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Mixtec Ethnicity: Social Identity, Political Consciousness, and Political Activism

Culture, according to one anthropological formulation, is “the structure of meaning through which people give shape to their experience” (Geertz 1973, 312). Clifford Geertz's definition necessarily implies consideration of struggles over the politics of that meaning. Implicit and explicit in such struggles are political efforts to impose upon others a particular concept of how things really are and therefore how people are obliged to act (Geertz 1973, 316). During the process of nation building, history and the structure of meaning that it gives to contemporary “culture” are often manipulated so that socially, politically, and economically opposed groups are merged into putative harmonious “imagined communities” whose reality enters into public consciousness and social discourse as the authentic past (Anderson 1983). But consciousness of shared identity and common discourse centered upon that identity are not un-contested. In Mexico competing images of indigenous “tradition” entail just such a political struggle over meaning, a struggle over the definition of what constitutes indigenous culture—“real” ethnic identity, as it were—and a consequent struggle over what actions, if any, need to be taken (and by whom) to combat the second-class status of most of the country's indigenous peoples.