Rodolfo Stavenhagen

Indigenous Peoples and the State in Latin America: An Ongoing Debate

One of the more remarkable developments that took place in Latin America during the last two decades of the twentieth century was the emergence of indigenous peoples as new social and political actors and their implantation in the national consciousness of the region’s countries. The changing relationship between national states and indigenous peoples in Latin America mirrors to a certain extent the re-emergence of indigenous issues in international legal debates since the early 1980s. However, it is remarkable, considering that throughout most of their modern history the Latin American republics had practically ignored the indigenous component of their national identity.1

CAPITALISM AND THE PEASANTRY IN MEXICO

The Mexican countryside has been the object of frequent study. Anthropologists have done community studies, primarily among indigenous populations. Sociologists have examined the process of change in family structure and behavior of rural people, whether involved in officially sponsored programs of social welfare or simply caught up in a more general process of modernization. Agricultural economists have studied the structure of farms and agricultural enterprises and have determined their costs of production, investment, expenditures, and profits. The traditional anthropological approachl to rural communities viewed them as closed units, self-sufficient, relatively isolated from the rest of the national society and composed of different parts which taken together formed a functional whole. Their analysis of the peasant economy consisted primarily of a minute description of various techniques of production supplemented, in the best of cases, with information on family budgets. The commercial exchange of products or wage labor outside the community, mentioned only when they played an important part in the domestic or community economy,

Collective Agriculture and Capitalism in Mexico: a Way Out or a Dead End?

Land reform has played an important political, social and economic role in the history of Mexico over the last fifty years. During that period, over 70 million hectares have been transferred from the large estates to circa 3 million peasant beneficiaries. An important innovation in the land reform process has been the institution of the ejido, a land-holding unit which has become the basis of different kinds of co-operative farming, carried out under government auspices and control.

The Future of Latin America: Between Underdevelopment and Revolution

The article below reviews past and present conditions in Latin America and evaluates alternatives to existing structural problems. It is a general overview for the non-specialized reader who may not be deeply familiar with Latin American affairs. It departs substantially from the more focused theoretical discussion elsewhere in this journal. It directly concerns problems, people, and institutions in Latin America, and as such we hope that it will provide useful background for teachers, students, and workers alike. Rodolfo Stavenhagen is Director of the Center for Sociological Studies, Colegio de México. His article is a revised version of a lecture given at the University of Geneva during September 1971. The author wishes to thank Philip Russell for the translation into English.

Ethnic conflicts and their impact on international society

A survey on states in armed conflict in 1988 reports that of a total of 111 such conflicts in the world, 63 were internal and 36 were described by the authors as ‘wars of state formation’, that is, conflicts involving one government and an opposition group demanding autonomy or secession for a particular ethnie or region. In fact, in recent years, the number of classic inter-state wars has been decreasing and the number of intra-state conflicts, particularly in Third World countries, increasing. Another report tells us that ‘state-sponsored massacres of members of ethnic and political groups are responsible for greater loss of life than all other forms of deadly conflict combined . . . On average, between 1.6 and 3.9 million unarmed civilians have died at the hand of the state in each decade since the end of World War II . . .’ 2

The emergence of indigenous peoples

Classes, Colonialism and Acculturation.- Indigenous Peoples: An Introduction.- The Return of the Native: the Indigenous Challenge in Latin America.- Indigenous Peoples in Comparative Perspective.- Mexicos Unfinished Symphony: the Zapatista Movement.- Struggle and Resistance: Mexicos Indians in Transition.

Self-Determination: Right or Demon?

Self-determination has been receiving a great deal of bad press lately. A lead article in the winter 1993 issue of Foreign Policy denounces the “Evils of Self-Determination” (Etzioni, 1993). One New York Times columnist complains ominously that in Africa “warring tribes are ripping apart the once-secure borders of nationhood” and “ancient savagery” has broken up Yugoslavia (Safire, 1993). Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who helped some years ago to make the term “ethnicity” intellectually fashionable, now cautions that the unlearned lesson about self-determination is that “minorities not infrequently seek self-determination for themselves in order to deny it to others” (Moynihan, 1993:70). It would seem that for some people self-determination is somewhat akin to an exclusive club: you fight hard to gain access yourself, but once you’re in, you’d rather not see any new upstarts come along.

Ruta Mixteca Indigenous Rights and Mexico’s Plunge into Globalization

“Ruta Mixteca” is the name given to the circular migrations of indigenous farm workers between the Mexican state of Oaxaca and California long studied by Michael Kearney and his collaborators. Indigenous migrations to the United States have expanded in recent years as a result of the North American Free Trade Agreement and changes in Mexico’s agrarian legislation that led to increased privatization of land and natural resources, dispossession of the traditional peasantry, and numerous local land- and resource-related conflicts. The Zapatista uprising stimulated the growth of a host of militant indigenous organizations, now also emboldened by constitutional changes that recognize the human rights of indigenous peoples according to international standards. Indigenous transnational migrations need to adapt to these changing conditions. “Ruta Mixteca” es el nombre dado a las migraciones circulares de campesinos indígenas entre el estado mexicano de Oaxaca y California que han sido estudiadas durante mucho tiempo por Michael Kearney y sus colaboradores. En años recientes aumentaron las migraciones de indígenas a Estados Unidos como resultado del Tratado de Libre Comercio de Norteamérica y los cambios en la legislación agraria en México, que han conducido a la creciente privatización de la tierra y los recursos naturales, al despojo del campesinado tradicional y a numerosos conflictos locales sobre tierras y recursos. El levantamiento zapatista generó el surgimiento de gran cantidad de organizaciones indígenas militantes, ahora también estimuladas por los cambios constitucionales que reconocen los derechos humanos de los pueblos indígenas de acuerdo con las normas internacionales. Las migraciones indígenas transnacionales necesitan adaptarse a estas condiciones cambiantes.

The Return of the Native: The Indigenous Challenge in Latin America (2002)

Some years after Cortes conquered Tenochtitlan almost five centuries ago, the chronicler Bernal Diaz del Castillo wrote that had it not been for Malintzin, an Indian woman who served Cortes as interpreter, the conquest of the fabulous Aztec empire might not have taken place. Malinche, as she came to be called, has since been portrayed in Mexico’s nationalist historical accounts as a traitor to her people and the term malinchismo became synonymous with kowtowing to foreign interests and selling out one’s country.

Pioneer on Indigenous Rights

Part I Rodolfo Stavenhagen.- A Personal Retrospective.- The Authors Relevant Papers: A Selective Bibliography.- Part II The Authors Key Texts.- Seven Fallacies about Latin America.- Decolonializing Applied Social Sciences.- Ethnodevelopment: a Neglected Dimension in Development Thinking.- Human Rights and Wrongs: A Place for Anthropologists?.- Indigenous Peoples and the State in Latin America: an Ongoing Debate.- Building Intercultural Citizenship through Education: a Human Rights Approach.- Making the Declaration Work.