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Charles R. Hale
University of Texas

Neoliberal Multiculturalism: The Remaking of Cultural Rights and Racial Dominance in Central America
This article analyzes the rising prominence of neoliberalism as a new strategy of governance that reaches well beyond economic reforms. In particular, neoliberal governance includes the limited recognition of cultural rights, the strengthening of civil society, and endorsement of the principle of intercultural equality. When combined with neoliberal economic policies, these progressive measures have unexpected effects, including a deepened state capacity to shape and neutralize political opposition, and a remaking of racial hierarchies across the region. Drawing on ethnographic examples from three sites of political practice, the article documents these processes and their consequences, especially for black and indigenous Central Americans.

Puerto Lempira is a small, predominantly Miskitu Indian town on the banks of a salt water lagoon in northwest Honduras, the central place of the Honduran Mosquitia and the homeland of the Miskitu people. I went there in May 2003 for the final meeting of a participatory mapping research project, designed to support Miskitu and Garfuna people in their struggle for land. We invited 30 leaders to a two-day workshop in order to discuss the findings and to plan follow-up actions; we arrived to find 75 people packed into the Catholic church meeting hall, already sweltering hot at ten oclock in the morning. Our research had produced maps and supporting documents for 15 multicommunal claims called bloques, a compromise between individual community claims, clearly favored by the project donors and the Honduran state, and an expansive demand for the entire Mosquitia, which many Miskitu fervently believed to be rightfully theirs. The compromise emerged as a partly explicit, partly concealed strategy to achieve the expansive territorial demand in a less confrontational and perhaps more efficacious way: piecing it together, one bloque at a time. We expected workshop participants to endorse this plan and to devote remaining project resources to one chosen bloque, which would achieve a collectively held land title, and consequently open a path for others to follow.

PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review, Vol. 28, No. 1, pp. 1028, ISSN 10816976, electronic ISSN 1555-2934. 2005 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Rights and Permissions website, at http://www.ucpress.edu/journals/rights.htm.

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I then watched, with an odd combination of dismay and exhilaration, as our carefully conceived plan unraveled. In rhetoric emboldened by the studys resounding support for indigenous rights, by the collective energy of the packed meeting hall, and by cumulative anger with historic government oppression, one speaker after another opted for the radical alternative: Demand the entire Mosquitia, which has been our homeland for time immemorial. Even some of the Miskitu leaders who had been instrumental in formulating the bloque strategy ended up endorsing the clamor for territory, whether out of pragmatic calculation or because they too were transformed by the meetings fervor. After much heated debate, the plenary overwhelmingly endorsed a militant, vaguely millenarian declaration of rights to territorial autonomy. The dismay that tempered my exhilaration at this glimpse of an uprising in the making was because it seemed likely that energy would dissipate in the face of powerful opposition and weak internal organization. These mixed reactions inform the central analytical question: Under what conditions can indigenous movements occupy the limited spaces opened by neoliberal multiculturalism, redirecting them toward their own radical, even utopian political alternatives? September 11, 2003, marked thirty years since the overthrow of Chilean president Salvador Allende, which has become the point of departure for tracing the rise of neoliberal economic reform in Latin America. Pinochet and his Chicago School advisors were precocious. Neoliberalism did not become a household term in academic and policy circles until well into the 1980s, and later still did it become a continentwide object of critical analysis and political repudiation. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, however, it already had become anachronistic to continue speaking of neoliberal reforms as opposed to simply using the term neoliberalism to name the quasi-naturalized mode of politicaleconomic organization that now prevails. The harvest from these two decades of neoliberal economic policy has been remarkably bitter. According to the most recent report from the Economic Commission on Latin America (ECLA), 220 million Latin Americans (or 43.4 percent) live in poverty; inequality in the distribution of wealth and income has deepened; prospects for the near future appear bleak. Even in their own terms, neoliberal economics are not working all that well. Despite Pinochets distinction as a pioneer, it would be misleading to associate neoliberal ascendancy with dictatorship. On the contrary, this shift has been consummated in tandem with a region-wide return to democracy, during the same years that scholars have heralded as the era of new social movements (Escobar 1992; Dagnino. Alvarez, and Escobar 1998). Yet, however critical these new democratic actors, the general pattern has been for stark opposition to fade into negotiation and compromise. With the partial exception of Fidel Castros Cuba and the embattled municipios autnomos of Chiapas, oppositional political initiatives are apt to be found waging their struggles from within the neoliberal establishment.

