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Mixtecs and Modernity
Modernity, Indigeneity, and Religious Conversion
Are indigenous people modern? Can they be modern? Is modernity the absolute opposite of tradition, which indigenous people such as the Mixtecs honor as their tie to their villages? These are questions that social scientists ask (Ariel de Vidas 2006; Sahlins 1999; Singh 2011; Pitarch and Orobitg 2012). Most Mixtecs do not recognize the term “modernity” as having anything to do with them. Yet they are surrounded by the products and symbols of modernity. Indeed, even in many villages, symbols of modernity such as cellular phones and video cameras are common. By embracing these, do Mixtecs become “less indigenous”? By converting to other religions, do Mixtecs become more modern, less indigenous?
Modernity and Religion
Modernity is a European construct that has not appeared independently anywhere outside of Europe. Yet seemingly all nations must aspire to achieve it (Wagner 2012:1). There can be little doubt that modernity was made possible by Europe’s colonization of the rest of the world, beginning in the fifteenth century. The unequal relationships established by colonialism did not end with the political independence of the colonies but continue today. If modernity was achieved through colonialism, then it is unlikely that nations such as Mexico, which do not have colonies, will be able to achieve it. But the idea persists that the goal of all nations must be modernity, that if all nations were modern the world would be a better place (Gwynne et al. 2003:195; Escobar 2007:181).
Modernity is associated with progress—the idea that human life is becoming better and will continue to do so. This improvement is achieved through science, which is based on rationality. Individual freedom of choice replaces the tyranny of the family and community. Democracy is the political embodiment of this freedom. The market is the economic one. Modernity facilitates the expansion of the state by replacing relationships based on trust with a faith in the institutionalized rules of impersonal bureaucracies, which presumably treat everyone the same. These are some of the central elements of modernity; they by no means comprise the entire laundry list of possible characteristics.1
Although freedom of religion may seem a logical part of modernity, the role of religion in society was severely contested for over a century after other aspects of modernity were accepted in Europe. Conflicts between Catholics and a growing number of warring Protestant movements were the defining feature of the history of Europe between 1559 and 1648 (Dunn 1979:1–3). In these stand-offs, the Protestants, especially Calvinists, were the standard-bearers of modernity, while the Catholics represented the rejection of modernity along with the entire Protestant Reformation. There was no desire, on the part of the Protestants or the Catholics, to compromise: “Everyone agreed that religious toleration was intolerable” (Dunn 1979:8).
In fact, true religious toleration was not really established in a civil state until the US Constitution was adopted in 1789. In Mexico, the Constitution of 1857, guaranteeing religious freedom, as well as decreeing the establishment of other modern institutions, resulted in a civil war between the Liberals, representing modernity, and the Conservatives, representing tradition, especially allegiance to the Catholic Church. The Liberals won that war, but contention over religion did not disappear. The histories of both the United States and Mexico show that the establishment of a law does not necessarily guarantee its peaceful acceptance by the population at large. Toleration is still somewhat intolerable.
The conflicts among present-day Mixtecs echo the wars of the past: the non-Catholics are seen as foreign and anti-tradition, while the Catholics are associated with traditions previously considered immutable (Knight 2007:97–98; Blancarte 2000:592). From another point of view, Catholics are perceived as a drag on progress and non-Catholics are the key to modernization.
“The Great Transformation”
Modernity is the driving paradigm of the industrialized nations, which insist on making sure that their less-developed brethren have the benefit of this Western invention. It has been the underlying justification of colonialism and its latter-day counterparts, development and neoliberalism. Today, there seem to be no aspects of modernity that can be criticized. It celebrates rationality, individual freedom, democracy, and the free market. The actual effects of these ideals on those who originally came under their power in the eighteenth century, however, have given us a world very different from that envisioned by the worthy philosophers.
Rather than a rational world of democracy and individual freedom, capitalism and progress created what Bruce Berman (2006:3) describes as a system that has “generated intense moral and political crises in every society, and led to the most destructive violence against humanity and nature in history.” This was as true for the initial victims of industrialization as it is for today’s Third World victims of globalization.
