Think Locally, Act Globally

WHEN I ARRIVED AT THE MODEST HOME A
few blocks from downtown Fresno, California, I
was thinking about the Mixtec Indian villages I’d seen in
Oaxaca, Mexico. In the High Mixtec region, nestled in the
Sierra Madre mountains, even the poorest houses, made
of logs or adobe with palm or tile roofs, have a certain
dignity. There, a house is a metaphor for the relationship
of the individual to the community: the roof was raised
and the foundation laid by relatives and neighbors in a
festive celebration that resounds in the villagers’ memory
years later.
In Fresno the contrast could not have been greater. The
dilapidated home I saw was also a metaphor, a pathetic
illustration of the solitude of poverty in the heart of one of
the wealthiest regions in the world. A sign in front
announced, “Casa del Mixteco.” Filem6n L6pez, a Mixtec
Indian from Rio Timbre in Mixtepec, Oaxaca who works
as a migrant farmworker, is the president and founder of
this community center, a meeting place for some of the
thousands of Mixtecs who work in California’s Central
Valley. Their organization, the Benito Juirez Civic Asso-
ciation, has members from as far away as Salem, Oregon.
In the midst of this highly technological agro-industrial
mecca, the group functions as a truly Mesoamerican
Indian institution, based on the tequio (cooperative com-
munity labor donated voluntarily to the collective), reci-
procity (as the moral basis for the exchange of goods and
services), democracy by consensus, and political author-
ity based on the moral weight of age and experience.
Juan Martinez, the association secretary, is a young
Mixtec agronomist, who works in a restaurant to earn a
living. Juan’s dream is to get into a master’s program in
rural development and continue using his knowledge to
assist expatriate Mixtecs. He would like to found an
agricultural production cooperative with two locales: one
VOLUME XXV. NUMBER 3 (DECEMBER 1991)
IL
Stefano Varese teaches Native American studies at the
University of California at Davis.
13The First Nations
The First Nations
“,- “, ,
:tX!+ a .
A Kampa from the Brazilian state of Acre in the Amazon. Amazonian indigenous peoples have formed a
multinational body to bring their grievances directly to the World Bank, the IMF and the United States.
in California’s Central Valley, the other in the Indian
township of San Juan Mixtepec in Mexico. The leaders of
the Casa del Mixteco know that ethnic sovereignty and
political autonomy are not achievable in either Mexico or
the United States without a strategy for economic devel-
opment that can give them a margin of independence, a
certain freedom from the slavery of rural wage labor.
A few miles to the north, in Livingston, another group
of Mixtec migrants founded the Organization of Ex-
ploited and Oppressed People (OPEO). The group’s logo
is a handshake crowned by a machete and an axe, with the
motto, “For the People’s Liberation.” OPEO Secretary
General Rufino Domfnguez maintains that his organiza-
tion intends to do more than promote the development of
their communities of origin in Oaxaca by remitting dol-
lars like most Mexican migrants. It seeks to defend
Mixtecs in California and northern Mexico from exploi-
tation in the workplace and ethnic or racial discrimina-
tion.
Similar organizations of Mexican Indians-Zapotecs,
Chinantecs, Triques, Pur’epechas and others-have
emerged in recent years in San Diego, Los Angeles, the
vineyards of Napa and Sonoma, and the Central Valley. In
their communities of origin, native peoples tend to have a
parochial view of the world. But once they come to the
United States, they quickly become politicized and “pan-
Indianized,” transformed by the direct and brutal experi-
ence of economic exploitation and ethnic discrimination
they all encounter. Back home, oppression has histori-
cally been perceived as coming from neighboring villages
with which for centuries they have competed for access to
land and ever-scarce resources (threatened continually by
landowners, companies, state projects, and most recently
by corporate interests).
Here in the United States, on the other hand, they
consider themselves to be Mixtec or Zapotec, members of
a larger social grouping, of an ethnicity.’ Their specific
ethnic identity is recuperated as a sense of nationality,
with the political awareness that they are discriminated
against because they are Indians, not only by the Anglo
population, but by Mexicans and Mexican-Americans as
well.