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The anti-globalization movement is another exception, which still mainly serves to prove the rule: impressive intensity of political energy, prescient in its global analysis and scope, but largely disarticulated from, for example, the daily struggles of those 220 million who seek immediate relief. To the economic paradox of failed policies that continue to be implemented, add the following political one: The best analyses of neoliberalisms systemic ills inform political strategies that most potential supporters cannot or will not follow. This, in turn, raises the question of cultural rights. Are indigenous movements, with their endorsement of a radically distinct cultural-political logic, demands, and notions of rights, poised both to articulate strongly with a multitudinous base and to advance an alternative political vision that directly challenges neoliberal orthodoxy? In order to address this question, we must first expand our understanding of neoliberalism itself. This means thinking beyond its original meaning: a set of market-oriented reforms meant to correct and eliminate the flawed economic policies of import substitution industrialization and state-driven economic development. Latin American neoliberalism, I will argue, has become a full-fledged political project. Neoliberalism encompasses economic doctrine but also promotes a reorganization of political society along the lines of decentralization, trimming down of the state, affirming basic human rights, and calling for minimally functional democracies. Most importantly for us here, neoliberalism brings forth a new direction in social policy, emphasizing the development of civil society and social capital, and an approach to cultural rights that at first glance appears highly counterintuitive. It is often assumed that the central tenet of neoliberalism, like the unadorned cognate from which it derives, is the triumph of an aggressively individualist ideology of economic man. In contrast, I suggest that collective rights, granted as compensatory measures to disadvantaged cultural groups, are an integral part of neoliberal ideology. These distinctive cultural policies (along with their sociopolitical counterparts), rather than simply the temporal lapse between classic liberalism and its latter day incarnation, are what give the neo its real meaning. To emphasize the integral relationship between these new cultural rights and neoliberal political economic reforms, I use the term neoliberal multiculturalism. In previous moments of Latin American history, the hegemonic idiom of nation building was mestizaje, a gesture of deep reverence for the indigenous (or, in Brazil and perhaps Cuba, African) roots of national identity, combined with a privileging of the European-oriented mestizo subject, as bearer of rights and source of political dynamism that looks to the future (see, for example, Bonfil Batalla 1981, Hale 1994, Gordon 1998, Stutzman 1981, Gould 1998). This profoundly assimilationist project remains strong in many parts of Latin America, but in general is waning and being replaced by a politics of cultural recognition. In part taking the rise of cultural rights activism as an inevitable given, and in part actively substituting a new articulating principle, the emergent regime of

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governance shapes, delimits, and produces cultural difference rather than suppressing it. Encouraged and supported by multilateral institutions, Latin American elites have moved from being vehement opponents to reluctant arbiters of rights grounded in cultural difference. In so doing, they find that cultural rights, when carefully delimited, not only pose little challenge to the forward march of the neoliberal project but also induce the bearers of these rights to join in the march. In this article I briefly examine three sites of neoliberal multiculturalism, drawn from three different arenas of my own work in Central America: a landmark cultural rights case in the Inter-American Human Rights Court in San Jos, Costa Rica; struggles for black and indigenous lands in Nicaragua and Honduras; and Ladino responses to the rise of the Maya movement in Guatemala. From this analysis emerges, first, a strong and vivid sense of rights grounded in cultural difference as a rich, expansive, and volatile terrain of political mobilization. In each case, powerful institutions played key roles in recognizing, encouraging, and opening the space for certain versions of cultural rights. These institutions, however, cannot easily set limits on the mobilizations that follow, nor can they readily fix the cultural-political meanings that people produce and affirm as they mobilize. Yet in the struggles that ensue, the scope and meaning of cultural rights become the focus of contention while the outcome of struggles in this arena often remains ambiguous and highly contingent. The great efficacy of neoliberal multiculturalism resides in powerful actors ability to restructure the arena of political contention, driving a wedge between cultural rights and the assertion of the control over resources necessary for those rights to be realized. This is not a divide between (endorsed) individual rights and (prohibited) collective ones but rather a retooled dichotomy between base and superstructure: a Marxist vision returning to social movements as a nightmare. This dichotomy acquires such efficacy in part because it looks precisely like what these movements themselvesespecially indigenous movementshave been struggling to achieve: affirmation of cultural particularity and relief from the Marxist penchant to reduce all political contention to class struggle. The nightmare settles in as indigenous organizations win important battles of cultural rights only to find themselves mired in the painstaking, technical, administrative, and highly inequitable negotiations for resources and political power that follow. I develop this argument focusing on three sites of Central American research, using each to explore a distinct effect of neoliberal multiculturalism: extending the grid of intelligibility, defining legitimate (and undeserving) subjects of rights, and remaking racial hierarchy. I conclude by pointing tentatively to pathways for confronting and moving beyond these limitations: sparks of utopian politics that change the subject; carrying on the cultural rights discussion in a language fundamentally at odds with the neoliberal multicultural frame; strategies for rearticulating cultural rights with demands for political-economic resources from the

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start. These pathways embrace expansive political alternatives; not only have local strategies been welcomed, but they have also started occupying the spaces that neoliberal multiculturalism has opened. The Awas Tingni Case in the Inter-American Human Rights Court This first site should quickly dispel the gloomy sense of entrapment in my argument. The site is the Inter-American Human Rights Court, and the specific occasion is the landmark case of the Mayagna (indigenous) community of Awas Tingni against the Nicaraguan state. Very briefly: Awas Tingni brought suit against the government for violation of their rights to communal lands and for denial of due process in the national courts in adjudication of those rights. The legal framework for the case was the American Convention on Human Rights, formulated in the 1960s at the height of the previous era of assimilationist cultural conformity and signed by Nicaragua in 1979. In keeping with the ideological precepts of the time, the Conventions guaranteed protection of property rights (Article 21, Right to Property) had an unyieldingly individualist content (Inter-American Commission on Human Rights 1969): 1. Everyone has the right to the use and enjoyment of his property. The law may subordinate such use and enjoyment to the interest of society. 2. No one shall be deprived of his property except upon payment of just compensation, for reasons of public utility or social interest, and in the cases and according to the forms established by law. The crux of the audacious strategy of the Awas Tingni lawyers was to convince the judges that this clause should be stretched and reinterpreted in order to apply property rights to a collective subjectan indigenous communityrather than individually and to understand property not as a legal title but, rather, as a culturally sanctioned occupation. During most of the trial, the communitys lawyers built their case around the key term ancestrality: Awas Tingni inhabitants have lived on this land for time immemorial, according to traditional cultural patterns, and have property rights that take precedence over those granted by a late-coming nation-state. This line of reasoning fit neatly within the lines of political contention in the previous era: a hegemonic mestizo state defending one cultural-political principle, and a militant indigenous movement, putting forth a radically different and contradictory one. In the final phase, in the face of the governments relentless challenge of the ancestrality claim, S. James Anaya, the lead lawyer for the community, gave his argument a dramatically new twist. There are two approaches (tendencias) that states may follow in response to indigenous peoples claims for rights, Anaya began. One approach he called modern; he never gave the other a name, but he associated it with the past, the out-of-date, the backward-looking, so I will refer

