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From: Chantlaca@...
Date: Sun, 10 Oct 2004 00:51:16 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: Frente Norte Teotihuacana - Boycott Wallmart

BOICOT INTERNACIONAL CONTRA WALMART Y COSTCO-COMERCIAL MEXICANA
POR LA DEFENSA DE NUESTRO PASADO Y EL ESTADO DE DERECHO

El Frente Civico pro Defensa del Casino de la Selva y el El Frente Cívico en
Defensa del Valle de Teotihuacan convocan:

A ACTUAR EN CONTRA DE WALMART Y COSTCO COMERCIAL MEXICANA. EMPRESAS
CORRUPTAS DESTRUCTORAS DE NUESTRO PATRIMONIO EN TEOTIHUACAN, EL CASINO DE LA
SELVA, TEXCOCO.

Demandamos que se clausuren las tiendas en Teotihuacan, el Casino de la
Selva, de Texcoco, Atizapan y Cd. Sahagun ahora violentadas por empresas
transnacionales.


POR MÉXICO ­ PROMUEVE NO COMPRAR O CONSUMIR EN WALMART, COSTCO COMERCIAL
MEXICANA, AURRERA O RESTAURANTES CALIFORNIA o VIPS


Fcpcdls: www.laneta.apc.org/procasino
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Frente Norte Teotihuacana
www.tonatierra.org

Friday October 8, 2004
Relatives,
Yesterday I was on a radio program, Native America Calling out of
Albuquerque, the theme of which was Wall Mart at Teotihuacan.

A Wall Mart representative was also on the on-air panel, along with another
reporter calling in from Mexico City.

I am not pleased to report that although I had one intervention at about
midway into the hour program, I was not given any more opportunities
(although I attempted repeatedly) to intervene and rebut the Wall Mart
positions which went out uncontested for the most part. My mike was dead
(phone line). We are still evaluating what actions to take, yet in
conversation yesterday with Maya Vision in California, we had an intial
discussion regarding:

Frente Norte Teotihuacana
And the posssible campaign actions we could colectively accomplish, among
which was:
Indigenous Peoples Delegation to Wall Mart Headquarters in Kansas.

This information we have also shared with the ANIPA (Asociacion Nacional
Indigena Plural por la Autonomia) of Mexico, who will be sending a
representative north during the first week of November, Lorena Gutierrez, to
present on Issues of the Indigenous Pueblos of Mexico, (including the issues
of Sacred Sites in Mexico - Teotihuacan)

For your consideration and advise.

Tupac Enrique Acosta
chantlaca@...

Background information:
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2267/is_2_70/ai_107489499

"Like millions of indigenous people elsewhere, Mexican Indians demand rights
to cultural self-determination. They insist on the right to live according
to traditional usos y costumbres, to self-government in accord with local
practices and customs. They demand recognition as collective units, and have
fought for the inclusion of the term pueblo--peoples--in the constitution.
Their claims for collective rights include bilingual education, the right to
local and regional autonomy, and to communal land as the basis of the
cultural reproduction of the group.

These demands are seen by many as a threat to both emergent and established
democracies. Demands for collective rights are in tension with the
commitments of liberal democracies to individual rights. Moreover, demands
for autonomy and self-determination are perceived to be threatening to the
national identity of the state. If democracy rests in part on an ideal of
"the people" as a cohesive group that has the capacity to deliberate
together to achieve consensus, then the demands of some of the people for
autonomy, and for recognition of their difference, threaten to undermine the
fabric of the national culture. At an extreme, the very borders of the state
are at stake, as groups make demands for self-determination and even
independence.

