Who Defines Indigenous?: Identities, Development, Intellectuals, and the State in Northern Mexico

by Carmen Martinez Novo

Overview

For years, conventional scholarship has argued that minority groups are better served when the majority groups that absorb them are willing to recognize and allow for the preservation of indigenous identities. But is the reinforcement of ethnic identity among migrant groups always a process of self-liberation? In this surprising study, Carmen Martínez Novo draws on her ethnographic research of the Mixtec Indians’ migration from the southwest of Mexico to Baja California to show that sometimes the push for indigenous labels is more a process of external oppression than it is of minority empowerment.

            In Baja California, many Mixtec Indians have not made efforts to align themselves as a coherent demographic. Instead, Martínez Novo finds that the push for indigenous identity in this region has come from local government agencies, economic elites, intellectuals, and other external agents. Their concern has not only been over the loss of rich culture. Rather, the pressure to maintain an indigenous identity has stemmed from the desire to secure a reproducible abundance of cheap “Indian” labor. Meanwhile, many Mixtecs reject their ethnic label precisely because being “Indian” means being a commercial agriculture low-wage worker or an urban informal street vendor—an identity that interferes with their goals of social mobility and economic integration.

            Bringing a critical new perspective to the complex intersection among government and scholarly agendas, economic development, global identity politics, and the aspirations of local migrants, this provocative book is essential reading for scholars working in the fields of sociology, anthropology, and ethnic studies.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780813536699
Publisher:	Rutgers University Press
Publication date:	11/04/2005
Edition description:	ANN
Pages:	192
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.60(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Carmen Martínez Novo is a professor in the Center for Latin American Studies at the University of Florida, Gainesville. She is the editor of the Latin American Research Review journal.

Table of Contents

	Acknowledgments	vii
	Maps	xi
	Introduction	1
1	Mixtec Communities at the Mexican Border	18
2	The Making of Vulnerabilities: Indigenous Day Laborers in Mexico's Neoliberal Agriculture	27
3	"We Are Against the Government, Although We Are the Government". State Institutions and Indigenous Migrants in Baja California in the 1990s	58
4	The Culture of Exclusion: Representations of Indigenous Women Street Vendors in Tijuana	96
5	Race, Maternalism, and Community Development	118
	Conclusion: Cultural Difference and Democracy	152
	Notes	167
	Bibliography	173
	Index	183

Editorial Reviews

Virtually all of the scholarship on identity sees it as something that comes from the bottom-up. Martinez Novo recognizes the popular side of identity formation, but also looks at the process from the top down. How do more powerful actors-state institutions, intellectuals, elites, NGOs, etc.-try, in an imperfect and messy way, to mold collective identities? Martinez Novo not only poses this rather interesting problem, but investigates it with an innovative methodology and supports it with sound scholarship.

author of In the Shadows of State and Capital - Steve Striffler