Copyright

by

Mariana Mora

2008

The Dissertation Committee for Mariana Mora Certifies that this is the approved

version of the following dissertation:

DECOLONIZING POLITICS:

ZAPATISTA INDIGENOUS AUTONOMY IN AN ERA OF

NEOLIBERAL GOVERNANCE AND LOW INTENSITY WARFARE

Committee:

Charles R. Hale, Supervisor

Shannon Speed

Richard Flores

João Vargas

Rosalva Aída Hernández Castillo

María Elena Martínez Torres

DECOLONIZING POLITICS:

ZAPATISTA INDIGENOUS AUTONOMY IN AN ERA OF

NEOLIBERAL GOVERNANCE AND LOW INTENSITY WARFARE

by

Mariana Mora, B.S., M.A.

Dissertation

Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of

The University of Texas at Austin

in Partial Fulfillment

of the Requirements

for the Degree of

Doctor in Philosophy

The University of Texas at Austin

December 2008

Dedication

A las bases de apoyo zapatista

del municipio autónomo 17 de Noviembre y a sus futuras generaciones

v

Acknowledgements

This dissertation represents the combination of so many collective reflections,

discussions, debates and conversations generated during fourteen years with friends and

colleagues, in academia and as part of political projects, in diverse geographical spaces,

in the Caracoles Zapatistas, San Cristóbal de las Casas, the Bay Area of California,

Mexico City, Austin and Barcelona, that it is impossible to claim them as my own. The

best this document has to offer reflects the sum of these exchanges and analysis; its

interpretations, errors and limitation, are my exclusive responsibility.

Words fail to express the gratitude I feel toward the women and men of the

Zapatista autonomous municipality 17 de Noviembre and the other municipalities which

form part of the Caracol IV, Torbellino de Nuestras Palabras. It has been a true honor to

have had the opportunity to conduct this research in your communities, to work alongside

you, to listen to your histories and theories, and to learn to re-imagine the political from

what you create. I would especially like to thank the members of the autonomous council

2005-2008, for their trust and for accepting to coordinate fieldwork with me in the midst

of a whirlwind of activities and commitments. I hope these pages manage to capture a

just a little of the much I have learned from you.

To my dissertation chair, Dr. Charles R. Hale, and members of my dissertation

committee, Dr. Shannon Speed, Dr. Rosalva Aída Hernández Castillo, Dr. María Elena

Martínez, Dr. João Vargas and Dr. Richard Flores, for their invaluable support,

comments and feedback that helped me develop and clarify my arguments and theories,

while remaining grounded in commitments to social justice.

I feel fortunate to have studies my PhD at UT Austin, not only for the support of

the professors, but for the opportunity to engage in so many rich theoretical and political

discussions with fellow graduate students, especially with Mohan, Alan, Pablo, Geoff,

Kora, Gilberto, Teresa, Celeste, Peggy, Kaiman, Halide, Jael, Vivian, Emiliana, Rosa

Maria, Ajb’ee, Courtney, Siyar and Ruken.

vi

To Dr. M. Teresa Sierra, Dr. Rachel Sieder and Dr. Aída Hernández and all the

researchers who participate in the seminar “gender and ethnicity” in CIESAS- D.F. Few

are the academic spaces which combine theoretical rigor with so much truly human

interactions.

In jovel, to my compañeras mariposas Ximena, Amaranta, Luz, Eva, my soul

sisters, Ana, Gabriela, Claudia, Marcela, my brothers Paco and Timo. Mi familia de

complices and artists in utopias. To Hilary Klein for having shared the first years of this

journey with me. To Jorge Santiago and the team at Desmi, for the never ending

conversations, for the enthusiasm in my project and for having granted me access to the

treasures of their archive. To Mercedes Olivera, Jan Rus, Neil Harvey, Jan de Vos for the

conversations and support. To Ronald Nigh for his advising during my student residency

at CIESAS- Sureste. To Magalí Rabasa for helping me transcribe and document the

interviews in 8 de Marzo. To Richard, Bruno, and the other authors of the book still in

writing, for representing a new generation of academics committed to social justice in

Chiapas. To Don Andrés Aubry and Angélica Inda, for their wisdom and for the legacy

offered as a gift in passing.

This project has one of its first roots in the political work of the Comité Emiliano

Zapata in Berkeley in 1994, in the reflections and actions I engaged with alongside Maria

Elena, Peter, Arnoldo, Diego, Pinti and Mary Ann. And to the academic support I

received at the time from my advisors Dr. Claudia Carr and Dr. Beatriz Manz. To my

professors at Stanford, Dr. Renato Rosaldo and Dr. Terry Karl, for their support during

my Master’s in Latin American Studies, when I was first attempting to organize and give

meaning to the work I had done in Chiapas.

It would have been impossible to finish my dissertation if it wasn’t for the

tremendous support I received during the last months of writing. To Kora and Helena, my

Tía Xenia, and Ana and Yolanda for having offered me a refuge in moments of crisis. To

Ora and Jim, for adopting me and offering me a space to live in Austin. I can’t imagine a

better home to have finished a dissertation. To Briana, Mohan and Kaiman for their

friendship and constant support. Your friendship has been one the best gifts Austin gave

vii

me. And to Rocio for checking-in everyday on skype, regardless of which café or place in

this world.

Many individuals agreed to read earlier versions of the chapters and sections of

this dissertation. Thank you to Mercedes Olivera, Elsie Rockwell, Don Pablo González

Casanova, to the members of the autonomous governments of La Garrucha and Roberto

Barrios and the authors of our book during the seminar held in January 2008 in CIDECI.

To the feedback I received during the seminar “Poder-política y movimientos sociales” in

CIESAS- sureste upon completing fieldwork. To the participants of the seminar “Género

y etnicidad” of CIESAS- D.F. And for the invaluable feedback and comments of: Marco

Aparicio, Alan Gómez, Peter Rosset, Jorge Santiago, Ronald Nigh, Teresa Sierra, Neil

Harvey, Jan Rus and Guiomar Rovira.

The last version of this dissertation was revised in a transborder transatlantic

chain, thank you to Amaranta who was in Nicaragua, Marco in Barcelona, my parents in

San José, Alan in Nueva York, Pablo and Briana in Austin, Jorge Santiago in San

Cristóbal and Alejandro in DF.

The translation from Spanish to English was done thanks to the help of Ana,

Graciela, Daniela and Servicios Tlatolli Ollin.

Fieldwork was conducted with a Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner-

Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. The dissertation was written with the

support of the Ford Diversity Fellowship, UT Austin Continuing Fellowship, UT Mexico

Center E.D. Farmer International Fellowship and as part of the project CONACYT-

U52410-S “Globalización, derechos indígenas y justicia desde una perspectiva de género

y el poder: Una propuesta comparativa”.

Lastly, to my parents, my sister and her family, for being my never ending

fountain of support and inspiration, your love illuminates my journey.

viii

DECOLONIZING POLITICS:

ZAPATISTA INDIGENOUS AUTONOMY IN AN ERA OF NEOLIBERAL

GOVERNANCE AND LOW INTENSITY WARFARE

Publication No._____________

Mariana Mora, Ph.D.

The University of Texas at Austin, 2008

Supervisor: Charles R. Hale

Grounded in the geographies of Chiapas, Mexico, the dissertation maps a

cartography of Zapatista indigenous resistance practices and charts the production of

decolonial political subjectivities in an era of neoliberal governance and low intensity

conflict. It analyzes the relationship between local cultural political expressions of

indigenous autonomy, global capitalist interests and neoliberal rationalities of

government after more than decade of Zapatista struggle. Since 1996, Zapatista

indigenous Mayan communities have engaged in the creation of alternative education,

health, agricultural production, justice, and governing bodies as part of the daily practices

of autonomy. The dissertation demonstrates that the practices of Zapatista indigenous

autonomy reflect current shifts in neoliberal state governing logics, yet it is in this very

terrain where key ruptures and destabilizing practices emerge.

