Mixtec Evangelicals

Front matter

DES

MIXTEC EVANGELICALS

MIXTEC EVANGELICALS

Contents

List of Figures

List of Tables

List of Abbreviations Acknowledgments

Conclusion

CHAPTER 2. MIXTECS AND MODERNITY Modernity, Indigeneity, and Religious Conversion Modernity and Religion “The Great Transformation”

Globalization and Neoliberalism

Mixtecs in the New World Order

Globalization, Migration, and Modernity

Cultural Remittances

Mixtec Communities in the Context of Globalization Globalization and Religious Conversion

Indigenous Modernities

Conclusion

CHAPTER 3. SAN JUAN MIXTEPEC: Nuvu VICU, THE LAND OF CLOUDS The Municipio

The Setting

Two Agencias: San Lucas and San Pedro Yososcuá Discussion

Relations between Catholics and Non-Catholics Non-Catholic Churches in Yososcuá

Relations between Catholics and Non-Catholics in Yososcuá

Migration and Religious Change Social and Economic Indicators

Modernity and Usos y Costumbres

CHAPTER 4. SAN JUAN DIQUIYÚ: VILLAGE ON A ROCK Why San Juan Diquiyu? The Setting The Village of San Juan Diquiyú

23 24

55 58

61 61 61 62

CONTENTS

The Fiesta System 64 Orthodox and Folk Catholicism 65 Non-Catholics in San Juan Diquiyú 66 Seventh-Day Adventists 67 Trinitarians in San Juan Diquiyú 69 Conflict, Peace, and Ridicule 70 Discussion 71 CHAPTER s. COLONIA SINAÍ: Los EXPULSADOS 73 Introduction 73 The Village 73 The Expulsion 74 After the Expulsion 75 The Return to the Village 77 Discussion 79 CHAPTER 6. FOUR COMMUNITIES COMPARED 81 Variations on a Theme 81 The Settings 81 Language and Religion 82 Socioeconomic Characteristics of the Communities 83 Migration and Community Development 84 Catholics and Non-Catholics 87 Usos y Costumbres in Three Communities 88 Migration, Religious Change, and Modernity 88 CHAPTER 7. MIXTEC DIASPORA? 9I Introduction 91 Mixtec Migrants in Mexico 92 Conversion in Culiacán 94 Miguel Alemán, Sonora 97 Non-Catholics in Miguel Alemán 99

Baja California 99 x

CONTENTS

San Quintin

Tijuana

Mixtecs in the United States

California

Oregon and Washington

Generations, Present and Future

Ethnic Organizations

The IJA: An Alternative to Ethnic Organizations?

Mixtec Diaspora?

CHAPTER 8. CONCLUDING REMARKS

Mixtecs in the Modern World-System

Transnational Communities and Religious Conversion

Mixtec Villages as Transnational Communities

Transnational Studies, Globalization, and Religious Conversion Selective Modernity

Toward a General Explanation of Religious Conversion

Glossary References Index

121 123

Figures

. Map of Mixteca region Eroded hills next to a cornfield 6 . A migrants house built next to the old house 34 . Busesleave Tlaxiaco every Saturday bound for agricultural communities—migrant destinations—in northern Mexico 35 Iglesia de Jesucristo de las Américas, San Lucas 49 Iglesia de Jesucristo de las Américas, San Pedro Yososcuá $4 Seed advertisement in Sinaloa for seeds for growing products that are exportable to the United States 94 . The Sinaloa congregation of the Iglesia de Jesucristo de las Américas, in front of the church 97 Some patterns of migration by Mixtecs IOI xi

Tables

Socioeconomic indicators, San Lucas Socioeconomic indicators, San Pedro Yososcua Language and religion, San Lucas

Language and religion, San Pedro Yososcua Language and religion, San Juan Diquiyú Socioeconomic indicators, San Juan Diquiyú Language and religion, Colonia Sinai Language and religion in four communities Households in three communities Migration in two municipios

Indigenous language speakers, Sinaloa

Non-Catholics, Sinaloa

CDI

DIGEPO IJA INEGI MICOP

NAFTA

UPBJ

Abbreviations

Comisión Nacional para el Desarrollo de los Pueblos Indígenas; Indian agency that replaced the Instituto Nacional Indigenista (INI)

Dirección General de Población de Oaxaca, Oaxacan population survey Iglesia de Jesucristo de las Américas Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía, Mexican national census

