Free Labor
The description of the systems of civil and religious charges occupies a considerable place in the ethnographies devoted to the Mesoamerican indigenous communities. It is often seen as an organizing principle of collective life, a source of social cohesion. Among the Me’phaa of the state of Guerrero in Mexico, offering free labor is interpreted as a sign of the individual’s sacrifice for the good of the group and as a contribution to the historical project of the “great ancestors” (xabo niki), whose founding ambition was to see the community prosper for multiple generations. To this long-standing reflexivity associated with the provision of free labor, we see another one added in the last decade, that of free labor as an identity marker referring to a Me’phaa way of making community. Using the notion of indigenous futurisms, we explore here the ways in which the social production of the cultural imaginary surrounding free labor is both a continuation of earlier Me’phaa norms and a process of emergence of new ways of integrating free labor into the identities mobilized by Me’phaa.