Being Indian Revisited

The first edition of Being Indian in Hueyapan closes with one of my favorite anecdotes from Doña Zeferina’s repertoire of personal stories. I recorded the incident in ethnographic time, outside of history, even though I had rejected this anthropological convention throughout most of the book. In doing so, I turned the timelessness of traditional ethnography away from its usual subjects—from people living on the edges of modern society—and directed it toward the urban elite. The incident itself occurred in the 1930s, when Doña Zeferina was working as a maid in Mexico City. For my purposes, however, the date was irrelevant. The encounter she had on a particular day, with a particular man and his prized “Aztec” dog, stood in for every encounter between the urban rich and the rural poor. The script never changed. You could always count on members of the Mexican upper classes to identify people from the impoverished countryside as living links to the nation’s prehispanic past.

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