S H AY L I H M U E H L M A N N How Do Real Indians Fish? Neoliberal Multiculturalism and Contested Indigeneities in the Colorado Delta ABSTRACT There has been a growing interest in anthropology regarding how certain political conditions set the stage for “articu- lations” between indigenous movements and environmental actors and discourses. However, relatively little attention has been paid to how these same conditions can suppress demands for indigenous rights. In this article, I argue that the pairing of neoliberalism and multiculturalism in contemporary Mexico has created political fields in which ethnic difference has been foregrounded as a way of denying certain rights to marginalized groups. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in northern Mexico, I analyze how the arguments of a group of Cucapá for fishing rights in the Colorado Delta have been constrained within these political circumstances. I argue that cultural difference has been leveraged by the Mexican federal government and local NGOs to prevent the redistribution of environmental resources among vulnerable groups such as the Cucapá. [Keywords: indigeneity, multiculturalism, neoliberalism, environmental conflict, Mexico] A GROUP OF EIGHT Cucapá men and women crowded into their lawyer’s office on a sweltering summer afternoon in Mexicali, a border city in the northwest of Mexico. Andrés Rivioli, the lawyer who has handled the Cucapá’s fishing conflict with the Mexican federal government, began the meeting by denouncing the government for denying the Cucapá access to their ancestral fishing grounds at the end of the Colorado River. He said that by criminalizing their fishing, the Cucapá’s primary subsistence activity, the state was effectively committing “cultural genocide” on its own people. The lawyer was referring to the federal biosphere reserve that was created in 1993 in the Colorado River Delta to protect its struggling ecosystem. The Mexican Colorado Delta has suffered increasingly devastating effects of reduced flows from the river as a result of the construction of the major dams upstream in the United States throughout the 20th century. Since the creation of the biosphere reserve, the Cucapá have been denied access to their fishing grounds, now cordoned-off within the limits of the protected area. Although they have been granted legal permits to fish farther upstream, those areas have very few fish and are not seen as a viable source of livelihood. The lawyer’s diatribe was a familiar opening to his meetings with the fishing cooperative. Unlike previous meetings, however, on this occasion he moved on from detailing the litany of injustices suffered by the Cucapá to propose some of the reasons why the Mexican government had been able to prohibit their fishing in the first place. He suggested that the reason fishing restrictions have continued despite a decade of protest, a constitutional clause advocating “indigenous rights,” and pressure from the National Commission of Human Rights was that the Cucapá were not adequately performing their indigeneity. In addition to advising that they wear traditional grass skirts, he told the group that they had to speak their indigenous language if they wanted their government to take them seriously “as Indians.” “How is the government even supposed to know you’re Indians?” he concluded, pointing to one of the women, “You dress and speak like Mexicans!” (field notes, August 29, 2005). This incident foreshadowed what I came to learn was a more general critique of the legitimacy of Cucapá claims to an indigenous identity. The conflict over the Cucapá’s rights to fish corvina (Cynoscion xanthulus, Mexican saltwater sea bass) in the government-protected ecological reserve is a debate deeply intertwined with issues of indigenous authenticity, hegemonic assumptions about cultural and ethnic difference, and state-sanctioned rights granted on the basis of such differences. C 2009 by the American Anthropological Association. AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST, Vol. 111, Issue 4, pp. 468–479, ISSN 0002-7294 online ISSN 1548-1433.  All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1433.2009.01156.x Muehlmann • The appeal to indigenous people to conform to particular expectations of what it means to be indigenous is part of a broader political and historical trend in which national and international laws have begun to recognize the rights of indigenous people while simultaneously imposing the criteria that allow for groups to qualify as indigenous in the first place (Field 1999; Miller 2003). In Mexico, this trend has been particularly contradictory. After centuries of discrimination on the grounds of their ethnic difference, by the late 20th century most indigenous groups in the country had undergone high levels of cultural and linguistic assimilation. In the 1980s and 1990s, in contrast, government policies began encouraging multiculturalism and began requiring certain populations to identify as “indigenous” to grant them certain forms of support. In other words, the shift from policies of indigenous assimilation to a program of multiculturalism in public discourses during the last several decades represented a significant change in the conditions under which indigenous groups articulate with state agencies. In this article, I analyze how the Cucapá’s arguments for fishing rights in the Colorado Delta have been constrained within the multicultural discourses espoused by state actors. In particular, I examine how these constraints and the denial of rights resulting from them are part and parcel of the neoliberal policies implemented in Mexico since the 1990s. It has generally been assumed by scholars and activists that neoliberalism and multiculturalism are divergent projects. This is partially because of neoliberalism’s notorious celebration of the economic individual as the quintessential autonomous subject (Kingfisher 2002; Peters 2001) and the related idea that the neoliberal program calls into question collective structures that might be obstacles to the logic of the pure market (Bourdieu 1998; Harvey 2005). Recently, however, a growing number of authors have drawn attention to how discourses and policies of multiculturalism form in fact part of the larger neoliberal project in Latin America and beyond (Hale 2005; Martı́nez Novo 2006; Povinelli 2002; Sieder 2002; Speed 2005). In this article, I draw on this body of work to analyze how the seemingly counterintuitive pairing of neoliberalism and multiculturalism in Mexico has created political conditions in which ethnic difference is foregrounded as a way of denying certain rights to marginalized groups. Through an examination of a series of fishing meetings, interviews with local actors, and NGO reports, I analyze how current environmental and multicultural discourses and policies have imposed implicit measures of indigenous authenticity, linked primarily to environmental sustainability (Bamford 