The growing ethnic-national politicization of indig-
enous migrants from Mexico and Central America is a
relatively new phenomenon, dating only from 1980, when
large numbers of peasants from Indian regions entered the
labor market of the agro-industries of northern Mexico
and the United States. Today, of the several million
REPORT ON THE AMERICASundocumented workers who periodically cross the Mexico-
U.S. border, I estimate that more than a quarter of a
million are Indians from Mexico, Central and South
America? The Maya of Guatemala flee the terror in their
country en masse to Mexico and the United States; the
Indians of Mexico periodically escape the economic
misery of their regions; and even towns of Quechua
shepherds from Peru’s Central Andes find themselves
tending sheep on the farms of Basque ranchers in the state
of Nevada, while thousands more Andean Quechuas take
refuge from the terror of Peru’s civil war in some other
niche of the U.S. labor market. 3
The case of Latin American Indian expatriates in the
United States is a dramatic example of the evolution of
indigenous society and politics since the 1970s. Native
movements, thrust into new roles by the new global
division of labor and the advanced appropriation of the
environment, seem to have taken a strategic step forward.
Even as indigenous people are forced to migrate across
national borders, and as transnational corporate capital
moves into the heart of Indian territory-or perhaps
because of these phenomena-Indians have emerged on
the stage of regional politics, overturning the common
wisdom that they and their cultures are doomed to perish
in the face of modernity.
A N OLD LATIN AMERICAN SAYING HAS IT
that, “If you’ve seen one Indian, you’ve seen them
all.” The racist brutality of the proverb points to a fact of
history brilliantly analyzed by the late Mexican anthro-
pologist Guillermo Bonfil Batalla: Spanish colonialism
created and institutionalized a generic definition of “Indi-
ans” that negated the historic validity and cultural specific-
ity of hundreds of native nationalities. 4 The colonial
system denied indigenous societies their ethnic ties and
identities in an attempt to weaken the reconstitution of
native nationalisms.
The unforeseen result was the emergence of a double,
contradictory process of ethnogenesis. Some of the agrar-
ian peoples of Mesoamerica and the Andes closed them-
selves into local units of production and reproduction: the
indigenous community, the village, what was known as
the “Indian republic.” These are the people who supplied
the seasonal labor force for public works, haciendas,
plantations and mines.
Others, “new indigenous peoples,” began to emerge
from the changing needs of the labor market. They were
partially uprooted from their communities of origin and
partially connected to their new workplaces. These Indi-
ans were less conservative in their cultural identity, more
adaptable to new environments, and more effective in
using ethnicity as a flexible strategy. From this group, as
well as from the communal elites (curacas and caciques),
came the most prominent Indian political and revolution-
ary figures of the last five centuries: Tdpac Amaru, a rich
eighteenth-century merchant and international trader from
the southern Andes; Juan Santos Atahuallpa, a seven-
teenth-century Quechua intellectual renowned for his
knowledge of international politics and Andean-Amazo-
nian history and culture; Tfipac Katari, Jacinto Kanek,
and Quintin Lame, to mention only a few names from a
history yet to be written.
Generic “Indianness” encouraged by the colonial state
quickly became the principal form of identification for the
native nobility of the Andes and Mesoamerica. But for
millions of indigenous peasants, the residential commu-
nity, with its colonial socio-political and economic struc-
tures, its intense and absorbing ceremonial life, and its
fragmented and parochial world-view, became the only
mirror of ethnic identity. The image it gave was partial
and narrow, certainly, but it truly reflected the existing
conditions of oppression and injustice.
The gap between indigenous elites and the subordi- nated communities, confirmed and reaffirmed by the
colonial administration, prompted a growing class differ- entiation between the intelligentsia and the masses. The
intellectuals, most of them urban, slowly became a depen- dent and literate aristocracy, one which invented a new historical memory for its new identity. Although these elites sought to defend their class interests throughout the
colonial period, from the middle of the eighteenth century on they became increasingly involved in popular Indian
movements and insurrections, enriching these with ideas
about nations, states and independent Indian kingdoms.