By and large, theorists of democracy and multiculturalism have failed to
develop an account of the contemporary salience of such demands for cultural
recognition, focusing instead on theories of human identity to explain the
politics of indigenous rights claims. They argue that demands for cultural
recognition are an expression of the individual's attachment to his or her
cultural group. As Will Kymlicka says, the bond between individuals and
their cultural groups is simply "a fact ... whose origins lie deep in the
human condition, tied up with the way humans as cultural creatures need to
make sense of their world, and that a full explanation would involve aspects
of psychology, sociology, linguistics, the philosophy of mind, and even
neurology" (Kymlicka, 1995: 90). Charles Taylor argues that human identity
is constituted by cultural group membership, and an individual's sense of
self worth is thus deeply tied to the value that others attach to his or her
cultural group. As a result of this "new understanding of the human social
condition," cultural recognition can be construed as a necessary component
of individual recognition, and misrecognition can reasonably be considered a
form of oppression (Taylor, 1994: 25-26). If cultural group attachment is a
feature of the human social condition, liberal theory had better deal with
cultural group rights if it is to be relevant.
Against this backdrop, the contemporary emergence of cultural claims for
recognition is seen as a result of the homogenizing threats of modernity,
and the frequency with which previously insular cultural units come into
contact with one another and with the penetrating reach of the liberal state
and neoliberal economic policies. Demands for cultural recognition seem to
stem from a protective instinct in defense of the familiar and the local.
Taylor states, for example, that "in pre-modern times people didn't speak of
'identity' and 'recognition'--not because people didn't have (what we call)
identities, or because these didn't depend on recognition, but because these
were then too unproblematic to be thematized as such" (1994: 35). It is only
in the present era that the possibility of misrecognition has generated the
conditions of oppression. In a sympathetic vein, Seyla Benhabib argues that
"the continuing subjection of tradition to critique and revision in a
disenchanted universe make it difficult for individuals to develop a
coherent sense of self and community under conditions of modernity" (1992:
81). The demand for cultural recognition springs from a crisis of identity
as human beings are buffeted by misrecognition and incoherence in a (modern
or postmodern?) world.

Deborah Yashar strikes a similar chord in her analysis of the recent
emergence of a Latin American indigenous rights movement as a defensive
reaction against external threat to the community. Yashar argues that
corporatism, coupled with the failure of the state to penetrate the
countryside in most Latin American countries, protected indigenous ways of
life in a de facto autonomy of neglect. By adopting neoliberal economic
policies that privatize communally held land and extend market forces into
rural areas, however, the state began in the mid-1980s to threaten the
coherence and traditions of indigenous life (Yashar, 1998, 1999). In general
terms, Taylor, Benhabib, and Yashar argue that cultural group identity is
salient because it is newly threatened by the coexistence of competing
groups and commitments in contiguous spaces, and by the homogenizing drive
of globalization.

While such theories seem to capture something of the human social condition
in an atomized world in which we all suffer from weakened attachment to
family and community, they capture little of the strategic and political
context in which such claims are formulated and advanced. Using a case study
of the emergence of the Mexican indigenous rights movement, I argue that
indigenous claims for autonomy and collective rights are not an expression
of the universal human need for cultural recognition. Nor do they reflect a
retreat to the familiar realm of identity in the face of the incoherence and
atomization of a globalizing world. Nor, finally, are they primarily an
attempt to safeguard traditional practices, beliefs, and forms of life from
the threat of modernity and homogenization.

Instead, indigenous identity is the condition of participation in a global
political dialogue.

"The politics of indigenous identity: neoliberalism, cultural rights, and
the Mexican Zapatistas"
Courtney Jung

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**

TONATIERRA
Community Development Institute
P.O. Box 24009
Phoenix, AZ 85074 EEUU

Septiembre 10, 2004

C. Lorena Guerrero Moreno
Tuliman, Guerrero, Mexico
Delegada de la Asamblea Nacional Indigena Plural por la Autonomia, y de la
Coordinadora Nacional de Mujeres Indigenas

PRESENTE:
Por este medio confirmamos la INVITACIÓN para que puedas visitarnos y
compartirnos las experiencias sobre el trabajo que han desarrollado con los
pueblos y comunidades indígenas de México; en particular, participes en una
serie de Foros y Reuniones de trabajo con nuestros pueblos y comunidades con
los temas: ³MORATLIDAD MATERNA, DERECHOS SEXUALES Y REPRODUCTIVOS DE LAS
MUJERES INDÍGENAS², del 17 de octubre al 15 de noviembre del 2004.

Te reiteramos que todos los gastos de traslado y estancia serán cubiertos
por nuestra organización.
Esperamos que la presente facilite los trámites y gestiones para tu viaje,
entre estos la reposición de tu VISA ante la Embajada de nuestro país en
México, que como nos habías confirmado, te fue expedida con una vigencia de
10 años.
Seguros de tener la dicha de tu pronta visita que permita estrechar aún más
lo lazos de amistad y hermandad entre nuestros pueblos, recibe fraternos
saludos.

ATENTAMENTE,

Tupac Enrique Acosta, Coordinador
TONATIERRA

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Frente Norte Teotihuacana - Boycott Wallmart