2002; Brosius 1997; Conklin and Graham 1995). I show how these policies ultimately displace the responsibility of environmental management onto the Cucapá, as a culturally defined group, by portraying them as the cause of the environmental damage in the delta, rather than one of its casualties. Contested Indigeneities in the Colorado Delta 469 NEOLIBERALISM, MULTICULTURALISM, AND INDIGENEITY In the first half of the 20th century, and largely because of the political impact of the revolution (1910–20), national policies and class-based organizing in Mexico encouraged indigenous people to self-identify as peasants (Jackson and Warren 2005). Nationalist ideologies of mestizaje (racial and cultural mixture) emphasized cultural and biological mixing as opposed to ethnic difference and further discouraged politicized indigenous identification (Alonso 2004). And while celebrating the contributions of indigenous groups to the forging of a “mestizo nation” and granting land rights, the state encouraged the abandonment of indigenous markers such as language and traditional clothing (Knight 1990). Therefore, for decades, Mexican public policies discouraged indigenous identification and aimed for assimilation. This began to change in the 1980s and 1990s, when Mexico started implementing neoliberal, multicultural policies and encouraging ethnic forms of self-identification. As noted by several authors, the neoliberal project encompasses both economic restructuring and new practices of governance, including the transfer of state responsibility for mediating social conflict to civil society and the encouragement of forms of “self-regulation” for certain groups (Inoue 2007; Speed 2005). On the U.S.–Mexico border, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) has been the most obvious manifestation of the economic restructuring of neoliberalism and the subsequent rise of exportoriented development, specifically with the increasing presence of maquiladoras (assembly plants) owned by U.S. corporations in the border region. These reforms also imported ideological changes encouraging a move toward official multiculturalism. Under pressure from international agencies and in preparation for NAFTA, Article 2 of the Mexican constitution was altered to recognize Mexico’s “pluriethnic composition,” and multicultural policies were introduced that encouraged “cultural recovery” (Hale 2005; Sieder 2002). These reforms were intended to further integrate Mexico within the new neoliberal global order (Speed 2005:35). Despite the simultaneous rise of narratives focused on neoliberalism and multiculturalism, some observers, as noted, have seen them as antagonistic projects. This view has been particularly apparent in some parts of Europe, where conservative, neoliberal governments have been lukewarm or even hostile to embracing multiculturalism vis-à-vis immigrant populations. For example, in countries such as the Netherlands and France, recent political debates about immigrants have shifted away from the celebration of multiculturalism and toward the need to “integrate” these groups within the national mainstream (Bjornson 2007; Fassin 2005). In Latin America, the perceived contradiction between neoliberalism and multiculturalism has been fueled by high-profile cases wherein policies espousing economic liberalism, free trade, and privatization triggered the rise of 470 American Anthropologist • Vol. 111, No. 4 • December 2009 political movements that have openly criticized neoliberalism in the name of “indigenous rights.” The Zapatista movement in Mexico or the rise to power of Evo Morales in Bolivia are probably the most clear examples of this trend (Ramı́rez Paredes 2002; Postero 2007). Finally, the assumption that trends of neoliberalism and multiculturalism run counter to one another is because scholars who have explored the ideological effects of neoliberalism have often focused on the particular notion of “the individual” that it propagates. Such a notion implies a self-contained rational actor who stands in tension with the collective notions of group membership that are often associated with indigenous groups (Ellison 2006; Ferguson 2007; Inoue 2007). A growing number of authors, however, have challenged the view that neoliberalism and multiculturalism necessarily stand in tension with each other, especially in Latin America (Hale 2002, 2005; Martı́nez Novo 2006; Sieder 2002; Speed 2005). Shannon Speed (2005), for example, argues that one of the main differences between neoliberalism and earlier forms of liberalism is precisely that the emphasis on the individual as the primary social actor has been reduced. In the neoliberal period, the need for multiculturalism results from the minimization of the role of the state and from the impulse toward the self-regulation of different sectors of society. Speed cautions that if we continue to see the neoliberal state as a project that advances “individualism,” we might be misled to conclude that all groups pushing for collective rights are necessarily anti-neoliberal (Speed 2005:46). Therefore, theorists have increasingly noted that multicultural policies are an essential element of the larger neoliberal project in Mexico and beyond (Hale 2002, 2005; Postero 2007; Sieder 2002; Speed 2005). These discussions are particularly relevant for understanding the current contours of the environmental movement in Mexico—and specifically the way this movement has embraced discourses on multiculturalism. I argue here that the environmental movement in Mexico has been a critical platform for neoliberal interventions because it imposes particular constraints on how environmental rights and resources should be distributed. Recent work in anthropology has examined how environmental discourses can be exclusive and favor the interests of some groups to the exclusion of others (Brosius 1999; McElhinny 2006; Zerner 2000). Anthropologists and other scholars have also drawn attention to the ways in which environmental discourses both incorporate and erase indigenous subjects by assuming a “natural” relationship between indigeneity and environmental sustainability (Bamford 2002; Braun 2002; Chapin 2004; Field 2008). Since the 1980s, indigenous people have become key symbols and sometimes key participants in the development of a transnational environmental ideology and discourse that has promoted an image of the “ecologically noble savage.” These Western environmental ideologies have located au- thenticity and purity in imaginaries of indigenous peoples and have presented them as living in harmony with nature, outside of modernity, and in a manner resistant to global capitalism. And environmentalists have often used these narratives as leverage for their own projects (Brysk 2000; Conklin and Graham 1995; Graham 2002). There has been a recent effervescence of interest in how contemporary political conditions have set the stage for “articulations” between indigenous movements and environmental discourses