COLUMN ONE : New Push in 500-Year Struggle : Latin America’s Indians are fighting to preserve their culture amid poverty and discrimination. Leaders are pressing to have native people made a top priority for the region.

People who live on this steamy isthmus of southern Mexico say their town is named for the jasmine that scents the air here, juchitan being a word that roughly means “among the flowers.”

But in the rest of Mexico, Juchitan means trouble: The town fought the Aztecs in the 15th Century, the Spaniards in the 16th Century, the French in the 19th Century and the Mexican aristocracy early in the 20th Century. It has played a leading role in every rebellion, from the isthmus’ separatist movements to taking over the town hall to protest fraud in the last municipal elections.

A key reason for Juchitan’s battles has been its struggle to stay Zapotec--recognizable descendants of the Indian civilization that once ruled this land. In that regard, the town has achieved notable successes. Two-thirds of its residents speak Zapotec. Its schools are bilingual. There is a Zapotec cultural center where poets, potters and painters work.

Yet for all Juchitan’s brawling and ethnic pride, its leaders have not overcome the most common problem for Latin America’s 40 million Indians: poverty. Like the rest of the 404 rural Mexican counties that are predominantly Indian, census takers classify Juchitan as impoverished.

“Paradoxically, the people who gave the world more than 100 kinds of food, including such indispensable items as potatoes and corn, are currently among the most undernourished people on the planet,” stated a report published in February by a think tank. “Indians occupy the lowest level in the American social structure. They continue to be oppressed and discriminated against, culturally, socially, politically and racially.”

As Latin American presidents meet this week with leaders of Spain and Portugal to lay the groundwork for a joint commemoration next year of the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’ arrival in this hemisphere--and to discuss other issues--the continent’s Indians have a clear message for them: “This is nothing to celebrate,” said Jenaro Dominguez, an official of the World Council of Indian Peoples, an activist group.

He has displayed his feelings about Columbus Day for nine years. Each Oct. 12, he leads a group of Indians who remove wreaths from the Columbus monument on Mexico City’s elegant Paseo de la Reforma. They march down the boulevard to leave them at the feet of the statue of Cuauhtemoc, the last Aztec emperor.

Appalled by the prospect of a celebration focusing on Columbus, Indian leaders from 17 nations hope to use the quincentenary to propel to the top of Latin leaders’ agenda efforts to end their people’s poverty and isolation. President Carlos Salinas de Gortari of Mexico has agreed to present such a proposal at this week’s meeting.

In doing so, the Indians hope to force Latin America to confront its deepest identity crisis, the conflict between its European and Indian heritages. They want regional leaders to choose between celebrating with Spain and Portugal and aligning themselves with the most oppressed members of their own societies.

The importance of the choice is obvious in Guatemala, Bolivia, Ecuador and Peru, where half the population is Indian. But the decision is significant, too, in countries such as Brazil, Chile and Venezuela. Their small Indian populations are caught up in the region’s most pressing problems: the environment, drugs, migration and urban poverty.

Indian leaders want solutions to address these problems. They hope for judicial reform, land distribution, development strategies and education. They are scarcely interested in semantic issues, such as whether they should be called Indians or Native Americans.

As Efren Capiz, a Nahuatzen from the central Mexico state of Michoacan, said: “We were conquered as Indians, let us be liberated as Indians.”

Capiz, now in his 60s, has fought for Indian rights since he was a child, following his father from one village to the next, organizing to preserve Indian land. He and his wife, Eva, a lawyer, are among the pioneers of an emerging group of Indian professionals who are using international forums--from intergovernmental agencies to art galleries--to renew 500 years of struggle to preserve and develop Indian cultures.

“We believe that after 1492, the normal development of the Indian world was interrupted,” said Dominguez, a lawyer who wears long hair and the white cotton shirt and trousers traditional in his native Veracruz.

Natan Warman, a scholar and director of Mexico’s National Indigenous Institute, shares that view. Besides losing 75% to 95% of their total population to war and disease in less than a century, Indian civilizations lost their elites, Warman said. “It was as if all our universities and libraries were destroyed.”

