Indigenous Attitudes and Ethnic Identity Construction in Mexico

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Indigenous Attitudes and Ethnic Identity

Construction in Mexico

Todd A. Eisenstadt* American University

Challenging primordialist positions commonly held in Mexico’s policy debate

over relations between indigenous groups and the state, this article confirms

the instrumentalist position that ethnic identities may be readily shaped. Using

findings from a recent survey in Chiapas, Oaxaca, and Zacatecas, the author

concludes, after distinguishing individual- from collectivity-oriented attitudes,

that indigenous and non-indigenous respondents are similarly individualist. Im-

portant differences were found, however, on a second dimension distinguish-

ing pro-state respondents from those who were more communally-oriented.

Indigenous respondents, particularly in Oaxaca, were found to possess more

statist orientations than non-indigenous respondents. The author asserts that

decades-old state policies to assimilate indigenous communities may be par-

tially responsible, and that disillusionment with these policies and state-ledrepression in Chiapas may explain attitude differences among indigenous

respondents.

Desafiando las visiones primordialistas comúnmente apoyadas en México du-

rante los debates de política pública sobre las relaciones entre los grupos políti-

Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos Vol. 22, Issue 1, Winter 2006, pages 107–129. ISSN 0742-9797

electronic ISSN 1533-8320. ©2006 by The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved.

Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the Uni-

versity of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website, at www.ucpress.edu/journals/rights.htm.

107

* The author acknowledges funding from the United States Agency for International De-

velopment Cooperative Agreement 523–A-00–00–00030–00 with the University of New

Hampshire, American University, and the Centro de Investigaciónes y Estudios Superiores

en Antropología Social (CIESAS). Survey co-authors Araceli Burguete of CIESAS-Sureste

(San Cristobal de las Casas, Mexico), and María Cristina Velásquez, an independent scholar then affiliated with CIESAS-Ithsmo anthropology institute (Oaxaca, Mexico) also con-

tributed to survey implementation, as did Francisco Muro of the Universidad Autónoma

de Zacatecas. Raul Benítez-Manaut, Roderic Camp, Wayne Cornelius, Soledad Loaeza, Pe-

ter Lewis, Shannan Mattiace, Ashutosh Varshney, Peter Ward, and Steven Wuhs commented

on presentations and drafts of this paper, and Viridiana Ríos Contreras provided able re-

search assistance. Needless to say, all interpretations—and any errors—are the author’s

alone.



cos y el estado, este artículo confirma la posición instrumentalista de que

la identidad étnica puede ser voluntariamente adoptada. Usando hallazgos de

una reciente encuesta en Chiapas, Oaxaca y Zacatecas, el autor concluye, des-pués de distinguir las actitudes individuales de las colectivas, que los encues-

tados indígenas y no-indígenas son similarmente individualistas. Se encuentran

importantes diferencias, pero en una segunda dimensión que distingue a los

encuestados pro-estatales de los que tienen orientaciones comunitarias. Los

indígenas consultados, particularmente los de Oaxaca, tienen orientaciones

más estadistas que los no-indígenas (o sea más orien-tados hacía el estado-

gobierno). El autor argumenta que décadas de viejas políticas públicas estata-

les para asimilar a las comunidades indígenas pueden haber producido parcial-

mente estos resultados, y que las desilusiones por estas políticas y la represión

estatal en Chiapas pueden explicar las diferentes actitudes entre los indígenas

encuestados.

The rise of ethnic mobilization in Latin America is being attributed in-creasingly by social scientists to changes in the constructed identities of

rural indigenous groups. In contrast to previous generations of scholars—the primordialists—who argued that ethnic identity was ascribed atbirth, Latin Americanists are joining a broader movement which con-

siders ethnic identities as flexible and changing rather than given and

static. Proponents of the malleability of ethnic identities range fromconstructivists like Fredrik Barth (1969) and Walker Connor (1994),

who believe that ethnic identity is malleable albeit rooted in strong so-cial, political, and even psychological facts, along with instrumental-

ists like Michael Hechter (1986) and Paul Brass (1985, 1997) who ar-gue that a substantial portion of the content of ethnicity is based inappeals to mobilize groups as much as in objective cultural traits or

markers. Brass ascribes agency to ethnic elites who provoke and fos-ter identity, in a claim consistent with other scholars who also under-

score the subjectiveness of boundaries and the generation of identi-ties by discrimination from outsiders (as well as from within). He argues

that “once it is recognized that the processes of ethnic—and class—identity formation and of intergroup relations always have a duel di-mension of interaction/competition with external groups and of an in-

ternal struggle for control of the group, then the direction for research on ethnicity and on the relationship between ethnic groups and thestate are clear (1985: 33).”

In Mexico-based scholarship, revisionist anthropologists like Rus(2002) and political scientists like Trejo (2004) claim that—consistent

with claims by Pallares (2002) and Yashar (1999) about other parts of

108 Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos



Latin America—authoritarian state corporatist regimes1 of the early and

mid-twentieth centuries granted state benefits to peasants, prompting

otherwise disenfranchised indigenous groups to seize upon opportuni-ties to reorganize as peasants to petition the state for resources. Classrather than indigenous identity emerged as the most salient social cleav-age in most rural areas of Latin America, especially as “nation-building”

efforts permeated remote areas in the mid-twentieth century. As thisprocess unfolded,governments defined roles for agrarian elites and their subjects, who were pacified through receipt of subsistence help from

the government in exchange for desisting in rebellions and acceptingauthoritarian regimes built on class lines defined primarily in terms of

land ownership.These scholars challenged more static, primordial views of ethnic-

ity and ethnic groups, such as that cited by López y Rivas, for whom an

ethnic group is a “stable group of people who have in common rela-tively enduring characteristics of culture (including language) and psy-chology, as well as a unity of conscience . . .” (Bromley as quoted in López

y Rivas 1995). The 1994 Zapatista rebellion seems to have extended whathad been a scholarly debate into the policy realm (see Benítez Manaut,

