Crossing Party Lines: Volatility and Ticket Splitting in Mexico (1994–2000)

This article aims to amplify our portrait of the Mexican electorate by examining the ways in which Mexican electors distributed their votes among the parties during 1994–2000, both over successive elections (volatility) and in the same election (ballot splitting). Aggregate and survey data revealed that Mexicans engaged in these two forms of electoral behaviour frequently, indicators of an electorate in flux. Regression analysis indicated that, contrary to the expectation that the politically sophisticated differentiated their votes, virtually all parts of Mexican society were equally likely to switch parties and split tickets.     

Migración,lucha por la vivienda y transnacionalismo socio-político: El caso de Movimiento por Justicia del Barrio

Transnationalism is, within Mexican migration studies, the predominant perspective to explain collective action undertaken by Mexicans in the United States. It takes into account the Mexican “diaspora's” interest and political participation in their hometowns. This article challenges transnationalism's basic tenet and proposes, instead, the notion of socio-political transnationalism. Nevertheless, the article emphasizes on how migrants fist act collectively to improve their living conditions in the host societies, rather than organizing around their ties with their homeland. This kind of organizing does not imply indifference towards the situation in their country of origin. It does mean, however, that the transnational perspective falls into a second plane. To illustrate, we will depict the history of Movimiento por Justicia del Barrio, an immigrants' organization in the City of New York, principally Mexican based, and their struggle against the gentrifying attempts taking place in East Harlem. We will also look at their political vision and the links they have created with organizations in Mexico.     

At Boiling Point: Like Water for Chocolate and the Boundaries of Mexican Identity

Abstract — This article explores the mechanisms of Mexican identity as they are constructed in Alfonso Arau's film Como agua para chocolate (1991) (Like Water for Chocolate). In re-designing the characters of Laura Esquivel's novel, Arau produces a range of filmic stereotypes drawn from both the Hollywood and the Mexican traditions of film-making. Through the careful manipulation of filmic devices such as editing, framing and close-ups, many of the features of Mexican otherness perpetuated by Hollywood throughout the twentieth century are inscribed. I apply the metaphor of boiling, derived from the film's title, to examine certain key concepts of cinematic 'mexicanness' including the tropes of 'revolution', 'border', 'race' and 'sex'. Crucial to this argument is a consideration of the contemporary political climate in which Like Water for Chocolate was both produced and released. In Mexico, it was released halfway through the sexenio (six-year period of rule) of President Carlos Salinas de Gortari's rule and is clearly one of the most succesful cultural products (and exports) of his government's now infamous rule. In the United States, the climate of anti-immigrant attitudes in 1992 and 1993 and the corresponding political tension provokes new readings of certain stereotypical images of Mexicans and mexicanness. It is the tension that is produced by the collision between these two contexts — cultural, political and ethnic — that forms the principal focus of discussion in this article.     

Client‐ship and Citizenship in Latin America

This article explores the development of political relationships between people and politicians since around 1820 in Latin America. In particular, it develops the idea of client‐ship as a form of political agency and contrasts it to citizenship, linking both to 'natural' and 'historical' interpretations of inequality. The piece claims that client‐ship has dominated political relations and that its twin tools of charisma and votes‐for‐goods allows it to thrive today in the form of neo‐populism. In contrast, citizenship has been thwarted by the efforts of parties which control political agency by imposing norms of intellectual superiority and hierarchies of disdain. Throughout, I argue that issues of race, gender and class are central to political relationships which are the cultural terrain of power, and conclude that parties must begin to take citizens – and citizenship – seriously if they wish to avert a crisis of democracy.     

Grandes expectativas: la democracia mexicana y sus descontentos

There is no doubt that democracy in México has fallen short of expectations: it has not increased social and economic equality. Few people deem their participation in politics is now more effective than before, the elected government often fails to meet citizens' demands, and some regions of the country are seemingly under the control of violent drug cartels. These faults certainly fuel the voters' discontent with the democratic regime. The aim of this paper though is to focus on other less apparent sources of the existing intense political dissatisfaction. Mexicans are unsatisfied with their democratic government not only because it has not provided them with the social goods they are realistically or not expecting from democracy. They are also unhappy due to the perceived gap between an idealized notion of democracy and the way the existing democratic institutions actually work, as an odd ahistorical image of democracy has been constructed. The major claim of this work is that the critical standard of democracy assumed by Mexicans is inaccurate. It will be argued that this ideological misconception has had pernicious effects, as it has nurtured unreasonable expectations and has inhibited Mexicans from considering feasible reforms. It will be also examined in particular the role played by the pursuit of equity.     

