SOCIAL MOVEMENTS AND HYBRID CULTURAL FORMATIONS: TEPOZTLÁN’S “NO AL GOLF”
John Stolle-McAllister
University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC)
What does it mean when a “traditional” Mexican campesino declares himself to be an “environmentalist?” How do we explain a women’s Bible study group taking up the mantle of defenders of “human rights?” How do these new titles and identifications reflect changing self-perception and local social relations? And, how do existing social relations change the meanings of those globalizing discourses? These were some of the questions that I encountered as I investigated a conflict in the town of Tepoztlán, Morelos, around the construction of a golf course. What began, ostensibly, as a conflict over a request to change land use rules, quickly drew in actors and organizations from well beyond the territorial limits of Tepoztlán, and became articulated not just in legalistic or political/institutional discourse, but in terms of fundamental cultural conflict. Opponents of the golf course, for instance, consistently attempted to frame the argument in terms of an almost sacred local autonomy versus outside imposition, whereas supporters of the golf course pointed to supposed universal desires and models of development versus a manipulative minority of irrational individuals who were willing to sacrifice the common good in the name of some antiquated sense of local identity.
The rhetorical distinctions made by both sides between local and outside, universal and particular, however are less clear in the lived experiences of people residing in Tepoztlán, because in contemporary social relations, local and global are mutually constitutive. There is, in other words, no completely autonomous localness as the “local,” in terms of both the conflict and everyday life, is completely penetrated by “outside” national and global cultural commodities and practices. The universality of those influences, however, becomes articulated around and through embedded local practices and beliefs, making assertions of universal meaning dubious at best. This interpenetration of global and local cultural phenomena, as Roland Robertson has described it, becomes very apparent in the formation and direction of contemporary Latin American social movements because it reflects the heterogeneous cultural terrain in which activists operate, and it describes the necessary tactics which local movements devise in order to combat opponents who are ideologically and materially allied with neoliberal concerns.
This engagement and articulation of discourses, which are simultaneously local and non-local, contribute to the ability of political activists to cross between different cultural codes and to create new meanings and social relations by creatively combining elements of those multiple cultural codes. Active involvement in social movements forces participants to question the underlying practices of identity formation and opens up possibilities for new self-perceptions and different challenges to social hierarchies. Given the globalized context of contemporary social relations, this means that a wide variety of cultural codes come into contact with each other and are actively reorganized according to the particular needs of the social movement. By demanding redress of political and economic issues and asserting themselves as legitimate participants in a political and economic system that seeks to marginalize them, social movement activists challenge and build upon widely circulating processes of identity formation and social hierarchy. They appropriate outside (that is, national and transnational) discourses according to the logic of their immediate context and their embedded patterns of communication and signification, inevitably altering both the outside discourse as well as locally ordered meanings and practices, thus contributing to the ongoing process of cultural change.
No al golf
The case of Tepoztlán provides an excellent example of how local activists were engaged by global discourses of economics and power, and subsequently appropriated parts of those very discourses in order to articulate a grievance which resonated both with a majority of the local population, as well as larger constituencies. In the course of their struggle against the country club and golf course, activists made use of local networks and ideologies in order to question not only the specifics of the project, but perhaps more importantly, the underlying power relationships and positioning of local community members within national and increasingly global social relations. In the words of one of the protest leaders, their struggle quickly “became much more than the golf club matter (Martínez).” What eventually came into contestation during the conflict was the very meaning of democracy, local control of natural resources, and relationships with national and global institutions.
The golf course project represented no small investment in terms of physical size and financial commitment. In late 1994, the Cuernavaca based and globally financed development company, Kladt Sobrino (KS), proposed building a $500 million, Jack Nicklaus designed, 18 hole golf course, complete with luxury condominium units, a data processing center, artificial pond and heliport on 187 hectares of land in the northwest part of the municipality that it claimed to own. Supporters of the project assumed that it would be welcome in this community, given its already existing tourist infrastructure and its apparent need for economic investment. The state governor, former general Jorge Carrillo Olea became an ardent supporter of this potential “development pole,” promising to deliver all needed political support and administrative approvals that the company required. The head of the state’s environmental protection agency, Ursula Oswald, for instance, expressed her excitement about promoting this “industry without smokestacks” as a model of environmentally sustainable development, despite the fact that the project had failed two of three environmental impact studies (Rosas 69). Even the bishop of Cuernavaca, Luis Reynosa Cervantes, blessed this “gift from Heaven” for the people of Tepoztlán.