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to it as backward. The backward approach sought to assimilate indigenous peoples, stripping away their cultural attributes (rasgos), their cultural essence, preventing them from prospering in the lands where they have lived. The modern approach, in contrast, was to be found in all the recently approved international laws, backed by the United Nations, that strengthen the cultural essence, the life ways of indigenous peoples, assign value to indigenous religious and philosophical beliefs (cosmovisin) and to their relations with the land. Anaya gave the word modern and its cognates a striking amount of air time in the final minutes of the courtroom drama, in contrast to the words near absence in the rest of the proceedings. For example, one government argument was that Awas Tingni people had moved around too much to have a claim to ancestral rights. Anaya responded: It does not matter . . . according to the modern criteria of the modern approach, reflected in the modern judicial instruments, it doesnt matter how much you move around; what matters is the continuity of a historically constituted group, which maintains traditional traits and patterns. This has not been disputed. (authors emphasis added) Modernity was a space that both the judges and the illustrious Nicaraguan state imagined themselves to occupy, especially in contrast to the monolingual Mayagna of Awas Tingni who filled the courtroom. Anaya had simply added a key attribute to that same space: Judges and states alike, if they are indeed truly modern, recognize and affirm the rights of indigenous communities such as Awas Tingni. After lengthy deliberations, the judges delivered a sentence that resoundingly supported this contention. The Awas Tingni victory has galvanized similar struggles by other indigenous and black communities in Nicaragua and throughout the Americas. It has injected a burst of energy in work to advance an international legal regime in defense of cultural rights, and it has moved Awas Tingni community members closer to achieving their fundamental goals of livelihood security and cultural survival. These achievements, however, have come with a full complement of contradictions. The case in favor of Awas Tingni became so compelling to the judges for a combination of reasons: On the one hand, community lawyers emphasized the profoundly authentic cultural difference of Awas Tingnis people, and on the other hand, they convinced the court that such cultural difference deserves legal protection, because that is what modern nation-states are supposed to do. Although the Nicaraguan government fought this position tooth and nail, more agile and astute political elites might well have gone with the current. Two years later, it is clear that Awas Tingnis legal victory has come at the cost of deeper entanglement in, to adapt a term from James C. Scott (1998), neoliberalisms grid of intelligibility. This is not to argue that community members were foolhardy to

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wage the struggle nor that the cost was exorbitant, but, rather, to insist on seeing the process as a transformation of power relations as opposed to resistance toward empowerment. Following the legal victory, in September 2001 government negotiators engaged the community and its lawyers in a protracted twenty-month negotiation before finally beginning work on the mandated demarcation of the communitys lands in June 2003. Claiming lack of funds (due in no small part to the fact that the president of the time, Arnoldo Alemn, stole untold millions from the government coffers, a crime for which he was jailed), the state turned to the World Bank, who agreed to finance the demarcation. As of this writing, the demarcation study is being reviewed by government officials who, according to the negotiated arrangement, are entitled to demand changes until they are satisfied. Whatever the community gains in the final analysisand it is likely to be substantialthe cost will be an unprecedented involvement of the state and of neoliberal development institutions in the communitys internal affairs: regulating the details of the claim, shaping political subjectivities, and reconfiguring internal relations. This entanglement in a grid of intelligibility is a key feature of neoliberal governance. The transformation of power relations is especially productive because it involves the concessionor, indeed the active promotionof long-standing demands for cultural rights. Its advance is deceptive, among other reasons, because victory often comes in the face of vigorous resistance from recalcitrant elites who defend the previous order. In the Awas Tingni case, for example, government lawyers defended a remarkably aggressive and arrogant version of Nicaraguas myth of Mestizaje (Gould 1998), arguing that the claimants had no rights because they were racially mixedan argument that showed contempt for their cultural backwardness and suggested that their legitimate rights were no greater than those of any mestizo peasant. This posture clearly irked the judges and helped to set up Anayas modernity move, momentarily positioning the Nicaraguan state as needing to be educated and disciplined. The Awas Tingni case is especially challenging in relation to the problem of neoliberal multiculturalism, because the rights in question go well beyond cultural recognition (language, education, spirituality, identity) to encompass land and resources. Do black and indigenous community land rights really fit within the broader frame of neoliberal governance? In the course of a five year exercise in activist research, a group of colleagues from the University of Texas and I, along with others from Central America, have been reflecting upon this very question. We accepted the World Banks offer to support black and indigenous land rights, to find out whether such an offer might be put to the service of the more expansive visions of political change that these communities nurture, whether these communities can use the system, as one Garfuna activist intellectual from Honduras put it, to fight the system.

