Mexico's postrevolutionary project to bring development to the Oaxacan countryside and integrate indigenous rural communities into the national sphere is the focus of this wide-ranging study that ties together state-sponsored twentieth-century development, decolonization movements, and indigenismo from below. Drawing on diverse sources, including oral histories and files from the Mexican intelligence services, A.S. Dillingham weaves together a powerful story of resistance in one of Latin America's most culturally rich regions, well known to tourists but also historically underdeveloped. Dillingham argues that as PRI rule progressed, Oaxaca's indigenous communities resisted and reclaimed their ground, leading to the 2006 movement that resulted in the takeover of the state capital's center, thus marking a resurgence, as the title indicates, of indigenista culture by those who had long claimed their voices had not been heard.
Development is one of the book's core topics. By the mid twentieth century, the Mexican government, through the Instituto Nacional Indigenista, had come to view Oaxaca as a problem in need of solving. As Dillingham writes, efforts such as bilingual radio education programs incorporating Mixtec and the voluntary resettlement of highland populations to the Costa Chica, a project that ultimately failed due to lack of interest, were intended to modernize the population. These two centralized projects, however, drew resistance from powerful departments such as the SEP (Secretaría de Educación Pública), and the Catholic Church, the latter objecting to educational efforts. Developmentalist projects were rooted in the belief that overpopulation was an issue that plagued local communities. Dillingham cites numerous classic studies from the era and notes how the topic of rural poverty became an important concern to central planners, who often acted with little input from local actors.
Although indigenismo lay at the core of these efforts, it was indigenismo in its classic form, with the Mexican state in control of the narrative. Still, local communities often chose the terms of engagement as they negotiated with outsiders, a thread that picks up steam in the book's latter chapters. Of relevance here is the fact that indigenous peoples were migrating anyway but to other cities in Mexico and to the United States, a point noted in the study.
Political events in Mexico City and abroad led to regional changes. The emergence of the Third World movement in the late 1960s altered the developmentalist model, but it was under Luis Echeverría that Oaxaca experienced more profound changes. The state-driven apertura paved the way for local dissident movements like those within the powerful SNTE (Sindicato Nacional de Trabajadores de la Educación) and the national teachers’ trade union. Dillingham's tracing of local politics and the discussion of how Mixtec speakers became teachers is fascinating, as are the encounters between urban leftists and indigenous councils, the former being taught a lesson between revolutionary theory and practice. Although the study could have included more of these accounts, the real issue is the tension between neoliberal multiculturalism and indigenous anticolonialist discourse that eventually led to the 2006 movimiento. With its roots in the 1970s Petrostate, the drive to commodify indigenous culture through celebrations such as the Guelaguetza, whose origins were rooted in a unifying folkloric festival in the 1930s, lies at the heart of the resistance.
Ultimately, as Dillingham points out, official multiculturalism did not exclude indigenous radical politics. Instead, activists operated within the environment the state facilitated. It was, in essence, the numerous programs, resurgences, and professionals from within and without that transformed Oaxaca's cultural and political landscape, making it one of the places where inequality continues to be challenged. The value this important study brings to the field is that it uncovers the long history of indigenous activism that survived and even thrived despite the oppressive nature of one of the longest-lived political regimes of the Western Hemisphere, a testament to the will of Oaxaca's communities.
