I. NATIONALIST MEXICAN MESTIZAJE

“Nacionales y extranjeros encomian unánimamente las excepcionales virtudes femeninas de la mujer mexicana.”

Manuel Gamio, “Nuestras Mujeres”

At the beginning of the 1920’s, when a coalition of revolutionary leaders became

the authorities of the state, a new Mexico was said to be born. This new Mexico has been

usually conceived by historians to be the consequence of the first revolutionary

movement of the twentieth century, which emerged as the result of the breaking down of

Porfirio Díaz’s Ancient Regime. Since those germinal times, other progressive Latin

American states and popular movements have reconfigured Mexico’s revolutionary

nationalist ideology in opposition to the elite’s post-independence nationalism. At present

days, the same nation-state-centric political system that post-revolutionary Mexico

embodied and that was conceived as the salvation of the country is claimed to be the

cause of Latin American countries’ modernizing failed efforts. At the same time, new

social movements have reconfigured revolutionary nationalism, and transnational social

movements explore the contributions of a new mestiza or hybrid identity for

(post)modern community making. In the Americas, ethnic and women’s social

movements struggle through transnational politics against what they perceive as the

unfair effects of globalization while reterritorializing the mestiza ideology of Mexican

revolutionary nationalism. How have contemporary activists reconfigured revolutionary

nationalism in the Americas? Why is it important for transnational new social movements

involved in progressive community making under global contexts, to take into account a

feminist perspective on Mexico’s revolutionary mestizo nationalism?

This chapter draws on gendering and racializing as central phenomena for

understanding how power works within modern practices of exchange between formally

equal while hierarchically differentiated citizen-subjects. It examines the role of women

within the indigenist and mestizaje politics of post-revolutionary Mexico. By articulating

Latin American Indigenism to anthropologist Manuel Gamio’s life, this chapter connects

mestizaje and community building to Latin American male intellectuals’ subject-

formation. It relates the life of Manuel Gamio, a Mexican anthropologist known as the

father of Mexican anthropology and Latin American Indigenism, to the post-

revolutionary politics of mestizaje.1 This perspective uncovers the political implications

that teleological narratives on the Mexican Revolution have had when informing

Mexico’s politics of mestizo nationalism. I first examine the main narratives on the

Mexican Revolution focusing my attention on the historical references of the revolution’s

pre-modern and bloody mobilizations. Secondly, I relate anthropologist Manuel Gamio’s

life to his indigenist practices, and in the last part of the chapter, I examine Néstor García

Canclini’s links to Gamio. I hope that at the end of the chapter, my feminist research site 1 I will use Juan Comas’ definition of “indigenism.” “Se trata de un movimiento social preocupado por la dificil y precaria situacion material y espiritual en que se encuentran los indigenas de Americas (llamados “indios” o “amerindios”) y que aspira a lograr su mejoramiento en ambos aspectos hasta incorporarlos a la vida ciudadadan del pais en que residen, elevando su nivel socioeconomico y cultural y convirtiendolos, por tanto, en actuvios factores de produccion y consumo.” Juan Comas, Ensayos sobre Indigenismo, Mexico: Instituto Indigenista Interamerican, 1953. Juan Comas, is an indigenist anthropologist. Manuel Gamio, the man on which the chapter focuses said about him “Dr. Juan Comas, intachable espanol de origen y buen mexicano por naturalizacion; en efecto, durante los ultimos doce anhos, que en gran parte dedico a colaborar en la obra indigenista continental, mucho ha contribuido a aplacar las ciegas y desatads pasiones que la disucsion de dichos criterios antagonicos trae consigo. Para el, como para todos los que laboran en el Instituto Indigenista Interameircano y en los Institutos Nacionales que le son afiliados, al verdadero indigenismo no le preocupa tanto la extemporanea y sistematica busqueda de perteritos sucesos indohispanicos, tarea encomendada al historiador, como el estudiar y conocer al indio contemporaneo, tratando de statisfacer con conocimiento de causa sus necesidades y sus legitimas aspiraciones y defenderlo de las calumnias, abusos y extorsiones de que ha sido y es constanate victima.” Manuel Gamio, “Prologo” en Juan Comas, Ensayos sobre Indigenismo, Mexico: III, p. IX.

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will provide evidence of how the politics of sexuality have informed the racializing

politics of the mestizo new revolutionary Mexico. I also hope to have suggested the

productivity that a feminist perspective on mestizaje opens up for (post) modern social

movements’ politics for transnational community formation in the Americas.