Selee, and Arnson article in this issue of MS/EM ). Claiming that ethnicidentity was at least partially fixed and that Chiapas’ Mayan-descendedcommunities and their allies from the traditional left were rising up

against centuries of discrimination, the Zapatista rebels launched their

insurgency seeking to draw attention to their case that Mexican govern-ment institutions needed to adapt to indigenous peoples’expressions of citizenship and grant them greater autonomy for self-government.2 Infavoring indigenous identity over class identity, the Zapatistas rein-

forced an already-emerging trend, by the early 1990s, of indigenous rightspromotion elsewhere in the Americas, such as in Bolivia and Ecuador (see Van Cott 2000; Brysk 2000).3

Some recent ethnic research in Mexico on the Zapatistas (such as

Eisenstadt, Ethnic Identity Construction in Mexico 109

1. Corporatism, as applied to the Mexican case by Reyna and Wienert (1977: 161)

is a means of political control emphasizing mobilization of unions requiring government-

sanctioned membership. In Mexico, official mobilization was utilized by the ruling party to replace class conflicts based on redistributive demands. In the countryside, this meant

compulsory participation in local branches of the official peasants’ union, forced regis-

tration of winning traditional “non-partisan” uses and customs candidate slates with the

official Partido Revolucionaria Institucional (PRI), and cooptation by state governments

of rural squatters by offers of land if the deals could be sealed quietly.

2. This indigenous rights case was made forcefully after 1996. The Zapatista upris-

ing started primarily as a classrather than ethnicity-based movement.

3. This connection between the Zapatistas and more contemporary indigenous move-

ments is drawn in international media.See for example, “Indigenous People in South Amer-

ica. A Political Awakening,” (2004) and Hayden (2004).



Inclán 2004 and Trejo 2004) does follow more instrumental theories

about the construction of ethnicity. However, rather than focusing on

individuals and their choices, much Zapatista-related research, and thepolicy debate led by the Zapatistas, seeks to reassert the collectivity asunit of analysis. These scholars study mobilizations, rather than indi-

vidual attitudes and their propensities for mobilization. They and other

innovative scholars of Chiapas’ recent social movements (such as Har- vey 1998 and Pérez Ruiz 2000) do consider relations between move-ments, leaders, and followers, consistent with Brass’assumption that eth-

nic appeals by elites drive indigenous social movements such as theZapatistas. They are pushing to better document the causes of political,

social, economic, and now ethnic movements, and to more rigorously differentiate roles of ethnic elites and followers in the shaping of socialmovements.

While the Zapatista rebellion offers a famous demonstration of thepower of appeals to indigeneity and ethnic autonomy, the success and

worldwide publicity of the Zapatistas seems to have prompted a se-

lection bias in much of the scholarship on Mexico’s indigenous move-ments. In the far more numerous cases when indigenous groups do

not mobilize to air longstanding grievances and publicize what oftenhas been systematic discrimination by the state, why do they not mo-bilize? And in contrast to all the consideration about how political elites

frame issues to catalyze movements, how might one study whether and

when potential movement followers decide to cast their lot with would-be leaders?4 That is, instead of always documenting “instru-mentalism from above,” can evidence be amassed of “instrumentalismfrom below”?

By most accounts, individuals may consciously decide to be Indiansrather than peasants in given circumstances, but the process and mech-anisms of this decision are not drawn out. In other words, the all-im-

portant changes in individual attitudes which lead them to choose eth-nic identity or not, take place in a “black box.” Most of the literature

does not even consciously draw out the strategic individual choices con-tributing to peoples’ decisions to adopt indigenous rather than—or inaddition to—peasant identities. In fact, in most existing literature, es-


4. The late Mancur Olson and his followers pioneered some clever studies to elab-

orate The Logic of Collective Action (1971) and how movement participants seek side

payments and obey selective incentives. However, if one assumes that ethnic collective

actions have any basis at all in objective cultural markers, or even “interior identity and

psychic structure, or blood-ties, or chemistry, or soul (Connor 1994: 204),” and seek to

engage those who do believe that at least some of the movement-propelling passions are

real, then there must be more causing the movement than just generic collective-action

incentives.



pecially the social movements literature which dominates the field, em-

phasis is on consciousness-raising by movements after they have estab-

lished indigenous collective identities. The preceding step, movementformation and crystallization, is underspecified.

This article tests the instrumentalist argument within the Mexicancontext, using a survey research approach which seeks to differentiate,

through the construction of latent variable clusters, individually-orientedfrom collectively-oriented respondents and pro-state, corporatist re-spondents from those whose views are more traditional and communally-

oriented; in other words, as a first step towards understanding thepropensity for mobilization of prospective ethnic movement members,

but in environments where they have been mobilized and in environ-ments where they have not been mobilized. The article argues, upondemonstrating remarkable similarities between the 2,186 indigenous and

3,194 non-indigenous respondents in the representative sample fromthree Mexican states, that respondents’attitudes are quite similar. How-ever, when asked—in terms of concrete cases rather than more abstract

attitudes—which authorities they would seek out to resolve particular practical problems, indigenous respondents inclined more often and de-

cisively towards indigenous authorities and institutions, while non-indigenous respondents more tentatively selected state authorities andinstitutions.

Based on an unprecedented survey of 5,280 respondents in the

highly indigenous states of Chiapas and Oaxaca, and non-indigenous Za-catecas, this article refutes the primordialist position, demonstrating thatindigenous respondents—like their non-indigenous comparison group—freely interact with the state to fulfill basic universal human needs, and

assume individual (as well as communal) responsibility for their conductin society. The article suggests, through initial descriptive analysis of thesurvey results, that factors other than ethnic identities may have a greater

effect on indigenous (and non-indigenous) respondent views of citi-zenship (peoples’perceptions of their roles in political society), and con-

cludes with suggestions for further research to identify how indigenousidentities are formed and shaped.

Case Selection and Methods

This article assesses public opinion in Chiapas (28.5 percent indigenous

by linguistic criterion) and Oaxaca, another of Mexico’s most rural south-ern states (47.9 percent indigenous by this criterion), as compared with

Zacatecas (0.3 percent indigenous), another poor rural state, in centralMexico used here as a “control.” As elaborated below, I construct threelatent variable cluster sets to compile attitude variables from survey ques-




tions.5 Indigenous respondents were oversampled (by the linguistic cri-

terion, for which census data guided sample selection by indicating

where indigenous citizens were concentrated), but the municipalities were otherwise selected randomly, as were the statistical tracts, locali-ties, households, and respondents (but with a replacement rate of at least20 percent each at the level of localities, households, and respondents).

