A. S. Dillingham opens Oaxaca Resurgent with an unsettling vignette: US anthropologist Frederick Starr measuring the skulls and photographing the Indigenous population of San Andrés Chicahuaxtla, Oaxaca, in 1899 in order to document their “racial types” (p. 1). From the onset, then, Oaxaca Resurgent understands indigeneity and development in Mexico as part of a hemispheric plot. Dillingham does not shy away from asking big questions: What did indigeneity, modernization, and development mean—as ideas, state projects, and lived experiences? His answers will interest not only scholars of Mexico but readers concerned with indigeneity, modernization, and development in the Americas.
Dillingham posits the “double bind of indigenismo” as the dilemma at the heart of his book. As he explains it, the state invokes “Native history and culture in projects of nationalism and state building,” which has “meant the loss of Indigenous land, language, and governing structures” (p. 8). And yet, as he...
