Oaxaca Resurgent: Indigeneity, Development, and Inequality in Twentieth-Century Mexico by A. S. Dillingham

In the face of more than a century of scholarship that has made Oaxaca and its peoples an object of inquiry—in archaeology, anthropology, sociology, and other fields—this wide-ranging study instead demonstrates the many ways that Oaxacans have made themselves the subjects of their own history. Indigenous youth, in particular, drive this interdisciplinary analysis, which relies on local, state, and national archives, as well as interviews with key figures, to highlight the contested nature of state-directed modernization efforts. By closely examining agricultural and educational programs led by state agencies from the 1950s through the 1980s, Dillingham demonstrates the contradictory and complicated nature of indigenismo in Mexico in the decades after World War II. State agencies created to promote official Indigenous uplift in Mexico sought to solve problems that they associated with indigeneity, simultaneously understanding the country’s Indigenous populations as “the origin of national identity, a barrier to be overcome, and a...