Elusive Unity: Factionalism and the Limits of Identity Politics in Yucatan, Mexico: Factionalism and the Limits of Identity Politics in Yucatán, Mexico - Softcover

Fernando Armstrong-Fumero

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1607323532 ISBN 13: 9781607323532

Publisher: University Press of Colorado, 2014

Synopsis

In Elusive Unity, Armstrong-Fumero examines early twentieth-century peasant politics and twenty-first-century indigenous politics in the rural Oriente region of Yucatán. The rural inhabitants of this region have had some of their most important dealings with their nation’s government as self-identified “peasants” and “Maya.” Using ethnography, oral history, and archival research, Armstrong-Fumero shows how the same body of narrative tropes has defined the local experience of twentieth-century agrarianism and twenty-first-century multiculturalism. Through these recycled narratives, contemporary multicultural politics have also inherited some ambiguities that were built into its agrarian predecessor. Specifically, local experiences of peasant and indigenous politics are shaped by tensions between the vernacular language of identity and the intense factionalism that often defines the social organization of rural communities. This significant contribution will be of interest to historians, anthropologists, and political scientists studying Latin America and the Maya.

About this title

About the Author

Fernando Armstrong-Fumero is an assistant professor of anthropology at Smith College. He has conducted research in Maya-speaking communities in Yucatán, Mexico, since 1997.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Elusive Unity

Factionalism and the Limits of Identity Politics in Yucatán, Mexico

By Fernando Armstrong-Fumero

University Press of Colorado

Copyright © 2013 University Press of Colorado
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-60732-353-2

Contents

List of Figures, 
Acknowledgments, 
1. Peasants and Maya, Solidarity and Factionalism, 
2. "How It Happened That We Fomented This Town": Tensions between Family Autonomy and Community Solidarity during the Agrarian Reform, 
3. "Back Then, There Was No Order": The Early Twentieth Century in Collective Memory, 
4. "Now There Is More Culture": Rural Schools as Monuments to Revolutionary Culture, 
5. "When I First Went to Study": Pedagogy, National History, and Bilingualism, 
6. "That Time of Change": The Limits of Agriculture and the Rise of the Tourist Industry, 
7. "What Does 'Culture' Mean?": Progressivism, Patrimonialism, and Corporatism in Vernacular Discourse on Maya Culture, 
8. The Realpolitik of Yucatecan Multiculturalism, 
References, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

Peasants and Maya, Solidarity and Factionalism

This book is a study of the dichotomous nature of identity politics. It documents how the same forms of politicized self-labeling that members of local communities use to build large-scale coalitions can also fuel factional disputes. The rural inhabitants of Oriente, a region of the Mexican state of Yucatán, have had some of their most important dealings with their nation's government as self-identified "peasants" and "Maya." In the early twentieth century, peasant identity played a key role in a series of institutions through which communities secured title to collectively held lands and free public schools, and asserted their rights as a special class of Mexican citizens. Today, amid vastly different economic and political realities, the descendants of these same people are experimenting with the use of Mayan identity as a means of securing other concessions and collective rights (see Figure 1.1). Yet both of these periods also involve a second dimension of identity politics: the narratives and labels that help local people to imagine different forms of collective action and solidarity also figure in intracommunity feuds that fragment larger coalitions.

Throughout this book, I will argue that this dual tendency is an element of local experience that transcends the differences between the agrarian politics of the early twentieth century and contemporary mobilizations of Mayan identity. My goal in stressing these parallels is not to provide a comprehensive linear history of the evolution or transformation of identity politics in Oriente. Rather, I will use ethnography, oral history, and closely targeted archival research to examine how local experiences of peasant and indigenous politics are shaped both by ambiguities built into the vernacular language of identity and by tensions within the social organization of rural communities. In some cases, the parallels between agrarian and ethnic politics are due to a direct historical continuity in certain institutions or ideas. For example, the collective memory of political processes associated with the agrarian reform of the 1920s and 1930s has shaped the expectations that many people have for newer forms of indigenous identity politics. The heritage of early twentieth-century institutions is less evident in other political phenomena, such as the new importance given to the term "Maya" by the market for cultural tourism. Even in these cases, however, processes of factionalism and solidarity — like those that shaped the agrarian reform — are also shaping multicultural politics.

In my comparison of these two periods, I will use a fairly expansive definition of phrases such as "identity politics" or "politics of identity." That is, I will use these terms to refer both to the negotiation of older statesanctioned social identities such as "peasant" and to more contemporary uses of Mayan ethnic identity. This approach runs somewhat against the grain of a tendency in contemporary literature, which often draws a contrast between the "class-based" peasant organizing of the early and mid-twentieth century and the explicitly ethnic "identity politics" of post–Cold War indigenous movements (Alvarez, Dagnino, and Escobar 1998; Castañeda 1994; Hale 1994; Yashar 2005). But as social histories of other parts of Mexico have demonstrated (Boyer 2003; Purnell 1999), the meaning of the term "peasant" was as ambiguous to rural agriculturalists in the 1920s and 1930s as notions like Maya are today. In many ways, early twentieth-century peasant-based organizations were also experienced by local communities as a form of identity politics, in which rural people and urban bureaucrats negotiated a working definition of these politically resonant labels. Then and now, who can claim specific rights and privileges often hinges on local disputes over who "counts" as a member of a given social or ethnic category.