Mixteco/Indigena Community Organizing Project, located in Oxnard, California; provides services to Mixtecs and other indigenous people in the area

North American Free Trade Agreement among the United States, Canada, and Mexico; went into effect on January 1, 1994, and has had many negative impacts on Mixtec lives

Centro de Unidad Popular Benito Juarez, centered in Bakersfield, California; a cultural organization dedicated to education and the continuation of indigenous traditions

Acknowledgments

First and foremost, I must thank the People of the Land of Rain, the Mixtecs, for

their participation in this project. Ihe members of the villages and the transnational communities with whom I worked had a very hard time figuring out what I

was doing and I had a hard time figuring out what they were doing, but at the end

I think we came to an understanding, or understandings, of each other. Among the

many people who contributed to my work, Azucena Hernández Cruz, who worked

as interpreter, was absolutely essential to the project. I would like to express my gratitude to the members of the Iglesia de Jesucristo de las Américas, who were a focus

of my work over several years. In addition to the Mixtecs, Alberto Hernández—my friend, colleague, and collaborator for many years— deserves special thanks. He

helped identify Mixtec non-Catholics in Tijuana, San Quintín, and northern San

Diego County. He and I have had many discussions about migration and conversion and their relationships during the many years of our collaborations. His contribution has been invaluable.

I would also like to thank the organizations that supported my research over a period of ten years. These include the Fulbright-Hays Faculty Research Abroad Fellowship Program as well as several different granting agencies within the University of California: UC MEXUS, the UCSB Interdisciplinary Humanities Center, and the UCSB Office of Research. Ihe UCSB Institute for Social, Behavioral and Economic Research, whose directors have shown tremendous patience with me, must also receive a bow. The University of California, Santa Barbara, in general xviii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS has supported me over many years, for which I am much indebted. Finally, the Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social, in Oaxaca, allowed me to affiliate with them during my time in the Mixteca region. I am very grateful for their support.

The indigenous Mixtec people of Oaxaca, Mexico, have developed complex, multi-sited transnational communities rooted in the ancestral villages of their homeland, the Mixteca region. The ways that these transnational communities are maintained are tightly connected to the tradition of usos y costumbres. This system is a hierarchy of alternating civil and religious cargos, or posts, which must be taken up by representatives of each of the families in the community. This includes people outside of the village in the far-ranging transnational communities. By continuing to recognize and participate in this system, Mixtecs help to create and maintain transnational networks. While there is a good deal of literature on transnationalism, the Mixtecs stand out in their allegiance to and participation in the civil-religious hierarchy that is generated by usos y costumbres. This requires that each member of the community participate in a series of Catholic rituals, focusing on saints, which make up half of the hierarchy. It is precisely by maintaining the hierarchy that they have maintained the communities (Besserer 2004).

Imagine my surprise, then, when I discovered in 2001 that there were four congregations of Mixtec Pentecostals in Santa Maria, California, an hour's drive from my home in Santa Barbara. When I found out that there were many Mixtecs who were converting to non-Catholic churches, my interest was piqued. Evangelicals absolutely reject the Catholic saints as false idols. In addition, they do not drink alcohol, an important ingredient in all Mixtec Catholic festivities. In fact, Pentecostals reject all of the religious side of the civil-religious hierarchy. It seemed apparent xix that, once Evangelicals returned to their villages, they were on a collision course with the Catholics, as well as with the major traditions that are the basis for Mixtec transnational communities.

My colleague Alberto Hernández at El Colegio de la Frontera Norte, in Tijuana, Mexico, knew many Mixtecs in Tijuana, and he began to research Mixtec Evangelicals there.’ He found congregations in Tijuana, but many more in the Valley of San Quintín, about four hours south of the border in Baja California. I decided to go to San Quintín to conduct fieldwork there. What I found was that there were many, many Mixtecs living in the valley, and a good percentage were Evangelicals. This was turning into a long-term project.

My interest in Evangelicals in Latin America had begun during my dissertation research with indigenous Mayos in Sonora. There, I found two types of religious movements: Evangelical Protestantism and a millenarian, nativistic movement in which only Mayos participated (O'Connor 1979). My analysis of these divergent reactions to social change made me realize that cultural and social change is actually brought about by the decisions of many individuals. Of course, they must have reasons to change, and the social and cultural milieu must encourage and allow change. In Sonora, all of these conditions held.

