Neoliberal Multiculturalism

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Charles R. HaleUniversity of Texas

Neoliberal Multiculturalism:The Remaking of Cultural Rights and Racial Dominance in

Central America

This article analyzes the rising prominence of neoliberalism as a new strategy ofgovernance that reaches well beyond economic reforms. In particular neoliberalgovernance includes the limited recognition of cultural rights, the strengtheningof civil society, and endorsement of the principle of intercultural equality. Whencombined with neoliberal economic policies, these progressive measures haveunexpected effects, including a deepened state capacity to shape and neutralizepolitical opposition, and a remaking of racial hierarchies across the region.Drawing on ethnographic examples from three sites of political practice, the ar-ticle documents these processes and their consequences, especially for black andindigenous Central Americans.

Puerto Lempira is a small, predominantly Miskitu Indian town on the banks of asalt water lagoon in northwest Honduras, the central place of the HonduranMosquitia and the homeland of the Miskitu people. I went there in May 2003 forthe final meeting of a participatory mapping research project, designed to sup-port Miskitu and Garffuna people in their struggle for land. We invited 30 lead-ers to a two-day workshop in order to discuss the findings and to plan follow-upactions; we arrived to find 75 people packed into the Catholic church meetinghall, already sweltering hot at ten o'clock in the morning. Our research had pro-duced maps and supporting documents for 15 multicommunal claims called blo-ques, a compromise between individual community claims, clearly favored bythe project donors and the Honduran state, and an expansive demand for the en-tire Mosquitia, which many Miskitu fervently believed to be rightfully.theirs. Thecompromise emerged as a partly explicit, partly concealed strategy to achieve theexpansive territorial demand in a less confrontational and perhaps more effica-cious way: piecing it together, one bloque at a time. We expected workshop par-ticipants to endorse this plan and to devote remaining project resources to onechosen bloque, which would achieve a collectively held land title, and conse-quently open a path for others to follow.

PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review, Vol. 28, No. 1, pp. 10-28, ISSN 1081-6976, electronic ISSN 1555-2934. 2005 by the American Anthropological Association.All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce ar-ticle content through the University of California Press's Rights and Permissions website,at http://www.ucpress.edu/journals/rights.htm.

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I then watched, with an odd combination of dismay and exhilaration, as our care-fully conceived plan unraveled. In rhetoric emboldened by the study's resound-ing support for indigenous rights, by the collective energy of the packed meetinghall, and by cumulative anger with historic government oppression, one speakerafter another opted for the radical alternative: "Demand the entire Mosquitia,which has been our homeland for time immemorial." Even some of the Miskituleaders who had been instrumental in formulating the bloque strategy ended upendorsing the clamor for territory, whether out of pragmatic calculation or be-cause they too were transformed by the meeting's fervor. After much heated de-bate, the plenary overwhelmingly endorsed a militant, vaguely millenariandeclaration of rights to territorial autonomy. The dismay that tempered my ex-hilaration at this glimpse of an uprising in the making was because it seemedlikely that energy would dissipate in the face of powerful opposition and weakinternal organization. These mixed reactions inform the central analytical ques-tion: Under what conditions can indigenous movements occupy the limitedspaces opened by neoliberal multiculturalism, redirecting them toward their ownradical, even utopian political alternatives?

September 11, 2003, marked thirty years since the overthrow of Chilean presi-dent Salvador Allende, which has become the point of departure for tracing therise of neoliberal economic reform in Latin America. Pinochet and his ChicagoSchool advisors were precocious. Neoliberalism did not become a householdterm in academic and policy circles until well into the 1980s, and later still did itbecome a continentwide object of critical analysis and political repudiation. Bythe beginning of the twenty-first century, however, it already had becomeanachronistic to continue speaking of "neoliberal reforms" as opposed to simplyusing the term "neoliberalism" to name the quasi-naturalized mode of political-economic organization that now prevails. The harvest from these two decades ofneoliberal economic policy has been remarkably bitter. According to the most re-cent report from the Economic Commission on Latin America (ECLA), 220 mil-lion Latin Americans (or 43.4 percent) live in poverty; inequality in thedistribution of wealth and income has deepened; prospects for the near future ap-pear bleak. Even in their own terms, neoliberal economics are not working allthat well.

Despite Pinochet's distinction as a pioneer, it would be misleading to associate ne-oliberal ascendancy with dictatorship. On the contrary, this shift has been con-summated in tandem with a region-wide return to democracy, during the sameyears that scholars have heralded as the era of new social movements (Escobar1992; Dagnino. Alvarez, and Escobar 1998). Yet, however critical these new dem-ocratic actors, the general pattern has been for stark opposition to fade into nego-tiation and compromise. With the partial exception of Fidel Castro's Cuba and theembattled municipios aut6nomos of Chiapas, oppositional political initiatives areapt to be found waging their struggles from within the neoliberal establishment.

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The anti-globalization movement is another exception, which still mainly servesto prove the rule: impressive intensity of political energy, prescient in its globalanalysis and scope, but largely disarticulated from, for example, the daily strug-gles of those 220 million who seek immediate relief. To the economic paradox offailed policies that continue to be implemented, add the following political one:The best analyses of neoliberalism's systemic ills inform political strategies thatmost potential supporters cannot or will not follow.