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The Black and Native Land Rights Struggles in Honduras and Nicaragua Shelton Davis, activist anthropologist turned World Bank sociologist, led with remarkable success a two-decade-long campaign from within the organization to reform World Bank policies toward indigenous peoples (Davis and Partridge 1994). Playing strategically off rising cries of protest over World Bank megaprojects and their deleterious effects on indigenous peoples (protest that Davis himself helped to ignite with his early ethnography-expos of development in the Brazilian Amazonia, Victims of the Miracle), these insider reformers worked to develop a new operational directive for indigenous peoples (known as DO 4.20), which committed the World Bank to an extensive new set of constraints and obligations in recognition of indigenous cultural, political, and economic rights.1 Davis, who frequently makes university visits, gave an impressive PowerPoint seminar at the University of Texas in the spring of 2003 that placed the World Bank at the cutting edge of the trend in support of development with identity: indigenous participation in all facets of project development; respect for cultural difference; and multiculturalism as a forward-looking political sensibility that the World Bank urges member states to endorse, all directly resonant with Anayas modernity move in the Awas Tingni case. In keeping with this policy shift the World Bank has funded land demarcation projects, intended to map black and indigenous claims, as a prior step to definitive titling of their lands. The Caribbean Central American Research Council (CCARC), an activist research organization of which I am a member, entered a competitive bidding process for the research contracts in Nicaragua (19971998) and in Honduras (20012002), winning both. Thus began a five year attempt to ride the tiger, about which we have just recently started thinking in analytical terms.2 We managed a combined budget of some seven hundred thousand dollars, worked with teams of about twenty researchers in each country, and designed and employed a participatory research methodology that involved community leaders in a dynamic process of discussion, elaboration, and validation of their land rights. The most important research products were what we call ethno-maps: computerbased cartographic representations of claims, created through georeferenced field data collected by the community members themselves. Land use designations inside the perimeters of these claims demonstrate that, far from being empty territory, this land encompassed a dense, long-standing network of human-resource relationships. The products also include an accompanying text, which explains and documents the claims, based on ethnographic research in the community. Quite apart from these principal research results, the project also provided an occasion to explore why neoliberal institutions are opening these spaces in the first place. The prevailing image of the World Bank and affine institutions in academic and political circles on the Left is of ruthless guardians of a punishing economic

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model, bowing down obediently to the interests of capital and trampling on the needs and rights of the poor.3 This image is badly in need of revision. The point is not that the overall effects depart sharply from this portrayal but rather that the political sensibilities and institutional practices that drive World Bank policies toward agricultural modernization in Central America, for example, are more subtle, gentle, and comprehendingand thus much more effective. For every orthodox economist who sees the world in supply-and-demand equations driven exclusively by individual interests, there is a front-man like Enrique, a former friend of mine from Nicaragua solidarity days, who insists that he has not wavered in his support for radical egalitarian political principles but simply has added a dose of pragmatism in his methods for getting therewhich, in neoliberal discourse, is called a shift from protest to proposal. Moreover, in policy and ideological terms, it would be mistaken to assume that the architects of neoliberal policies need, or even prefer, a strictly individual notion of rights. Collective rights to land work just as well, as long as they meet two basic conditions: The first is that they cannot contradict the principal tenets of the long-term economic development model, which, in these countries, is turning away from most largescale agriculture toward free-trade-zone manufacturing, financial services, commerce, tourism, and environmental management. The second condition is that they cannot cross a certain line in the gathering of political clout, which would threaten established power holders and destabilize the regime. This line, highly subjective and unstable, is often drawn in the heat of the moment by state operatives rather than Bank functionaries themselves. As long as these conditions are met, collective land rights actually help advance the neoliberal model by rationalizing land tenure, reducing the potential for chaos and conflict, and locking the community into a mindset that makes it more difficult for expansive political alternatives to emerge. To grasp the contradictory, three-way power relations behind these land rights struggles, comprising the World Bank, the client state, and the subjects of cultural rights, is to go to the heart of the puzzle of neoliberal multiculturalism in Central America. The Nicaraguan and Honduran states have been dragged into compliance with the new multicultural mandates, pressured not only by the World Bank but also by organizations such as the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB), the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and the Inter-American Human Rights Court, who advance progressive agendas along these lines. In Nicaragua we heard constant protests from state officials assigned as counterparts to our land rights study as well as denunciations of the World Banks new imperialism in favor of indigenous rights. As one sharp-tongued Nicaraguan Ministry of the Environment and Natural Resources (MARENA) lawyer quipped, The costeos [black and indigenous residents of the Atlantic coastal region] do not work hard to produce, they simply hunt and fish. They

