Dialectical Indigenism and Cognitive-Evaluative Compassion in Rosario Castellanos’s Balún Canán

El indígena no puede incorporarse de golpe a la civilización moderna, como el niño no puede transformarse en adulto de la noche a la mañana; esto es obvio y no requiere discusión

—Manuel Gamio, La población del Valle de Teotihuacán

Imagining Unwritten Scholarship on Balún Canán

How difficult it would be to imagine Mexico’s twentieth-century literary production without Rosario Castellanos’s Balún Canán. Happily, more than sixty years after the novel’s 1957 publication, it is as impossible to un-think the text’s existence as it is to be unaffected by the stirring coming-of-age story narrated by a young girl. By narrating how family matters are affected by national politics, the novel attempts to sway both hearts and minds—that is, to both feel compassionately and think dialectically. With the following, I argue that the novel’s fortuitous mix of thought and feeling can be understood in terms of what Jeffery Belnap has cogently referred to as ‘dialectical indigenism’—an artistic process that aims to combine native cultures with national and industrial modernity.¹ Thus, contra most scholarship of Balún Canán, which elides the distinctly dialectical character of Rosario Castellanos’s work, I read the novel as epitomizing just such a dialectical indigenism, activated to task readers to solve the so-called ‘Indian problem’ of midcentury Mexico. In this way, Balún Canán speaks explicitly to the novel’s time and place, defined prominently by the Mexican state’s attempt to apprehend indigenous cultures via (oftentimes) socialist-tinged philosophies.

Beyond merely applying Belnap’s innovative coinage to Balún Canán, I shall deepen and clarify the notion of dialectical indigenism by invoking Martha Nussbaum’s novel interpretation of compassion, which emphasizes the ethical dimension of emotions. Nussbaum’s thesis—which depicts emotions as “suffused with intelligence” (Nussbaum 1)—helps us to grasp how compassion (especially between indigenous and ladino characters) is portrayed in Balún Canán. Compassion aids us in elaborating judgments that are intensely ethnical and thus, politically cogent. Before pursuing this line of thinking further, I will first examine the politics, philosophies, and feelings that characterized Castellanos’s Mexico.

Midcentury Indigenism and Dialectical Thought

Castellanos came of age in a Mexico that assiduously pursued an official policy of indigenism; the strategy saw bureaucrats, politicians, anthropologists, and artists alike attempt to integrate Mexico’s native populace into the life of the nation-state by way of agrarian reforms, public education initiatives, artistic endeavors, and health and hygiene programs (Doremus). Castellanos had a unique purview into these ongoing measures and their related debates.

Raised within an affluent family in Comitán—town located in the markedly indigenous state of Chiapas—Castellanos witnessed firsthand the peculiar and oftentimes strained racial relations therein; as a child, her household kept indigenous servants and as an adult, Castellanos took an interest in the nation’s indigenist politics and policies. Starting in the 1950s, Castellanos assumed a position in the now defunct Instituto Nacional Indigenista (INI); residing in Cristóbal de las Casas—the veritable headquarters of the INI’s regional coordinating centers—Castellanos worked with anthropologists to document life among the tzotzil, tzeltal, and tojolobal peoples.² During her time at the INI, Castellanos also composed didactic puppet shows meant to instruct native peoples on the essential behaviors of citizens (O’Connell 72). This period in Castellanos’s life saw her complete Balún Canán. In 1958, she married UNAM professor Ricardo Guerra, intellectual best known for his work with the Mexican philosophical organization Grupo Hyperión, as well as his translation of Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Spirit with one of Mexico’s foremost Marxists, Wencelsao Roces.³

All told, Castellanos’s Mexico was immersed in the philosophy, politics, and culture of the indigenism’s so-called ‘third wave’—which witnessed its heyday in midcentury Latin America.⁴ Indigenism was theorized by intellectuals tied to the state such as Alfonso Caso, Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán, Narciso Bassols, and Manuel Gamio, who...