This, in turn, raises the question of cultural rights. Are indigenous movements,with their endorsement of a radically distinct cultural-political logic, demands,and notions of rights, poised both to articulate strongly with a multitudinous baseand to advance an alternative political vision that directly challenges neoliberalorthodoxy? In order to address this question, we must first expand our under-standing of neoliberalism itself. This means thinking beyond its original mean-ing: a set of market-oriented reforms meant to correct and eliminate the flawedeconomic policies of import substitution industrialization and state-driven eco-nomic development. Latin American neoliberalism, I will argue, has become afull-fledged political project. Neoliberalism encompasses economic doctrine butalso promotes a reorganization of "political society" along the lines of decen-tralization, trimming down of the state, affirming basic human rights, and callingfor minimally functional democracies. Most importantly for us here, neoliberal-ism brings forth a new direction in social policy, emphasizing the developmentof civil society and social capital, and an approach to cultural rights that at firstglance appears highly counterintuitive.

It is often assumed that the central tenet of neoliberalism, like the unadorned cog-nate from which it derives, is the triumph of an aggressively individualist ideol-ogy of "economic man." In contrast, I suggest that collective rights, granted ascompensatory measures to "disadvantaged" cultural groups, are an integral partof neoliberal ideology. These distinctive cultural policies (along with their so-ciopolitical counterparts), rather than simply the temporal lapse between classicliberalism and its latter day incarnation, are what give the "neo" its real meaning.To emphasize the integral relationship between these new cultural rights and ne-oliberal political economic reforms, I use the term "neoliberal multiculturalism."

In previous moments of Latin American history, the hegemonic idiom of nationbuilding was mestizaje, a gesture of deep reverence for the indigenous (or, inBrazil and perhaps Cuba, African) roots of national identity, combined with aprivileging of the European-oriented "mestizo" subject, as bearer of rights andsource of political dynamism that looks to the future (see, for example, BonfilBatalla 1981, Hale 1994, Gordon 1998, Stutzman 1981, Gould 1998). This pro-foundly assimilationist project remains strong in many parts of Latin America,but in general is waning and being replaced by a politics of "cultural recogni-tion." In part taking the rise of cultural rights activism as an inevitable given, andin part actively substituting a new articulating principle, the emergent regimeof

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governance shapes, delimits, and produces cultural difference rather than sup-pressing it. Encouraged and supported by multilateral institutions, LatinAmerican elites have moved from being vehement opponents to reluctant arbitersof rights grounded in cultural difference. In so doing, they find that culturalrights, when carefully delimited, not only pose little challenge to the forwardmarch of the neoliberal project but also induce the bearers of these rights to joinin the march.

In this article I briefly examine three sites of neoliberal multiculturalism, drawnfrom three different arenas of my own work in Central America: a landmark cul-tural rights case in the Inter-American Human Rights Court in San Josd, CostaRica; struggles for black and indigenous lands in Nicaragua and Honduras; andLadino responses to the rise of the Maya movement in Guatemala. From thisanalysis emerges, first, a strong and vivid sense of rights grounded in cultural dif-ference as a rich, expansive, and volatile terrain of political mobilization. In eachcase, powerful institutions played key roles in recognizing, encouraging, andopening the space for certain versions of cultural rights. These institutions, how-ever, cannot easily set limits on the mobilizations that follow, nor can they read-ily fix the cultural-political meanings that people produce and affirm as theymobilize. Yet in the struggles that ensue, the scope and meaning of cultural rightsbecome the focus of contention while the outcome of struggles in this arena oftenremains ambiguous and highly contingent. The great efficacy of neoliberal mul-ticulturalism resides in powerful actors' ability to restructure the arena of politi-cal contention, driving a wedge between cultural rights and the assertion of thecontrol over resources necessary for those rights to be realized. This is not a di-vide between (endorsed) individual rights and (prohibited) collective ones butrather a retooled dichotomy between base and superstructure: a Marxist visionreturning to social movements as a nightmare.

This dichotomy acquires such efficacy in part because it looks precisely like whatthese movements themselves-especially indigenous movements-have beenstruggling to achieve: affirmation of cultural particularity and relief from theMarxist penchant to reduce all political contention to class struggle. The night-mare settles in as indigenous organizations win important battles of culturalrights only to find themselves mired in the painstaking, technical, administrative,and highly inequitable negotiations for resources and political power that follow.I develop this argument focusing on three, sites of Central American research,using each to explore a distinct effect of neoliberal multiculturalism: extendingthe grid of intelligibility, defining legitimate (and undeserving) subjects of rights,and remaking racial hierarchy. I conclude by pointing tentatively to pathways forconfronting and moving beyond these limitations: sparks of utopian politics thatchange the subject; carrying on the cultural rights discussion in a language fun-damentally at odds with the neoliberal multicultural frame; strategies for reartic-ulating cultural rights with demands for political-economic resources from the

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start. These pathways embrace expansive political alternatives; not only havelocal strategies been welcomed, but they have also started occupying the spacesthat neoliberal multiculturalism has opened.

The Awas Tingni Case in the Inter-American Human Rights CourtThis first site should quickly dispel the gloomy sense of entrapment in my argu-ment. The site is the Inter-American Human Rights Court, and the specific occa-sion is the landmark case of the Mayagna (indigenous) community of AwasTingni against the Nicaraguan state. Very briefly: Awas Tingni brought suitagainst the government for violation of their rights to communal lands and fordenial of due process in the national courts in adjudication of those rights. Thelegal framework for the case was the American Convention on Human Rights,formulated in the 1960s at the height of the previous era of assimilationist cul-tural conformity and signed by Nicaragua in 1979. In keeping with the ideolog-ical precepts of the time, the Convention's guaranteed protection of "propertyrights" (Article 21, "Right to Property") had an unyieldingly individualist con-tent (Inter-American Commission on Human Rights 1969):

1. Everyone has the right to the use and enjoyment of his property.The law may subordinate such use and enjoyment to the interest ofsociety.

