MSc Thesis Rural Development Sociology AUTONOMY BUILDING IN MODERN INDIGENOUS COMMUNITIES . THE CASE OF THE AUTONOMOUS MUNICIPALITY IN SAN JUAN COPALA, MEXICO. August, 2008 2 MSc programme Management of Agroecological Knowledge and Social Change Specialisation Rural Development Sociology Name of student Víctor Manuel Mendoza García Name of Supervisor(s) Dr. Alberto Arce Thesis code: E0430 3 4 Contents Presentation ................................................................................................................. 7 Introduction .................................................................................................................. 9 Chapter I UNDERSTANDING THE COMMUNITY ......................................................................... 13 Geography and Population ..................................................................................... 13 A Bit of History ........................................................................................................ 20 Chapter II METHODOLOGY .......................................................................................................... 22 The Case Study ........................................................................................................ 22 Unity of Analysis ..................................................................................................... 22 Importance of the Case Study ................................................................................ 22 Research Questions ................................................................................................ 23 Sampling ................................................................................................................. 23 Data Collection........................................................................................................ 24 Analysis of Data ...................................................................................................... 25 Chapter III FROM VIOLENCE TO AUTONOMY; the Drama of the Triqui Society .......................... 27 Triquis: a violent race? ............................................................................................ 27 Chapter IV LIFE CYCLE ................................................................................................................... 37 POLITICAL ORGANISATION ......................................................................................... 46 Chapter V THE TRANSNATIONAL COMMUNITY OF SAN JUAN COPALA ...................................... 52 5 Origin of the Diaspora ............................................................................................. 52 The Path to the North ............................................................................................. 54 Encounters of the Triqui Nation .............................................................................. 61 Chapter VI THE EXTERNAL SITUATION .......................................................................................... 66 Social movements ................................................................................................... 69 Arenas for Autonomy .............................................................................................. 73 CONCLUSIONS ............................................................................................................. 78 Glossary of abbreviations ............................................................................................ 82 Bibliography ................................................................................................................ 83 Appendix I .................................................................................................................... 86 6 Presentation The present is a case study of a very interesting indigenous community in Oaxaca Mexico. I have been working on indigenous communities for almost ten years since I graduated from college in Mexico City. The diversity of the indigenous cultures, their struggles, resistances and symbolic beliefs are embedded in their everyday life. It is wondering how many forms they found out to survive and make a living in this changing world. Development policies changes and adjust to the new theories and political establishment; so far the voice of the subjects of development has been ignored or repressed. However the indigenous communities has learnt to deal with the policies and incorporated official discourses in their cumulus of experiences and knowledge, which has been an important element in the evolution of their traditions. After the demise of the cold war, ‘the end of the history’ and the idea of the world as a ‘global village’, drew a landscape of a non-differentiated society regulated for the ups and downs of the free market. The modern state-nations embody that idea in themselves since the binomial character of nation and state tends to legitimise the construction of bounded systems of homogenous situations which may be manipulated, shaped and re-designed according to a teleological ‘ideal’ about how the society ought be rather that understand how it is. Paradoxically, the modern communication, the wider access to technology and information produce the rough material to create contest proposal in multiple and unpredictable ways. In Mexico, since the upraising of the rebellion of indigenous peoples in the southern state of Chiapas on January 1 of 1994 (the same day the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) came into effect), the indigenous peoples have been present in the political national agenda.. The upcoming years, indigenous peoples experienced intensification of the poverty on one hand and escalation of the repression of the state on the other. In their aim to resist, indigenous peoples and their political organisation has been seeking a way of self-determination and voice since the democratic system of political parties does not regard alternative ways of organisation apart of the established modes. Oaxaca State in Mexico is one of the poorest of the country and plenty of conflicts. At the same time Oaxaca is considered a multicultural state since the number of the indigenous peoples that inhabit in the state many centuries before the Spaniards arrived. Every indigenous community has a big sense of identity which they continue until now. Isolated in their communities, indigenous peoples has been able to preserve most of their ancient traditions, beliefs, form of organisations and way of live. Most of them use their traditional methods to choose their local 7 authorities which govern under the principles of ‘ usos y costumbres’ which is the system of rules and regulations based in the tradition which is passed down from generation to generation. Nowadays, the global policies concerning rural development go more into diversification of the economic activities in the rural areas such as rural tourism, and commoditisation of the rural life ‘packed’ in folklore which denies the importance of the food security in rural villages. Nevertheless, under uneven circumstances of the global market, communities have left behind the agriculture production and they have to survive by diverse ways. The Triqui peoples are one more amongst the diverse indigenous groups in Oaxaca, but its history is a chronicle of marginalisation, discrimination and violence. Triquis lost the best part of their land and then they refuge in the mountains surrounded by other indigenous and non-indigenous communities who exploited and discriminated them for ages. Violence and political control has created a symbiosis that transformed the communitarian life in a sort of ‘lumpenindigenous’ groups without an own ideology and coercively controlled by their leaders. The triqui region holds an official ranking of ‘high marginalisation’; as a consequence, Triqui communities are considered target groups for governmental social programs. Every year, new programs and projects are applied in the region without any improvement in quality of life of the Triquis; indeed they left the agriculture production many years ago. Hence, development policies seem not to have sense for Triquis who survive from the scarce remittances of migrants and from the even scarcer benefits that their leaders get from the government. Thus triqui leaders have become experts in the use of discourse and manipulation in order to effectively negotiate with the government. This thesis pretends to identify the causes that led the violence and how it shapes the social life of Triquis taking in account that the Triqui peoples are a community that extends out of the Triqui homeland. Nevertheless, The Triqui peoples are not a passive entity; they experience social changes, assimilate and/or contest them. The recent proposal of the Triquis in order to create an autonomous municipality caught my attention as an interesting counter-tendency which in certain way draws an alternative way to do politics by claiming the right of self- determination as the base for development. 8 Introduction “The first day of 2007, Oaxaca woke up with a new municipality: San Juan Copala. It is not another municipality amongst the 570 of this state; it is an autonomous one, like those that indigenous peoples are building in several parts of the country as a way to defend their rights and to construct their future”(F. López, 2007a). The region of Copala in the state of Oaxaca Mexico is the homeland of the Triqui ethnic group. For non-Triquis, Copala represents a mysterious