The overall margin of error is less than + 2 percent,6 although it can behigher within particular question categories.

The search for two indigenous states to sample led to Chiapas and

Oaxaca because they are among Mexico’s “most indigenous” popula-tions, but also because of contrasting histories of state permeation of

traditional communities. Chiapas has been characterized as an area of strong indigenous communal identity, social polarization, and enduringstate-society conflict, settled by large landowner outsiders who have mar-

ginalized indigenous communities since colonial times (Collier andQuaratiello 1994;Harvey 1998). The Zapatista Rebellion made conditionsin Chiapas the subject of national debate, culminating in the historic pas-

sage in 2002 of a constitutional amendment granting Mexico’s indige-nous peoples partial autonomy. The amendment was ratified by nine-

teen states, but has remained largely unimplemented.7

Oaxaca is known for a development pattern respectful of indigenousautonomy (Díaz Montes 1992:101–103, López Bárcenas 2000, 267–308),

but also for fierce inter-village conflict, especially in indigenous areas

(Dennis 1987;Greenberg 1989). As if to reinforce the reputed harmony


5. The survey was designed by the author, Araceli Burguete of CIESAS-Sureste, and

María Cristina Velásquez, affiliated with the CIESAS-Isthmo anthropology institute, and ad-

ministered in Spanish and six indigenous languages, between June 2002 and Feburary 2003.

The author devised the sampling technique, which sought to identify a representative sam-

ple of respondents over eighteen years old in at least three urban census tracts (“AGEBs”

in Mexico) and/or rural communities (“localidades”) per municipality in between twenty-

two and thirty municipalities each in Chiapas and Oaxaca, and Zacatecas. Burguete,

Velásquez, and Francisco Muro of the Universidad Autónoma de Zacatecas supervised con-

duct of the surveys by trained interviewers, most of whom were bilingual (Spanish and

indigenous languages) university students. The survey over-represented indigenous re-

spondents by sampling 50 percent from indigenous majority-communities and 50 percentfrom non-indigenous majority communities in Chiapas and Oaxaca, but randomly gener-

ated the other strata (statistical tracts, blocks, and households for municipalities with more

than 4,000 residents, and localities and resident lists for localities with fewer than 4,000

residents, for which statistical tracts are not kept) for the three states, based on 2000 pop-

ulation data (see the three bibliographic entries for the Instituto Nacional de Estadística

e Informática 2002). While several substitutions of municipalities and sub-municipal lo-

calities were required, these were not widespread.

6. This margin of error holds with a 95 percent confidence interval.

7. According to González Oropeza (2004: 1), only San Luís Potosí has enacted im-

plementing legislation since the constitutional amendment.



there between state government and indigenous localities, state author-

ities in 1995 codified acceptance of indigenous customary law, called

usos y costumbres, in the selection of local leaders.8

Although local,municipal-level variance merits consideration and will also be introducedin future presentations of the data, in general terms, Oaxaca’s less mo-bilized, less polarized relations between indigenous and non-indigenous

citizens contrasts with conditions of high mobilization and polarizationin Chiapas.

Defining the “ethnic” boundary of the population boundary of those

considered to be “indigenous” is a complex task. “Indigeneity” may bedefined by linguistic categories (which is how Mexico’s census has de-

fined the category since 1895), or by self-identification (acknowledgedby demographers such as Serrano Carreto, et. al. 2002: 17–20, as an im-portant but problematic complement to the linguistic criterion). After

observing less robust response patterns from self-identity 9 and findinglinguistic identity to be more consistent with environmental conditionsthat scholars have tended to correlate with indigeneity (such as shared

histories and cultures, rural economies and remote locations which re-inforce cultural, social, and sometimes biological markers), this study set-

tled on that form of identification.

Dependent Variable Construction

Two sets of attitudes are tested through the construction of latent vari-able clusters measuring the degree of a respondent’s association with an individual view of identity (defined mostly in relation to oneself ) ver-sus a collective view of identity (heavily influenced by group percep-


8. The Oaxaca state government recognized the longstanding practice in traditional

communities of selecting leaders through routes other than partisan local elections. For

example, supporters of given candidates were asked to “line up” behind their candidate,

local mayors were selected via municipal plebiscites where at least some citizens were

empowered to vote, or decisions were made behind closed doors by a tribal Council of

Elders. As of 1995, these practices assumed a legal status for local mayoral selection in in-

digenous majority municipalities (418 out of Oaxaca’s 570 municipalities as of 1998), and

political parties have been banned from participation. Eisenstadt and Ríos Contreras (2005)argue, based on systematic evidence from 1995, 1998, and 2001, that the new system has

actually increased election conflictiveness.

9. Respondents were asked whether they considered themselves primarily to be:

Mexican, Chiapanecan/Oaxacan/Zacatecan, or “part of an indigenous group.” There was

a 50–percent overlap between the linguistic and self-identified samples, but the linguistic

definition was ultimately used as: 1) it yielded more robust statistical patterns, implying

that was a better standard by which to measure “indigenousness,” 2) it yielded about 20

percent more respondents and thus greater potential variation in the statistical analysis,

and 3) as the Mexican Census standard, this measure allowed for better independent con-

firmation of results.



tions),10 and whether the respondent more readily considered him-or

herself “statists”—associated more with the Mexican state (as per much

of the literature arguing for a more corporatist construction of state-society relations)—or “communalists”—(as per arguments favoring indigenousautonomy from the state) identified more with traditional communalgroups outside of the state’s official “corporate” organizations for chan-

neling mobilization.11 Each respondent was sorted into one bivariate cat-egory on each of the two dimensions—“individualist” or “collectivist”and “statist” or “communalist.” The ultimate objective was to compare

indigenous and non-indigenous positions on a two-dimensional modelsimilar to that used by Inglehart and Baker (2000) to differentiate West-

ern or “modern” worldviews (which here correspond to a compositeindividualist/statist category) from indigenous or “traditional”ones (cor-responding to a composite collectivist/communalist category). However,

prior to testing the two-dimensional composite, I compared indigenousand non-indigenous respondents on the one-dimensional individualist-collectivist and statist-communalist classifications.

