In recent years, Indians of different ethnicities in Chiapas have come together in regional and national forums around a sense of shared Indian identity. Calls for Indian unity at these forums are based on common experiences of discrimination, lack of representation and power in the national political system, and the absence of government services in indigenous regions, as well as on the shared practice of communal work and similar decision-making procedures within indigenous communities. Since the organization of the first of these meetings, the Indian Congress in San Crist6bal de Las Casas in 1974, increased collective organization across Indian ethnic boundaries has occurred, as Chiapas's Tzotzils, Tzeltals, Chols, and Tojolabals have joined in a historic discussion about common problems and potential solutions. The bringing together of indigenous ethnicities throughout the state was an important contribution in itself, providing the participants with a broader vision of themselves both as members of particular ethnic groups and as Indians in the larger context. Participants formed new alliances as they sought to establish links with other organizations in the state, in Mexico, and in the international community. Although ethnically based solidarity provided a way for Chiapas's indigenous people to begin addressing their common problems, turning that solidarity into political and economic power is still in a formative stage and has been more problematic. Nevertheless, especially since the Zapatista uprising, indigenous activists have taken advantage of the disarray in Chiapas's constitutional government to undertake political and administrative reforms unilaterally at the local and regional levels. These experiments in rearranging government to include people who have for 500 years been excluded from power have faced unrelenting opposition from the state and national govern-