The Image of la india in Oaxaca, Mexico: Forging Afro-descendant Visibility and Trans-modern Indigeneity at the 2019 Guelaguetza

Abstract

Each July, tourists descend upon the capital city of Oaxaca, Mexico to attend the Guelaguetza, an 88 year-old, government-run festival of Indigenous culture. Scholars including anthropologist Deborah Poole and sociologist Eric D. Larson describe Indigenous participants as political and economic pawns of the state. This study builds on and complicates these assertions. By engaging with the festival as a frame for understanding how Oaxacan women navigate hegemonic constructions of Indian womanhood, I uncover ways in which participants reclaim conventional markers of identity toward destabilizing a societal structure designed to oppress them. I begin by demonstrating how the Mexican discourse of mestizaje inadvertently opens up space for its own contestation through its production of the Guelaguetza festival. Within this cultural phenomenon, the power that Oaxacan elite wield over renderings of female indigeneity becomes vulnerable to the influences of the women who participate in representations of their own identities. I explore openings for challenging and channeling the festival’s productive power presented by two prominent participants in the 2019 Guelaguetza: Lilia López Hernández, the first Afro-descendent woman to be selected as la Diosa Centéotl, a pan-Indigenous goddess figure who presides as the celebration's foremost representative of Oaxacan culture, and Yalitza Aparicio, the first Indigenous celebrity to serve as the face of the Guelaguetza in its advertisements. I find that both women animate the image of la india toward subversive ends. López Hernández acquires visibility and belonging for Afro-Mexican identity, disrupting the Guelaguetza’s categorizations of Oaxacan ethnicity. Aparicio decenters the Guelaguetza’s authority over portrayals of authentic indigeneity, repositioning this identity beyond the dichotomy of a provincial, pre-modern world of Indigenous Oaxaca and a cosmopolitan, modern realm of the mestizo urban center.