In all, three sets of dependent variables were tested: modal attitudeclusters measuring the degree of collectivism versus individualism,

statism versus communalism, and the bivariate two-dimensional com-bination of these into statist/individualist and communal/collectivistcategories. The null hypotheses—tested here at the level of descriptive

statistics—were:1) that indigenous respondents fall into the collectivist

modal cluster rather than the individualist cluster with much greater fre-quency than their non-indigenous cohort, 2) that indigenous respondentssort into the communalist cluster more than into the statist cluster, and3) that the combined, two-dimensional cluster would reinforce these

trends. Analysis disconfirmed all three null hypotheses.The premise behind these distinctions was that if culture was to be

viewed as ‘the structure of meaning through which people give shape

to their experience (Geertz 1973: 312),” then views about relationsbetween the individual and society, and between an individual’s com-


10. The cluster was composed of the following four questions:1) “Poverty Exists inMexico because individuals do not strive hard enough to get ahead;” 2) “People have the

responsibility of following ideas of the community, and not question them much;” 3) “One’s

identity as an individual is more important than the groups one belongs to;” and 4) “It is

more important to teach children a good sense of the history of their people than a good

sense of self-confidence.”

11. The cluster was composed of the following four questions:1) “Mandatory com-

munal work is not legal;” 2) “It is better to help collaborate for the good of this place than

to pay taxes to the government;” 3) “The government should always be above the laws or

customs of indigenous communities;” and 4) “The indigenous people are the true stew-

ards of Mexico’s land.”



munal loyalties and membership (and relations to broader circles of

community, from the individual and his/her immediate family, to neigh-

borhood or kinship groups, to the locality, to the nation-state) are a cru-cial and tractable component of one’s political culture and socialization.The eight questions chosen to place each respondent along the four-question collectivist-individualist continuum, the four-question statist-

communalist continuum, and the eight-question combined continuum, were selected as the combinations of twenty eligible questions estab-lishing the most robust cluster analysis extremes (called “modal clus-

ters”), and offering sufficient variance with regard to these categoricaldependent variables.

Questions for the two collectivist-individualist clusters sought tomeasure perceptions about abstract relations between the individual andsociety (e.g., “One’s identity as an individual is more important than the

groups one belongs to . . . ” and “People have the responsibility of fol-lowing ideas of the community, and not question them much”) in a man-ner intelligible to indigenous and non-indigenous respondents alike. The

statist-communalist questions sought to consider general attitudes (e.g.,“It is better to help collaborate for the good of this place than to pay

taxes to the government”), as well as those particular to indigenous com-munities—but about which non-indigenous respondents would alsolikely have formulated opinions (e.g., “The indigenous people are the

true stewards of Mexico’s land”).

Similarities Between Indigenous

and Non-indigenous Respondents

For the collectivist-individualist continuum, a two-cluster model wasfound to fit the data better than three- or four-cluster models (StandardR 2= 0.708 with classification log-likelihood -20100.31).12 Some 94.5 per-

cent of the linguistically indigenous respondents were sorted into theindividualist modal cluster, while only 89.8 percent of the non-indigenous

respondents were sorted into that category. As reported in Table 1, theaverage difference between indigenous and non-indigenous respondentpercentages in each cluster varied by less than one percent.

The difference between states in percentage of respondents sortingeach of the two categories was also negligible.

When the process was repeated to identify the statist and commu-

nalist modal clusters, a two-cluster model was again found to fit the data


12. As with all the latent variable analyses presented here, Latent Gold version 3.0

was used to divide the sample into modal clusters and then assign each case to its most

proximate modal cluster.



better than three- or four-cluster models (Standard R 2= 0.948 with clas-sification log-likelihood -19686.88). Indigenous respondents were alsomuch more likely than their non-indigenous counterparts to be sorted

into the statist category in the statist-communalist cluster. As reported inTable 2, the average difference between indigenous and non-indigenous

respondent percentages in each cluster varied much more than in the

individualist/collectivist scale.Contrary to conventional wisdom, indigenous respondents were

more statist than inclined to their traditional communities, at least with regard to the survey questions, which sought to address social issues for

which indigenous and non-indigenous respondents would have formu-

lated attitudes upon which to draw. More abstract spiritual and religious


13. The sole linguistically indigenous respondent in Zacatecas has been excluded

from state-by-state analysis, but included in the pooled “overall average” data.

Table 1: Measuring Individualism Versus Collectivism

Ethnic Identity N Pct in Individualist Pct in Collectivistand Its Derivation Cluster Cluster

Chiapas linguistic 1206 92.6 7.4

indigenous

Oaxaca linguistic 979 96.7 3.3

indigenous

Average Pct 2186 94.5 5.5

Indigenous


non-indigenous


non-indigenous

Zacatecas linguistic 1534 95.5 4.5

non-indigenous

Average Pct 3194 95.1 4.9

Non-indigenous

Note:Sample includes 2,186 indigenous13 and 3,194 non-indigenous respondents.For Latent Gold 3.0 latent variable cluster, standard R-squared was 0.708 and classifi-cation log-likelihood was -20100.31. The non-response rate was below 1 percent. Whilea five-category Likkert scale response was elicited by each question, the “agree” and“strongly agree”categories, and the “disagree”and “strongly disagree”categories wereconflated in data analysis, as the distinctions were found to be too subtle for some re-

spondents.Hence, the three response categories for each variable were agree, disagree,and the residual (neither agree nor disagree/do not know/no response). The more in-dividualist response was in each case coded as 1, the more collectivist response wascoded as 2, while the residual category was coded as 0.



questions were not raised, as these were considered to be well withinthe purview of traditional community jurisdictions but outside the

scope of the state. Two of the questions in this four-question cluster suf-fered non-response rates approaching 25 percent,14 but overall, the sort-ing between clusters one and two generated much greater variance on

the statist-communalist dimension than on the individualism-collectivismdimension.