In The Great Transformation, Karl Polanyi (2001:33–218) points out that the Industrial Revolution in England, between the 1780s and 1830s, destroyed the social compacts that had held society together for millennia. In the premodern world, although the market existed, it was contained within a larger social context where reciprocity and redistribution were the main forms of exchange. Land was held communally and allocated according to the needs of the members of the community. Labor was part of the duties of individuals to the family or the community. Peasants worked their land and paid their rents from the sale of their products. Selling land or labor were concepts that did not exist. The kinship systems that regulated this world depended importantly on relationships of trust, on the assurance that people would behave according to the rules of the society rather than their individual choosing. Predictability was at the bottom of the whole.
With the imposition of the market economy, the “great transformation,” everything changed. Now, everything was commoditized, part of the market. Everything had a price and everything was allocated by supply and demand in the marketplace. The traditional social relations were swept away in the face of raw capitalism. Polanyi (2001:136–38) documents the terrible disruptions of these changes to society in England, when capitalism was in its infancy. The glories of the free market were not so evident to the paupers who appeared in the towns as a result of the rational choices of landowners and the rulers of the day (91–95). In Polanyi’s view (and Berman’s and not a few others), modernity was the result of a terribly destructive force that affected most people negatively and only a few people very positively.
Modernity, colonialism, and the capitalist world-system that developed in the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries, have brought us now to globalization. Globalization, new and fresh as it may seem, is really only the most recent version of the drive to impose the market economy on all the nations of the world and in every corner of those nations. The capitalist mantra of “buying cheap in order to sell dear” clearly results in those who are selling cheap getting the less pleasant side of the bargain. The Mixtecs, who have only their labor to sell on the global market, find that it is very cheap indeed.
Globalization and Neoliberalism
In the world of the Mixtecs, the most visible consequences of globalization are neoliberalism and its effects. Neoliberalism is the term for a group of policies devised by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in the wake of the global debt crisis which began in 1982. As most of the Third World was unable to repay its debt, the banks had the power to demand changes in policy which, economists predicted, would create economic growth so that the loans could be repaid. The debt crisis was said to be caused by too much government control of the market, as well as by strict controls of foreign investment and trade, on the part of the debtor nations. As part of the restructuring of the economy required by the World Bank and the IMF, debtor nations were to open their markets to the world economy and to allow foreign direct investment. The role of government in the market was to be severely reduced by privatizing government-owned enterprises. Money from the sale of these companies could be used to repay loans. The market was to be the primary factor in the allocation of resources. The private sector was to be the main instrument of economic growth through deregulation, secure property rights, and financial liberalization. This remedy was, essentially, the re-creation of the conditions of classic liberalism, in turn based on the ideas that had given the world the first Great Transformation, not to mention the Great Depression. Despite the negative outcomes of these policies, as demonstrated by the global economic crisis of 2007–2008, neoliberalism is alive and well today.
In Mexico, the primary face of neoliberalism has been the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) between the United States, Canada, and Mexico. This agreement went into effect on January 1, 1994. Globalization had already made inroads in Mexico to some degree by then. For example, multinational corporations such as Birds Eye vegetables had invested in trade agreements with Mexican vegetable farmers as part of a vertical integration process. Domino’s Pizza, Blockbuster Video, and other retail stores familiar to people in the United States had become common in the larger cities. When I returned to Mexico in 1993, after some time away, I was very surprised to see US brands where only Mexican ones had been in place during my entire previous experience in Mexico. While these changes had begun when Mexico joined the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade in 1986 (Robertson 2007:1378), and thus had affected Mexicans before 1994, the full brunt of NAFTA was not felt until after it was implemented. Over time, as various agreements have gone into effect, Mexico has had ever less control over its economy.
Mixtecs in the New World Order
Mixtecs had by the 1990s already begun to be affected by globalization, though few were aware of the reasons for their experiences. In agriculture, the trade agreement was anything but free or equal among the three nations. The United States, in order to protect its agricultural sector, pays enormous subsidies to the wealthiest of agricultural producers. These subsidies continue, while in Mexico the subsidies for corn production are pitifully small:
In Mexico, each acre of planted corn yields one ton, versus more than three and a half tons in the United States; Mexico subsidizes its agricultural industry with $3.5 billion each year, versus $20 billion in the United States; Mexico’s fertilizers, electricity, diesel, and gasoline cost up to 60 percent more than in the United States, and the Mexican government promotes dumping against its own producers, having charged no duties on corn imports that exceeded quotas since NAFTA was instituted—duties that would have equaled $1.3 billion between 1995 and 2000. (Zermeño 2008:28)
These terms of trade resulted in a deluge of cheap corn, beans, and other foods traditionally produced in the Mixteca; the Mixtecs understood the underlying causes poorly, but the effects were very comprehensible: they could not sell their corn because US corn was cheaper. Along with this crisis, government programs such as CONASUPO, which guaranteed low prices of basic foods for sale to the poor, were dismantled in the name of “fair competition” with programs not subsidized by the government (Zermeño 2008:29). In general, Mixtec corn production had to compete with that of the United States; this was and is always going to be a losing proposition for the Mixtecs.