Local activists with a thirty-year history of opposing similar tourist development projects, however, greeted this alliance with suspicion.(1) A small group of concerned citizens organized themselves into the Comité de Unidad Tepozteca (CUT) in order to gather information about the project and, discovering serious environmental, social and economic flaws in the plan, began to mobilize opposition to it. Using the findings from two of the environmental impact studies, anti-golf activists argued that the golf course would use half of the town’s limited water supply in order to irrigate the greens. Furthermore, based on information from organizations such as Greenpeace, the CUT pointed out the dangers associated with toxic run-off from golf courses. In addition, some townspeople expressed concern that the golf course would create an enclave of wealthy people that would seriously disrupt local social relations.(2) Finally, there was generalized disbelief that KS actually owned the property, as it was believed that much of the proposed property was communally held land that had not been legally ceded to KS’s corporate predecessor.(3)
The conflict simmered through 1994 and 1995, with KS and the state government pushing for public approval, and the CUT building steady opposition to construction of the golf course. Activists effectively pressured local officials in March 1995 to promise, publicly, and in writing, not to issue any permits to KS for the purposes of building the golf course. In August 1995, however, the Municipal President and a majority of the council quietly issued the final land use permits that the company needed to begin construction. Within hours of this “betrayal,” as it would be referred to, and as KS moved its heavy equipment into place, a gathering of 8,000 of the municipality’s 24,000 citizens physically removed the council from office, hung them in effigy and forced them to seek safety in the state capital (Rosas 22). Ensuing conflicts with the state government led the Tepoztecos to barricade of all the entrances to the town and to remove the police and other state officials.(4) Neighborhoods took turns organizing security patrols to protect citizens against police attack and criminal activity. Nightly assemblies gathered to share information and to make decisions regarding town governance and the direction of the movement. When the governor refused to sanction new elections for municipal authorities, the CUT leadership organized elections themselves through the community’s ceremonial mayordomo system.(5) After a series of neighborhood assemblies nominated candidates, an unprecedented number of Tepozteco voters turned out for the elections and named their own Free, Popular and Constitutional Council (Ayuntamiento libre, popular y constitucional).
The state responded by increasing pressure on Tepoztlán through eliminating funds to the newly elected municipal council, cutting phone service, denying Tepoztecos access to the civil registry, and most ominously by mounting a series of physical and legal threats against the CUT/Ayuntamiento leadership. Over one hundred arrest warrants were issued for crimes ranging from kidnapping to theft of government property. After a relative of the deposed municipal president was shot and killed, three highly visible members of the CUT leadership were arrested and charged with the crime, even though eyewitnesses indicated that others were responsible.(6) Teacher Gerardo Demesa, for example, was arrested several days after the incident and spent almost three years in prison despite the lack of credible evidence against him.(7) Official intransigence and attempts at intimidation served only to galvanize the population, and independent polls of the community showed upwards of 90% supporting the radical tactics of the movement leadership (Enriquez 27).
On 10 April 1996 approximately 500 Tepoztecos were making their annual pilgrimage to the site of Emiliano Zapata’s assassination in hopes of presenting a letter of protest to President Ernesto Zedillo, when state police ambushed them along an isolated stretch of the highway. One man, Marcos Olmeda, was shot to death and dozens were injured, denied medical treatment, and kept in the hot sun throughout the day without food or water. As national outrage at the news of the attack spread, KS was forced to suspend its plans, noting that the social conditions “unfortunately” did not currently exist in Tepoztlán to successfully carry out their project. The state government likewise was forced to alter its hard line approach to the “problem” in Tepoztlán.
By April 1996, therefore, the “problem” consisted of three basic demands on the part of the Tepoztecos: definitive cancellation of the golf course, recognition of their elected officials, and resolution of the various human rights issues. The question of political representation was finally settled in March 1997 when Tepoztlán agreed to participate in regularly scheduled municipal elections. An agreement was reached between the CUT and the Center-Left Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), in which the PRD agreed to allow the Tepoztecos to use its official “registry” without interfering in the selection of candidates.(8) Using the neighborhood system, which it had developed in 1995, Tepoztecos nominated a “Popular/PRD Slate” which easily defeated its PRI rivals in the general election. Despite their new found “legitimacy,” however, Tepozteco officials refused to work with Governor Carrillo Olea, insisting that he be impeached and charged with his involvement in the April attack. This impasse was resolved in May 1998 when Carillo Olea was forced to resign or face impeachment amid charges of corruption and rampant human rights violations through out the state. The new governor, Morales Barud, claimed that regularizing relations with Tepoztlán would be his top priority. Toward this end, he quickly ordered the release of Gerardo Demesa, the town’s remaining political prisoner, and within a year, the outstanding arrest warrants were canceled and the state government promised, in writing, not to issue new building permits without the direct consultation of the town’s citizens.
The Tepozteco Cultural Field
Although this movement would seem to have at its heart the resolution of specific political and economic demands, it was also fundamentally a cultural movement. Activists operated within and contributed to the evolution of locally embedded practices and beliefs that define and order local social relations. At the same time, they challenged the relationships through which national and global power interests assert their influence, by engaging those cultural discourses and appropriating them in ways that were meaningful and useful to them in their attempts to win redress for their political and economic grievances. The movement, therefore, acted as a kind of catalyst in local cultural evolution by providing a means for framing the integration of multiple discourses into people’s self perception and social positioning.
