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Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the semiotic processes that undergird the making of an essentialized Nahua identity in present-day Mexico. Analyzing state programs of Nahuatl language revival and labor formalization in Morelos, it considers the stakes of this politics of recognition for indigenous justice.

Paper long abstract:

Since the 1990s and escalating with the 2018 victory of the populist Morena party, Mexico has undertaken a program of state reform aimed at overcoming injustices of a colonial and neoliberal past. As the president Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) positions himself in defense of causes of “honesty” (honorabilidad), “democracy” (democracia), and “the good of all, but especially the poor and indigenous,” he discursively voices new semiotic categories of personhood—indigenous, women, children, the “rural” and “poor” –internationally legible as rights-bearing subjects. Drawing on ethnographic research with Nahuatl-speakers in the state of Morelos, in this paper I explore the semiotic processes that undergird the making of an essentialized indigenous identity in contemporary Mexico. I focus on the emergence of two new diacritics of the majority indigenous Nahua population in Morelos: Nahuatl language, and domestic labor, embodied in efforts by the Mexican government to revive and legislate the state’s “mother tongue,” Nahuatl, in primary and secondary schools, and to formalize domestic work. For whom are such diacritics of Nahua subjectivity legible, and to what effects? What ideal future imaginary of nationhood animates these transformations? What is the labor of establishing semiotic regularities across encounters—of cultivating a collective interest to correctly apprehend and display being Nahua? This paper explores the stakes of this politics of recognition for questions of indigenous justice in present-day Latin America.