Choice, Exogamy, and Vulnerability: the liberal renegotiation of young Huastecan Nahuas’ sexual citizenship in Mexico

• In Event: Amerindian Ethnicity, Gender, and Stereotypes

Abstract

To be Indian according to the folkloric view prevalent in Mexico is not only to be rural, marginal, and backwards but also unreflexively fertile, making indigenous peoples prime targets of developmental programs aimed at population control. The view of Indians as overpopulating automatons glosses over the way liberal discourses of individual autonomy over reproduction and sexuality are shaping the moral leanings of indigenous peoples. Among Nahuas of the Huasteca region of Hidalgo, there has been a shift from marriages consolidated by parents to self-choice marriages in the last twenty or thirty years opening up ground for dating, premarital sex, and other sexual practices that flaunt parental authority. At the same time, young Nahuas are migrating to cities such as Monterrey in record numbers which opens up the possibility for exogamous casual sexual relations, dating, and marriage that bring indigenous migrants face to face with mestizo views of Indians and Indian territory. This article argues that Huastecan Nahuas in both rural and urban ambits are renegotiating their sexual citizenship or the sexual terms by which they are considered members in the body politic of Mexico. Nahuas are producing a regional modernity of which emergent sexual practices that evoke liberal discourses of individual agency and control are a salient component. This article suggests that indigenous youth consolidate attachments to their indigenous territories in part out of a sense that these regions do or do not provide them the opportunity to be modern intimately.

Author

• Raquel Pacheco, University of California San Diego