Alvarez, Dagnino and Escobar argue that social movements need to be understood as attempts to alter the intersecting fields of the “politics of culture” and the “cultures of politics.” Contemporary social movements operate at the margins of institutional power, often viewing institutions (including opposition political parties) with skepticism, if not outright hostility. They work from and within webs of social relations spun out of the experience of everyday life, and as such their attempts to win a particular concession inevitably alter the ever-changing sets of beliefs and practices that constitute cultural processes. At the same time, by demanding redress to specific grievances, marginalized groups not only seek some sort of realignment in the distribution of material and political capital, but also present themselves as citizens worthy of being considered. This is no small cultural matter, in that the institutional political system is often blind to their very existence, therefore their assertion as citizens is an affirmation of their identity as such and an implicit challenge to the institutional order which ignores them. By organizing themselves through non-institutional communicative channels and networks, activists rely upon social relations created and ordered by forces other than the state, and therefore build upon and transform those embedded forms of practices and relationships unique to their cultural experiences. This type of cultural politics that affirms distinction from the system which oppresses them and that simultaneously seeks to alter the hierarchization of relations inherent in local community’s relationships with states and other institutional actors, also ultimately seeks to alter the political culture by challenging the limits and parameters of institutional practices around what is considered to be acceptable political processes.(9)
In the current phase of globalization, states have been considerably weakened both materially and ideologically. Power over economic policy has been transferred from governments to private corporations, making political contestation less dependent on the taking of state power, and more focused on the organization and signification of other kinds of social realties. Fernando Calderón points out that social movements not only arise out of the inability of states or parties to totalize and incorporate their experiences, much less to satisfy their physical and spiritual needs, but that movements themselves create new cultural space by attempting to re-order and re-signify social relations. This new cultural space in which different models of interaction are proposed and experimented with, must, necessarily, be created out of the everyday experiences in which social movement activists are embedded.
As life in Tepoztlán clearly illustrates, everyday experience is a highly complex intermingling of distinct, and sometimes contradictory, cultural inputs. The last several decades have witnessed remarkable change within the municipality. In terms of social class, for instance, the majority of inhabitants has abandoned agricultural work in favor of professional, urban work, or provides service to the local tourist industry.(10) Linguistically, the past half-century has seen a significant switch from Nahuatl to Spanish as the overwhelmingly dominant language for everyday encounters, with fluent Nahuatl speakers now mostly isolated to remote communities or elderly residents of the county seat.(11) The roads constructed in the past several decades connecting Tepoztlán to the Federal District and to Cuernavaca have resulted in a great exchange of people, as Tepoztecos frequently and easily travel to the metropolitan areas and conversely tourists from all over the world visit frequently from those areas. These types of changes result in a remarkable juxtaposition of different cultural codes in everyday life. On a typical Sunday, for instance, one can observe Nahuatl speaking market vendors selling Nike running shoes, campesinos waiting in line next to lawyers for photocopies of documents, and elite Mexico City residents on cell phones sitting in Xoochitepec Pizza watching poor artisans from Guerrero and Oaxaca attempting to sell their goods to a large weekend crowd. This suggests that seemingly different cultural phenomena come into contact with each other as people go about their daily business. The incorporation of Tepoztlán into, and the concomitant economic and political dependence on, the cosmopolitan systems dominated by Cuernavaca and Mexico creates important new mixtures of beliefs and practices.
This juxtaposition of different cultural codes within a singular geographic and population area suggests, as García Canclini has argued, that contemporary Latin American culture needs to be understood as hybrid. People make sense out of their life experiences by unevenly consuming and fragmenting the varying material and ideological inputs that surround them. To speak of a pure or authentic culture is illusory because people’s culture, that is the signifying and material practices which orient people’s interpretation and realization of experience, is necessarily composed of very different, and sometimes contradictory, discourses which are in constant dialogue with each other and with the changing material circumstances of their lives.(12) Such a process is apparent in the ways in which public life is played out in Tepoztlán and the explanations that people give of their community and their place in the world.
Since the larger metropolitan areas of Cuernavaca and Mexico City easily access Tepoztlán and because it is a popular site for both national and international tourism, residents have developed ambiguous attitudes toward outsiders. In an attempt to maintain their distinction from “outsiders,” many Tepoztecos place a great deal of importance on practicing and maintaining local traditions. Neighborhood festivals are important mechanisms of community cohesion (Echeverría, Corona). The annual selection of the leadership for those festivals through a mayordomo system dating at least back to colonial times(13) strengthens the importance of local, kin and neighborhood politics, formalizing relations of compadrazgo and confianza. In this way, neighbors not only know each other because of their quotidian interactions and concerns, but also ritualize those connections through specific neighborhood festivals organized around the honoring of each neighborhood’s patron saint. These neighborhood festivals, as well as the municipal wide ones of Carnival and the Challenge of the Tepozteco, cannot be underestimated in their importance for providing distinction between Tepoztecos and the rest of the world. It is one of the things that make them unique, and something in which many take a great deal of pride.
