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Ethnohistory 50.4 (2003) 751-753



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Histories and Stories from Chiapas: Border Identities in Southern Mexico. By Rosalva AÌda Hernández Castillo. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001. xix + 295 pp., preface, introduction, photos, maps, glossary, bibliography, index. $50.00 cloth. $22.95 paper.)
Mesoamerican Healers. Edited by Brad R. Huber and Alan R. Sandstrom. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001. xiii + 403 pp., introduction, illustrations, maps, tables, glossary, bibliography, index. $50.00 cloth. $24.95 paper.)

These two books provide testimony to the vitality and diversity of Mesoamerican cultural anthropology, and they show that historically contextualized, cultural studies can demonstrate how the past helps shape the present and how the present may well constrain the future. The books differ substantially in theme and theoretical orientation, each covering much new ground, providing novel information, and pointing to fruitful avenues of further investigation.

Rosalva AÌda Hernández Castillo's insightful and timely book is a translation of a Spanish-language edition. It has much to say about ethnicity as an ongoing project of identity formation and contemporary politics—national, local, academic—in a pluralistic Mexico where the issues raised by the 1994 Zapatista uprising remain far from resolved. More specifically, Hernández Castillo's book is a study of the history, cultural practices, and ongoing struggles of the "Mexican Mam." This diverse, peasant group is descended from migrants who settled on the Mexican side of the Chiapas-Guatemala border in the late nineteenth century, after Porfirio DÌaz's government promoted colonization to help develop the growing coffee plantations of the Sierra Madre and Soconusco areas. In seven chapters, the author traces the history of this people, from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth-first century, who have made and remade their identity/s several times over in the face of changing political, economic, and religious influences and pressures. Tracing dramatic changes in government policies and personnel relating to indigenous peoples, these chapters make a number of important points: first, that the changing ethnic politics of national, state, and local governments played an influential role in the ways indigenous groups defined their identities in relation to external and internal actors and institutions; second, that Protestant missionary activity is not a recent phenomenon but, instead, is one with a lengthy history and deep appeal across Mexico's southern border; third, that Mam men and women experienced their history of cultural loss, fragmentation, creation, and re-creation [End Page 751] in dissimilar ways and that women became more willing in recent years to challenge the gender subordination they continue to experience.

In addition to these arguments, Hernández Castillo tells the story of the Mam dance groups, self-consciously created in the early 1980s to legitimize, teach about, and reinforce Mam identity. These continue to exist, but new efforts, such as organic growers' cooperative societies, an autonomous municipality, as well as several women's organizations in which Mam women have participated, have developed, reflecting the impact of the Zapatista movement from 1994 on. The national government's response has been to increase militarization (or paramilitarization) of the area while disbursing development funds widely to blunt protest and compete with the Zapatistas for the loyalty of Mam organizations.

The book offers a sophisticated analysis and is a challenging read most suited to a scholarly audience interested in the history, politics, and culture of contemporary Mexico. I found the book compelling and useful for its employment of postmodern theory to remind the reader that identities and institutions are always cultural constructions, its ability to weave descriptions of a wide range of Mexican institutions and actors (including wonderful analyses of the politics of Mexico City's anthropology museum and INI, the National Indigenous Institute), and its inclusion of the voices of individual Mam of different ages, political viewpoints, and genders. Combining detailed description and history of the Mam with an in-depth analysis of contemporary Mexican politics as it relates to the southern border region, the book is an outstanding contribution to cultural anthropology and cultural studies more broadly.

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