and priorities (Clifford 2001; Li 2000). And many authors have focused on relatively successful alliances between environmental NGOs and indigenous groups, in which both actors have sometimes benefited from or strategically invoked these alliances (Brosius 1997; Conklin 1997; Greenough and Tsing 2003). Yet little systematic attention has been paid to cases in which these same articulations are not successful and actually suppress other demands for indigenous rights. I argue here that, in the conflict over the last stretches of the Colorado River, the way that indigeneity has been foregrounded ultimately constrains access to environmental resources among vulnerable groups such as the Cucapá. In short, this is a story in which indigeneity and environmentalism did not fully “articulate,” in part because of the neoliberal assumptions about multiculturalism and indigeneity at play in the fishing conflict. In the Colorado Delta, the essentializing view of indigenous people popularized in environmental discourses has resulted in an ambivalence among NGO workers, government officials, and the local public about how to situate the Cucapá people in the local environmental crisis. This ambivalence manifests in two incommensurate portrayals of the Cucapá, both of which depend on notions of “authenticity”: a romanticized version derived directly from mainstream environmental discourses that portray the Cucapá as living “in harmony with nature” and a “corrupted” version that results when such a romanticization proves contradictory and untenable. This ambivalence arises from what many local, nonindigenous Mexicans and NGO workers perceived as a contradiction between the place of indigenous people in a particular strain of environmental rhetoric and the reality they saw in the field. At its worst, this portrayal identifies the Cucapá as the perpetrators of the environmental damage in the delta, rather than as one of its victims. THE FISHING CONFLICT: “WE WILL FISH HERE FOREVER” The Cucapá are a transnational group divided by the U.S.– Mexico border. Approximately 1,000 Cucapá live in Somerton, Arizona, and several hundred more live in the Mexicali valley in the Mexican states of Sonora and Baja California. The village of El Mayor, which is located at the very end of the Colorado River, is the home of the largest population of Cucapá people in Mexico. Muehlmann • Contested Indigeneities in the Colorado Delta 471 FIGURE 1. The Upper Gulf of California Biosphere Reserve (Comisión Nacional de Áreas Naturales Protegidas 2007). Since the construction of the major dams on the Colorado River in the United States and the rapid growth of the American West, the Mexican Colorado River Delta has suffered increasingly devastating effects from reduced water flows. As a result of the 1944 water treaty between the United States and Mexico and its subsequent amendments, 90 percent of the water in the Colorado is diverted before it reaches Mexico. The remaining ten percent that crosses the border is increasingly being directed to the burgeoning manufacturing industry in Tijuana and Mexicali. Decades of dam construction and water diversions in the United States have reduced the delta to a remnant system of small wetlands and brackish mudflats (Colombi in press; Espeland 1998). In 1993, the Mexican government created a biosphere reserve, an ecological protected area, in the delta to conserve its fragile ecosystem. Since the creation of the reserve (see Figure 1), the Mexican Federal Agency for Environmental Protection (PROFEPA) has denied the Cucapá access to their traditional fishing grounds at the mouth of the Colorado.1 The Cucapá fishing cooperative has repeatedly challenged this restriction on the grounds that they have a long-standing historical connection to the delta. Although I focus here primarily on a core group of Cucapá fishers, it should be noted that not everyone in El Mayor belongs to the fishing cooperative.2 The Cucapá who live in this village constitute a very diverse group. There are people who have not been politicized by the fishing conflict in the same way as those described here or who emphasize class-based forms of solidarity over indigenous politics. Like the majority of indigenous communities in Mexico, El Mayor is largely made up of a mestizo population in which the boundaries separating indigenous and nonindigenous people are often ambiguous. The Cucapá people in the region have also responded to the environmental and fishing crisis in different ways. Some former fishermen and women reject local ideas, espoused by many in the cooperative, that the Cucapá will “fish forever” and have instead become more integrated in the local formal and informal economies: working as farm hands; working on projects for the government (such as building roads); collecting and selling scrap metal; or working as “mules” for the drug-trafficking economy, which has taken a strong hold of the region (Muehlmann 2008b). 472 American Anthropologist • Vol. 111, No. 4 • December 2009 Regardless of their subsistence strategies, however, there was markedly uniform agreement in El Mayor that the federal government’s denial of the Cucapá’s fishing rights was an affront to their identity, autonomy, and livelihood. As a result, the conflict served to sharpen the boundaries between local groups (esp. between indigenous and nonindigenous fisher people) and to strengthen a sense among the Cucapá that they shared a common identity in opposition to the abuses of the Mexican government. In the last several years, the fishing conflict has escalated in a series of intense negotiations involving the Cucapá fishing cooperative, human-rights lawyers, and federal and state environmental officials. In 2002, after nine years of conflict, Adriana González, the president of the Cucapá fishing cooperative, made a complaint to the Human Rights Commission of Mexico. In the recommendation that resulted from this investigation, the commission declared that the fishing restrictions were violating the Cucapá’s human rights (Waisman and Arroyo 2002). Drawing on a conception of human rights that gained broad currency with the United Nations Universal Declaration following World War II (Brysk 2000), the report recommended a solution to the conflict that would allow the Cucapá to continue practicing their traditional fishing activities. The report is one of the main avenues of appeal that Cucapá fishers have against the restrictions placed on them and is routinely cited by their lawyer and by the more politically active fishermen and women. Yet to this day, the Mexican government has yet to respond to the report’s recommendations. In fact, on my first day in the biosphere reserve at the beginning of the 2006 fishing season, there were twice as many environmental officials and Navy marines trying to enforce restrictions as there were Cucapá men and women trying to fish. Although the Human Rights Commission’s recommendation was based on national and international