Social movements and hybrid cultural formations: Tepoztlan's "no al golf".

What does it mean when a "traditional" Mexican campesino declares himself to be an "environmentalist?" How do we explain a women's Bible study group taking up the mantle of defenders of "human rights?" How do these new titles and identifications reflect changing self-perception and local social relations? And, how do existing social relations change the meanings of those globalizing discourses? These were some of the questions that I encountered as I investigated a conflict in the town of Tepoztlan, Morelos, around the construction of a golf course. What began, ostensibly, as a conflict over a request to change land use rules, quickly drew in actors and organizations from well beyond the territorial limits of Tepoztlan, and became articulated not just in legalistic or political/institutional discourse, but in terms of fundamental cultural conflict. Opponents of the golf course, for instance, consistently attempted to frame the argument in terms of an almost sacred local autonomy versus outside imposition, whereas supporters of the golf course pointed to supposed universal desires and models of development versus a manipulative minority of irrational individuals who were willing to sacrifice the common good in the name of some antiquated sense of local identity.

The rhetorical distinctions made by both sides between local and outside, universal and particular, however are less clear in the lived experiences of people residing in Tepoztlan, because in contemporary social relations, local and global are mutually constitutive. There is, in other words, no completely autonomous localness as the "local," in terms of both the conflict and everyday life, is completely penetrated by "outside" national and global cultural commodities and practices. The universality of those influences, however, becomes articulated around and through embedded local practices and beliefs, making assertions of universal meaning dubious at best. This interpenetration of global and local cultural phenomena, as Roland Robertson has described it, becomes very apparent in the formation and direction of contemporary Latin American social movements because it reflects the heterogeneous cultural terrain in which activists operate, and it describes the necessary tactics which local movements devise in order to combat opponents who are ideologically and materially allied with neoliberal concerns.

This engagement and articulation of discourses, which are simultaneously local and non-local, contribute to the ability of political activists to cross between different cultural codes and to create new meanings and social relations by creatively combining elements of those multiple cultural codes. Active involvement in social movements forces participants to question the underlying practices of identity formation and opens up possibilities for new self-perceptions and different challenges to social hierarchies. Given the globalized context of contemporary social relations, this means that a wide variety of cultural codes come into contact with each other and are actively reorganized according to the particular needs of the social movement. By demanding redress of political and economic issues and asserting themselves as legitimate participants in a political and economic system that seeks to marginalize them, social movement activists challenge and build upon widely circulating processes of identity formation and social hierarchy. They appropriate outside (that is, national and transnational) discourses according to the logic of their immediate context and their embedded patterns of communication and signification, inevitably altering both the outside discourse as well as locally ordered meanings and practices, thus contributing to the ongoing process of cultural change.

No al golf

The case of Tepoztlan provides an excellent example of how local activists were engaged by global discourses of economics and power, and subsequently appropriated parts of those very discourses in order to articulate a grievance which resonated both with a majority of the local population, as well as larger constituencies. In the course of their struggle against the country club and golf course, activists made use of local networks and ideologies in order to question not only the specifics of the project, but perhaps more importantly, the underlying power relationships and positioning of local community members within national and increasingly global social relations. In the words of one of the protest leaders, their struggle quickly "became much more than the golf club matter (Martinez)." What eventually came into contestation during the conflict was the very meaning of democracy, local control of natural resources, and relationships with national and global institutions.

The golf course project represented no small investment in terms of physical size and financial commitment. In late 1994, the Cuernavaca based and globally financed development company, Kladt Sobrino (KS), proposed building a $500 million, Jack Nicklaus designed, 18 hole golf course, complete with luxury condominium units, a data processing center, artificial pond and heliport on 187 hectares of land in the northwest part of the municipality that it claimed to own. Supporters of the project assumed that it would be welcome in this community, given its already existing tourist infrastructure and its apparent need for economic investment. The state governor, former general Jorge Carrillo Olea became an ardent supporter of this potential "development pole," promising to deliver all needed political support and administrative approvals that the company required. The head of the state's environmental protection agency, Ursula Oswald, for instance, expressed her excitement about promoting this "industry without smokestacks" as a model of environmentally sustainable development, despite the fact that the project had failed two of three environmental impact studies (Rosas 69). Even the bishop of Cuernavaca, Luis Reynosa Cervantes, blessed this "gift from Heaven" for the people of Tepoztlan.

Local activists with a thirty-year history of opposing similar tourist development projects, however, greeted this alliance with suspicion. (1) A small group of concerned citizens organized themselves into the Comite de Unidad Tepozteca (CUT) in order to gather information about the project and, discovering serious environmental, social and economic flaws in the plan, began to mobilize opposition to it. Using the findings from two of the environmental impact studies, anti-golf activists argued that the golf course would use half of the town's limited water supply in order to irrigate the greens. Furthermore, based on information from organizations such as Greenpeace, the CUT pointed out the dangers associated with toxic run-off from golf courses. In addition, some townspeople expressed concern that the golf course would create an enclave of wealthy people that would seriously disrupt local social relations. (2) Finally, there was generalized disbelief that KS actually owned the property, as it was believed that much of the proposed property was communally held land that had not been legally ceded to KS's corporate predecessor. (3)