With the publication of two books (Stoll 1990, Martin 1990) declaring that Protestantism was growing rapidly in Latin America, I turned again to my interest in religious change. I conducted a study of Evangelicals in Santa Barbara, where I met the Mixtec Evangelicals. Between 2001 and 2012, I conducted fieldwork in many locations where non-Catholic Mixtecs live, both in Mexico and the United States.” I eventually conducted research in most of the West Coast communities of Mixtecs in both countries.

In my research, I have always looked for explanations for behavior. I believe that such concerns as reflexivity (Marcus 1994:384—385) and the importance of recognizing the role of anthropology as part of the Western colonization of non-Western cultures are essential parts of fieldwork. I also agree with Geertz (1973:14) that anthropology is “a developing system of scientific analysis”; thus, my interest in the scientific explanation of behavior.

While the word subject is still used by academic review boards, the feeling I have toward the people I come to know well in the course of my work is that they are colleagues trying to explain to me, the dumb American, what for them are obvious realities. One of the most important of these realities at present is religious change. I claim only to have approximated an understanding of it.

A basic understanding of the history and the social organization of the Mixtecs is necessary before even beginning to document such change. Most people in Mexico have abandoned the practice of the ancient traditions of usos y costumbres. The maintenance of these traditions is the basis of the transnational networks that make up every Mixtec community? The role of the Catholic Church has been pivotal in this system. The presence of non-Catholics has had major effects on the system, but it has not destroyed it completely. The traditional system, the churches to which some Mixtecs convert, and the processes of conversion, are discussed in chapter 1.

But beyond merely documenting religious change, I wanted to find out why people change their religious beliefs. In the case of the Mixtecs, why are they changing when their very identity is supposedly wrapped up in Catholic rituals that are hundreds of years old? Why risk rejection and even expulsion from their villages? The fact is that the process of economic globalization has been affecting the Mixtec communities to an even greater extent than the religious conversion of their members. Conversion is actually part of a much larger process that includes economic marginalization, migration, a confrontation with modernity in its many manifestations, and the formation of transnational communities made up of complex networks that span the territory from the Mixteca to the many places where Mixtecs are found today. Modernity, globalization, and the ways that they impinge on Mixtec life, as well as Mixtec responses to these processes, are discussed in chapter 2.

My field project involved research in four different communities in the Mixteca region of Oaxaca.* While three of the four villages in the project are all rural, all poor, and all Mixtec, the ways that they have experienced emigration, return migration, and the religious conversion of their members have contributed to distinct outcomes in the relationships between Catholics and non-Catholics. Chapters 3 and 4 discuss these communities. The fourth community in my study is a neighborhood of the city of Huajuapan de León, in the Mixteca region. Here live members of a village who were expelled by their fellow villagers because they were non-Catholic. In the new community, everyone is non-Catholic. The ways that they have developed and adapted provide a contrast to the processes found in the other villages. This community is discussed in chapter 5. Chapter 6 is a summary and discussion of the similarities and differences among the four communities.

In addition to my fieldwork in Oaxaca, I conducted research in many of the places to which Mixtecs migrate, which are also the places where they tend to convert to Evangelical religions. These include communities in the states of Sinaloa, Sonora, and Baja California, in Mexico, and the states of California, Oregon, and Washington, in the United States. It is in communities such as these that the transnational networks mesh the members of Mixtec communities together even after many years of separation. While other migrant groups tend to acculturate and assimilate to US culture, the Mixtecs remain within their transnational communities, all tied to the Oaxacan villages where the members were born. Within the larger transnational communities, the converts to non-Catholic religions make up a xxi xxii smaller web rather than a separate entity. They participate in the lives of the villages to the same extent that Catholics do, within the limits that their religious affiliations allow. Chapter 7 contains the results of this work.

In chapter 8, I summarize and draw some conclusions on the work presented in the earlier chapters.

In my research, I used the standard anthropological methods of participant observation and key informant interviews. I attended non-Catholic church services as well as Catholic fiestas. I conducted life history interviews with non-Catholic pastors as well as members of the Evangelical churches in each community. I interviewed the political leaders of the villages I worked in. I spent time in peoples’ houses, just talking about general topics. I interviewed Catholic priests. In addition to this fieldwork, I have amplified my findings with statistics from the Mexican census, as well as with information from other studies.

What I found from my research among Mixtecs is that, indeed, the Catholics reject the non-Catholics, saying that by not honoring the saints they are destroying the community. The non-Catholics maintain that the rejection of the saints is necessary, whether or not it destroys the community. As the saints are from the devil, they must be eliminated. The non-Catholics reject a// aspects of the religious organization of the community because it is Catholic, it includes drinking and dancing, and it is a waste of money. In some cases, the Catholics have expelled the non- Catholics from the villages and prevented them from returning. In others, there are now sizeable numbers of non-Catholics in the villages themselves.