laws regarding indigenous people’s rights to resources and the practice of “traditional customs,” local environmental officials have been able to bypass these legal stipulations by questioning the legitimacy of the Cucapá’s claims to an indigenous identity in the first place, much as their lawyer suggested in the opening vignette. “YOU FISH LIKE MEXICANS!”: MOTORBOATS AND NETS IN THE BIOSPHERE RESERVE The debate over the Cucapá’s fishing rights revolves around three key themes: whether the fishing grounds at stake were actually “traditional”; the extent to which fishing—and, in particular, fishing corvina—is “a Cucapá custom”; and whether the Cucapá’s fishing techniques are adequately “indigenous” and “sustainable” in character. Although all of these issues played a role in defining the Cucapá’s rights, the last of these themes, based on a certain conception of how indigenous people are expected to fish, has come to take primacy in the dispute over the river fishing grounds. According to Vı́ctor Ortega, the director of the biosphere reserve, the primary reason the Cucapá’s case was rejected was because their fishing techniques were considered both unsustainable and unindigenous. He said: “If they fished with spears or bows and arrows, it would be a different story. But the Cucapá fish with very large nets on pangas” (small boats with outboard motors; interview, December 6, 2005). The issue was not with the equipment per se, for the Cucapá use boats and nets that are smaller than those used in many of the surrounding nonindigneous fishing communities. Yet Ortega believed that the fact they did not use canoes, for example, significantly undermined their claims to “indigenous fishing rights.” He argued, “They don’t just fish to feed their families. They sell the fish! It would be fine if they just fished to feed themselves as Indians did traditionally” (interview, December 6, 2005). Here Ortega was referring to the fact that the Cucapá sell the fish in nearby cities such as Ensenada and Mexicali or to buyers who come to El Mayor. It may appear that Ortega was making an ecological argument against the environmental impact of Cucapá fishing on the reserve. The potential environmental consequences of their fishing is, in fact, an argument that has often been used against members of the cooperative. For example, Article 49 of Mexico’s general law of ecological balance and environmental protection states that in the “nuclear zones” (centers) of protected areas it is prohibited to exploit any species. However, the law also specifies that limited exploitation of these zones is permitted as long is it does not affect the overall “ecosystem balance.” There is ample evidence that the Cucapá’s yields alone are not substantial enough to affect the ecology of the reserve. Several investigations carried out by Universidad Nacional Autónoma Metropolitana (UNAM) and the Centro de Investigación y Estudios Superiores de Ensenada have shown that the Cucapá’s yields account for less than three percent of the total extraction in the zone, with 97 percent of the extraction resulting from nonindigenous fishing cooperatives (Alarcón-Cháires 2001). Many of the Cucapá fishers I interviewed also identified the fallacy in the argument that their fishing would make a substantial impact. Familiar with studies of environmental impact, members of the cooperative would often make reference to these studies in everyday conversation about the conflict. As González, president of the fishing cooperative, explained on one occasion, fishing three percent of the total corvina extracted in the nuclear zone would not be the cause of lower yields in the future: “The 40 boats we have currently fishing in the reserve are certainly not the cause of the environmental disaster in this area” (interview, January 24, 2006). The Cucapá fishing cooperative’s 40 boats have a minimal impact compared to the approximately 1,000 boats that frequent the area from surrounding fishing communities such as Santa Clara and San Felipe. Other members of the cooperative emphasized even more systematic underlying causes. For example, many point out Muehlmann • that since the building of the dams in the United States, the water that has reached Mexico has barely been sufficient to sustain the expanding border economy in cities such as Tijuana and Mexicali, much less the riverine species in the lower delta. Indeed, when I pressed Ortega (the director of the reserve) on this issue, he agreed that he did not think the issue was the number of fish extracted by the Cucapá (although this was clearly the legal matter from the environmental standpoint). He went on to say: “It would be different if they fished large amounts of fish and then salted it to eat it later. In the winter, for example” (interview, December 6, 2005). Once again for him such a practice would imply following allegedly “traditional indigenous customs.” Ortega’s concern was not environmental but social: he simply did not think the Cucapá qualified as having differential rights as “indigenous people.”3 The argument against the Cucapá having differential fishing rights, which Ortega expressed in the interview, draws directly on mainstream environmental discourses that portray indigenous people as natural allies of conservationists and as actors who exist outside of capitalism and resist the commodification of natural resources. By this logic, evidence that indigenous people do not conform to given stereotypes functions to disqualify them as properly “indigenous” and to exclude them from the constitutional guarantees of their right to livelihood and to practice their customs. Yet it is important to note that the Mexican constitution does not state that to receive differential rights, indigenous people have to conform to expectations of being “natural conservationists” (Conklin and Graham 1995; Krech 1999).4 Although this stipulation is not written in national law, it is powerfully underwritten by current global discourses on the environment and indigeneity. In fact, as many authors have argued, current discourses on “ecopolitics,” which invoke a particular incarnation of the “noble savage,” were born in the transnational environmental movement (Conklin and Graham 1995; Ramos 1994). These authors have argued that mainstream environmentalism constructs the threat to the environment in a way that prescribes the roles that certain actors, particularly indigenous people, should play (Bamford 2002; Braun 2002; Brosius 1997; Escobar 1996). The discourse of the ecologically noble savage has become so powerful in this region that legal conflicts for the Cucapá have sometimes played out as if those stereotypes were legal terms of recognition. The particular concept of “indigeneity” invoked in this strain of conservationism has not always been a feature of environmental discourses. Until the 1970s and early 1980s, environmental advocacy focused largely on protecting plants and animals; the presence of people tended to