¿Quién soy? Who am I?

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For the majority of my high school and collegiate career, I studied the Spanish language and the cultures of the countries whose people speak it, one of them being Mexico. In the course of my studies, I always wondered what to call the people from these countries. Hispanic? Latin American? Spanish? The list goes on and on. What I came to learn was that even if the people of those countries did not explicitly know the true ethnic background of their ancestors, they relied on a practice of self-identification; they essentially chose who they are.

I have traveled internationally, but only to one country–Mexico. My first time in Mexico was for my honeymoon, which my husband and I spent in Riviera Maya, about an hour away from Cancún. I loved it there, but I did not get a local’s perspective until I came to Mexico the second time and stayed in Cancún. As pictured on the left, I participated in an excursion to help give out food and school supplies to a very poor village located far outside the busy city in a jungle that is only accessible by dune buggy. While eating dinner at a village member’s house, it became apparent to me that the abundance of diversity in Mexico alone is astounding, but it also has negative effects on the people as well.

Our host shared with us that the people who have the chance to earn a decent income are those who work in the tourist areas, usually as hotel and resort staff. But as she described, these jobs are difficult to get. The only people who get chosen to work in such positions must speak English well and be highly educated–two things that to do not typically describe the constituents of the country’s rural and indigenous populations. Apparently, however, the distinction between indigenous and non-indigenous people in Mexico is an ever-changing moving target.

While Andrés Villarreal (July 23, 2014) states that Mexico is the country with the largest indigenous population in the Western hemisphere, he also tells us that the identifying factors for indigenous and non-indigenous Mexican people have included less indicators of surface-level diversity, and have instead focused on the vast distances between the population’s indicators of deep-level diversity. Because this method of identification is always changing, the people of Mexico are always self-identifying based on malleable measures rather than concrete sociological fact. And just like our village host alluded, this creates issues not only between populations, but also in the practice of keeping true ethnic culture alive in Mexico.

The lack of explicit identifiers on the Mexican census is one of the biggest reasons as to why specific population identification has become such a muddled process. Until recent changes, the country’s census identified indigenous populations simply based on the proficiency at which one spoke an indigenous language, not based on any genetic factors or family lineage. Because of this, the social boundaries between Mexico’s cultures have become highly blurred and nearly indistinguishable. This essentially stops no one from simply learning the culture, customs, and language of a particular population so as to be able to then identify as a member of that population (Villarreal, July 23, 2014). This is obviously a problem, as it leads to the dilution of the true historical culture of the people.

In many ways, I as an American have always viewed ethnicity as a concrete and stable part of one’s identity; either you are or you are not. It is evident, however, that that is not the case, especially as a native Mexican.

References

Villarreal, A. (July 23, 2014). Ethnic identification and its consequences for measuring inequality in Mexico. American Sociological Review, 79(4), 775-806. Article