Contains 13 essays which discuss the experiences of indigenous peoples in their quest for municipal and regional indigenous autonomy. Includes discussion of the ILO Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Convention, 1989 (No. 169).

Drawing on an original survey of more than 5,000 respondents, this book argues that, contrary to claims by the 1994 Zapatista insurgency, indigenous and non-indigenous respondents in southern Mexico have been united by socioeconomic conditions and land tenure institutions as well as by ethnic identity. It concludes that - contrary to many analyses of Chiapas's 1994 indigenous rebellion - external influences can trump ideology in framing social movements. Rural Chiapas's prevalent communitarian attitudes resulted partly from external land tenure institutions, rather than from indigenous identities alone. The book further points to recent indigenous rights movements in neighboring Oaxaca, Mexico, as examples of bottom-up multicultural institutions that might be emulated in Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America.

Over the past two decades, Zapatista indigenous community members have asserted their autonomy and self-determination by using everyday practices as part of their struggle for lekil kuxlejal, a dignified collective life connected to a specific territory. This in-depth ethnography summarizes Mariana Mora’s more than ten years of extended research and solidarity work in Chiapas, with Tseltal and Tojolabal community members helping to design and evaluate her fieldwork. The result of that collaboration—a work of activist anthropology—reveals how Zapatista kuxlejal (or life) politics unsettle key racialized effects of the Mexican neoliberal state. Through detailed narratives, thick descriptions, and testimonies, Kuxlejal Politics focuses on central spheres of Zapatista indigenous autonomy, particularly governing practices, agrarian reform, women’s collective work, and the implementation of justice, as well as health and education projects. Mora situates the proposals, possibilities, and challenges associated with these decolonializing cultural politics in relation to the racialized restructuring that has characterized the Mexican state over the past twenty years. She demonstrates how, despite official multicultural policies designed to offset the historical exclusion of indigenous people, the Mexican state actually refueled racialized subordination through ostensibly color-blind policies, including neoliberal land reform and poverty alleviation programs. Mora’s findings allow her to critically analyze the deeply complex and often contradictory ways in which the Zapatistas have reconceptualized the political and contested the ordering of Mexican society along lines of gender, race, ethnicity, and class.

The dissertation examines contemporary struggles for autonomy and self-governance in the P’urhépecha region of Michoacán, Mexico. Although P’urhépecha ethno-political movements have not emerged necessarily as autonomy struggles, this work argues that native communities have constructed ethnic discourses through demands for territorial rights and local security. Through the unfolding of such movements, P’urhépecha communities have inserted a political discourse around ethnic revival and the recognition of self-determination rights, consolidating demands for self-governance, following customary law, and outside of partisan politics. Framed within the theory of the “New Social Movements,” which examine collective actions by granting more visibility to issues other than class, such as ethnicity, gender, and environmentalism, to name a few, the work attempts to provide a meta-theoretical understanding of indigenous mobilizations, emphasizing “new forms of making politics.” By interweaving an extensive bibliographical and archival research, as well as ethnographic methods, such as participant observation, and oral interviewing, this work presents the struggles of contemporary autonomy movements in Michoacán, and their diverse actors. In this way, the dissertation contributes to building knowledge on communalism, ethnic revival mechanisms, as well as the praxis of self-governance. In this way, the work describes strategies of socio-political organization, which may be emulated beyond indigenous and local contexts. The first chapters follow a chronological order to illustrate the emergence of ethno-political mobilization in the P’urhépecha area. Chapter 1 introduces the theoretical framework, as well as the research methods. Chapter 2 examines the inception of contemporary autonomy struggles, and addresses the land movement of 1979 in Michoacán’s Lake Pátzcuaro. The chapter focuses on the deployment of communalism as an organizing strategy, as well as the emergence of regional solidarity networks, and the incorporation of culture to P’urhépecha people’s territorial claims. Chapter 3 pays attention to the process of ethnic re-vindication, and the building of transcommunal alliances in the P’urhépecha region, deploying strategic essentialism to foster indigenous unity and consolidate demands toward political autonomy. Meanwhile, Chapter 4 analyzes the 2011 forest defense movement in Cherán, a native community located in the P’urhépecha highlands area. Initially, the movement revolved around three specific demands (security, justice, and the recovery of the forest), but it transformed eventually into a struggle for local self-governance, proposing new forms of making politics outside political parties. The rest of the chapters are organized thematically, to emphasize key issues in contemporary P’urhépecha autonomy movements. Chapter 5 examines the establishment of communal governance councils and Rondas Comunales (community security guards), while Chapter 6 discusses the conceptual frameworks embedded in P’urhépecha practices of self-governance. More specifically, the chapter focuses on two specific principles: communal work and collective power. Chapter 7 analyzes the current struggles for economic self-administration in the P’urhépecha region as a facet of self-governance, and considers the transition from partisan politics to customary law. Chapter 8 concludes with general considerations for indigenous social movements, and frames P’urhépecha autonomy struggles within three main lines of action: ethnic revival, communalism, and self-governance.

Shannan Matiace looks at political consciousness amongst Indians of the Chiapas in Mexico, tracing how it has developed from the founding of peasants' associations in the 1930s to the recent Zapatista uprising.

The Mexican Revolution gave rise to the Mexican nation-state as we know it today. Rural revolutionaries took up arms against the Díaz dictatorship in support of agrarian reform, in defense of their political autonomy, or inspired by a nationalist desire to forge a new Mexico. However, in the Gran Nayar, a rugged expanse of mountains and canyons, the story was more complex, as the region’s four Indigenous peoples fought both for and against the revolution and the radical changes it bought to their homeland. To make sense of this complex history, Nathaniel Morris offers the first systematic understanding of the participation of the Náayari, Wixárika, O’dam, and Mexicanero peoples in the Mexican Revolution. They are known for being among the least “assimilated” of all Mexico’s Indigenous peoples. It’s often been assumed that they were stuck up in their mountain homeland—“the Gran Nayar”—with no knowledge of the uprisings, civil wars, military coups, and political upheaval that convulsed the rest of Mexico between 1910 and 1940. Based on extensive archival research and years of fieldwork in the rugged and remote Gran Nayar, Morris shows that the Náayari, Wixárika, O’dam, and Mexicanero peoples were actively involved in the armed phase of the revolution. This participation led to serious clashes between an expansionist, “rationalist” revolutionary state and the highly autonomous communities and heterodox cultural and religious practices of the Gran Nayar’s inhabitants. Morris documents confrontations between practitioners of subsistence agriculture and promoters of capitalist development, between rival Indian generations and political factions, and between opposing visions of the world, of religion, and of daily life. These clashes produced some of the most severe defeats that the government’s state-building programs suffered during the entire revolutionary era, with significant and often counterintuitive consequences both for local people and for the Mexican nation as a whole.