
Michael Kearney
Carole Nagengast
Affiliation:
University of California, Santa Cruz
Michael Kearney
Affiliation:
University of California, Riverside
Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Core share and HTML view are not available for this content. However, as you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

Culture, according to one anthropological formulation, is “the structure of meaning through which people give shape to their experience” (Geertz 1973, 312). Clifford Geertz's definition necessarily implies consideration of struggles over the politics of that meaning. Implicit and explicit in such struggles are political efforts to impose upon others a particular concept of how things really are and therefore how people are obliged to act (Geertz 1973, 316). During the process of nation building, history and the structure of meaning that it gives to contemporary “culture” are often manipulated so that socially, politically, and economically opposed groups are merged into putative harmonious “imagined communities” whose reality enters into public consciousness and social discourse as the authentic past (Anderson 1983). But consciousness of shared identity and common discourse centered upon that identity are not un-contested. In Mexico competing images of indigenous “tradition” entail just such a political struggle over meaning, a struggle over the definition of what constitutes indigenous culture—“real” ethnic identity, as it were—and a consequent struggle over what actions, if any, need to be taken (and by whom) to combat the second-class status of most of the country's indigenous peoples.

Type
Research Article
Information
Latin American Research Review , Volume 25 , Issue 2 , 1990 , pp. 61 - 91
Copyright
Copyright © 1990 by the University of Texas Press

Footnotes

*

The authors wish to acknowledge the anonymous reviewers who gave generously of their time to read and comment on this manuscript. Their remarks contributed to a more coherent and cogent argument. We also wish to thank Raymond Wiest for his especially helpful suggestions.

