Politics, Identity, and Mexico’s Indigenous Rights Movements Cambridge Studies in Contentious Politics Series

Drawing on an original survey of more than 5,000 respondents, this book argues that, contrary to claims by the 1994 Zapatista insurgency, indigenous and non-indigenous respondents in southern Mexico have been united by socioeconomic conditions and land tenure institutions as well as by ethnic identity. It concludes that - contrary to many analyses of Chiapas's 1994 indigenous rebellion - external influences can trump ideology in framing social movements. Rural Chiapas's prevalent communitarian attitudes resulted partly from external land tenure institutions, rather than from indigenous identities alone. The book further points to recent indigenous rights movements in neighboring Oaxaca, Mexico, as examples of bottom-up multicultural institutions that might be emulated in Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America.

1. Indians by choice?: traditional societies, indigenous rights movements, and the state in post-Zapatista southern Mexico; 2. A tale of two movements: the salience of indigenous rights in Chiapas 1994 but not in Oaxaca 2006; 3. Agrarian tenure institutions, conflict frames, and communitarian identities in indigenous southern Mexico; 4. Agrarian conflicts, armed rebellion, and the individual versus collective rights tension in Chiapas' Lacandon jungle; 5. Individual rights and communal elections in Oaxaca, Mexico: a challenge to multiculturalism and women's rights; 6. From balaclavas to baseball caps: wearing many hats in the exercise of 'real world' identities; 7. Reconciling individual rights, communal rights, and autonomy institutions: broader lessons from Chiapas and the 'Oaxaca experiment'.

Todd A. Eisenstadt is Associate Professor of Government at the American University, where he also serves as chair of the department. He is the author of Courting Democracy in Mexico (Cambridge University Press, 2004) and has published dozens of articles and book chapters and co-authored or edited several books on democratization, identity and social movements, public opinion, political parties and electoral campaigns, mainly in Latin America. Professor Eisenstadt has been a visiting scholar at Harvard University's David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, the Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas (CIDE) and El Colegio de México in Mexico City, the Latin American Social Science Faculty (FLACSO) in Quito, Ecuador and the Center for US-Mexican Studies of the University of California, San Diego. Research for this book was funded in part by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and an American University Faculty Development grant. His work has also been funded by the Fulbright Commission, the National Security Education Program, the International Rotary Foundation and the Ford Foundation, among others.