Department of Geography
University of Kentucky
The focus of this project is on the importance of geographic information in the current indigenous struggles in southern Mexico. In the state of Oaxaca, many indigenous movements center on the attempt to construct so-called 'autonomous regions'. They attempt to address the marginalization of indigenous communities through the construction of new political units, in which indigenous traditional laws and culture take precedence over state and some federal laws. This movement is related to the armed uprising of Zapatista rebels in the neighboring state of Chiapas, which also has indigenous rights and local autonomy as a key demand. A key issue is the relationship between indigenous communities and the existing administrative structure, specifically if these regions should be based on current district boundaries, or if new regions should be created. As such, the current negotiations between local groups and the Mexican government to create these regions involve the consideration of a variety of factors, including cultural, ecological and political concerns. Of crucial importance is how these issues are represented at the negotiating table. The way in which geographic information is produced and disseminated has a deciding influence on the outcome of these local struggles.
In this context, the importance of what counts as geographic information and how it is produced comes to the fore. A narrow definition of GIS in which only the analyst as the expert has the power to define the representation of issues limits local participation to circumscribed points in the production of geographic knowledge. On the other hand, if the definition is broadened to include systems of communications that convey and produce geographic information, the space is opened up for contesting representations in which marginalized movements can produce alternative versions to contest dominant representations. This has happened very effectively in the 2 year old uprising in Chiapas, where representations produced by the Zapatistas have been reproduced and disseminated through a variety of media, including the Internet, thereby challenging the attempt to localize and narrowly define the object of negotiation.
Attempts at using GIS in conjunction with social movements have often focused on the problem of incorporating other knowledges into existing GIS. The problem is that through this approach the social relations of the technology, i.e. the role of the analyst and the constrains of technology, often go unquestioned. Situating GIS within the wider field of communications and the production of geographic knowledges, illuminates the role of contemporary GIS and its embeddedness in current social relations without privileging the technology. It becomes one way of producing geographic knowledge, rather than a privileged form of representation. In this context, the current social struggles in southern Mexico provide an illustration of the role of GIS. They clarify the effects of using GIS in a context in which the state and social groups are in conflict.
States have long been the primary producers of geographic information, and have often sought to present in ways that would benefit certain social groups and classes. This is especially true in Mexico, which has historically struggled to create a unified nation state. With the advance of GIS technology and its barriers to participation ranging from cost to skills, the privileging of sophisticated information automatically favors the producers of this information, in this case one side of the conflict, even if other knowledges are incorporated. It seems largely impossible that peasant movements can compete with the resources of the state in producing sophisticated, 'objective' information. A different strategy, rather than to resort to a war of technology in which the state is clearly favored from the outset, is to rely on alternative productions of geographic information to question the primacy of largely state-owned and produced information. The issue then moves from the incorporation of knowledges into existing systems, and thereby acknowledging the superiority of technology driven knowledge, to the contestation of particular knowledges.
In the general drive for more sophisticated information, it is often forgotten that geographic information about localities is produced and transmitted by local populations in a variety of forms. This has traditionally been confined to oral history, or generally to informal networks to be investigated by anthropologists. But there are also technologies that can be used to transmit differing accounts, from local newsletters to the Internet. The Chiapas uprising has demonstrated the utility of the Internet as an alternative route of producing accounts of the conflict and the issues involved. The EZLN and sympathizers with e-mail access have managed to increase the scale of knowledge, refusing to let the conflict be confined to a mere question of regional inequality. The Internet, a system with multiple access points and potentialities for the production of knowledge that do not necessarily favor one particularly trained expert, has proven useful in directing international attention and thereby constraining the possibilities for action by the Mexican government. In this struggle in cyberspace (a 'war of ink and Internet' as one Mexican official called it) geographic representations are contested. I do not want to suggest that the Internet by itself is a social equalizer, but the use in this particular conflict points to the potentials emerging in this technology. This clash of different versions in cyberspace is vastly different from the attempt of incorporating local knowledge into an existing system, in which the analyst plays the role of gatekeeper, while she/he is constrained by the technology itself.
The issue then moves away from constructing the perfect GIS in
which all knowledges are represented as a perfect mirror of the
world, or as a tool around which liberal notions of negotiation
and compromise can be deployed. The traditional barriers(i.e.
expertise, money, access to information) favor particular
institutions, in this project certainly the state. The point is
then not to try to compete on the same level, but rather putting
GIS in its place by validating other knowledges that are
difficult or impossible to be represented because they are
produced under different circumstances than the technology-heavy
knowledges of current GIS.