A. A FEMINIST GENEAOLOGY OF THE MEXICAN REVOLUTION

El radicalismo actual, puede llegar a ser mayor, mucho mayor, si se provoca su transformación; hay que considerar a la Revolución, como un acontecimiento natural,

enteramente natural; hay que marchar con ella y no contra ella. Oponer obstáculos a su carrera, es tanto como empeñarse en inmovilizar el mar u obscurecer el día.

Manuel Gamio, Forjando Patria

In 1986, Ángeles González Gamio wrote Manuel Gamio’s biography. Manuel

Gamio, an Endless Struggle is the name of a grandaughter’s book on her grandfather’s

quixotic struggle for achieving “a better life for the indigenous groups.” (AGG, 21) The

author points out that “the always difficult task of penetrating a human being’s life”

becomes still more difficult when the objective is to write a biography. At the same time,

to be the grandaughter of the man to be biographied makes this intellectual task

additionally difficult for her. “I confess that my adoration for my grandfather makes it

still harder the attempt to narrate a fair biography.” Nonetheless, adolescent Ángeles’

memories of her adorated grandfather’s “adventures in the jungle and in ancestral

archeological ruins” coincede with the human being that many years later, when she

herself became an author, she uncovered and represented in her text. (AGG, 15)

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Like Ángeles González Gamio, I also know that it is impossible to inscribe

through fair words any person’s life. Therefore, this study on Mexico’s politics of

mestizaje through anthropologist Gamio’s life is not focused on replicating the energetic

and prolific life of this man.2 If I am not interested in Gamio’s life, why do I write about

him? I wanted to understand why Manuel Gamio, who was a middle class intellectual

man of Spanish ascendance, has devoted his entire life to write about Mexican and Latin

American indigenous populations and to struggle endlessly “for redeeming their living

conditions.”(MGG, 11) Since 1906, when he was twenty-three years old, Gamio’s life

began to be engaged in indigenous peoples. Since the very beginning until the moment of

his death, in 1960, Gamio has been a scholar associated with the revolutionary

corporative Mexican government as well as with the US discipline of applied

anthropology. He lived as an organic intellectual of the government of the revolution, yet

he never participated in the social movement of the Mexican Revolution. First as an

assistant in the Mexican National Museum (1907-1911), as well as a functionary in the

General Inspection of the Archeological Monuments in the Education Ministery (1913-

1916), and third as an inspector in the Agricultural and Mines Ministries (1917-1924), he

was moving forward his master achievements, the Mexican Bureau of Anthropology and

the Interamerican Indigenist Institute. “Since he came back from Columbia University,

Gamio was aware that it was necessary to create departments of anthroplogy in all the

countries.” (AGG) Gamio foresees an indigenist Pan-American project to be applied all

along the Americas. He was the president of the Mexican delegation at the II Scientific

Pan-American Conference in Washington, when in January of 1916 he argued for the

2 Anthropologist Manuel Gamio wrote approximately 132 works all along his life (1882-1960), and since 1905 until 1960 he has been very actively engaged in the Mexican state bureaucracy.

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foundation of Bureaus of Anthropology all around the Americas. Gamio asked this

congress to create indigenist institutes in Latin American countries “ as a tool for fixing

the different nationalities of America, which constitutes the model to follow in order to

construct an efficient Pan-Americanism.” (FP, 19) For Gamio it was “axiomatic that

anthropological knowledge was basic for the performance of a good government.”

Population “is the raw material with which and for which any government rules.” The

lack of “integral anthropological studies” is the cause of the “abnormal evolution” of

almost all Latin American countries.3 According to Gamio, for disrupting the “infernal

circle” of failure of post-colonial Mexico and Latin American countries, it was

indispensable to control Mexico’s ethnic diverse population, which at the same time

requires anthropological knowledge. In 1916, the scientific men participating in the Pan-

American Congress in Washington unanimously approved Gamio’s proposal, which

became real when the Interamerican Institute was founded in 1940 in Pátzcuaro, Mexico.

