Mexico’s Forgotten Find Cause for New Hope

High in the Sierra Madre mountains of Oaxaca, a simple village is practicing the kind of autonomy that could change the future for millions of indigenous people throughout Mexico.

The mayor was chosen not by secret ballot, the way of Western democracies, but by village assembly, the traditional method of the Zapotec Indians. He presides over a centuries-old system that provides basic services, maintains customs and resolves disputes for the village’s 1,200 people.

Many of Mexico’s indigenous people barely scratch a living out of corn farming and funds sent by relatives from cities on both sides of the border with the United States. They suffer from illiteracy six times greater than the national average. Intestinal diseases kill Indians at three times the rate of non-Indians.

But like the San Pablo Guelatao villagers, most have retained a cultural strength that has withstood pressures to assimilate and ensures their unity and survival. Now they are on the verge of attaining something historic: the right to govern themselves, manage their own budgets, impose their own justice and exploit their abundant natural resources. Such constitutional reforms, some say, could create a new Mexico.

Attention has focused in recent years on the uprising in Chiapas state and the charismatic leader of the Zapatista National Liberation Army, Subcommander Marcos. That 7-year-old struggle is coming to a head this month with Marcos’ caravan to Mexico City to argue for the legislation that would grant some autonomy to all of Mexico’s 62 indigenous groups.

But the problems of the indigenous are hardly unique to Chiapas, and the proposed solutions reach far beyond the embattled south.

As he tries to reshape his country, new President Vicente Fox faces two overriding challenges: poverty and security. He has recognized that tackling Indian poverty will give him powerful leverage for raising overall living standards. And that could improve security by eliminating the reasons for some armed revolts and drug trafficking.

“We are at the dawn of a new country that will let us recover the richness of all the peoples of Mexico,” said Felipe de Jesus Vicencio, a senator from Fox’s center-right National Action Party who is a leading member of the congressional peace commission for Chiapas.

Re-energizing the native societies descended from such great Mesoamerican cultures as the Olmecs, the Toltecs and the Aztecs could unleash human capital that has been largely ignored in the rush to modernize.

“The indigenous people are like shadows--or like people who don’t have a shadow,” said Maria Jose Medina of the Compartimos action group in Yucatan state, where the Maya people make up nearly half the population.

Most Mexicans a Mix of Spanish and Indian

The attitude in Mexico toward indigenous people has always been schizophrenic. Unlike in the United States or Argentina, where little mixing occurred between conquerors and the conquered, in Mexico about 90% of the population is mestizo, of mixed Spanish and Indian descent.

Although Mexicans lionize their Indian pre-colonial heritage and the richness of the mestizo culture, they have long ignored or tried to assimilate the remaining indigenous communities, which make up what the late anthropologist Guillermo Bonfil Batalla called Mexico profundo, or “deep Mexico.”

The Zapatista uprising sparked new thinking about ways to incorporate the strengths of modern indigenous life into national development--and not just admire the Indians’ folkloric past. In Yucatan, the state director of the National Indigenous Institute, Arturo Caballero, noted: “The first challenge is to know and respect the living presence of the Maya culture--not just as our roots, but its modern reality and its proposals for development in the region. The challenge is to find ways to take advantage of Maya ideas and values and still live in the global economy.”

San Pablo Guelatao--a 1 1/2-hour drive northeast of the city of Oaxaca, the state capital--is a laboratory for national reforms. In 1998, the state adopted Mexico’s most progressive indigenous rights law, which acknowledges that most villages are ruled by communal tradition rather than Western democratic notions.

The mayor, Aldo Gonzalez, is a tall, handsome Zapotec who wears his hair in a long ponytail. He is an appropriate heir to Benito Juarez, Mexico’s only full-blooded indigenous president, who was born here in 1806.

‘To Be Different Makes Us a Richer Country’

Gonzalez left home to earn an electronic engineering degree in Mexico City and, even more unusual, he came back. He founded a radio station that broadcasts in Zapotec as well as Spanish and promotes Indian cultural and social issues.

He is part of an emerging indigenous elite that moves deftly in two worlds. He advised the Zapatistas as they negotiated a reform package in 1996, which then stalled until Fox’s inauguration Dec. 1. Two years ago, the village assembly made him mayor.

“In school, we were all told that we were just Mexican, that the Indians should disappear,” he said. “The transformation now is that we are recognizing the differences among us. To be different makes us a richer country, it gives us not one identity but many, and we are proud of them all.”

The problems plaguing Mexico’s indigenous peoples range from economic and health inequities to injustice, discrimination, migration and loss of culture.

Xochitl Galvez, the new presidential advisor for indigenous affairs, is an Otomi from the state of Hidalgo. She is a successful entrepreneur who designs high-tech buildings. The World Economic Forum last year named her one of 100 young global leaders to watch. Yet, she recalled at a recent seminar, she was fired some years ago on her first day at a job in Mexico City because she didn’t have the right accent.

In her first policy address this month, Galvez was blunt:

* Only 36% of indigenous children complete primary school, compared with 75% nationally.