The consequences of these and many other policies implemented by multilateral banks have been largely negative for the poor of Mexico, of whom Mixtecs are among the poorest. There is little wonder, then, that in the 1980s, when agribusinesses in northern Mexico began sending buses to the villages of the Mixteca to hire workers (Zabin et al. 1993:48), many Mixtecs willingly acquiesced. Whether the conditions and payment were actually as advertised mattered little, as the alternative was hunger and extreme poverty—these, certainly, were very well known. What confronted them in northern Mexico and the United States was modernity.
Modernity, in the guise of modernization, has had predominantly negative effects on Mixtec society in general. However, Mixtecs have responded to modernity by adopting and rejecting aspects as they see fit. As Sahlins (1999:v) points out, “Cultural differences thrown out the front door by the homogenizing forces of world capitalism creep in the back in the form of an indigenous counterculture, subversion of the dominant discourse, or some such politics (or poetics) of indigenous defiance.”
Consider, for example, the cellular phone. The Mixteca has never had many land telephone lines. Before the advent of cellular technology, typically a village had one telephone, not often used. When someone in the village got a call, that person was paged or searched out. Telegrams also had a place in the system. Telegrams were much more reliable than the telephone, albeit quite a bit slower. Beginning in the 1980s, cell phones have been available to most Mixtecs in Mexico and in the United States. Cell phones are necessary to the smooth running of the transnational communities. Thus, communication is exponentially more available as a consequence of globalization. The Internet can be accessed from many villages, some of which have Web pages that create a virtual transnational community that coincides with the one on the ground. Schoolchildren instantly learn how to use computers when one becomes available. Lower costs of transportation have a variety of effects. They make migration to the north cheaper, and thus migrant labor more available to employers. At the same time, cheaper transportation facilitates migrants’ bringing many examples of the modern world into the villages. In this context, the highly decorated bed of a large, new pickup truck from the United States being used to transport the bride and groom through a village in a traditional Mixtec wedding is not incongruous to the people themselves, regardless of how it seems to outsider anthropologists. Likewise, the video recording of the traditional fiestas is now commonplace. Thus, modernity has not resulted in the end of tradition but rather an elaboration of it. Here is an example of how Mixtecs redefine and repurpose elements of the modern world to suit their indigenous world rather than abandon it.
Globalization, Migration, and Modernity
Globalization has caused migration to the core nations, where the markets attract cheap labor. Without NAFTA and similar agreements based on the decisions of multilateral development banks, the Mixtecs would probably not have left their homeland in the numbers we see today. Migration involves encountering modernity, especially in the United States. Modern goods and services such as cell phones, televisions, and computers are available to many Mixtecs, even in Oaxaca. But is a boy who uses a cell phone while herding sheep truly modern? Classic modernity would have to include a market for the wool and transportation to get the wool to market. The wool would have to be turned into products for sale to modern consumers. The boy’s family would have to know how to conduct such a business. Actually, there is a market for wool in the valley of Oaxaca, where weavers famously make rugs for international buyers. But Mixtecs do not know how to shear sheep, and they have no communication with the weavers. Many Mixtecs know the supermarkets of Oxnard, California, better than the wool markets in the valley of Oaxaca. Sheep are tended until needed for food, then slaughtered for meat. Rather than becoming modern in the classical sense, Mixtecs have adopted cell phones as part of their response to the situations they find themselves in as a result of globalization. The core aspects of Mixtec culture are not significantly changed by the use of cell phones.
In a way, the phones are a means to continue traditional culture while simultaneously producing the new social system of transnational communities. These communities have the dual role of providing elements of modernity to the villages in the Mixteca and continuing the traditional cultural practices of usos y costumbres. These traditions have been affected by globalization, but they have not been eradicated. So perhaps, as Singh (2011:58) suggests, “[T]he idioms of indigenous modernity underscore that modernity is better understood as a field of tensions that points to multiple paths through modernity rather than as a unilinear narrative of modernization processes and systems.”
