UC Riverside UC Riverside Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title The End of the Plantations and the Transformation of Indigenous Society in Highland Chiapas, Mexico, 1974-2009 Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1s11164b Author Rus, III, Jan Publication Date 2010 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE The End of the Plantations and the Transformation of Indigenous Society in Highland Chiapas, Mexico, 1974-2009 A Dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Anthropology by Jan Rus III Dissertation Committee: Dr. Thomas C. Patterson, Chairperson Dr. Carlos Vélez Ibáñez Dr. Ronald Chilcote Copyright by Jan Rus III 2010 This Dissertation of Jan Rus III is approved: ____________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________ Committee Chairperson University of California, Riverside Acknowledgments In the course of composing this dissertation, I received generous, thoughtful, patient assistance from more people than I can begin to thank. With apologies to anyone I may miss, let me at least make a start. First, in the Tzotzil-Maya municipio of Chamula, Chiapas, I owe most of what I know about surviving the crises that have broken over Chiapas‘s indigenous people since the 1970s to my sons‘ godparents, my compadres Mateo Méndez Aguilar, María Gómez Monte, and María Méndez Aguilar. In addition to Mateo, his wife María and his sister María, through the years my wife Diane and I eventually became compadres as well with Mateo‘s and María‘s children and their spouses – Mariano Méndez and Dominga Pérez Jolkotom, Marcos Méndez and Verónica Pérez Jolote, Lucía Méndez and Lucas Patixtán Joljex, Salvador Méndez and Dominga Jiménez Méndez, and Verónica Méndez and Juan Jiménez Patixtan – and I am grateful to all of them, and now a third generation, their children, for taking our family into theirs. It has been a long time since most ethnographers stopped using the term ―informant‖ for those on whom they rely to learn about foreign ways of life. Aside from the unfortunate undertone from detective stories of one who furtively passes along inside information, the term implies that what the cultural native provides is merely raw material which the clever ethnographer then elaborates into a scientific analysis. At least in my experience, the relationship is far more personally and intellectually complex. While my compadres have answered questions that I have asked – some of them, as they occasionally gently remind me, more than once – from the very beginning of my attempts iv to learn their language and understand their experience they have also anticipated questions I did not know enough to ask, and shared with me their own very astute analyses of the politics and culture of their community, as well as of the economics and politics of the wider world as it affects them. I am of course responsible for what I have written here, but it is clear to me that my description and analysis of their way of life has always been drawn in large measure directly from their own. I am more grateful than I can say. Beyond our first compadres and their families, with time my family and I acquired a wide network of shared Chamula friends. All of these chapters bear traces of these relationships, but the surveys that are the bases of Chapters 2 and 5 in particular would not have been possible without them. In both cases, the work went on over a number of years, involved many helpers, and was undertaken to provide information that community members agreed could be useful both to preserve a record of what had happened to them, and perhaps to support community petitions to the state and to independent funding agencies. Much of this material has been published in pieces in Spanish, and some of it in Tzotzil (see Rus and Rus, forthcoming.) In addition to the Méndez Aguilar family and their neighbors, none of this further elaboration would have been possible without the close collaboration of Salvador Guzmán Bakbolom, who was my companion and editor on all of the work in Tzotzil, and who took part in the three surveys that are the basis of Chapter 2. Others who played important roles in gathering, analyzing, and publishing these collective studies were Pascual López Calixto, José Hernández González, and Manuel Pérez Pinar. v Several of the chapters (especially 2, 4, 5 and 6) also grew out of larger, multi- researcher projects. In those cases, I benefitted not only from my colleagues‘ help in developing the questions and methodology, but from their suggestions as the studies went on, and then their acute comments on my texts. For Chapters 2 and 4, support was provided by the National Science Foundation (SBR-9601370, ―Rapid Social and Cultural Change in Southeastern Mexico‖), in collaboration with George Collier, Jane Collier and Diane Rus. For Chapter 2, I also inherited the 1974 economic survey forms of my original collaborator, Robert Wasserstrom, which