Explaining the Politics of Recognition of Ethnic Diversity and Indigenous Peoples' Rights in Oaxaca, Mexico

A 'politics of recognition'– a process of political reform intended to recognise formally cultural diversity and indigenous peoples' rights – has developed in Mexico, both at the federal and at the state levels, since the early 1990s. The case of the state of Oaxaca stands out in this respect – the local constitution and nearly a dozen secondary laws were reformed during the 1990s, resulting in the conformation of the most comprehensive multicultural framework in Mexico. In this article, I attempt to explain the emergence and the particular development of Oaxaca's unique politics of recognition. Following an explanatory framework proposed by Donna Lee Van Cott, I conclude that the recognition agenda emerged in Oaxaca as legitimacy and governability was put under strain. In addition, I conclude that the (by Mexican standards) rapid and broad fashion in which it developed can be explained on the bases of the severity of the threats to governability and of the capacity of indigenous actors to influence the decision‐making process and form alliances with key political actors – i.e. the state governors.     

Putting Large-Scale Infrastructure Projects First: The COVID-19 Pandemic in Indigenous Mexico

This article argues that whilst indigenous people are central to the Mexican president's official developmentalist discourse of bringing prosperity to the country's marginalised and poor, their needs during the COVID-19 pandemic have not been met and their interests have been sidelined. Whilst experiencing serious loss of trading revenue, negative impacts of misinformation, and lack of access to appropriate healthcare, indigenous Mexicans also faced the aggressive advance on their territories of large-scale infrastructure projects, which have become the backbone of the president's strategy for countering the economic recession caused by the pandemic. The discontinuation of relevant legal means to challenge the advance of the megaprojects during the pandemic effectively threatened indigenous people's democratic rights to protect their land, identities and way of life.     

Africa’s Initial Encounter with Texas: The Significance of Afro‐Tejanos in Colonial Tejas, 1528–1821*

The topic of African slavery and the role of Afro‐Tejanos in Texas during the period of Spanish colonial rule has been totally neglected. Primary sources used in this study discuss Afro‐Tejano family life, economic activities, military duties, and their experiences both as slaves and as individuals who gained their freedom. Hispanic treatment of Africans gradually became more enlightened by the eighteenth century to the point that Afro‐Tejanos suffered a decline in their overall standard of living after Texas became an independent republic in 1836. The relationship of Afro‐Tejanos to Mexico’s current total of 500,000 Afro‐Mexicans is an issue of contemporary relevance because of recent efforts in Mexico to highlight its African heritage.     

Popular Culture, Power Relations and Urban Discipline: The Festival of the Holy Spirit in Nineteenth-Century Rio de Janeiro

The Festival of the Holy Spirit was considered the most important religious celebration in nineteenth‐century Rio de Janeiro. I discuss the popular practices of music, dance and theatre during the festival. By merging European waltz and the African batuque, the heterogeneous public re‐created and re‐invented a number of new genres that are at the roots of twentieth‐century Brazilian popular music. The festival of the Holy Spirit allows an examination of elite strategies and municipal policies regarding popular culture. In this respect, it is remarkable how much political use the Brazilian Empire made of the festival of the Holy Spirit and how its revellers fought for their celebration.     

Hirohito Redux-- Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan by Herbert P. Bix

ABSTRACT

The American Anthropological Association's Code of Ethics does not sufficiently acknowledge the challenges posed for anthropologists who “study up” and “across” rather than “down” the partly imagined power hierarchy within which the researcher and her host members position themselves. The Code proves inadequate for the ethical dilemmas that emerged from the four projects presented in this volume on the worlds of urban feminists and right-wing conservatives, activists and policy-makers of a local community revitalization project, an indigenous minority in the process of reclaiming its present, and corporate soccer functionaries. Several features distinguish these articles from previous work on the subject of ethics in anthropology: It is no longer necessarily nor exclusively the ethnographer who does the writing. The contested claims to ethnographic authority, access, and representation are closely related to the importance of the production and circulation of texts. The will to be loyal to one's consultants does not in all projects appear as the most ethical manner to pursue fieldwork. The power relations that anthropologists engage mirror the fluidity and flexibility of power relations among their research subjects that appear exacerbated in study-up projects. As anthropology's focus has become increasingly urban, cosmopolitan, and Western, conventional understandings of ethnographic authority, access, and power relations are contested and problematized in new, more complex ways.     

