A. S. Dillingham opens Oaxaca Resurgent with an unsettling vignette: US anthropologist Frederick Starr measuring the skulls and photographing the Indigenous population of San Andrés Chicahuaxtla, Oaxaca, in 1899 in order to document their “racial types” (p. 1). From the onset, then, Oaxaca Resurgent understands indigeneity and development in Mexico as part of a hemispheric plot. Dillingham does not shy away from asking big questions: What did indigeneity, modernization, and development mean—as ideas, state projects, and lived experiences? His answers will interest not only scholars of Mexico but readers concerned with indigeneity, modernization, and development in the Americas.Dillingham posits the “double bind of indigenismo” as the dilemma at the heart of his book. As he explains it, the state invokes “Native history and culture in projects of nationalism and state building,” which has “meant the loss of Indigenous land, language, and governing structures” (p. 8). And yet, as he goes on, “these same state invocations have proven useful to those marked as Indigenous to make claims for rights, resources, and autonomy” (p. 8). Indigenismo has been analyzed by historians as a project of nation building, state formation, and political subjugation. Oaxaca Resurgent follows this research but pays close attention to the lives of Indigenous people who used the institutions of indigenismo to empower themselves and their communities.The first three chapters describe projects of Indigenous development conducted by the federal Instituto Nacional Indigenista (INI) in Oaxaca in the 1950s and 1960s. Chapter 1 introduces Oaxaca's Mixteca Alta through the studies of INI experts who viewed it as an underdeveloped region. Rather than fighting relationships of economic exploitation—which their research explored—indigenista officials devised solutions inspired by the ideologies of modernization and development. One of these solutions, the matter of chapter 2, consisted in a bilingual (Spanish and Mixtec) education radio program. While short lived, the program trained a generation of Indigenous teachers and served as a seminal experience for education programs in Indigenous languages. Chapter 3 studies the resettlement of hundreds of Mixtec families from the highlands—deemed overpopulated by development thinkers—to the underpopulated coast. Plagued by conflicts between INI officials, resettled families, and the coastal elites averse to government interference, this resettlement project failed, a failure that Dillingham contrasts with the migration of Indigenous Oaxacans to Mexico City, Mexico's northern region, and the United States.Indigenous development was undermined by insufficient resources and flawed assumptions about the relationship between indigeneity and culture. But rather than merely noting the shortcomings and unintended consequences of policies of Indigenous development, Dillingham interrogates how they opened political spaces occupied by Indigenous teachers, unionists, and activists from the 1960s onward. A new indigenismo took shape in these years, as a cohort of intellectuals and state officials criticized the earlier assimilationist project as ethnocidal. This transformation is usually viewed through the work of well-known anthropologists such as Arturo Warman and Guillermo Bonfil Batalla, but Dillingham focuses on Oaxacan Indigenous actors and local institutions. In his telling, meticulously based on local archives but attuned to global processes, the new indigenismo was influenced by the New Left, decolonization, antiracism, and the ways in which teachers and activists appropriated these ideas. Indigenous Oaxacans took advantage of President Luis Echeverría's “democratic opening” and his expansion of the public sector, particularly in a revamped INI and in the Secretaría de Educación Pública (SEP). The last chapters of Oaxaca Resurgent explore how Indigenous teachers fought for an equal standing within the SEP, a more democratic teachers' union, and an Indigenous (bilingual and anticolonial) education.These struggles are usually understood as taking place in the larger context of Mexico's democratization and its embrace of neoliberalism and multiculturalism. Dillingham rejects the existence of a natural affinity between the latter two terms, instead proposing that multiculturalism was forged in the anticolonial and antiracist fights of the 1970s. More ambitiously, his research illuminates how authoritarian policies of modernization and development helped to create movements for autonomy and democratization that, in turn, became part of a neoliberal and multiparty arrangement. It has become a truism that Mexico's Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) was not a monolith, but Dillingham's use of local archives and oral histories reconstructs how teachers and activists pursued their own goals within state and party institutions, undermining many of these institutions in the long run. Of course, there is a gap between the experiences of these men and women and the larger meaning that readers might ascribe to their actions. The lines between autonomy, resistance, and co-optation are thin, and sections of the book seem to confirm the limitless capacity of the PRI to negotiate with, and co-opt, different social movements. This is only one interpretation, but Oaxaca Resurgent undoubtedly adds a regional perspective and original evidence to the ongoing debate about the nature of Mexico's postrevolutionary state. In any case, Dillingham's attention to the global scale ultimately makes the Mexican political system seem less exceptional. In Mexico as elsewhere in the Americas, identity claims made by Indigenous peoples over the last three decades are part of a longer fight for autonomy, economic resources, and political power.