The dissertation focuses on the recolonization aspects of neoliberal rationalities of

government in their particular Latin American post Cold War, post populist

manifestations. I argue that in Mexico's indigenous regions, the shift towards the

privatization of state social services, the decentralization of state governing techniques

ix

and the transformation of state social programs towards an emphasis on greater self-

management occurs in a complex relationship to mechanisms of low intensity conflict.

Their multiple articulations effect the reproduction of social and biological life in sites,

which are themselves terrains of bio-political contention: racialized women's bodies and

feminized domestic reproductive and care taking roles; the relationship between

governing bodies and that governed; land reform as linked to governability and

democracy; and the production of the indigenous subject in a multicultural era.

In each of these arenas, the dissertation charts a decolonial cartography drawn by

the following cultural political practices: the construction of genealogies of social

memories of struggle, a governing relationship established through mandar obedeciendo,

land redistribution through zapatista agrarian reform, pedagogical collective self-

reflection in women’s collective work, and the formation of political identities of

transformation. Finally, the dissertation discusses the possibilities and challenges for

engaging in feminist decolonizing dialogic research, specifically by analyzing how

Zapatista members critiqued the politics of fieldwork and adopted the genres of the

testimony and the popular education inspired workshop as potential decolonizing

methodologies.

x

Table of Contents

Introduction…………………………………………………..……………………………1

The first political theoretical question:

Neoliberalism and it states of exception…..............................................................7 Second political-theoretical question: The denaturalization of autonomy and the production of decolonial knowledges …………………………………………..10 Decolonizing practices at the fissures of the neoliberal state……………………12 Decolonizing theories: An aproximation to Zapatista indigenous autonomy……15 The neoliberal state and its governing logics…………………………………….18 Indigenous political identities and processes of ethnic-racialization…………….22 A genealogy of Latin American critical thought and

decolonizing methodologies……………………………………………………. 25 A feminist materialist mapped to analyze and act from within decolonial processes of liberation…………………………………………………………..28 The structure of the dissertation………………………………………………….28

Prelude: Building rebel and indigenous Zapatista Autonomy…………………………...34 Police brutality and the militarization of public security………………………...45 Encounters and Disagreements…………………………………………………..47 Chapter 1: The production of knowledge on the terrain of autonomy: Research as a topic of political debate………………………………………………………………………...52 A (de) colonizing gaze from the southeast………………………………………55 Research proposed from a dialogue immersed in frictions and transformations...60 Governing by obeying and democratizing knowledge…………………………..62 Power between the verbal and written…………………………………………...67

xi

The interview as a testimony on the knowing-doing of history………………….73

New grammars of decolonization………………………………………………..80 Chapter 2: The History of Autonomy:

A Genealogy of Social Memories Struggle……………………………………...………84

Remembering the age of the servants and life in the fincas……………………..91 Agrarian reform, the foundation of Ejidos and the Word of God………………..98 The politics of work of Zapatista indigenous women……………...…………...103 The struggle for land and the peasant organizations……………………………107 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………...…113 Chapter 3: The Zapatista Agrarian Reform…………………………………………….115 Zapatista Agrarian Reform in a historical context……………………………...125 The Revolution and the ejido…………………………………………………...121 Procede and the agrarian reform………………………………………………..129 Neoliberal governance and land tenure……………..………………………….132 The Zapatista agrarian reform……………………………...…………………...137 Political participation and the action of work………………………………….145 Food sovereignty and territory………………………………………………….148 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………...…154 Chapter 4: Governing by Obeying and the politization of daily life…………………...156 Between the good government and the bad government……………………….164 The pedagogical practices of governing by obeying………..………………….172

xii

The bio politicization of reproductive work……………………………………180 Governing by obeying, within the ambiguities of the local state………………187 Conflict resolutions……………………………………………………………..192 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………...195 Chapter 5: A S/state of War – Politics………………………………………………….198

From counterinsurgency to low intensity warfare toward a S/state of permanent conflict………………………………………………………………………….208 Low intensity conflict…………………………………………………..………210

The transition towards a police military state………………………………..…214 Social service work and the militarization of daily life………………………...218 The ambiguity of the nation-state and control over social and

biological reproduction ………………………………………………………...225 Biocapital Opportunities………………………………………………………..227 From cultural and corporal “degeneration”…………………………………….232 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………...234 Chapter 6: The search for transformative political identities in relation to the coloniality of power……………………………………………………………...238 A critique of the ethnic-racial ordering of Mexican society……………………244 A historical trajectory of mestizaje……………………………………………..250 The development of culture and culture for development: Between neo-indigenism and the multicultural policies of the state…………...252 The Indianization of the autonomous municipality…………………………….260 The search for transformative political identities………………………………267 Transcending and transforming borders………...……………………………...273

xiii

Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………...269

Collective reflection on neoliberalism and autonomy………………………….278 Biopolitical production of decolonization…………………………………………..282

Decolonial imaginaries…………………………………………………………283

The exceptions which engender the neoliberal state and the coloniality of power…………………………………...285 The production of liberatory knowledge………………………………………..287 Appendix. Spanish version of dissertation……………………………………...292 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………600

Vita……..…………………………….....……………………………………...621

xiv

List of Figures

Figure 1. Aguascalientes de Morelia……………………………………….……………34

Figure 2. Attacks against autonomous municipalities 1998. Author: CIEPAC……….…45

Figure 3. Primary school students in the community 8 de Marzo. 2005………………...84 Figure 4. View of the valley of the river Tzaconeja’ from the community

10 de Mayo……………………………………………………………………………..115

Figure 5. Women’s breadmaking collective in the community of 7 de Enero………... 156

Figure 6. Public security forces in the community of Taniperla. 1998………………....198

Figure 7. Taking notes of individual’s participation in the

Other Campaign Assembly. 2005………………………………………………………238

Figure 8. Discussion on the program Oportunidades and women’s collective

work………………………………………………………………………………….…275

1

Introduction

When I first arrived to the Zapatista territory in Chiapas, a legend circulated

throughout the jungle. It was the legend of the head-cutter. So strongly was felt the

possibility of his presence, that the fear this story generated kept women and men in their

homes as soon as night fell. They preferred to not leave. It was 1996 and the Mexican

military was about to complete a road that would effectively enclose the EZLN and its

civilian support bases. All that was needed was a bridge built by the military in the most

remote region of the Lacandon Rainforest, a bridge said to be filled with the decapitated

heads of local townspeople. Containing acts of rebellion was not just a geographical

matter, of surveillance and social control, but rather an extraction of life itself. Against

this phantasmatic and yet very real threat by the state, what emerged in the heart of

Zapatista communities were ways of doing politics inseparable from daily life, from

history, from memory, and from collective self-reflections. In the Tseltal, Tojolabal,

Chol, and Tsotsil communities, alternative bridges emerged from within the practices of

autonomy.

This doctoral dissertation has its origin in the personal interactions and

experiences surfacing since that time. It is a reflection on struggles for decolonization and

for the decolonization of politics in a neoliberal era. It places at its very heart the cultural

political practices elaborated by Tseltal and Tojolabel women and men civilian support

bases immersed in social struggle as part of the construction of indigenous autonomy.

The dissertation presents an incomplete and partial history (which does not make it less

critical) of the construction of their municipalities and autonomous governments as the

most recent expression of acts of resistance and rebellion against a colonial legacy of

power-knowledge related to the logics of global capital. It analyzes the reconfiguration of

the Mexican state under neoliberal conditions and its multiple articulations to new

capitalist interests as processes of recolonization inseparable from (yet not reduced to)

epistemic, disciplining and mutilating acts of violence. In this scenario, the dissertation

charts a cartography of daily practices — decision-making processes in assemblies,

socialization of memory in the agricultural production collectives, reinterpretation of

history in the classrooms, agricultural work in the cornfields—for transcending and

2

transforming current dehumanizing conditions. I wrote this document with the explicit

intention of contributing to critical discussions about/ along side with/ and as part of

social actors struggling for the creation of new political imaginaries of liberation.

