Continuity and Disjunction in Zapotec Ethnicity “Their Own Soul, Now Perfectly Defined”! Ethnicity is the medium through which autonomy and difference, as well as alliance and accommodation, were constructed historically in Juchitén, and it played a central role in the formation of COCEI in the 1970s. In addition, Zapotec ethnicity was itself shaped by the forms of outside intervention and internal mobilization it fostered. This “mutually constitutive” relationship between ethnicity and other social forces (Co- maroff 1987, 313) can be seen in Juchitan in enduring capacities for eco- nomic self-sufficiency and political rebellion and in the strategic class and gender alliances through which Zapotecs have negotiated inequality and conflict. The interrelationship between ethnic discourse and practice and other phenomena can also be seen in the recurring tropes of savagery and barbarism through which Juchitecos were represented by both for- eigners and themselves. In her analysis of “marginal” geographic and cultural regions in Indo- nesia, Anna Tsing details the intricate interplay of “outside” and “inside” cultures in the construction of political meaning and action and illustrates the ways in which “the authority of national policies is displaced through distance and the necessity of reenactment at the margins” (1993, 27) Similarly, in analyzing power relations in Mexico, Claudio Lomnitz- Adler emphasizes the rootedness of political authority in the complex deployment of cultural resources on the part of distinct classes and groups within regions (1992), Both Tsing’s and Lomnitz-Adlers disag- gregations of cultural practice illustrate the ways in which ethnicity can function simultaneously as “a sign of exclusion” and “a tool for destabiliz- ing central authority” (Tsing 1993, 27). Mapping out the history of these