The bridge that divides: local perceptions of the connected state in the Kyrgyzstan–Tajikistan–China borderlands

The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 brought profound changes to the borderlands of Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Xinjiang. In eastern Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan’s Gorno-Badakhshan region, present-day weaknesses in territorial control of the post-Soviet state’s edges are directly wedded to borderlanders’ memories of Soviet-era practices of bordering, perceived locally as both systemically stronger and cognitively more beneficial to local lifeworlds than contemporary ‘Chinese penetration’. Across the border in Xinjiang, a formerly distant state has been brought into borderlanders’ locales and inscribed into everyday lifeworlds through novel manifestations of the state, which significantly affect cross-border interaction. By comparing how borderlanders on both sides of this frontier themselves choose to characterize border processes between ‘their’ states in the initial two decades of connections to Xinjiang, I explore how and why Kyrgyz and Tajik/Pamiri borderlanders voice strong opinions about what it is they feel has changed in these administrative-territorial homelands. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork on both sides of this frontier, I argue that the gradual bridging of this formerly sealed border has led to neither the development of a new trans-frontier identity nor locally established trans-frontier networks but, instead, reconfirmed borders between China and Central Asia.     

Another Textual Frontier: Contemporary Fiction on the Northern Mexican Border

This article approaches fiction writing from the northern Mexican frontier from the perspective of the border. It perceives the border between Mexico and the United States as a multispace that permeates fictional texts from the area. In clear contrast with most Chicano and Border Studies perspectives, the border is viewed here as a physical rather that metaphorical space whose dynamics formulates textual discourses and aesthetics. The fiction works of Luis Humberto Crosthwaite and Jesús Gardea are analysed from this perspective.     

Limits of diaspority in Central Asia: contextualizing Dungan's multiple belongings

This article shows different ways of defining, understanding and performing ‘diaspority’ in the border region of Kordai (Kazakhstan) and Tokmok (Kyrgyzstan). Taking the example of Dungan people, as the Sinophone Muslims are known in Central Asia, both academic and political definitions of the concept of ‘diaspora’ are compared. This ethnographic account problematizes Kazakhstani Shaanxi Dungan ‘diaspority’. Together with this, the political definitions of ‘diaspora’ are also analysed. I show that while in China and Kazakhstan the definitions of the Dungans as a ‘diaspora’ of ‘China’ are somewhat complementary, once the Shaanxi Dungan emic perspective is taken into account, this concept becomes rather problematic. The kinds of diaspority defined by the states involved are ways of implementing particular cultural hegemonies that legitimate the two political regimes analysed in this article. Concurrently, this dual diaspority is used by the Dungan people in distinct ways in defining their own identities. Nevertheless, I show in this article that the ‘Chinese card’ is not necessarily played by all Dungans. Moreover, there are some Dungans for whom ‘Chinese-ness’ is not even relevant.     

The faith-based segregation of interments: insights from a Senegalese commune

ABSTRACT

In Senegal’s Thies Region, Joal has separate cemeteries for Muslims and Christians, while the neighbouring community of Fadiouth has one cemetery for the dead of all faiths. This paper uses these cases to shed light on why some communities have separate cemeteries for people of different faiths while others bury people of all faiths in the same cemetery. I argue that the manner in which Christianity and Islam spread in the two communities explains the differences in the spatial organisation of burials. This study of divergent approaches to burying people of different faiths sheds light on histories of migration and the important issues of inter-communal and interfaith relations. The paper is based on ethnographic research and also draws on a participatory cartography exercise.     

Post-socialist China: Labour relations in Korean-managed factories

Abstract

How are labour relations practiced in Korean-managed factories in China? It is often said that labour relations in Korean transnational factories are abusive, even despotic. In this article, I argue that the disciplinary nature of labour relations in Korean factories in China is more complex and so multi-dimensional that they cannot be characterised as a simple economic matter of labour exploitation. These relations entail hierarchical segregation, normalising workers' behaviour through fines and salary reductions, personal degradation and dissimilar cultural practices.     

