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Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies

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Zapatismo and the Legitimacy of Indigenous Rights

Niels Barmeyer
a a

Latin America Institute, Freie Universitt Berlin, Rdesheimer Strae 5456, 14197 Berlin, Germany Available online: 18 Nov 2011

To cite this article: Niels Barmeyer (2011): Zapatismo and the Legitimacy of Indigenous Rights, Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies, 6:3, 329-331 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17442222.2011.617592

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Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies Vol. 6, No. 3, November 2011, pp. 329331

Zapatismo and the Legitimacy of Indigenous Rights

Niels Barmeyer

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The Moral Force of Indigenous Politics: Critical Liberalism and the Zapatistas. By Courtney Jung. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2008. In her book, The Moral Force of Indigenous Politics, Courtney Jung argues the case for reframing the claims of indigenous groups in ways that are consistent with their origins as well as with their social character. The author accuses the contemporary normative discussion over multicultural citizenship of making a fetish of culture by either demanding the privatization of cultural commitments or by insisting on the obligation of democracies to protect the cultural groups making up their citizenry. As an alternative, Jung presents the perspective of critical liberalism, which argues for establishing the legitimacy of particular claims through the language of structural injustice rather than cultural difference. Critical liberalism reorients the political frame away from notions of identity, consensus, and collective rights. Instead, it emphasizes the importance of contestation and membership rights as agents for change in the self-perception and political participation of indigenous peoples in a society that hitherto excluded them. Jung argues that social identities such as race, gender, ethnicity or class function as vessels of political identity, as a result of the way they have been used by the state to regulate access to power. Turning cultural practices, skin color, biological sex, and property ownership into boundaries of inclusion and exclusion, the state has been central for the constitution of political identities. In her analysis the author traces the formation and transformation of political identity among Mexicos rural poor. In this, she focuses on the realignment, from peasant to indigenous identity, outlining the historical changes in self-perceptions among the autochthonous population of Mexico starting from the time of the colony and putting particular emphasis on the recent history of the Zapatista struggle in Chiapas. Since the early 1990s indigenous identity has become a political alternative to peasant identity and, as it has been used a resource by millions of the worlds most dispossessed people to challenge the terms of their exclusion, the author regards it as a political achievement rather than an accident of birth. Moreover, she contends that, because they have been constructed as the antithesis of neoliberal globalization, indigenous people are able put forth a powerful moral critique. While Jung recognizes that liberalism has often been criticized for the exclusions, which sustain it, she argues that the liberal rights regime also offers the terms by
ISSN 17442222 (print)/ISSN 17442230 (online)/11/0303293 2011 Taylor & Francis http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17442222.2011.617592

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N. Barmeyer

which such exclusions can be contested. She notes that, although rights legitimate democratic systems by setting forth a promise the state is pledged to uphold, they also offer internal normative standards by which democratic governments can be held to account. They provide oppressed peoples with a basis on which to constitute the terms of struggle through the formation of new political identities, which Jung regards as a condition of their political agency. The book outlines how, over the course of the 20th century, indigenous peoples have increasingly used the language of rights to establish the legitimacy of their political presence. Indigenous identity thus emerges in the space that has opened up between the international promise of indigenous rights as laid down in convention 169 of the International Labor Organization and the failure by national states to fulfill such promises. Indigenous activists use the same language of selfdetermination and autonomy, consciously employing the proper terminology to link their demands to the language in international declarations using them like a raft to put forth their demands. The author concludes that, while rights provide no guarantee, they do offer a framework for participation and voice serving as a political wedge anchored in moral leverage. With a focus on the southern Mexican state of Chiapas, Jung investigates peasant politics during the 1970s and 1980s, which laid the base for later indigenous politics. It was thus the constitutional right to land redistribution that allowed peasants to establish a genuinely political voice. The author convincingly shows that peasant political identity in Chiapas has been neither automatic nor spontaneous but was shaped by a broad range of activists ranging from the Catholic Church to Maoists radicals. The focus on Chiapas emphasizes the authors key point, which holds that the origins of the indigenous rights movement are to be found not in the desire to protect traditional indigenous communities and practices, but instead in a history of peasant political organization. Unfortunately the author describes the Zapatistas shift of focus from a class-based social revolutionary perspective to indigenous customs and traditions without considering the guerrilla movements strategic motives for survival. This shortcoming is particularly salient as, although the case of Oaxaca is prominently featured in the book, the influence of Oaxacan indigenous rights activists who acted as the Zapatistas advisors in the San Andres negotiations on indigenous autonomy remains without mention. Jung uses the example of the Zapatistas to illustrate how indigenous politics have brought about a democratic opening both by establishing a new discourse of rights and culture and by creating links to international forums and movements. When the author contends that, by making common cause with feminists and the womens rights movement, they have identified themselves as part of a progressive political alliance of marginalized populations, explicitly eschewing a political stance rooted in hidebound traditionalism, one would appreciate some further differentiation. It is questionable how deep such progressive rhetoric by the Zapatistas reaches as often the popular base of indigenous movements is not only antipathetic to feminist ideas but it is simply not in charge of putting out the message heard by an international audience; this is done by a select few public relations-specialists who are well-versed in tuning their words to current global discourses, be they feminist, environmentalist

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Zapatismo and the Legitimacy of Indigenous Rights

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or against neoliberal globalization. Due to an apparent limitation in first-hand sources on the Zapatista movement, the authors portrayal of it appears overly optimistic with regard to the proactive role of women and an alleged gender equality, disregarding the stark discrepancies between the rebels media image and realities on the ground. In the face of limitations and the many risks of cooptation, Jung remains doubtful whether indigenous political organization will develop the capacity to genuinely transform politics and emphasizes the risk of it being limited to the sphere of culture. She cautions that, as long as the indigenous idiom of political contestation limits itself to cultural claims, it will not challenge the fundamental premise of neoliberal reforms that impoverish and marginalize indigenous subsistence farmers. In her final analysis, however, she regards the construction of indigenous political identity as a strategic victory, which allows autochthonous groups to reach beyond the state for alliances to exert pressure for their demands by using electoral and legal strategies that were beyond the scope of peasant activists in the 1970s and 1980s. The book concludes that the responsibility of states lies in the fact that they themselves have forged social groups and political identities by using markers such as cultural practices, phenotypic traits, biological sex, and wealth to organize access to power and delimit the boundaries of citizenship. Jung contends that, like race, class, and gender, culture too develops political resonance when it has been used as a marker of selective inclusion and exclusion. However, the author warns that cultural groups commit a strategic error when they anchor their political claims in cultural difference as they risk being limited to demands for cultural protection and the preservation of tradition, which do not fundamentally challenge the structural conditions of their disadvantaged position. In fact, some states may even promote self-government of their indigenous populations, using territorial autonomy to evade state responsibility for providing development and social services. On the whole, Jungs astute and complex analysis is both illuminating and convincing as well as a highly enjoyable read.

Niels Barmeyer is at the Latin America Institute, Freie Universitat Berlin, Rudesheimer Strae 5456, 14197 Berlin, Germany (Email: niels.barmeyer@web.de).