* * * *

Since the uprising on January 1, 1994, the Zapatista movement became an

important reference point for many social movements throughout the world, nourishing

new political imaginaries and theoretical debates on resistant practices that move through

the fissures of neoliberalism in attempts to redirect its processes. At the time that the

rebel army declared war, academic and social activists worlds discussed the practices,

discourses and demands of what constituted new Latin American social movements.

They discussed the construction of political processes from a strengthened civil society

which acted at the margins of the political party system and state institutions. These

served as mechanisms to challenge and rupture corporativist relations in order to promote

new democratic expressions.1 Simultaneously, actors in both spaces questioned the

homogenous construct of the mestizo nation-state through demands which recognized the

collective rights of indigenous and Afro-Latin peoples, particularly their rights to

autonomy and self-determination.2 “We have the right to be indigenous peoples and

Mexicans”, proclaimed multiple indigenous organizations throughout the republic. At

the same time, diverse sectors of the population, amongst these feminist groups, formed

part of debates redefining the political. They argued that it emerges in other spheres, such

as in daily life outside of the formal public space, and also from affective relations.3

During the first years, the Zapatista movement not only concentrates these

political theoretical debates, but also transforms itself into a mirrors reflecting and

reproducing new ways of doing politics inside and outside Mexico. The mirrored

dialogues, the resulting fresh and dynamic language, was what resulted most attractive to

me, as they represented the possibility of painting new utopias which contrasted to the

1 See Escobar y Alvarez (1992), Fals Borda (1988), Foweraker (1995), Laclau (1994), Slater (1985).

2 See Assies, van der Haar, Hoekema (1999), Bartolomé and Barabas (1998), Brysk (2000), González

Casanova y Roitman (1996), Van Cott (1994), Warren (1998), Yasher (1998). 3 See Davis (1998), hooks (1984), Lowe and Lloyde (1997), Sudbury (1998).

3

discourses of other sectors of the “left” which I considered too rigid and anchored in

their ways of communicating and classifying world social problems. I was 20 years old,

was about to finish my undergraduate career at UC Berkeley, and as many of my

generation, the words pronounced from southeastern Mexico resonated with my desires

for social change and to form part of new forms of political participation. The EZLN

communiqués and those of its subcomandante insurgente Marcos arrived via fax to our

student solidarity collective. We grasped the written words as each line slowly emerged

from the apparatus. The phrases interpellated me. I knew it was utopic, yet I wanted to

learn from the movement from the daily efforts of the communities within their territory.

After 1996, the Zapatista civilian support began to exercise their right to

indigenous autonomy. Tens of thousands of individuals living in the third of the state of

Chiapas organized into autonomous municipalities as part of the tactics of a political

military structure demonstrating territorial control, while at the same time implementing

the San Andrés Accords on indigenous rights and culture, signed on February 16 of that

year. Regardless of whether the government respected what it signed, they would

practice their right to autonomy in its exercise in that least 38 municipalities. The support

bases named their municipalities in honor of actors struggling for social change, such as

Ernesto Che Guevara, Lucio Cabañas, Miguel Hidalgo, Tierra y Libertad and Libertad de

los Pueblos Mayas. These women and men grounded political invitations to enact social

transformation in the founding of autonomous governments and administrative

commissions, which began to implement alternative health, education, justice, and

agricultural production programs. As part of these practices of autonomy, the Zapatista

support bases declared their rejection of all state social assistance programs, for example

agricultural projects, production subsidies, they even expelled official schoolteachers

under the frequently repeated phrase that "autonomy is to do things ourselves, with our

own ideas, and from our own traditions as indigenous people".

The national context was marked by hierarchical politics generated in a highly

militarized arena. Elements of the armed forces patrolled the region night and day. In the

air, helicopters surveiled the region and took photographs.

The Ejido Morelia -- head of the autonomous municipality 17 de Noviembre,

named in honor of the date in which the Zapatista rebel army was founded in 1983 -- and

4

its then roughly 40 Tseltal and Tojolabal communities initiated a series of discussions

and assemblies to define how to form their autonomous government. For the first time,

they elected a council who, according to the guidelines, had the responsibilities to

coordinate all of the activities of the municipality and ensure that the different

commissions, particularly those of Land and Territory, Agricultural Production, Health

and Education, implemented projects and alternative policies to those of official

institutions. One of these was the Women's Commission, whose objective consisted in

expanding and strengthening women’s participation in the political and administrative

structures of the municipality. Part of these tasks included organizing regional

gatherings, or encuentros, where women discussed their rights and reflected on their

experiences as peasant and indigenous people.

In these spaces, I had the opportunity to implement popular educational

workshops with a friend from undergraduate school. We combined practical materials, of

accounting and mathematics, with reflections on women's rights and their participation in

autonomy. The spaces of conversation and discussion with these women, many a

generation older than us, offered a window to reflect on the processes we observed. I

noticed with admiration but also with astonishment, the amount of collective discussions

and assemblies behind any decision, no matter how apparently insignificant. At the same

time, the inherent contradiction between the socialization of democratic exercises and the

concentration of power within the EZLN political-military structure was apparent. I

recognized the challenge facing women, who debated whether to leave their children at

home, while at the same time incorporating domestic activities into the political life of

the community. In addition, they struggled to not reproduce the authoritarian experiences

their communities had lived with state representatives. The meetings of women and their

agricultural production collectives served as spaces of political formation and economic

development, while at the same time acting as sources of motivation against the fears

emerging from a constantly militarized scenario. I lacked the clarity at the same, but I

now recognize that the discussions with other women in workshops, traveling on dirt

roads from one community to another, and drinking numerous cups of coffee in their

kitchens served as fundamental reference points to analyze the interactions between

practices of autonomy and Mexican state forces.

5

The two central questions at this doctoral dissertation emerged from the sharing of

daily life with these women and with members out of their Zapatista communities. They

reflect political concerns which have important theoretical implications for understanding

the cultural practices of social movements under conditions established by neoliberal

state forces. In this introduction, I outline both sets of questions in order to subsequently

detail the central arguments of this document. In the two following sections, I

demonstrate how the cultural practices of zapatista indigenous autonomy interact with

Mexican state forces, illustrate in which spheres of daily life these disputes take place and

to what new political imaginaries they signal. I then define the four central concepts

utilized as part of the theoretical framework. Lastly, I summarize the six chapters of the

dissertation.

The first political theoretical question: Neoliberalism and it states of exception

During conversations and discussions, Tseltal and Tojolabal women and men

Zapatista support bases, activists and members of NGOs in San Cristóbal de Las Casas

repeatedly referred to the concept of neoliberalism. The support bases contrasted it to

autonomy. I remember conversations, primarily with men from the municipality 17 de

Noviembre, who were political authorities during those first years: Macario4 and Don

Leopoldo who comunicated their anger for the ways in which the federal government

dismantled the few state programs in their communities, such as, Diconsa, a type of basic

food store subsidized by the government or fellowships for indigenous students through

the National Indigenist Institute (INI). They denounced that the Mexican government

only offered "projects" to buy votes and ensure political loyalty to the then “party of

state”, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), and “convince people" to not

participate in peasant organizations or guerrilla groups, rumored to exist.