Motherhood and Extradomestic Work in Urban Mexico

Abstract— This article analyses the meanings attributed by Mexican women of different social classes to motherhood and extradomestic work, as well as life experiences of family planning and child care. Information for the study was provided by 79 in-depth interviews with women who were either married or living with a partner who contributed regularly to the family income. The findings suggest that cultural norms regarding motherhood change far more slowly in urban Mexico than child-rearing or fertility control practices. Many women from different social classes still consider motherhood as their main source of identity and only a very educated and privileged group speaks with ambivalence regarding their mother's role. In contrast, more women are ready to accept child-care substitutes, especially if they find satisfaction in extradomestic activities, or carry them out because of personal or family necessities. Finally, the analysis points out that most urban women in Mexico, particularly the younger and more educated cohorts, are very much aware of the costs involved in children's education and rearing, and have acted accordingly, using contraceptives and limiting their family sizes. 0 1997 Society for Latin American Studies     

The capacity to aspire: young persons and gender–age relations in southern Tajikistan and North India

ABSTRACT

Rather than studying young men's career- and/or economic-based aspirations, this article explores the obstacles that hinder youths of both sexes in gerontocratic southern Tajikistan and North India from developing the capacity to make their own life choices. Focusing mainly on the selection of marital partner and largely on women, I explore the narratives of those who have never even dreamed of a good life, of others who have dreamed but been unable to actualize their dreams, of a few who have started to plan the way forward, and of a tiny number who actually managed to achieve their aspirations, teasing out the influences that facilitate this. I suggest that even educated youths with some control over their public lives are constricted by their family relations and that it requires quite specific support to defy one’s family, which can create significant vulnerabilities in settings with no other safety net.     

Protesting gender discrimination from within: women’s political representation on behalf of Islamic parties

Abstract

In recent decades, Islamic political movements, and their subsequent political parties, have been increasingly recruiting and nominating women to high-level decision-making positions despite the fact that the ideology they espouse often acts to dissuade women from assuming positions of political leadership. My ethnographic research on religious women’s activism in Iran and Turkey helps explain this unexpected trend by shedding light onto the role of Islamic party women in challenging the gender discriminatory attitudes and behaviours of their male party leaders. In particular, I highlight the role that a number of high-ranking Islamic party women with close ties to the ruling elites played in pressuring their male party leaders to address women’s political underrepresentation in formal politics. Women’s close ties to the ruling elites consisted of formal ties with key Islamic leaders that evolved thanks to women’s long-term devotion to the Islamic movement or learning at Islamic seminaries. I demonstrate that such close ties to the leaders, as well as the presence of a public discourse in favour of women’s increased access to politics, enabled influential Islamic women to leverage a form of ‘internal criticism’ as an important strategy to enhance women’s political rights and status from within the Islamic movements.     

Rooting and Cultura in West Mexico

Drawing on Kwame Appiah’s discussion of the relationship between rooting and cosmopolitanism, I show that this concern was shared by many in west Mexico, where I conducted fieldwork among diverse groups of townspeople, villagers, weekend visitors from Guadalajara, and migrants working in Guadalajara and in California. All of those groups talked about belonging or rooting to specific places – villages, towns, cities, countries and so on. They also used the term cultura in a way that resonated more with Appiah’s ‘cosmopolitanism’ than with his ‘cultural particularities’. Although most people aspired to gain cultura without losing rooting, I found that many people judged themselves or others to fail in one or both respects. Migrants in California, in particular, were felt to have lost rooting without having become cosmopolitan. I focus throughout on how west Mexicans, including the novelist Juan Rulfo, used their knowledge of history as a way of claiming both rooting and cultura.     

Appropriating and contesting ‘traditional Islam’: Central Asian students at the Russian Islamic University in Tatarstan

ABSTRACT

Based on an ethnographic case study of an Islamic university in Russia, I examine how the state-implemented and bureaucratized traditionalization of Islam in Russia affects the everyday life of Central Asian students and how this project ‘from above’ is entangled with their coping strategies. I show how religious education has become a resource for the state as well as for young students and their parents. The Russian state uses these official religious institutions to control the Muslim population by creating and promoting a state-approved version of ‘traditional Islam’ and producing official religious specialists. For the young Muslim students, however, Islamic education provides, in addition to religious knowledge, access to networks, social security and new economic opportunities. It thereby offers a way to cope with the uncertainty caused by high unemployment rates and other socio-economic difficulties among young people.