In the last fifteen or twenty years, Latin America has witnessed a great sociopolitical movement in favor of the human rights of indigenous groups. This is both a "social" and a "political" phenomenon, which is new in Latin America. I think it's new in that it's a dissociation from the manner in which countries, states, and nations (if we may distinguish them) viewed these groups. For the first time since the nineteenth century, these entities had to confront demands and reclamations with which they had not dealt for the better part of a century.
The indigenous groups are asserting a position through their congresses, demonstrations, and spokespersons (because now they have a group of very articulate, expressive, and militant intellectuals), who demand acknowledgment of their human rights, which have been denied for a long time. This position has two tendencies. The first and older one is the civil and political rights that are due all citizens. In reality, the indigenous people, as opposed to other citizens, have not enjoyed these rights for cultural reasons of discrimination, racism, and marginalization.
The second tendency, which has been put forward in the last twenty years, is that these groups also assert the specific cultural rights to maintain their indigenous identity--their languages, their territories and lands, their autonomy--in the face of the nation-state. The nation-state in Mexico and the rest of Latin America has always thought that the indigenous people should integrate, assimilate, in essence, stop being indigenous, such that they could transform themselves into "good" Mexicans, Peruvians, Colombians, Guatemalans, etc. But this was the model of "nationhood" held by the ruling elite, who wished to deny the indigenous their own identity.
Human Rights: Latin America II
Now, with this new movement, the indigenous organizations demand acknowledgment--within the law, the state, and the concept of the nation--of their cultural, ethnic and linguistic rights and of their way of life and their modes of organization. In the last ten or fifteen years, some countries have responded with juridical, legislative and constitutional modifications--such as in Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, and in Brazil--where now the text of their constitutions, for the first time, recognizes that nations are multi-ethnic, multicultural, and that the indigenous people have the right to conserve their identities within a national framework.
Much of this is put forward by indigenous peoples--as in the case of the Zapatista movement in Chiapas--in terms of demands for autonomy (i.e., regional and local autonomy), self-determination, control of resources, recognition and demarcation of their own territories, and so forth. This is something that is being discussed [in many places], including in the U.N., because there is a project of the declaration of indigenous rights in the U.N. which has not yet been fully adopted. This is Convention 169 of the International Labor Organization (ILO), approved and ratified by certain Latin American countries. The Organization of American States (OAS) also has an indigenous rights project.
These demands put forth assertions many states don't wish to accept. They don't wish to accept indigenous autonomy because they fear it militates in the direction of "balkanization," of a breakdown of national sovereignty and of the unity of national territory. This is what, for example, the Mexican government doesn't want to accept of the San Andres Accords with the Zapatistas, which they actually signed four years ago, but which they choose not to put into practice. These are some of the more polemical and problematical questions of the indigenous movement for human rights in Latin America.
Earlier Methodologies
People of my generation, who were trained as anthropologists, had two options in terms of doing anthropology. One was the British and North American anthropology of the 1930s and 40s, which was the idea of participant-observation--[the researcher] lives in a remote place, takes in everything, but views it from a slightly distanced vantage point, like a scientist with complete objectivity and neutrality, to determine what is going on. But, in contrast to this, in the 1940s and 50s (if a bit less in Latin America) arose the concept of an applied and engaged anthropology. This was a vision that implied it was the state and the state's sociopolitical ends that the anthropologist should serve. This was an "indigenist" politics (as it was and is still called in much of Latin America), which is to say, the anthropologist was an instrument to generate indigenous social change, acculturation, integration, and assimilation. I, as a young anthropologist, participated in the governmental offices of the National Indigenous Institute (INI) in something called the Commission of Papaloapan, in which they [the government] asked the anthropologists to act somewhat as intermediaries between the government and the indigenous groups to help serve the political goals of assimilation and integration that the government held at the time.
A Recent Methodological Change
However, beginning in the 1960s and accelerating in the 70s, there has been a complete change in which anthropologists became dissatisfied with their state-assigned roles. They transformed themselves into participants, sympathizers, and defenders of social struggle, of reclamatory agrarian and peasant struggle, and of the struggle for the acknowledgment of indigenous human rights. More and more, one sees in Latin American social science (mostly but not solely in anthropology) an engagement with the specific struggles of indigenous peasants. Social scientists no longer function as outside-observers or technicians in service to the state, but rather as anthropologists, social scientists, students, teachers, investigators, etc. who see themselves as accomplices with the peasant and indigenous organizations, as defenders of indigenous rights.
This was made very clear a few years ago during the debates surrounding the new Brazilian Constitution of 1988-89, where anthropologists were in the vanguard of the fight to incorporate indigenous rights into the constitution. The same thing has occurred in Nicaragua, Colombia, Bolivia, and also in Mexico. In the same way that there has been a change in overall perception, there has been a change in self-perception among the investigators, especially with the anthropologists. There has been a change between the social scientists and the object of study--that object now being the struggle of indigenous populations itself and their reclamations. And there has been a change with respect to indigenous relations to the state.
