D WILEY

ANTl-IROP 0 GI AL
ASSOCIAflO

Global Processes and Local Identity among Mayan Coffee Growers in Chiapas, Mexico
Author(s): Rosalva Aida Hernandez Castillo and Ronald Nigh
Source: American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 100, No. 1 (Mar., 1998), pp. 136-147
Published by: Wiley on behalf of the American Anthropological Association
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ROSALVA AiDA HERNANDEZ CASTILLO I CIESAS-SURESTE
RONALD NIGH I CIESAS-SURESTE
Global Processes and local Identity
among Mayan Coffee Growers in
Chiapas, Mexico
THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE economic relations
among nations, the creation of regionally based eco-
nomic blocs, and the intensification of the worldwide
flow of money and information are part of a new plane-
tary reality we call globalization. The fate of local cul-
tural identities in this transformation is debated in the
social sciences from two opposing perspectives. One
view stresses the aggressive publicity and commercial-
ism of transnational industries who seek a "global mar-
ket" in which consumer demands are increasingly
homogeneous and the same commodities are marketed
throughout the world. Advertising, the electronic me-
dia, and the accommodating policies of many national
political elites whose interests are tied to those of mul-
tinational finance are seen as manipulating the tastes
and aspirations of local populations who abandon their
traditional values and aesthetic preferences to become
global consumers. This perspective has underscored
the homogenizing force of capital and tends to underes-
timate the representations of local cultures, proposing
the idea of a worldwide "postmodern condition" or
"global culture," which would tend to erase cultural
specificity (Jameson 1990).
An alternative reading of the contemporary pro-
cess of the globalization of culture points to a counter-
tendency of increasing differentiation and reconstitu-
tion of local identity (Nagengast and Kearney 1990;
Rouse 1991). The same conditions that facilitate the in-
ROSALVA AfDA HERNANDEZ CASTILLO is a research anthropologist at
CIESAS-Sureste, San Cristobal de Las Casas, Chiapas, Mexico.
RONALD NIGH is a research anthropologist at CIESAS-Sureste, San
Cristobal de Las Casas, Chiapas, Mexico.
ternational flow of goods, capital, people, and, espe-
cially, information permit the reinforcement of local
and translocal spaces of resistance to the "mobilization
of desire and fantasy" (D. Harvey 1989:60) and to the im-
position of cultural values by international commercial-
ism.
These two perspectives, however, are not neces-
sarily exclusive. Jean Baudrillard (1981) and, more re-
cently, Scott Lash and John Urry ( 1994) propose that the
global economy is concerned as much with the produc-
tion of signs, sign systems, and images as it is with the
production of commodities. From this standpoint, pro-
cesses of globalization and local reaffirmation of iden-
tity are found in a dialogic relation in which local socie-
ties respond to the production of images and sign
commodities from outside their culture with a counter-
production of their own images. More than a passive re-
sistance by clinging to traditional cultural values, social
identity emerges in a process of political struggle and
response in the face of often aggressive outside influ-
ences. Local cultures are redefining their identities in
the new global context, and in doing so they often ap-
propriate "nontraditional" elements from outside, a
situation that gives these cultural identities a "hybrid"
appearance. This imagery also includes elements of lo-
cal tradition as essential to identity and may include the
reinvention of the past, combining historical and myth-
ological elements. 1
In the concrete experience of the Marn, Maya Indi-
ans from the Sierra Madre region of Chiapas, ethnic
identity is manifested not as a shared harmonic feeling
of belonging to a collectivity, but rather as a heterogene-
ous space with multiple self-definitions. Relationships
 MAYAN COFFEE GROWERS IN CHIAPAS
with the state and of class, gender, and religious affili-
ations have influenced the terms in which different sec-
tors define themselves as Mam (see Hernandez Castillo
1994, 1995a, 1995b). In this essay we will approach the
way in which a sector of Mam coffee growers has appro-
priated agroecological ideology in the reconstitution of
their ethnic identity. In particular, we examine a genre
of discourse within the lndigenas de la Sierra Madre de
Motozintla (ISMAM) cooperative with respect to a phi-
losophy of organic agriculture expressed as a way oflife
and as an affirmation of identity.
By the term discourse genre we refer to a generali-
zation of Mikhail Bakhtin's (1986) concept of speech
genres, a particular process of image production in the
context of a dialogue with outside social groups. For ex-
ample, we interpret Bakhtin's description of individual
utterances in our culture in terms of more general dia-
logic expressions of cultural identity:
the unique speech experience of each individual is shaped
and developed in continuous and constant interaction with
others' individual utterances. This experience can be char-
acterized to some degree as the process of assimila-
tion-more or less creative-of others' words. Our speech,
that is, all our utterances (including creative works), is
filled with others' words, varying degrees of otherness or
varying degrees of "our-own-ness," varying degrees of
awareness and detachment. These words of others carry
with them their own expression, their own evaluative tone,
which we assimilate, rework and re-accentuate. [Bakhtin
1986:89]
We prefer Guillermo Bonfil's (1993) term appropria-
tion-rather than assimilation-to refer to the crea-
tive integration of outside cultural elements into the
discourse of identity of a local culture. A discourse
genre refers to the representation of identity in a par-
ticular sphere of communication, that is, with respect to
other social groups. It is important to recognize that the
appropriation of the discourse of the other does not
make ethnic identity less authentic, but is itself part of
the dialogic emergence of identity (Mannheim and Ted-
lock 1995).
The Maya Mam of Chiapas
The Mam are a Maya-speaking group whose geo-
graphical center is in Guatemala, where around 500,000
people inhabit rural towns in the departments of San
Marcos and Huehuetenango. The Mexican Mam inhabit
the Sierra Madre of Chiapas, on the fringes of a region
known since pre-Columbian times as the Soconusco.