Indeed, some 87.3 percent of the indigenous respondents were sortedinto the statist cluster, while only 59.1 percent of the non-indigenous re-spondents fell into this category. The 27 percent difference between the

indigenous and non-indigenous respondents was doubled when the least


14. These were: “Mandatory communal work is not legal,” and “It is better to help

collaborate for the good of this place than to pay taxes to the government.”

Table 2: Measuring Statist Versus Communalist Attitudes

Ethnic Identity Pct in Statist Pct in Communalistand Its Derivation N Cluster Cluster


indigenous


indigenous

Average Pct 2186 87.3 12.7

Indigenous


non-indigenous


non-indigenous


non-indigenous

Average Pct 3194 59.5 40.5

Non-indigenous

Note: Sample includes 2186 indigenous and 3194 non-indigenous respon-dents. For Latent Gold 3.0 latent variable cluster, standard R-squared was 0.948and classification log-likelihood was -19686.88 The non-response rate was usually below 5 percent, but went as high in one question as 24 percent. While a five-category Likkert scale response was elicited by each question, the “agree” and“strongly agree”categories, and the “disagree” and “strongly disagree” categories

were conflated in the data analysis, as the distinctions were found to be too sub-tle for some respondents. Hence, the three response categories for each variable were agree, disagree, and the residual (neither agree nor disagree/do not know/noresponse). The more statist response was in each case coded as 1, and the morecommunal response was coded as 2, while the residual category was coded as 0.



statist of the survey states, Zacatecas (some 40 percent statist), was com-pared with the most statist, Oaxaca (over 90 percent statist). These re-markable differences convey a strong pattern with several possible ex-

planations, which may not be readily answered here but raise importantquestions for future research. Perhaps Mexico’s corporatist state (de-emphasizing traditional indigenous communities and seeking to link in-

digenous citizens to formal state structures) played a more prominentrole in Mexico’s indigenous zones, and particularly Oaxaca. The state

is indeed known to have commanded a much bigger and more constantpresence in rural Chiapas and Oaxaca than in Zacatecas, through its in-

digenismo project launched in the 1930s to de-emphasize traditional

cultures and assimilate indigenous citizens into the state (see for ex-ample Gutiérrez 1999; Díaz-Polanco et al. 1979; Warman 2003). How-ever, recent prominent tensions between the state and civil society in

Chiapas which produced extensive outbreaks of violence decades prior to the Zapatista rebellion, may explain Chiapas respondents’ disen-

chantment with pro-statist attitudes and turn more to a pro-communalperspective.

The process was repeated a final time to test both the individual-


Table 3: Clustering Statist-Individuals and Collectivist-Communalists(eight questions from tables 1 and 2 ordered into two clusters)

Ethnic Identity Pct in Pct inand Its Derivation N Statist-Individualist Collectivist-Communalist


indigenous


indigenous

Average Pct 2186 86.6 13.4

Indigenous


non-indigenous


non-indigenous


non-indigenous

Average Pct 3194 59.1 40.9

Non-indigenous

Note: For Latent Gold 3.0 latent variable cluster, standard R-squared was 0.945 with a clas-sification log-likelihood of -39747.34. The non-response rate was usually below 5 percent, but went as high in one question as 24 percent.



collective and the statist-communalist dimensions simultaneously. Here,

a two-modal cluster combined model was also found to fit the data best

(Standard R 2

= 0.945 with classification log-likelihood -39747.34). Thistime, 70.5 percent of the cases overall were sorted into the statist/ individualist cluster and 29.5 percent were sorted into the collectivist-traditional/communalist cluster. The two high non-response questions

from the statist-communalist cluster were also incorporated into thiseight-question cluster, but the two-dimensional model’s fit to the casepatterns was still very strong, greatly exceeding that of the sorting into

individualist-collectivist modal clusters, and nearly equaling that of thestatist-communalist modal clusters. As reported in Table 3, the average

differences between indigenous and non-indigenous respondent per-centages in each cluster were remarkably close to those in Table 2.

The similarity in frequencies between the models summarized in

tables 2 and 3 presents a pattern of correlation, confirmed by the very strong Pearson correlation between them of 0.987 (as compared to a

very weak correlation of the classifications presented in tables 1 and 3

of 0.070). These patterns suggest that the variance driving the compos-ite model was derived almost entirely from the statist-communalist di-

mension; the individualist-collectivist dimension was of little significance.

Contrasting Evidence Favoring

Frequent Recourse to Traditional Authorities

The remarkable similarity in attitudes between indigenous and non-indigenous respondents derived from clusters aggregating general andhypothetical questions does not hold when measured through more con-

textually grounded and empirically based questions. For example, a se-ries of questions asking respondents “which authority they turn to first”to resolve a series of problems ranging from the theft of farm animals to

land tenure conflicts to loans for business start-up did yield more pre-dictable results. Indigenous respondents were on average quite decisive

and four times more likely to turn to traditional or private authoritiesthan to the government, while non-indigenous respondents were ambig-uous and only twice as likely to seek traditional or private authorities.15

The mean values reported in the “Go to Government First” and “Goto Traditional-Private Authorities First” columns ignore important dis-tinctions between indigenous and non-indigenous respondents; mainly

that non-indigenous respondents were routinely much more ambiguous.


15. No distinction was drawn between levels of government, as the emphasis of the

question was to distinguish between traditional/communal authorities and formal gov-

ernment (i.e. the State).