Many criticized the government for a series of contradictory, multifaceted actions,

of acting simultaneously as a "father government" and as an ajvalil, a landlord

government that offered token gifts and maintained a tutelage relationship towards the

local population, as if these were children incapable of enacting their own social and

political actions. They also criticized the state for not complying with its mandate of

4 All of the names of the Zapatista support bases have been changed to protect identities.

6

guaranteeing access to health education services as well as to programs that improve

living conditions of indigenous peasant populations. They identified a void between the

promises of the populist period (dismantled during the mid-80s that were characterized

by the role of the state as a social and economic benefit provider) and its lack of

compliance as part of state neoliberal restructuring. With anger, they signaled that it

wasn't that the state was passively withdrawing, but rather it was systematically

excluding certain populations by not offering certain social programs. This active

marginalization reflected broader expressions of state violence which intensified in acts

repression, surveillance and military and police unit patrol. Macario and don Leopoldo

explained that from the voids and contradictions created by the same state, they began to

implement autonomy. "The state never complied with its promises. They don't want us

alive, unless it is as indentured servants, as a cheap labor source. That is why we decided

to organize ourselves with our own resources and with our own ideas, to resolve our

needs ourselves, to liberate us ourselves".

From the fissures and gaps identified by the support bases with whom I spoke,

emerges one of the central theoretical political questions of this dissertation. At a

superficial plane, it appears that under neoliberalism the state slowly disappeared to be

replaced by the omnipresence of the market (Appadurai 1996) or withdrew in order to be

replaced, for certain sectors of the population, by its armed forces (Gill 2000). What

occurs is a profoundly reconfiguration of its capacities to regulate and administer diverse

sectors of the population (differentiated by processes of racial, class and gender

differences), where the logics of the market form part of a governing ethos –

entrepreneurial attitudes, acting according to the laws of supply and demand, and

responding to the options offered based on comparative advantages (Rose 1999). Under

these new governing logics, its mechanisms and techniques become increasingly diffuse,

they extend across the social body and articulate through mutually constitutive

constellations irreducible to one or to the other. These governing mechanisms

incorporate, in ways differentiated by sectors of the population, the militarization of daily

life. In this sense, the neoliberal state is transformed into articulated series of flexible

states of exception that construct differentiated political spaces (Ong 2006)

The women and men with whom I spoke pointed to the incomplete, illegible and

7

multifaceted state effects when they described, for example, how they experienced

increased conditions of surveillance and militarization while at the same time feeling

abandoned and delegated to resolve their own needs themselves. The explicit decision to

reject the presence of official institutions and maintain themselves at the margins of the

state (given that they as peoples have been systematically marginalized), contains in itself

a paradox. Under new neoliberal conditions which engender multiple states of exception,

the political spaces located at its margins could potentially be articulated to its logics of

governance. Autonomy, in this sense, is not de facto, a radical political position against

neoliberalism.

Second political-theoretical question:

The denaturalization of autonomy and the production of decolonial knowledges

This doctoral dissertation emerges from a second concern which surfaced during

conversations and interviews conducted after 2003. That summer I returned to Chiapas

to begin initial fieldwork. My travel coincided with the 10th anniversary of the uprising,

20 years since the founding of the EZLN and 30 years since the founding of the National

Liberation Forces, the political military organization which gave birth to the rebel army.5

The political project of autonomy had entered into a new phase. The councils and

commissions of the autonomous municipalities had grouped together in regional centers

referred to as Caracoles, from which operated the good government councils, or juntas de

buen gobierno, where representatives of each municipal council rotated weekly. The

priorities of autonomy had changed. If in other years, the distribution of lands was most

vital, now conflict resolutions gained increasing importance. Their organizational

capacity was such that more representatives of non-Zapatista communities or individuals

aligned with the ex parte of state, the PRI, arrived to resolve conflicts than members of

the "organization". By that time, an entire generation of Zapatistas youth had been

educated in the autonomous schools. And autonomous public policies integrated health,

educational and agricultural production sectors in order to establish alternative

development strategies which emphasized the integral health of communities and their

5 For a detailed description of the history of the National Liberation Forces, see Castellanos (2007) and

Bellingeri (2003).

8

environment. In this new context, it was particularly noticeable the ways in which men

and women support bases had reinterpreted daily practices, through the exercise of

collective self reflection, until transforming them into new political expressions.

The maturing indigenous autonomy project also implied tremendous collective

exhaustion, resulting from the tremendous efforts needed to maintain 10 years of

resistance in a context of low intensity warfare. At the same time, structural changes in

the countryside generated a profound economic crisis reflected in the migration flows to

the hotel districts of the Rivera Maya in the Mexican Caribbean and increasingly towards

the American Dream, the other side of the border in the United States. Political alliances

were also affected. In 2000, under President Vicente Fox’s "Government of Change" and

under then Chiapas Governor Pablo Salazar Mendiguchía, many of the peasant

organizations which in previous years had maintained sympathetic political alliances with

the Zapatistas, distanced themselves in order to gain institutional positions in the state

government.

After 10 years of the Zapatista movement, autonomy was becoming a vanguard

form of struggle. Other social movements in diverse regions of Mexico and in other

countries identified it as the model to follow. The fact that the Mexican state refused to

radically recognize rights to autonomy transformed this demand into the primary terrain

of dispute between the government and social movements aligned with zapatismo. The

multiple chants, marches and demonstrations calling for its recognition converted

autonomy into a political objective rather than a process, a tactic for social

transformation. I am not suggesting that juridical reforms or state public policy reforms

are not essential, of course they are, but by centering the disputes on these terms, the

movement ran the risk of separating autonomy from historical trajectories of social

transformation and from the radical impulses which gave it life.

The naturalization of autonomy as an objective masks a series of complex

historical processes, which generates an impoverished theoretical analysis on cultural

practices of resistance and rebellion. Indigenous autonomy is not by nature

transformative nor does it generate de facto ruptures to neoliberal recolonizing processes.

It contains the possibilities to revert and explode hegemonic processes to the extent that

individuals and collectives involved in its daily implementation generate practices that

9

create new forms of knowledge production, meanings attached to the political, alliances

with other actors, and alternative ways to understand themselves and act in the world

contrary to the most recent and residual expressions of domination. These are

indispensable steps in the transformation of power- knowledge related to a colonial

legacy, currently manifested under neoliberal conditions.

However, its naturalization makes it difficult to critically analyze the potentially

novel political processes, along with its challenges and contributions to political theory,

as related to the collective actions for social transformation. Academics primarily of

political theory have signaled that social struggle through Zapatista autonomy transcends

the reform revolution dichotomy so often debated by left political organizations during

the last decade of recent Latin American history (Gonzalez Casanova 2005). As part of

these debates, autonomy is proposed as a form of struggle for liberation against a colonial

legacy linked to capital logics. This necessarily requires returning to theoretical political

debates on internal colonialism and decolonization while at the same time analyzing how

historical conditions have changed under neoliberalism and globalization (Ibid.).

The questions that emerge are the following: In what ways do the political

practices of Zapatista indigenous autonomy represent new efforts of liberation under

current conditions of neoliberalism? What are the contributions, it challenges at you

possibilities that emerge from these political imaginaries?

The importance of critically analyzing the political practices of autonomy and

locate these in a historical trajectory of social struggle was made evident several years

later during a collective interview. During the beginning of field work, I spoke with men

from the community Emiliano Zapata, a Zapatista community which forms part of the

municipality 17 de Noviembre. We reflected on autonomy as an expression of struggle

and I asked why if before the struggle was for land why is it now autonomy? They

responded:

"It’s that the way to organize changes when history changes, even though history

stays the same. Before the EZLN there were many organizations, and before the struggle

was for land, that history made the demands change, and what we desired also changed.

Maybe later it will no longer be autonomy, but the struggle against exploitation,

discrimination and injustices are the same”.

10

My doctoral dissertation emerged from these two central sets of interrogations:

The political concern that the most recent mechanisms of neoliberal governance could

articulate the political spaces of Zapatista indigenous autonomy to its states of exception,

a concern which surfaced during the first years of solidarity support in the autonomous

municipalities; And the need to historize and denaturalize current practices of resistance I

struggles for decolonization of what it means to be a woman and man, Tseltal, Tojolabal,

Mayan, indigenous and Mexican in order to recuperate the contributions to radical

politics from the historical particularities of communities forming part of 17 de

Noviembre. The first question reflects the political theoretical motivations behind my

fieldwork; the need to locate the practices of autonomy in a particular social and political

geography was an element that emerged in the majority of the interviews conducted in 17

de Noviembre.