Figure 2.1. A migrant’s house next to the old house.
Figure 2.2. Buses leave Tlaxiaco every Saturday bound for agricultural communities—migrant destinations—in northern Mexico.
Migration ties Mixtecs to the modern world, but only very tenuously and at the very bottom of the economic system. Because they have no way to change their economic status, they are able to see and appreciate the products of modernity without actually participating in the modern world to any great extent. Migrants take consumer goods with them when they return to their villages as trophies of their very marginal economic success as farmworkers. Migrants send money to their families, most of whom use it to buy food and clothing. Some use the remittances they receive to send their children past ninth grade, the highest grade offered by the Mexican government. To the extent that the children then participate in the modern world, migration contributes indirectly to an aspect of modernity. Money sent to the villages by groups of migrants for the betterment of the entire community is sometimes used to extend modern services such as potable water or sewage removal. But often the money is used to fix up the Catholic church or build new government buildings that have the trappings of modernity but are still symbolic of the traditions of usos y costumbres—decidedly not modern. Mixtecs, as individuals and as members of transnational communities, pick and choose the elements of modernity that they are willing to accept. They then weave these elements into their existing cultural beliefs and practices.
Cultural Remittances
Peggy Levitt (1998:933–34) identifies social remittances as distinct both from economic remittances and from the overarching social changes brought about by globalization. They are, among other things, “normative structures” (ideas, values, and beliefs) that are transmitted through “systems of practice” (actions shaped by normative structures). They are transmitted by individuals to individuals at the local village level. This “transnationalism from below” contrasts with the transnational capitalist system precisely in that it is a process in which individuals bring about cultural change in others. I prefer to see these as cultural, rather than social, remittances. One such cultural remittance is Evangelical Protestantism. It is transmitted by individual converts to other individuals, who decide whether or not to accept it. The “systems of practice” of non-Catholics in Mixtec communities are the church services and other activities engaged in by converts, through which they communicate the messages of Evangelicalism. Conversion is rarely the product of missionary activities in the Mixteca. Rather, it is individuals who take the message to their villages. With a few exceptions, the church organizations to which converts belong were established by Mexican migrants to the United States.
In the original development of capitalism, Protestantism contributed to the breakdown of the traditional social and economic system. Instead of looking to the good of the community, Protestants were free to pursue their individual benefits. Because they worked hard and did not spend money on expenses such as alcohol and parties, they tended to have more consumer goods and more money to improve their homes. The success of capitalism and Protestantism in Europe and the United States is a testament to the fit between their messages, which essentially comprise modernity. In the Mixtec villages, however, non-Catholics are not really free of the constraints of the community. More important, they do not seem to want such freedom. They are content to participate in the secular communal activities as long as they are not required to support the Catholic fiestas. While some Catholics complain that the non-Catholics do not contribute their fair share, they actually do. Non-Catholics participate in the non-Catholic aspects of usos y costumbres, taking on the nonreligious cargos and contributing tequio. Non-Catholic migrants also send economic remittances for projects planned and carried out by the entire village. I know one non-Catholic minister who lives in California and has only been to his village once since he was an infant. He continues to send money for the upkeep of the public buildings and other community development works in the village. Like the Catholics, the non-Catholics accept, change, and repurpose symbols of modernity like the cell phone. In both cases, the cell phones are used to maintain the traditional community as well as to participate in modern activities such as coordinating the installation of potable water systems in the villages. Whether Catholics or non-Catholics, the villagers are all Mixtec.
Mixtec Communities in the Context of Globalization
It is hard to imagine a difference greater than that between the traditional Mixtec village and the places that Mixtecs migrate to. The small, remote villages embody the essence of tradition and non-modernity, while the destinations of the migrants are by comparison centers of capitalist globalization and consumerism. In the villages there are symptoms of modernity, such as stereo systems, televisions, and large US-made vehicles, and also the idea that owning them is a good thing. There is at the same time the curious practice of using the wages of migrants to remain non-modern. The role of non-Catholics in this conjunction is of particular interest to me.
As I pointed out in chapter 1, the tradition of usos y costumbres is still prevalent in the Mixteca region.2 This tradition is, in many respects, similar to those that held society together before the great transformation in England. The land is held in common by the community. It cannot be sold to anyone outside the community. Reciprocity is still extremely important as a means of exchange. Each village requires its members to fulfill certain tasks, all for no pay. The market economy is known but is not well understood by people who have not migrated. The migrants understand it, of course, but many are still drawn to the village, where they are part of a communal web that makes sense to them. Here, consumer goods are desirable but service to the community is essential.
