SXjra pp: -- Techset Composition Ltd, Salisbury, U.K. // J. Lat. Amer. Stud. , – © Cambridge University Press doi:./SX 1 2 ‘ ’ 3 Civilising the Savage : State-Building, 4 Education and Huichol Autonomy in 5 6 Revolutionary Mexico, – 7 8 9 Q1 NATHANIEL MORRIS* 10 11 12 13 Abstract. Attempts to use schools to assimilate the Huichols into the Revolutionary nation-state prompted the development of divergent partnerships and conflicts in 14 their patria chica, involving rival Huichol communities and factions, local mestizos, 15 government officials and Cristero rebels. The provocations of teachers, the cupidity 16 of mestizo caciques, rebel violence and Huichol commitment to preserving communal 17 autonomy undermined alliances between Huichol leaders and federal officials, and led 18 to the ultimate failure of the government’s project. If anything, the short-lived Revolutionary education programme equipped a new generation of Huichol leaders 19 with the tools to better resist external assimilatory pressures into the s and 20 beyond. 21 22 Keywords: Huichols, Mexican Revolution, state-building, education, Cristero rebel- 23 lion, assimilation 24 25 Between the accession of Álvaro Obregón to Mexico’s presidency in , and 26 the end of Lázaro Cárdenas’ presidency in , the federal government 27 sought to politically, culturally and economically ‘incorporate’ the country’s 28 Indian peoples into the nation-state, predominantly via the efforts of the maes- 29 tros rurales (rural schoolteachers) of the Secretaría de Educación Pública 30 (Secretariat of Public Education, SEP). The case of the Huichols of northern 31 Jalisco (see Map ) – described in the early s by government officials as ‘an 32 almost savage tribe’, whose members ‘go around naked and subsist on 33 34 Nathaniel Morris, Research Fellow, University of Warwick. Email: nathanielmorris@ 35 gmail.com 36 * While all errors of fact or interpretation in this article remain my own, I owe a great debt of 37 thanks to Alan Knight, for his patient and perceptive help in putting together the thesis upon which this article is based; to Johannes Neurath, for sharing his time and insights with me as I 38 struggled to write up the article itself; and, most of all, to the Huichols of Santa Catarina 39 Cuexcomatitlán, San Andrés Cohamiata, San Sebastián Teponahuaxtla and Tuxpan de ff 40 Bolaños, who o ered me information, shelter, food and friendship throughout my research into the history of their communities. ¡Pamparios! 41 Diego Hernández to Departamento de Educación y Cultura Indígena (Department of 42 Indigenous Education and Culture, DECI), June , Archivo Histórico de la Nathaniel Morris 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 ). 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 (Guadalajara: Poder Ejecutivo Federal, 63 64 65 66 Operación Huicot 67 68 69 70 The Huichol Communities of Jalisco . 71 72 73 Map 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 s elaboration from Plan Lerma Asistencia Técnica, ’ 81 82 Author 83 84 Source: i.1-Clu nie / nprint in B/W online, - Colour 1 Fig. ‘Civilising the Savage’ 85 hunting and fishing like prehistoric man’ – provides a particularly dramatic 86 example of the failures of this assimilatory programme. However, despite 87 the popularity of the Huichols with anthropologists, and of Revolutionary 88 state-building with historians, the SEP’s failures in the Sierra Huichola in 89 the period have been mentioned only by Beatriz Rojas and Alexander 90 Dawson, and then only briefly, and without reference to the s. Nor do 91 most Huichols themselves remember the SEP’s early ‘civilising’ mission in 92 the Sierra Huichola, testament to its ultimate failure. 93 Although government officials tended to blame this failure on what they 94 saw as the extraordinarily low ‘cultural level’ of the Huichols, I contend 95 that Huichol resistance was the primary obstacle to their ‘incorporation’, 96 and that it was both the nature of the federal education system itself, and, 97 more importantly, the behaviour of its local representatives, that galvanised 98 this opposition. Through an analysis of how Huichol participation in the 99 Cristero rebellions and the Cardenista agrarian reform was conditioned by 100 their relationships with federal schoolteachers, this article sheds light on the 101 nature and outcomes of the Revolution in the Sierra Huichola, and also pro- 102 vides insights into the sometimes disastrous consequences of the discrepancies 103 between official government policies and their local-level implementation, as 104 well as the more radical effects of Revolutionary state-building on rural, and 105 particularly indigenous, Mexican communities. 