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are generally lazy. How can we justify giving them so much land? In any case, it is we Nicaraguans who have to decide who has rights to communal lands. The World Bank should not be making this decision, exerting influence where it does not belong. These guys want to turn all of Nicaragua into a national park. Many times I heard Enrique gripe about the dinosaurs in the Honduran state, whom he and others in the most recent Bank Mission had to bring into line. World Bank funding props up these tiny, corrupt, bankrupt states and, in the process, gains the informal prerogative to dictate policy, force out incompetent or backward-thinking state functionaries, and even create new government entities if the existing ones seem incompetent. High-level operatives in the resulting pseudo-state chafe at this blatant intervention and at times protest openly, but they generally are too well paid and too dependent to persist. They are more likely to remain smiling until the mission leaves and then find ways to evade full compliance. Obedezco pero no cumplo [I obey but I do not comply],4 all over again. Local power holders, in contrast, feel much more directly threatened by the advance of cultural rights, and they have much less to lose in voicing protest. In Honduras, for example, our Diagnstico (Diagnostic) caused great disquiet among members of the local mestizo economic and political elite, who would be directly displaced if the land claims we had documented were actually granted. In one public meeting, the mestizo mayor of Juan Francisco Bulnes, a tricultural (Garfuna, indigenous, and mestizo) municipio, took a stance of vehement opposition to our Diagnstico. Here the question of adjudicating authenticity comes to the fore. Staunch opposition from one sector of local and national elites keeps the proponents of neoliberal multiculturalism on high ground, fighting the good fight against the dinosaurs, while serving notice to the subjects of these newfound rights to stay within certain pre-inscribed limits. Institutions such as the World Bank then present themselves as pragmatic mediators, carving out a space of compromise between militant cultural rights activists and recalcitrant, powerful conservatives. As Elizabeth Povinelli (2002) argues for parallel land rights claims brought forward by aboriginal Australians, late liberal states can turn the tables astoundingly quickly. They do so happens not by denying rights but rather by granting them, as long as they maintain the prerogative to set standards of authenticity associated with these rights and to decide who meets those standards. A recent volume titled Indigenous Self-Representation in Latin America (Warren and Jackson 2002) echoes similar concerns: The state has shifted from adversary to arbiter, introducing a whole new set of problems for indigenous movements. The following questions arise: Do the indigenous claimants measure up? How must they behave in order to become and remain deserving subjects of these

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rights? When indigenous leaders or intellectuals occupy that authorized space of compromise, they win an important battle in the struggle for recognition. Yet when they exchange protest for proposal, they often lose the inclination to articulate more expansive, utopian political visions with the pragmatic tactics of the here and now. Those expansive visions remain, most apt to burst forth as angry repudiation of pragmatic compromise rather than as its strategically articulated complement. This is the lesson we learned in the church hall meeting described at the beginning of this article. Under the weight of this predicament, even cultural difference, that reliable font of utopian counterdiscourse, submits to domestication as indigenous representatives accept recognition in exchange for compliance with the economic and political constraints that follow. Ladino Response to the Rise of the Maya5 The most counterintuitive outcome of this shift is not the domestication effecta feature of any governance regimebut, rather, the remaking of racial hierarchy, even amid vehement condemnation of classic racism. To probe this facet of the panorama, I turn to Guatemala, where Mayas constitute the majority of the population and have made impressive strides over the past two decades in nearly every realm of cultural rights: forging powerful cultural-political organizations, contesting racism, and demanding and receiving recognition from dominant actors and institutions who, a generation earlier, espoused a naturalized scorn for lo indio. Members of the dominant culture, known as Ladinos, generally have distanced themselves from the racism of times past, adopting instead a position that affirms cultural equality and allows a limited space for cultural rights but ultimately justifies a new form of racial hierarchy, letting culture, rather than race itself, provide the rationale. The yearly kite festival in the predominantly indigenous town of Sumpango, just south of Chimaltenango on the Pan-American Highway, is a quintessential space of Maya efflorescence. Starting months before November 1, the day of the festival, groups of indigenous youth organize to raise funds and design and build enormous kites made of brightly colored paper carrying emphatic messages, almost always revolving around Maya identity and cultural rights: Tejemos nuestra propia historia [we weave our own history]; Identificamos como pueblo maya [we identify as the Mayan people]; panegyrics to Rigoberta Mench, quotations from the iconic Maya text, the Popol Wuj. Sumpango also is situated in the midst of a vast quasi-free trade zone of maquiladoras, which line the PanAmerican Highway. Driving by on any weekday at dawn, one will find the bus stops teeming with indigenous youth, waiting for transportation to their minimum-wage maquila jobs. Only in an era of neoliberal multiculturalism could such an image congeal: the same people working as producers of surplus value for the Korean-owned multinational textile industry by day and as producers of Maya cultural militancy by night.