This Indian nationalism, encouraged by the Bourbonic
reforms and infused with the ideals of the Enlightenment,
was occasionally capable of linking the affronts to indig-
enous elites with the injustices suffered by the peasantry,
thus bridging the gap between the metropolitan aspira-
tions of the former and the parochial perceptions of the
latter.
Even though political independence from Spain and
the consequent hegemony of liberal thought dealt a mortal
blow to the Indian elite as a class, a small sector of
intellectuals and d6class6 continues to exist to this day
throughout the Andean and Mesoamerican world. This intelligentsia is part of an indigenous petit bourgeoisie: a
class of petty bureaucrats, local chiefs, village merchants,
teachers, students and professionals. Their association with the Indian peasant community has at times been distant, ideologized, paternalistic, and even arrogant. Yet
this ambiguous and contradictory relationship has been part of Indian community life for more than a century, and
it is essential to understanding the history of political
resistance and cultural tenacity of native peoples. 5
A EUROCENTRIC READING OF THE NATIVE
history of Latin America has obscured and twisted
the many rebellions and political movements that oc-
curred over 500 years of European occupation. Official
history books give the impression that conquest and colonization were achieved in a few decades, after which the various indigenous peoples simply adjusted to the demands of their colonial and republican rulers. Histori-
VOLUME xxv. NUMBER 3 (DECEMBER 1991)15 VOLUME XXV, NUMBER 3 (DECEMBER 1991) 15The First Nations
ans, Marxist and non-Marxist alike, have tended to paint
Indians as people who can only respond to the initiatives
of others, not as historical subjects who, though domi-
nated, continually attempt to negotiate their political and
cultural autonomy using all sorts of sophisticated strategies.
Such interpretations tend to assume the inevitable
success of capitalism. According to this view, Indians
have predictable and mechanical responses to the expan-
sion of the market and the penetration of capitalist ways
of life in their societies. They become “modern,” leaving
behind their ethnicity, perceived by theoreticians of mod-
ernization as an obstacle to entrepreneurial individual-
ism, and by Marxists as an impediment to proper
politicization, that is, class consciousness. The specific
ethnicity of each native people is viewed as a precarious
identity that will vaporize as soon as the society joins the
modem world, even under conditions of subordination
and exploitation.
History, however, shows a different face. The indig-
enous peoples who survived the biological disaster of the
invasion recovered their numbers extremely slowly, but
HOW MANY NATIVE PEOPLE?
MEXICO
PERU
GUATEMALA
BOLIVIA
ECUADOR
UNITED STATES
CANADA
CHILE
COLOMBIA
EL SALVADOR
ARGENTINA
BRAZIL
VENEZUELA
PANAMA
HONDURAS
PARAGUAY
NICARAGUA
GUYANA
COSTA RICA
BELIZE
SURINAM
FRENCH GUYANA
URUGUAY
TOTAL
Estimated
Population
10,537,000
8,097,000
5,423,000
4,985,000
3,753,000
1,959,000
892,000
767,000
708,000
500,000
477,000
325,000
290,000
194,000
168,000
101,000
66,000
29,000
19,000
15,000
11,000
1,000
0
39,317,000
% of Total
Population
12.4
38.6
60.3
71.2
37.5
0.8
3.4
5.9
2.2
10.0
1.5
0.2
1.5
8.0
3.4
2.5
1.7
3.9
0.6
9.1
2.9
1.2
0.0
5.8
steadily. This was particularly true for the agrarian peoples
of the Andes and Mesoamerica, and moderately the case
for those in the Amazon and other tropical lowlands. In
Latin America today there are nearly 40 million Indians
and more than 400 ethno-linguistic groups. 6 Contrary to
the predictions of assimilative policies, native peoples
have remained demographically stable, bilingualism has
increased without any disastrous loss of native languages,
and in some cases there is an unmistakable tendency
toward demographic growth.
