Ensayos indigenistas (review)

Ensayos indigenistas: Francisco Rojas González. Edited by Andrés Fábregas Puig. (Guadalajara: Ciesas-México, 1998. 163 pp., introduction, notes, photographs.)

The novels of the famous Mexican costumbrista writer Francisco Rojas González are well known but his scholarly contributions are often overlooked. This interesting compilation, edited by Andrés Fábregas Puig, is a bold attempt to focus attention on the ethnographic and ethnohistorical work of the noted novelist. The volume is a compilation of Rojas González’s previous publications that are skillfully brought together and organized into three separate sections. Within each section the editor arranges Rojas González’s essays according to their focus and methodology: ethnohistory, ethnology, and ethnography.

The essays included in section one, published from 1939 until 1942, make Rojas González one of Mexico’s founding fathers of ethnohistory. In his first essay, “Cartas etnográficas de México,” he alluded to the importance of colonial documents and the writings of colonial chroniclers as sources of knowledge on colonial ethnography and anthropology. His essay also revealed the importance of linguistics in the analysis of Mexico’s sociocultural history. In his second essay, “Estudio histórico-etnográfico del alcoholismo entre los indios de México,” he is one of the first to examine the nature of alcoholism among colonial indigenous cultures in terms of resistance to colonialism. He also explored the origins of the different regional Mexican alcoholic drinks and their ingestion as ritual intoxicants before the conquest. In his final essay in this section, “El comercio entre los indios de México,” Rojas González undertakes a historical review of the importance of commerce and trade among the ancient peoples of Mexico. He concluded that an intimate relationship existed between commerce and indigenous concepts of the world.

Three of Rojas González’s most important ethnological essays make up section two. Beginning with “La institución del compradrazgo entre los indios de México,” he made the interesting argument that the system of compadrazgo was of mestizo, not of Hispanic, origin. He was also one of the first to examine the importance of the system as a mechanism of social cohesion and resistance in indigenous communities. In the next essay, “Totemismo y nahualismo,” Rojas González argued that Mexican nahualism was in effect a form of totemism that evolved at the time of the Spanish conquest.

The third section includes three of Rojas González’s ethnographic essays. In “Las industrias otomíes del Valle del Mesquital,” Rojas González reveals his indigenista ideals, stating that he compiled the information so that the government could “take advantage of these observations in order to better the lives of the people under examination” (112). According to the editor, Rojas González’s third essay, “Los Mazahuas,” is an important contribution because of the “rapid acculturation” faced by Mazahua culture today (15). Rojas González’s final essay, “Los Tzotziles de Chiapas,” was a pioneering study of regional ethnography at a time when Mexican anthropologists were producing microstudies of single communities. He examined Tzotzil culture, religion, and society using contemporary standards of ethnographic research.

Overall, the volume has two strengths. First, it unites under one cover a series of Rojas González’s ethnographic and ethnohistorical articles, previously published in journals with limited circulation from 1939 until 1948. Second, the volume offers the reader an insightful and valuable collection of the writings of one of the founding fathers of Mexican ethnohistory. Some of the volume’s shortcomings include the editor’s lack of any discussion of Rojas González’s role in the history of the development of Mexican anthropology. Fábregas Puig, the author of a 1991 book on the history of anthropology in Mexico (Una visión del desarrollo de la antropología en México), misses the mark in not placing Rojas González’s work into historical perspective. The purpose of the introduction should have been his synthesis of Rojas González’s work in light of the...