106 Some scholars have taken a relatively sympathetic view of Revolutionary 107 efforts to assimilate Mexico’s Indians. For example, Andrae Marak writes 108 that while ‘the oppression that the Tarahumara suffered at the hands of local 109 110 111 Secretaría de Educación Pública (Historical Archive of the SEP, AHSEP), Mexico City, / 112 C//E/. 113 J. G. González to José Vasconcelos, Apr. , AHSEP-/C//E/.. 114 Beatriz Rojas, Los huicholes en la historia (Mexico City: Instituto Nacional Indigenista (National Indigenist Institute, INI), ), pp. –; Alexander Dawson, Indian and 115 Nation in Revolutionary Mexico (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, ), pp. – 116 , p. 117 Interviews with Salvador Sánchez, elder in Tuxpan de Bolaños, Mar. ; Mauricio 118 Montellano, middle-aged member of gobierno tradicional in San Andrés Cohamiata, Mar. ; Antonio Candelario, community leader in Las Latas (Santa Catarina 119 Cuexcomatitlán), Apr. ; and Jesús Mercado González, elder in Tuxpan de 120 Bolaños, Feb. , who, having studied at the Bolaños internado (boarding school), 121 was the only one to remember anything about schools prior to the s, while asserting that the internado was the first school ever established for Huichols. 122 Cf. Mary K. Vaughan, Cultural Politics in Revolution: Teachers, Peasants, and Schools in 123 Mexico, – (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, ); Adrian Bantjes, As if 124 Jesus Walked the Earth: Cardenismo, Sonora, and the Mexican Revolution (Wilmington, DE: SR Books, ); Stephen Lewis, The Ambivalent Revolution: Forging State and 125 Nation in Chiapas, – (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 126 ); Dawson, Indian and Nation. Nathaniel Morris 127 mestizos was self-interested and calculated … that which they suffered at the 128 hands of the SEP, for whatever it was worth, was meant to improve their 129 lives’. However, such interpretations often reflect an overreliance on the dis- 130 course of SEP ideologues, and on the frequently exaggerated reports of rural tea- 131 chers (whose jobs, after all, depended on their success in ‘civilising’ their 132 charges). These views also frequently ignore the Indians’ own, more critical 133 voices, and overemphasise the federal education system’s attempts to socially 134 and culturally ‘rehabilitate’ the nation’s most marginalised groups, while under- 135 playing the abuses of rural teachers, the conflicts created by their attempts to 136 open up Indian lands and resources to outsiders in the name of ‘progress’, 137 and the fundamental ethnocentrism of the SEP curriculum, which, especially 138 in the s, sought the destruction of Indian identity, language and culture 139 in order to create a homogenous, Spanish-speaking Mexican nation. 140 Under Cárdenas, national-level SEP policy-makers did increasingly promote 141 the material improvement of the conditions in which Mexico’s Indian popu- 142 lation lived, and became more tolerant (or even, on occasion, admiring) of 143 Indian cultural ‘difference’. However, throughout the s most of the 144 SEP officials active in the Sierra Huichola continued to view Huichol 145 language, autonomous power structures, subsistence-based economy and polit- 146 ico-religious customary practices – which for the Huichols were all inseparable 147 parts of a complex known as el costumbre – as obstacles to their assimilation. 148 They therefore sought to destroy such ‘primitive’ beliefs and customs, or trans- 149 form them into picturesque ‘folklore’ drained of all meaning. Throughout 150 the period, many Huichols therefore saw schools as directly challenging 151 their political autonomy, ethnic identity and costumbre – the destruction of 152 which, according to Huichol belief, would cause the world as a whole to dis- 153 appear, or never to have been in the first place. Even those more 154 155 Andrae Marak, ‘The Failed Assimilation of the Tarahumara in Postrevolutionary Mexico’, 156 Journal of the Southwest, : (), p. Dawson, Indian and Nation, pp. –. 157 Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán, Teoría y práctica de la educación indígena (Mexico City: INI, ), 158 pp. –. 159 Ibid., p. ; Dawson, Indian and Nation, pp. –; Vaughan, Cultural Politics, pp. –, 160 p. Ibid., pp. –, pp. –; Dawson, Indian and Nation, pp. –, pp. –. 161 Alexander Dawson, ‘From Models for the Nation to Model Citizens: Indigenismo and the 162 “Revindication” of the Mexican Indian, –’, Journal of Latin American Studies, : 163 (), pp. –. Note the Huichols’ idiosyncratic masculine version of the word costumbre to refer specifically 164 to their political-ceremonial complex, so as to distinguish it from las costumbres in general. 165 Aguirre Beltrán, Teoría y práctica, p. –; cf. Dawson, Indian and Nation, pp. – and 166 especially p. Cf. Jesús Jáuregui and Johannes Neurath (eds.), Fiesta, literatura y magia en el Nayarit: 167 Ensayos sobre coras, huicholes y mexicaneros de Konrad Theodor Preuss (Mexico City: 168 Centro de Estudios