Distinction is also carved out in other more pedestrian manners. Keenly aware of their economic and political dependency on the larger metropolitan areas, residents commonly express a great deal of ambiguity and distrust toward the many outsiders who pass through their town. This distrust not only applies to temporary visitors, but also to “fureños” who have come to reside in town. Some long time residents who were not born in Tepoztlán, for instance, claim that they feel like outsiders no matter how long they live there, nor how much they try to assimilate. They will always be considered Tepoztinos, and although they may be liked and respected, will always be considered de afuera and be excluded from full participation in collective decision making processes. One political activist, for instance, even though he had lived in Tepoztlán for decades and his ideas were generally popular, reported that he always needed to work through established, native-born proxies in order to have his ideas accepted by the community. In other political discourse, one of the highest complements that could be paid to a public official was that he (and almost without exception they are men) was “a true, but a true Tepozteco.” In this way, “outsiders” whether they be wealthy people from Mexico City who reside part time in an estate in Tepoztlán, migrant laborers and artisans who have come to reside in the outskirts of town, or others who have come to live and participate as fully as possible in the community, are effectively marginalized from full inclusion as community members.
Many Tepoztecos also try to further distinguish themselves by complaining about the negative influences that outsiders supposedly have on the community and, particularly, on young people. Although Tepoztlán depends heavily on tourism, and many people welcome tourists to come visit, they also tire of their leaving behind of trash or their lack of respect for local customs. Furthermore, many older Tepoztecos criticize the negative effects that Cuernavaca, Mexico City and radio and television have had on young people, because they confuse their “authentic Tepozteco values” by romanticizing consumerism, sex, drugs and lack of respect for elders and tradition. Young people, they complain, become seduced by the more affluent lifestyles offered in the metropolitan areas and never return to support the community, or they become lost in the vices of “modern” society (Flores Pérez 83). In their discussions, they are able to draw clear distinctions between a more or less homogenous us, and an “other” which operates under alien values and systems.
Such separation, based on supposed cultural difference, however, is not completely possible. Attempts over the decades by the Mexican state to build a nation upon the glorification of an indigenous past and the myths of the Mexican Revolution are apparent throughout Tepoztlán. The continued use of Nahuatl for names of places, for instance, and pride in an indigenous past speak not only to unique local tradition, but also to the Mexican state’s attempt to forge a mestizo nation built upon the inclusion and subordination of Mesoamerican culture into the national character. Similarly, and equally problematically, residents of Tepoztlán have incorporated the myth of Emiliano Zapata into their local discourse as a means of explaining their rebellious nature. Although actual participants in the Revolution hold mixed memories of Zapata’s armies, the dominant image of Zapata is that which has been promoted by the state since the late 1920s as a hero and liberator of the poor (Martin, Tostada). Even in terms of political practices, Tepoztlán has historically been dependent on its location to forge ties with state and national level politicians. Under the PRI regime, the state governor essentially chose the municipal president and council, often over the objections of important local political groups. At the same time, Tepozteco leaders used their access to national politicians who vacation in the area in order to gain support for the construction of infrastructure or other such projects deemed beneficial by and to the community (Lomnitz, Evolución). Even though Tepoztecos, in other words, distinguish themselves as uniquely “Tepozteco,” they are also clearly “Mexican” and are concerned with their integration into Mexican society.
In addition to these tensions and contradictions between being uniquely “Tepozteco” but also clearly “Mexican,” many Tepoztecos also deal with and integrate transnational ideas and practices into their discourses of identity. Like most places in the world today, one can point to the obvious importation of goods and cultural artifacts (movies, music, etc.). Tepoztlán, however, also hosts people from very different parts of the globe. In addition to the many tourists who pass through for short periods of time, there is also a rather significant US and European expatriate artist community in the municipality. Of equal importance, many Tepoztecos travel to the United States for work, and bring back with them their experiences of life there. The cultural field of Tepoztlán, therefore, is one that is highlighted not only by great internal heterogeneity associated with internal migration and rapid class differentiation, but also by competing tensions between local, national and global discourses which characterize the community’s quotidian experience.
Rhetoric of resistance
In order to successfully mobilize not only significant portions of Tepozteco society, but also in order to engage potential allies outside of the municipality, the movement leadership needed to deploy a rhetoric which simultaneously captured and unified the cultural heterogeneity of the town’s residents as well as spoke to outside allies. In constructing its rhetoric, therefore, the movement needed to negotiate a glaring paradox. Resistance had to be articulated as a discourse that simultaneously affirmed Tepozteco distinction as a community, but which nevertheless recognized and even welcomed its inclusion in the larger national and global relations in which it was enmeshed, and upon which it was dependent for support.