The Mam language is now spoken principally by men
and women above the age of 50 in Mexico. The Instituto
Nacional Indigenista (INI 1993:64) reports the existence
of 2,260 Mam speakers in the Sierra region. There are
8,000 Indians, however, who identify themselves as
/ ROSALVA AiDA HERNANDEZ CASTILLO AND RONALD NIGH 137
Mam, even though nearly 6,000 of them no longer speak
the language.
The experience of the Mexican Mam differs sub-
stantially from that of their Guatemalan counterparts, a
consequence of the way the differing indigenist policies
of the two nation-states have influenced Mam daily life.
The political and religious hierarchy, the distinctive
costume of colonial origin, and even the use of the Mam
language, described by ethnographers working among
the Guatemalan Mam, disappeared in the Mexican Mam
communities, as we explain below. 2 On the other hand,
the pueblos de Indios that were established in highland
Guatemala in colonial times and that became spaces of
ethnic identity and political organization never existed
in the Sierra Madre or in the Soconusco. For the Mam
who inhabited these areas, the cacao plantations of the
colonial period and the coffee plantations founded in
the late 19th century formed the principal social spaces
for those who lived in the dispersed settlements of the
Sierra.
The Mam and other Indian groups in this region
have been part of a global economy for many centuries.
The history of the Soconusco provides evidence thatthe
present globalization phenomenon is only a recent step
in a long process that acquires new characteristics with
technological change (Robertson 1990). By the time of
the Spanish invasion of Chiapas, the Soconusco had al-
ready been conquered by the Aztec empire from central
Mexico, whose interest was the control of the planta-
tions of cacao, used then as a form of money and the
principal commercial export crop of the region since
around 2000 B.C.E.
Early Spanish colonists invested heavily in cacao
production during the late 16th and early 17th centuries,
expanding the original plantations and introducing
Moorish irrigation technology. Cacao drinking, for-
merly a prerogative of an indigenous elite, suffered a de-
mocratization process in the colonial period and be-
came the popular beverage of the masses throughout
Mexico. The newly expanded plantations supplied this
demand as well as a lucrative global market centered in
Europe, where chocolate became the beverage of pref-
erence among the aristocracy. Mam Indians probably
supplied the skilled labor necessary for the cacao boom
that produced some of the first Spanish fortunes in the
New World. The demographic collapse of Mexico's na-
tive population and the severe world depression of the
1630s brought the cacao boom to an end, and the Mam,
along with the 17th-century global entrepreneurs, left
the Soconusco largely abandoned throughout the rest
of the colonial period (MacLeod 1973).
The current wave of Mam occupation dates from
the end of the 19th century and was again a response to
forces of the global economy. In both Guatemala and
Mexico, German and other foreign investors created
138 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST VOL. 100, No. 1 MARCH
what is still today one of the major coffee-producing re-
gions of the world. In Chiapas, under the liberal land
and investment policies of Porfirio Diaz's government,
largely uninhabited lands were sold, but in Guatemala a
large-scale process of enclosure and dispossession of
communal lands by the government provoked the
Mam's return to the mountains on the Mexican side,
which they had abandoned centuries before. The Mam
again supplied the labor for the production of an inter-
national commodity that has been Mexico's principal
agricultural export for many decades. Thanks to Mam
laborers on Soconusco plantations, their owners were
able to export 227,040 quintals of coffee to Germany,
the United States, England, France, Spain, and Switzer-
land between 1927 and 1928 (Waibel 1946).
With the Mexican Revolution and the arrival of land
reform, some Mam Indians received ejido lands (state
collective farms created by the revolution), though for
the most part the best coffee lands were retained by pri-
vate owners. From 1937 to 1940, 349, 130 hectares were
distributed, benefiting 29,398 peasants (Gutierrez 1941:
34 ). In the Mam region, 26,899 hectares were distributed
in the municipalities of Bella Vista, Frontera Comalapa,
Mazapa de Madero, Motozintla, and Siltepec, benefiting
1,812 peasants (Gobiemo del Estado de Chiapas 1936-
40).
The creation of the ejido brought substantial
changes to the social organization of the inhabitants of
the Sierra. Much of the dispersed population concen-
trated around the ejido agencies, creating a new com-
munity space. At the same time, state institutions began
to attend to the needs of the Mam, who had lived on the
margins of the nation for decades. On a symbolic level,
agrarian reform is remembered by the elders as a divide
between the time ofthefinca (coffee plantations), with
their associated suffering, and the time of the ejido com-
munity, even though the lands that were distributed
were not fertile enough to permit self-sufficiency and
the majority of ejidatarios continued to migrate to
nearby plantations for work. Having a piece of land rep-
resented a significant change for the Mam people: in the
official records of this period the inhabitants of the eji-
dos are referred to not as Mam Indians but as campesi-
nos (peasants), a homogenizing designation that erased
cultural differences among rural people.
Even though the possibility existed for ejidatarios
to become coffee growers, the ability to supply the lu-
crative export market remained in the hands of private
plantations, and Mam continued to supply the labor.
Thus, the Maya Mam, as participants in the global econ-
omy for several centuries, have found themselves in a
the highly disadvantaged position of supplying cheap la-
bor for the export economy. In recent years Mexican
Mam have found their labor replaced by Guatemalan
1998
braceros, many of them culturally Mam, further deterio-
rating the position of Mexican Mam.
The Vicissitudes of Mam Identity
A group labeled Mam existed before the arrival of
the Spanish, although the meaning of this social cate-
gory has changed through time. In Guatemala, the
meaning of Mam identity was modified by the Spanish
friars during the colonial period with the creation of a
new syncretic religion and the resettlement of the In-
dian population into towns convenient for the Spanish
administration. For the Mexican Mam, social identity
has suffered much change due to migration and to the
separation from the larger Guatemalan body dictated by
the Limit Treaties of 1882 and 1894, which set the bor-
der between the two countries. These agreements put
an end to the uncertainty of land titles and facilitated in-
tense foreign investment in the coastal area of So-
conusco and the lower slopes of the Sierra, where cof-
fee flourished.
