Mapping
the Totonaco’s of Huehuetla Struggle for Self-government and Autonomy
Korinta
Maldonado
University of Texas at Austin
In 1989 as a result of 10 years of community organizing within states institutions and that included the efforts of a liberation theologist, the Totonac of Huehuetla, Puebla, Mexico, announced the creation of an ethno-political organization: the “Organizacion Independiente Totonaca” (OIT). This same year the Totonac won control of the municipality in local elections for the first time in more than hundred years. Their victory changed the social and political landscape of the region and they went on to hold power for nine years. Since then, the OIT has a played a critical role as a mediating force between the Totonac communities and local, regional, and state powers. Drawing from their experience of municipal government and from the cultural knowledge of community governance, the Totonac have built a legitimate structure of self-governance that has enabled them to configure and imagine an autonomic project that today extends to the whole region of the Northeastern Highlands of Puebla.
In this paper, I track how the Zapatista movement and the particular forms of state power exercised in the region allowed for radical imaginaries to emerge and consolidate, influencing these Totonac processes. That is, I will analyze how in Huehuetla the OIT emerged in response to the racist political dynamics exercised by the local mestizos that had excluded them for decades from participating in the local affairs of the municipality.
Notably, the success of the initial years of the OIT occurs within the socio-historical context of Mexican state turn to multiculturalists policies in where it has redress demands of justice by indigenous organizations through the implementation of policies that tolerate the accommodation of indigenous forms of governance and justice such as the recently opened indigenous court in Huehuetla. These new forms of governance are being arranged through the decentralization policies, a central pillar of what a growing consensus in social science has termed as neoliberal multiculturalism.
The highlands of Puebla are an exemplary case where indigenous self-rule is being recognized within the legal framework of the state. Yet, it in this paper, I analyze the contradictions embedded in these processes of decentralization. First, the indigenous regions are experiencing increasing levels of social violence exemplified in the actions of various state institutions and groups in power, particularly policing. Second, even though the state mediates these multicultural arrangements, Zapatismo as a catalyst of radical imaginaries has debunked multicultural state practices and allowed Totonacs to think of political organizing beyond the state.
» Subconferencia: The Past and Future of Totonaco Studies