T a b l e

4 :

A u t h o r i t i e s S o u g h t F i r s t t o A d d r e s s G

i v e n P r o b l e m s

C h i a p a s a n d O a x

a c a O n l y ( N = 3 , 8 4 5 )

G o t o T r a d i t i o n a l

O t h e r ( u n c e r t a i n o

r

I s s u e

G o t o G o v e r n m e n t F

i r s t

A u t h o r i t i e s F i r s t

n o r e s p o n s e )

N o n -

N o n -

N o n -

I n d i g e n o u s

I n d i g e n o u s

I n d i g e n o u s

I n d i g e n o u s

I n d i g e n o u s

I n d i g e

n o u s

F a r m a n i m a l r o b b e d

5 . 7

7 . 0

3 8 . 7

9

1 . 9

5 5 . 6

1 . 1

W o o d s t o l e n / d e f o r e

s t e d

8 . 3

1 2 . 2

3 4 . 9

8

5 . 2

5 6 . 8

2 . 5

L a n d t e n u r e c o n fl i c t s

1 0 . 3

1 3 . 7

3 3 . 8

8

4 . 7

5 5 . 8

1 . 6

P o l l u t i o n o f f o r e s t

1 0 . 5

2 0 . 2

3 2 . 4

7

4 . 3

5 7 . 1

5 . 5

P o s t - b i r t h h e a l t h p r o b l e m s

1 9 . 2

2 7 . 8

2 4 . 3

6

6 . 6

5 6 . 5

5 . 6

E d u c a t i o n o f c h i l d r e

n

1 8 . 0

2 9 . 8

2 5 . 6

6

7 . 1

5 6 . 4

3 . 1

L o a n s f o r b u s i n e s s s

t a r t - u p

1 8 . 8

3 3 . 3

2 0 . 1

5

7 . 8

6 1 . 1

8 . 9

T o i n v e s t i g a t e a r a p e

1 3 . 4

1 6 . 7

3 1 . 1

8

1 . 4

5 5 . 5

1 . 9

F o r a c c e s s t o w a t e r

s p r i n g

7 . 3

8 . 8

3 4 . 1

8

6 . 3

5 7 . 5

5 . 0

A v e r a g e P c t b y C a t e

g o r y

1 2 . 4

1 8 . 8

3 0 . 6

7

7 . 3

5 6 . 9

3 . 9

N o t e : S i n c e l i t t l e v a r i a n c e w a s e x p e c t e d i n Z a c a t e c a s w

h e r e r e s p o n d e n t s d i d n o t h a v e t h e c o

n t e x t t o h a v e f o r m u l a t e d o p i n i o n s a b

o u t “ t r a -

d i t i o n a l a u t h o r i t i e s , ” t h e s e q u e s t i o n s w e r e n o t a s k e d t h e r e .



An average of 57 percent of non-indigenous respondents did not know

which authorities they would seek out first to address the nine issues

raised, or did not answer, as compared with 4 percent of the indigenousrespondents. Much of the apparent indecisiveness of non-indigenousrespondents may be due to the fact that, although the questions were

worded sufficiently generally as to allow respondents to state whether

they would turn first to state or traditional authorities (without speci-fying that traditional authorities were indigenous), the questions seemto have better fit considerations of instrumental indigenous respondents,

whereas non-indigenous respondents were at a loss to even consider non-state options.

Indigenous citizens were more decisive and utilized the range of recourses available to them, favoring traditional authorities by a widemargin, but they also—and this is crucial in establishing the case for

instrumentalism—turned to formal government authorities more fre-quently than non-indigenous respondents. These results, while pre-liminary, debunk the stereotype of the isolated but pastoral indigenous

communities who keep to themselves and maintain government insti-tutions at arm’s length. Neither group expressed great enthusiasm about

seeking assistance from the government first, although indigenous re-spondents sought the government as first responder at a higher rate thannon-indigenous respondents (12 percent for non-indigenous respon-

dents, as compared with 19 percent for indigenous respondents).

While further analysis is required, it would appear that indigenous re-spondents have more readily-formulated answers to questions aboutsolving social and economic problems as they may more routinely facesuch problems because of discrimination16 and the greater likelihood

that they live in poverty and isolation. These respondents were predis-posed to solving such problems via traditional routes first, although they

were less averse to using state institutions than their non-indigenous

cohort. Just as they had revealed themselves, through their attitudes, to be

“like everyone else” (here, their non-indigenous comparison group)rather than ascriptively different on ethnic grounds, the indigenous re-spondents revealed themselves—in their relations with problem-solving


16. For example, between 1974 and 1988, fully 49 percent of the repressive acts in

Chiapas documented by Burguete and Montero Solano (1989 typescript) were undertaken

directly by government authorities (who were also known to hire the thugs and vigilantes

who committed many of the other 51 percent of the repressive acts). The authors of this

study documented some 195 deaths from repression over these sixteen years, concen-

trated in the state’s indigenous region. Numerous repressive acts were also committed in

Oaxaca to be sure (see for example Minnesota Advocates for Human Rights, 1996) but

they were less systematic and also involved inter-village conflicts.



social institutions—to be predisposed towards traditional institutions but

also flexible (or even instrumental). Counter to the expectations of schol-

arship on primordial identities (from Geertz 1973 to preeminent Mexi-can anthropologists like Bonfil Batalla 1996), the survey data show thatindigenous respondents are actually as statist/individualist in their atti-tudes as non-indigenous respondents, and that they would appear to be

more flexible in the range of institutions to which they will readily turnin order to solve problems. These response patterns recall Popkin’s ob-servation, made in another context but applicable here, that “village in-

stitutions work less well than they [moral economists] maintain, in largepart because of conflicts between individual and group interests, and

that far more attention must be paid to motivations for personal gainamong the peasantry (1979: 17).”

These findings offer new evidence for the position that indigeneity

in itself does not make people more susceptible to influence by pres-sure from their kinship groups, or more likely to make decisions basedon collective identities alone. Rather, the majority of the 2,186 linguis-

tically indigenous respondents, like everyone else, tended to think of themselves as individuals first, and members of a traditional community

only second. In other words, while “ethnicity” has some bearing on whether people viewed themselves principally as statist/individualists(i.e. a Western liberal view of relations between citizens and their gov-

ernment) rather than collectivist-communalist (referred to by social sci-

entists as agrarian, pre-modern, traditional, or “closed” communities),about eight out of ten interviewees, indigenous and non-indigenous alike,

viewed themselves as statist/individualists, according to the category clusters. These results imply that the instrumentalist position (also re-

ferred to as constructivist in its more moderate versions) is more re-flective of empirical reality; that individuals choose ethnicity for politi-cal expediency as well as for more fixed or “given”causes (such as when

group identification is a central element in an individual’s worldview be-cause of discrimination or oppression by outsiders). The survey results

demonstrate that over 90 percent of the respondents (indigenous re-spondents included) possess a Western liberal conception of their ar-ticulation of interests with the state, based perhaps in part on the state’s

corporatist conditioning of its subjects via permeation of the country-side in sixteenth century Oaxaca and twentieth century Chiapas, givingrise to a more subtle question. Are the indigenous social movements to

demand collective autonomy and rights truly expressing indigenous cit-izen interests, or are they reframing the views of rational individual peas-

ant activists as pleas for indigenous collective rights so leaders can draw attention to social problems and/or gain power?




