In this ethnohistory, Nathaniel Morris examines the indigenous peoples in the Gran Nayar region—sometimes grouped as Huichol, but better described as Náyari, Wixárika, O'dam, and Mexicanero—through the early decades of the twentieth century. He follows these polities with careful attention to schools and their ambiguous participation in both the Revolution and the first and second Cristero rebellions of the 1920s and 1930s. He approaches the region as a “shatter zone” where indigenous actors negotiated between forces of development or change, versus political and cultural autonomy. Morris argues that through resistance and accommodation we can trace the rising influences of bicultural caciques and new social structures, religious practices, conflicts, and cash economies.
Through all these shifts, the adherence to custom (8, 9) afforded the indigenous people of the Gran Nayar a degree of resilience, and, ultimately, a point for unification against the forces of a larger state. This was always a complicated process, nonetheless, with many different interests at play. Morris shows these agendas in the interactions of actors at all levels of government and community. Their conflicts illuminate regional and indigenous identities that these groups fiercely retained in communities that were far from “closed” corporate communities and distant from being wholly mestizo.
Morris adheres to a chronological order. The first and second chapters depend more heavily on secondary works and travel accounts, but the following chapters show an impressive breadth of archival research with special attention to the archives of Mexico's education ministry, the SEP. Perhaps the best of his sources are 46 interviews with caciques. These develop the inter- and intra-communal struggles that are the meat of the arguments.
Much of the book works as an engagement with the historiography: Morris debates Butler, Vaughan, Bantjes, and Meyer on education and the Cristeros; contributes to Knight and Joseph on the Revolution; and builds on Wolf and Scott in his ethnography. As one example, he argues that the Gran Nayar demonstrates both “types” of revolutionary impetus that Knight had proposed, as indigenous groups pursued both serrano political autonomy and agrarista land claims.
To this careful, sometimes deferent, engagement with the historical canon, Morris brings interesting reevaluations of indigenous politics. He argues for a nuanced take on rural violence that elides usual notions of passive victims. Morris is also prescient in discussing indigenous boarding schools—a topic well-studied in Canada and the United States, but largely unwritten for Mexico. His look at the internados is both novel and welcome. The work also shifts the depiction of indigenous communities with his examination of the “cosmopolitans” (bicultural caciques) and his depiction of native agency. These groups’ efforts to preserve their culture, religion, and political economy revealed the internal contradictions of the Revolutionary project. Morris also makes an intriguing point in explaining how, and why, many of the largely non-Catholic indigenous of the Gran Nayar joined the clerical side of the Cristero rebellions with even more fervor than their mestizo compatriots.
Overall, Morris does an excellent job in bringing the political cultures of the Gran Nayar into light. Some areas where Morris might offer the reader more include a clearer synthesis of how his four peoples differed in cultural practices. Rural violence in Mexico certainly did not suddenly stop in 1940, and therefore, some connection might be made to scholars working on similar themes in later decades, including Cedillo, Aviña, Pensado, and Osten. The seismic shift of changing to new cash crops (these are farmers first, after all) needs further analysis. Turning to coffee, avocados, oranges, and bananas must have been a dramatic moment.
This book is nonetheless of exceptional value to our scholarship on modern Mexico. It is well suited to specialists and graduate students and would appeal to upper division undergraduate classes. Morris provides a smart and well-researched entry to indigenous roles in nation formation and state-building in postrevolutionary Mexico.