In other words, neither with respect to demographics
nor cultural assimilation have native peoples been de-
feated. Toward the end of the second millennium, there
are Indians in nearly all the regions where they lived in the
eighteenth century. In some cases they have expanded
into new territories and established a presence in urban,
highly industrialized societies supposedly incompatible
with the stereotypical image of indigenous peasants.
Thousands of Indian squatters occupy the cities of America,
from Lima, La Paz and Quito, to Mexico City, San Diego
and Los Angeles.
There are Indians living in both the cities and their
communities of origin, moving back and forth according
to the farming seasons. Some travel thousands of miles
one, two or more times a year, from the country to the city
and back again, crossing international borders to take
advantage of the niches left open by an economic system
that is ever less interested in the survival of markets
defined by national boundaries. A growing number of
native people are learning to manipulate alien and com-
plex cultural contexts, with practically no one noticing
that they are Indians, even in environments rife with
ethnic and racial tension.
This new sociology of the native peoples of Latin
America-transnationalized, urban, proletarian, border-
crossing, bilingual and trilingual, professional-poses a
direct challenge to established anthropological tradition.
To be an Indian meant fundamentally to belong to a
residential indigenous community located in a marginal
rural zone, to be preferably monolingual in a native
language, to have a strong communal and ceremonial
understanding of life, to show some rejection of the logic
of the market economy, and to be satisfied with the
repetitive and “traditional” use of antiquated technology.
This simply does not describe a Quechua from the
Andes who works on a computer, a Shuar from the
Ecuadorian Amazon with a doctorate in pedagogy, a
Kuna from Panama who is a doctor, a Tukano from Brazil
with a pilot’s license, an Aymara or a Zapotec who writes
books on sociology and history. Are these people not
Indians? What do we do with an entire community of
Mixtecs who own pick-up trucks, have parabolic anten-
nae on their roofs and VCRs in the kitchen next to the
comal? In which of the boxes of anthropological tax-
onomy do they fit? Obviously, this is a problem that
worries academics and development specialists a lot more
than it does Indians. It is a sign that, in spite of an emerging
REPORT ON THE AMERICAS
Computed from: Enrique Mayer& Elio Masferrer,’La Poblaci6n Indigena
de America,” Amrica Indi’ena, Vol. 39. No. 2 (1979); World Bank,
Infonne sobre el desarrollo mundial 1991; U.S. and Canada census.anti-colonial streak, anthropology still suffers from the
ideological effects of Eurocentric thinking.’
Indigenous intellectuals of course feel no obligation to
maintain loyalty to the science and epistemology of their
masters, even if they have studied in Euroamerican uni-
versities. TomBs Huanca, an Aymara ethno-historian with
a master’s degree in anthropology from the University of
Florida, believes that cultural change and continuity among
Andean peoples should be understood in terms of political
strategy. Ethnic identity is used strategically and “oppor-
tunistically” in each context, Huanca argues. And no one
is less Aymara or less Quechua for using his or her
ethnicity in an intelligent way.’
A Quichua from the Ecuadorian Amazon, Valerio
Grefa, a bilingual professor and president of the Confed-
eration of Indian Nationalities of the Ecuadorian Amazon
(CONFENIAE), has elegantly and efficiently combined
his training as a teacher in Ecuador’s mestizo society, his
militant and committed role as an Indian of the Amazon,
his experience as a modern political cadre, and his syn-
cretic intellectual preparation. A Quichua from the Ecua-
dorian Andes, Luis Macas, president of the Confederation
of Indian Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE), finds it no
burden to synthesize in his political activism the most
progressive postures of the Catholic church, Andean
socialist traditions and a firm respect for Quichua culture.
DURING FIVE CENTURIES THE OLIGARCHIC
states and societies of Latin America have been
based on maximizing the exploitation of a workforce
carefully organized along ethnic lines. The incorporation
of indigenous ethnicity into the international division of
labor gave form to class differences within ethnic groups,
as well as to the inequalities among them. The result of
this differential treatment of Indian peoples and regions is
a complex class structure that permeates the entire multi-
ethnic configuration of Latin America. This class struc-
ture spawned an equally intricate panorama of native
organizations and political platforms, reflecting different
levels of ethnic and class consciousness.