proved invaluable. Chapter 5 was undertaken while I was a visiting fellow at the Center for US-Mexico Studies of the University of California, San Diego (2002-03), and continued with summer support in 2004 from the Centro de Investigación y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social (CIESAS), and then from 2005 to the present from the Centro de Estudios Superiores sobre México y Centroamérica (CESMECA) and the Instituto de Estudios Indígenas (IEI), both of San Cristóbal. In addition to Diane, Ian Zinn worked on the project with us in 2007. For Chapter 6, Diane and I were partially supported for two summers by the Jacobs Fund of Bellingham, Washington, and then in collaboration with James Diego Vigil of the University of California, Irvine, by a pilot grant from University of California/MEXUS and the UCLA Center for the Study of Urban Poverty. Polly Vigil and Carlos Ramos also participated in this second period. Finally, the two oldest chapters (1 and 3) were developed while I worked for the Instituto de Asesoría Antropológico para la Región Maya, in San Cristóbal. Beyond my immediate collaborators, there are many to thank in the community of vi scholars and activists in San Cristóbal for support, advice, or comments on all of my work during the years when these chapters were written. Chief among them are the late Andrés Aubry and Angélica Inda de Aubry, colleagues in the Instituto de Asesoría Antropológica para la Región Maya, where Diane and I worked full-time in the second half of the 1980s, and continued to have a home during the summers from 1990 through 2007. Together with Andrés we developed the model of collaborative community research that we used as long ago as the 1970s. Although as a Campesinista and Zapatista Andrés was firmly opposed to the urbanization and long distance, off-farm migration that are the subject of several chapters here – and constantly questioned us about whether in studying them we were not somehow legitimizing and perhaps encouraging them – he continued to offer support and careful readings of drafts until the end of his life. Others in San Cristóbal who helped particular chapters get written are Dolores Aramoni Castellanos, Sonia Toledo Tello, Anna Garza Caligaris, María Elena Fernández Galán (and Kees Grootenboer), Gracia Ímberton, and Jacinto Coello Ímberton, all of IEI; Daniel Villafuerte Solís, María del Carmen García, Mercedes Olivera Bustamante and Cindy Reyes Angulo of CESMECA; and Araceli Burguete Cal y Mayor and Xóchitl Leyva Solana of CIESAS. Others in Chiapas who opened their homes, shared their work, and answered endless questions are Pablo Ramírez Suárez and Silvia Peña, Gaspar Morquecho, Vernon and Carla Sterk, Al and Sue Schreuder, Francisco Millán Velasco and Virginia Calhoun de Millán, Susana Ekholm, Ámbar Past, Matilde Moreno, Justus Fenner and Marta Ramírez, Robert and Miriam Laughlin, and Jan de Vos. vii Outside of Chiapas, I am grateful for the comments, critiques, and simply kindness of Michiel Baud, John Burstein, Ruth Chojnacki, Christine Eber, Christine Kovic and Francisco Argüelles, Steve Lewis and Jessica Vanderhoven, Heidi Moksnes, Wil Pansters, Pedro Pitarch, Michael Rolland, Richard Stahler-Sholk, Juan Pedro Viqueira and Graciela Alcalá, and Carter Wilson. Finally, I thank many friends and colleagues in the Anthropology Department of the University of California, Riverside, for their friendship and support, personal and intellectual, among them Eugene N. Anderson Jr., Paul Gelles, Karl Taube, Piya Chatterjee, David Kronenfeld and Juan Vicente Palerm. In particular, I am grateful for the careful reading and suggestions of my three committee members: Carlos Vélez- Ibáñez, whose research interests are close to my own, and who was a steady presence at every milestone of my passage through Riverside; Ronald Chilcote of Latin American Studies, and my colleague at Latin American Perspectives, who offered constant, gentle encouragement, and when the time came, on very short notice, copy-edited this manuscript for me; and Thomas C. Patterson, for picking up the chairmanship of my committee after the death of my original advisor, Michael Kearney, and helping me see the dissertation through. My deepest thanks for all the work and years embodied in these pages are to my wife Diane Rus, and our sons Juanito (K’ox Xalik in Tzotzil) and Jacob (K’ox Sav.) Taken separately, the papers here were individual projects; taken together, they overlapped and were years of our lives together as a family. Last of all, I would like to dedicate this dissertation to the memory of my friend viii and advisor Michael Kearney. Gracias por todo. ix Copyright status of chapters drawing on previously published material: The following chapters contain material drawn from the previously published, copyrighted articles listed. In each case, the chapters here have been substantially revised and/or updated from their published form.