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The middle-class Ladinos from Chimaltenango, whom I accompanied to visit the Sumpango kite festival in the late 1990s, were duly impressed with the display of energy around Maya cultural themes, if mildly ambivalent. Ramiro, a high school teacher, drew my attention to one kites slogan he especially liked: Mataron nuestra gente pero no mataron nuestra cultura [they killed our people, but they did not kill our culture]. He shared the intense revulsion toward the previous military regime that the slogan reflected, and he also affirmed how important it was that indigenous people have a strong sense of identity and cultural pride. The ambivalence came out in a different register: a string of jokes playing on musings by Ramiros sister-in-law Brenda, as we strolled around the soccer field turned festival grounds. She said, We are like the insides of a gaucho [the greasy sandwich that is the favorite street food in festivals like this one]. The rich evade taxes, she continued, the poor have nothing to pay, and we pendejos (fools) from the middle class declare our incomes and pay with the illusion that we are building democracy. After an interlude of humorous banterhow bread in the gaucho kept getting thicker and the meat inside more meager, how grease from the meat must soak through and drench the bread to make it tastythe conversation reverted back to more serious allusions of the metaphor. Brenda, Ramiro and the others also feel sandwiched between a EuroGuatemalan elite, who control disproportionate amounts of wealth and power, and an ascendant indigenous majority, who are fed up with their assigned place at the bottom of Guatemalas race-class hierarchical ladder. To make matters worse, the Euro-Guatemalan elite seem willing to endorse and promote multicultural reforms, often at the behest of purveyors of multilateral aid, bolstering Maya cultural rights activism that leaves provincial Ladinos at the margins. As school teachers, both Ramiro and Brendas sister had serious reservations about the proposed constitutional reforms meant to give legal expression to key provisions of indigenous cultural rights, approved in the 1996 peace accords.6 They both opined that education in an indigenous language was not feasible. More generally, while Ramiro approved of indigenous cultural pride, he worried that this emphasis on cultural rights could go too far, causing fragmentation and strife: The thing is, people here just do not feel Guatemalan. Quite apart from everything else, they should have that identity. It doesnt matter what you are in addition. Mexico does not have this problem: as they say, Mexico first, Mexico second, Mexico third. We are not like that: we have no loyalty. . . . If we all identified as Guatemalans, there would be no problem; we could accept one another differences and all. The key to mutual respect for cultural difference, Ramiro believes, is a common identity as Guatemalan that transcends that difference altogether. Middle-class Ladinos provide a revealing facet of the relationship between neoliberal multiculturalism and racial hierarchies, because their anxieties remain

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unusually close to the surface and because their multiple responses confound any neat cultural logic that could be associated with this new moment of political contention. Among the many Chimaltenango Ladinos with whom I conducted fieldwork over some three years in the late 1990s, I found near-unanimous repudiation of the racism characteristic of Brenda and Ramiros parents generations: a punishing assertion of indigenous inferiority, an emphatic presumption that indios should be confined to separate and unequal spaces of Guatemalan society. Repudiation of these former views comes as an endorsement of cultural equality, an encouragement of cultural pride, and an anxious receptivity to demands for cultural rights. The anxiety deepens as the points of contact increase between Maya cultural activism and inherited prerogatives of Ladino racial privilege. When Mayas claim jobs that Ladinos might otherwise count on, predominate in local electoral politics, wrest resources for cultural rights programs by rearranging zero-sum budgets, or broach the ever-explosive question of land distribution, Ladinos get anxious. Yet, whether out of political maturity or prudence, most Maya organizations do not pursue these hot-button demands in explicit ways; they dissemble, highlight safer and less controversial demands first, gradually building the outer trenches of cultural rights on which most can agree. In the face of these more moderate demands, Ladino responses become perplexingly fragmented, multiplied, and contradictory. Some take a hard line against any hint of multicultural recognition, a few join the struggle against recalcitrance in their own ranks, but most embrace Maya cultural rights while seeking to define their limits. These efforts to set limits on Maya cultural rights, without returning to the classic racism of times past, involve a series of loosely articulated approaches, but rarely coordinated or thought through as such. The first is to question the authenticity of demands made in the name of lo maya. As I engaged Silvia, another school teacher from Chimaltenango, in conversation about indigenous-Ladino relations, her first inclination was to emphasize how resolutely the members of her profession endorse the principles of cultural equality and to gently reprimand her sister, who also partook in the conversation, for displaying overtly racist precepts that others such as herself had left behind. Yet when the conversation raised the topic of the Maya movement, Silvia turned surprisingly adamant: They do not have the right, historically, culturally, they do not have the right to call themselves Mayas. By the time of the Conquest, the Maya Empire had disappeared; when the Spanish arrived, there was already a mixed people here. There were Toltecs who came from Mexico, and by that time the Maya had completely disappeared. Afterwards, the Spanish came, and found a mixed culture. . . . Legally the indigenous people claim they are Mayas and this is a lie. . . . There are no pure Mayas left.

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For Silvia, like many Ladinos of her ilk, something about the effort to ground cultural rights in claims to continuity with the ancient Maya crossed the line between legitimate cultural pride and crass political opportunism. It raised the specter of inauthenticity. Following from this passionate deconstruction of authentic Mayan identity is the second approach, an inclination to categorize indigenous people according to how deserving they show themselves to be. In the previous moment of classic racism toward Indians, few escaped its punishing effects. An indigenous person had to pass as Ladino and display deep affinities to the new identity category to find relief from opprobrium. Even then, doubts remained. Ladino responses in the current era send a very different message: an explicit endorsement of the right to be indigenous, of equal status that indigenous culture should enjoy, of freedom from precisely the opprobrium that previously created such a strong impetus for assimilation. Yet there are still behaviors, attributes, and dispositions that make certain indigenous people undeserving of these rewards: If they are too expansive in their demands, too drastic in their political means, too strident in their inclination to ferret out and denounce persisting Ladino racism, they earn the epithet radical. Don Anselmo has worked for decades with the Cooperative movement in Chimaltenango, in strong support of indigenous peoples economic organization and betterment, but takes a dismal view of Maya cultural activism: There are about forty different groups, each one seeking its own power and advancement. Their objective is now to cut ties with Ladinos, and to go it alone. Echoing Silvia, he believes that Maya religion, an important component of the efflorescence, lacks an actual Maya basis. . . . it is superficial, a maneuver to earn money and to gain position. Finally, when it comes time to weigh blame for these detours in what could be an important contribution to social change in Guatemala, he points to the extremism of the Maya leaders: The people promoting this point of view lack political vision. Like [names one prominent Maya intellectual] he is one hundred percent radical. With opportunist radicals at the helm, the argument suggests, the healthy and moderate aspirations of the indigenous majority are betrayed. A third and final element in this disciplinary response to the perceived excesses of Maya cultural activism comes in a familiar form: allusions to cultural pathology. In some respects, these allusions represent a strong continuity from the previous era. When Silvia had finished her riff against the Maya movement, she returned to her teachers vocation: help them superarse (better themselves). But even when they better themselves, she reflected in conclusion, some indigenous characteristics just dont go away. Her brother Chepe, who also took part in the conversation followed up: They are mistrustful. It is as if they are angry that you [Ladinos] have more than them [como que les da coraje que uno tiene las cosas]. I see this when they work for me on my farm. Instead of taking care

