Dissenting Bureaucrats in Times of Crisis: The Politics of Bureaucracy in Mexico’s National Indigenous Institute

Maria Lopez-Portillo, Brown University

A burgeoning literature at the intersection of political sociology and organizations explores how changing state projects come into tension with varied bureaucracies within those states. The present article contributes to this literature by analyzing the case of the National Indigenous Institute of Mexico, a federal agency in charge of indigenous policy who came into conflict with Executive projects on indigeneity in the 1970s and in the 1990s. Drawing from interviews with former public officials and archival material, I show how the public officials of the Indigenous Institute positioned themselves within contending professional, political and organizational identities during both periods. The open challenge of bureaucrats to the projects of the state in indigenous communities was met with varied strategies by the Executive, such as appeasement, cooptation and weakening. My findings suggest that these tensions in the politics of bureaucracy in Mexico shaped the way indigenous policy is carried out today, with reduced spaces of action for bureaucrats and a distant relationship to communities reinforced by design.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 37. Crisis and Social Transformation