* Deaths from intestinal infections number 84 per 100,000 among indigenous people, compared with 27 nationally.

* Only 42% of Indian homes have running water, versus 84% nationally.

The 2000 census put the indigenous population at 8.7 million in a nation of 97 million people. Using different methodology, Mexico’s National Indigenous Institute estimates the figure at 10.6 million.

The census indicated that 62% of indigenous people are illiterate, compared with 10% nationally. What’s more, 21% of indigenous men speak only their native language, not Spanish.

Marcos Matias Alonso, director of the National Indigenous Institute, is a Nahua from Guerrero. In the “real indigenous world,” he said in an interview, “the rivers are poisoned, the ecological deterioration is terrible, the hills are without trees, the rivers are without water, the villages are without people.

“The fundamental priority is to eat, to stay alive.”

San Pablo Guelatao has endured well-meaning and often misguided paternalism for decades. Thanks to its heritage as Juarez’s birthplace, the town has received more than its share of aid.

Hilario Ruiz, a member of the council of elders, said the government once gave people pigs, but the animals became sick and died; American cattle were later introduced in the 1960s, but they needed costly care and too much grazing land.

Gonzalez, the mayor, recalled that another development program built the town’s lone paved road, which destroyed the ancient irrigation canal; people abandoned their nutrition-rich vegetable patches for lack of water. Officials persuaded villagers to cut down fruit trees and plant “improved” varieties, but they were inappropriate and withered.

“Now we are trying again to decide for ourselves what we want, and take our own decisions so we can continue living here, according to our own vision,” Gonzalez said.

For many, the only option has been to leave. Though providing one of the few sources of income, migration has also torn families apart.

Migrants don’t head only to the United States. Shantytown suburbs ring many Mexican cities, and Indian migrants from the south fill the seasonal labor barracks in northern farming states such as Sinaloa and Baja California.

Money sent home from the U.S. by Mexicans--$6 billion to $7 billion annually--helps prop up Indian villages throughout the country.

In the Indian communities of Hidalgo state’s arid Mezquital Valley, home to about 200,000 Otomi, who call themselves Hnahnu, the homes that have sent migrants to the United States are easy to pick out. They are the ones with satellite dishes, aluminum window trimmings and sometimes even a second story. And these are often the houses where only children and old people live.

Many Children Move to the ‘Other Side’

In the village of Boxhuada, 20 miles north of the regional center of Ixmiquilpan, Juan Zapote and his wife, Antonia Cruz, served a visitor a glass of pulque, a milky alcoholic beverage distilled from the maguey cactus.

Two of their four children live in Wichita, Kan., and send back money when they can. “Almost every family here has children on the other side,” Zapote said. “Thank God they can help us.”

Still, Zapote and his wife mainly live on tortillas, beans and nopal cactus fronds, the only thing that grows on their dusty ranch. They eat meat just once a week or so, Zapote said. Now 64, he works as a day laborer a few times a week for $7 a day. He and his wife speak Otomi, but their children have lost the language.

Cultural deterioration has its roots in the decades in which the government policy was to force Indians to become part of Mexican society.

That gave way in the 1980s and ‘90s to the notion of “participation,” meant to allow indigenous cultures to coexist with the nation’s dominant way of life.

Vicente Lara, who works at the Academy of the Hnahnu Culture in nearby Remedios, said he spoke only Otomi until he was 15. When he went to high school in a neighboring town, “there was terrible discrimination against those of us who wore huaraches [sandals], there was terrible racism. But the people there were also Otomi; it was just that they had left behind their language and culture. We were punished for speaking our language.”

At the culture academy’s modest office in a converted schoolroom, director Hermenogildo Lozano and a few other staff members try to promote the Hnahnu culture. But the academy staff mostly graduated from a short-lived university program in ethno-linguistics, offered in Michoacan state in the 1980s.

“No new talent is being developed. There are no funds to pass down what we’ve learned,” Lozano said.

Although the use of indigenous language textbooks broadened in the 1990s, many, he said, contain errors and need revision. If teachers speak the language, Lozano said, they don’t use it to address students--the native language is relegated to one class period a day.

Radio is one force for preserving native culture. The Voice of Hnahnu plays regional music, transmits community messages and reinforces the language. One recent day, the station was advising a mountain village that a local migrant had been arrested trying to cross into the United States but that he was fine.

The station is one of 16 funded by the indigenous institute that broadcast in the major indigenous languages as well as Spanish. Roberto Garrido, the institute’s regional director, said Voice of Hnahnu counts 600,000 listeners.

Facing poverty, migration and cultural erosion, Mexico’s indigenous people are turning back to their traditional strengths: collective support and community service systems.

The legislation stemming from the San Andres Accord, as the 1996 Chiapas agreement is known, would allow autonomy over issues including local rule, justice and culture.

The previous government argued that such autonomy could undermine national sovereignty and create conflicts between existing and new indigenous structures.

But on his fifth day in office last December, Fox submitted the package to Congress.

“It goes beyond [Chiapas] to the question of how do we rethink the relationship of indigenous peoples with the state and what is the new conception of the Mexican state. This change will for the first time include the Indian peoples in the conception of a new citizenship,” said Rodolfo Stavenhagen, a prominent sociologist.

