¿Por qué son ambientalistas? Las múltiples gubernamentalidades en Metzabok y en Nahá, Selva Lacandona, Chiapas, México

Abstract

This article analyzes the agrarian-environmental process followed by an indigenous group in southern Mexico to request the environmental protection of their territories. This Lacandon ethnic group has 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. From the proposal of 'multiple governmentalities' (Fletcher 2017) we analyze the process through which their territories were declared natural protected areas. We also investigated the productive, ecological and social changes caused by environmentalism and the concretization of identities, practices and discurses. By privileging ethnographic recording and qualitative methodology, we were able to construct the historical process of territorial appropiation and the defense of their territories since the 1990's. We found that the request was sponsored, on the one hand, by socio-environmental conflicts at the beginning of the 1990's 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 produced changes and meant the arrival of economic support that promoted the surveillance and disciplining of a cultural identity subject to nature conservation, converting the Lacandones into park guards under surveillance rather than guardians of nature.