But for the Mam, any concept of national identity
was late in coming, as is evident in the testimony of one
60-year-old man in 1990:
My grandfather used to tell me that when he went to the
plantation he found a lot of workers who spoke Mam. They
came from Guatemala, but they did not see the difference
then; they did not say you are Guatemalan or you are
Mexican, they just said "we are Mam." That is what they
used to say. 3
It seems clear that the Mam of this region never had
closed corporate communities that were later de-
stroyed by the plantation system, as some have argued
(Pozas l 952b ). The Mam of the Sierra Madre were dias-
poric from the outset, acquiring and transforming their
identities as they engaged in the global economy. Their
circumstances and history thus contradict the anthro-
pological stereotype of the deep-rooted community as
the basis of Mesoamerican Indian identity and its resis-
tance to homogenizing national and global processes. In
dealing with Mam identity we must have an explanation
that accounts for resistance and the re-creation of iden-
tity in the context of diaspora and the pressures of mul-
tinational capitalism. For many groups, migration and
globalization can reasonably be seen as new phenom-
ena characteristic of "late capitalism." But in the Mam
case, identity has been formed under these conditions
since at least the early colonial period.
After the Mexican Revolution, the Mam faced a
severe challenge to their existence as a Mayan people,
distinct from the emerging image of a mestizo raza c6s-
m ica (cosmic race) enthusiastically promoted by the
denizens of the postrevolutionary state. The policies
of the early governments sought to create a "national
 MAYAN COFFEE GROWERS IN CHIAPAS
consciousness" and to culturally homogenize the coun-
try. Now here was this integrationist policy applied with
more vehemence than in this southern frontier region,
and no one felt the brunt of it more directly than the
Mam. Mam and other Mayan languages along the border
were considered Guatemalan, unlike other Mayan lan-
guages such as Tzotzil and Tzeltal, which were spoken
in the Chiapas highlands and thus not only represented
cultural backwardness but a threat to national sover-
eignty as well. Instead of being tolerated during the
early years of school as these other languages were, the
speaking of Mam was prohibited.
To reinforce these integrationist policies, the De-
partment of Social Action, Culture, and Indigenous Pro-
tection was created in Chiapas on April 18, 1934. The de-
cree that established this agency stated that "the largest
social problem which overwhelms and arrests the eco-
nomic evolution of the state of Chiapas is the existence
of great masses of Indian people, which, amounting to
38% of our population, are a drag on collective progress"
(Gobierno del Estado de Chiapas 1934:3). Three weeks
later, on May 7, a circular was sent to the Mam area an-
nouncing that the new department would start operat-
ing in the Sierra region (Gobierno del Estado de Chiapas
1934).
Within the Department of Social Action, Culture,
and Indigenous Protection, the Central Committee for
Clothing of the Indigenous Student (Comite Central
pro-vestido del Alumno Indigena) was created on Octo-
ber 3, 1934. This program of "civilization through dress"
was described by one man:
I remember when the law came that prohibited our cos-
tume: they took the weaving from the women and the short
pants from the men, and they burned them in the middle of
the plaza. One old man refused; he wouldn't take off his
pants, and so the policeman came and threw kerosene on
him. We were all in the plaza-I was a child still. He said,
"Take it off or I'll set you on fire; you're a stubborn Indian."
The poor man took off his short pants crying. 4
Thus, although the census of 1940 reported 23,970
speakers of Indian languages in the Mam townships
along the border, the 1950 census notes that only Span-
ish was spoken in those townships, undoubtedly a sign
of the success of the government campaigns to civilize
the Indians. The campesino identity that arose with
agrarian reform came to replace Mam identity, at least
in public discourse and in government offices and cen-
sus statistics. The disappearance of a Mam ethnic self-
identity, however, did not necessarily indicate radical
changes in many aspects of traditional culture, such as
agriculture and natural resource exploitation, social or-
ganization, and many other customs. These fundamen-
tal patterns common to many Mesoamerican cultures,
the "Mexico Profundo" of Bonfil (1987), were assimi-
/ ROSALVA AiOA HERNANDEZ CASTILLO ANO RONALD NIGH 139
lated as part of the lifeways of the campesino of the Si-
erra. Decades later they were again vindicated as "Mam
traditions." As campesinos, the inhabitants of the Sierra
began to organize, both in official organizations in order
to receive benefits from the state and in independent
ones to push for further land reform.
It was not until the 1970s that more populist winds be-
gan to blow, as the Mexican government faced the human
rights policies of their international creditors. In 1978, the
National Indian Institute (INI) finally founded an office
specifically recognizing the Mam as an Indian population
with rights to government programs such as agricultural
assistance and bilingual education. In spite of the decline
of the language during more than three decades of forced
integration, Mam culture began to flourish in the new
spaces opened up by the changing policies.
The new environment created by government pol-
icy could hardly have been more different. Financial
support was given for a number of cultural expressions
in language, festivals, dance, and so forth. Money was
even made available for the purchase (in Guatemala) of
traditional costumes (Hernandez Castillo 1995a). More
importantly, new forms of economic organization for
small coffee producers were encouraged. Through the
Mexican National Coffee Institute (IMECAFE), growers
were provided with technical assistance, credit for ag-
rochemicals, and state-supported channels for market-
ing (Nolasco 1985; Villafuerte 1993).