References

Anderson, Benedict 1983 Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso.Google Scholar
Barthes, Roland 1972 Mythologies. Translated by Lavers, Annette. New York: Hill and Wang.Google Scholar
Mixteco, Boletin 1987 “Malas noticias de San Quintín.” Volume 2, no. 2 (Fall).Google Scholar
Butterworth, Douglas 1975 “Rural-Urban Migration and Microdemography: A Case Study from Mexico.” Urban Anthropology 4: 265–83.Google Scholar
Cockcroft, James 1986 Outlaws in the Promised Land: Mexican Immigrant Workers and America's Future. New York: Grove Press.Google Scholar
Comaroff, John 1987 “Of Totemism and Ethnicity.” Ethnos 52, nos.3-4:301–23.Google Scholar
Conover, Ted 1987 Coyotes: A Journey through the Secret World of America's Illegal Aliens. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Cornelius, Wayne 1988 “Migrants from Mexico: Still Coming—and Staying,” Los Angeles Times, 3 July, pt. v, pp. 1–2.Google Scholar
Coronil, Fernando n.d. “Mastery by Signs, Signs of Mastery.” Manuscript, University of Chicago.Google Scholar
Dennis, Phillip 1987 Intervillage Conflict in Oaxaca. New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press.Google Scholar
Diener, Paul 1978 “The Tears of St. Anthony: Ritual and Revolution in Eastern Guatemala.” Latin American Perspectives 5, no. 3: 92–115.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel 1970 The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences. London: Tavistock Publications.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel 1973 Madness and Civilization. New York: Vintage Books.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel 1980 Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977. Edited by Gordon, Colin. New York: Pantheon Books.Google Scholar
Geertz, Clifford 1973 “The Politics of Meaning.” In Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Greenberg, James 1981 Santiago's Sword: Chatino Peasant Religion and Economics. Berkeley and London: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Griffin, Keith 1974 The Political Economy of Agrarian Change: An Essay on the Green Revolution. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Griffin, Keith 1987 World Hunger and the World Economy. London: Macmillan.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hewitt De Alcantara, Cynthia 1978 La modernización de la agricultura mexicana, 1940–1970. Mexico City: Siglo Veintiuno Editores.Google Scholar
Hewitt De Alcantara, Cynthia 1984 Anthropological Perspectives on Rural Mexico. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.Google Scholar
Juffer, Jane 1988 “Abuse at the Border.” The Progressive, 14 Apr., pp. 14–19.Google Scholar
Kearney, Michael 1986a “Integration of the Mixteca and the Western U.S.-Mexico Region via Migratory Wage Labor.” In Regional Impacts of U.S.-Mexican Relations, edited by Rosenthal-Urey, Ina, 71–102. La Jolla: Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies, University of California, San Diego.Google Scholar
Kearney, Michael 1986b “From the Invisible Hand to Visible Feet: Anthropological Studies of Migration and Development.” Annual Review of Anthropology 15: 331–61.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kearney, Michael 1988 “Mixtec Political Consciousness: From Passive to Active Resistance.” In Rural Revolt in Mexico and U.S. Intervention, edited by D. Nugent. Monograph Series, Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies, University of California, San Diego.Google Scholar
Kearney, Michael, and Nagengast, Carole 1989 “Anthropological Perspectives on Transnational Communities in Rural California.” Working Group on Farm Labor and Rural Poverty, Working Paper no. 3. Davis, Calif.: California Institute for Rural Studies, University of California.Google Scholar
Kistner, William 1986 “Scrutiny of the Bounty.” Mother Jones 11, no. 9 (Dec.):28-35, 58.Google Scholar
Lappe, Frances Moore, and Collins, Joseph 1979 Food First: Beyond the Myth of Scarcity. New York: Ballantine Books.Google Scholar
Lappe, Frances Moore, and Collins, Joseph 1986 World Hunger: Twelve Myths. New York: Grove Press.Google Scholar
Nagengast, Carole, Stavenhagen, Rodolfo, and Kearney, Michael n.d. “Human Rights and Indigenous Workers: The Mixtecs in Mexico and the United States.” In Neighbors in Crisis: A Call for Joint Solutions, edited by Lorenzo Meyer and Daniel Aldrich. Boulder, Colo.: Westview, forthcoming.Google Scholar
Ortiz Gabriel, Mario n.d. “Deterioro y crisis de la economía campesina de la Mixteca de Oaxaca.” Manuscript, Colegio de México.Google Scholar
Riding, Alan 1986 Distant Neighbors: A Portrait of the Mexicans. New York: Vintage Books.Google Scholar
Romney, Kimball, and Romney, Romaine 1966 The Mixtecans of Juxtlahuaca. New York: Wiley.Google Scholar
Sidman, Deborah 1988 “A Project in Alcozauca, Guerrero, Mexico.” Senior thesis, University of California, Santa Cruz.Google Scholar
Spores, Ronald 1967 The Mixtec Kings and Their People. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.Google Scholar
Spores, Ronald 1984 The Mixtec in Ancient and Colonial Times. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.Google Scholar
Stavenhagen, Rodolfo 1978 Current Problems of Mexico. San Diego, Calif.: Institute of Public and Urban Affairs, San Diego State University.Google Scholar
Stavenhagen, Rodolfo 1986 “Ethnodevelopment: A Neglected Dimension in Development Thinking.” Reprint from Development Studies: Critique and Renewal. Leiden: E. J. Brill.Google Scholar
Stuart, James, and Kearney, Michael 1981 Causes and Effects of Agricultural Labor Migration from the Mixteca of Oaxaca to California. La Jolla: Program in U.S.-Mexican Studies, University of California, San Diego.Google Scholar
Taussig, Michael 1984 “Culture of Terror—Space of Death: Roger Casement's Putumayo Report and the Explanation of Torture.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 26, no. 3: 467–97.Google Scholar
Todorov, Tzvetan 1984 The Conquest of America. New York: Harper and Row.Google Scholar
Vaupel, Suzanne, and Martin, Phillip 1986 “Activity and Regulation of Farm Labor Contractors.” Giannini Information Series no. 86–3, Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources. Oakland, Calif.: Giannini Foundation of Agricultural Economics, University of California.Google Scholar
Williams, Raymond 1975 The Country and the City. St. Albans: Paladin.Google Scholar
Wolf, Eric 1957 “Closed Corporate Peasant Communities in Mesoamerica and Java.” Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 13: 1–18.Google Scholar
Wright, Angus 1986 “Rethinking the Circle of Poison.” Latin American Perspectives 13, no. 4: 26–59.Google ScholarPubMed
Wright, Angus n.d. The Death of Ramón Gonzales: The Modern Agricultural Dilemma. Austin: University of Texas Press, forthcoming.Google Scholar