The economic system that prevails in most Mixtec villages includes reciprocity as well as redistribution and the market system. Everyone knows that if you go to the little store you must have money to buy anything. But most people do not really have to buy very much at the little stores. Most people participate in a complex form of reciprocity and redistribution as their major system of exchange. Hence, the market is embedded in the social system rather than the reverse.
Reciprocity
I had a running joke with several people during my fieldwork in the Mixteca as to what cost money and what was “free.” In this context, just about everything is free. For example, the chicks that hatch are free, and the feed they live on is mainly available in and around the household, so it is also free. Women plan their chicken production so that there will be lots of chickens available at fiesta times. Women kill and cook most of these chickens themselves, but chickens are sometimes available in exchange for other products from the community. Chickens, therefore, are, in general, entirely within the reciprocity system.
I once asked my friend Magdalena to show me how to make mole in the style of her village. This required a chicken. She had no adult chickens, so she went to other women in the village. No one had chickens because it was a period of low chicken consumption. Magdalena finally found a chicken for sale for US$14—an outrageous price.3 Here she was, a victim of supply and demand. “If you don’t want to pay that price, then I don’t need to sell it,” said the owner of the chicken. Magdalena needed a chicken, and since the supply was limited, she had to pay the market price. This became part of the joke about what is free versus what costs money. If she had had a full-grown chicken it would have been free.
Another example is the use of firewood to cook with and for heat. Firewood is becoming scarce, and the government is encouraging people to use propane stoves instead. Members of Mixtec communities have the right to collect dry wood on community land. This task is ever more difficult. In 2004 a full day collecting firewood on foot yielded only enough for three days for a household. Nevertheless, firewood is free, whereas propane costs money. While some families own gas stoves as a status symbol, few use them regularly. They cost money to run. Labor is not yet commoditized, at least in the villages.
Redistribution
Tequio, what anthropologists call corvée labor, is also part of the traditional system. Every week, each family in the village is expected to provide one family member to volunteer for work decided on by the community councils. This is a type of redistribution, where the government requires a labor tax. Traditionally, tequio labor was/is considered free, as it does not require money. There is usually a surplus of labor as there is no employment in the villages; in this context, all labor is free.
This system operated largely outside the market until people began migrating. Suddenly, families found themselves with no one to contribute the required labor. Eventually, in many cases, migrants began to allocate part of the remittances they sent to their families to pay for the lost tequio. In this way, labor became transformed into cash and commoditized, at least for some.
The fiesta system, which is the main form of redistribution in the villages, is also regulated by usos y costumbres. Ideally, the fiesta hosts give away large amounts of goods, thus redistributing wealth and gaining prestige and power. Reciprocity is also an essential element of the system, as relatives, fictive kin, and others contribute goods. Some of these are consumer goods but most are produced in the village or within the noncash economy.
Now, migration has brought globalization and the market economy into the fiesta system. Fiesta hosts who return only to fulfill their cargos are expected to have money to buy the food, fireworks, and other necessary goods and services. These are all usually still couched in the parlance of reciprocity. As with tequio, members who are not able to serve in person are expected to pay money to the community. The fiesta hosts’ migrant kin contribute their share to the fiestas, but they contribute mostly money, as they are largely outside the system of reciprocal relations.
One of the traditional events of a fiesta is bull riding by young men. Currently, there are rarely enough young men in the villages (they are all in the migrant stream), and bull riders must be hired from outside. This is done with money sent by migrants. In most villages, the number of fiestas held every year is constantly decreasing, because there are no longer enough people willing to host a particular fiesta. Migration and the money economy reduce the commitment to traditional rituals. Money arrives by telegram or ATM deposits to those with relatives in the United States. These and many other changes are having a major result: people are becoming ever more aware of the usefulness of being able to calculate the money value of anything.