This institute was created after the Mexican revolution “ensayo diversos medios

encaminados a lograr la pronta integracion nacional. El mas sustancial fue la restitucion

de las tierras usurpadas a las comuniades, seguido de un intento de modernizacion

agricula mediante otorgamineto de creditos. Vino luego una campanha de educacion, a

traves de la escuela rural y las misiones culturales, que pretendio difundir en todos los

sectores de poblacion formas de convivencia nuevas. Al observar el escaso efecto de tales

medidas sobre las comunidades indigenas con bajos niveles de aculturacion, la

Revolucion creo un organismo especificamente encargado de buscar el mejoramiento por

la ereccion de internados de capacitacion tecnica, procuradurira de pueblso y

3 Manuel Gamio, Forjando Patria, p. 15; antología, p. 31, and Manuel Gamio, El Gobierno, la Poblacion, el Territorio, Mexico, Departamento de Talleres Graficos de la Secretaria de Fomento, 1917, p. 3.

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comunidades de promocion. Con tales esfuerzos, ensayos y tentativas praciales, vindo

dando forma a programas de accion que han madurado en el desarrollo de una politica

integral puesta en marcha a partir de la fundacion del Insitituto Nacional Indigenista in

1948.”4 Mexico’s indigenist organization and ideology traveled through the Americas,

and in 2004 Venezuela, its presence is still alive.5

In 1942, after the un-expected death of the first chair of the institute,

anthropologist Moises Saenz, Gamio became the president of the Interamerican

Indigenist Institute. In 1946, at the end of his first presidential period in the Interamerican

Institute, he was named by his pairs “the continental symbol of the scientific indigenism.”

Within these celebrations, John Collier, former commissioner for Indigenous Affairs in

the United States, posited that in the administrative and political fields there have been

some men who have surpassed the work of Dr. Manuel Gamio (like general Rondon,

President Cárdenas, President Franklin Roosvelt). Nonetheless “no one has ever been

equal to Manuel Gamio’s versatility in terms of concentration and application,” a divine

feature that “he sustained all along his life with the spirit of science and justice.”6 He left

the leadership of the Interamerican Institute only when he died in 1960, being reelected in

1948 and 1954.7 His deepest desires for forging a strong and great Mexican mestiza

4 Gonzalo Aguirre Beltran and Ricardo Pozas Arciniegas, Instituciones Indigenas en el Mexico actual. Mexico: Instituto Nacional Indigenista, p. 24. 5Juan Comas, p. 60-63. En las reunions internacionales de Montevideo y Lima, en 1933 y 1938 respectivamente, se adoptaron acuerdos reomendando la celebracion de un Congreso Indigenista Contienta. La reunion tuvo lugar en Patzcuaron, en 1940. Ahi se creo el instituto como “organo destinado, entre otras funciones, a ‘colectar, ordenar y distribuir’ informaciones referentes a estudios, legislacion, administracion, etc., relacionadas con el problema indigena; asi como tambien a ‘iniciar, dirigier y coordinar investigaciones y encuestas cientificas que tengan aplicacion imediatas a la sociucion de los problemas indigenas.” En 1942, seis paises se habian adherido, y en 1954 ya cuenta con 15 naciones, habiendo quedado al margen Cuba, Haiti, Chile y Uruguay. 6 John Collier, Consideraciones sobre el Problema Indígena. p. XII.7 Juan Comas, in Antologia, p. 31.

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nation have been always supplemened by a Pan-American union of nationalities, an

apparent paradox that he often convincingly addresses in his prolific articles.8

As a Mexican white man of Spanish ascendance and as an anthropologist

validated by the U.S. academy, Gamio considered himself an equal of modern European

or American white men. But he also understands that Mexico’s modernizing failure

projects on him a wrong modern subjectivity.9 Under this perspective, Gamio’s

identification with Mexican nationalism indicates that for him, his anthropological

commitment for making a new Mexico is entirely intertwined with his modern selfhood

and with internationalism. It is his scientific commitment toward the salvation of the

millions of Mexican indigenous living as “parias” that would introduce him as a modern

man equal to other modern men who belong to the most developed nations of the world.

Significantly, the political failure for modernizing Mexico operates in the sense of

invalidating his identification as a modern man. Being recognized as a modern Mexican

man of European ascendance required him to be accepted by those that he understood as