Two ideological currents have threatened to tear apart
each native political organization over the past two de-
cades. The “peasant” and “proletarian” postures empha-
size the class content of indigenous social reality and
native struggle. The “Indianist” stance conceives of in-
digenous political struggle as a national liberation move-
ment, seeking autonomy, self-determination, sovereignty,
or limited or absolute independence for each specific
ethnic group.
Of course this multifaceted and dynamic political
movement cannot be reduced to a simple and fixed
taxonomy. There are indigenous peasant organizations
which defend the economic and social rights of farmers;
urban Indians primarily concerned with the ideological
debate regarding “Indianness” and class; ethnic federa-
tions primarily made up of non-peasant horticulturists
particularly interested in cultural rights and ethnic au-
tonomy; Indians organized in unions, such as miners,
factory workers, petty bureaucrats, bilingual teachers,
agricultural workers and the urban underemployed; in-
digenous expatriates in the United States, including po-
litical refugees (Mapuches from Chile, Maya from Gua-
temala); and lastly, international indigenous organiza-
tions like the Coordinating Body for the Indigenous
People’s Organization of the Amazon Basin (COICA).
The new realities of indigenous peoples suggest that
their politics cannot be understood within the old spatial,
historical and structural framework of the nation-state.
The nineteenth-century notion that the state should act as
the founder and originator of the nation, giving a sense of
unity to a heterogeneous ethnic and territorial space for
the benefit of a ruling elite, is giving way, under pressure
from the transnationalized economy for a more perme-
able and flexible state that is less centralized, less homo-
geneous, less authoritarian, and thus more open to corpo-
rate penetration.’ This process relieves Latin American
states from the burden of having toplay an entrepreneurial
role in lieu of passive national bourgeoisies or oligarchies,
while at the same time threatening their very existence.
As capital flows to “freer” regions-indigenous terri-
tories, among others-where local environmental restric-
tions and labor organizations are nonexistent or weak,
state-Indian relations seem bound to become increasingly
internationalized. Questions such as territorial and re-
source preservation, land entitlement, migration, union-
ization and the operation of foreign enterprises in indig-
enous territory will become strategic issues of “national
security.”” The Amazonian Indians in COICA are al-
ready acting on this trend. Not only have they created a
multinational organization to defend their rights, but they
also take their demands directly to international bodies,
such as the World Bank, IMF and Inter-American Devel-
opment Bank, or to the United States government, rather
than addressing only regional states.
It is ironic that a lesson in political clarity and long-
term perspective comes from a coalition of Indian horti-
culturists from the Amazon. No serious social analyst
would have thought that a series of fragmented “tribal”
bands, without a significant proletariat or a bourgeoisie,
and with a tiny intelligentsia, could have woven a com-
plex transnational network of local organizations capable
of addressing a gigantic and powerful enemy. Similarly,
the 1990 Indian uprising in Ecuador, that paralyzed the
heart of the country for a week, was unexpectedly effec-
tive. Mexican and Andean indigenous organizations in
the United States may bring similar surprises.
Because the various Indian nationalist movements of
Latin America emanate from marginality rather than from
direct historical involvement in state management, they
are less conditioned by the legacies of the old liberal
nation-state, and more reflective of the multiple Indian
civil societies long hidden from view. As such, native
peoples may be way ahead of the rest of us in articulating
the political struggles of the twenty-first century.
References
Think Locally, Act Globally
I. Carole Nagengast and Michael Keamrney, “Mixtec Ethnicity: Social
Identity, Political Consciousness, and Political Activism,” Latin American
Research Review, Vol. V, no. 2 (1990), p. 80.
2. This estimate is based on a number of micro studies and conversations
with academics who are following the subject. See, for example, James Stuart
and Michael Kearney, Causes and Effects of Agricultural Labor Migration
from the Mixteca Oaxaca to California (San Diego: University of California,
Program in U.S.-Mexican Studies, 1981).
