The Mestizo State

The Mestizo State is a very theoretically sophisticated book that analyzes in depth from a sociocritical perspective the centrality of the category of race in the formation of the Mexican liberal state in the nineteenth century and in the postrevolutionary period. Throughout the book, Joshua Lund explores the dilemma of the mestizo state and its racial construction. On the one hand, Indians have been recognized as the nation's authentic source; on the other hand, the Mexican state has accepted the Indian's abandonment, poverty, marginalization, and exploitation since the conquest. These “truths,” supported by politicians and intellectuals, have not resolved the aporia regarding the Indian, who is preserved as a source of tradition and national essence but is not integrated into the capitalist internal market or transformed into a “productive citizen” as an active participant in the modernization of the country. For Lund, this paradox is the mestizo state. And at its core is the role of race in controlling the distribution of land and constructing national aesthetic narratives.To go beyond this superficiality and to get to the bottom of this paradox, Lund has selected four intellectuals who dealt with race in their various texts — two liberal journalists and politicians of the Porfiriato, Luis Alva and Ignacio Manuel Altamirano, and two twentieth-century writers, Rosario Castellanos and Elena Garro — to examine the social and historical construction of this state along with its symbolic, material, and spatial roles. These elements help Lund to point out the changing ideas about mestizaje, indio, and nation. Lund deconstructs these four authors through a Eurocentric tradition of critical thought (Immanuel Kant, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Franz Boas, and Ernest Renan). I was struck by the absence of both a postcolonial critique developed within Latin America and the point of view of indigenous academics on the indio and race.Despite this omission, the author carefully contextualizes the rise of the idea of the mestizo state in the second half of the nineteenth century, the different ideas and public policies (cultural, economic, political, and social) implemented, and the development of discussions about “the Indian problem,” the mestizo, and the nation after the Mexican Revolution of 1910 and during the period of the so-called “Mexican miracle” (1940–1970). One of the most important contributions is the chapter on Luis Alva, because he is least known to scholars who currently study Mexico more generally. Lund reconstructs how Alva developed a sharper critique of nineteenth-century liberal politics in relation to the individual rights, sovereignty, and capitalist expansion that destroyed communal property and thus increased the poverty of indigenous communities. To overcome their poverty, to compensate for their exploitation since colonial times, and to recognize the “crimes of race,” Alva favored that indigenous communities be included in the colonization policy, the distribution of land in unpopulated areas to promote small property and agricultural capitalism. In this way, the Indians would become active workers. For Alva, the Indian is not a monument; rather, he is an active social agent in his communities. This view coincides with Elena Garro's, who in Los recuerdos del porvenir (1963) also criticized the monumental history that has tried to erase the excess of violence perpetrated on indigenous communities in the construction of national memory. Like Alva, Garro interrogated the role played by race in postrevolutionary Mexico.For Lund, Ignacio Manuel Altamirano's literature has been studied significantly, especially his novel El Zarco (1901), but most of these studies have examined only certain elements of this story, such as the identity of the Indian, “the ugly Indian,” or Indianness. For Lund, previous scholars have not paid attention to the troubled relationship between the mestizo and the Indian at the end of El Zarco, expressed through the vigilante character Martín Sánchez. Martín Sánchez was the lynch law incarnate, speaking to the “desperate situation in which national development must cede its security to the independent work of others: paramilitaries” (p. 60). For Lund, through this character one can grasp “that the mestizo was in circulation as the symbolic subject capable of lining up campo and ciudad, nation and state, of mediating the delicate negotiation between hegemony and sovereignty” (p. 69). Altamirano pondered the issues of individual rights, law, race, sovereignty, and the liberal state in times of extreme crisis, and his writings interestingly show the indio as a heterogeneous category.Castellanos and Garro put their finger into the ulcer of the twentieth-century mestizo state. From different and sharp perspectives, they pointed out the very contentious relationship among mestizos, the Indian (represented as loud or submissive), and the national. They described the armed struggle of 1910, the land reform, “the race war” (which Lund reconceptualizes via Michel Foucault), and the violence that triggered these processes in Chiapas and Morelos. By analyzing these female writers, Lund uses the concept of race in a spatial and group dimension to deconstruct the novels Oficio de las tinieblas (1962), Balún-Canán (1957), and Los recuerdos del porvernir. Castellanos gives us a more complex picture of the capitalist expansion that crushed collective rights for the individual rights implemented by nineteenth-century liberal reforms, which attacked communal forms of ownership such as the ejido. The Mexican Revolution sought to reinstate the ejido and implemented an indigenous policy, which in the end failed to resolve the dilemma of the mestizo state.This book fits in contemporary debates on race, ethnicity, culture, and nation. It is for a specialized audience in cultural studies, anthropology, history, and literature. It is provocative and goes beyond ethnic studies and interethnic relations that have dominated Mexican anthropology and ethnohistory

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