Etnia, estado y nacion: ensayo sobre las identidades colectivas en Mexico (review)

Etnia, estado y nación: ensayo sobre las identidades colectivas en México. By Enrique Florescano. Nuevo Siglo. Mexico City: Aguilar, 1997. Photographs. Illustrations. Maps Tables. Figures. Notes. 512 pp. Paper.

That the present is shaped by the past is an axiom that few scholars of Latin American history have used so explicitly to inform their work as Enrique Florescano does in this sweeping overview of cultural politics in Mexico. Troubled by the limited public and political understanding of the realities of indigenous life that the Zapatista rebellion revealed, Florescano set upon an ambitious project to trace the broad historical roots of the current crisis. Beginning with the Precolumbian origins of Mesoamerican cultural and political formations, this book explores the changing relationship between ethnicity and the state in Mexico through the prehistoric, colonial and early national periods, culminating with the brutal repression of Yaqui and Maya rebellions during the Porfiriato.

Modestly subtitled an "essay," Etnia, estado y nación is, in fact, a probing analysis of published archaeological and historical research for each of the periods under examination. Linking Florescano's analysis across time periods and scholarly traditions is his focus on the three factors highlighted in the book's title: (1) the development and political identity of native ethnic groups; (2) the institutions of the state as manifested in successive historical transformations; and (3) the early nineteenth-century conceptualization of the Mexican nation-state. What he wishes to demonstrate to the general reader is the mutability of national and ethnic identities largely regarded as fixed by the Mexican public. As his historical survey suggests, these identities have in reality long been subject to manipulation by political leaders and social groups. In the classic "primordialist" vs. "instrumentalist" dichotomy posed in studies of ethnicity, Florescano would avow a strongly instrumentalist view of ethnic identity, regarding it as forged in the dynamics of inter-group interaction. Yet at the same time he acknowledges the enduring values of community and sacred space that have persisted in Mesoamerica since the beginnings of agricultural life.

Archaeologists should not be surprised by Florescano's convincing synthesis of recent scholarship on Mesoamerica's diverse precolumbian cultures, for he has demonstrated his fluency in the language of prehistory in many previous works. Here he moves adeptly from the early development of chiefdoms through the rise of Terminal Formative/Classic period states to the Postclassic development of multiethnic empires, giving detailed consideration to distinctive regional traditions and to the iconography of political and religious power. Departing from conventional approaches, however, Florescano attempts to tease symbols of ethnic identity from the archaeological record and demonstrate how changing political configurations manipulated ethnicity and ethnic groups, issues that in the main have escaped the attention of prehistorians. If at times his conclusions push the limits of reasonable inference, even the most skeptical reader will be prompted to reconsider his or her own received understandings.

Several basic principles about indigenous ethnicity emerge from the complex regional and temporal variations surveyed here. Florescano concurs with James Lockhart and others that the altepetl or independent community was the fundamental unit of ethnic identification in Precolumbian Mesoamerica, subsuming all other social groups like lineages, guilds, and residential wards. Its connection with the physical landscape, where the supernatural forces of decay and regeneration were at work, reinforced the sacredness of the community and gave authority to its hereditary rulers. Complex, multiethnic political states of later prehistory (and perhaps earlier at Teotihuacan) recreated the primary city as a mirror of the cosmic order, while their leaders developed more complex bureaucracies to manage increasingly disparate social entities under the state's domination.

Spanish colonial rule derailed this trajectory of autocthonous development, dismantling complex tributary states and imposing exploitative economic policies on communities disrupted by population loss and congregación. Reviewing familiar ethnohistorical ground, Florescano points out that numerous institutions of the colonial state, from the...