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.