Changes in government policies coincided with
other changes in the social field in which Mam identity
was constituted. Protestant religions, some of which
had been proselytizing in the region for decades, began
to attract more Mam converts. A variety of reasons lie
behind this trend, but at least one missionary group (the
Presbyterians) had been advocating a revival of tradi-
tional Mam culture. At the same time-partly as a re-
sponse to Protestant advances-some elements within
the Catholic Church, influenced by the more progres-
sive church policies of Vatican II and liberation theol-
ogy, began to question the long-standing hostility of the
church toward traditional Indian culture (Hernandez
Castillo 1995b).
Also during this period some individual Mam came
into contact with the new political movements that
were forging a wider consciousness among Indian
groups of their common plight and the possible advan-
tages of their national and international organization.
All of these factors conditioned what was to be the Mam
response to the political and economic reforms leading
to the NAFTA agreement.
NAFTA and the Official Discourse of Modernization
Economic globalization has materialized in Mexico
in the form of NAFTA, the Salinas administration's star
140 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST VOL. 100, No. 1 MARCH 1998
program for the modernization of Mexico. Once again,
the state has had a profound effect on the life of the
Mam and on the context in which their identity and aspi-
rations are constructed. The implementation of the free
trade agreement with the United States, if considered in
isolation, has had only minimal impact on local commu-
nities in Mexico. But if we see NAFTA as one recent
stage in the neoliberal economic policy that has been
followed by several administrations since the early
1980s, then we confront a series of political and eco-
nomic changes which have had a profound effect on all
sectors of Mexican society.
In preparation for the implementation of NAFTA,
Mexico effected drastic reforms to agrarian policy, in-
cluding abandoning an 80-year commitment to land re-
form to benefit small farmers, retiring direct subsidies,
credit, and technical assistance, and ending direct inter-
vention in marketing structure and price regulation.
The reforms to Article 27 of the Mexican Constitution
are a significant step toward the elimination of the ejido
and communal lands of Indian communities, based on
the assumption that modernization necessarily implies
the transformation of collective forms of economic or-
ganization and their replacement by individual entre-
preneurs.
The constitutional reforms made it clear to many
farmers that they should give up all hope of obtaining a
piece of land under the agrarian reform program. Al-
though in practice the reforms have had little immediate
impact on land tenure, on a symbolic level they were
perceived by the rural population of Chiapas as a viola-
tion of their rights. Among the Mam it was widely ru-
mored that the times of the plantations would return
again:
We found out that the president had changed the law and
that now the rich could take our ejido, that gringos, Ger-
mans, and people from everywhere would come to start
large companies and take our land. That is what we heard.
Then my son and I went to Motozintla to talk with the father
so that he could explain what was happening with the
Agrarian Law. 5
The fears expressed in this testimony do not seem unre-
alistic when we consider that the small family farm, pro-
duction for local consumption, and ejido tenure are
considered antithetical to modernization by official dis-
course.
NAFTA is an instrument of this official discourse of
the Mexican government and its international financial
advisors. The expressed goal is "the modernization of
Mexico." With respect to the agricultural sector, NAFTA
discourse calls for the substitution of basic foods for
crops of "greater value," that is, crops for export. No
one can speak with more authority on this point than
Luis Tellez, architect of President Salinas's rural poli-
cies:
Greater specialization according to the model of compara-
tive advantage will permit a gradual improvement of rural
well-being and, at the same time, provide society with food
at lower prices. This process of specialization, which has
already been initiated by Mexico, has as its fundamental
axis the efficient insertion of the (agricultural) sector in the
global economy. [Tellez 1994:85]
As far as technological development is concerned,
Tellez leaves no doubt that the vehicle of modernization
is industrial technology: tractors, chemical fertilizers,
and hybrid seeds. The goal is to increase productivity
and reduce the proportion of the population working in
the agricultural sector:
Migration from the countryside to the cities is a conse-
quence of the process of industrialization. It is a highly
desirable phenomenon to the degree that the rural popula-
tion can be absorbed by the industrial and service sectors
because it permits an increase in the standard of living.
[Tellez 1994:27]
It is not our purpose in this article to analyze the
pros and cons of this rural development policy or even
to describe it completely. Let it suffice to comment that
the apparent effects of these policies on rural Mexico
during the past decade could hardly be more dramatic.
The per capita harvest of eight basic grains, including
com, wheat, and rice, has fallen 27 percent while im-
ports have tripled in absolute terms. Over 1 million pro-
ductive acres were abandoned from 1994 to 1995, while
others were converted from basic food crops to forage
or export crops. Food imports have increased from
U.S.$1.8 billion in 1984 to $7.2 billion in 1994, equivalent
to the value of Mexico's annual petroleum exports
(Calva 1995).
Apart from this increasing economic dependency,
the social consequences of neoliberal policies on the
countryside have been even more dramatic, including a
widespread debtors rebellion and an Indian uprising in
Chiapas that has gained national and even international
sympathy. The devastating human cost of these policies
can be imagined if we recall that, in 1984, 80 percent of
rural families in Mexico were classified by the govern-
ment as poor and 19 percent as living in extreme pov-
erty (Tellez 1994:29)
NAFTA discourse follows the first model of globali-
zation mentioned above, that is, one in which cultural
homogenization in a process of urbanization and spe-
cialization in the production of standardized goods for
global markets is assumed to be inevitable and even de-
sirable. Indian farmers such as the Mam are thought by
NAFTA planners to have no possibilities for competing
or even surviving the adoption of free trade. In one
sense, the philosophy and strategies of the organic farm
 MAYAN COFFEE GROWERS IN CHIAPAS
cooperative that we analyze below can be seen as a re-
sponse to this discourse. The fact is that Mexico's rural
population has not taken the role of a passive spectator
in the political and economic reforms promoted by the
country's elite. The modernization discourse has elic-
ited a wide response from the rural sector that has in-
cluded, in the ISMAM case, a questioning of the new re-
lationship with the state as well as the technological
style that agricultural development should follow.