2. No one shall be deprived of his property except upon payment ofjust compensation, for reasons of public utility or social interest, andin the cases and according to the forms established by law.

The crux of the audacious strategy of the Awas Tingni lawyers was to convincethe judges that this clause should be stretched and reinterpreted in order to applyproperty rights to a collective subject-an indigenous community-rather thanindividually and to understand property not as a legal title but, rather, as a cul-turally sanctioned occupation. During most of the trial, the community's lawyersbuilt their case around the key term "ancestrality": Awas Tingni inhabitants havelived on this land for time immemorial, according to traditional cultural patterns,and have property rights that take precedence over those granted by a late-com-ing nation-state. This line of reasoning fit neatly within the lines of political con-tention in the previous era: a hegemonic mestizo state defending onecultural-political principle, and a militant indigenous movement, putting forth aradically different and contradictory one.

In the final phase, in the face of the government's relentless challenge of the an-cestrality claim, S. James Anaya, the lead lawyer for the community, gave his ar-gument a dramatically new twist. "There are two approaches (tendencias) thatstates may follow in response to indigenous people's claims for rights," Anayabegan. One approach he called "modern"; he never gave the other a name, but heassociated it with the past, the out-of-date, the backward-looking, so I will refer


to it as "backward." The "backward" approach sought to assimilate indigenouspeoples, "stripping away their cultural attributes (rasgos), their cultural essence,preventing them from prospering in the lands where they have lived." The mod-em approach, in contrast, was to be found in all the recently approved interna-tional laws, backed by the United Nations, that "strengthen the cultural essence,the life ways of indigenous peoples, assign value to indigenous religious andphilosophical beliefs (cosmovisi6n) and to their relations with the land." Anayagave the word "modem" and its cognates a striking amount of air time in the finalminutes of the courtroom drama, in contrast to the word's near absence in the restof the proceedings. For example, one government argument was that Awas Tingnipeople had moved around too much to have a claim to ancestral rights. Anaya re-sponded:

It does not matter.., according to the modern criteria of the mod-ern approach, reflected in the modern judicial instruments, it doesn'tmatter how much you move around; what matters is the continuity ofa historically constituted group, which maintains traditional traits andpatterns. This has not been disputed. (author's emphasis added)

Modernity was a space that both the judges and the illustrious Nicaraguan stateimagined themselves to occupy, especially in contrast to the monolingualMayagna of Awas Tingni who filled the courtroom. Anaya had simply added akey attribute to that same space: Judges and states alike, if they are indeed trulymodem, recognize and affirm the rights of indigenous communities such as AwasTingni. After lengthy deliberations, the judges delivered a sentence that resound-ingly supported this contention.

The Awas Tingni victory has galvanized similar struggles by other indigenousand black communities in Nicaragua and throughout the Americas. It has injecteda burst of energy in work to advance an international legal regime in defense ofcultural rights, and it has moved Awas Tingni community members closer toachieving their fundamental goals of livelihood security and cultural survival.These achievements, however, have come with a full complement of contradic-tions.

The case in favor of Awas Tingni became so compelling to the judges for a com-bination of reasons: On the one hand, community lawyers emphasized the pro-foundly authentic cultural difference of Awas Tingni's people, and on the otherhand, they convinced the court that such cultural difference deserves legal pro-tection, because that is what modem nation-states are supposed to do. Althoughthe Nicaraguan government fought this position tooth and nail, more agile andastute political elites might well have gone with the current. Two years later, it isclear that Awas Tingni's legal victory has come at the cost of deeper entangle-ment in, to adapt a term from James C. Scott (1998), neoliberalism's "grid of in-telligibility." This is not to argue that community members were foolhardy to

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wage the struggle nor that the cost was exorbitant, but, rather, to insist on seeingthe process as a transformation of power relations as opposed to resistance to-ward empowerment.Following the legal victory, in September 2001 government negotiators engagedthe community and its lawyers in a protracted twenty-month negotiation beforefinally beginning work on the mandated demarcation of the community's landsin June 2003. Claiming lack of funds (due in no small part to the fact that thepresident of the time, Arnoldo Alemdn, stole untold millions from the govern-ment coffers, a crime for which he was jailed), the state turned to the WorldBank, who agreed to finance the demarcation. As of this writing, the demarcationstudy is being "reviewed" by government officials who, according to the negoti-ated arrangement, are entitled to demand changes until they are satisfied.Whatever the community gains in the final analysis-and it is likely to be sub-stantial-the cost will be an unprecedented involvement of the state and of ne-oliberal development institutions in the community's internal affairs: regulatingthe details of the claim, shaping political subjectivities, and reconfiguring inter-nal relations.

This entanglement in a grid of intelligibility is a key feature of neoliberal gover-nance. The transformation of power relations is especially productive because itinvolves the concession-or, indeed the active promotion-of long-standing de-mands for cultural rights. Its advance is deceptive, among other reasons, becausevictory often comes in the face of vigorous resistance from recalcitrant elites whodefend the previous order. In the Awas Tingni case, for example, governmentlawyers defended a remarkably aggressive and arrogant version of Nicaragua's"myth of Mestizaje" (Gould 1998), arguing that the claimants had no rights be-cause they were racially mixed-an argument that showed contempt for their"cultural backwardness" and suggested that their legitimate rights were nogreater than those of any mestizo peasant. This posture clearly irked the judgesand helped to set up Anaya's modernity move, momentarily positioning theNicaraguan state as needing to be educated and disciplined.