Some members of Fox’s own party have worried that autonomy could lead to the balkanization of Mexico. For example, the Nahua people live in 10 central Mexican states; the fear is that regional autonomy could lead to conflicts with state governments.

Stavenhagen, a professor at the Colegio de Mexico and now a visiting professor at Harvard, said such fears are misguided. “They want to be included, as their own peoples with their distinct identity. This means taking over the capacity to decide what is best for themselves.”

Galvez, the presidential advisor, said in her policy speech that the self-rule of towns like San Pablo Guelatao will be central to Fox’s approach.

“If you travel through this country, you are going to find the same demands in all the indigenous communities: recognition of their autonomy, recognition of their usage and customs, respect for their traditions and, most of all, the power to benefit from the soil where they live.”

The San Andres Accord would enact a series of collective rights for Mexico’s indigenous peoples.

They could “decide their own forms of social, economic, political and cultural coexistence”; resolve internal disputes; elect authorities according to traditional norms; control collectively the natural resources in their territories (except those, like petroleum, that belong to the nation); and control financial resources to be allotted to them by the states.

The Oaxaca model could be an example. The state has 15 ethnic groups, dominated by Zapotecs and Mixtecs, and has the highest proportion of indigenous people--nearly 70%--of any Mexican state.

Municipalities may choose whether to elect their officials through “usage and customs” or through political parties. No fewer than 412 of the 570 towns in Oaxaca have chosen the traditional route, using a town assembly. Electoral conflicts have declined sharply.

Although some activists criticize the reforms as insufficient, most acknowledge progress.

“The local autonomy system has allowed hundreds of communities to maintain traditional systems of landownership and traditional forms of organization,” said Eduardo Torres, head of the CAMPO nongovernmental development group. “This has achieved stability and respect for ‘governability’ in Oaxaca, where communities are allowed to make their own decisions.”

The day-to-day system is built on obligatory community service called the tequio, in which people give a number of days of labor a year to the community to build sewer systems, maintain roads and otherwise keep the town functioning. Some communities require up to 50 tequio days a year.

“The tequio hasn’t been recognized sufficiently,” said Gonzalez, the San Pablo Guelatao mayor. “The towns have been able to do great things without money. We have built a new drainage system with our own picks and buckets, each person doing two or three [yards]. . . . If the tequio was counted formally as tax collection, Oaxaca would be among the highest collectors in the country.”

Some religious groups have opposed the tequio, calling it involuntary labor. Those who don’t do their service are sanctioned or fined. Gonzalez calls the tequio an essential force for community-building. “If we didn’t have the tequio, the community wouldn’t exist.”

Another pillar of the indigenous structure is the series of positions that people start filling at age 18 as they work their way up through the village hierarchy. These positions start with topil, the lowest rank of town assistant, and rise up through administrative, police or church positions to mayor--and then the council of elders. In some towns, the responsibility is taken so seriously that officials cannot have sexual relations for up to two months before taking office.

Etelberto Santos, mayor of Zacatepec Mije, said that 65 people serve in this structure in his coffee-growing community. “I consult with the council of elders and hear their ideas, and we work out proposals that I put to the assembly,” Santos said.

Community judicial authorities grant divorces, resolve land disputes and mete out sentences for crimes such as theft.

Salomon Nahmad, one of Mexico’s most respected anthropologists, has argued since the late 1970s that such approaches would foster greater development. That stance contributed to his firing as director of the National Indigenous Institute in 1982.

“I insisted that it was time to change the model from integration to participation and self-management of projects and funds,” Nahmad recalled in an interview at his Oaxaca home.

Now, finally, he sees hope for real change.

“I believe that to the extent that communities have better capacity to control their own resources, and their right to do so is recognized, these people will live better,” Nahmad said.

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One Nation, Many People

Mexico’s indigenous peoples comprise 62 separate ethnic groups. They speak 91 languages and include descendants of major Mesoamerican cultures such as the Olmecs, the Toltecs and the Aztecs. According to estimates, they account for between 8.7 million and 10.6 million of Mexico’s 97 million people.

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Historical Perspective

* 1519: The Spanish armada invades Mexico. Two years later, Hernan Cortes conquers Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital. It takes more than 20 years for the Spaniards to subdue the last Maya rebellion on the Yucatan peninsula. Centuries of Spanish domination begin.

* 1847: Maya rebellion erupts in Yucatan. Ensuing revolts there last 50 years.

* 1858-72: Mexico’s only indigenous president, Benito Juarez, holds office.

* 1917: Mexican Revolution ends with constitution granting indigenous land rights.

* 1930s: President Lazaro Cardenas distributes communal land to peasants.

* 1992: 500th anniversary of Columbus’ landing sparks rights movement; Zapatista rebellion in Chiapas state begins two years later.

* 1998: Oaxaca state adopts nation’s most progressive law recognizing indigenous rights and autonomy.

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Sources: Mexican National Statistical Institute; Times Mexico City Bureau