be seen as an obstacle to environmental preservation (Hecht and Cockburn 1990). As environmental philosophy shifted to emphasize “sustainable development,” rather than strict preservation, an ecological rationale for defending indigenous people emerged. Elizabeth Conklin and Laura Graham (1995) describe how, Contested Indigeneities in the Colorado Delta 473 during the 1980s, environmentalist NGOs began to promote development models that made the promotion of local equity and the preservation of local cultures a central component of development planning. It was at this time that “Indians—formerly seen as irrelevant to economic development—now were championed as the holders of important keys to rational development” (Conklin and Graham 1995:698). The authors argue that the discourse of the ecologically noble savage has particular contemporary political appeal because it allows for the assumption that native peoples’ views of nature, and ways of using natural resources, are consistent with the goals of Western conservationists. Perhaps precisely because of the global cachet of current environmental discourses, the Human Rights Commission’s report, which recommends that the government support the Cucapá’s claims, appeals as much to a discourse of indigenous sustainability as it does to legal frameworks in its support of the Cucapá people. The commission’s recommendation cites Article 2 of the Mexican constitution, which recognizes that Mexico is a pluricultural nation. It also cites the International Labor Organization (ILO) Convention No. 169 concerning Indigenous and Tribal Peoples in Independent Countries, which Mexico ratified in 1990. This convention states that it is the obligation of governments to recognize, protect, and respect the values and practices of indigenous people and, in particular, their spiritual and cultural relation to the land. After clearly stating PROFEPA’s breach of national and international law in denying the Cucapá rights to fish, however, the commission also takes pains to reinforce stereotypes of the Cucapá’s inherently ecosustainable characteristics. Its report, for instance, includes the following statement: The cosmology of the Cucapá finds its roots in relation to the river where they have lived since ancestral times, since forever the ecosystems of the Hardy and Colorado Rivers have permitted the conservation of this culture. The Cucapá are considered children of the river, their origin myth identifies them as born of water. This group considers whale, deer and rattlesnake as symbols of their lineage and totemic entities, with dances and songs that evoke different elements of nature, as if searching for a reciprocal communication with it. [Waisman and Arroyo 2002:4] It is noteworthy that the reference to the Cucapá as “children of the river” resonates with infantilizing colonial stereotypes. The report goes on to specify that the Cucapá still speak their native language even though Spanish is the dominant language in El Mayor. By focusing in detail on these romanticized and exaggerated portrayals of the Cucapá’s reverence of nature, the report reinforces the slippage between constitutionally guaranteed rights and rights bestowed on the basis of adequate conformity to stereotypes of indigeneity. The trope of “authenticity” is a pervasive one in this dispute, underpinning the multiple and sometimes competing discourses of indigenous rights, environmentalism, 474 American Anthropologist • Vol. 111, No. 4 • December 2009 and neoliberalism. Anthropologists have problematized the notion of “authenticity,” tracing its origin as a colonial folk category that emerged out of contact imperialism in the late 18th and 19th centuries (Graham 2002). Others have explored the way the “cultural authenticity” concept has become a repository of anxieties around the encroachment of the global free market and the perceived homogenizing effects of the spread of capitalist market systems (Clifford 2001; Gupta 1998). Nonetheless, it is important to emphasize that ideas about what constitutes an authentic identity are not just imposed from outside of indigenous communities but are often contested within these communities as well. Many Cucapá youth, who are monolingual in Spanish, criticize the notion that what makes them “indigenous” is speaking Cucapá; instead, they connect their sense of identity to shared conditions of subordination (Muehlmann 2008a). Members of the cooperative expressed the belief that what makes them “Cucapá” is a long-standing residency in the delta and a history of fishing on the river. Of course, these signifiers involve strategic essentialisms as well, but it is important to recognize that they are not the same essentialisms invoked by human rights officials, NGO workers, and government officials. AMBIVALENT ALLIANCES: “THEY SEEM TO CARE MORE ABOUT THE FISH THAN THE PEOPLE” Current environmental discourses constrain not only indigenous subjects but also a set of social relationships in which new alliances between environmentalists and indigenous people have formed. The ecological damage to the delta has brought about a series of unexpected alliances whereby Mexican and U.S. environmental organizations and NGOs have supported the Cucapá through numerous ecotourism and community projects as well as various reforestation efforts. These projects were often seen with suspicion by residents of El Mayor, however, because they were advanced as alternatives to fishing rather than as supplements to it. In fact, Don Madaleno, the Cucapá chief, would often comment that environmentalists and government officials “seem to care more about the fish than the people.”5 Despite this perception, it was clear that many environmentalists in the area were genuinely committed to improving the conditions of life in El Mayor. There were dozens of initiatives to find sustainable economic alternatives for the Cucapá. When I started asking how these NGOs became involved in community-development projects, many environmentalists recalled something Madaleno had said at a water users’ association meeting. Madaleno repeated his comments to me, saying: “They’re so worried about the endangered species of this region. I asked them: ‘What about the human beings? We are also endangered’” (conversation with author, November 14, 2005). This idea, that the people too were “an endangered species,” had a pro- found emotional effect on some of the environmentalists. The chief’s sense that they cared more about the fish was strategically employed by him in this comment. With the Cucapá people recast as part of the nature at risk, the environmentalists could care about them in the same way they cared for the plants and the fish. By moving one step beyond the idea of the local people as stewards and, in fact, conflating the Cucapá people with the nature at risk of disappearing, conservation discourses make the Cucapá visible but only by being incorporated within the terms of a preservationist politics. For example, the book Red Delta: Fighting for Life at the End of the Colorado River (2002), which was copublished by Charles Bergman and the U.S.