This kind of ethnographic history, like the expansive definition of identity politics that I will use throughout the text, helps explain how the ethnic movements of post–Cold War Latin America are understood by their rank-and-file constituents. Changes in political culture that seem significant from a top-down perspective can — but often don't — have a significant impact on the everyday speech and common sense of rural people. Especially since the 1990s, anthropologists have demonstrated how the application of a broad identity label such as "Maya people" tends to obscure a range of localized identities and loyalties that have a more tangible presence in the everyday life of rural communities (Gabbert 2004; Hervik 1999; Restall 1997; Gabbert 2004; Hervik 1999). The fact that grassroots movements have begun employing the idea of Maya culture and other broad ethnic rubrics in new ways seems to imply that these essentializing "Mayan" identities are transforming older localisms. In the Mexican case, this shift in local forms of identity has often been explained in terms of a dynamic between the decline of twentieth-century welfare institutions and peasant organization, and the rise of ethnic mobilizations that have sought to adapt to new neoliberal realities (Mattiace 2009; Yashar 2005).

Presbyterianism to the community of Pisté. His other grandfather was the first tour guide at Chichén Itzá. He himself has helped to administer Pisté's collective landholdings as director of the local agrarian committee (comisario ejidal). He and his family are active participants in an organization of local vendors of handicrafts who have asserted their rights to sites of sale in the ruins of Chichén Itzá as descendants of its ancient builders. The range of engagements with peasant, Mayan, and other identities that are implicit in his and his family's experience is typical of the complexity of self-labeling in the political life of Oriente. Photo by author.

Although a top-down analysis of large-scale mobilizations and formal political institutions suggests that post–Cold War identity politics is changing local forms of identity, these processes can seem more fluid and ambiguous in the conversations that take place at the kitchen tables, agricultural fields, and storefronts of rural communities. In these spaces, people make sense of new political possibilities with oral narratives that commemorate earlier moments of local history. As in other parts of Mexico, rural people in Oriente often associate their collective rights as self-identified indigenes with the heritage of agrarian institutions that were developed in the 1920s. But it is important to note that defining the local body politic and the nature of these "communities" during this earlier period was as much marked by conflict and semantic ambiguity as the definition of politicized Mayanness is today. This heritage of ambiguity (Armstrong-Fumero 2009a) tends to blur the distinctions between "peasant" and "ethnic" politics that can seem clearer from the analysis of formal and large-scale institutions.

These local contexts for the language of identity politics also provide important insights into the reasons why larger-scale mobilizations don't come together, or why coalitions tend to fragment into factional groups. The everyday narratives that help people imagine large-scale political mobilizations also bear the seeds of a parallel series of processes that tend to reinstate differences of interest between communities, families, and individuals. These tensions between communal solidarity and factionalism have a long history in Mexicanist and Mesoamericanist ethnography. Perhaps the most important were early critiques of Robert Redfield's idyllic image of a "folk" community, which he thought was defined by egalitarianism and a shared class and territorial identity (Redfield 1941; Redfield and Villa Rojas 1934). From Oscar Lewis's (1960) discussion of class differences in Tepoztlán to George Foster's (1987) analysis of individualistic behaviors that were conditioned by the "idea of limited good," scholars writing since the 1950s seem to revel in unveiling the factionalism and hierarchies that exist beneath the surface of the "little community."

In returning to this old debate I intend to apply the kind of ethnographic insights that Redfield, Lewis, and Foster derived from the quotidian experience of rural people to the larger question of why and how groups mobilize around certain statesanctioned identities. Narratives about Mayanness, peasantness, and other identities don't just emerge during the kind of public events and mobilizations that receive international recognition. They can also be heard in the much more intimate public and private spheres of rural communities, spaces in which ethnography can provide a perspective distinct from that which can be derived from more top-down analysis of formal state or nongovernmental organizations. It is in these spaces that semantically ambiguous concepts such as Maya culture enter the speech and consciousness of the rank-and-file constituents of different regimes of identity politics.

The ambiguity and semantic flexibility that mark everyday invocations of "peasant" and "Maya" constitute a discursive space in which divisions between peasant and ethnic politics are far from clear-cut. This discursive space also enables the almost simultaneous emergence of solidarity and factionalism. I took part in a conversation in 2003 that provides a good example of these two phenomena. I posed the question "How would you characterize the culture of this community?" to a gathering of several generations of a well-to-do family of Maya speakers from the town of Pisté. Doña Petrona Chan de Mukul, the seventy-year-old matriarch of the family, responded in Maya, as many people of her generation did, "Today there is more culture, more education" (Behlae, mas yan kúultura, mas yan éedukasion). She expounded on how the building of the first school in the town around the time that she was born and the expansion of public education in the decades since had given local people "more culture" and "more order." When she was a young girl, she noted, "There was no order! There were cattle in the village square" (Mina'an orden! Yan wakax t[i l]e k'iwiko!).