The Awas Tingni case is especially challenging in relation to the problem of ne-oliberal multiculturalism, because the rights in question go well beyond "culturalrecognition" (language, education, spirituality, identity) to encompass land andresources. Do black and indigenous community land rights really fit within thebroader frame of neoliberal governance? In the course of a five year exercise inactivist research, a group of colleagues from the University of Texas and I, alongwith others from Central America, have been reflecting upon this very question.We accepted the World Bank's offer to support black and indigenous land rights,to find out whether such an offer might be put to the service of the more expan-sive visions of political change that these communities nurture, whether thesecommunities can "use the system," as one Garffuna activist intellectual fromHonduras put it, "to fight the system."

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The Black and Native Land Rights Struggles in Honduras and Nicaragua

Shelton Davis, activist anthropologist turned World Bank sociologist, led with re-markable success a two-decade-long campaign from within the organization toreform World Bank policies toward indigenous peoples (Davis and Partridge1994). Playing strategically off rising cries of protest over World Bank "mega-projects" and their deleterious effects on indigenous peoples (protest that Davishimself helped to ignite with his early ethnography-expos6 of development in theBrazilian Amazonia, Victims of the Miracle), these insider reformers worked todevelop a new "operational directive" for indigenous peoples (known as DO4.20), which committed the World Bank to an extensive new set of constraintsand obligations in recognition of indigenous cultural, political, and economicrights.1 Davis, who frequently makes university visits, gave an impressivePowerPoint seminar at the University of Texas in the spring of 2003 that placedthe World Bank at the cutting edge of the trend in support of "development withidentity": indigenous participation in all facets of project development; respectfor cultural difference; and multiculturalism as a forward-looking political sensi-bility that the World Bank urges member states to endorse, all directly resonantwith Anaya's "modernity move" in the Awas Tingni case. In keeping with thispolicy shift the World Bank has funded "land demarcation" projects, intended tomap black and indigenous claims, as a prior step to definitive titling of theirlands.

The Caribbean Central American Research Council (CCARC), an activist re-search organization of which I am a member, entered a competitive biddingprocess for the research contracts in Nicaragua (1997-1998) and in Honduras(2001-2002), winning both. Thus began a five year attempt to "ride the tiger,"about which we have just recently started thinking in analytical terms.2 We man-aged a combined budget of some seven hundred thousand dollars, worked withteams of about twenty researchers in each country, and designed and employed aparticipatory research methodology that involved community leaders in a dy-namic process of discussion, elaboration, and validation of their land rights. Themost important research products were what we call "ethno-maps": computer-based cartographic representations of claims, created through georeferenced fielddata collected by the community members themselves. Land use designations in-side the perimeters of these claims demonstrate that, far from being "empty ter-ritory," this land encompassed a dense, long-standing network of human-resourcerelationships. The products also include an accompanying text, which explainsand documents the claims, based on ethnographic research in the community.Quite apart from these principal research results, the project also provided an oc-casion to explore why neoliberal institutions are opening these spaces in the firstplace.

The prevailing image of the World Bank and affine institutions in academic andpolitical circles on the Left is of ruthless guardians of a punishing economic

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model, bowing down obediently to the interests of capital and trampling on theneeds and rights of the poor.3 This image is badly in need of revision. The pointis not that the overall effects depart sharply from this portrayal but rather that thepolitical sensibilities and institutional practices that drive World Bank policies to-ward "agricultural modernization" in Central America, for example, are moresubtle, gentle, and comprehending-and thus much more effective. For every or-thodox economist who sees the world in supply-and-demand equations drivenexclusively by individual interests, there is a "front-man" like Enrique, a formerfriend of mine from Nicaragua solidarity days, who insists that he has not wa-vered in his support for radical egalitarian political principles but simply hasadded a dose of pragmatism in his methods for getting there-which, in neolib-eral discourse, is called a shift from protest to proposal. Moreover, in policy andideological terms, it would be mistaken to assume that the architects of neolib-eral policies need, or even prefer, a strictly individual notion of rights. Collectiverights to land work just as well, as long as they meet two basic conditions: Thefirst is that they cannot contradict the principal tenets of the long-term economicdevelopment model, which, in these countries, is turning away from most large-scale agriculture toward free-trade-zone manufacturing, financial services, com-merce, tourism, and environmental management. The second condition is thatthey cannot cross a certain line in the gathering of political clout, which wouldthreaten established power holders and destabilize the regime. This line, highlysubjective and unstable, is often drawn in the heat of the moment by state oper-atives rather than Bank functionaries themselves. As long as these conditions aremet, collective land rights actually help advance the neoliberal model by ration-alizing land tenure, reducing the potential for chaos and conflict, and locking thecommunity into a mindset that makes it more difficult for expansive political al-ternatives to emerge.

