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Ethnohistory 47.1 (2000) 268-271



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Book Review

To Die in This Way:
Nicaraguan Indians and the Myth of Mestizaje, 1880–1965


To Die in This Way: Nicaraguan Indians and the Myth of Mestizaje, 1880–1965. By Jeffrey L. Gould. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998. xiii + 305 pp., introduction, maps, bibliography, index. $18.95 paper, $54.95 cloth.)

Gould’s first book, To Lead as Equals (1990), helped lay the foundation for critical scholarship on Nicaragua, which moves beyond the overly neat categories of analysis and the historical periodization created by the Sandinista revolution. To Die in This Way is a masterful culmination of that endeavor. Although the research ends in 1965, the book’s central argument speaks to—indeed is constantly haunted by—implications for the Sandinista years that follow. When a well-placed Sandinista official in the highland province of Matagalpa tells Gould in 1990 that “there are no real Indians” here (274), the reader hears a cruel echo of elite efforts since the mid-nineteenth century to eradicate indigenous communities in western Nicaragua. Against all odds, some of these communities survive, and Gould tells their story both to highlight the Sandinistas’ “abysmal record” (16) in dealing with them and to reflect on how it might have been otherwise. [End Page 268]

The heart of this book is a painstaking and sensitive comparative analysis of indigenous communities in western Nicaragua: beginning in the mid-nineteenth century when they were still numerous and relatively well endowed with communal lands, distinct cultures, and a semblance of political autonomy; ending a century later when they were embattled, stricken with the collective trauma, and (for most) at the verge of extinction. Gould documents the ingenuity, courage, and grim persistence of indigenous community leaders, as they alternately fought for and negotiated their survival—striking deals mainly with the Conservatives, but at times also with Liberals, and when expediency dictated, with both at once. Yet there are not many heroes in this story or even collective heroics. Gritty local-level politics of survival required compromise at every turn, which frequently opened onto co-optation, factionalism, and outright perplexity. Most damaging is the “myth of mestizaje,” which rendered indigenous people invisible: if there are “no real Indians left” there can be neither struggles nor rights that demand serious attention. Gould takes apart this myth, with a virtuoso application of what has become his signature methodology: to carry out the careful reconstruction of local histories—using both archival and oral sources—while combining them with regional- and national-level analysis in search of comprehensive explanation.

Many of these communities had ceased to exist by the mid-twentieth century. This makes Gould skeptical of recent “constructivist” understandings of Indian identity, which offer salutary correctives to static notions of culture but go on to jettison the idea of “culture loss” altogether. When transformation is conflated with loss, Gould argues, the collective trauma is obscured and the brute historical fact of ethnocide is softened. The culprits in this erasure are the Indians’ class enemies, but even more centrally, provincial and national state elites who embraced classic nineteenth-century liberalism cast in the idiom of mestizaje. A homogenous and individualized notion of citizenship could not be compatible with the rights of Indian communities whose collective histories and identities stood opposed to the dominant mestizo culture. Just beneath the alluring promises to Indians who would accept these individual rights of citizenship was incomprehension, invisibility, and punishing racism for those who would not. The comparison of diverse community responses to this oppression allows Gould to pinpoint key factors that facilitate and impede absorption into the dominant mestizo project. In a fascinating contrast between two communities in Matagalpa, for example, he finds that one became politically immobilized, burdened by shame and complicity, and yet remained more distinctly Indian. The second grew more “removed” from Indian culture, more inclined to be involved in mestizo-controlled “union and radical movements,” yet ultimately more successful in defending community rights grounded in [End Page 269] an “autochthonous sense of identity” (239...

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