Defining the Indian: State definitions, perception of the other and community organization in southwestern Tlaxcala and Mexico

Abstract

The way the inhabitants of two communities of Nahua origin in southwestern Tlaxcala in Central Mexico perceive their own and each other’s identities defy categorizing these towns as “indigenous” or “Mestizo”. In the Mesoamerican culture area at large, situations such as these far outnumber those of regions such as the Chiapas highlands with a clear caste-like ethnic divide. This is so in part because of the massive and rapid language shift in the twentieth century that took place in tens of thousands of Mesoamerican communities that were repúblicas de indios during the colonial period, consequent to a nation-state building project based on Spanish monolinguism. In this paper I criticize how anthropologists have used the “indigenous” and “mestizo”. Instead of centering on how that policy has caused massive re-identification, ethnicity and identity studies are equated with identity politics. By paying more attention to state than to local categories, anthropologists have ignored important social processes and have contributed to the Mexico´s twentieth century state building and forced identity change project. Emphasis is placed on the role of the cargo systems in defining membership in communities that in the colonial period were “repúblicas de indios” or “pueblos de indios”.