To grasp the contradictory, three-way power relations behind these land rightsstruggles, comprising the World Bank, the client state, and the subjects of cul-tural rights, is to go to the heart of the puzzle of neoliberal multiculturalism inCentral America. The Nicaraguan and Honduran states have been dragged intocompliance with the new multicultural mandates, pressured not only by theWorld Bank but also by organizations such as the Inter-American DevelopmentBank (IADB), the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and theInter-American Human Rights Court, who advance "progressive" agendas alongthese lines. In Nicaragua we heard constant protests from state officials assignedas counterparts to our land rights study as well as denunciations of the WorldBank's "new imperialism" in favor of indigenous rights. As one sharp-tonguedNicaraguan Ministry of the Environment and Natural Resources (MARENA)lawyer quipped,

The costehios [black and indigenous residents of the Atlantic coastalregion] do not work hard to produce, they simply hunt and fish. They

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are generally lazy. How can we justify giving them so much land? Inany case, it is we Nicaraguans who have to decide who has rights tocommunal lands. The World Bank should not be making this deci-sion, exerting influence where it does not belong. These guys wantto turn all of Nicaragua into a national park.

Many times I heard Enrique gripe about the "dinosaurs" in the Honduran state,whom he and others in the most recent "Bank Mission" had to bring into line.World Bank funding props up these tiny, corrupt, bankrupt states and, in theprocess, gains the informal prerogative to dictate policy, force out incompetent orbackward-thinking state functionaries, and even create new government entitiesif the existing ones seem incompetent. High-level operatives in the resultingpseudo-state chafe at this *blatant intervention and at times protest openly, butthey generally are too well paid and too dependent to persist. They are morelikely to remain smiling until the "mission" leaves and then find ways to evadefull compliance. "Obedezco pero no cumplo" [I obey but I do not comply],4 allover again.

Local power holders, in contrast, feel much more directly threatened by the ad-vance of cultural rights, and they have much less to lose in voicing protest. InHonduras, for example, our Diagndstico (Diagnostic) caused great disquietamong members of the local mestizo economic and political elite, who would bedirectly displaced if the land claims we had documented were actually granted.In one public meeting, the mestizo mayor of Juan Francisco Bulnes, a tricultural(Garffuna, indigenous, and mestizo) municipio, took a stance of vehement oppo-sition to our Diagn6stico.

Here the question of adjudicating authenticity comes to the fore. Staunch opposi-tion from one sector of local and national elites keeps the proponents of neolib-eral multiculturalism on high ground, fighting the good fight against the"dinosaurs," while serving notice to the subjects of these newfound rights to staywithin certain pre-inscribed limits. Institutions such as the World Bank then pres-ent themselves as pragmatic mediators, carving out a space of compromise be-tween militant cultural rights activists and recalcitrant, powerful conservatives. AsElizabeth Povinelli (2002) argues for parallel land rights claims brought forwardby aboriginal Australians, "late liberal" states can turn the tables astoundinglyquickly. They do so happens not by denying rights but rather by granting them, aslong as they maintain the prerogative to set standards of authenticity associatedwith these rights and to decide who meets those standards.

A recent volume titled Indigenous Self-Representation in Latin America (Warrenand Jackson 2002) echoes similar concerns: The state has shifted from adversaryto arbiter, introducing a whole new set of problems for indigenous movements.The following questions arise: Do the indigenous claimants measure up? Howmust they behave in order to become and remain deserving subjects of these

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rights? When indigenous leaders or intellectuals occupy that authorized space ofcompromise, they win an important battle in the struggle for recognition. Yetwhen they exchange protest for proposal, they often lose the inclination to artic-ulate more expansive, utopian political visions with the pragmatic tactics of thehere and now. Those expansive visions remain, most apt to burst forth as angryrepudiation of pragmatic compromise rather than as its strategically articulatedcomplement. This is the lesson we learned in the church hall meeting describedat the beginning of this article. Under the weight of this predicament, even cul-tural difference, that reliable font of utopian counterdiscourse, submits to do-mestication as indigenous "representatives" accept recognition in exchange forcompliance with the economic and political constraints that follow.

Ladino Response to the Rise of the Maya5

The most counterintuitive outcome of this shift is not the "domestication" ef-fect-a feature of any governance regime-but, rather, the remaking of racial hi-erarchy, even amid vehement condemnation of "classic" racism. To probe thisfacet of the panorama, I turn to Guatemala, where Mayas constitute the majorityof the population and have made impressive strides over the past two decades innearly every realm of cultural rights: forging powerful cultural-political organi-zations, contesting racism, and demanding and receiving recognition from dom-inant actors and institutions who, a generation earlier, espoused a naturalizedscorn for "lo indio." Members of the dominant culture, known as Ladinos, gen-erally have distanced themselves from the racism of times past, adopting insteada position that affirms cultural equality and allows a limited space for culturalrights but ultimately justifies a new form of racial hierarchy, letting culture,rather than race itself, provide the rationale.

The yearly kite festival in the predominantly indigenous town of Sumpango, justsouth of Chimaltenango on the Pan-American Highway, is a quintessential spaceof Maya efflorescence. Starting months before November 1, the day of the festi-val, groups of indigenous youth organize to raise funds and design and buildenormous kites made of brightly colored paper carrying emphatic messages, al-rhost always revolving around Maya identity and cultural rights: "Tejemos nues-tra propia historia" [we weave our own history]; "Identificamos como pueblomaya" [we identify as the Mayan people]; panegyrics to Rigoberta Mench6i, quo-tations from the iconic Maya text, the Popol Wuj. Sumpango also is situated inthe midst of a vast quasi-free trade zone of maquiladoras, which line the Pan-American Highway. Driving by on any weekday at dawn, one will find the busstops teeming with indigenous youth, waiting for transportation to their mini-mum-wage maquila jobs. Only in an era of neoliberal multiculturalism couldsuch an image congeal: the same people working as producers of surplus valuefor the Korean-owned multinational textile industry by day and as producers ofMaya cultural militancy by night.