Mario Mukul, her fifty-year-old son, agreed with his mother. Switching between Maya and Spanish, he mentioned that old marriage customs and respect for elders were once commonplace, but "Now there is not as much old Maya culture as before" (Behlae ... Pues, ahora, no hay tanta cultura antigua de los Mayas como antes). Doña Petrona smiled and nodded. Like most people her age, she welcomed the coming of "order," but lamented the loss of older traditions.

Something that struck me but that Doña Petrona seemed not to notice was that Mario defined "culture" in a way that was quite distinct from her use of the term. She associated culture with the Westernized education and habits that brought order to unruly peasant lifestyles, while he associated the term with traditionally Maya ways of being that were lost with the advent of modernization. Although I initially thought that the different ways in which they used the term "culture" would be a source of friction between their two narratives, Doña Petrona and Mario Mukul were in essential agreement about the moral content of modernization. As in many examples that I heard over the course of my fieldwork, the representation of local identity as a dialectic between pride in modernization and nostalgia for the loss of tradition is far more important than the exact semantic content of a powerful word like "culture."

Just as this ambiguity of the term "culture" allows Doña Petrona and Mario to agree while making very different kinds of arguments, this same term creates a conceptual space in which a speaker can imagine either an egalitarian solidarity or a series of elitist hierarchies. Mario's reference to "old Maya culture" means a heritage that is shared by people of all social classes in town and a collective memory that can be used as the basis for cross-class solidarity. In contrast, Doña Petrona's iteration of "culture" as something that some people have "more" of refers to a process through which whole communities became "cultured." But it also hints at differential access to intellectual goods that have allowed some local families to become more "cultured" than others. Similar assumptions about being cultured are often applied in discussions of who speaks the "best" Maya. Through these and other everyday performances of indigenous identity, the same labels that become a metonym for ethnic solidarity can also become tools for factional and individual competition.

This book will examine the history and texture of this dynamic between solidarity and factionalism in three sections. Chapters 2 and 3 will look closely at the experience of communities in Oriente during the early 1920s, and at how this period is remembered today. The collective memory of the early twentieth century — or the way in which the period is retrospectively understood — constitutes a series of precedents for collective action and factionalism that are cited in everyday narratives about the politics of Mayan identity today. Chapters 4 and 5 turn to rural education, focusing on the foundation of the first public schools in the 1930s and the pedagogical techniques that diffused a series of key narratives about national and linguistic identity to students. As I will show, rural education translated the pact that had been established between Maya-speaking agriculturalists and the state into the idiom of "culture," instituting a series of assumptions that continue to play a role in the contemporary politics of ethnicity.

Chapters 6 through 8 turn to transformations in vernacular narratives about "culture" that have taken place in the last three decades. I will focus on some cases in which local people successfully use this discourse in articulating different political projects, and others that show a growing disconnect between popular expectations conditioned by the heritage of peasant politics and the more limited possibilities of neoliberal multiculturalism. I will also stress ways that the contemporary politics of indigenous identity figures in processes that are just as likely to reinstate existing hierarchies and factional disputes as they are to forge new kinds of political coalitions.

Before entering into substantive discussion of local experiences of the agrarian reform, the remaining sections of the current chapter will provide additional background for three topics that will occur repeatedly in this book. The first is the ethnic labels used in the everyday speech of Yucatán. These labels form the basis on which rural people make sense of the discourses on ethnicity diffused by formal political organizations, and they differ in significant ways from the assumptions of many foreigners and urban Mexicans. Second, this section will be followed by a brief discussion of the broader political context of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Mexico, an important backdrop for many of the local processes that will be discussed later on. Third, I will close this introduction with a general summary of some of the specific sources and methods that figure in the research that contributed to this book.

Ethnic Labels in Yucatán

Identity labels that seem straightforward to many foreigners and urban Mexicans tend to be far more contentious or ambiguous in rural communities such as those of Oriente. In much anthropological literature written from the nineteenth century until the 1960s, rural people who spoke Yucatec Maya are referred to as "Maya Indians." Today, in most if not all of the communities where I have conducted research, "Indian" (Sp. indio) is more an insulting reference to poor manners and low education than an ethnic or racial label. Similarly, the term "Maya" is rather ambiguously linked to ideas of race or ethnicity. In the early twentieth century, the vast majority of rural Yucatecans would only have used the term to refer to maya t'aan, or the Yucatec Maya language. This language is spoken by a diverse community of rural and urban social groups, many of which are identified with the heritage of Europe as much as they are with the indigenous (see Armstrong-Fumero 2009b). This disjuncture between academic writing and local ethnic categories is compounded by the fact that the concept of "Maya Indian" has no simple cognate in maya t'áan. The term máasewal, translated as "Indian" in many contemporary dictionaries, tends to refer to poverty more than to ethnicity as such. Likewise, the term ts'ul, used to refer to "white" foreigners and Spanish-speaking urban Yucatecans, is also applied to wealthy Maya speakers from rural communities who have cultivated urban habits and speech.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: University Press of Colorado
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 1607323532
• ISBN 13: 9781607323532
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 220