Rethinking Mexican Indigenismo: The challenge of drawing conclusions from a high-profile indigenista experiment

• In Event: Indigenismo and its contested legacy in Latin America (I)

Abstract

Ever since critical anthropologists attacked Mexico’s National Indigenous Institute (INI) around 1970 for its paternalism and its outmoded projects of cultural assimilation, few researchers have found redeeming qualities in the INI’s work. My research, which examines the first twenty-five years of the National Indigenist Institute’s pilot Coordinating Center from 1951-1976, draws attention to the INI’s “utopian,” early years, its innovations, and its struggles to establish itself in a hostile environment. It also traces the INI’s slow decline into irrelevance in Chiapas. By the time President Echeverría made indigenismo an important part of his populist agenda, indigenous people across Mexico had begun to mobilize within and without the structures of the corporate state. In this presentation, I present my concluding arguments, attempting to balance and validate the well-known critiques against the INI’s modest achievements and the factors that prevented the INI from doing more than it did. I will also discuss the challenges inherent in writing a concluding chapter about this particular project.

Author

• Stephen E Lewis, California State University/Chico