In July 1993, Mexican president Carlos Salinas sat between King Juan Carlos of Spain and Guatemalan activist Rigoberta Menchú at the Guelaguetza, an annual celebration of Indigenous dance and dress from across the state of Oaxaca. The image of Salinas, the engineer of Mexico’s structural adjustment, flanked by the world’s most distinguished Indigenous activist, applauding the dancers as they performed their indigeneity seemed the embodiment, “nearly a caricature,” of the cynicism of neoliberal multiculturalism: the state invoking Indigenous history and customs while implementing programs that gutted Indigenous communities. However, the meaning of this image—elaborated in A. S. Dillingham’s excellent book—may not be as clear as it seems as first glance. While acknowledging the disparity between official rhetoric and material conditions—an unavoidable theme in twentieth-century Indigenous history in Mexico—Dillingham eschews “facile narratives of neoliberal entrapment,” instead framing the rise of official multiculturalism as “a partial concession to antiracist demands” (18). Dillingham historicizes emerging antiracist and anticolonialist demands in decades of negotiations between high modernist indigenistas and Indigenous activists themselves, who participated in shaping a “multiculturalism from below.”
Dillingham focuses on the southern state of Oaxaca, often revered as the Indigenous heartland of Mexico. He sets up in the first half of the book in the Mixteca Alta—a mostly Indigenous (Mixtec) and deeply impoverished region in the state’s western periphery—and then zooms out to the state of Oaxaca for the second half. This shift in geographical focus reflects a conceptual shift, as Dillingham navigates the transition from materialist, class-based models of development favored by the postwar state to the rise of cultural rights and “so-called identity politics” by the 1980s and 1990s. Using the Instituto Nacional Indigenista (INI) and Indigenous education policy as a lens, the first half of the book explores the limits and, ultimately, the failure of high modernist indigenismo in the Mixteca Alta. The second half examines the critical response to this crisis: a full-scale and often bottom-up rethinking of indigenismo as a whole, and bilingual education specifically. This reconsideration had important implications for Indigenous educators, who used the shifting language of development—from stabilizing development to shared development to ethnic development—to challenge their second-class status within the teachers’ movement. These resurgent teachers form the vena cava of Oaxaca Resurgent.
The first three chapters map the failure of development projects in the Mixteca Alta in the 1950s and 1960s. The first chapter explores the “double bind of indigenista development” (45), which Dillingham frames as government projects intended to improve material conditions in Indigenous communities but that ultimately had the opposite effect. Part of a global trend, at mid-century “stabilizing development” projects linked economic production to cultural and social integration, bringing together infrastructure, education, and public health under the umbrella of modernization. Early social scientific diagnostics of the Mixteca Alta, sponsored by the INI, attributed the acute poverty of the region—its “underdevelopment”—to its lack of integration, most obvious in the persistence of Indigenous language and the lack of literacy. In so doing, these development studies naturalized the relationship between indigeneity and poverty and set the tone for projects to come, all of which cast Indigenous language and customs (and indigeneity itself) as obstacles to modernization.
Chapters 2 and 3 examine specific INI-sponsored development projects in the Mixteca Alta: the bilingual radio school program (1958–1964) and the voluntary resettlement program (1961–1968). Though it was short-lived, the first, a shortwave radio program that gave Spanish lessons in Indigenous languages, represented some of the positive aspects of midcentury indigenismo: it promoted bilingual education and created the first generation of bilingual teachers in the Mixteca. The second project represented the hubris of high modernist indigenismo in all its condescending glory: in the name of integrated development, INI agents, completely disregarding the “significance of community identity and territoriality in the Mixteca Alta” (76), encouraged highland communities to “voluntarily” resettle in the more fertile lowlands. Doomed to failure, the project never got off the ground. Taken together, the first three chapters make the case that so long as indigenista projects remained imprisoned by the international discourse of development, even the best-intended reforms would continue to replicate colonial power relations and even reinforce indigenismo’s worst, most ethnocidal tendencies.