While conducting field research in the four communities, I found that religious change varies from one to another. In one village, where the non-Catholics are approaching 50 percent of the population, a kind of agreement has been reached, where each group lets the other worship as they will. In another, there is a great deal of animosity between Catholics and non- Catholics, and there is no rapprochement. I believe this is because the percentage of non-Catholics, while growing, is still considerably lower than 50 percent. A third village has an even lower percentage of non- Catholics. Here there is an undercurrent of unhappiness, but, in general, the Catholics are in charge. The fourth community I studied is a neighborhood of the city to which a group of converts fled when they were expelled from their village. This community gives an idea of what life is like in a place where there are no Catholics at all.

In each of the communities I studied, migration is a major factor in religious conversion. It is migrants who first converted, and it is migrants who returned to the villages to try to convert their relatives and neighbors. It is in the migrant stream that a large percentage of Mixtec converts live today. They are part of the transnational communities that define their lives. Although they are steadfastly anchored to their villages, non- Catholics are not willing to give up their religious commitments. To the contrary, they would like to see all the members of the villages become converts. At the same time, most remain outside the villages themselves. The risk of conflict over religion is at least part of the reason for this.

Globalization has led to migration away from the Mixteca region. Migration, in turn, provides the context for individuals to decide to convert. In the beginning, no one converted before leaving the Mixteca. Circumstances of migration led to their conversion in the migrant communities. Thus, globalization caused migration, and migration provided the contexts for conversion. The combination of these processes led to the formation of transnational communities composed of all the members of each village and smaller transnational networks of non-Catholics within the larger network.

Unlike some communities (see, e.g., Dow 2001), conversion in the Mixtec villages is not a way to eliminate the entire traditional social system. Although non- Catholics reject the Catholic aspects of this system, they still participate in the political aspects. Importantly, they still maintain their membership in the transnational communities that are the basis of Mixtec life today. There are hundreds of thousands of Mixtec migrants in Mexico and the United States. Each of them belongs to a transnational community whose focus is a village. This is a remarkable adaptation of traditional culture to the globalized world that Mixtecs inhabit. It has served them well, mainly because the migrants, for the most part, were born in the village. The extent to which the system will be maintained by the children of these migrants remains to be seen. However, the tenacity and the creativity of the parents may well continue, in some form, in the generations still to come.

NOTES

1. Alberto and I have collaborated on several projects over the years, he in Baja California and I in various sites. The results of our collaboration on Mixtecs can be found in Hernández and O'Connor 2015.

2. For my initial research on Mixtecs, I received grants from the UCSB Interdisciplinary Humanities Center, UC MEXUS, and the UCSB Office of Research. My subsequent funding came from the Fulbright-Hays Faculty Research Abroad Program, which allowed me to spend a year in the Mixteca region conducting research in four different communities. Another grant, from the UC MEXUS program, funded multi-sited research with some parts of what might be called the Mixtec diaspora. Alberto Hernández collaborated with me on the second MEXUS grant.

3. There are also complex traditions of belief and practice that vary from one village to another. Some of these date to before the Conquest, and some intersect syncretically with xxiii xxiv the folk-Catholic cargo systems (see Monaghan 1995:97-166). As the present multi-sited study focuses on transnational processes and religious change, the kind of full-bore, detailed research that we find in John Monaghan work was not possible for each village. In any event, non- Catholics reject every belief that is not found in the Bible; these include precolonial traditions as well as those introduced by the Spanish.

4. During my stay in Oaxaca, I affiliated with the Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social in Oaxaca City. I am very grateful for their support.

MIXTEC EVANGELICALS

A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE MIXTECA REGION

It is said that Benito Juárez was once asked to describe the geography of the Mixteca region. He responded by crumpling up a piece of paper. That is what the area looks like. It is extremely irregular, with many small valleys between rippling steep mountains. The terrain is so difficult to tame that even today most of the roads are dirt and many communities are accessible only on foot. Both paved and dirt roads go around precipitous turns and hills, hugging the sides of the mountains. Landslides and mudslides are common occurrences. The extreme fragility of the soil in the region adds to the incidence of slides, and the torrential rains wash away soil from the cornfields as well as from the roads.

