Indian and Nation in Revolutionary Mexico
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 19192598 |
|---|---|
| Authors | José Antonio Aguilar Rivera (0000-0001-9250-0827, Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2005 |
| Volume | 110 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 836-837 |
| Publication date | 2005-06-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The American Historical Review (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0002-8762 • E-ISSN: 1937-5239 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1086/ahr.110.3.836 |
| OpenAlex | W2065760711 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 6 |
Alexander S. Dawson's book is a timely contribution to the understanding of indigenismo in postrevolutionary Mexico. According to Dawson, “Indigenismo acted as a medium through which a series of actors, including social scientists, bureaucrats, intellectuals, teachers, and Indian themselves negotiated a new place for indigenous peoples in Mexico” (p. xv). The book's main objective is to provide an alternative interpretation of the role played by indigenistas in the making of modern Mexico. Dawson undertakes this task by closely examining the different institutional policies followed by the Mexican state from the 1920s through the 1940s. Mainstream accounts of indigenismo contend that most indigenistas believed that indigenous peoples should be assimilated into the Mexican nation. They considered that the Indians, while embodying the true nationality, were also deeply backward and atavistic. Their conception of indigenous peoples was in the end negative, and their program for regeneration for them was assimilation and modernization. Dawson provides a more positive account of indigenistas. He argues that the value that they placed in native cultures should not be underestimated. Even the father of modern indigenismo, Manuel Gamio, claimed that the “organic resistance of the Indian” was superior to that of whites and mestizos (p. 15). Early indigenistas actively fought racial theories that considered the Indians as inferiors. They contended that education and enhanced opportunities would redeem the Indian race. Thus the first experiments in Indian policy were the Casa del Estudiante Indígena in the mid-1920s and the Internados Indígenas in the 1930s. Dawson carefully mined the archives of the different bureaucratic agencies that implemented Indian policy in order to provide a vivid and well-documented account of the occasional successes and many failures of these institutions. However, according to Dawson, if we only examine these failures we miss the larger impact of indigenista enterprises. The very promises the revolutionary state made “afforded local residents opportunities they had not seen before, and they would push them to their limits” (p. 66)
Art · Ethnology · Humanities · Immigration · Indigenous · Mainstream · Modernization theory · Nationality · Political science · Sociology · Value (mathematics) · Gender Studies · Historical Studies in Latin America · Latin American history and culture · Law · Politics and Society in Latin America
| Citations per year | 0.43 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2012 - 2020 (9) |
| Highly cited | No |