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of things, they are destructive. A few Indians are good, but only a very few. Another school teacher, named Andrin, explained the problem in curt terms: they are drastic, and very arbitrary, when they get into positions of power. He continued, Yes, Carlos, Im telling you, their resentment [against us] runs in their veins, and when they have power, they use it to take revenge. Although the metaphor of resentment running in the veins might seem quirky and ill-chosen, I found this quasi-Lamarckian reasoning to be surprisingly common. Indigenous people have cultural traits, produced through the centuries, internalized, and passed on from generation to generation through a process closely akin to biological inheritance. Taken together, these brief invocations of Ladino responses to Maya ascendancy should help to illustrate the articulation between neoliberal multiculturalism, on the one hand, and what might be called cultural racism, on the other. These responses do not add up to a homogeneous or uniform position, however. Ramiro and, especially, Brenda are much more sympathetic to Maya cultural rights than the others. Moreover, the three facets are present and prominent to varying degrees, such that broad generalizations about Ladino consciousness would be extremely hazardous to make. Yet these precepts do fit neatly together to form a contention; a position, that saturates the social milieu of Ladino-indigenous relations and stands ready for people to tap into, affirm, or put to use. This position stakes out the high ground of anti-racism and respect for cultural difference, which in turn is connected with a differential evaluation of the indigenous beneficiaries of this newfound recognition. Moderate Mayas are fully deserving of the rewards of multiculturalism, while radicals display a lack of gratitude. Their intransigence is not only unfair but borders on racism itselfa paradoxical turnabout effect, since racism is a principal target of their activism in the first place (Balibar 1991). Moreover, Ladinos portray the demeanor of Maya radicals as having a deeper source: characteristics such as hotheadedness, treachery, and resentment, long in formation, ingrained, quasi-inherent. Moderates, according to this reasoning, have managed to shake free from these shackles, and in that sense the problems are not completely without solution. Multiculturalism is predicated on respect for and recognition of this redeemable Indian. Yet even redeemed Maya remain in a shadow of doubt cast by their radical counterparts, having risen above, but not completely freed from, the burden of their racialized origins. Multiculturalism in this light becomes the alibi that deflects attention away from the remaking of racial hierarchy, under the triumphant banner of its elimination. Conclusions In Guatemala, Maya cultural rights activism articulates with the various expressions of indigenous identity politics that fall outside the bounds of the indio permitido: the so-called Maya radicals; the poor rural indigenous population who

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do not form part of cultural rights activism; those engaged in processes of metizaje from below.7 Throughout the Central American region, the ideal of mestizaje has lost its once prodigious power as an ideology of nation building, supplanted by neoliberal multiculturalism, on the one hand, and increasingly contested by newly assertive political subjects, on the other. Although Guatemalas particular route to this new national project has differed from those of the other Central American states, current conditions are strikingly convergent. Perhaps this shift away from the elite and state-driven myth of mestizaje will free up the term, semantically and politically, to a different set of articulations. In Chimaltenango, I found large numbers of peoplemostly urban, poor, and youngwho seemed to be refusing both the Ladino and the Maya identity categories. Members of the most popular youth gang in the citywhich had taken on the name Cholosfit this description; so do a surprising number of high school youth, who acknowledge indigenous descent of some sort and know they are not Ladinos, but ultimately prefer to position themselves in between. Still other new mestizos are Ladinos who have affirmed this refurbished identity category as a gesture of solidarity with Mayas and as a critique of the persisting racial hierarchy. Neither fully formed nor clearly defined, these expressions of mestizaje from below are noteworthy for the way they cut against the grain of state-endorsed efforts to carefully define each cultural group and its associated rights. Perhaps greater articulations between established cultural rights activists and those groups who do not fit might help to subvert the regulatory effects of neoliberal multiculturalism while helping to recover the expansive vision of Maya cultural rights activism, so palpable in the early phases of its reemergence two decades ago. In the case of black and indigenous struggles for land rights, we have focused on the radical potential of multicommunal territories or bloques, which have become, both in Nicaragua and Honduras, the emergent idiom of their claims. These bloques appear to remain within the neat logic of the World Banks agricultural modernization schemes, but they go on to interrupt it by forging multi-communal coalitions with much greater potential clout than individual communities could hope for. When the bloques are multiracial, they disrupt another premise of neoliberal multiculturalism by displacing efforts to define culturally bounded rightsbearing units and substituting the principle of common cause among differentially racialized peoples. Moreover, these multicommunal bloques suggest the possibility of a hybrid relationship among rights, identity, and territory: The demand is expansive in that the bloques are contiguous and together comprise territories that black and indigenous peoples would essentially control; yet the proposed mode of self-government is decentralized and not especially nationlike, which helps dispel dominant actors anxieties about separatism and provides a modicum of assurance that the ills of nation building would not be replicated at a smaller scale. The