First and foremost, the movement highlighted the community’s unique identity as a means to secure internal cohesion. “We are Tepoztecos. We are not like other Mexicans, because we know who we are,” one movement leader explained to me, when I asked him why this movement was so successful, where as similar development projects were installed elsewhere with little effective opposition. Other movement participants referred to the town as their “patria chica,” and cited their “love” for the town as a motivation for their involvement. Acknowledging that internal differences do nevertheless exist in this patria chica, movement leader Gerardo Demesa conceded, “my people are difficult. We fight among each other all of the time, but when we are threatened by something from outside, we put those differences aside and work together, like a family” (Interview). Opposition to the golf course was always portrayed as nearly unanimous both in interviews with participants as well as in the many slogans citing “Tepoztlán, sí; Club de Golf, no” and “todos somos el CUT.” The small number of golf club supporters was labeled as “traitors,” their businesses boycotted and their property sometimes vandalized. In other words, being authentically Tepozteco meant being a part of that community which clearly identified itself as opposed to the project. The discursive assumptions of the movement were that all Tepoztecos were opposed to the golf course because they were Tepoztecos who would “naturally” defend their territory against this kind of encroachment. To have a different vision of development would be tantamount to being outside of the acceptable community and raised questions as to one’s authenticity.
This kind of unifying rhetoric, of course, did not simply spring out of the minds of the movement leadership, but reflected the more embedded cultural concerns that many Tepoztecos share about outsiders, as well as the entrenched communicative networks within the town. Beginning as a small committee, the CUT was able to effectively involve large segments of the population by making use of neighborhood networks organized around the mayordomos. Not only was this an effective manner of disseminating information, but the widely held respect for the mayordomos also added greater legitimacy to the CUT’s concerns and calls for action. Furthermore, the mayordomos were clearly associated with a uniquely Tepozteco identity based upon local historic experience.(14)
The rhetoric of authenticity and unity was reinforced through some of the organizing practices of the CUT, particularly the nightly assemblies and changing of the neighborhood guard in which everyone (at least those opposed to the golf course) could gather, share information and be heard. These moments allowed people to feel like a community in which they had face-to-face knowledge of each other and could share concerns and hopes for their struggle. People reported that these meetings, despite their seriousness, often engendered a festive atmosphere as people took time out of their busy lives to visit with neighbors, share gossip and food, and strengthen their ties of friendship. The 1995 elections as an organizing mechanism reveal the importance of the depth of embedded structures in the movement’s development. Not only were they carried out under the auspices of the mayordomos, lending them that prestige, but also, and of significant importance, political parties were banned from participating. Fearing that the parties, even the sympathetic PRD, would attempt to exploit the elections for their own gain, the town decided to select candidates through neighborhood assemblies and then through a general election in which candidates were not allowed to represent any political party. Using the elections as an organizing tool, therefore, the CUT reflected the larger cultural concerns about undo outside influence and the importance of face-to-face knowledge of community.
That is not to say, however, that the movement saw itself as completely distinct from the national context in which it was operating. Despite the sometimes xenophobic tenor of the rhetoric, there were also important inclusions of outside influences and discourses at the heart of the movement. The council that was elected, for instance, adopted the name: “Ayuntamiento Libre, Constitucional y Popular,” in order to signify its adherence to national norms, despite its technically illegal convocation.(15) Furthermore, the movement continually highlighted Article 39 of the Constitution, which states, “National sovereignty resides essentially and originally in the people. All public power comes from the people and is instituted for their benefit. At all times, the people have the inalienable right to alter or modify the form of their government.” Even graffiti bore references to Article 39 and to the assertion that “Tepoztlán will win, because it has the law on its side.” Such statements not only attempted to lend legal cover to their actions, but they also affirmed Tepozteco’s desire to be included in the greater nation of Mexico. The movement’s appropriation of the symbol of Emiliano Zapata further underscores their self inclusion in the Mexican nation. Zapata not only represents the “best” of the Mexican Revolution, but he was a local hero. Images of him accompanied the Tepoztecos in all of their marches, and references to his militant resistance to powerful enemies abounded in speeches and publication. By incorporating Zapata into their rhetoric, therefore, the Tepoztecos were able to fuse both national and local concerns, and to position themselves as the true defenders of the Mexican Revolution and the Mexican people.
