CHAPTER 8 NATIVE MESOAMERICANS IN THE MODERN ERA 319one-third of them identified far more with their traditional communities than with
the nation as a whole. Much of the resistance to the indigenist programs by Indians
took the form of either indifference or careful monitoring of proposed changes from
the outside.
Resistance also took more violent forms during the 1970s and 1980s, as hun-
dreds of thousands of rural Indians joined radical peasant movements in order to re-
coup lands lost to agrarian capitalists. Guerrilla warfare broke out in states like
Hidalgo, Guerrero, Oaxaca, and Chiapas; and hundreds, perhaps thousands, of
Otomís, Huastecs, Tarascans, Zapotecs, and Mayas were tortured and killed by gov-
ernment and private security forces. In some cases, such as the Yaqui and Mayo
seizure of lands in Sonora, the government supported some of the Indian demands,
but overall the response to Indian militancy was extremely harsh.
Scholarly critique of indigenismo became acrimonious far beyond what might be
expected of an academic debate. It split anthropologists and other Mexican social sci-
entists into two hostile and opposed camps: The defenders of the indigenist and
other programs for the “development” of Indians were pitted against those who fa-
vored radical change through renewed revolutionary actions. The opponents of in-
digenismo in Mexico included illustrious students of Indian history and culture.
They argued that the indigenists define the Indians too much in cultural terms, a
process that is misleading: first, because it falsely assumes that Mexican national cul-
ture represents a more progressive evolutionary stage than the Indian cultures; and,
second, because the focus on Indian culture diverts attention away from the Indians’
exploited class condition as rural proletariats. Such critics claimed that the indigenist
program was actually destructive to the Indians because it “modernizes their ex-
ploitation;” that is to say, it makes the Indians more accessible to capitalist exploiters.
Critics further point out that the Indians could no longer be culturally distin-
guished from the Mestizo peasants and rural proletariats of Mexico. Both were said
to be fundamentally Western in culture and increasingly subject to U.S. influences.
It was the Indians’ profound dependence on the Mexican nation-state, which in turn
was dependent on outside capitalist countries such as the United States, that to this
day makes discussion of the “Indian problem” so volatile among Mexican scholars.
The fundamental issue at stake was the same issue that led to the original revolu-
tionary struggle in Mexico: liberation from dependency on foreign powers (the issue
of national sovereignty). Unfortunately, as Aguirre argued, even should the prob-
lem of Mexico’s dependency on outside powers be resolved, this solution probably
would not have eliminated the so-called Indian problem because the Indians con-
tinued to demand to be recognized as culturally distinct peoples with rights of self-
determination (this point is further discussed in the final section that follows).
The historian Alexander Dawson (2004) insists that one of the main conse-
quences of the indigenist project was the emergence of “indígenas capacitados,” bilin-
gual and bicultural Indians who mediated between the state agencies and the local
communities they represented. Through time these educated Indians were able to
make the indigenist programs conform more with local native traditions and inter-
ests, and in the long run this outcome helped create more pluralist relationships be-
tween the Indian communities and the state. But many of these Indian leaders also