Decolonizing practices at the fissures of the neoliberal state

The spaces and practices of Zapatista indigenous autonomy, despite maintaining

themselves at the margins of neoliberal institutions, are not isolated from its governing

logics. The effects of low intensity warfare are perhaps the most palpable and crude

element of such a reality. In this dissertation, I argue that it is between the fissures,

contradictions and ambiguities created by the state through which the cultural practices of

Zapatista autonomy direct knowledge production and the exercise of the political towards

divergent means. However, as I demonstrate throughout the chapters, the terrain of

dispute is the same - life and the conditions for its biological and social reproduction.

In order to reflect on these processes, this dissertation covers a wide range of

practices, activities and spaces which form part of the Zapatista autonomous municipality

17 de Noviembre, including: the use of the testimonio genre and popular education

methods, the construction of a genealogy of memories of social struggle, the autonomous

agrarian reform, the relationship between the government and the governing in the

cultural practice of governing by obeying (mandar obedeciendo), the pedagogical

collective self reflexive practices in women's collective work, processes which

reappropriate and debate indigenous identity, and the search for shared political identities

11

with other social actors. They reflect a combination of didactical acts, of discussion and

debate, which run alongside the transformation of daily activities in Zapatista

communities and have the effect of politicizing the day to day within the municipality.

The activities within the diverse spheres of 17 de Noviembre are transformed into spaces

to understand themselves in time and space as women, men, indigenous, peasant

Mexicans and at the same time to act accordingly to these constant (re)interpretations.

As explained by Ignacio from the autonomous council, "autonomy is a new way to live

life, it is the creation of a new life".

On the same terrain of daily activities, which in their totality reflect the social life

of the population, operate neoliberal governing mechanisms. This is reflected in the

reconfiguration of diffuse governing techniques, articulated through flexible and

decentralized constellations in the production of states of exception. They are

concentrated in the effects generating the formation of new neoliberal subjectivities,

based on market logics. Throughout the dissertation, I demonstrate the ways in which the

articulation of neoliberal governing processes of operate through the production of

ethnic-racialized and gendered differences and how these reproduce social hierarchies. It

is exactly at the limits establishing these divisions where mechanisms considered within

the sphere of politics conflate with those logics of war. I identify and analyze four central

terrains of dispute between neoliberal governing logics and decolonizing practices within

the framework of Zapatista indigenous autonomy.

The first is the indigenous women's body and the domestic tasks traditionally

under her domain. The resignification that Tseltal and Tojolabal deposit on domestic

tasks and care-taking roles, primarily through didactical practices of collective self-

reflection, play a fundamental role in generating decolonizing practices within the project

of autonomy. At the same time, they are subjected to state regulation given that these are

fundamental terrains for the social and biological reproduction of the population. The

combination of war politics techniques transforms domestic work and indigenous

women's bodies simultaneously into indispensable and disposable elements of racialized

state formation.

The second terrain of dispute is the relationship which establishes links between

the governed and the governing. Both the reconfiguration of the neoliberal state and

12

governing by obeying distribute decision-making practices across the social body: in the

case of the neoliberal state, through the promotion of entrepreneurial attitudes which

facilitates subjects to respond to their own socioeconomic needs; in the case of the

practices of the autonomous government, through the politicization of the different

spheres of the autonomous municipalities through decision-making processes in the

spaces of the community, municipal and Caracol assemblies. I analyze the ways in which

both bodies of authority link self-governing techniques to processes of natural resource

distribution and interact with the logics of a representative democracy.

The third sphere of dispute terrain focuses on changes in land tenure after the

1992 Constitutional Reforms to Article 27 and the different meanings of democracy,

property regimes and representations of peasant-subjects. On these sphere, I argue that

both the support bases and state program representatives interviewed signaled that the

communal land model, referred to as ejido, as had been implemented before their

privatization in 1992, was no longer feasible. However, their critiques of the ejido model

during the populist period are based on different foundations and opt for strikingly

divergent paths.

Lastly, in a Latin American context framed by debates indigenous peoples’ rights,

the production of the indigenous subject and the concept of culture are transformed into

disputed terrains which reproduce and destabilize the ethnic-racial ordering of Mexican

society. I point to the ways in which the support bases signaled how the interrelationship

between ethnic, racial, class and gender categories reproduce social hierarchies which

locate indigenous peoples in the lowest scales of the social ladder. I detail the production

of indigenous political identities as part of the daily construction of autonomy that

transforms identity politics into a politics of transformation.

The decolonization of the political

Without being absent of complications, limits and tensions, the cultural practices

of Zapatista autonomy foreground the terms through which social, economic, cultural and

biological life is reproduced in each of these four disputed terrains. What is at stake is a

reformulation of the political inseparable from life itself. It is political production

established through the cultural practices of autonomy as part of processes transforming

13

being Tseltal, Tojolabal, Tzotzil, Mayan, and indigenous in relation to a legacy of power-

knowledge articulated to logics of global capital. Zapatista practices and meanings of the

political critique the ethnic racial structuring of Mexican society, often times through

incomplete, non-homogenous and yet palpable expressions, in which the construction of

the indigenous woman plays a fundamental role. They represent a series of processes that

point to the articulation between neocolonial forces and changes in capital logics and

interests, a proposal which find parallels in Franz Fanon’s definition of decolonization,

when he states: “The most extraordinary importance of this change is that it emerge as

something demanded, convoked and desired by the colonized… through which is born a

natural rhythm, introduced by new men, and that is born through a new language and a

new humanity… because decolonization is the inevitable creation of a new men.” (Fanon

p.36). Fanon prefers to decolonizing processes where what is at stake is the reproduction

of life itself because it requires a set of joint actions directed by the colonized which

generate a profound transformation of the individual, the community and structures of

governance.

In this doctoral dissertation I focus on the decolonization of politics because it is

precisely through autonomous practices of resistance where life and the political

converge. The ways to understand life and the possibilities of its transformation are tied

to recolonizing processes from which one struggles against. The cultural practices of

autonomy cannot be reduced to an economic sphere, as if distributing lands and natural

resources were sufficient to alter the living conditions of indigenous populations; nor can

they be reduced through a series of politics of recognition of cultural differences or solely

on the social sphere, rather the practices of autonomy attempt to simultaneously struggle

for the transformation of social, economic, cultural and political relations, for the

conditions through which life, in its social and biological forms, are reproduced.

The proposal, as anti-colonial activists, such as Fanon remind us, is not entirely

new. Nor is it currently reduced exclusively to zapatismo. The political expressions that

emerge from the autonomous municipalities are only one node amongst other nodes of

struggle against racism, against gender inequalities, against the colonial legacies of

power-knowledge, and against its articulations to the logics of global capital. The

political practices of Zapatista indigenous autonomy serve as a window through which to

14

reflect on new imaginaries of social transformation, the construction of alternatives,

tensions, challenges and obstacles.

