Grad - Staples

Abstract

The modern Mexican state has actively resisted acknowledging its indigenous peoples rights to land and self-government. The Mexican state’s granting of full citizenship to all peoples residing within its territory purposefully obliterated the cultural and political autonomy of its indigenous population. Moreover, the citizenship bestowed by Mexican revolutionary state on the popular sector, the peasantry and the indigenous peoples was a massified form of citizenship. In other words, citizenship was granted to the group not to the individuals within the group- citizenship belonged to the faceless masses not to a collection of private individuals. The state then co-opted these sectors’ citizenship by exchanging their political participation for government services and benefits. The Mexican state’s contraction following the 1982 peso crisis, which was later intensified with the passage of NAFTA in 1994, along with its repudiation of its commitment to semi-subsistence farming in the 1980s has heralded in substantive changes to citizenship in Mexico. This withdrawal of the state has led to an intensification of citizen opposition in the form of social movements to the massified corporate forms of political participation because they are no longer providing real benefits. These social movements like the Zapatista movement of Chiapas who in their contestation with the state are primarily concerned with revising the legal, political and cultural construction of citizenship and democracy. With these renewed calls by indigenous peoples for group-differentiated citizenship (i.e. political and legal autonomy), the Mexican state must not only abandon completely its ideological commitment to assimilation and co-optation, but take seriously the indigenous peoples demands to revise the terms of their citizenship. If it does not, it risks further destabilization when its indigenous people pursue alternative non-national state avenues of securing their rights and values.  Thus, not only secure its stability and viability, but to also meet its responsibility to respect the human rights of its indigenous peoples, the Mexican government must begin to take seriously the idea of a multinational state: a state that recognizes indigenous peoples’ social, political, territorial and cultural rights and powers. In this paper, I first will examine the ideological and political roots of citizenship in Mexico as it particularly relates to Mexico’s native peoples. I then will discuss the current struggle over the discourse of citizenship. Lastly, I will put forth an argument for the construction a multinational state in Mexico.