Law for the Protection of the Cultural Heritage of Indigenous and Afro-Mexican Peoples

By Dumont

On January 18, 2022, the Federal Law for the Protection of the Cultural Heritage of Indigenous and Afro-Mexican Peoples and Communities entered into force in Mexico.

The law aims to recognize and guarantee the property rights of those communities regarding the collective intellectual property of their cultural heritage, knowledge and traditional cultural expressions.

The law was established to:

-Promote the development of the cultural heritage of indigenous and Afro-Mexican peoples and communities;
-Recognize the diversity of such heritage;
-Allow these communities to define, preserve, protect, control and develop the elements of their cultural heritage;
-Sanction the infringement, misappropriation and non-authorized use, exploitation, commercialization and reproduction of the cultural heritage, knowledge and traditional cultural expressions of indigenous and Afro-Mexican peoples and communities;
-Create the System for the Protection of the Cultural Heritage of Indigenous and Afro-Mexican Peoples and Communities, a permanent public mechanism that helps the federal government to comply with the purposes of the law.

The new legislation is a new step in an long-year effort from different governments to strengthen indigenous people access to the formal economic activity.

Estimates of the proportion of people in Mexico who are indigenous range from 12 percent to 30 percent of the population, depending on whether language or self-description is used as an identifier. 68 indigenous languages and 364 variants are spoken in the country, with a recent project from the UNESCO Office in Mexico that promotes and preserves linguistic heritage, including a compilation of "untranslatable" words in indigenous languages whose meaning is difficult to express in Spanish.