What is critical to highlight is that this type of political struggle for decolonization

acquires particular significance under new historical and geographical conditions marked

by the logics of neoliberal governance. In the same way that the practices of Zapatista

autonomy attempt to transform all the spheres of social life, so too the mechanisms

through which the state regulates, disciplines and produces citizen-subjects. The terrains

of dispute are the conditions for the reproduction of the social and biological life of the

population. Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt refer to this phenomenon as biopower and

biopolitical production (2005). Bio-political production is imminent to society. It

produces social relations and collaborative forms of work. In contrast, biopower exists

above society, in the form of a sovereign entity that imposes order. In this dissertation, I

focus on biopower highlighting that this type of sovereign power emerges racialized in

the spaces of governance in the colonies and in neocolonial spaces which render

inseparable processes of politics and war (Mbembe 2003). Both operate through the

spheres of life, hence the term bio. In this dissertation, I analyze the relationship between

biopolitical practices of decolonization and mechanisms of neoliberal biopower linked to

tactics of low intensity warfare. That is how daily life -- the social reproduction activities

in the domestic sphere, decision-making practices between the autonomous government

and the support bases, the exercise of conflict resolutions and the practices that give new

meaning to indigenous political identities -- are transformed into contentious terrains

through which the possibilities to revert or reproduce conditions that establish social and

biological life are disputed. This task necessarily requires to defining four primary

concepts: decolonization, the neoliberal state, the production of political identities and

socially committed research methodologies.

Decolonizing theories: An aproximation to Zapatista indigenous autonomy

The last 25 years of indigenous movements’ demands for the recognition of

collective rights, particularly autonomy and self-determination, resulted in a series of

juridical and public policy reforms in the majority of Latin American states (Brysk 2000;

15

Warren 1998; Van Cott 2000; Van Cott 1994; Aparicio 2005). Countries such as

Nicaragua, Bolivia and Venezuela have implemented a series of policies and juridical

reforms which question more profound structures of inequality in order to transform the

relationships between the state and indigenous subjects. However, the majority,

including Mexico, implemented a series of limited reforms, based primarily on cultural

recognition (Sieder 2002).

Changes in state policies have been supported by and analyzed from the social

sciences primarily through theories of multiculturalism, interculturality and the politics of

recognition. Initially, these theoretical debates surfaced in Anglo-Saxon Academies, in

the United States and Great Britain.6 However, the 1990s witnessed an increase in

literature produced in Latin America.7 A wide range of publications focused on the

content and the implications of juridical reforms, their points of convergence and ruptures

with neoliberal restructuring. Included in these are debates in Mexico focused on

defining multiculturalism in contrast to interculturality (Olive 2004, del Val 2004, Díaz

Polanco y Sánchez 2002), the construction of ethnic citizenship (De la Peña 1995, 1999,

Rosaldo 1999, Leyva 2004, González Casanova y Roitman 1996, Cerda 2005), and

theories of autonomy (Díaz 2008, Díaz Polanco y Sánchez 2002, Anzaldo Meneses,

1998, Burguete Cal y Mayor 1999, Regino Montes 1998, Mattiace, Hernández y Rus

2002, Lopez y Rivas 2000). One of the central concerns consists in analytically

differentiating between “administered multiculturalism” and a transformative

multiculturalism from below (Hale 2002).

Liberal theories of multiculturality reproduce the first by limiting and

conceptually reducing the demands of indigenous social movements, as the case of the

Zapatistas, into a serious of cultural politics of recognition and cultural plurality within

the nation-state.8 This runs the risk of marginalizing the ways in which the recognition of

cultural autonomy masks or ignores structural inequalities, that is to say, the ways in

which cultural differences are inextricably tied to political economic processes. An

approximation from a liberal multicultural framework renders invisible the historicity of

6 Rosaldo 1997, Flores y Rina 1997, Kymlika 1995, Parekh 1997

7 Sieder 2002, Díaz-Polanco 2006. Assies, W., G. van der Haar, A. Hoekema 1999, Gonzalez Casanova and

Roitman 1996, Brysk 2000, Warren 1998, Sieder 2002, Van Cott 2000, Van Cott 1994, Yasher 1998,

Bartolome and Barabas 1998, Leyva; Gross 2000, Gustafson, B. 2002. 8 Sartori (2001), Kymlicka (1999), Taylor (1994), Young (1989).

16

social politics and the articulation to the categories of race, ethnicity, class and gender.

At the same time, several studies exemplify how, according to geographical and historical

conditions, these facilitate and articulated to neoliberal governing processes (Hale 2006,

Povinelli 2002, Yasher 1998, Postero 2007). In this sense, I coincide with E. San Juan

when, in Cultural Studies and Racism (2002), he argues that multiculturalism can be

transformed into a reform tactic to implement neoliberal governing logics which

generates stability, privatize identities and regulate differences in ways that fossilize these

racial, class, nationality (and I would add gender) differences (San Juan p.6).9

In contrast to liberal multicultural theories, other theorists analyze transformative

for multicultural processes from below. A month these, San Juan recuperates the

decolonial political imaginary of Franz Fanon, key intellectual of African anti-colonial

struggles. His thoughts and philosophy demonstrate the mediated articulation between

race and class necessary to confront the hierarchies of cultural differences found in

postcolonial regimes (p.330). Liberation is defined by Fanon as a result of social

struggles from which the same colonized actors generate a cultural revolution from

below, so as to transform “the subjugated spectators into privilege actors, illuminated by

the grand brightness of history” (1968, p. 36-37). From these anti-colonial struggles

emerge new subjects which do owe their liberation to a supranatural power, such as the

state. The object that has been colonized is transformed into a human through the very

process of her or his liberation. Conscious of the dangers of neocolonialism and that

internalization of colonial forces, Fanon emphasizes that the profound transformation of

the colonized is intimately related to the production of a new imagined community,

which he clothes under the concept of nation, a new configuration between the

government and the governing and against current and residual modes of production.

Fanon is one of the intellectual revolutionaries that has most effectively summarized and

expressed the desire is of liberation of (neo) colonized peoples. He is a fundamental

reference that nourishes the continuous theoretical-action implicit in the concept of

decolonization, a utopian frame necessary to maintain within the scope of one's analytical

horizon.

In this dissertation, I contextualize Fanon’s theories of decolonization within the

9 See also Hall (2000), Goldberg (2002).

17

historical and geographical particularites of Latin America. As part of transnational

dialogues across the “Third World” during the 1960s and 1970s, Latin American critical

thought retheorized conditions of social inequality in the continent from the contributions

of anti-colonial theorists involved in national liberation struggles in Asia and Africa in

the post-WWII era (Fanon 1967, Memmi 1965, Constantino 1978, Cesaire 2000). They

analyzed the historical particularities of Latin America which had undergone struggles

for independence almost two centuries before and yet continued to exist in disparite

relations vis a vis Europe and the United States. Mexico, for example, had already lived a

second revolution in 1910 and had achieved state led agrarian reform, processes of

industrialization and substantial infrastructure projects, yet continued to be located on the

periphery in relation to other nation-states as well as experience an internal center-

periphery along a rural-urban split, manifested in class and ethnic differences.

Theories of internal colonialism emerged to offer analytical dimensions to these

social problems. According to González Casanova, “internal colonialism corresponds to a

structure of social relations based on a domination and exploitation among culturally

heterogenous groups…It differs from class differences because the explotation is not only

of the worker but of an entire population” and is the product of an encounter between two

historically distinct civilizations, races or cultures (1965). According to the author,

internal colonialism is visible in the the uneven development within under-developed

nation-states and manifests itself along an urban-rural ethnic class divide.

Recent publications question the continued relevance of internal colonialism

theories. Under globalization and increased migration patterns, some authors point to the

changes creating a translationalization of the peasantry (Kearney 1996, Edelman 1998),

while others point to indigenous migration to urban predominantly mestizo centers (Pérez

Ruiz 2002, Valencia Rojas 1999, 2000) to question to its urban-rural divide.. From neo-

marxist positions, critiques have surfaced which suggest that an analysis from an internal

colonialism perspective foments processes of blancanization, argue that social disparities

between populations groups reflect exclusively cultural differences and that a culturalist

analysis decenters the focus on class based struggles (González Casanova 2005).

