Indian and Nation in Revolutionary Mexico

Abstract

Alexander Dawson sets out to understand how indigenismo functioned both as a legitimizing ideology and as a means of popular mobilization in postrevolutionary Mexico. At the same time, he charts how indigenista institutions—boarding schools, the Department of Indigenous Affairs (DAI), and the National Indigenous Institution (INI)—fostered a cohort of bilingual, bicultural indigenous men (capacitados). As such, his work bridges the new cultural history of Mexico and anthropological critiques of indigenismo. Its great value lays in the careful historical analysis of indigenista ideology and bureaucracies, above all the struggle between assimilationism, personified by Manuel Gamio, and the plurinationalism exemplified by Móises Sáenz. Populist president Lázaro Cárde-nas (1934–40) initially favored Sáenz’s approach and institutionalized it in the DAI. In the end, Cárdenas reverted to an assimilationist goal—to “Mexicanize the Indian”—and put political hack Graciano Sánchez atop the DAI. In the more conservative 1940s and 1950s, Gamio resurfaced, touting subtly discriminatory theory. Along the way, Dawson links these ideological duels in Mexico to larger, international intellectual trends. And he makes their relevance for today quite clear. Contemporary Mexican intellectuals and politicians laud the absence of blatant racism, while indigenous people who do not accept modernization on the state’s terms face marginalization.Dawson is on less sure ground when treating indigenismo’s role in the quotidian practice of state formation. He focuses on the generally overlooked Otomí people of the semiarid Valley of Mezquital in Hidalgo, where the state has long promised everything from schooling and land grants to irrigation. Indigenismo there began with a typical Cardenista project, ambitious and engineered from above. Sadly, official arrogance, ignorance, and waste doomed it and decades worth of subsequent programs. Exactly how the promise of Cárdenas’s indigenismo went wrong on the local level is not so clear-cut. Dawson insists that the discourse of the Cardenista regional indigenist congress was not just empty rhetoric—that the Otomí used it to challenge the stereotype of the passive Indian and to make meaningful claims on the state. He carefully analyzes Otomí petitions, but largely accepts the state’s claims to have responded. In the end, however, Dawson confirms the scholarly consensus that Cárdenas was hamstrung “both by the resources of the state and the need to avoid further civil unrest” (p. 125).More promising are Dawson’s conclusion that the Mexican postrevolutionary state’s hegemony was thin because it “was as much a function of personalistic rule as the result of discursive practices” and his call to analyze “power blocs and networks that framed and often limited that language” (p. 164). Yet the monograph never really examines the nexus between regional camarillas and Cardenista discourse. Cárdenas-era governor Javier Rojo Gómez used his operative Agustín Olvera to mobilize support among the Otomí, and “‘Rojo-Gomista caciques’ needed to deliver certain results in order to garner their support” (p. 109). This rings true, but Dawson never substantiates Rojo Gómez or Olvera’s ethnic brokering.The narrative fast-forwards to the 1960s and 1970s, when Otomí capacitados wrested power away from mestizos merchants in Ixmiquilpan, the valley’s main city. At their head was Maurilio Múñoz Basilio, an Otomí whose rise began with a scholarship to a normal school granted by Cárdenas himself, which led to a high post with the INI. Significantly, Múñoz founded the Ñhañhu Supreme Council in 1970 under the aegis of the postrevolutionary regime. For Dawson, his “strategic choice” of the “ancient name” of the Otomí represents a rejection of assimilationism (p. 160). But I was left asking how the implied ethnogenesis took place and what the state’s role in it was.Such key historical moments speak to the capacitados’ ambivalent role, but the selection of sources hinders deeper analysis. The author conducted some fieldwork in the Mezquital Valley, culled data from national newspapers, and relied heavily on correspondence with Cárdenas. Yet he taps no state or local archives, ruling out a microhistory of a single Otomí community that could have yielded valuable insights into what indigenismo did and did not change on the grassroots level.Much to his credit, Dawson focuses on the middle ground between national institutions and the local, and he does not limit his analysis to a single presidential term. To cover a half-century, the author moves his narrative forward in a highly readable way and generally keeps jargon to a minimum. Indian and Nation is highly recommended for students of the history of anthropology in Latin America and anyone seeking to comprehend the persistence of quiet racism in Mexico.