While these conditions present difficulties to the contemporary visitor, they have had important effects on the Mixtecs who live there. The villages are found in isolated nooks in the landscape and conditions are not conducive to intervillage cooperation. Geographic isolation is compounded by, or perhaps is a cause of, the practice of village endogamy: people usually marry people from the same community, thereby reducing the possibility of alliances among villages. This may be a continuation of pre-Hispanic social organization: according to Pérez Ortiz (2003:26), each community was actually a lineage and all the members were kin.

These factors, in turn, have had significant effects on culture: the Mixtecs have a long history of intervillage conflict (Terraciano 2001:227-28) and each village has its own version of the Mixteco language. Each village also has pre-Hispanic cultural

Acatlan d

Presa E Miguel Aleman

~ Superhighway ———— Main road A || eese - Secondary road Huajuapan *-**-* State boundary de León E nes unas E

5 0 10 20 Kilometers (* Vrezoattán à \ ide Segura y Luna i N H E I a ` Pure Villa de y D: 1 Asunción Silacayoapan x i Nochixtlàn Oaxaca zu study area

San Lucas 4,

ae Marfa Lond pa E 'eposlantongó San Pedro’ a ES Yososcui x Oaxaca de Juárez Putla de" ` Guerrero

FIGURE 1.1. Map of Mixteca region. Map by Mary I. O'Connor.

Copyright © 2007 by Mary |. O'Connor and social traditions that help identify the residents of that village. These beliefs and practices include healing, birth, death, and agricultural complexes that are outside the scope of this work. All these aspects of Mixtec life have combined to create a situation where identity with the home village is all-important. Taken together, all of these conditions have influenced the way that present-day migrants, traveling from the villages to the rest of the continent, construct their identities. Even in Tennessee, Mixtecs from the same communities tend to find each other and congregate together.

THE SPANISH CONQUEST AND AFTERWARD

When the Spanish arrived in the Mixteca region in the 1520s, they described the region as densely populated, wealthy, and productive, with a complex social organization and a flourishing agricultural economy (Terraciano 2001:1-3, 198). No one would describe it that way today. The Mixtecs had developed a complex system of irrigating and terracing the steep mountainsides in order to expand the amount of arable land. The terraces, along with the native vegetation, protected the soil from being washed away in the rain.

The Spanish introduced cattle and horses. These animals trampled the terraces and ate all the plants and trees that had no thorns. Eventually, only plants with thorns remained and sheep and goats largely replaced cattle and horses. At the same time, large parts of the forests were cut down for fuel, leading to further degradation of the soil.

Although the Nahua word Mixtec means “land of clouds,” the Mixtec name for their world is Nuu Shaavi, “the land of rain” The combination of the abrupt landscape (much of it is vertical) and centuries of overgrazing has resulted in extreme soil erosion. Today, the Mixteca region is considered arid, despite the fact that the amount of rainfall! in other conditions provided more than enough water to support viable agriculture (Edinger 1985:16—49). There are parts of the contemporary Mixteca region that are blasted landscapes of eroded red dirt suitable only, in the words of one resident, for use as a setting for a Hollywood film set on Mars. There is no shortage of land; there is a shortage of land suitable for agriculture.

There are, it is true, small subsistence farms in the region. Most of them are planted to corn, beans, and squash—the traditional crops—although today it is cheaper to buy corn imported from the United States or Canada than to produce it. But people plant the same plot every year, using seeds saved from the year before and fertilizer from animal manure. If we discount the cost of labor (which is worth little or nothing here), a kind of subsistence can be wrenched from the soil. That is, if the rain comes at the right time and if floods do not destroy the fields. There are also goats and sheep as well as some horses, donkeys, and cattle. Still, the residents of

FIGURE 1.2. Eroded hills next to a cornfield.

the area are mostly very poor: Oaxaca, the state where most Mixtecs live, is among the poorest in Mexico, and the Mixteca region is one ofthe poorest in Oaxaca. It is not a tourist destination, generally speaking.

POLITICAL ORGANIZATION IN THE MIXTECA AREA

Most Mexican states are organized into two levels of political organization: municipios and localidades. The municipios correspond roughly with counties in the United States. Localidades are entities within the municipios and include everything from large cities to single dwellings. Mexico has historically been very centralized, and small villages in most states have one or two political posts. The municipio leadership appoints people to these posts; they are not elective.

