Indian and Nation in Revolutionary Mexico (review)

This fine book examines the evolution of indigenismo in Mexico from the revolution through the 1940s, focusing on ideas, policies, and state institutions, as well as on Indians' reactions to these. In the realm of ideas, the book tracks the rival thinking of various prominent Mexican social scientists regarding the relationship between race, culture, language, modernity, and national identity. As Dawson shows, there was not one indigenismo, but several. He highlights Manuel Gamio's assimilationist nationalism, dominant in the 1920s and once again in the 1940s, and Moisés Sáenz' ethnic pluralism, briefly ascendant during the late 1930s, when it was championed by Luis Chávez Orozco, among others.

Overall, the book's summary analysis of the history of post-revolutionary indigenista thinking is admirably clear, well documented, and quite suggestive, but it does not break new ground. A deeper assessment would have required a more explicit examination of Porfirian writings on "the Indian question." What was new about revolutionary indigenismo? In Gamio, for one, the Porfirian continuities are striking (for example, in the figures of Justo Sierra and Andrés Molina Enríquez), and arguably more significant than the much avowed influence of Franz Boas' new cultural anthropology. Dawson duly notes some of these connections, but does not draw broader interpretive conclusions.

This is not primarily a study of ideas, however. The book's core is an analysis of indigenista policies and institutions, of indigenismo put into practice, and therein lies Dawson's most important scholarly contribution. Drawing from a variety of government archives (mainly SEP, INAH, and AGN) and a wide array of newspapers, he describes the short, often eventful history of a series of federal initiatives on behalf of diverse strands of Indigenismo: the Casa del Estudiante Indígena (1926-32), the Internados Indígenas (1933-1941), the SEP's Departamento de Educación Indígena (1936-38), the Departamento de Asuntos Indígenas (1936-46), the Congresos Regionales Indígenas (1936-39), and the Comisión Inter-Secretarial de Estudio y Resolución de los Problemas Sociales del Valle de Mezquital (1937-43). Moisés Sáenz' Estación Experimental de Incorporación del Indio (Carapan, Michoacán, 1932-33) and Maurice Swadesh's Proyecto Tarasco (Paracho, Michoacán, 1939-41) are also briefly discussed, as is the well-known Inter-American Congress in Pátzcuaro (1940). For the most part, these enterprises produced very meager results; some were ill conceived, others faced bureaucratic or local opposition, and most were inadequately funded and staffed. Dawson's research shows that, rhetorical flourishes notwithstanding, the practical effects of federal indigenista policy were rather shallow. In the end, the government did not care all that much for indigenismo, and indigenismo did very little for Indians. The Internados Indígenas, perhaps the most successful of the ethno-pluralist, "empowerment"-oriented indigenista educational institutions, are a good case in point. At the peak of their influence, in the late 1930s, there were only 3,000 students in these schools, out of an Indian population totaling many millions.

Significantly, the bulk of indigenista activism occurred during the presidency of Lázaro Cárdenas. As Dawson ably shows, Cárdenas' policy record exhibits a central contradiction at the core of revolutionary indigenismo: an incipient wish to recognize separate ethnic identities, granting them a small degree of local autonomy, clashed with the homogenizing drive to extend state authority and constitute a single national identity. Predictably, the latter ultimately prevailed. A modest pluralism made some inroads during Cardenismo, but the imperatives of corporatist political organization easily trumped it. As Cárdenas declared in Pátzcuaro, "Our Indian problem is not that of making the Indian "stay Indian," nor of Indianizing Mexico, but in Mexicanizing the Indian himself" (p. 85).

In evaluating the overall impact of indigenista state projects, Dawson wants to consider how these affected Indians. In this he is less successful, mainly because his sources are not adequate for that task. He gives...