Both the major Indian empires then--the Aztecs in Mexico and the Incas in the Andes of South America--were theocracies. Their scientists, artists and rulers were also priests. “They were barbarously persecuted” by the Inquisition and most were burned at the stake as heretics, Warman said.

Even Indian groups that allied themselves with the Spaniards were forced into virtual slavery. “We got the Bible, and they have the palaces built with our resources,” said Dominguez.

The mixture of the conquerors and the conquered produced a mixed race, or mestizos , people neither European nor Indian. In some cases, aspects of Indian culture survived through them. For example, Paraguay, where barely 1% of the population is Indian, is the only officially bilingual Latin American country. Guarani, the country’s dominant Indian language, is a strong symbol of Paraguayan nationalism.

But more often, mestizos have brought a new form of attack on Indian culture. As Nobel laureate Octavio Paz wrote: “The Mexican does not want to be an Indian or a Spaniard. Nor does he want to be descended from them. He denies them. And he does not affirm himself as a mixture, but rather as an abstraction: He is a man.”

For centuries, Mexico’s Indians were told that if they cut their braids, changed from richly embroidered huipiles to dresses and acted like mestizos , they would be accepted in society. They could trade their culture for prosperity, although the pressures for them to assimilate are less than in many parts of Latin America and the nation’s official policy encourages pluralism.

“Mexico has truly attempted to create a multicultural society,” said Jose Matus Mar, director of the Inter-American Indian Institute. “There is a long tradition, that has not occurred in any other Latin American country, of incorporating Indians in the national agenda. I am a Peruvian from the Andes, so I can judge. Mexico has the best Indian policy in Latin America.”

While Mexico’s 8 million Indians--10% of its population--are the best off in the region, they are far from affluent: 97% of rural Mexico’s Indians live in impoverished counties, as compared to 23% of the overall rural population. While nearly half of all Mexican children finish primary school, only one in five of those in bilingual Indian-language schools completes the sixth grade. Nearly two-thirds of the bilingual schools are one-room schoolhouses.

Living conditions for the 30% of Mexican Indians who live in cities are harder to measure. But early this year, a government report based on studies of Indians living in border cities and the resort of Acapulco concluded: “Indians living in major cities are poor, often extremely poor, and have the lowest, most vulnerable, precarious situations.”

Despite almost a century of sincere, if sometimes misguided, government policy, Mexican Indians face most of the same problems that plague others in the rest of the region.

For the Huichols on the Pacific Coast and the Tarahumaras in the border state of Chihuahua, an environmental disaster looms.

“Indians have been victims of ecological exploitation from which they have not benefited,” said Homero Aridjis, an environmental activist and author of a trilogy set in 1492. “Habitat destruction is causing entire ethnic groups to disappear. Among the Huichols and the Tarahumaras, entire villages are dying of hunger. Ecocide is ethnocide.”

The two groups live and hunt in some of Mexico’s few remaining forested areas, which are being destroyed by illegal logging. In a meeting with Salinas two years ago, the Tarahumaras reported that loggers cut down whole hillsides at night. That destruction is repeated on a giant scale in the Amazon jungle, where loggers, gold miners and settlers wreck Indian lands.

The pillage of their homelands and meager profits from their crops compel Indians to look for alternatives. They must grow other crops or leave.

Because they are in remote areas, Indian lands are often attractive to drug dealers, who pay Indians far more for marijuana or cocaine than they would receive for coffee or corn. An Americas Watch report on Mexican prison conditions found that half the prisoners in Nayarit state penitentiary were Huichols sentenced to seven-year terms for marijuana growing.

Peruvian Indians, who long have grown coca leaves, the source of cocaine, have similar links to drug dealers, with similar results.

The only alternative to involvement with drugs is often migration. The Mixtecs in eastern Oaxaca live in a region that was forest 500 years ago. But logging and overgrazing by cattle, starting in colonial times, has eroded the land so badly that it will be a desert in 40 years, the government predicts.