May 2005

The middle-class Ladinos from Chimaltenango, whom I accompanied to visit theSumpango kite festival in the late 1990s, were duly impressed with the displayof energy around Maya cultural themes, if mildly ambivalent. Ramiro, a highschool teacher, drew my attention to one kite's slogan he especially liked:"Mataron nuestra gente pero no mataron nuestra cultura" [they killed our people,but they did not kill our culture]. He shared the intense revulsion toward the pre-vious military regime that the slogan reflected, and he also affirmed how impor-tant it was that indigenous people have a strong sense of identity and culturalpride. The ambivalence came out in a different register: a string of jokes playingon musings by Ramiro's sister-in-law Brenda, as we strolled around the soccerfield turned festival grounds. She said, "We are like the insides of a gaucho [thegreasy sandwich that is the favorite street food in festivals like this one]. The richevade taxes," she continued, "the poor have nothing to pay, and we pendejos(fools) from the middle class declare our incomes and pay with the illusion thatwe are building democracy." After an interlude of humorous banter-how breadin the gaucho kept getting thicker and the meat inside more meager, how greasefrom the meat must soak through and drench the bread to make it tasty-the con-versation reverted back to more serious allusions of the metaphor.

Brenda, Ramiro and the others also feel "sandwiched" between a Euro-Guatemalan elite, who control disproportionate amounts of wealth and power, andan ascendant indigenous majority, who are fed up with their assigned place at thebottom of Guatemala's race-class hierarchical ladder. To make matters worse, theEuro-Guatemalan elite seem willing to endorse and promote multicultural re-forms, often at the behest of purveyors of multilateral aid, bolstering Maya cul-tural rights activism that leaves provincial Ladinos at the margins. As schoolteachers, both Ramiro and Brenda's sister had serious reservations about the pro-posed constitutional reforms meant to give legal expression to key provisions ofindigenous cultural rights, approved in the 1996 peace accords. 6 They both opinedthat education in an indigenous language was not feasible. More generally, whileRamiro approved of indigenous cultural pride, he worried that this emphasis oncultural rights could go too far, causing fragmentation and strife:

The thing is, people here just do not feel Guatemalan. Quite apart fromeverything else, they should have that identity. It doesn't matter whatyou are in addition. Mexico does not have this problem: as they say,"Mexico first, Mexico second, Mexico third." We are not like that: wehave no loyalty .... If we all identified as Guatemalans, there wouldbe no problem; we could accept one another differences and all.

The key to mutual respect for cultural difference, Ramiro believes, is a commonidentity as Guatemalan that transcends that difference altogether.

Middle-class Ladinos provide a revealing facet of the relationship between neo-liberal multiculturalism and racial hierarchies, because their anxieties remain

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unusually close to the surface and because their multiple responses confound anyneat cultural logic that. could be associated with this new moment of politicalcontention. Among the many Chimaltenango Ladinos with whom I conductedfieldwork over some three years in the late 1990s, I found near-unanimous repu-diation of the racism characteristic of Brenda and Ramiro's parents' generations:a punishing assertion of indigenous inferiority, an emphatic presumption that"indios" should be confined to separate and unequal spaces of Guatemalan so-ciety. Repudiation of these former views comes as an endorsement of culturalequality, an encouragement of cultural pride, and an anxious receptivity to de-mands for cultural rights.

The anxiety deepens as the points of contact increase between Maya cultural ac-tivism and inherited prerogatives of Ladino racial privilege. When Mayas claimjobs that Ladinos might otherwise count on, predominate in local electoral poli-tics, wrest resources for cultural rights programs by rearranging zero-sum budg-ets, or broach the ever-explosive question of land distribution, Ladinos getanxious. Yet, whether out of political maturity or prudence, most Maya organi-zations do not pursue these hot-button demands in explicit ways; they dissemble,highlight safer and less controversial demands first, gradually building the "outertrenches" of cultural fights on which most can agree. In the face of these moremoderate demands, Ladino responses become perplexingly fragmented, multi-plied, and contradictory. Some take a hard line against any hint of multiculturalrecognition, a few join the struggle against recalcitrance in their own ranks, butmost embrace Maya cultural rights while seeking to define their limits.

These efforts to set limits on Maya cultural rights, without returning to the "clas-sic" racism of times past, involve a series of loosely articulated approaches, butrarely coordinated or thought through as such. The first is to question the au-thenticity of demands made in the name of "lo maya." As I engaged Silvia, an-other school teacher from Chimaltenango, in conversation aboutindigenous-Ladino relations, her first inclination was to emphasize how res-olutely the members of her profession endorse the principles of cultural equalityand to gently reprimand her sister, who also partook in the conversation, for dis-playing overtly racist precepts that others such as herself had left behind. Yetwhen the conversation raised the topic of the "Maya movement," Silvia turnedsurprisingly adamant:

They do not have the right, historically, culturally, they do not havethe right to call themselves Mayas. By the time of the Conquest, theMaya Empire had disappeared; when the Spanish arrived, there wasalready a mixed people here. There were Toltecs who came fromMexico, and by that time the Maya had completely disappeared.Afterwards, the Spanish came, and found a mixed culture. . ..Legally the indigenous people claim they are Mayas and this is alie.... There are no pure Mayas left.


