Except for its effect on those who actually fought in the revolutionary armies, the Revolution was slow to impact indigenous communities. The delegates to the 1917 Constitutional Convention did not debate indigenous rights, and there is no indication that Indians concerned them. No specific rights were granted indigenous people based on their identity. At the time, the indigenous population remained reliant on craft production, poorly remunerated labor on haciendas, and the use of low-yield agricultural techniques on poor land. This use of poor land reflected the process by which non-Indians, beginning in colonial times, had inexorably appropriated the best Indian lands.212
During the 1920s, government policy makers sought to improve the lot of Mexico’s indigenous population. Unlike land reform, the government was not responding to popular pressure from below. Rather, the non-Indian intelligentsia imposed reform from the outside. Advocates of new government policies, known collectively as indigenismo, rejected nineteenth-century notions that Indians were biologically inferior. Such beliefs were replaced by the notion that Indian poverty resulted from their cultural values, the social structure of the Indian community, and the domination, exploitation, and oppression embedded in relations between Indians and non-Indians.213
Indigenismo advocated the voluntary integration of the Indian into Mexican society, especially through education. Its supporters claimed that Indians could become educated, bilingual, and politically mobilized and, at the same time, sustain their distinctive language, dress, religion, and mores.
While it was designed specifically to address what non-Indians perceived as the “Indian problem,” as historian Alan Knight observed, “Indians themselves were the objects, not the authors, of indigenismo.”214
The person most responsible for the development of indigenismo during the 1920s and 1930s was Manuel Gamio, who received the best anthropological training available at the time, having obtained a Ph. D. from Columbia University. He was a public intellectual committed to the success of the Revolution and the building of the nation. In addition to his contributions to indigenismo, he directed the restoration of Teotihuacan, where he studied not only the ancient civilization found there but also the modern inhabitants of the region.215
Gamio felt society, not genetics, shaped indigenous communities. He defined “Indianness” in cultural terms and even declared that Juarez was not an Indian since he had totally assimilated Mexican culture and thus lost his Indian status.
Gamio also believed the indigenous should be acculturated, not because their culture was inferior but because until Mexicans had a common culture they would not form a true nation. On a more practical level, Gamio initiated a program to revive the production of Indian textiles, ceramics, lacquerware, porcelain, and metalwork, whose production had declined during the nineteenth century as industrial production displaced them.216
Indigenismo was formulated without the participation or even awareness of most Indians. Its implementation involved establishing schools in isolated Indian villages. The primary goals of these schools were teaching Spanish and incorporating Indians into the national culture. In addition to being woefully underfunded in relation to the large indigenous population, the program had limited impact since its monolingual Spanish curriculum was detached from Indian reality.217
Rather than rushing to join the Mexican nation, many Indians consciously withdrew from it, since they felt they generally came out the worse when they worked for or sold goods to non-Indians. The indigenous community of Chamula, in Chiapas, even prohibited the selection of a mayor who spoke Spanish. Chamulans felt that mayors who spoke only the village language, Tzotzil, would be unable to sell out village interests to non-Indians.218
Cardenas, following the tenor of indigenismo, viewed Indians’ problems as resulting from their economic relationship with non-Indians. In 1940, he declared:
That which Indians have in common, more than the color of their skin, their forms of political organization, or their artistic creations, is their condition as an oppressed class, destined to perform the most unhealthy tasks in mines or to subsist on the hardest labor in agriculture, in the oil fields, and in the forests, anywhere that cheap labor is needed by exploitative corporations.219
To address these problems, Cardenas proposed changing Indians’ economic relations with non-Indians. He noted, “The program of Indian liberation is essentially that of the emancipation of any country’s proletariat.” In addition he declared the solution to Indians’ problems required new technology: “Irrigation, interstate highways, feeder roads, hydroelectric plants, animal husbandry centers, plant nurseries, orchards, improved seeds, trade schools, and sanitary services will rapidly restore the landscape of Indian regions.”220
During the Cardenas administration, the programs that had the greatest impact on Indians were those that affected all Mexicans. Land reform increased access to land for Indian as well as nonIndian. Similarly, both Indians and non-Indians enjoyed increased access to water, credit, and technical aid. Such programs also lessened local autonomy as they tied Indians more closely to state and federal governments through labor unions, land-reform offices, and local branches of the PRM and its peasant sector, the CNC.221
While Indian incorporation was the mantra of indigenismo, there were dissenting views. In 1936, labor leader Vicente Lombardo Toledano proposed: 1) the creation of new territorial divisions that would be homogeneously Indian; 2) “absolute” political autonomy for these units: 3) the promotion of Indian languages; 4) locating production in areas inhabited by Indians; and 5) collectivizing and industrializing Indian agriculture.222
During the Carranza administration, the Yaqui continued to resist outside control and raided Mexican settlements that had sprung up on land that had been usurped from them. In response, in December 1917, 1,500 Yaqui were deported to other parts of Mexico and were eventually sent to the Islas Marias penal colony. Yaquis would work in the United States to earn money so they could buy arms to attack Mexicans. From October 1926 to April 1927 Obregon took to the field, commanding 15,000 men to subjugate the Yaqui in an offensive that involved the aerial bombardment of Yaqui towns.223
In 1937, rather than mobilize yet another army to impose outside control on the Yaqui, Cardenas restored to them 1.2 million acres of land and provided credit, irrigation water, trucks, tractors, tools, livestock and organized schools, health programs, and co-ops. These measures ended the two-century-long struggle to dominate the Yaqui. From the point of view of both the Yaqui and the government, the measure was a success. Conflict ceased, and the Yaqui became Cardenas’s
Staunch supporters.224
On the abstract level, Indian “integration” remained a goal during the Cardenas administration. However, at the more practical level, it became apparent that programs tailored for the non-Indian population were not addressing the needs of Indians. This led to the 1936 creation of the Department of Indian Affairs. Its agents represented Indians in matters involving land, taxes, and labor rights. It managed vocational schools for Indians that taught agricultural techniques to boys and homemaking to girls. The agency gave free legal advice to indigenous communities and sought to guarantee labor rights for Indians employed on plantations. It organized co-ops, taught Spanish, and promoted government construction of roads, reservoirs, and schools. The agency also coordinated its work with that of other government agencies, such as the Education Ministry, whose work affected Indians.225
After the Revolution, Indians were indeed integrated with the rest of Mexico, but as proletarians and peasants, official clients, and (occasionally) as official caciques. The forces of the market overwhelmed the meager funds that the government set aside to address Indians’ concerns. A 1936 Department of Indian Affairs report declared that “conditions of virtual slavery exist in Chiapas.”226
Between 1921 and 1940, the proportion of the population over five years of age that spoke an indigenous language only varied slightly, declining from 15.1 percent to 14.8 percent. In 1929, using physical anthropological criteria, 29.2 percent of Mexico’s population was declared to be Indian. Precise figures on the number of Indians are lacking since enumeration was so subjective. There was no agreement on what physical or cultural characteristics marked one as an Indian. Speaking an Indian language was also subjective since it was never clear how much of a language one had to speak to be considered as Indian. Often enumerators simply asked subjects if they could speak an indigenous language. To further complicate the quantification of Mexico’s Indian population, beginning in 1930 racial categories were removed from the census since officials felt that the important social divisions were no longer ethnic or racial but socioeconomic.227
World History
