Indian and Nation in Revolutionary Mexico

Journal of Social History, Fall, 2005 by Christopher R. Boyer

Indian and Nation in Revolutionary Mexico. By Alexander S. Dawson (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2004. xxvi plus 222 pp. $45.00).

In 2001, the Mexican government approved a constitutional amendment that purported to give indigenous communities important new rights and thus to address the most imperative demands put forth by the indigenous guerrillas of the state of Chiapas. In fact, the new law did no such thing and essentially confirmed the status quo. Indian and Nation in Revolutionary Mexico, by Alexander Dawson (History, Simon Frasier University), reminds us that 2001 was hardly the first time that official initiatives meant to address Mexico's "Indian Problem" have fallen short of their promise. The book covers the period between 1917 and 1946, when a succession of scientific and educational institutions attempted to understand and modernize indigenous people and, in one form or another, to integrate them into the Mexican nation. Dawson is not the first scholar to trace the rise and eventual ossification of revolutionary indigenismo, or "indigenism," but he writes from a strikingly fair-minded vantage point and refuses to flatten out the complexities of indigenist initiatives or of native people's response to them. As a result, Indian and Nation represents a major contribution to the historiography of revolutionary state formation and ethnohistory in Mexico.

Dawson divides the history of revolutionary indigenism into two distinct phases. Between 1917 and the early 1930s, assimlationists argued that Indians could only become fully Mexican by casting away their culture and integrating into the social mainstream. The most notable proponent of this viewpoint was anthropologist Manuel Gamio, who headed up a newly established government department charged with understanding and assimilating Indians. Gamio sought to put anthropology at the service of revolutionary state-formation, but as Dawson shows, his anthropology was hardly value-neutral insofar as he intended to suppress cultural difference in order to create a culturally homogenous nation. Yet, Gamio and his followers were no racial essentialists and recognized that indigenous people's poor standards of living derived from three-hundred years of colonialism rather than some sort of inherent racial inferiority. Their belief that Indians were educable led them to found schools (the Casa del Estudiante Indigena, and Moises Saenz's educational station at Carapan, Michoacan) meant to serve racially "pure" Indians and thus demonstrate the viability of cultural assimilation. The students who attended these institutions received a steady diet of mainstream values and instruction in Spanish, all of which contributed to misunderstandings between educators and students and ultimately limited the quality of education these schools could hope to impart.

The schools' failure at least temporarily discredited assimilationist ideas and forced Mexico's bureaucrat/scholars to make practical and theoretical modifications to their project of "uplifting" native peoples. The crisis ushered in a second and more pluralist phase of indigenism which anticipated the populist regime of President Lazaro Cardenas (1934-1940) by two years. The first expression of this more catholic spirit was the establishment of Indian boarding schools intended like their predecessors to educate and modernize students, but to do so using indigenous languages and by working within native communities. A few years later, the Department of Indigenous Affairs was formed under the leadership of educator Moises Saenz, who believed that native people's culture and religious practices deserved a certain respect. President Cardenas also hoped to promote the uplift of indigenous peoples, and he convened a series of conferences at which community leaders could articulate their expectations of the revolutionary state. Cardenas nevertheless disagreed with more pluralist version of indigenism and stuck to the older model of Indian assimilation to a single Mexican nation. Dawson shows that these divergent understandings had begun to unravel the indigenist project by the late 1930s, even before Cardenas's successors backed away from the ideal of either assimilating or uplifting native peoples, preferring instead to convert the Department of Indigenous Affairs into an enclave for patronage appointments and half-measures. It was scrapped it altogether in 1946.

The book includes superb examinations of the Indian boarding schools, the indigenous affairs bureaucracies, and the Cardenista indigenous congresses. It also gives examples of individual students' experiences in the schools and of specific complaints and requests voiced during the congresses. These case studies do more than tell interesting stories. They lend the book real texture and allow Dawson to ensure that Indian and Nation does not devolve into a scholarly screed against what to twenty-first century eyes appear as state policies based on prejudice bordering on ethnocide. While Dawson does not deny the paternalist and Orientalist foundations of social-scientific treatments of indigenous people, he nevertheless insists on the evolving and sometimes emancipatory character of social scientists' understandings of indigenism. Social scientists and educators proved capable of learning from their own studies and came to recognize that racial categories needed to be rethought. They also learned from their students and subjects, and eventually proposed culturally pluralist forms of education and social development projects that at least some indigenous individuals and communities viewed as desirable. Likewise, he shows that indigenous people themselves did not always opt for cultural autonomy, but sometimes sought benefits that would tie them more closely to the Mexican mainstream. Many indigenous students at boarding schools hoped to find new career opportunities and did not intend, as the schools' proponents hoped, to return to their communities as cultural emissaries of the Mexican nation. Indigenous leaders requested benefits such as roads and schools that in some measure have led to greater assimilation. Finally, graduates of the boarding schools often used their education and role as cultural brokers to establish themselves as political bosses (known as caciques) in their hometowns, though others turned away from bossism and used their position as hinge-men to empower their fellows and improve their communities.