Recent reformulations seek to relocate the relevance of these theories in order to

better comprehend current discursive and material manifestations of recolonization that

18

maintain ethnically- racialized populations in subservient positions vis a vis dominant

groups. I draw from arguments that locate the continued relevance of an internal

colonialism framework based on the role that the nation-state continues to play in

capturing, directing and reformulating globazing political-economic and cultural logics of

capital. At the same time, processes of internal recolonization are evident in the tactics of

low intensity warfare and the militarization of daily life in important indigenous regions

of Mexico, which reflect internal wars oftentimes linked to international war machines.

Thirdly, as Peruvean writer Mariátegui suggested several decades ago, the liberation of

indigenous peoples (and I would add Afro-Latins) represent the liberation of society

within a nation-state as a whole. In this sense, it becomes imperative to analyze the

articulation of internal colonial processes to international and transational phenomena and

the responses of indigenous organizations in their current struggles for autonomy and

self-determination (González Casanova 2005). In the dissertation I analyze processes of

decolonization under current conditions framed by these three manifestations of the

continuation of internal recolonization.

The neoliberal state and its governing logics

Neoliberalism is a concept which reflects the reconfiguration of relationships

between the state, the market and citizens. It encompasses a series of processes which,

according to peasants from southeastern Mexico, aggravated their conditions of poverty

at the end of the 1980s. It was one of the primary motives behind the EZLN’s decision to

declare an armed uprising on January 1, 1994. Fourteen years later, the same time which

has transpired since NAFTA went into the effect, we find ourselves immersed in a new

phase of neoliberalism. Today, the population does not live the same neoliberal context in

which war was declared.

More than 25 years have passed since the debt crisis of 1982 served as the motive

behind Mexican state restructuring. The Washington Consensus, the recipe classified as a

“bitter pill” by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank (both based in the

US Capitol) contained the ingredients of the famous structural adjustment programs. The

recipe consisted in states in the South swallowing a series of juridical and policy reforms

19

in order to dismantle state protectionist mechanisms, privatize national businesses, create

incentives to attract foreign investment and reduce the federal budget focused on social

programs (Williamson 1989).

Its first phase, which began at the beginning of the 1980s and concluded during

the mid-1990s, is defined by policies which locate the market as the primary regulating

space which determines the social and economic development of the nation-state. Milton

Freedman and the Chicago school were its intellectual founders, Chile in the years

immediately following Pinochet’s coup d'état, it incipient laboratory. Mexico would be

the first country in which neoliberal policies would be implemented in a programmed and

systematic manner.

However, a shift in the neoliberal doctrine is apparent during the second half of

the 1990s, during the same period in which Zapatista support bases launched their first

autonomous programs. Documents published by multilateral institutions, such as the

World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, begin to emphasize the importance of

governability in strengthening human capital as part of the development of democratic

processes and the production of new citizenships within the nation-state. Aihwa Ong, in

Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in citizenship and sovereignty, refers to these

processes as the internalization of philosophical principles that emphasize economic

efficiency and an ethical logical based on the responsibility of the individual. An

internalization of neoliberal principles that generate new mechanisms which regulate,

govern and produce subjectivities (Ong 2006). Part of the necessary conditions of

governability includes public policies that encourage citizen-subjects in diverse sectors of

society to actively participate in improving their living conditions. New social programs,

such as those created to combat conditions of extreme poverty, emphasize the co-

responsibility and co-participation of the population. The emphasis consists in producing

new neo-liberal subjects which better respond to the conditions offered by the market.

It is in this shift toward neoliberal governance where this doctoral dissertation is

situated. In the social sciences circulate distinct definitions of neoliberalism. Some debate

the term as an exclusive economic theory, as the structural reconfiguration between

global capital, the market and the state (Brenner 1998, Demmers 2001, Giddens 2001,

Petras 2001, Stiglitz 2002). Others consider hegemonic discourses, as civilizing model

20

which transmits and imposes the basic values of liberal society, with specific definitions

of the human race, richness, progress and what constitutes a “good life” (Lander 2005). I

focus on the techniques and logics of governance through an emphasis in self-

management and self-government. The technologies are based on principles that conceive

the individual as competitive, capable of self-regulation and enact rational and calculated

decisions (Ong 2006).

I initially based my definition on Foucault’s theories of governmentality, as

interpreted and developed by British and Australian schools. These theorists define

neoliberalism as the art of governance, where the individual is considered an active and

free subject, a homo economicus.10

For Nikolas Rose, neoliberalism is a form of

governance in which the reductive capacities of the state are accompanied by the

proliferation of technologies that remake the social sphere and citizen-subjects. The

population tends to be defined on particular definitions of freedom, emphasizing self-

management and entrepreneurship in all spheres of daily life, for example, in terms of

health, education and economic productive capacities. Rose emphasizes the co-

responsibility of the individual and includes the active participation of collective actors

responsible for ensuring their own well-being.

This definition reflects the most contemporary expression of what Foucault

referred to as bio-power, modern techniques of governance that exercise regulatory

control mechanisms onto the population and onto individuals in order to direct, extract

and model biological and social forms of life. In Multitude, Michael Hardt and Antonio

Negri expand the concept of biopower to analyze the new reterritorialization of global

capital and immaterial labor in spheres such as knowledge, culture, communication and

the affective. It isn’t that one is the result of the other, a chain of cause and effect, as if

the art of governing under neoliberalism was determined by new capital interests, rather

both are articulated through mutually constitutive relations, and, as detailed below, their

effects acquire particular implications in their current manifestations in Chiapas.

Theories on the art of neoliberal governing serve to explain how these

technologies operate in advanced liberal democracies. As part of the geopolitics of

10

See Burchell, Gordon and Miller (1992), Dean (1999), Hindess (1997), Mitchell (1986), Rose (1999),

Rose and Barry (1996).

21

knowledge, theoretical production in the North contains superior value to that of the

global South. Partly for that reason, the theories have been used to understand contexts

and realities in other regions of the world, particularly in the south. The same

assumptions are reflected in social science theories which conceive neoliberalism as

designed exclusively by countries in the North, primarily the United Status, or by

multilateral agencies under their control, such as the World Bank, to be implemented and

imposed without discretions, in a uniform cookie cutter manner, in the South. I

understand neoliberal logics of government in an opposing manner, by recognizing the

lack of detailed studies on its particular characteristics in the third world. In this sense, I

borrow Aihwa Ong’s definition of neoliberalism as an exception:

"Neoliberalism as exception articulates a constellation of mutually constitutive

relationships that are not reducible to one or the other...the neoliberal exception in

governing constructs political spaces that are differently regulated and linked to global

circuits. Such reflexive techniques of social engineering and the reengineering of the self

interact with diverse ethical regimes, crystallizing contemporary problems of citizenship

and ethical living” (p.9).

To this definition, I incorporate the argument of Achille Mbembe elaborated in

his essay, “Necropolitics”, which details how governing logics in (neo)colonial spaces

erase the borders separating politics from war, hence creating conditions of racism that

separate those encouraged to live from those permitted or systematically encouraged to

die (2003).

I identify and map the historical and geographical particularities of neoliberal

logics of governance in Chiapas from the categories of gender, class and race. For this

task, I draw from two theoretical contributions which expand and improve Foucault’s

concepts. I use Anibal Quijano’s the coloniality of power which argues that capitalism

and colonialism emerged simultaneously and are mutually constitutive in Latin America.

Both are mediated by the concept of race. “The new historical identities produced over

the idea of race were associated to the roles and places of new legal structures regulating

labor. That is how both elements, race and divisions of labor, became structurally

associated and mutually reinforced (Quijano p. 204).” Quijano does not refer to

dependent relationships, but rather to those which are structurally related across time and

22

space. The author demonstrates how both concepts continue to influence the production

of indigenous and afro-latin subjects in the continent. According to Santiago Castro

Gómez, the coloniality of power expands and corrects Foucault’s power-discipline

because it situates the modern state within global relations of power, firstly configured by

colonial relations. For example, in order to analyzing alterity in Mexico, one can’t focus

exclusively on the construction of the mestizo and the indigenous within the republic, but

must analyze the historical location Mexico maintained with Europe and with the United

States.