Rise of the Organic Farm Cooperatives
The new institutional environment, even as it re-
opened space for the resurgence of Mam cultural ex-
pression, brought a new set of problems. In accordance
with the government's modernization policies, aggres-
sive promotion of the coffee export economy has dealt
a severe blow to traditional subsistence, as land and la-
bor formerly devoted to the production of the diverse
Mesoamerican basket of goods has been increasingly
diverted. Industrialized food began to replace locally
produced subsistence foods. This change represented
not only a deterioration of diversity and quality of diet
but increasing economic dependence, as an ever-larger
proportion of cash income generated by the coffee
economy went to buy food formerly produced at home.
A further blow to the farmers' economies was the gov-
ernment's promotion of agricultural chemicals, first
given away, later heavily subsidized, and, after chemi-
cal dependence was firmly established, left to the forces
of the free market.
In 1985 the Catholic Church's local cooperative
commission held a seminar with Mam coffee growers to
reflect on their problems and seek possible solutions.
The meeting set out to analyze the failure of some 40
consumer cooperatives that had been promoted by the
government. It was proposed that more production-
oriented cooperatives, without dependency on govern-
ment credit or subsidies, be formed to meet the threat of
lower coffee prices in the international market. After
analyzing the problems facing small growers, it was
found that low prices given by middlemen, low produc-
tivity due to soil erosion and degradation, and the fact
that up to 50 percent of coffee income went to pay for
fertilizers and pesticides, were central concerns (Sanchez
1990). Agrochemicals, brought to the region by govern-
ment policies, were also blamed by farmers for newly
appearing skin and lung diseases.
Meetings or workshops of this nature came to be
important events for the new cooperatives. A distinc-
tive methodology for these was gradually established,
borrowing from several sources. But participation in
one particular workshop, called Trabajo Comun Organi-
zado (Organized Communal Work), or TCO, was based
I ROSALVA AIDA HERNANDEZ CASTILLO AND RONALD NIGH 141
on a design developed to work with small-scale farmers
in Oaxaca by the Catholic Church in Tehuantepec. Influ-
enced by principles of European cooperativism, in the
Mam context this workshop became a point of encoun-
ter between the priests and Mam traditions. As one advi-
sor recalls,
In all the workshops the testimony of the elders was con-
sidered, to see how things had been in the past ... how
things were produced, why they no longer were produced
that way, the impact of fertilizers, and how they changed
the way of things in marty communities. For example, be-
fore, sheep provided fertilizer; they were put in small cor-
rals and these were rotated and this fertilized the fields. It
was only necessary to water. [Proceeding] in this way,
ideas were formed jointly [among advisers and farmers],
and we did little experiments and gradually found the way
[to farm organically]. 6
The ISMAM cooperative that eventually formed out
of workshops such as these (officially registered in
1988) resembles, in terms of operational structure and
ideology, the classic associations of industrial workers
in 19th-century England. Ideologically rooted in uto-
pian socialism, the Owenite and Rochdale cooperatives
nonetheless adapted themselves to efficient function-
ing in the capitalist system (Digby 1960). ISMAM's
ideology, as expressed to new members in the TCO
workshops, reiterates the basic principles of world co-
operativsim: direct participatory democracy, equity,
and mutuality (Nash and Hopkins 1976). These values
are not simply imposed by outside advisors but are reaf-
firmed in dialogues in which such outside proposals are
analyzed and appropriated in terms of traditional ethnic
values.
Meeting together to discuss the problems we are living and
reviewing the life of the past, we have reflected that the life
of the ancestors was very different from our life now. We
see the work, the science, and the intelligence of our ances-
tors that no longer exists. We have lost sight of that intelli-
gence and that work, that effort they made, without writing,
without science. They were always experimenting, and
they became great peoples. But what happens now? With
all the modernization that we've seen, now our people, we
are more useless, we're walking blind. What is it then?
Modernization. That intelligence from another country that
has ruined us, our culture, our intelligence. They have
taken away our work because now we see nothing made
with our own hands. Then that is what ruins our intelli-
gence, our capacity, our spirit of work, the struggle we have
lost against modernization ... like someone said today,
modernization has generated laziness. So we are reflecting,
we are investigating and wanting to return once again to
sort out the good things we have left behind. [Perez 1994]
The TCO workshops are now obligatory for all new
members in many of the organic farm cooperatives in
Chiapas. Even those Mam cooperatives that are not
142 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST VOL. 100, No. 1MARCH1998
associated with the Catholic Church have a similar rite
of passage in which the philosophy of cooperatives and
organic farming is analyzed.
We began the analysis based on what we had been living.
There were various problems. The first problem we ana-
lyzed was the great contamination of natural resources
such as the soil by chemical products and erosion, which
is worse everyday. The soil, the environment, and one's
health. Well, based on that we had to act; a group of farmers
of this community began by constructing compost piles to
grow healthy corn without the chemical products, and thus
we began to have results. The second thing was the terrain
(i.e., soil protection], a necessary factor in order to grow
healthy food. 7
The results of the analysis by ISMAM members dif-
fers considerably from that of the modernization dis-
course cited above. Both identify low productivity of ag-
riculture as a central problem but cite dramatically
different causes of that low productivity. For Luis
Tellez, low productivity is due to lack of machinery,
chemical fertilizers, and hybrid seeds, for which the so-
lution is "modernization": buying and using what is
missing. For Ciro Perez, chemicals are part of the prob-
lem, not part of the solution.
Thus, fundamental decisions regarding technology
took place before ISMAM and its advisors had become
aware of the market potential of producing organically.
