Oaxaca Resurgent: Indigeneity, Development, and Inequality in Twentieth-Century Mexico by A. S. Dillingham

Abstract

In the face of more than a century of scholarship that has made Oaxaca and its peoples an object of inquiry—in archaeology, anthropology, sociology, and other fields—this wide-ranging study instead demonstrates the many ways that Oaxacans have made themselves the subjects of their own history. Indigenous youth, in particular, drive this interdisciplinary analysis, which relies on local, state, and national archives, as well as interviews with key figures, to highlight the contested nature of state-directed modernization efforts. By closely examining agricultural and educational programs led by state agencies from the 1950s through the 1980s, Dillingham demonstrates the contradictory and complicated nature of indigenismo in Mexico in the decades after World War II. State agencies created to promote official Indigenous uplift in Mexico sought to solve problems that they associated with indigeneity, simultaneously understanding the country’s Indigenous populations as “the origin of national identity, a barrier to be overcome, and a source of inspiration for a multicultural future” (4). In so doing, officials tried to educate speakers of Indigenous languages, to relocate residents of supposedly “overpopulated” highlands to coastal areas, and to incorporate Indigenous trade-union members into the national political project of Mexico’s ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (pri).In each case, however, the subjects of these development efforts reappropriated the rhetoric and machinery of reform to their own ends. Dillingham finds, for example, that the reason for the failure of a state resettlement program that attempted to move residents of the Mixteca Alta highlands to low-lying coastal areas long inhabited by Afro-Mexican residents was not the refusal of Mixtec people to migrate. In fact, highlanders frequently undertook seasonal migration to northern Mexico and eventually to the United States to work as agricultural laborers before returning home, integrating themselves into “an increasingly interconnected economy, both nationally and internationally” while maintaining their ties to their communities (91). In detailing this disjuncture between state plans and local practices, Dillingham highlights the radical, Indigenous-led projects that emerged in the wake of the failure of such government-led programs, particularly as teachers and students criticized those programs’ paternalism and neocolonialism and fought for autonomy and dignity. Indigenous people, he argues, shaped Oaxaca’s postwar history through the “quotidian struggles to determine the terms of one’s incorporation into state structures” (116).A key chapter details how young people educated in indigenista state programs in Oaxaca City during the 1970s pushed against the institutional limits of their training when they returned home, fighting for educational programs that “articulated new theories of liberation that centered Indigenous peoples’ unique cultural and historical experiences” (95). This militancy set the foundations for a new vision of multicultural inclusion to which the state, under presidents Luis Echeverría and José López Portillo, was forced to respond. Crucial to Dillingham’s argument is the assertion that this multiculturalism was not merely an identity-based strategy of the state to incorporate Indigenous Mexicans into an increasingly austere, neoliberal economy. He shows instead that the struggle for multicultural recognition maintained its class character, serving as a source of organizing power especially for the dissident teachers-union movement that flourished in Oaxaca and directly challenged the hegemony of the ruling party. In developing a praxis of comunalidad, communality, these militants mobilized “a form of historical thinking, drawing on histories of exclusion to explain and make visible an unequal present” (181).In centering these young people’s voices and experiences, Dillingham offers an important revision to histories of development in Mexico, showing how Indigenous Oaxacans appropriated and refashioned attempts to “modernize” their communities. In so doing, they shaped not only their own futures but also the contours of the Mexican post-revolutionary state.