It is in the interstices between what “costs money” and what is “free” that the issue of continuing membership in the village comes to the fore. The labor of the migrants is no longer free: it is replaced by money, and some are less willing to give service to the community because the cash worth of their labor as migrants is clearly higher to them than the value of labor in the village. At the same time, some migrants use their newfound cash to perpetuate the traditional system. They carefully save the money they earn in order to be able to give service without pay in the village. Although the number of cargos related to the Catholic Church and its fiestas is diminishing in most villages, non-religious cargos continue to be filled. This compromise between the secular and the religious is similar to processes in other parts of Latin America, but the importance of maintaining village identity and allegiance is much greater among Mixtecs than in other groups. In this way, globalization, migration, and the money economy are helping to continue the tradition of usos y costumbres. This allegiance to the villages and their traditions is an important element in the transnational Mixtec communities that celebrate village identity and solidarity.
It seems clear that a great transformation is at work in Mixtec society today. Working conditions for migrants are perhaps not as dreadful as in eighteenth-century England, but they are far below the norm for workers in the United States or Mexico. Most Mixtecs find jobs in agriculture, which is not regulated by most US labor laws. Many Mixtecs migrated to the United States after the 1987 cutoff date for legalization under the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986. This means that they have far fewer rights than legal residents. They are not likely to complain about their working conditions. They are excluded from the pattern followed by former immigrant populations: upward mobility and eventual assimilation. In this respect, they are the embodiment of the effects of neoliberal policies and their similarity to the harshness of the original great transformation.
The eventual outcome of this transformation is still difficult to foresee, or even imagine. Mixtecs are torn between the comfort of tradition and the allure of modernity—are they mutually exclusive? Is there such a thing as indigenous modernity? Perhaps if we see Mixtecs’ behaviors as “indigenous modernities” (Pitarch and Orobitg 2012), we can begin to understand what is going on.
Globalization and Religious Conversion
An increase in opportunities for individual choice is an important aspect of modernity. Because of globalization, Mixtecs now have more opportunities for individual choices than did their ancestors. One of the important choices is conversion to non-Catholic faiths. Although Pentecostalism, the form of non-Catholicism most frequently chosen by Mixtecs, is seen as the reverse of modern by many in US society (Harding 1991:373–74), it nevertheless has the same characteristics as Calvinism in comparison to Catholicism: rejection of the saints, abstention from earthly vices, and hard work. Most important, it establishes the individual, rather than the community, as the agent deciding religious beliefs and behavior.
Pentecostalism is part of the strange new world being confronted by Mixtecs. It is part of the globalization package challenging Mixtec communities both in the Mixteca and in the migrant communities. Freedom of religion offers individuals choices beyond those available in the traditional folk-Catholic system. They decide, as individuals, what to believe and how to behave. So, Mixtecs are dealing with the question of Catholicism—the traditional system that dictates behavior in a society based on kinship relations and reciprocity—against non-Catholic systems that allow for individuals’ economic betterment to the exclusion of the traditional community. But the Mixtec emphasis on the community as the basis for identity and action ameliorates the emphasis on the individual that is the basis for modern identity. Non-Catholics are making a radical move to change Mixtec identity from one tied to local saints and fiestas to one tied to community participation regardless of religious affiliation. Allegiance to the village is possible, in some cases, without continuing all the traditions. Indeed, even the Catholic traditions are changing in response to globalization and migration: there are fewer fiestas than before.
Until now, in spite of their difficulties in the face of neoliberalism, Mixtecs have not wholeheartedly accepted Pentecostalism. It represents, after all, only one possible choice of religious behavior. The attraction of the folk-Catholic traditions of the villages is still more powerful for most. And the traditional system itself is changing in response to the impacts of globalization, migration, and the ensuing embrace of some aspects of modernity.
Indigenous Modernities
From the global perspective of the nations of the core, modernity is assumed to be the goal of all social processes currently under way. But I wonder why all nations must be modern, at least in the way that most people interpret modernity. Is there really no alternative? While it seems likely that modernity will continue to be the accepted paradigm in global studies, some scholars question its legitimacy. Is there, perhaps, more than one modernity?