This fact is important in establishing that ISMAM's
agroecological techniques are not mere stratagem,
mere opportunism motivated by higher prices, but
rather arose as a set of solutions to perceived technical,
environmental, and economic problems. The organic
marketing contact was provided by a sister organization
in Oaxaca (Union de Comunidades Indigenas de la
Region del Istmo ), which helped ISMAM enter the Euro-
pean market for organic coffee. The first container of
certified organic coffee exported directly by the coop-
erative, however, was sold to an American organic
farmer from Oregon, who discovered ISMAM by chance
on a tourist visit to the region.
ISMAM now has over 1,200 members from some 80
Mam communities located throughout the Sierra Ma-
dre. Not all growers in a given community are members
of the cooperative. ISMAM members in a community
form reciprocal work groups and engage in other forms
of cooperation together, but they may also participate
in community activities or even be members of other co-
operatives or organizations. Communities are grouped
into 34 regions; ISMAM members from the communities
in each region hold a periodic assembly and elect two
delegates to the monthly cooperative business meeting
in Motozintla. All members gather at least once a year in
the annual general assembly and festival. Every two
years the general assembly elects the cooperative ex-
ecutive committee; the outgoing committee continues
to serve as an advisory committee to ensure continuity
of cooperative administration.
The social science literature on cooperatives has
debated the question of when we can say that a coopera-
tive is successful. Ronald Dore (1971) suggests that
success means the degree to which the cooperative
achieves the goals originally set by its members. Donald
Attwood and B. S. Bavishar (1987) propose more extrin-
sic measures such as the technical efficiency of the
work process, levels of equity in the distribution of
benefits, expanded levels of economic activity, and in-
creased standards of living for the poorest members.
Gabriela Vargas Cetina (1993) suggests that relation-
ships with the external political environment, in par-
ticular the state, affect or even determine success as
measured by these performance characteristics.
By all of these measures, ISMAM can be considered
a highly successful cooperative. ISMAM annually ex-
ports about U.S.$ 7 million of premium organic coffee to
Europe, the United States, and Japan, steadily increas-
ing its sales and the income of its members. The coop-
erative has become a strong organization promoting the
interests of its members to the government and has im-
proved its economic stability by acquiring a coffee-
processing plant and a toasting and packing facility, and
negotiating a loan to build an instant-coffee production
unit. The cooperative provides jobs to some members'
sons and daughters, who have been encouraged to
study such subjects as business administration, agron-
omy, and computer science. The firm has even entered
into a joint-venture agreement with North American In-
dian investors (through the Native American Free Trade
Agreement) to build an ecotourism facility on the Chia-
pas coast.
The ISMAM experience is relevant to several other
theoretical issues concerning the anthropology of coop-
eratives. For example, it has been proposed that formal
cooperative relations are more likely to succeed if they
evolve from a previous context of informal cooperation
(e.g., March and Taqqu 1986; Raulin 1976). In ISMAM's
case it is clear that the ethnically based value placed on
reciprocity and collective action was central to the ap-
propriation of cooperative principles. Many studies
have analyzed the importance of the political and insti-
tutional context of cooperatives, particularly the rela-
tionships with the state and its development policies.
Goran Hyden (1988) has contrasted this later relation-
ship in two models he calls "blueprint" and "green-
house." The former refers to the top-down imposition of
cooperative organization as a part of national develop-
ment policy, whereas the later is a nurturing approach
in which the state creates conditions to favor local in-
itiative and support local solutions to development
problems. The ISMAM case, at least during its first de-
cade of existence, is an example of a third category of
 MAYAN COFFEE GROWERS IN CHIAPAS
cooperatives suggested by Shanti George (1992) which
is neither imposed from above nor nourished but
emerges spontaneously, as "garden weeds," ignored or
even suppressed by national governments.
The Local Construction of Global Identity
As we have seen, the Mexican nationalist and mod-
ernization discourses as well as the agrarian and neolib-
eral economic policies of the federal government have
all had an important impact on the social construction
of Mam identity. Still, the direct access of the Mam to
the global market and their contact with other cultural
discourses and organizational experiences have also in-
fluenced this process.
We can see that technological change, the develop-
ment of communications that have caused a greater flu-
idity of persons and information, the deregulation of na-
tional markets, and capital flexibility have influenced
the daily life of the Mam. Although the Mam have been a
part of the global market for centuries, what is new
about this stage of globalization is the direct contact
with sectors of the global community through participa-
tion in information and communication structures such
as the organic coffee market or the fair trade solidarity
movement. Through promotional trips made by mem-
bers of the Commercialization Commission, telephone
calls, and recently even e-mail messages, ISMAM has
overcome the isolation imposed by traditional regional
and national political structures. What Jean-Frarn;ois
Lyotard (1984) and David Harvey (1989) have called the
space-time compression characteristic of globalization
has allowed the Mam to have contact with indigenous
peoples from other parts of the world or with European,
Japanese, and American "green consumers." These ex-
periences have, of course, influenced the Mam world-
view and the way they have shaped their own cultural
discourse. Confluence spaces have been created where
they have been able to share their experience:
I went through Holland, Germany, and Switzerland. I got to
know these countries .... [W]e exchanged, well, experi-
ences, about how they did things over there and how we do
them here, and they liked very much the project we have
here. Then we are thinking about it, that they buy from us
a healthy product and it is well worth it for them: they pay
it at a slightly higher price, but they are buying a good thing.
