Indigenous Attitudes and Ethnic Identity Construction in Mexico Todd A. Eisenstadt* American University Challenging primordialist positions commonly held in Mexico’s policy debate over relations between indigenous groups and the state, this article confirms the instrumentalist position that ethnic identities may be readily shaped. Using findings from a recent survey in Chiapas, Oaxaca, and Zacatecas, the author concludes, after distinguishing individual- from collectivity-oriented attitudes, that indigenous and non-indigenous respondents are similarly individualist. Im- portant differences were found, however, on a second dimension distinguish- ing pro-state respondents from those who were more communally-oriented. Indigenous respondents, particularly in Oaxaca, were found to possess more statist orientations than non-indigenous respondents. The author asserts that decades-old state policies to assimilate indigenous communities may be par- tially responsible, and that disillusionment with these policies and state-led repression in Chiapas may explain attitude differences among indigenous respondents. Desafiando las visiones primordialistas comúnmente apoyadas en México du- rante los debates de política pública sobre las relaciones entre los grupos políti- Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos Vol. 22, Issue 1, Winter 2006, pages 107–129. ISSN 0742-9797 electronic ISSN 1533-8320. ©2006 by The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the Uni- versity of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website, at www.ucpress.edu/journals/rights.htm. 107 * The author acknowledges funding from the United States Agency for International De- velopment Cooperative Agreement 523–A-00–00–00030–00 with the University of New Hampshire, American University, and the Centro de Investigaciónes y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social (CIESAS). Survey co-authors Araceli Burguete of CIESAS-Sureste (San Cristobal de las Casas, Mexico), and María Cristina Velásquez, an independent scholar then affiliated with CIESAS-Ithsmo anthropology institute (Oaxaca, Mexico) also con- tributed to survey implementation, as did Francisco Muro of the Universidad Autónoma de Zacatecas. Raul Benítez-Manaut, Roderic Camp, Wayne Cornelius, Soledad Loaeza, Pe- ter Lewis, Shannan Mattiace, Ashutosh Varshney, Peter Ward, and Steven Wuhs commented on presentations and drafts of this paper, and Viridiana Ríos Contreras provided able re- search assistance. Needless to say, all interpretations—and any errors—are the author’s alone.