Chapter 4 examines indigenismo at a crossroads in the 1970s. In the wake of African decolonization, a new, transnational left began to challenge longstanding interpretations of global poverty, shifting the focus from “underdevelopment” to more structural, intentional causes, emphasizing the deleterious effects of colonialism. In Mexico, the rise of a more internationally oriented left created a rupture between developmentalists and a new generation of radical anthropologists, activists, and bilingual teachers. Under President Luis Echeverría, the state eagerly appropriated the discourse of the New Left, shifting to a lexicon of “shared development” aimed at encouraging active Indigenous participation.
Whether or not the “Echeverrista Opening” was intended to be purely symbolic, it had real, ground-level consequences in Oaxaca. Dillingham highlights these unexpected outcomes through the Instituto de Investigación y Integración Social del Estado de Oaxaca (IIISEO), a school founded in 1969 to train Indigenous youth from far-flung communities to become promotores biligües. Staffed by dissident social scientists steeped in the ideology of ascendant Third Worldism, the IIISEO trained promotores bilingües in anticolonial, antiracist theory to be not just language teachers but consciousness raisers. Although the school did not survive the austerity of the late 1970s, Dillingham uses it to make two important points. First, the shift in the official discourse to shared development gave grassroots organizers an official language in which to justify their demands of the state. Second, the IIISEO brought together young Indigenous people from all over the state of Oaxaca and politicized them, preparing them for leading roles as activists.
The last two chapters zero in on bilingual educators and their role in Oaxaca’s Indigenous resurgence in the 1980s. Chapter 5 examines their struggle for recognition, representation, and respect within the national teachers’ union (SNTE). Because they had been recruited for their language skills and not their formal training, bilingual teachers were relegated to second-class status among teachers, making less money, working harder jobs, and remaining alienated from the formal union. In the 1970s, the bilingual teachers formed their own coalition and won integration into the SNTE. In the 1980s, that coalition wrested control of Sección 22 (Oaxaca’s local teachers’ union) from the state’s preferred faction. The ground-level rise of the bilingual teachers coincided with a transformation in high indigenismo to a model of so-called ethnic development. This new model, examined in chapter 6, stressed a new commitment to participatory indigenismo: the training of Indigenous linguists to do research in their own languages. This form of pluralist indigenismo was not new in the 1980s, but for the first time it received the support of the state, which simultaneously endorsed neoliberal austerity and multiculturalism.
The rise of the discourse of cultural rights and official multiculturalism hand in hand with neoliberalism is one of the most important developments in Mexico’s twentieth-century history, and Dillingham interprets it incisively and with extraordinary acuity. His findings challenge critics who would reduce the successes of Indigenous activists to “a mere liberal veneer to a neoliberal order” (171) stressing historical contingency and the inherent instability of the state’s symbolic order. He shows that even if the state fashioned discourses of cultural inclusion in order to distract from growing inequality, time and again, indigenistas on the ground in Oaxaca seized on these discourses to justify their demands for rights, resources, and autonomy.
Dillingham further argues that the rupture between class politics and Indigenous identity politics was not as profound as some have claimed. Here, Oaxacan indigenistas’ connection to the internationalist strand of the New Left is critical. Trained in radical social science, the bilingual teachers linked structural inequality to colonialism. Not only did this interpretation not separate indigeneity from class struggle, but it compounded them and connected the poverty of Oaxaca’s Indigenous communities to that of the entire global south. This not only denaturalized Indigenous poverty in Mexico but drew it out of the past, highlighting it as part of an ongoing process.
Oaxaca Resurgent is an outstanding book. Dillingham’s analysis is sharp and conclusive but measured. His insistence that the state’s decoupling of social and cultural liberation not subsume the motivations and experiences of those who fought for cultural vindication is admirable. He maintains a healthy skepticism about multiculturalism throughout, but wisely refuses to give in to the “scholarly cynicism” (177) that has deemphasized the historical demands of Oaxaca’s Indigenous activists to the point of erasure. By embedding his analysis in layers of context, Dillingham tells a universal story, moved by the ebbs and flows of global intellectual sea change, yet never loses sight of the small group of Indigenous bilingual teachers from Oaxaca who drive his story, who are here not relegated to dancing for the approbation of the state.
