To understand the issues of indigenous rights, one needs to take a step back and look at broader questions of justice and self-determination. One of the biggest changes in Mexico in the last ten years has been the growing capacity of regionally based indigenous movements to define for themselves what their agenda for change will look like. Land is certainly the big issue, but there are many other issues: issues of cultural rights, the right to bicultural education, issues of control over their own media, basic questions of justice and human rights, as well as access to economic resources for those who already have access to some land so they can work it productively, rights as migrant workers elsewhere in Mexico or in the United States, the right to be free from racial and ethnic discrimination.
So land is a big issue, but it is one issue among many issues, and indigenous movements in Mexico are first and foremost very diverse. Some have been dispossessed from their lands. Others have not been able to work the lands that they already have in a way that permits them to generate the jobs needed to make family farming sustainable, so they're forced to migrate to other parts of the country. For them, their rights as workers are at least as important as the rights to a dry and dusty, infertile and eroded parcel at home. Their main problem is not some big land-owner who took their land away. They're now fighting for their rights as workers and as citizens.
The Basic Issue
The basic issue is how to create a fully functioning democracy, which in the case of indigenous peoples would require, for example, multilingual access to the system of justice, as opposed to just the promise of access to court interpreters. It would require respect for locally specific indigenous conceptions of what justice would look like, as opposed to a one-size-fits-all view. It's important to understand the various different kinds of indigenous movements as part of the broader national movement for democracy, rather than an ethnically specific, land-rights movement. Mass movements for land reform are not common because people usually have to take their lives in their hands to fight for land. If there were a democratic system in place in areas where land claims are in conflict, then the legal system would be one possible means for resolving those conflicts. Unfortunately, rural Mexico is a long way from enjoying a fully functioning, equitable and transparent legal system. So I think it's important to put the issue of justice front and center in order to understand the range of demands the different groups have, and the different strategies they have pursued.
Land and Territory
Another conceptual distinction one needs to keep in mind is between land and territory--tierra y territorio. Land [tierra] refers to a tangible resource, whereas territory [territorio] is much more of a concept under construction. It refers to the ancestral domains of different ethnic groups that perhaps until recently didn't think of themselves as having a shared ethnic identity. Perhaps for many communities their main form of identification was with their home village, and maybe their main perceived enemy was the next village over the rise, with whom they have been fighting for generations over boundaries. In many cases they begin to come together through having common enemies. They come to see themselves as being "Mixtecos," or being part of the broader national indigenous movement. This is relatively recent in Mexican history and has to do with the redefinition of the concept of pueblo from one of its meanings--which has been limited to village--to the concept of people and, plural, indigenous peoples.
"Los Pueblos"
There are at least fifty-six officially recognized ethno-linguistic groups. Some of those groups have a compact, relatively ethnically homogenous territory, like the Mixes in Oaxaca or the Yaquis in Sonora. In many other regions indigenous peoples are part of a multiethnic mosaic, as in much of Chiapas, where in the lowlands (that have become famous since the Zapatista rebellion), people came from many different ethnic groups to settle. As a result, the lowlands are not what would be conventionally understood as ancestral territories. They are recently colonized territories, very much linked to the role of the Catholic Church in helping people to create and recreate a sense of community that is not something that can be attributed to some legacy that has been handed down from the distant mists of time. And so one has, essentially, [the] social construction of ethnicity and community that remains in process in Mexico and has begun to converge at the national level.
Autonomy and Sovereignty
One of the biggest political and social results of the Zapatista rebellion was to provoke many of Mexico's already existing indigenous movements to come together and forge some common political identity that could help promote institutional change that would provide them with full citizenship rights, equality, plus respect for difference that would essentially guarantee self-determination. Self-determination means many different things in Mexico, as anywhere else.
If we look at the San Andrés accords, which are in many ways the minimum platform for the independent indigenous rights movement in Mexico, they make very clear that their national identity is as Mexicans. The [term] "indigenous nation" does not appear. They [the San Andrés Accords] talk about "indigenous peoples"--the "pueblos indígenas right to autonomy, in so far as they are collectivities with different cultures and with the capacity to decide their own fundamental issues within the framework of the national state." And they're talking about the right to choose their own forms of internal government.
This involves rethinking the relationship between currently existing local government and state government. It means encouraging a new kind of decentralization and democratization of the municipality as the key organ of local government. It means the formation of coalitions between indigenous majority municipalities so they can form regional blocks that would have more bargaining power.
They [indigenous peoples] have been very clear that their demands are not for separation and that their notions of sovereignty have been within the tradition of popular sovereignty--that the source of sovereignty of the national state lies in the democratic will of the people. They are fighting for their rights to autonomy just as all Mexican citizens should have the right to self-organization, self-representation.
Recently more than two million people voted in a nationwide referendum, which called on the government to demilitarize Chiapas. Mexico's indigenous civil society has become a national actor and has an agenda for nationwide change that is able to incorporate a wide range of locally and regionally specific visions of what self-determination would look like.
Is Change Possible?
Mexico's indigenous movements will have a very difficult time holding the Mexican state accountable to its promises, unless the rest of Mexico's national political transition moves closer to a democracy. At least one in ten Mexicans speaks an indigenous language, and so for them Spanish is a second language. They, in order to change the Mexican State, need to work in coalition with the rest of Mexican society. If it weren't for sympathy and support from the rest of Mexican civil society, the Zapatistas would have been militarily crushed long ago. International support has certainly helped, but it's been the support in the rest of Mexican civil society that has been most important at staying the hand of the military. The result is low-intensity conflict--keeping people down, trying to divide communities with carrots as well as sticks. To change that situation would require changing the balance of power at the national level.
In spite of their being very remote from most of indigenous civil society, the political parties are the ones which will have the last word. So one of the things you need to keep an open eye on is: To what degree are regional social and civic movements able to hold the political parties accountable, and to what degree are they able to build balanced partnerships?
The Huichol people of northern Jalisco, parts of Nayarit and other states in the north, have pursued a strategy of working through the agrarian tribunals to try to recover their ancestral lands that were taken over by ranchers. Their partial successes have served as a model for others who want to help to strengthen the public interest law tradition, which has historically been quite weak. People had little reason to have faith in the legal system. But the Huichol's partial successes in actually recovering land through the courts suggests that there's a lot to be gained from balanced partnerships between lawyers and organized communities.
