From Many, One: Indians, Peasants, Borders, and Education in Callista Mexico, 1924–1935 (review)

Schools and state formation are familiar topics, but this interesting volume still breaks new ground by exploring revolutionary cultural politics in peripheral settings. It examines the centralizing project of President Plutarco Elías Calles (1924–1934) first in Chihuahua, as the outermost expression of the jefe máximo’s program; then in the Tarahumara, Seri, and Tohono O’odham homelands; and finally, among migrant communities on the U.S. border. Even with such recalibrations, Marak must tread carefully around existing studies of northern revolutionary habitats, perforce omitting key topics: Yaqui and Mayo indigenes, or Sonoran Callismo, respectively studied by Mary Kay Vaughan (1997) and Adrian Bantjes (1998). Hence the book at times has a feel of niche-like intertextuality. Structurally, too, there are echoes of Vaughan’s Cultural Politics of Revolution, whose basic architecture Marak redeploys: as in Vaughan, an introductory survey precedes a portrait of educational bureaucracy and four studies of differential peasant engagements with the Secretaría de Educación Pública (SEP). Marak also dialogues (generally supportively, not always persuasively) with Vaughan’s thesis that SEP’s state-building role was less to diffuse a patriotic monoculture than to create hegemonic discourses joining rulers and ruled (p. 79). There are, nonetheless, fresh insights, and a wealth of new research in national, state, and U.S. archives, making this a useful study.

The book begins with an informative survey of Callismo. Chapter 2 is more original, if (to my mind) contrary to the negotiation thesis. Marak convincingly interprets the federalization of Chihuahuan schools in 1933 as the product of bureaucratic imposition, ideological complicity, and economic cooptation. SEP largesse won maestros’ support, while Callista governors’ anticlericalism drove them to support the beachhead of Socialist Education. Chapter 3 details SEP’s failure to wean Chihuahua’s Tarahumara off tesgüinadas (corn-beer bacchanals) and resettle them in centered villages with boarding schools. Mutual incomprehension prevailed as SEP misconstrued a dispersed society of canyon-floor herders as savages, failed to see that beer-drinking was the basis of ritual and kinship reciprocity, and proved unable to protect Tarahumaras from exploitative mestizos. Grilles on school windows to keep children in told the dismal story.

Chapter 4 relocates to Sonora and shows how the Seri––coastal fishermen living tensely alongside ranchers––collaborated with SEP following the mediations of Arizona rancher Robert Thompson. The Seri promised to attend school, fish efficiently, and desist from rustling. In return, SEP adopted a reservation-style, non-integrationist policy. Recognition of Seri otherness climaxed with a scheme to send a “Wild West Show” to Hollywood, featuring Seri wearing pelican skins. In the end, failure was symbolized by the sinking of the Seri’s motorized fishing boat and the expulsion of the interloping Thompson. Chapter 5 examines the significant tradeoffs experienced by the Tohono O’odham, desert Indians who played on SEP’s insecurities vis à vis U.S. cultural imperialism and their “Two Village” transnational status. Again, Marak shows, tribal brokers were pivotal in framing Indian demands for bilingual schools equipped to U.S. specifications and tolerance of saintly cults. In the end, SEP would not meet these demands and Tohono O’odham children attended U.S. schools. SEP found limited success at Piedras Negras (Chapter 6), where the nationalistic curriculum was sweetened with mixed-sex choirs and technical training, which addressed migrants’ romantic and economic aspirations. Even so, the northward drift to displaced Catholic or English-language schools was too strong. In sum, SEP’s repeated stabs at negotiating regional hegemony failed.

The book works best as an anthropological history offering fascinating, beautifully researched indigenista microhistories. It also provides surprising insights into the mélange of Callista educational politics at precisely the point where “nation” meant most to the regime and least to would-be citizens. Perhaps because of its rich specificity, however, the book works less well as a model of...