To this concept, I add the interseccional theorization of power relations elaborated

by Dorothy Smith and Chandra Mohanty. Smith coined the term “Global Relations of

Rule” in order to analyze not only the relations between capitalism and colonialism but

racial gendered inequalities. These authors highlight institutional knowledges and

organizing processes of power as techniques of governance rather than as frozen

indicators. Mohanty considers that this framework permits transcending the dicotomies

which oftentimes dehistoricize analyses of gender, race and class. Combining the concept

global relations of rule with the coloniality of power permits analyzing the historical

relationships between indigenous struggles for liberation and the rearticulation of

hegemonic forms of governance that generate recolonizing racial and gendered processes

as part of broader political-economic processes.

Indigenous political identities and processes of ethnic-racialization

In a Congress with indigenous organizations and international donors held in the

state of Querétaro in February 2008, don Samuel Ruiz García, ex-Bishop of San Cristóbal

de las Casas located current struggles of indigenous peoples Mexico in the historical

trajectory dating back to the colony, to the famous debates between Fray Bartolomé de

las Casas and Sepúlveda on whether or not indigenous peoples had souls. He narrated the

continuities and ruptures between different historical periods, beginning with the colonial

era, to the post independent neoliberal era of Benito Juárez, the Mexican Revolution, the

populist period, until reaching the current neoliberal moment. According to Ruiz García,

one of the central contradictions weaving together different eras of the 20th century can

23

be summarized in the following phrase: “The ideology of racism is argued to be

inexistent, but in practice, racism is evident”.

In the gap between the apparent contradiction exists the negation, both in popular

commonsense and in dominant discourses, of the category of race as a social construct

generating differences in Mexico and in Latin America more generally. What occurs

between the negation of the category of race and the racism which describes the lived

experiences of important sectors of the population? Teasing out the complexities of the

question allows us to more effectively analyze the construction of indigenous

subjectivities in the republic. On the one hand, the denial of racism justifies the presence

of cultural identities and yet discrimination and exploitations continue maintaining

"ethnic groups" in the lowest rungs of the social ladder.

In order to decipher the ambiguity and identify the multiple relations of power

necessary for its reproduction, I borrow the term ethnic-racial used by Alicia Castellanos

in her publication, Imágenes del Racismo en México (2003), in order to discuss the

production of the indigenous category in Mexico. The unity of the two words permits, on

one hand, to signal the ambiguities which exist in differences between the indigenous and

mestizo as relational identities. Castellanos argues that the category of race has not

disappeared from the social imaginary and believes as to the superiority/inferiority of

peoples and their culture continues to exist. At the same time, one can locate the

ethnocentrism of the mestizo in which racism is expressed through culture and identity.

On the other hand, the dash separating both terms renders visible the ways in which

biological codes, innate to the values, habits and attitudes of "being indigenous",

elements which construct a suppose it racial category, are masked in apparently ethnic

cultural characteristics (de la Cadena 2000, Warren 2001).

The term ethnic-racial also allows us to locate continuities and ruptures with the

past. It helps us to identify how the concept of race, used to describe and organize

populations throughout the colonies was displaced by ethnic categories or by cultural

markers in the post independent period. The construction of ethnic differences creates an

ideology which suggests they are more flexible and can be more easily manipulated to

transform the indigenous to a mestizo (Wade 1997). It is contrasted to the concept of

race, used primarily to create categories of blackness, in which the phenotype is

24

considered a biological element, more rigid in comparison to ethnic flexibility. The

displacement of a racial for an ethnic category has played a fundamental role in

constructing the ideology of mestizaje. As part of this construction, the masking of racial

codes as part of the production of cultural identities generates part of the vertical ordering

of Mexican society.

I use this concept to analyze the multiple articulations of the coloniality of power

via the concept of race (masked in ethnicity), in order to return to a historization of the

political struggles of indigenous peoples and the dialectical relationships between race,

class and gender. It is an important step to render visible the structures of power which

maintain a racial ordering of society (Carby 1990) and demonstrate how racialized

gendered constructs perpetuate structures of domination.

These dominant processes of ethnic racialization interact with reflections and

actions of historical consciousness generating what it means to be indigenous. They are

dynamic processes exercised on unequal terrains. In this sense, identities, the ways one

understands oneself as a subject in time and space, emerges not in a vacuum, but are

rather forged through social struggles. Acts of resistance and rebellion are indispensable

and inherent ingredients to its construction. In this dissertation, I analyze the production

of new indigenous political identities as emerging through knowledge produced betwixt

and between the ambiguities and contradictions of racialized cultural processes, processes

which reproduce and destabilize gender, political economic and geographical

inequalities. I analyze how the production of these political identities, in their multiple

manifestations, can simultaneously be the motor behind, and the result of social liberation

(Vargas 2006). For this task, I highlight the central role played by the socialization of

specific memories, that acts of denouncing oppression through the testimonial genre, and

the construction of genealogies of social struggle as part of the production of new

knowledge and actions from which necessarily emerge new political subjectivities (Pérez

1999, Saldaña Portillo 2003, Sandoval 2002; Sudbury 1998, Segura 1999, Saldivar-Hull

2000).

25

A genealogy of Latin American critical thought and decolonizing methodologies

Current theories elaborated by Third World feminist theories offer new

dimensions and questions to the trajectory of critical anthropology and decolonizing

theories which began in the decade of the 60s in Mexico and Latin America.11

Anibal

Quijano forms part of a current of Latin American Critical Thought which, since the

decades of the 60s and 70s, has focused on theorizing as part of the search for solutions to

the central social problems in the continent. Utilizing a Marxist base and influenced by

dependency theories (Cardoso y Faletto 1969) and world systems theories, these authors

argued that in Latin American countries and regions exist neocolonial relations which

maintain the entire continent, especially marginalized populations, in positions of

subordination (Quijano 1993, Lander 1998). Liberating oppressed sectors, especially

indigenous peoples, from an internal colonialism and neo imperialist capitalist logics

forms a central part of the construction of national sovereignty and a national identity

(González Casanova 1965, 2005, Stavenhagen 1969).

In respond, these authors argue for the need to link scientific activity to general

processes of political transformation. Texts such as those elaborated by the Colombian

Fals Borda (1986) reformulated the issues to be researched, how research is conducted,

and why it is carried forth. Based on the assumption that there exists a dialectical

relationship between theory and practice, they developed methodologies to unearth

popular knowledge from the false consciousness sustained by hegemonic processes in

order to the shatter its monopoly on knowledge.

Popular knowledge is rescued through series of techniques, primarily through

consciousness raising workshops. Critical reflections generated in the spaces serve to

name and confront dominant structures of political oppression and use popular

knowledge as a counterweight to elaborate and implement concrete solutions. Fals Borda

defines the objective of action-research as a process which, “implies acquiring

experiences and information to construct a particular type of power -- popular power --

which belongs to oppressed groups and classes and their organizations with the objective

11

I use the category, Third World feminists as a group of academics which form part of an imagined

community. That is to say, that construct alliances based on a series of political affinities rather than

cultural or biological attributes Mohanty (2003, p.46). The concept Third World feminism includes at the

same time the Third World in the First World, for example, latinas, African-Americans as Native

Americans in the United States, or Asians and Africans in Europe, see Sandoval (2000).

26

of defending their just interests and advanced towards shared goals of social change in a

participatory political system” (Fals Borda 1986).12

In the decade of the 80s, the decline in the Soviet Communist model and the

emergence of identity claims, as part of the struggle for the recognition of indigenous and

Afro-latin peoples in the Americas, required once again revising critical epistemologies

created in the social sciences, head is indirectly opening the door to reevaluate research

methodologies (Castro and Mendieta 1998). The revisions led them to theorize on the

multilo