Oaxaca differs from this pattern in several ways. First, there are thirty distritos, which comprise a level of bureaucracy between municipio and state. The distritos elect members of the national Senado and Cámara de Diputados, the Congress. Huajuapan de León and Juxtlahuaca are two Mixtec distritos from which large numbers of people emigrate (Mines, Nichols, and Runsten 2010:9). The communities discussed in this book are in these two distritos.

Municipios are within the distritos. They have several different committees, all elected, with the presidente de municipio at the top. These leaders are elected every three years. Within the municipios are agencias. These are small, fairly autonomous villages. Within the Mixteca region, members of agencias decide whether the leaders are elected or named in the process known as usos y costumbres. The vast majority of Mixtec villages follow the tradition of usos y costumbres.

POLITICS IN MIXTEC VILLAGES: USOS Y COSTUMBRES

The state of Oaxaca recognizes and supports fifteen distinct indigenous groups whose members live in the state. The constitution recognizes that their communities were in existence before the state of Oaxaca and cedes autonomy to them as to their internal organization. This includes the political, economic, social, cultural, and jurisdictional scope of the laws. The constitution recognizes the power of the community authorities in accordance with the uses and customs (usos y costumbres) of the community (Diario Oficial del Estado de Oaxaca 1998:519-26). This echoes the changes in the national constitution, effective in 1992, that protects “specific forms of social organization” (Garma Navarro 2002:38). This, in turn, is a response to indigenous demands for recognition that have emerged in many Latin American nations since 1992.”

Unlike most other Mexican villages, the Mixtec agencias have a full court of community positions. In addition to the purely political posts, many posts appear to be entirely religious. All of these positions are filled each year during an assembly to which all the families in the agencia send a representative, and the assembly decides who will take on the duty of each post during the following year. In most cases, the decisions are made in a complex set of discussions about who will be selected for each post; these discussions take place over the course of several years prior to any assembly. So, at the annual assembly, most of the participants know who will be designated for each spot.

It is mostly in the agencias that the tradition of “usos y costumbres” persists. This system is also known as the civil-religious hierarchy (Monaghan 1995:78- 93) as well as the fiesta or cargo system. It is found still in some of the areas of Latin America where there are indigenous populations, but most systems are changing or disappearing because of the penetration of the global marketplace. In the Mixteca region, the cargo system is a very important way of establishing and continuing the tightly knit social organization of the villages. Allegiance to the village, and membership in the village, are maintained even as more and more people leave for better opportunities (actually, the only opportunities) for work. Today, las autoridades—the authorities in the top echelons of the system— still control politics in the villages.

The civil-religious hierarchy consists of two sides, the civil and the religious.* Each side has many different committees, all of which must be filled every year.

Participants (and every family must contribute members to the system) alternate between the civil and religious sides. As community members ascend the hierarchy, the cargos become more complicated, difficult, and expensive, but participants also gain in village prestige and power. They become members of the various committees that are responsible for running the community. These include committees for protecting the natural resources of the village, as well as for providing candles and flowers for ceremonies in the church, dressing the saints in the church, hiring the band for the fiesta, overseeing the land and water rights of the villagers, and overseeing the schools. The highest committee on the civil side is the agencia committee, and the most important on the religious side is the mayordomo’s committee. The next agente and mayordomo are selected from these committees.

The agente is the recognized political representative who participates in the decision-making processes at the (higher) municipio level. He is also expected to be available to make decisions about the agencia, to settle disputes between villagers, and to cooperate with the religious authorities in preparing for the annual fiestas celebrating the feast days of particular saints. In the past, most agencias had several fiestas in addition to the one dedicated to the patron saint (usually, the saint for whom the village is named). While some agencias still have several fiestas every year, nowadays it is more common for there to be only one fiesta per year. This is a direct result of the integration of local communities into the market system.

The mayordomo organizes the religious side of the fiesta. Families within the mayordomos social network, as well as participants in the lower echelons of the civil-religious hierarchy, are expected to contribute both food and work. The money for such elements of the fiesta as the fireworks, the bull riding, and other incidentals is also contributed by the mayordomo and his circle. Taken together, those in charge of the fiesta are responsible for a very large variety of different tasks, some of which must be shouldered by people on the lower rungs of the hierarchy. Although Catholic members of the village see all of these activities as part of the tradition of usos y costumbres, and the traditional activities which give meaning to their identity with the pueblo as a whole, the non-Catholics* generally see them as a waste of money. Increasingly, the Catholic migrants also see the fiesta system as too expensive. Rather than abolish the fiestas, they would like to see them simplified.