modern. The existential burden weighing on Gamio is that for being admitted as a

8 See “Las Patrias y las Nacionalidades de la America Latina,” “Patrias y nacionalidades,” and Mexico pais representativo de la America Latina,” en Forjando Patria. See also “Nacionalismo e Internacionalismo,” Hacia un Mexico Nuevo.9 “La investigación progresiva y el continuo contacto con instituciones e intelectuales mexicanos y extranjeros, de ideología avanzada, nos hace ir con las novísimas corrientes del pensamiento actual; somos y seguiremos siendo internacionalistas convencidos, sobre todo cuando vemos más allá de nuestras fronteras. En cambio, en nuestro carácter de compatriotas, de hermanos, de diez millones de seres que se debaten en la civilizacón indígena retrasada de varios siglos, pensamos de otra manera, somos nacioanlsitas. … Descendemos hasta aquellos mexicanos parias, vivimos su vida y penetramos en su alma, a fin de conocer los medios propios para ayudarlos a reincorporarse, lenta, pero efectivamente, hasta que lleguen a ser elemetnos sociales comparables a los que constituyen poblaciones de países aptos para formar uan federación internacional.” (HNM, 4) “El término internacionalismo connota una federación de naciones. Cómo, pues, México y otros muchos países de la América Indo-Ibera podrían formar parte de tal federación si todavía no constituyen verdaderas nacionalidades?” (HNM, 5) “Hoy, como hace veinte años, que iniciamos esta campaña nacionalista, creemos que es de urgencia: equilibrar la situacion económica, elevando la de las masa proletarias; intensificar el mestizaje, a fin de consumar la homogeneización racial; substituir las deficientes características culturales de esas masas, por las de la civilización moderna, utilizando, naturalmente aquellas que presenten valores positivos; unificar el idioma, enseñando castellano a quienes sólo hablan idiomas indígenas.” (HNM, 5)

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modern man he needed to be acknowledged as an equal, a dilemma that his applied

anthropology attempted to solve. The mediation of universal knowledge becomes for

Gamio the tool for his recognizment as a modern man.

Within this framework, Mexico nationalism as well as its supplementary

indigenist and mestizaje politics can be understood as post-colonial elite men’s efforts for

the recognizment of their manliness in relation to the colonizer world. Gamio’s leading

idea in Forjando Patria coincides with other post-revolutionary Mexican men’s question.

How to achieve a great Mexican nation-state admitted and recognized within the

international community of modern states? But how is it that this “grandfather’s

adventure tales” came to be recognized by the political world as scientific knowledge on

other Mexican women and men, that in this case were named “indigenous” and

“mestizos”? Manuel Gamio is correctly represented as a man who struggled for the

integration between the poetics and politics of life, and this is why in 1948, the

Interamerican Indigenist Institute named him the “father of scientific indigenism.10”

However, if he is the father, who is or are the mothers? In other words, which is the

meaning of this shift from a grandfather’s storyteller to a scientific mediator of Mexico’s

mestizaje politics? For answers to this new question, I will begin providing the historical

context of Gamio’s life. Rather than summarizing historians’ representations of the facts

contemporary to Gamio, I will write a feminist interpretation of this story.

The effects of a State-centric representation of the Mexican Revolution

10 Manuel Gamio, Consideraciones sobre el problema indigena, Mexico, Ediciones del Instituto Indigenista Interamericano, 1948, p. vii.

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Why could independent Mexico not achieve postcolonial utopian promises? By

positing that Mexican elite’s recursive failure in modernizing Mexico had constituted the

main problem of the country, actual and contemporary narratives on the Mexican

Revolution follow similar rhetorical strategies. This initial research question leads

historians to assume that the Mexican Revolution stemmed from the incompatible contact

between a pre-modern and a modern Mexico. In addition, its formulation naturalizes

connections among Porfirio Díaz’s modernizing economic initiatives, the Mexican

Revolution, and ruling class’ claim for a strong state provider of political stability.

Modern historiography, which represents the participation of indigenous

populations as the bloody expressions of uncontrolled rural mobilizations, naturalizes the

transformation of social participation into political representation. It also states that the

basic limitation for Mexico becoming modern stemmed from the great proportion of

indigenous and mestiza Mexican peoples in relation to the minor proportion of Spanish

origin population. Looking for admittance and recognizment within the “ultramodern”

world, the Mexican elite goes through the entire country (and sometimes the hemisphere)

quantitatively and qualitatively measuring populations and territories. The magic word

mediating between the indigenous Mexico and these intellectuals who desired to be

identified as equals by modern European men was “scientific knowledge.” In the

understanding that scientific knowledge was the necessary requirement for an efficient

Post-Revolutionary government, Gamio struggled for the redemption of Latin American

indigenous peoples and their transformation into mestizo citizens of the world.11

11 Especially see, Manuel Gamio, El gobierno, la poblacion, el territorio. Mexico, Talleres Graficos de la Secretaria de Fomento, 1917.