Then for them it is an advantage, because this uneasiness
has emerged in them. They are also in favor of the environ-
ment, in favor of development through land. Then they tell
me, if we buy your product, we are also sharing your effort,
not only for you but for the environment, and this way you
can develop a project for people to live. 8
While describing this encounter with European al-
ternative markets, ISMAM's secretary, a man with only
three years of primary schooling, pointed out,
I ROSALVA AiDA HERNANDEZ CASTILLO AND RONALD NIGH 143
To commercialize we went in search of markets, we went
to lose the fear of going into new countries to fmd other
possibilities to sell our product to alternative markets, to
fair markets. Possibly we are now exporting our product to
alternative markets, at a price above that of the New York
exchange; we are selling in these markets .... We are ex-
porting to several countries, such as Holland, Germany,
France, Switzerland, Belgium, Sweden, Austria, the United
States, and Japan .... It was difficult for me to stand up in
front of my campesino brothers and to go abroad; there was
also the fear of going out; many things were suffered on the
way, [and we are still] suffering, but also tomorrow [there
will be] a benefit. [Perez 1994]
From their contact with North American natives,
the Mam have not only taken some elements of their dis-
course but have also learned from Native American
businesspersons about marketing, production, and the
formulation of a corporate image, among other things.
These contacts resulted in the joint investment in eco-
tourism mentioned above.
What we have called ISMAM's agroecological dis-
course genre, therefore, has been constructed in several
spheres of communication. Some of these are internal,
consisting of the Mam's analysis of the technological
and environmental aspects of agriculture as well as the
reinvention of their own traditional culture-in histori-
cal narratives of a former existence in which they pos-
sessed "intelligence, spirit of work," and lived in har-
mony with their environment. Thus, the evocation of a
past harmony with nature has been used by the mem-
bers of ISMAM as cultural capital in the global market.
Fiction and reality are mixed in the construction of a
"Mam Utopia," where lands were very rich and pro-
duced anything sown, Mother Earth was respected and
provided for every need, there was equality, work was
for the common good, laws were not necessary, and
everybody respected old people's advice (Perez 1994).
Other spheres of communication have involved
contact with other social groups-North American Indi-
ans, European cooperativists, U.S. organic farmers,
Fair Trade marketers, certification agencies, and so
forth-that constitute the global "information and com-
munication structures" (Lash and Urry 1994:64) in
which IS MAM now participates. Some of the discourses
encountered in these structures have been appropri-
ated and integrated into a new Mam identity, which, in
tum, is promulgated back as an image, both corporate
and ethnic, in those same global information and com-
munication structures.
The use of historical narratives to give authenticity
to a product in a competitive market has been analyzed
by Robert Ulin (1995), whose discussion of Bordeaux
wines illustrates the dialectical connection between
commodity and sign production. Interestingly, the
Bordeaux winegrowers invention of tradition was a
144 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST VOL. 100, No. 1 MARCH 1998
response to challenges in the global economy. During
the 17th and 18th centuries, competition from Spanish
and Portuguese wines, which were priced lower than
Bordeaux wines in the European market, provoked a
crisis among French growers. Ulin writes, "Rather than
seeking to compete directly with Spain and Portugal by
increasing quantity of production and lowering price ...
French growers opted to improve quality in the creation
of the grands crus (elite wines)" (Ulin 1995:521). The
parallel with the situation of Mexican agricultural com-
modities and organic production in the context of
NAFTA is notable. Similar to the wine producers of Bor-
deaux, who invented a particular narrative of a mytho-
logical aristocratic past, creating an image of special
quality directed to an elite market to enhance their com-
petitiveness, ISMAM also invented a specific corporate
image that caters to the demands of a select clientele.
This allows them the possibility of employing the past
as symbolic capital in order to increase the marketabil-
ity of their product internationally, as well as to reaffirm
their ethnic identity and their viability as farmers in the
face of hostile development policies.
ISMAM has responded to the demand for organic
coffee produced by "genuine indigenous people" with
"Cafe Marn: Organically Grown and Socially Responsi-
ble." On the label for the international market we read
that "Marn organic coffee is cultivated and produced by
the last descendants of the Mayan people." Certainly,
solidarity on the part of First World buyers has been an
important element in ISMAM's success. Though some
observers see a kind of artifice in this solidarity, it
should be noted that ISMAM has grown past depend-
ency on the solidarity market (which now accounts for
about 15 percent of their sales) and is competing in the
demanding gourmet coffee market with considerable
success.
Organic coffee is typical of the products of the
global economy, "the economy of signs" (Lash and Urry
1994), where the symbolic and aesthetic content of com-
modities becomes increasingly important. ISMAM's
customers do not just buy a commodity, they buy a
product that comes with a good deal of information and
symbolic content, including organic certification and
solidarity with "the last descendants of the Mayans" as
part of the package. We can say that part of ISMAM's
success has been the ability to adapt competitively to
the new "reflexive economies" of the postmodern era.
Access to the European alternative market also
helped solve the problem of exploitation by middlemen,
allowing the cooperatives to begin direct export; or-
ganic production, however, was never a requirement of
the European solidarity networks. Although the deci-
sion to produce organically has certainly been well re-
ceived and rewarded by ISMAM's First World clients,
that decision was made in a complex internal process
that involved reference to their agricultural traditions
and the reformulation of Marn ethnic identity, as well as
a creative response in the ongoing dialogue with the
Mexican state.
Final Considerations
The adoption of organic methods of production has
been crucial to the success of ISMAM, as we analyze
elsewhere (Nigh in press). In this and other aspects of
the formation of the cooperative, we clearly see a dual
process of adopting new cultural elements (e.g., the
techniques of modern organic farming) combined with
the revival of established cultural elements (traditional
agriculture, communal work relations) into a new syn-
thesis and a new identity. As we have indicated, organic
agriculture is more than just a strategy to access an up-
scale market in developed countries. It also responds to
the internal necessities of the Indian farmers by ad-
dressing the physical and biological causes of low soil
productivity by adopting soil-protection methods (ter-
races, mulches, and so forth) and regenerating the mi-
crobiological fertility systems (with composts and
elimination of toxic agrochemicals). Agroecological
discourse also provides an internationally recognized
arena for the reaffirmation of what are considered by
the Marn to reflect their traditional cultural values of in-
dependence and respect for nature.
