182 PART TWO
themselves. To the limited extent that public schools entered their regions, they
contributed to the adoption of Spanish as a second language or sometimes led
to total abandonment of their native tongues. Mexican historian Eduardo Ruiz
recalled that as a child he spoke only Tarascan but had forgotten it during his
twelve years of study at the colegio. “I did not want to remember, I must confess,
because I was ashamed of being thought to be an Indian.” Some acculturation
also occurred in dress, with frequent abandonment of regional fashions in favor
of a quasi-European style, sometimes enforced by legislation and fi nes. Over much
of Mexico, for example, the white trousers and shirt of coarse cotton cloth and the
broad-brimmed hat became almost a native “uniform.”
Yet pressures toward indigenous acculturation or assimilation failed to
achieve integration into “white” society that well-meaning liberals had hoped to
secure through education and employment in the modern world of industry and
trade. At the end of the nineteenth century, the processes of acculturation had not
signifi cantly reduced the size of the indigenous sector in the fi ve countries with the
largest native populations: Mexico, Guatemala, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia. There
were various reasons for this. The economic stagnation and political troubles of
the early postindependence decades tended to reinforce the isolation and cultural
separateness of their communities. When the Latin American economies revived
as a result of the expansion of the export sector, this revival was achieved largely
at the expense of indigenous peoples and served mainly to accentuate their pov-
erty and backwardness. Their economic marginality; their almost total exclusion
from the political process; the intense exploitation to which they were subjected
by white and mestizo landowners, priests, and offi cials; and the barriers of distrust
and hatred that separated them from the white world prevented any thorough-
going acculturation, much less integration.
Indigenous communities made such concessions to the pressures for assimi-
lation as were necessary but preserved their traditional housing, diet, social or-
ganization, and religion, which combined indigenous and Christian features. In
some regions, the pre-Conquest cults and rituals, including occasional human
sacrifi ce, survived. The existence in a number of countries of large native popula-
tions, intensely exploited and branded as inferior by the ruling social Darwinist
ideology, constituted a major obstacle to the formation of a national conscious-
ness in those lands. With good reason, pioneer Mexican anthropologist Manuel
Gamio wrote in 1916 that Mexico did not constitute a nation in the European
sense but was composed of numerous small nations, differing in speech, economy,
social organization, and psychology.
The wars for independence, by throwing “careers open to talent,” enabled a
few natives and a larger number of mestizos of humble origins to rise high on the
military, political, and social scales. The liberal caudillos, Vicente Guerrero and