Stand Up and Fight: Participatory Indigenismo, Populism, and Mobilization in Mexico, 1970–1984 by María L.O. Muñoz (review)

IN STAND UP AND FIGHT, María L.O. Muñoz recuperates the history of Mexico's 1975 First National Congress of Indigenous Peoples and the subsequent National Council of Indigenous Peoples from the perspective of the bilingual indigenous activists who organized both. Muñoz conducted extensive interviews with the principal organizers and gained rare access to their personal correspondence and archives. As a consequence, she presents the reader with an original and field-changing book. The 1975 First National Congress is a watershed event in the Mexican history; however, historians, political theorists, and anthropologists have adhered to a simplistic analysis of the Congress (and the Council) as orchestrated by the Mexican state for the purposes of refurbishing the tarnished repututation of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (the PRI, as known in Spanish) after the repression of the 1968 student and guerrilla movements. Indeed, President Luis Echevarría (1970–76), believed to have ordered the 1968 Tlatelolco student massacre as Interior Secretary, ran on a platform of returning to revolutionary populism, including a recommitment to "participatory indigenismo" as the means of addressing indigenous peoples' socioeconomic needs. Thus the indigenous activists who worked with Echevarría's administration to organize the Congress and the Council have been dismissed by scholars as at best dupes, and at worse sellouts who willingly whitewashed the reputation of an assassin.

Muñoz's analytical perspective exposes this representation of the indigenous activists for what it is, at best mestizo condescension, at worse a racist denial of indigenous agency. Instead, Muñoz convincingly argues that "bilingual promoters" (as the indigenous activists are called) maneuvered within the "field of force" between the ruling elite and the subaltern to the advantage of indigenous communities. Rather than portray them as manipulated by forces beyond their control, Muñoz documents the manner in which bilingual promoters used their unique position as cultural and linguistic mediators to catapult indigenous peoples onto the national political stage, to forge a unified indigenous identity from the diversity of indigenous peoples, and to demand revolutionary redress for their economic marginalization and political exclusion. More than seventy-five regional indigenous congresses took place leading up to First National Congress, and Muñoz reconstructs the roles played by bilingual promoters in those regional conferences by retracing their travels across the entire country, outlining the specific dialogues and conflicts theses bilingual promoters had with regional indigenous leaders, as well as restaging the power plays made by local and state officials opposed to the Congress and participatory indigenismo. In Muñoz's invaluable historical reconstruction of events, she is as frank about the failures of bilingual promoters as she is laudatory in reevaluating their successful efforts at controlling the field of force. With the Congress and the Council, these bilingual promoters created a national indigenous organization capable of representing indigenous peoples as full Mexican citizens who nevertheless retained rights and privileges as the original inhabitants of Mexico. Yet, as Muñoz amply documents, constructing this singular vision of a national indigenous political organization at times clashed with indigenous communities who had other forms of governance they wanted to preserve, or who preferred to engage with local "fields of force" rather than intervene at the national level. All this Muñoz reconstructs with unflinching detail, including the manner in which indigenous leaders in the regional conferences were manipulated by regional government agents from the National Peasant Confederation (CNC) intent on derailing the National Congress, even though Echevarría had ordered the CNC to assist in its organization.

This is another much-needed correction to the historiography of the Congress and the Council. Muñoz reconstructs the protracted struggle by which the bilingual promoters wrenched control of the Congress from the CNC by appealing directly and repeatedly to Echevarría's inner circle, demonstrating their political expertise in operating in the field of force. This...