Ritual and Community Networks Among Laborer Groups in Mexico

Abstract

As a symbolic act of cultural reproduction and re-elaboration of networks of community cohesion, so crucial to civic society at times of discontinuity of the social sense, ritual provides a temporary but necessary reorientation of the daily lives of industrial workers of Nahua origin in the Puebla-Tlaxcala region. This community phenomenon contrasts with the purpose of ritual connected to the workplace, where reaffirmation of identity as a worker is accentuated, subsuming ethnic identity and enhancing cohesion within the labor group and the factory. It is in this dual context that ritual be comes an intermediary in a sincretic process of both community and worker cohesion and ethnic and worker identity. What is important, then, is to distinguish between the two types of ritual, analyzed within the inter- and extra-workplace sphere of interaction, and the different symbols found in each. The purpose of this article is to present such an analysis using the voice of blue-collar workers.