ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the local context, the paradoxical nature of multicultural governance. It examines the overlap between culture and politics in Oaxaca and, explores the links between indigeneity, politics, and cultural expressions. The institutional exaltation of regional ethnic and cultural diversity has been explicitly disputed for several years by a 'popular' Guelaguetza, initiated in an extremely contentious local and national political context. This proposes 'popular' reappropriation of an event that has long been regulated by disputed local power, to replace it with a form closer to roots and modalities deemed to be more authentic, drawn from older, more distant, origins. Local versions of multicultural governance reveal the coexistence of two entangled regimes of govern mentality: formal recognition and the permanency of public policies that continue to separate, denigrate, and underestimate knowledge and skills linked to Indigenous groups. Poverty affects the rural Indigenous populations far more than urban populations.