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prospects for the multicommunal bloques are far from clear; they face ample opposition from various quarters. They have no assured political or economic viability. They do, however, offer an exciting potential challenge to neoliberalisms business as usual, more attractive still because they have emerged in part thanks to funding from the very World Bank scheme that they now call into question. In the end we may be left with a version of the dichotomy that Dipesh Chakrabarty puts forth in Provincializing Europe. This dichotomy is between good progressive history, which expand[s] the scope of social justice and representative democracy but is ultimately constraining, and talk about the limits of history, [which is] about struggling, even groping, for nonstatist forms of democracy that we cannot yet either understand or envisage completely (Chakrabarty 2000). However much we sympathize with the latter position, I contend that we need to devote much greater energy to theorizing effective articulations between these two stances. In brief moments of the Awas Tingni trial, as in the Puerto Lempira meeting, this radical indigenous imaginary did indeed burst forth. It called into question the long-standing histories of oppression, and it also expressed skepticism toward the new framework of cultural rights. Yet the militancy quickly faded, leaving in its place, yet again, an urgent need for political strategies that would move forward, strengthen organizational bases, and keep the conditions in place for a renewed burst of collective energy. The thought of contributing to the domestication of indigenous movements with the unreflective pragmatism of good history is horrifying, a critical reminder to be kept always close at hand. Another image, however, should create equal unease, especially for activist scholars: remaining at arms length as indigenous movements grapple with the painful dilemmas of neoliberal multiculturalism, offering a fully deployed cultural critique of domestication, while waiting patiently for the truly subversive uprising to begin.

Notes
This article began as the keynote lecture for the workshop, Language, Ethnicity and Conflict, Indiana University, October 23, 2003. I am grateful to Jeffrey Gould and Daniel James for their comments on that earlier version. Thanks also to Shannon Speed and Jane Collier for comments on the current version. Many of the ideas in this essay were worked out through collective work with Edmund T. Gordon, who also read and critiqued an early version. 1. DO 4.20 has had an ambiguous relationship to Afro-Latin communities, although more recently the World Bank has placed them, at least rhetorically, in the same category. For a coauthored essay that offers some of this reflection, see the article by Gordon, Gurdin, and Hale (2003).

2.

May 2005 3. 4.

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A good example of this discourse is the video on the World Bank in Nicaragua, Deadly Embrace. This was the stance attributed to colonial authorities, especially in the later period of Spanish colonial rule, when obedience to the Crown became an increasing irritation. This section is taken from my forthcoming monograph, focusing on Ladino responses to Maya cultural political ascendancy, titled Ms que un indio . . . Racial Ambivalence and the Paradox of Neoliberal Multiculturalism in Guatemala (School of American Research Press). For an analysis of the failed referendum on these accords, and its significance for Guatemalan cultural politics, see Warren (2002). For further elaboration of this concept of the indio permitido in comparative perspective, see: Hale and Millaman (forthcoming).

5.

6. 7.

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Gordon, Edmund T. 1998 Disparate Diasporas: Identity and Politics in an AfricanNicaraguan Community. Austin: University of Texas Press. Gordon, Edmund T., Galio C. Gurdin, and Charles.R. Hale 2003 Rights, Resources and the Social Memory of Struggle: Reflections on a Study of Indigenous and Black Community Land Rights on Nicaraguas Atlantic Coast. Human Organization 62(4):369381. Gould, Jeffrey 1998 To Die in This Way: Nicaraguan Indians and the Myth of Mestizaje, 18801965. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Hale, Charles R. 1994 Resistance and Contradiction: Miskitu Indians and the Nicaraguan State, 18941987. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Hale, Charles R. and Rosamel Millaman Forthcoming Cultural Agency and Political Struggle in the Era of the Indio Permitido. In Cultural Agency in the Americas. Doris Sommer, ed. Durham: forthcoming from Duke University Press. Inter-American Commission on Human Rights 1969 American Convention on Human Rights. Electronic document, http://www.cidh.org/Basicos/basic3.htm, accessed February 28, 2005. Povinelli, Elizabeth A. 2002 The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian Multiculturalism. Durham: Duke University Press. Scott, James C. 1998 Seeing Like a State: Why Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven: Yale University Press. Stutzman, Ronald 1981 El Mestizaje: An All-Inclusive Ideology of Exclusion. In Cultural Transformations and Ethnicity in Modern Ecuador. Norman E. Whitten, ed. 4593. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Warren, Kay B. 2002 Voting Against Indigenous Rights in Guatemala: Lessons from the 1999 Referendum. In Indigenous Movements, Self-Representation, and the State in Latin America. Kay B. Warren and Jean E. Jackson, eds. 149180. Austin: University of Texas Press. Warren, Kay B. and Jean E. Jackson 2002 Indigenous Movements, Self-Representation, and the State in Latin America. Austin: University of Texas Press.