Questioning Authenticity: A Cautionary Tale (Natasha)

Questions of authenticity, as we learn from this week's readings, are central to the study of folklore. But questioning what is authentic and what is not, especially when the questioning is being done by someone outside the core folk group, can very quickly lead to oversimplification and misinterpretation.

 I ran into some of these issues while conducting my Master's research in the Sierra Norte de Puebla, Mexico. I worked with a women's cooperative that produced and sold hand-embroidered textiles to tourists traveling through the region. They often talked about what a difficult market they faced and how their products were undercut by the cheaper, machine made textiles sold by the shops in the center of town. I noticed that the women who owned the shops didn't bear any of the external markers of indigeneity that the women in the cooperative demonstrated. They wore modern clothes and hairstyles and had lighter skin. They were clearly members of a higher social class.

Meanwhile, the women in the cooperative all wore huipiles and long, braided hairstyles on a daily basis and they spoke to eachother in Nahuatl. A cursory analysis of this situation, combined with input from members of the cooperative, left me believing that the women who owned the shops in the center of town were non-Natives selling inauthentic replicas of the regional textiles. However, the more I delved into my research, the more I became tuned into the complexities of racial identification in Mexico. Some of the shop owners did identify as indigenous even though they were not embracing "traditional" indigenous identity. Who was I to question their legitimacy as producers and sellers of regional textiles - even if they used more machinated production methods and cheaper products in doing so?

Ultimately, I changed the nature of my research because questions of who had the right to produce and sell the textiles proved too murky of an issue for me to grapple with in the six months I had in the field. I think these are important questions to examine and, with distance, I see that there is no single answer to that question. Perhaps the lack of a single, easy answer makes these questions especially important to look at, especially if you incorporate histories of who, why, and how identity and authenticity have been constructed over time in communities like the one I worked in.