National practices and discourses, however, were not the only kind of outside influences to be incorporated into movement rhetoric. Leaders conceded, for instance, that Greenpeace and other environmental groups heavily influenced much of their thinking about the golf course. These organizations provided political support in articulating their struggle to a wider audience as well as the scientific studies detailing the dangers of golf courses in terms of water consumption and toxic runoff. Within Tepoztlán, people made specifically environmental arguments against the golf course, and often times referred to themselves or their movement as “ambientalista” or “ecologista.” Furthermore, as the conflict grew more intense and dangerous, and as the state opted to use illegal pressure and force against the movement, leaders turned to a number of human rights organizations, both national and international, in attempts to secure some sort of safety for their members. The tropes of justice, universal rights, and truth-telling often employed by human rights organizations, became integrated into local movement rhetoric, as could be seen not only in formal legal demands for resolution of human rights violations, but also stylistically in the ways in which movement members presented their version of events. Grievances were framed not as legal technicalities or economic demands, but as violations of basic rights, such as the right to necessary natural resources, democratic control over political institutions, and freedoms of expression and organization. In memoirs written by former political prisoner Gerardo Demesa, for example, he claims to be writing in order that the “state not erase what happened, so that we never forget”(Interview 1999). He claims that in his book, “I tried to stick to the strictest reality…in this way I hope that my unique and true testimony may serve as an antecedent for the future generations of my patria chica, Tepoztlán” (114). He incorporates the rhetoric of the global human rights movement–truth telling, objectivity, and historic memory–with his desire to “serve the future generations of his people.”
In part, the successful integration of these seemingly disparate rhetorical strategies can be attributed to the mixed culture of the population of Tepoztlán, and in particular, the core CUT leadership. Despite an ongoing attempt to identify the movement and the population with the traditions of indigenous and campesino communities, Tepoztlán, particularly the municipal seat where most of the conflict took place, cannot really be characterized in those terms. Class and demographic changes over the past thirty years have seen people’s work change from the field to the office. Education has been a priority for many Tepoztecos, and it is claimed that every family has at least one teacher working somewhere in the state. Despite the residual campesino ideology that it employed, the leadership of the CUT was composed of doctors, teachers, and state bureaucrats. These individuals were able to use their understanding of, and contacts in, the larger world to gain favorable press, win support from environmental and human rights organizations, and articulate their struggle in terms that were understandable to people not immediately connected with Tepoztlán. At the same time, however, these leaders were also intimately connected with the local communicative and prestige networks detailed above, and understood the importance of the uniquely Tepozteco part of local identities and practices.
Constructing Hybrid Political Subjects
This ability to move between and to synthesize remarkably different cultural discourses represents the kind of cultural hybridity characteristic of contemporary Latin American experiences. The crystallization of different cultural manifestations within the movement points in the direction of García Canclini’s cultural hybridity, but in the context of social movements it becomes hybridization with a concrete agent.
García Canclini argues that meaning is created in contemporary societies through the consumption of various and at times contradictory cultural codes and artifacts (84). In his analysis, however, it is never terribly clear how these vastly different codes are mediated, much beyond people’s exposure to them. Nor, as John Beverly (115-132) points out, does García Canclini’s version of cultural hybridity allow for the articulation of an oppositional stance, as oppositional or subaltern culture becomes blended with and ultimately indistinguishable from the dominant one. If cultural hybridity is the ongoing process of cultural blending, how do oppressed peoples distinguish themselves from their oppressors?
What is lacking in this theory of hybridity is the ability of people to consciously choose different aspects of the heterogeneous cultural terrain through which they move, in order to create identities and empower projects that simultaneously distinguish them from the dominant culture and which challenge the assumptions and hierarchies of that dominant culture. Because social movements provide people with a means to concretely act upon and, in that process, create meaningful uses of these various cultural codes, they serve as one of the catalysts for cultural hybridity. Furthermore, since activists in social movements come from varied backgrounds and need to be able to communicate through multiple networks, they become transgressors of various social, cultural and political boundary lines. These transgressions position movements, therefore, as channels for transmission and resignification of meaning. In the working out of a particular conflict, movement participants choose from and consume elements of their cultural terrain that are useful to them. That act of consumption, in turn, resignifies those meanings and, in that process, creates new symbols and practices that come to constitute a part of people’s culture.
The ability of people to create hybridized cultural formations and to then use them for their own benefit against dominant political/cultural blocs suggests that the notion of cultural hybridity is not necessarily void of political possibilities. When agents are left out of the equation, then the idea of hybridity is easy to associate with absorption into diverse yet dominant cultural processes in which some attributes of subaltern cultures are incorporated, but which ultimately conform to dominant logics. In the case of the types of social movements like the one in Tepoztlán, however, one can discern the abilities of actors who live within cultures marked by their incorporation of various semiotic influences, to actively use that internal heterogeneity to their own advantage, thus creating a unique culture related to their specific experiences. Because of the concrete necessities of political organizing, successful activists are adept at moving about in the different cultural terrains that define their lives. They know, in other words, the logics of local practices and beliefs as well as the languages of the national regime and of global allies and adversaries. Using these various codes to build a successful movement, in turn affects the ways in which local cultural systems operate in the future.
