De guardianes a vigilantes vigilados. Las múltiples gubernamentalidades en Metzabok y en Nahá, Selva Lacandona, Chiapas, México

Abstract

This article analyzes the agrarian-environmental process that led an indigenous group in southern Mexico to request the environmental protection of their territories. This Lacandon ethnic group has been singled out for (and popularized by) the traditional knowledge and management of their tropical forest environment and, more recently, for their close association with the policies of nature conservation in Chiapas. Employing the proposal of 'multiple governmentalities' (Fletcher, 2017) we analyze the process through which their territories were declared natural protected areas. We also researched the productive, ecological and social changes brought about by environmentalism and in the shaping of identities, practices and discourses. By privileging an ethnographic and qualitative methodology, we were able to construct the historical process of territorial appropriation and the defense of their territories, in particular since the 1990s. We found that the request was motivated, on the one hand, by socio-environmental conflicts at the beginning of the 1990s between Tzeltales and Lacandones first in Metzabok and later in Nahá; and on the other hand, by the influence of several actors that supported nature conservation, among them an international non-governmental organization and the environmental institutional apparatus recently established in Mexico. We conclude that environmentalism has produced diverse changes, through the arrival of economic support that promoted the surveillance and disciplining of a cultural identity subordinated to nature conservation, converting the Lacandones into park guards (under surveillance) rather than 'guardians of nature.'