Half those born in the region migrate, mainly to Baja California or Southern California, where they become seasonal farm laborers. Many leave permanently to join the masses of Indians in Mexico’s cities.

The 1980 census, the most recent available, found 306,000 Indians in Mexico City--the nation’s largest Indian population. They speak 40 languages and are highly visible--weaving in crafts markets, selling rag dolls on street corners or begging in front of hotels. But in a city of 18 million, they have little effect on urban life.

That is not true in Lima, Peru, where the city’s character has been transformed. The once elegant streets of its historic district have become flea markets. Apachetas-- figures from pre-Hispanic religions--appear along with crucifixes in public parks on holidays. Houses built by migrants follow the architecture of the mountains above the coastal city. The best composers, singers and bands of traditional music now live in Lima.

“The result is an inter-regional fusion of cultures, traditions and institutions with a strong Andean component . . . with its own sense of law and morality that depends more on customs, lifestyles and collective decisions than the legal theory on which Peru’s constitution and laws are based,” according to one report.

A similar process is occurring in La Paz, Bolivia, and other spots, where Indians are, in effect, resuming their cultural development after a 500-year interruption.

The results can be seen in a less urban cultural center like Mexico’s Oaxaca, a state of cool, rolling hills and steaming jungles where nearly half the residents speak one of 14 Indian languages. Almost one-fifth of Mexico’s Indians live in this cluster of city-states, conquered first by the Zapotecs, who built the hilltop pyramids of Monte Alban, then by the Aztecs, rulers of what is now Mexico, and finally by Spain.

In recent years, the state capital has become an art hub, where Indian artists who studied in Mexico City or Paris employ traditional craft techniques and colors to produce modern art.

Arnulfo Mendoza learned to weave in his family’s workshop when he was 9. He gained a new appreciation of the craft when Francisco Toledo, a famed Mexican painter, commissioned his father to weave hangings based on his designs. Now 36, Mendoza uses traditional dyes, techniques and motifs to produce untraditional weavings.

“Sometimes I copy what I paint on the loom,” he said. “Other times, I weave directly . . . “

Toledo also has played an important role in developing the community cultural center in Juchitan, providing another arm in the isthmus’ fierce defense of its Zapotec culture. The women here proudly wear traditional dress: an elaborate embroidered tunic and white, fan-shaped head cover for feast days, and a simpler version for daily wear.

“If someone from Juchitan does not speak Zapotec or speaks it badly, that is a cause for shame,” said Vicente Marcial, the cultural center’s director. Zapotec is one of 10 Mexican Indian languages with a literary tradition, a tradition the center helps sustain with reading classes and poetry workshops.

The center also is helping to perpetuate Zapotec music, producing two recordings. “Each instrument has its place, its own expression,” Marcial said, explaining the Zapotec sound. “They all finish together in tremendous chaos.”

In recent years, performers have been adding saxophones, clarinets and trumpets to the traditional flutes and drums. Adaptation illustrates that the Zapotecs of Juchitan are part of a vibrant, growing Indian culture, Warman said.

“We are interested in the development of Indian culture, not simply its preservation,” he said. “Indians are our contemporaries, not museum pieces. Indians must choose which aspects of their culture should be kept and which discarded. Many aspects are the mark of poverty and should not be conserved.”

To keep the culture contemporary, Warman recently commissioned the center to translate Mexico’s new federal electoral code into Zapotec--work that is under way on computers.

Desiderio de Gyves, a retired teacher, is writing a physics book in Zapotec. He has already adapted the Zapotec’s base 20 mathematical system to the more familiar base 10 system used worldwide and has written an introductory algebra text using the adapted system. Using the two books, the center plans to sponsor after-school science classes in Zapotec for fourth- and fifth-graders in 25 villages starting next year.

“We will show them that after 500 years of oppression, we have still been able to incorporate the latest scientific principles into our language,” De Gyves said proudly. “We have not remained isolated.”