Who Defines Indigenous?

For years, conventional scholarship has argued that minority groups are better illegible] when the majority groups that absorb them are willing to recognize and illegible] the preservation of indigenous identities. But is the reinforcement of ethnic illegible] among migrant groups always a process of self-liberation? In this surprising illegible] Carmen Martinez Novo draws on her ethnographic research of the Mixtec illegible] migration from the southwest of Mexico to Baja California to show that illegible] the push for indigenous labels is more a process of external oppression than illegible] minority empowerment. In Baja California, many Mixtec Indians have not made efforts to UNK] themselves as a coherent demographic. Instead, Martinez Novo finds that the push for indigenous illegible] in this region has come from local government agencies, economic elites, intellectuals, and other illegible] agents. Their concern has not only been over the loss of rich culture. Rather, the pressure to illegible] indigenous identity has stemmed from the desire to secure a reproducible abundance of cheap illegible] labor. Indian means illegible] commercial agriculture low-wage worker or an urban informal street vendor - an identity that interferes their goals of social mobility and economic integration. Bringing a critical new perspective to the complex intersection among government and scholarly illegible] economic development, global identity politics, and the aspirations of local migrants, this provocative illegible] is essential reading for scholars working in the fields of sociology, anthropology, and ethnic studies.