MEXICO CITY (Reuters) -- Nine years after Mexico's Zapatista guerrillas burst into the limelight, they have yet to win the indigenous rights they seek, but their campaign has inspired other Indian groups to push for autonomy as well.

Even in the megapolis of Mexico City, small groups of Nahuatl Indians, who are descended from the Aztecs, are trying to reclaim land they say was taken first by Spanish conquistadores then by the Mexican state.

The Indians of Milpa Alta, an area on the outskirts of the capital, style themselves on the Zapatistas who are setting up autonomous communities in the southern state of Chiapas. "We have been Zapatistas in Milpa Alta for some time," said Agustin Martinez, sitting below a photograph of the legendary peasant leader Emiliano Zapata. "It's not just Chiapas, not just little outbreaks in different places. We are everywhere."

Twelve indigenous communities in Mexico City are demanding that the government recognize them as autonomous municipalities, which can elect their own representatives and use their lands and other resources according to custom. "We have been arguing with the city government that they must recognize us as owners of communal land," said Silverio Arroyos, who represents the community of San Pedro Actopan in Milpa Alta. "We're the ones in charge here."

The city has barely acknowledged the demands, said Francisco Garcia, head of the leftist Party of the Democratic Revolution, or PRD, in Milpa Alta. The PRD controls city government.

"There has been little response from either the local government or the federal government; meanwhile urban sprawl is encroaching on us," Garcia said.

The Zapatistas, led by the enigmatic Subcommander Marcos, burst out of the jungle in 1994 and attacked security forces in a campaign to win rights for Maya Indians. The violence did not last long and the rebels are now contained in their southern base, posing no or little military threat.

----------Indian Autonomy---------- Last month they returned to the political spotlight, installing so-called good government committees in Chiapas composed of local indigenous leaders to run them and collect taxes.

Though government officials say the committees may be operating outside the law, they tolerate them.

The Zapatistas' struggle has put the focus on the demands of Mexico's estimated 13 million Indians for greater rights.

Most are trapped in rural poverty, but those in Milpa Alta live in the country's political power base.

Some 100,000 Indians live in Milpa Alta's adobe houses. On 66,700 acres (27,000 hectares) they grow vegetables, corn and nopal, an edible cactus popular in Mexico. They cannot touch the forest under preservation laws passed in 1947.

Mexico City, a conurbation of some 18 million, has devoured other indigenous communities over the centuries; 33 remain.

Mexico City gives them access to the largest market in the country for their products, and some families have prospered enough to build brick homes. They have water, electricity and other services that many of their country's brethren lack.

But the city chips away at their traditional lifestyles. "Modernization traps us, of course; it destroys the sense of communal life," said Humberto Jurado, a teacher from the Milpa Alta community of Santa Ana Tlacotenco. "Urbanization absorbs political power, identity, but we're fighting it off here."

Indian communities struggle to pass down customs, art, history and language orally from generation to generation.

In Milpa Alta some of the old people teach the Nahuatl language to youngsters. Young people participate in a traditional dance group and villagers hold annual indigenous festivals.

"At the end, one is proud to have a culture thousands of years old," Jurado said.

Indigenous activists say greater autonomy would be key to helping preserve their cultures by allowing communities to develop through their own resources and customs.

Usually they remain on the margins of development, in poor communities, with migration the only possible route to a better life.

"The government allows what has been going on for 500 years to continue," said federal deputy Hector Sanchez, an Indian from Oaxaca.