For Silvia, like many Ladinos of her ilk, something about the effort to groundcultural rights in claims to continuity with the ancient Maya crossed the line be-tween legitimate cultural pride and crass political opportunism. It raised thespecter of inauthenticity.

Following from this passionate deconstruction of authentic Mayan identity is thesecond approach, an inclination to categorize indigenous people according to howdeserving they show themselves to be. In the previous moment of "classic" racismtoward Indians, few escaped its punishing effects. An indigenous person had to"pass" as Ladino and display deep affinities to the new identity category to findrelief from opprobrium. Even then, doubts remained. Ladino responses in the cur-rent era send a very different message: an explicit endorsement of the right to beindigenous, of equal status that indigenous culture should enjoy, of freedom fromprecisely the opprobrium that previously created such a strong impetus for assim-ilation. Yet there are still behaviors, attributes, and dispositions that make certainindigenous people undeserving of these rewards: If they are too expansive in theirdemands, too drastic in their political means, too strident in their inclination to fer-ret out and denounce persisting Ladino racism, they earn the epithet "radical."Don Anselmo has worked for decades with the Cooperative movement inChimaltenango, in strong support of indigenous people's economic organizationand betterment, but takes a dismal view of Maya cultural activism: "There areabout forty different groups, each one seeking its own power and advancement.Their objective is now to cut ties with Ladinos, and to go it alone." Echoing Silvia,he believes that Maya religion, an important component of the efflorescence,"lacks an actual Maya basis.... it is superficial, a maneuver to earn money andto gain position." Finally, when it comes time to weigh blame for these detours inwhat could be an important contribution to social change in Guatemala, he pointsto the extremism of the Maya leaders: "The people promoting this point of viewlack political vision. Like [names one prominent Maya intellectual] he is one hun-dred percent radical." With opportunist radicals at the helm, the argument sug-gests, the healthy and moderate aspirations of the indigenous majority arebetrayed.A third and final element in this disciplinary response to the perceived excessesof Maya cultural activism comes in a familiar form: allusions to cultural pathol-ogy. In some respects, these allusions represent a strong continuity from the pre-vious era. When Silvia had finished her riff against the Maya movement, shereturned to her teacher's vocation: help them superarse (better themselves). Buteven when they better themselves, she reflected in conclusion, "some indigenouscharacteristics just don't go away." Her brother Chepe, who also took part in theconversation followed up:

They are mistrustful. It is as if they are angry that you [Ladinos] havemore than them [como que les da coraje que uno tiene las cosas]. Isee this when they work for me on my farm. Instead of taking care

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of things, they are destructive. A few Indians are good, but only avery few.

Another school teacher, named Andridn, explained the problem in curt terms:"they are drastic, and very arbitrary," when they get into positions of power. Hecontinued, "Yes, Carlos, I'm telling you, their resentment [against us] runs intheir veins, and when they have power, they use it to take revenge." Although themetaphor of resentment running in the veins might seem quirky and ill-chosen, Ifound this quasi-Lamarckian reasoning to be surprisingly common. Indigenouspeople have cultural traits, produced through the centuries, internalized, andpassed on from generation to generation through a process closely akin to bio-logical inheritance.

Taken together, these brief invocations of Ladino responses to Maya ascendancyshould help to illustrate the articulation between neoliberal multiculturalism, onthe one hand, and what might be called cultural racism, on the other. These re-sponses do not add up to a homogeneous or uniform position, however. Ramiroand, especially, Brenda are much more sympathetic to Maya cultural rights thanthe others. Moreover, the three facets are present and prominent to varying de-grees, such that broad generalizations about "Ladino consciousness" would beextremely hazardous to make. Yet these precepts do fit neatly together to form acontention; a position, that saturates the social milieu of Ladino-indigenous rela-tions and stands ready for people to tap into, affirm, or put to use. This positionstakes out the high ground of anti-racism and respect for cultural difference,which in turn is connected with a differential evaluation of the indigenous bene-ficiaries of this newfound recognition. Moderate Mayas are fully deserving of therewards of multiculturalism, while "radicals" display a lack of gratitude. Theirintransigence is not only unfair but borders on racism itself-a paradoxical "turn-about" effect, since racism is a principal target of their activism in the first place(Balibar 1991). Moreover, Ladinos portray the demeanor of Maya radicals ashaving a deeper source: characteristics such as hotheadedness, treachery, and re-sentment, long in formation, ingrained, quasi-inherent. Moderates, according tothis reasoning, have managed to shake free from these shackles, and in that sensethe problems are not completely without solution. Multiculturalism is predicatedon respect for and recognition of this "redeemable" Indian. Yet even redeemedMaya remain in a shadow of doubt cast by their radical counterparts, having risenabove, but not completely freed from, the burden of their racialized origins.Multiculturalism in this light becomes the alibi that deflects attention away fromthe remaking of racial hierarchy, under the triumphant banner of its elimination.

ConclusionsIn Guatemala, Maya cultural rights activism articulates with the various expres-sions of indigenous identity politics that fall outside the bounds of the "indio per-mitido": the so-called Maya radicals; the poor rural indigenous population who


do not form part of cultural rights activism; those engaged in processes of "meti-zaje from below."7 Throughout the Central American region, the ideal of mesti-zaje has lost its once prodigious power as an ideology of nation building,supplanted by neoliberal multiculturalism, on the one hand, and increasinglycontested by newly assertive political subjects, on the other. AlthoughGuatemala's particular route to this new "national project" has differed fromthose of the other Central American states, current conditions are strikingly con-vergent. Perhaps this shift away from the elite and state-driven myth of mestizajewill free up the term, semantically and politically, to a different set of articula-tions.