Conclusions

The timing of the permeation of traditional communities by state cor-poratism in Mexico differed greatly in Oaxaca and in Chiapas, as the Oax-acan indigenous population was devastated by the Spanish conquest, but

was then allowed to reorganize into the small, closed communities they

populate today. According to the historian Chance (1986, 180), “theSpaniards were most concerned with replacing Indian structures abovethe community level, and in Oaxaca, where these were either tenuous

or nonexistent, a substantial portion of the indigenous sociopolitical or-ganization survived the conquest years.” In Chiapas, weak communities

of indigenous citizens were co-opted as peasant groups in response tostate permeation in the mid-twentieth century (Rus 1994; Pineda 2002),

whereas in Oaxaca, this cooptation into the broader state occurred much

earlier. While further research is needed to confirm the cause of differ-ence in the two states, often ignored by the Chiapas-centric social move-ments studies, it may be that Oaxaca respondents were actually more

individualist, statist, and statist-individualist (remember three separatecluster classifications were deployed) because state corporatism (the

cooptation of rural citizens by compulsory membership in peasantunions and organizations which dispensed state patronage) impartedthese values in Oaxaca much sooner than in Chiapas. Another plausible

explanation is that the collective actions against state repression and the

struggle for land in Chiapas fostered communal and collective identitiesthere (indigenous and otherwise) which were not generated by condi-tions in Oaxaca.

These differences in the Chiapas and Oaxaca survey responses also

convey a broader point. Over time, these rural Mexicans’conceptionsof their ethnic and non-ethnic identities seem to have been manipulatedby state authorities. Accounting for regional differences, it is evident that

other factors—besides ethnic identity—cause attitudes which may beclassified as statist as opposed to communalist and statist/individualist

as opposed to communalist/collectivist. Survey results confirm that “in-digenous” is less a defining trait of respondent attitudes towards indi-

vidualism, collectivism, the state, and their traditional societies, than

other concomitant circumstances, such as community size, rural poverty,isolation, and societal conflictiveness, as conveyed by preliminary re-porting of demographic information from the survey reported in Table 5.

As may have been expected, indigenous respondents are notably poorer and more isolated (measured both as a scale of awareness of world

affairs and also as whether the respondent is from an urban or rural area).Future iterations of this research will assess whether demographic factors




T a b l e

5 :

S c a l e

A n a l y s i s S u m m a r y o f P e r c e n

t D e v i a t i o n s f r o m A v e r a g e s

E n v i r o n m e n t a l o

r A t t i t u d e

I n d i g e n o u s A v g P c t D e v i a t i o n

N o n - I n d i g e n o u s A v g P c t D e v i a t i o n

S c a l e V a r i a b l e

f r o m O v e r a l l A v e r a g e

f r o m O v e r a l l A v e r a g e

d

e v i a t i o n c a t e g o r y p c t

d e v i a t i o n c a t e g o r y p c t

E d u c a t i o n L o w

+ 8 . 9

8 5 . 6

- 8 . 9

6 7 . 8

E d u c a t i o n H i g h

- 8 . 8

1 4 . 6

+ 8 . 8

3 2 . 2

P o v e r t y L o w

- 1 9 . 4

1 3 . 9

+ 1 9 . 5

5 2 . 8

P o v e r t y H i g h

+ 1 9 . 5

8 6 . 2

- 1 9 . 5

4 7 . 2

R u r a l

+ 1 3 . 2

8 3 . 6

- 1 3 . 2

5 7 . 2

U r b a n

- 1 3 . 2

1 6 . 5

+ 1 3 . 2

4 2 . 9

C o n fl i c t i v e

+ 5 . 2

5 8 . 5

- 5 . 2

4 8 . 1

N o n - C o n fl i c t i v e

- 5 . 2

4 1 . 6

+ 5 . 2

5 2 . 0

O u t s i d e A w a r e n e s s L o w

+ 1 5 . 7

6 1 . 3

- 1 5 . 7

2 9 . 9

O u t s i d e A w a r e n e s s H i g h

- 1 5 . 7

3 8 . 8

+ 1 5 . 6

7 0 . 1

R e t r o s p e c t i v e O p t i m i s m L o w

+ 4 . 5

5 8 . 2

- 4 . 5

4 9 . 2

R e t r o s p e c t i v e O p t i m i s m H i g h

- 4 . 5

4 1 . 8

+ 4 . 5

5 0 . 9

C o n fi d e n c e i n I n

s t i t u t i o n s L o w

+ 5 . 3

5 3 . 7

- 5 . 3

4 3 . 1

C o n fi d e n c e i n I n

s t i t u t i o n s H i g h

- 5 . 3

4 6 . 4

+ 5 . 2

5 6 . 9

S o u r c e : P r e l i m

i n a r y d e s c r i p t i v e s t a t i s t i c s a s s u m m a r i z e d i n E i s e n s t a d t 2 0 0 4 . I t e m s w i t h

a n a v e r a g e v a r i a t i o n b e t w e e n i n d i g e n

o u s a n d

n o n - i n d i g e n o u s r e s p o n d e n t s o f g r e a t e r t h a n t e n p e r c e n

t h a v e b e e n b o l d e d . “ L o w ” e d u c a t i o n

m e a n s r e s p o n d e n t d i d n o t r e a c h s e c o n d a r y

s c h o o l . “ L o w ” p o v

e r t y m e a n s p o s s e s s i o n o f m o r e t h a n t w o o f fi v e m a t e r i a l i n d i c a t o r s o f m o d

