Abstract

BARTOLOME, Miguel. Ethnicity, historicity, and complexity. From colonialism to indigenism and the multicultural state in Mexico. Cuicuilco. Rev. cienc. antropol. [online]. 2017, vol.24, n.69, pp.33-64. ISSN 2448-8488.

Since my arrival in Mexico, in the early 1970s, the issue of inter-ethnic relations and state policies concerning them, and thus embodied in indigenism, were a central part of my intellectual and political concerns. The ethnic issue in Mexico has been addressed by many researchers from the historiographical, economic, political, institutional, ideological nationalist, discursive, etc. points of view. However, I believe that the situation of Mexico’s indigenous people refuses to be translated by a single story or by the image of a chronological moment, since it is nourished by a historicity without which it is impossible to approach its present. It is a reality reluctant to be embodied by any analytical reductionism that abdicates from history, from ideologies, from power, from economics, from the cultural dimension, and from the multiplicity of global contexts and their regional translations. It is therefore necessary to build a narrative that seeks to integrate the different stories without proposing to replace them. This essay does not aim to be that, though it does endeavor to take a step in that direction.

Keywords : Ethnicity; indigenism; Mexico; complexity.

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