"Assimilating the Primitive": Parallel Dialogue on Racial Miscegenation in Revolutionary Mexico (review)

After the Mexican Revolution of 1910, Mexican intellectuals in search of cultural sovereignty embraced the ideal of racial and cultural mixture, or mestizaje. Swarthout focuses on anthropologist Manuel Gamio, educator José Vasconcelos, and the British novelist D. H. Lawrence to examine contrasting ways that intellectuals engaged "the primitive" in Mexico. She argues that while Europeans viewed the distant Other through the anti-modern lens of "primitivism," postrevolutionary Mexican intellectuals developed their own distinctive discourses of "the primitive." This was because, in contrast to their European counterparts who were confident of their own position at the center of modernity, Mexicans had still to figure out how to modernize their country. More importantly, while for Europeans the primitive was a distant Other, for Mexicans the primitive comprised the majority of their domestic population.

In Mexicans' drive for modernity, they debated how best to assimilate this indigenous "Other" into the nation. In his search for a solution to Mexico's problems, Gamio developed a social-scientific indigenista discourse rooted in social practice, but which ultimately proved degrading to natives. Vasconcelos, for his part, exalted the mestizo ideal through a celebration of aesthetic and metaphysical racial mixture, while insisting that only by embracing Hispanic culture and the Greek classics could Mexicans elevate themselves toward modernity and spiritual transcendence. According to Swarthout, both authors engaged the indigenous peasantry as "primitive" but because of their commitment to modernization, each also rejected "primitivism" and all its anti-modern baggage. Swarthout contrasts this to D. H. Lawrence, who failed to understand Mexico, and instead imposed a European "primitivist" reading that focused on the Mexican Indian as a dark, menacing, primeval savage, the irreconcilable antithesis of modern civilization.

The book is comprised of three parallel essays. Though lack of concrete examples in the first of these can be frustrating, the essay creatively elucidates some of the transnational intellectual strands from which post-revolutionary Mexican intellectuals drew inspiration. The essay focuses particularly on vitalism, "scientization," cultural relativism, and primitivism. The second chapter offers a summary of four hundred years of Mexicans' debates over their identity as a colony, a people, and a nation. At the outset, Swarthout promises to show that twentieth-century Mexicans possessed their own homegrown idea of the "primitive" rooted in colonial history and nineteenth-century Creole nationalism. Her argument, though, loses focus as she navigates through four centuries of Mexican thought. Swarthout's third essay examines the writings of Gamio, Vasconcelos, and Lawrence. Though the chapter is fragmented, it does provide an insightful elaboration upon Claude Fell's interpretation of Vasconcelos.

Readers might find the first chapter of the book to be the most useful thanks to its attention to Mexico's complex relationship to primitivism and Mexicans' eclectic appropriation of German and French vitalism. The implications of Chapters 1 and 2 together might be that postrevolutionary nationalists drew upon transnational discourses of vitalism, scientization, cultural relativism, and primitivism, which they creatively melded with home-grown, nationalist and anti-indigenous interpretations of the primitive. This seems to be where the author is pointing, but the book never states so outright, nor does it follow up on the implications of such an argument. As a result, Swarthout offers fresh insights about the tributaries to Mexicans' twentieth-century intellectual thought, but neglects to explore how these creative insights might revise our understanding of the meaning, motives, implications, or implementation of postrevolutionary mestizaje. An introduction or a conclusion might have helped frame the author's arguments, as would an engagement with some of the recent contributions to these issues by the likes of Helen Delpar, Mary Kay Vaughan, Karen Cordero Reiman, Agustín Basave Benitez, and others. Despite these problems, specialists in Mexican thought and intellectual history will find Swarthout's discussion of Mexicans' sustained, but ambivalent relationship with primitivism to be insightful and engaging.