3. According to Peruvian anthropologist Te6filo Altamirano, at least a
thousand Quechua shepherds from central Peru have settled in Nevada; he
found over 60 Andean cultural organizations in the United States. Te6filo
Altamirano, Los que sefueron: Peruanos en Estados Unidos (Lima: Pontifica
Universidad Cat61ica, 1990). In 1990 alone 328,000 people left Peru, of whom
132,000 came to the United States. Most of them were “students” (a classifi-
cation more indicative of age than anything else) or “workers.” A sizeable
number of these are probably Quechuas. See Latin American Weekly Report,
no. 31 (Aug. 15, 1991).
4. Guillermo Bonfil Batalla, Utopia yRevoluci6n: El Pensamiento Politico
Contempordneo de los Indios de America Latina (Mexico: Editorial Nueva
Imagen, 1981).
5. Regarding class formation among native peoples, see Serge Gruzinski,
“TheNetTorn Apart: Ethnic Identities and Westernization in Colonial Mexico,
Sixteenth-Nineteenth Century,” in Guidieri, Remo, F. Pellizzi, andS.J.Tambiah
(eds.), Ethnicities and Nations: Processes of Inter-ethnic Relations in Latin
America, SoutheastAsia, and thePacific(Austin: Univ. ofTexas Press, 1988);
Alicia Barabas, Utopias Indiacts: Movimientos Sociorreligiosos en M(xico
(Mexico: Grijalbo, 1987); Alberto Flores Galindo, Buscando un Inca: Identidad
y Utopia en los Andes (Lima: Institato de Apoyo Agrario, 1987); Steve Sternm
(ed.), Resistance, Rebellion, and Consciousness in the Andean Peasant World,
18th to 20th Centuries (Madison: Univ.of Wisconsin Press, 1987); William
Taylor, Drinking, Homicide, and Rebellion in Colonial Mexican Villages
(Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1979); St6fano Varese, La Sal de los Cerros:
Una Aproximacion al Mundo Campa (Lima: Retablo de Papel, 1973).
6. See NACLA this issue for population; forearlierdata on population and
language groupings, see Guillermo Bonfil Batalla, Utopia y Revolucidn.
7. There has been a long native tradition of criticizing the Euro American
academy’s approach to historical and cultural studies. One contemporary
Quechua thinker put it this way: “In our analysis, we don’t only use class
contradictions, but also ‘contradictions of civilization’….there are three con-
centric chains that colonize our people: class oppression, that of the nationalist
Creole and acculturated mestizo state, and lastly the oppression of civilization
that the West has imposed on the Andean world….We use Marxism exclusively
as a valuable tool. The principal error that Peruvian socialists commit-a result
of the absenceof indigenous cultural identity and the presence of an embarrass-
ing Western cultural identity among the Creoles and mestizos in their ranks-is
to confuse the tool with their identity…and even using a foreign ideological tool
as a crutch for their identity.” Javier Lajo Lazo, “Ni Utopismo Andino, Ni
Socialismo MAlgico: Descolonizacion Abora,” Winay Marka (Barcelona),
no. 15 (mayo 1991). Fora systematic indigenous critique of Eurocentric social
science, see: Wanker, Tawantisuyu: Cinco Siglos de Guerra Qheswaymara
contra Espaiia (Mexico: Nueva Imagen, 1981); Guillermo Bonfil Batalla,
Utopia y Revolucion.
8. Tomis Huanca, “Relaciones Interdinicas Andinas: Cotidianeidad de los
Grupos etnico-Culturales en Bolivia,” (unpublished mss.), 1991.
9. See the studies of Henry Lefebvre, L’Etat (Paris: Editions 10/18, 1974);
S. Varese, “Multiethnicity and Hegemonic Construction: Indian Plans and the
Future,” in Guidieri et al., Ethnicities and Nations.
10. A clear example of this trend is the growing militarization of the drug
war in the Andes.