To be more specific, some critics of the Tepoztlán movement contend that the victory of the movement was due less to anything the Tepoztecos did, and more to the heavy handed and politically inept actions of the state government. The cancellation of the golf course was precipitated by the police attack, and not the direct action of the movement, which had been stalemated by the state’s intransigence. Given time, they argue, the movement would probably have faltered under its own inability to achieve a clear victory and the golf course would have been built. That kind of analysis, besides being counter factual, begs several questions. First, had the movement never existed and had it not been able to effectively stall the state government and the corporation, then, obviously the events leading up to the cancellation would not have occurred. More to the point, however, the movement’s ability to effectively mobilize its cultural hybridity did two important things when the attack took place. First of all, it laid the necessary groundwork for townspeople to band together for mutual protection and support. It allowed them to face the attack and its aftermath with unity rather than with division, which is a frequent result of this type of terrorist action.(16)
Secondly, it allowed the movement to effectively access those networks of non-governmental organizations and journalists to quickly pressure authorities to stop the human rights violations and to shame them and the corporation into changing course. Without the contacts and the language of those organizations and their concomitant cultures, then the police attack would not have been front page news throughout the country and it would not have been contextualized as part of an ongoing and wide-spread pattern in which the state was attempting to subjugate citizens by illegal force.
The crossing between and mixing of different cultural codes in this case also changed the parameters of local cultural formations. The movement leadership did not just negotiate a pre-existing hybridized cultural field, but rather it contributed to the ongoing process of hybridization in that cultural field itself. The incorporation and equation of very local symbols and practices (neighborhood festivals and organizations), with national (Zapata, the Constitution) and global ones (human rights, ecology), through the concrete actions of the movement created a qualitatively different cultural field in which people carried out their everyday lives, both during and after the conflict. Those months of struggle, at the very least, now form a part of people’s common, sedimented experiences, and the effects of that struggle can be observed in a change of regime in local offices, greater importance of certain rituals and myths, different attitudes about relations between civil society and elected officials, and a more localized signification of the symbols of the global discourses of human rights and environmentalism. These contributions to people’s experiences inevitably affect the ways that they make sense out of the world by combining the discourses inherent in the multiple cultural codes that were incorporated into the movement.
These kinds of social movements, furthermore, point to the ways in which people create and re-create their own cultures. Because they involve people in actively attempting to change their world, social movements are a means for the renovation and the transmission of popular culture. This breaks with many notions that popular culture is static and “traditional,” proposing instead that it is a highly dynamic and ever-changing process through which people make sense of their lives. Social movements disrupt the apparent stasis of everyday life, thus opening up to new meaning the symbolic order that regulates people’s practices. It is, in other words, one of the mechanisms through which discourses and social positions are fused in an ongoing process of forming and contesting different and competing systems of meaning that confront people everyday.
These different cultural discourses come not only from outside of the community, such as through the mass media and the state’s ideological apparatus, but also come from within the community itself. Locally based movements, because they are centered on a particular issue of common concern, tend to be made up of diverse coalitions of activists, which in turn, highlight and emphasize the important internal heterogeneity of communities. The movement in Tepoztlán was successful because it was able to recognize and draw upon the community’s internal differences, in order to utilize different kinds of talents, connections and perspectives. The movement made much use of the residual campesino ideology in the region, by making explicit connections to land issues and a revolutionary past. Most of the movement’s leadership, however, although they did reach out to campesino organizations, was made up primarily of professionals whose work could be classified as urban. Despite potentially deep class differences, activists used different sectors of their society and collective culture to articulate a successful coalition. Again, this runs counter to many analyses of popular culture which tend to posit an internal homogeneity to local communities, thus assuming that there is, ultimately, an essential way of being for that community. Rather, heterogeneous social movements help strengthen the importance of those internal differences, while at the same time attempting to build upon a common identity or interest. It shows the very constructedness of local popular culture as a terrain that is internally complex and that adapts to and incorporates elements of other outside sources in an ongoing process of self-construction.
The fact that people can use their culture to oppose a project of dominant groups further suggests that popular culture can be politicized and remain somewhat autonomous from dominant formations. There is, therefore, a people’s culture that is distinct from, but not unrelated to, dominant cultures. It does not mean that popular culture is necessarily radical or revolutionary (nor necessarily reactionary or passive, either, for that matter). Rather, it demonstrates that given the right circumstances and the correct alignment of forces and leaders both within local communities and within larger national and global contexts as well, culture can be signified to be oppositional. Under such circumstances, individuals and collectives can make use of those guiding metaphors and practices that regulate the everyday lives of their communities in order to propose a reordering of their social relations not only within that community but with larger social formations as well.
Notes
1 Since the 1960s, activists in Tepoztlán successfully defeated projects to build a golf course, highway, cable car and scenic railway, arguing that such projects were unsustainable, damaging to the environment or threatening to local economic interests.