In Chimaltenango, I found large numbers of people-mostly urban, poor, andyoung-who seemed to be refusing both the Ladino and the Maya identity cate-gories. Members of the most popular youth gang in the city-which had taken onthe name "Cholos"-fit this description; so do a surprising number of highschool youth, who acknowledge indigenous descent of some sort and know theyare not Ladinos, but ultimately prefer to position themselves in between. Stillother "new mestizos" are Ladinos who have affirmed this refurbished identitycategory as a gesture of solidarity with Mayas and as a critique of the persistingracial hierarchy. Neither fully formed nor clearly defined, these expressions ofmestizaje from below are noteworthy for the way they cut against the grain ofstate-endorsed efforts to carefully define each cultural group and its associatedrights. Perhaps greater articulations between established cultural rights activistsand those groups who "do not fit" might help to subvert the regulatory effects ofneoliberal multiculturalism while helping to recover the expansive vision ofMaya cultural rights activism, so palpable in the early phases of its reemergencetwo decades ago..

In the case of black and indigenous struggles for land rights, we have focused onthe radical potential of multicommunal territories or bloques, which have become,both in Nicaragua and Honduras, the emergent idiom of their claims. These blo-ques appear to remain within the neat logic of the World Bank's "agricultural mod-ernization" schemes, but they go on to interrupt it by forging multi-communalcoalitions with much greater potential clout than individual communities couldhope for. When the bloques are multiracial, they disrupt another premise of ne-oliberal multiculturalism by displacing efforts to define culturally bounded rights-bearing units and substituting the principle of common cause among differentiallyracialized peoples. Moreover, these multicommunal bloques suggest the possibil-ity of a hybrid relationship among rights, identity, and territory: The demand is ex-pansive in that the bloques are contiguous and together comprise territories thatblack and indigenous peoples would essentially control; yet the proposed mode ofself-government is decentralized and not especially "nationlike," which helps dis-pel dominant actors' anxieties about separatism and provides a modicum of assur-ance that the ills of nation building would not be replicated at a smaller scale. The

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prospects for the multicommunal bloques are far from clear; they face ample op-position from various quarters. They have no assured political or economic viabil-ity. They do, however, offer an exciting potential challenge to neoliberalism'sbusiness as usual, more attractive still because they have emerged in part thanks tofunding from the very World Bank scheme that they now call into question.In the end we may be left with a version of the dichotomy that DipeshChakrabarty puts forth in Provincializing Europe. This dichotomy is between"good" progressive history, which "expand[s] the scope of social justice and rep-resentative democracy" but is ultimately constraining, and "talk about the 'limitsof history,' [which is] about struggling, even groping, for nonstatist forms ofdemocracy that we cannot yet either understand or envisage completely"(Chakrabarty 2000). However much we sympathize with the latter position, Icontend that we need to devote much greater energy to theorizing effective artic-ulations between these two stances. In brief moments of the Awas Tingni trial, asin the Puerto Lempira meeting, this radical indigenous imaginary did indeedburst forth. It called into question the long-standing histories of oppression, andit also expressed skepticism toward the new framework of cultural rights. Yet themilitancy quickly faded, leaving in its place, yet again, an urgent need for polit-ical strategies that would move forward, strengthen organizational bases, andkeep the conditions in place for a renewed burst of collective energy.The thought of contributing to the domestication of indigenous movements withthe unreflective pragmatism of "good history" is horrifying, a critical reminderto be kept always close at hand: Another image, however, should create equal un-ease, especially for activist scholars: remaining at arm's length as indigenousmovements grapple with the painful dilemmas of neoliberal multiculturalism, of-fering a fully deployed cultural critique of domestication, while waiting patientlyfor the truly subversive uprising to begin.

Notes

This article began as the keynote lecture for the workshop, "Language,Ethnicity and Conflict," Indiana University, October 2-3, 2003. I am gratefulto Jeffrey Gould and Daniel James for their comments on that earlier version.Thanks also to Shannon Speed and Jane Collier for comments on the currentversion. Many of the ideas in this essay were worked out through collectivework with Edmund T. Gordon, who also read and critiqued an early version.

1. DO 4.20 has had an ambiguous relationship to Afro-Latin communities, al-though more recently the World Bank has placed them, at least rhetorically,in the same category.

2. For a coauthored essay that offers some of this reflection, see the article byGordon, Gurdidn, and Hale (2003).

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3. A good example of this discourse is the video on the World Bank inNicaragua, Deadly Embrace.

4. This was the stance attributed to colonial authorities, especially in the laterperiod of Spanish colonial rule, when obedience to the Crown became an in-creasing irritation.

5. This section is taken from my forthcoming monograph, focusing on Ladinoresponses to Maya cultural political ascendancy, titled Mds que un indio...Racial Ambivalence and the Paradox of Neoliberal Multiculturalism inGuatemala (School of American Research Press).

6. For an analysis of the failed referendum on these accords, and its signifi-cance for Guatemalan cultural politics, see Warren (2002).

7. For further elaboration of this concept of the indio permitido in comparativeperspective, see: Hale and Millaman (forthcoming).

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Neoliberal Multiculturalism

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