-based NGO “Defenders of Wildlife, devotes each chapter to a different endangered species in the delta. One chapter is dedicated to the flat-tailed horned lizard; another focuses on the nearly extinct Yuma clapper tail. Toward the end of the book, Bergman also includes a chapter about the Cucapá entitled, “We are not yet dead still.” The Cucapá have a place in environmental discourses but only insofar as they are represented, or represent themselves, as yet another endangered species that needs to be defended. When NGO workers and environmentalists were confronted with the reality of Cucapá fishing practices, however, they often responded like government environmental officials and agencies: they turned away from representing the Cucapá as part of the nature at risk or as keys to the amelioration of the environmental degradation to seeing them as responsible for it. NGO workers were particularly astounded by what they interpreted as a lack of foresight. As one NGO worker commented: “Don’t they realize that fishing these fish while they are with their eggs and using these nets will mean lower yields in the future?” (conversation with author, February 18, 2006). Thus, some saw the Cucapá fishers as the cause of environmental degradation and accused them of dumping garbage in the desert near the Hardy River, of illegally fishing in the reserve, and of using unsustainable fishing practices on the river with huge nets to catch the baby fish. Cucapá fishermen and women are not complacent about these accusations. Although few conceded that their fishing was the cause of the environmental problems in the delta, some Cucapá fishers expressed concern that their fishing practices could be contributing to an environmentally unstable future. Most of them, however, were quick to point out that the necessity of feeding their children outweighed these considerations. For example, Cruz, the man in whose house I stayed during my fieldwork in El Mayor, explained: “In the end, my priority is to put food on the table. It’s not our responsibility to manage the environmental damage caused by so much greed and overuse in the U.S.” (interview, March 3, 2006). Therefore, in the Colorado Delta, the alliances formed between some Cucapá and environmental organizations are precarious and uneven. The discourses that have helped Muehlmann • to foster these alliances rely on essentializing arguments that assume that saving plants and animals will necessarily alleviate the social problems experienced by indigenous peoples. This discourse has contemporary political appeal because it allows for the assumption that native peoples’ view of nature and ways of using natural resources are consistent with the goals of conservationists. As Cruz pointed out above and as scholars have recently argued (Brosius 1999; Chapin 2004; Conklin and Graham 1995), although the environmentalists’ primary goal is to promote naturalresource management, indigenous peoples often seek selfdetermination and control over their own resources, a goal that does not necessarily align with that of conservation NGOs. It is precisely such a disjunction of interests that has led to an ambivalence among environmental officials about how to situate the Cucapá in the environmental crisis in the delta. It is not unusual for populations living in poverty to be cast as culprits rather than victims of environmental degradation (Gupta 1998; Hill 2001). But the effect in this case is striking in relation to the coupling of neoliberal and multicultural policies. Just as Speed (2005) emphasized, in this case a discourse of multiculturalism and indigenous rights has the effect of, first, liberating the neoliberal government from taking on certain forms of responsibility and, second, shifting this responsibility onto groups defined in cultural terms. In this case, the invocation of the category of “the indigenous” as a “sustainable space outside or resistant to modernity” (Gupta 1998:179) has provided a justification for policies that download the responsibility of environmental management, or the blame for environmental erosion, onto the Cucapá. Significantly, as alliances between NGOs and Cucapá fishers have started breaking down, the potential for new links has emerged. Because the region is marked by high levels of poverty and fishing is a central source of income for surrounding communities as well, local fishermen and women from different ethnic backgrounds have joined forces in protesting as the biosphere reserve has enforced the bans on fishing. The livelihoods of nonindigenous fishermen have been threatened by the prohibitions as well (Vásquez León 1999). Yet, as we shall see in the next section, these alliances are currently rendered less visible by the environmental discourses described above. SHIFTING POLITICAL BOUNDARIES IN THE COLORADO RIVER DELTA As the 2006 fishing season approached, the tone at the Cucapá’s fishing cooperative meetings changed dramatically. The cooperative shifted its attention away from the long-standing conflict with the biosphere reserve and toward a new set of monitoring techniques that officials were introducing. Environmental officials cruised through El Mayor, documenting equipment and verifying receipts. Boats and equipment were registered to individuals who Contested Indigeneities in the Colorado Delta 475 were photographed with their gear and crew. Officials emphasized that permits could not be transferred and that boats could not be lent to others. They also explained that these new measures, by making the fishers more identifiable, were meant to help prevent people from illegally renting out their permits. González, the president of the fishing cooperative, held a meeting to discuss these changes. We all filed into the local school. The teacher took the children out to play so the cooperative could use the classroom. Sitting around uncomfortably in miniature desks, the crowd shuffled government forms as González began her announcements. She explained that, as a result of the more elaborate monitoring system, it was important that year to fish with as few “Mexicans” as possible. Cucapá people are certainly Mexican citizens too and often identify as such. However, in contexts such as this one, where residents of El Mayor make a distinction between indigenous and nonindigenous residents, the term Mexican is used to refer to individuals of nonindigenous descent. González emphasized that they had to represent themselves as “a community” for the ongoing conflict. She then set out a series of rules: “We should try to avoid taking non-Cucapá people onto the boats or hiring them on crews; permits should not be rented to Mexicans; if you get sick, pass your permit on to another Cucapá” (field notes, January 10, 2006). When she made these announcements, the meeting room burst into discontented chatter. Some shouted out over the din of disquiet to González at the front of the room, “What about my boyfriend? Do I have to marry him?” and “What about my sister-in-law? She has always fished with us!” Those people were referring to the fact that intermarriage with non-Cucapá is very common in the area and that fishing crews, therefore, are often made up of indigenous and nonindigenous people. Some muttered among themselves: “Who’s going to clean the fish? We’re not going to!” One man in the crowd began accusing González of hypocrisy, “Nobody takes Mexicans out there like you!” González responded, “This isn’t what I want. This is what the authorities want.” She then tried to justify herself by explaining, “We’re in a conflict. They’re going to say, ‘they are reclaiming their rights and then just renting to Mexicans.’ They aren’t going to support that.” The raucous discussion that ensued revealed that there is generally a great deal of cooperation between Cucapá fishers and nonindigenous locals. The Cucapá tend to fish with a wider network of “Mexican” families, because their own families extend into these networks. People wanted to fish with their in-laws, neighbors, and friends, and they depended on them. The backlash against González’s new stipulations also revealed a complex set of relationships of exploitation and cooperation between the Cucapá and “Mexican” fisher people. Some people explained that the reason so many Mexicans fished with the Cucapá was that the former would get greater yields than on their own because they did not 476 American Anthropologist • Vol. 111, No. 4 • December 2009 have the permits to fish near the nuclear zone. Sometimes members of the Cucapá fishing cooperative with permits but no equipment would form crews with Mexicans that have boats and nets, and the Cucapá would take a smaller cut of the profit. Other Cucapá who already had equipment said that their incentive for fishing with people from other villages is that it is almost impossible to find helpers from El Mayor that were also Cucapá (with the exception of children). If a Cucapá person wanted to fish, he or she would be better off getting their own permit than working for a crew cleaning fish. Some scholars have drawn attention to a tendency in studies of environmental struggles to assume a monolithic “state” in opposition to an undifferentiated “community.” Donald Moore (1998) emphasizes that environmental struggles do not just pit given groups against each other; rather, these struggles themselves shape the political boundaries of the state by constituting how social boundaries are drawn. In the case of the Colorado River fishing conflict, the tendency to reify the Cucapá community is equally apparent. The conflict with the Mexican government and the emerging discourse on the environment and indigeneity has shaped the way boundaries between groups have been drawn and the understandings of what community membership means. Membership has been defined by the state to exclude the networks of mestizo families and obscure the heterogeneous composition of local social relations. In the case of current legal proceedings with the biosphere reserve, the Cucapá themselves are also excluded from full membership because measures of authenticity imposed by government officials ultimately disqualify them as sufficiently “indigenous.” Charles Hale (2005) argues that this type of exclusion is the ultimate achievement of the neoliberal incarnation of multiculturalism: a restructuring of the political arena that drives a wedge between claiming cultural rights and claiming control over the resources necessary for those rights to be realized. In the case of the Cucapá fishing conflict, we can see this principle in action. By encouraging multicultural policies that pay lip service to “indigenous rights” instead of affirming class-based political organizing, for instance, government policies radically constrain for indigenous groups the possibility of gaining control over the resources at stake by reserving the final judgment over what constitutes ethnic difference. CONCLUSIONS In an effort to account for the simultaneous introduction of neoliberal reforms and multicultural policies in many Latin American states, various arguments have been made. Some scholars have argued that multicultural policies were implemented to overcome a crisis of legitimacy in response to international pressures (de la Peña 2005; Sieder 2002) or to avoid ethnic conflict (Yashar 1998). Others have explained the introduction of multicultural policies by ne- oliberal regimes as a form of co-optation of popular forms of activism (Inoue 2007) or, more optimistically, as part of deeper changes reflecting democratization (Hernández Castillo 2001). In this article, I have argued that multiculturalism is fundamental to the project of neoliberalism in Mexico. Hale’s term neoliberal multiculturalism is, indeed, intended to signal this profound linkage between both political projects. In the case of the Cucapá fishing conflict, the coupling of neoliberal and multicultural policies has provided a rationale for downloading the responsibility of environmental management and sustainability onto the Cucapá. This further reinforces the preferred mode of neoliberal development in the border region as it leaves work in the factories, temporary work on farms, or ecotourism projects as the only legal economic options for the Cucapá. Carmen Martı́nez Novo’s (2006) work on indigenous migrant farm workers in San Quintı́n, Baja California, provides an interesting parallel to the Cucapá cooperative’s case by showing how ethnic categories are mobilized under a neoliberal era. She analyzes how ethnic labels created a justification to offer indigenous migrant workers lower wages and worse working conditions than those offered to mestizos (Martı́nez Novo 2006:34). Martı́nez Novo documents, in particular, how state organizations argued that indigenous people are used to living in cramped quarters, perceive child labor as an “indigenous tradition,” and do not trust biomedicine. Thus, their poor working conditions and lack of access to services were said to replicate “traditional ways of life” (see also Gordillo 2004). Likewise, the case of the Cucapá fishing cooperative shows how the implementation of a particular construction of difference can prevent the distribution of resources. In this case, the Mexican state has put difference to work in regulating and limiting the distribution of resources to indigenous populations. The conflict between the Cucapá fishing cooperative and the Mexican government provides an example of how contested notions of “indigeneity” are unevenly aligned with local, national, and transnational discourses and policies, or what Anna Tsing has called “emergent channels of public attention” (2007:50). Therefore, this case study provides a productive comparison to recent work in anthropology that has examined how expressions of indigenous identity have been linked to