Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Maya Exodus: Indigenous Struggle for Citizenship in Chiapas

2014; Duke University Press; Volume: 94; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-2390213

1527-1900

Kathleen M. McIntyre,

Politics and Society in Latin America

The 1994 Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, Mexico, brought new questions about indigenous peoples’ position in the modern nation-state. Anthropologist Heidi Moksnes’s work Maya Exodus: Indigenous Struggle for Citizenship in Chiapas argues that indigenous Catholics used a globalized moral discourse to challenge neoliberalism and seek freedom from poverty, suffering, and marginalization. Moksnes focuses on catechists in the Tzotzil-speaking municipality of San Pedro Chenalhó in highland Chiapas who are members of the civil association Las Abejas (The Bees). Las Abejas sympathized with Zapatista demands but never joined the armed movement. In 1997, the organization received international support when a paramilitary organization aligned with municipal authorities murdered 45 Las Abejas members, mostly women and children, while in a church in Acteal, Chiapas.Moksnes explores how modern conceptualizations of human rights play out at the local level in Maya communities, both complementing and challenging collective rights. By promoting a rights-based citizenship, Pedrano Catholics attempt to redefine their relationship with the Mexican state while simultaneously “restructuring local Maya life” (p. 4). Pedrano Catholics refuse government patronage and ground their resistance in the tenets of liberation theology. By applying the message of the Gospel to their contemporary struggle for local autonomy and emancipation from poverty, Catholics perceive their suffering as “contrary to the will of God, who will help set them free” (p. 3).Moksnes’s work exemplifies the complex integration of indigenous peoples into the nation-state. Pedrano Catholics precariously balance collective and individual rights frameworks of resistance. They refuse to accept patronage from the state, which they see as harboring vestiges of colonialism. Furthermore, they use modernist notions of human rights to criticize neoliberal economic policies that led the Mexican state to privatize communal lands, or ejidos, in the early 1990s. Pedrano Catholics believe that only a radical change in Mexico’s government can bring any meaningful progress to their communities. Until then, they vow to operate outside the state and to attempt to recreate traditional Maya structures of governance. However, their reliance on the mestizo-dominated San Cristóbal de Las Casas diocese and international human rights organi-zations to attend to their material and spiritual well-being presents further dependencies.Through participant observation at church services and interviews with Las Abejas members in the mid-1990s and again in 2008, Moksnes reveals that the historical memory of the Acteal massacre serves as the rallying point for Pedrano Catholics’ continued struggle for social justice and government accountability in the matter. Moksnes’s analysis of Las Abejas builds on the important earlier work of anthropologist Christine Kovic and sociologist Marco Tavanti, but Moksnes is able to offer a vivid account of the group’s roots and its contentious split into two organizations by 1998. The Acteal case is still far from resolved; in 2009 several of the gunmen initially arrested for that attack were freed due to misconduct in the state investigation, and in the fall of 2012 a group of survivors filed a lawsuit against former president Ernesto Zedillo, currently the director of the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization, for crimes against humanity.Ultimately, Moksnes laments that Pedrano Catholics never reached their exodus: liberation from oppression and poverty. They instead are stuck in a trapped claim for citizenship. The 1996 Peace Accords on Indigenous Rights and Culture brokered between the Zapatistas and the Institutional Revolutionary Party culminated in watered-down constitutional amendments in 2001 that defined Mexico as a multiethnic nation while jettisoning any guarantees of indigenous autonomy, self-determination, and control of natural resources. Most of her original informants in Chenalhó remain mired in poverty. Once forced out of their homes by paramilitary groups in the mid-1990s, they are now destined to migrate to the United States. Moksnes concludes that “this mass migration is a testament to the failures of Mexican politics” (p. 277).Like migration, Protestantism has also had a tremendous impact on social relations in Chiapan communities. However, the author’s brief nod to Protestantism leaves the reader curious as to whether the central themes of Moksnes’s book—poverty, suffering, and longing for change—aren’t also experienced by Presbyterian and evangelical Christian converts in Chenalhó. Given that the state is almost one-third Protestant, Moksnes’s book disappoints by glossing over this massive religious transformation in the region.This book will be of particular interest to indigenous rights and antiglobalization activists as well as students and scholars of Mexican history and religious studies. While there has been no shortage of scholarly and popular coverage of antineoliberalism in Chiapas, Moksnes’s oral histories provide an intimate (her host family were leading catechists and Las Abejas members who became political refugees) and complex history of the ongoing struggle. Moksnes’s work will no doubt continue to fuel broad discussions of indigenous rights, the nuances of local citizenship, and the inherent difficulty of maintaining independent civil associations such as Las Abejas.