By pointing out the hybrid character of Marn agro-
ecological discourse, we do not mean to delegitirnize
that discourse, or the new Marn identity to which it con-
tributes, in relation to other supposedly "more authen-
tic" identities. We consider that the Marn case illustrates
with particular clarity the process by which all ethnic
identities are constituted: as changing, situational, his-
torical discourse genres in dialogic relation to other so-
cial groups, and not as rnillenary, static traditions that
have survived internal or external colonialism.
In other words, the appropriation of the discourse
of the other is not an acritical, mechanical process but a
dialogical and creative one in which certain values and
propositions are rejected (e.g., NAFTA-style modern-
ization) and others, such as environmental protection
or the principles of cooperativisrn, are reinterpreted
and revindicated. Dialogue and creative selection are
key elements in the process of resistance and suggest
the mechanism by which processes of globalization can
result in parallel processes of "localization" and in the
creation of "cosmopolitan spatial heterotopia" (Lash
and Urry 1994:32) as alternatives to the uniform "global
culture" of transnational commercialism. Roland Robert-
son (1995) has suggested adopting the international
marketing term glocalization to describe this dialogue
of global and local.
 MAYAN COFFEE GROWERS IN CHIAPAS
The Zapatista uprising of January 1994 represents a
different Maya response to the hegemonic discourse of
NAFI'A modernity. It was a response by men and women
who, more isolated from the "information and commu-
nication structures" that aided ISMAM, found their ef-
forts blocked by the repression of traditional political
and economic structures that have characterized Chia-
pas for 500 years (Benjamin 1989; N. Harvey 1994). It is
noteworthy that, more than a strategy of arms, the
EZLN (Ejercito Zapatista de Liberaci6n Nacional) has
pursued, since January 1994, a political strategy of
strengthening their links with those global information
structures. Even with these relative advantages, the
more peaceful challenges of ISMAM to the dominant
discourse of modernization have met an ambivalent re-
sponse from government institutions and the organiza-
tion has faced sporadic incidents of state repression. 9
While ISMAM did not participate in the social base
that gave birth to the Zapatista movement, the 1994 up-
rising represented a watershed in the organization's re-
lationship to the state. In the wake of the widespread
sympathy the Zapatistas generated in the Mexican
countryside (including among many ISMAM members),
the government sought new alliances in the rural
sectors. "Garden weeds" such as ISMAM suddenly
awoke official interest. In 1995, ISMAM was awarded
the National Prize for Agroindustrial Exports, presented
personally by Mexican president Ernesto Zedillo, and
has since been disproportionately favored over other
independent organizations in Chiapas in the wake of
the government's scaled-down rural assistance. As a re-
sult, ISMAM's official position has changed from one of
support for Zapatista demands, but rejection of violent
methods, to open criticism of the movement. It is also
clear, however, that this shift in policy does not express
the true sympathies of all, or even most, ISMAM mem-
bers. Rather, it is the result of pressures placed on the
cooperative's leaders and key advisors. This divergence
of the social base from the leadership has been fatal to
many Chiapas Indian organizations since 1994 and cer-
tainly represents a risk for ISMAM.
So once again, as is so often mentioned in the an-
thropological literature on cooperatives, their relations
to the state and the political environment emerge as cru-
cial variables that will probably determine, more than
any other factor, the future of ISMAM. Nonetheless, the
cooperative's first decade can only be called a remark-
able example of autonomous grassroots development, a
demonstration that Mayan proposals to control their
own economic lives are more than idle dreams.
Notes
Acknowledgment,s. We would like to thank Father Jorge
Aguilar and the members of the ISMAM and K'nan
/ ROSALVA AfDA HERNANDEZ CASTILLO AND RONALD NIGH 145
Choch/Nuestra Madre Tierra cooperatives for their coopera-
tion and friendship during our fieldwork. We would also like
to thank CIESAS, Dana, A.C., and the Wenner-Gren Founda-
tion for financial support of this research. An earlier version
of this article was prepared for the panel "Globalizing Anthro-
pology," at the 94th Annual Meeting of the American Anthro-
pological Association, Washington, DC, November 18, 1995.
1. Although we use the term invention of tradition popu-
larized by the work of Hobsbawm and Ranger (1983), we
differ in our analysis in that we do not accept the dichotomy
of "invented" versus "authentic" traditions. Our notion of
invention is one of social construction. With reference to the
proposals of Handler and Linnekin (1984), we assume that all
cultures are in permanent flux. Thus, to conceptualize some-
thing as "traditional" means to give it a specific symbolic
value rather than to refer to its temporal depth. "Cultural
categories such as traditions have reflexive character; they
are invented as they are lived and thought about, people's
consciousness of them affect their content" (Handler and
Linnekin 1984:280).
2. Hernandez Castillo 1995a; Hawkins 1984; Medina 1973;
Pozas 1952a, 1952b; Wagley 1949; Watanabe 1992.
3. J.M., municipality of El Porvenir, interview, May 1990.
All cited interviews were conducted by Rosalva Aida Hernan-
dez Castillo.
4. S. V., ejido male, El Porvenir, interview, September 1994.
5. P. M., municipality of El Porvenir, interview, April 1994.
6. Father Jorge Aguilar Reyna, Tapachula, Chiapas, inter-
view, May 23, 1995.
7. Ciro Perez, Colonia Zaragoza, interview, October 7,
1994.
8. C. P. G., Union Fuerza Liberadora, interview, October 7,
1994.
9. As recently as 1994, two ISMAM members were mur-
dered and the president and accountant were kidnapped and
beaten by members of the local judicial police. These and
other incidents of repression were protested by over 1,000
ISMAM members, who traveled in caravan to Mexico City to
meet with high government officials.
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