broader social movements. In particular, several authors have recently come to explain how idioms of identification have been calibrated to broader systems of signification through the concept of “articulation” (Clifford 2001; Garcı́a 2005; Li 2000; Nelson 1999; Yeh 2007). Drawn from Stuart Hall, this concept is used to denote the way that groups come to express particular collective political identities and manage to connect these identities to wider discourses and social forces at different historical conjunctures. Hall drew attention to the dual meaning of the term articulation. Articulation is for him the process of rendering a collective identity, position, Muehlmann • or set of interests explicit and, at the same time, is a conjoining of that position to definite political subjects (Hall 1996; Li 2000). Tania Li (2000) and James Clifford (2001) have suggested that the concept of “articulation” provides a framework for understanding how a collective identity and set of interests are rendered explicit and expressible and also how that identity is connected to specific political subject positions. Specifically, an analytic attention to articulations avoids the predicament of undermining political movements by reducing them to historical contingencies or strategic essentialisms (Li 2000). The framework is also one way to avoid debates over authenticity by shifting focus to the articulation of indigeneity. The notion of “articulation” has been particularly useful for explaining how certain subject positions are taken up in ways that resonate with wider political and ideological trends and become intelligible in relation to them. That is, the concept is powerful at explaining where these articulations of indigeneity are politically successful. However, scholars who have examined articulations have noted that there are always risks inherent to the different interests at play in any articulation that always threaten to lead to its unraveling (Li 2000:169). As Stuart Hall (1983) warned, this is a process “without guarantees.” As I have shown in this article, candidates for indigenous rights who do not conform to the global environmental standards expected from them are particularly vulnerable to accusations of not being sufficiently “authentic” (Ramos 1994). As the Cucapá case shows, global and local interests, in other words, are not always aligned so easily to create a common agenda with local actors (Bamford 2002; Braun 2002; Conklin 1997; Conklin and Graham 1995; Jackson and Warren 2005). Although one of the advantages of a focus on the politics of articulation is precisely that it allows for contingency, in the sense that no identification is inevitable, this perspective nonetheless shifts the focus toward instances in which claims to indigeneity are recognized and granted. In this article, I have argued that it is important to look at situations in which articulations of an identity fail or are not entirely successful—such as the case of the Cucapá, who have not been able to take up the spots that are ostensibly made available for them by the state and NGOs in relation to their fishing rights. Therefore, the pairing of neoliberal policies and discourses of multiculturalism has created political conditions in which ethnic difference is brought to the foreground as a way of denying certain rights. By radically constraining the conditions under which articulations with the transnational environmental movement are possible, neoliberal multiculturalism can prevent the distribution of resources by thwarting these articulations. What the Cucapá case shows is that the same historical conditions and fields of power that make some subject positions recognizable in forums of public attention can simultaneously shut down the possibility of recognition for Contested Indigeneities in the Colorado Delta 477 other groups. It is as important to understand the mechanisms that render some indigenous articulations inaudible as it is to explore the processes at work that make other articulations recognizable. Perhaps most significantly, this ethnographic case serves to remind us that environmental conflicts are never just about “the environment.” Sometimes, they also become the terrain on which other ideological conflicts play out. In the case of the Cucapá fishing dispute, debates about the conservation of the river have become a battleground for struggles over how cultural difference should be recognized and what constitutes that difference in the first place. SHAYLIH MUEHLMANN Department of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720-3710; smuehlmann@berkeley.edu NOTES Acknowledgments. I am grateful to the residents of El Mayor for making this research possible. Earlier drafts of this article were presented at the American Anthropological Association Meetings and the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine. Funding for this project came from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council and the International Development Research Council. I would like to thank Philip Malmgren, Bonnie McElhinny, and Jack Sidnell for comments on this article at various stages of its development, as well as Gastón Gordillo for his detailed suggestions and encouragement. Conversations with Tania Li, William Hanks, and Benedict Colombi were very helpful for thinking through some of the themes in this article, and suggestions from Tom Boellstorff and the reviewers at American Anthropologist also significantly shaped the article in its final form. 1. Although indigenous groups in Mexico do not have rights to Colorado River water, in the United States many of the federally recognized tribes on the Colorado’s river shed have been granted “reserved rights” to the river, including the Cucapá reservation in Arizona, referred to as the Cocopah in English (Wilkins and Tsianina Lomawaima 2001). The existence of “differential rights” is a strategy used in attempts to offset preexisting inequalities. Holston argues (2008), however, that this brand of citizenship also works to legitimize the rights of elites to special treatment by approving the compensation of inequalities. 2. In 1938, Mexican President Lázaro Cárdenas implemented the organization of rural fishing people into cooperatives as part of a plan to develop fishing in the region by allocating fishing rights and territories to different sectors of the population and to allow the government to regulate extraction (Cruz-Torres 2000). Although cooperative organization continues up to the present, in the past few decades, the fishing industry has been increasingly privatized (Vásquez León 1999). 3. Victor Ortega expresses a particularly purist version of the view of indigenous people as existing outside of capitalism. By excluding indigenous groups from participating in local economic markets, this logic also makes a link between “authentic indigeneity” and poverty (see also Darian-Smith 2004). 4. 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