296
CHAPTER 8 NATIVE MESOAMERICANS IN THE MODERN ERA
Globally, the twentieth century has been a time of reaping the harvest of seeds sown
by nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century capitalism and the liberal reforms
used to justify them. This has been as true for the native Mesoamericans of Mexico
and Central America as for native peoples elsewhere. Liberal programs from the
neocolonial period evolved into more sophisticated and carefully planned modern
“development” strategies, while widespread opposition to the injustices accompany-
ing residual old-fashioned liberalism and the new developmental reforms led to “rev-
olutions” throughout the region.
The revolutionaries and development agents of twentieth-century Mexico and
Central America have not always taken the native Mesoamericans into account in
their haste to create modern nation-states, although they have at least paid lip ser-
vice to the preservation of their surviving cultural traditions. Even the “indigenist”
programs sponsored by agents of the modern world were largely designed to assim-
ilate the native Mesoamericans as underclass minorities. It is not surprising that the
Indians have resisted the loss of their cultural heritage.
Revolution has been one common path to modernization in the twentieth cen-
tury, and another was development. The Mexican author Octavio Paz (1985) has
commented that there are two kinds of revolution, one resulting because ofdevelop-
ment, as in England and France, and one from the lack ofdevelopment, as in Russia
and China. The developmental approach to change is more gradual than the revo-
lutionary approach, and it tends to be more conservative. It may avoid most of the
violence associated with revolution, but it has costs, particularly the costs of devisive
social inequalities and widespread poverty.
Attempts in Mexico and Central America to modernize through both revolution
and development are the main topic of this chapter. Our focus will be on the reaction
to and the participation in these historical events by the native Mesoamericans. The
first section to follow will deal with revolutionary movements in Mexico and later in
Central America. The second section will provide an account of the developmentalUNIT3: MODERNMESOAMERICA