The Role of the State in Postrevolutionary Mexico: A New Period of “Evangelization” in Hueyapan

Abstract

In the early 1920s, schoolteachers came to Hueyapan to help the villagers take advantage of new opportunities opening up in the country. Representing Mexico’s revolutionary government, they were part of a wider national campaign to “acculturate” the Indians, offering the inhabitants of indigenous pueblos the tools that they needed—both ideological and technological—to reap the benefits of social and economic reform. Twenty-five years later, social workers settled down in Hueyapan for a few months as well to help the villagers achieve the same goal. Although these ambassadors spoke about change, their words harkened back to the old colonial project. Social workers, for example, wanted to alter the same areas of daily life that colonial priests had focused on centuries before. Then, while pledging allegiance to an anticlerical state, both schoolteachers and social workers adopted the model of colonial Catholic rituals to celebrate national holidays. Finally, like the colonists before them, they continued to blame traditional cultures for the persistence of ignorance and poverty in the country—Indians remained poor, the argument went, because they stubbornly held on to their ancient customs. But unlike their predecessors, these secular emissaries of postrevolutionary Mexico spoke glowingly about the nation’s indigenous past, sending mixed messages to those still identified as Indians.