Pre-defence seminar with Casper Jacobsen

Multicultourism in Mexico's Magical Village Cuetzalan

Opponent: Associate Professor Anna Källén, Stockholm University

Abstract

In the course of the 1990's, an unprecedented arena of political negotiation emerged for indigenous minorities (and majorities) within Latin America, as many national constitutions were reformed to accommodate notions of multiculturalism, and political multiculturalist initiatives multiplied. Frequently, political multiculturalism is seen to hold an emancipatory and empowering potential leading to equal citizenship and social justice. Nevertheless, in the case of Mexico, political multiculturalism appears to stand the strongest when not interfering with government agendas and not looking to substantially restructure society, and when supporting national economic incentives. Notably, the surge of political multiculturalism in Latin America coincides with the discovery of intangible (indigenous) culture as a national economic resource. Thus, while indigenous claims to autonomy and self-determination based on control of land and resources or the right to receive education in a first language has had little resonance in government policies, politics of recognition have been placed centerpiece in heritage and tourism policies.

To take the temperature of such political space, my thesis examines one expression of the surge of political multiculturalism; the tourism program Magical Villages launched in 2001 by Mexico's federal government. Through a focus on the participant town Cuetzalan (Puebla) and surrounding indigenous Nahua communities, I analyze the identity and power configurations that are produced by and in relation to the program. Combining a governmentality-inspired approach with sociologist Erving Goffman's ideas on frame and social interaction, I draw forth contradictive and counter intuitive views of political multiculturalism in contemporary Mexico (2001 to 2014). While the Magical Villages Program is embedded in a liberating desire to reduce social inequality through empowerment strategies, I argue that the program contributes to maintain and enforce existing divisions, hierarchies and asymmetrical power relations between majority society and indigenous minorities. Integral to program practice is a dehistoricization and depoliticization of political activity and power relations through totalizing and culturalizing representations. This way, I argue that contemporary Mexican multiculturalism dismantles the political indigenous subject position that came to rise with the surge of Latin American multiculturalism, and it has equally reconfigured the arena of political action into one of multicultourism, thereby both redirecting the efforts of cultural rights activists and contributing to a radicalization of proponents of wider-reaching cultural rights demands.