2 The southeast section of Tepoztlán, the Valle de Atongo, has been effectively colonized by Mexico City elites over the past several decades. There are large estates on some of the best land in the municipality. The owners of these estates, however, spend little time participating in public life in Tepoztlán, and have created an “enclave” community which is viewed with distrust and resentment by many long time Tepoztlán residents.
3 Land tenure has historically been a problem in Tepoztlán, with ownership and boundary lines in constant dispute. Although this is the case in many small municipalities throughout Mexico, Tepoztlán is unique in that about 85 percent of the land in the municipality is technically communal land, whose sale or rent is dependent upon a complex system of checks and balances involving various municipal and communal officials and agencies. According to many townspeople, the land in question was “illegally” purchased by the Montecastillo company (KS predecessor) in the early 1960s, because many of the legal technicalities of the sale were not met. Furthermore, much of the private land that Montecastillo acquired at the same time was done through coercion and threats against small landholders.
4 On 3 September 1995, state officials and the President of Communal Property, Abraham López, held a communal assembly in front of the national press in order to ratify the permits issued by the Municipal Council. Tepozteco comuneros were surprised to learn of this meeting, to which they had not been invited, and discovered that the “comuneros” had actually been trucked in from other municipalities to pose as Tepoztecos for the cameras. After a brief skirmish with state riot police, the state officials were taken prisoner and the police were driven out of town. The officials were released several days later after promises (quickly broken) by the governor to dissolve the Municipal Council and sanction new elections.
5 Mayordomos are elected annually in neighborhood assemblies and are charged with organizing neighborhood festivals, maintaining the local chapel and serve as community leaders and spiritual advisors.
6 In December 1995 family members of the ex-Municipal President came into the Zócalo and began firing weapons in an attempt to free Diana Ortiz a PRI activist who had been arrested by municipal security officials for threatening another merchant with a pistol. During the discharge of weapons one of the attackers fell and accidentally shot his cousin (who was also armed and firing). Although the three gunmen were apprehended by local citizens and turned over to the Attorney General’s office for violation of weapons laws, they were quickly released and never prosecuted. The wounded man died two weeks later. Three other Tepoztecos were eventually arrested and charged with the murder, even though none of these men were present at the time of the shooting, and despite dozens of witnesses who clearly identified the gunmen (Rosas 76-79).
7 Demesa was declared a prisoner of conscience by Amnesty International, and the federal government’s own National Commission for Human Rights recommended that he be released because of the inadmissibility of the evidence presented against him (statements allegedly made by the dying man, while strongly medicated and heard by no one but the investigating officer) along with innumerable other procedural and factual discrepancies in his case. He would not be released, however, until after Governor Carrillo was forced to leave office.
8 Given the vertical nature of Mexican political parties, this alliance of the PRD and the “People’s Slate” was no small matter, as the party agreed not to interfere with local processes.
9 See Wallerstein (1990) for an in-depth discussion of the functions of culture as distinction and hierarchy.
10 One of the complaints of many golf course opponents was that although KS promised to provide many jobs, they were not the right kind of jobs. They were offering positions in construction, grounds keeping and housekeeping, but many in the leadership of the movement claimed that such jobs would not provide for a sustainable economy nor would they employ the many well-educated and professionally trained young people in the town.
11 See Oscar Lewis’ work from mid-century.
12 Bahktin referred to this process as heteroglossia, which would suggest that the process which Canclini and others are describing, and which is often associated with postmodernism, has roots outside of contemporary intellectual fads. Clearly there has never been a pure culture, because culture is an ever-evolving process that responds to new stimuli and changing circumstances. Recent uses of hybridity, however, in a post-colonial context, more specifically refer to the realization that very different cultural realities of colonizing and colonized populations have more deeply shared and changed each other than either side would like to have admitted.
13 Some residents claim that the mayordomo system is a hold over from the Tlalhuica/Mexica calpulli system of local and ceremonial governance. Scholars seem somewhat divided over the validity of that argument.
14 This association with a unique indigenous past could also be seen in the swearing in of the provisional municipal council, in which the “Rey Tepozteco,” a young man selected to act out the role of the Tepozteco King in the town’s annual celebration of its founder, presided over the oath of office. During the ceremony, the public was instructed to administer the oath themselves, because it was they who had won democracy and they who were ultimately responsible for its safeguarding. The King, speaking in Nahuatl (and translated into Spanish), warned the townspeople, in the name of ancient deities, who would “seek the hearts of traitors for sacrifice,” to protect their territory from outside influences and “from lights which are not stars” (Menendez). The public rhetoric used by the movement, therefore, sought to strengthen perceptions of Tepozteco unity and exceptionalism.
15 See Swidler (1995) for a discussion of how social movements use and resignify the institutions of the very system that they are opposing.
16 Hence, its popularity in low intensity conflicts as a means of disrupting organizations.
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