MESTIZO MEXICANS: Are we Indigenous?
As Mexicans, born of this land, this continent and this hemisphere, it is not our citizenship or nationality in the country of Mexico that establishes the immutable characteristic of our identity and indigeneity, it is our origins, our family’s origins, our pueblo’s origins. This is not subject to approval or denial by anyone else but ourselves, our families, our pueblos.
Often, social theory is affirmed in the absence of real politics, and politics are imagined in the absence of any theory. Such is often the case of anti-indigenous and anti-miscegenation biases and discrimination at play in academia, on social media and in the nonprofit industry today.
Besides internationally affirmed rights such as those upheld by the #UNDRIP and the #OIT169, for Mexicans, the Mexican COnstitution matters. The 2020 reforms of the Mexican Constitution include the affirmation that in Mexico, indigenous peoples “are those who descend from populations that lived in the actual territory of the country at the beginning of the colonization and that preserve their own social, economic, cultural and policies, OR PART OF THEM.”
The Constitution goes on to affirm that “Consciousness of one’s indigenous identity should be a fundamental criterion in determining to whom the provisions on indigenous peoples apply. (“La conciencia de su identidad indígena…