Oaxaca Resurgent: Indigeneity, Development, and Inequality in Twentieth-Century Mexico

Abstract

In Oaxaca Resurgent, A. S. Dillingham explores the paradoxes of Mexican indigenista education and development in the Mixteca Alta. Indigenista thought “simultaneously cast the ‘Indian’ as the origin of national identity, a barrier to be overcome, and a source of inspiration for a multicultural future” (4). Indigenismo sought to recognize Native communities, but their resistance defied expectations. Triqui women of San Andrés Chicahuaxtla frowned and stared at the ground in the photographs of anthropologist Frederick Starr. Decades later, an elderly Mixtec man scolded a teacher: “Damn, Ramón. We sent you to Mexico [City] to learn la castilla [Spanish] so you could return and teach it to us. Now it turns out you want to teach us in our own language?” (58). Throughout the mountainous western region, the teachers, agriculturalists, and other promotores bilingües like Ramón joined Indigenous communities to engage, reject, and reshape state initiatives to modernize living standards.Dillingham captures the dissonant voices and visions that indigenistas represented. Early chapters explore economic development and inequality during the sexenios of Adolfo Ruiz Cortines (1952–58) and Adolfo López Mateos (1958–64), Spanish literacy campaigns, and land and labor systems. Anthropologists of the Instituto Nacional Indigenista (INI) Julio de la Fuente and Alejandro Marroquin, and the economist Moisés de la Peña, associated Indigeneity with colonialism. They reported that local mestizo elites, mine owners, forestry officials, merchants, coffee estate coyotes, and parasitic agraristas exploited Mixtecs at the Tlaxiaco market. For its short-wave radio broadcasts in both Spanish and Mixtec, INI hired Ramón Hernández López of San Agustín Tlacotepec and fifty other radio auxiliary teachers (nine were women) to educate Mixtecs over the radio station XEINI. The broadcasts invoked declarations that God or the devil spoke Mixtec. Two-hour daily lessons covered languages, literacy, and math and reached forty-nine schools at a time when children traveled miles to classrooms with a week’s worth of tortillas and no formal sleeping arrangements. In 1963, INI resettlement of Mixtecs to Oaxaca’s Costa Chica erupted into racial violence that required federal intervention.Dillingham devotes later chapters to Third Worldist development strategies, dissident trade unionism, and anti-colonial multiculturalism. The Oaxaca State Institute of Social Research and Integration (IIISEO) adopted anti-colonialist pedagogies during Luís Echeverría’s presidency (1970–76). Leading critics of indigenista policy, Guillermo Bonfil Batalla, Margarita Nolasco, and Mercedes Olivera deployed INI to politicize Indigenous claims to rights and autonomy. University students seized coordinating centers and demanded professional training. IIISEO director Gloria Ruiz de Bravo Ahuja hired Nolasco and recruited Indigenous children and young adults to promote their culture. IIISEO educators embraced the New Left, formed the Coalición de Promotores Culturales Bilingües (CPCB), and coordinated strikes until the PRI shuttered the organization in 1977. A year later, Santiago Salazar, Eva Ruiz, and the Coalition of Indigenous Promoters of Oaxaca (CMPIO) occupied the SEP building until President José López Portillo (1976–82) and the national teacher’s union Sindicato Nacional de Trabajadores de la Educación (SNTE) honored their demands. Dillingham argues that Oaxacan teachers who declared their own multicultural visions for rural education, development, and equality predated the critique of neoliberalism and the Zapatista uprising in 1994. The rise of the Pátzcuaro Ethnolinguistic Program, decline of the SIL, and publication of school textbooks in twenty-two Indigenous languages (including Tutu sa’an ñuu savi, my first-grade Mixtec book) further valorized bilingual teachers. CMPIO’s resurgent anti-colonial agenda blossomed into the 2006 Oaxacan social movement, which “drew on decades of teacher activism and the strength of Oaxacan community ties” (187).Dillingham’s research on the Mixteca Alta presents myriad perspectives over decades, granting vast dimensions to a subject difficult to historicize and problematize. With exceptional gifts in interpretation, empathy, and exposition, he might consider producing an authoritative study of nineteenth-century Indigenous Oaxaca.