Cuetzalan Del Progreso

Ethnic-coded responses: institutional racism and sexism against indigenous women in Cuetzalan del Progreso, Puebla, México

Context

Cuetzalan del Progreso, hereafter referred to as Cuetzalan, is located in the North East of the State of Puebla, Mexico. At the national level, Cuetzalan is a well-known touristic place, where according to the Department of Tourism (SECTUR) visitors can ‘experience authentic Mexican traditions’, through the balanced mix of the ‘modern’ and the ‘indigenous. The archaeological zones represent the pre-Hispanic ancestry of the Mexican identity, whereas the town center represents the Spaniard heritage. Nevertheless, besides depicting the ideal of the ‘mestizo’ Mexican identity, Cuetzalan also portrays accurately the

Despite it has one of the largest hospitals in the region, proclaimed by Puebla’s former Governor ‘a world-class public hospital’ (Alianza, 2011 ), Cuetzalan holds the 20th position of mother-child mortality rates (CONAPO, 2010) . Although it has over 210 public schools ranging from kindergarten to high-school, it still occupies the 8th place of illiteracy rates in the State, being women the gender group who hold the highest percentage (INEGI, 2010). These statistics do not stand for all the identities that co-exist in Cuetzalan: the ‘mestizo’ and the indigenous (which includes nahua and totonaco peoples), these figures epitomize the latter. Furthermore, these quantitative data are a brief overview of how systemic sexism and structural racism operate not only in Cuetzalan, but in Mexico. Nevertheless, Cuetzalan is not only relevant because it is a metonymy of the dynamics of ethnic exclusion at a national-scale, but also because it is a place where indigenous peoples have been politically active in the past decades; where the emergence of indigenous cooperatives, NGO’s

On the other hand, when the State is unwilling to provide specific groups with access to services, infrastructure or political goods; either through biased law enforcement, inefficient policy-making or precarious social services, it becomes a perpetrator of social, political, systemic and structural violence. Therefore, my aim is to explain what role is the State playing on inflicting ethnic-based and gender-based violence towards indigenous women. In order to explain violence based in ethnicity and gender, I will address how indigenous women identity constructed their own identity and the process by which the State constructed racialized bodies. Since the objective of this research is to analyze structural violence against indigenous women it is necessary to determine which are the dynamics and discourses within systemic ethnic-based and gender-based discrimination. Therefore, I will examine institutions as social spaces where the State is socially, physically and symbolically personified by its inhabitants, both indigenous and non-indigenous. This approach aims to provide three insights. The first one is to describe what indigenous women perceive as ethnic-based and gender-based violence, not as a mere collection of situations, places and times, but as an analysis of racialized bodies within a broader political context. Secondly, it would help to determine what is