e r n i z a t i o n ( w h e t h e r r e s p o n d e n t s u s e d c o o k -

i n g f u e l o t h e r t h a n

w o o d , a n d w h e t h e r t h e y p o s s e s s e d r u n n i n g w a t e r , e l e c t r i c i t y , a n d h a d p e

r m a n e n t r o o f a n d a n o n - d i r t fl o o r ) . “ R u r a l ” i s

d e fi n e d a s c o m m u n i t i e s o f f e w e r t h a n 2 , 5 0 0 p e o p l e b y t h e 2 0 0 0 c e n s u s . “ C o n fl i c t i v e ” m e a n s

t h a t r e s p o n d e n t h a d e x p e r i e n c e d a t l e a s t o n e

o f t h e f o l l o w i n g : r e

l i g i o u s , m u n i c i p a l g o v e r n a n c e , p o l i t i c a l p a r t y , a n d / o r r e s o u r c e / e n v i r o n m e n t a l c o n fl i c t s . “ L o w ” a w a r e n e s s o f o u t s i d

e w o r l d

i s d e fi n e d a s a s c o r

e o f l e s s t h a n 2 o n a 6 – p o i n t s c a l e . “ L o w ” r e t r o s p e c t i v e o p t i m i s m i s d e fi n e d a s a s c o r e o f l e s s t h a n 4 o n a n 8 – p o i n t s c a l e .

“ L o w ” c o n fi d e n c e

i n i n s t i t u t i o n s i s d e fi n e d a s a s c o r e o

f l e s s t h a n 3 o n a 5 – p o i n t s c a l e . F o r

q u e s t i o n s u s e d i n c o n s t r u c t i n g t h e l a s t t h r e e

s c a l e s , s e e E i s e n s t a d t 2 0 0 4 .



and other attitude scales, such as those summarized in Table 5, have any

bearing on whether respondents’outlooks are more statist or communalist.

While research on ethnic politics “has been piling up for at least ahalf-century (Chandra 2001: 7),” few empirical tests exist of “the instru-mentalism hypothesis” as direct as this one, and fewer still which query ethnic subjects themselves, and in their own languages where necessary,17

in order to generate evidence about “bottom up” assumption of ethnicidentities, which is usually analyzed through “top down” models of eth-nic political entrepreneurs. In the Mexican case, this may be the first large-

sample non-governmental survey ever administered person-to-person ina half-dozen languages, and its findings imply that the ethnic component

of peoples’environments is less fixed and plays a less permanent role inshaping their attitudes than the socio-economic and geographic condi-tions they face. Furthermore, the propensity for linguistically indigenous

and non-indigenous respondents to favor statist/individualist articulationsof citizenship, as opposed to the traditional collective and communal ex-pressions of citizenship usually associated with primordial claims, raises

several questions. How and why did indigenous communities choose toadopt these attitudes? How did statism-individualism come to “trump”

more traditional and ethnicity-reinforcing expressions of citizenship? What conditions and signals allowed leaders, appealing to communalistand collectivist claims, to succeed in convincing their followers to mo-

bilize? The answer given by historians and anthropologists to these ques-

tions is that state corporatist efforts by Mexico’s ruling elites to pene-trate rural areas and nation-build in even the country’s most remote (andoften indigenous) areas, reconditioned expressions of citizenship in thepost-World War II era. The salience of indigenous “autonomy”movements

has been controversial even among those they claim to represent, in goodmeasure because such communalist/collectivist ideals defy the pre-dominant statist/ individualist notions, perpetrated by “state corporatist”

permeation of the countryside, of how citizens should perceive and ar-ticulate their interests.

Efforts to decentralize governance in indigenous areas, through in-conclusive experiments such as the creation of indigenous governmentsin Chiapas or the legalization of usos y costumbres in Oaxaca, may ap-

peal to ethnic identities but be of little practical utility in fostering eco-nomic development and political enfranchisement with the state, whereindigenous (and non-indigenous) respondents still seek to fulfill basic


17. Over half the indigenous respondents were surveyed in languages other than

Spanish. Some 660 were interviewed in Oaxacan dialects of Mazateco, Mixe, Mixteco, Za-

poteco, and Zapoteco del Valle, while 597 were interviewed in Cho’l, Tzeltal, Tzotzil, and

Zoque from Chiapas.



social and economic needs first. While indigenous respondents in remote

areas may have denser networks of social institutions than equally re-

mote non-indigenous respondents, these institutions allow instrumen-tal Indians to maximize their set of choices if they are complementedby the presence of state resources. In a statement also true of many of Oaxaca’s other indigenous peoples, Nagengast and Kearney (1990: 65)

noted that the Mixtecs “know themselves as those who originate in lu-

gares tristes (sad places), villages in the Mixteca where food is oftenscarce, a decent living is difficult to obtain, and children die of pre-

ventable diseases . . . Mixtecs do not glamorize their poverty by claim-ing that it is traditional.”

Instrumental citizens have—quite reasonably—adopted the demandsof Indians in an effort to be heard. The story of their marginalization isan old one, exacerbated over the last decade by cuts in Mexico’s social

spending, by the opening of agricultural staples like corn and coffee tointernational markets with which Mexico’s peasants cannot compete,andby military occupation of large parts of the Chiapas countryside (see Col-

lier and Quaratiello 1994, for example). However, evidence presented inthis article, subject to further confirmation via future statistical analysis,

implies that a great majority of indigenous citizens—at least from thosesurveyed in Chiapas and Oaxaca—view the world from an instrumen-tal and statist-individualist vantage not altogether different from that of

Mexico’s non-indigenous citizens. Rather than limiting themselves ex-

clusively to the use of their own, autonomous institutions, Mexico’s in-strumental Indians showed a predisposition towards utilizing social andpolitical institutions of their own construction as well as those providedby the state. Mexico’s “Indians by choice” may yet succeed in refram-

ing the debate as one allowing them both to maintain their own insti-tutions and to play a greater role in designing those used by the broader state. Indeed, only by participating on both levels will they continue to

have the choice of which to select first in a given situation.

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Indigenous Attitudes and Ethnic Identity Construction in Mexico