Arjun Appadurai (1996:65), in his freewheeling discussion of the topic, suggests the existence of “alternative, interactive modernities.” In the context of the world beyond Europe, Raymond M. Lee (2008) proposes a view of two modernities: first and second. First modernity is the modernity I have been discussing in this chapter. Second modernity is what is following in the aftermath. It is more accurate to describe this process as creating modernities, for there are many and they are growing. This process is still going forward:
Rather than imagining modernity in its pristine form, it is more practical to envisage the global spread of modernity as resulting in no single agreed idea of modernity, multiple ways of interpreting modernity and an openness that gives rise to new theories of modernity. (Lee 2008:65)
Escobar dismisses this apparent opening of the modernity paradigm as “a reflection of a eurocentered social order, under the assumption that modernity is now everywhere, an ubiquitous and ineluctable social fact” (Escobar 2007:183). For Escobar, terms such as postmodernity, alterity, and subaltern processes are all tarred with the Eurocentric brush: they all assume the Eurocentric view of modernity as the basic paradigm. He, too, proposes alternative modernities but rooted in the Latin American experience rather than in Europe’s (Escobar 2007:180; 2008:131). Other Latin Americanist writers have similar ideas, but they seem mainly to focus on the cultures of indigenous peoples as models for some New World society (e.g., Aparicio and Blaser 2008:66–71; Van Cott 2007:135–36).
Marshall Sahlins, Pedro Pitarch and Gemma Orobitg, Anath Ariel de Vidas, and Priti Singh focus specifically on the ways that indigenous people as social entities respond to the impulse of modernity. For Sahlins (1999:v),
[T]o speak of the historical agency of indigenous peoples, true as it may be, is to ignore the tyranny of the Western world-system, thus to conspire intellectually in its violence and domination. Whereas, to speak of the systematic hegemony of imperialism, true as it may be, is to ignore the peoples’ struggles for cultural survival, thus to conspire intellectually in Western violence and domination.
Pitarch and Orobitg (2012:15), on the other hand, propose a view of modernity and tradition not as opposing forces or historical phases but rather in terms of “affinities, contrasts and interchanges” between both terms. They recommend seeing indigenous people as defined not by their opposition to modernity but rather as sophisticated cultural forms able to develop a dialogue with new global processes. Ariel de Vidas (2006:5) points out that all cultures are continuously engaged in the process of change. In this context, she recommends seeing the ways that globalization is changing indigenous people as the election of new options of value systems that can oscillate between the holism of the traditional cultures and groups of values that come from outside. Singh (2011:57–58) looks to the emerging generation of indigenous leaders to organize themselves and their societies as having primordial rights, based on their claims of having been in the same geographical location since well before the existence of the nation-state. These rights precede the nation-state and so are different from those of nonindigenous minorities, whose rights are bestowed by the nation-state. These indigenous rights can be the basis for social movements within the indigenous groups.
Where do the Mixtecs fit in these suggested modernities? They are oscillating between their traditional culture and elements of modernity. They see tradition and modernity as simultaneous. As I will show in the following chapters, they are in the process of choosing which aspects of modernity to embrace (such as paved roads) and which to reject (such as individual ownership of land). This is a complex, ongoing process that is different in each community. Conversion to non-Catholic faiths is a catalyst for change, but change occurs in the context of global forces.
Conclusion
This discussion of paradigms and theories has taken us far from the daily reality of the world—modern or not. So I return to the question at the end of chapter 1: Are Mixtecs becoming modern? Are Mixtecs also looking for alternatives to modernity? Or will their destiny be assimilation into US culture at the bottom of the ethnic ladder? There are those who are still willing to defend their rights to their ancestral land and their cultural traditions. More and more, these traditions are being changed in order to accommodate modernity. This hybrid modernity includes non-Catholics as members of the traditional community. Mixtecs are finding ways to embrace certain aspects of certain kinds of modernity while maintaining some aspects of their ancestral culture. The real lives of Mixtecs as presented in the following chapters exemplify the ways that economic models such as neoliberalism, rather than predicting or explaining behavior, instead impact the lives of people without the inventors of the models even noticing. The ability to survive these impacts while part of the modern system is one aspect of Mixtec modernity. The ability to adapt their traditional cultures without allowing the modern world to destroy them is another.
Notes
1. Some examples of such lists can be found in Escobar (2007 :181–82) and Knight (2007:92–105).
2. This is how earlier anthropologists (e.g., Cancian 1965 , Foster 1967) described Latin American villages. Under the prevailing paradigm, it has been supposed that such traditions had disappeared before modernity’s relentless trajectory.
3. As I was the one who needed the chicken, I paid the $14. There are, of course, commercially produced chickens available in the town of Tlaxiaco, two hours away. But if I had bought such a chicken, for about US$3, it would have been unacceptable. Chickens raised in the village are seen as much preferable to commercially raised chickens, although my US palate deems the village chickens tough and stringy compared to commercial ones.