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By emphasizing the presence of the archeolgical past, and by linking monumental

pre-Columbian ruins to Mexican indigenous people, these middle class intellectuals,

favorably position themselves in opposition to the overwhelming presence of this

glorious indigenous past. They face the challenge of transforming this pre-modern world

in order to be recognized as modern by the “ultramodern” world, as Gamio named it.12

Once the Mexican Revolution was institutionalized, this self-defined enlightened elite

declared that it was necessary to engender a new mestiza nation in order to disrupt

Mexico’s failed attempts to become modern. All along Gamio’s life it is possible to

observe his anguished oscillations between his pessimism as a Mexican man challenged

by the recursive cycles of never ended revolutions and his euphoric celebrations of a

future glory to be embodied by a new beginning for the administration. Gamio divorced

from an understanding of extreme political struggle, can be compared to many other

middle class men deeply engaged with the revolutionary aims of redeeeming the

indigenous and forming the citizens. Among the many interpretations done by/of Latin

American intellectuals’ progressive positions, I select Néstor García Canclini’s

explanations of this progressive committment for the people. This author reconfigures

Gamio’s understanding of multiple Mexicos. He emphasizes the relevance of cultural

consumption at present global times, while re-introducing the trope of mestizaje through

consumption for explaining Latin American shifts between cultural modernism and social

(post)modernization. This author rejects the “unfinished transition” perspective often

applied to Latin America. He proposes that an “inter-classes mestizaje” has generated

multi-temporal “hybrid formations.” García Canclini understands this hybridity as the

result of the utopian commitments for social transformation of a continental elite

12 Manuel Gamio, “Nacionalismo e Internacionalismo,” HMN, p. 3.

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tensioned between structural conflicts at the domestic order and dependence at the

international sphere (74), a repeated while always challenging cliché of Latin American

historiography.

Two supplementary discursive strategies construct the Revolutionary state’s

politics on mestizaje and Indigenism for the modern new Mexican nation-state to be

born: A state-centric perspective on social mobilizations overlapping a developmental

narrative on culture. Historiography often represents Porfirio Díaz as a prisoner of the

success of his own modernizing politics, and anthropological discourses conceive

Mexico’s indigenous populations to be the cause of the failure of the modernizing dreams

of the country. The convergence of these two narratives marks the beginning of the

twentieth century as the seminal scenario for the proliferation of modern Mexican

recursive and un-controlled rural mobilizations. Indeed, both historiography and

anthropology conceive the centralizing and unifying force of the state as the Deus ex-

machina that will make of Mexico a mestizo modern country.

Along these lines, the success of the armed indigenous mobilization is understood

as the precursor movement of the new Mexico to be made. A unified mestiza nation

becomes the pre-condition for creating this new Mexican efficient modernizing state. But

how can the indigenous people, who are responsible both of Mexico’s modernizing

failure and of Mexican Revolution’s success, become part of the new mestiza nation to be

made? By emphasizing the violence and marking the ethnicity of the Indians and

mestizos, modern historiography does more than following Hobbes’ narrative on the

necessity of a state of law in order to control human beings’ natural state of war.

Historians’ emphasis on the threats stemmed by the articulation of diversity and ethnicity

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leads to the logical construction of a mestiza nation as a pre-condition for post-

revolutionary modern Mexico. This magic narrative articulates state production to nation

reproduction, a twist that introduces sexuality politics, and women’s agency enters within

the debate.

There would be anything new in reflecting on how for the exchange between

formally equal citizen-subjects, the mediation of national state constitutes an

indispensable requirement. In the Mexican case this assumption would explain why the

state promoted through mestizaje and indigenist politics the transformation of a

heterogeneous indigenous social movement into a mestizo nation. This narrative

corresponds to the perspective of a third-world nationalism in formation. This rhetoric

posits that at the end of the nineteenth century, a new elite opposed the Porfirian Díaz’ s

ruling classes composed mainly by generals and political technocrats. It also states that

by 1908-1909, in abeyance local discontents coincided against Díaz while the country

experiencing a great change when multiple waves of oppositional movements expanded

nationwide. The regime could no longer sustain the unstable balance of its centralized

political system and a national crisis took place when the Porfirian elite failed to agree on

who should succeed the aging Diaz. The struggle for political supremacy first emerged in

Ciudad de México and other regions that were becoming prosperous drawing on the

liberal abolition of corporate property. The struggle for the formation of the national

market underlies the post-revolutionary efforts for making a new Mexico often

contextualized within the Pan-American Indo-Ibero America.

This post-colonial historiography has repeated that meanwhile the political crisis

was running, the rural inhabitants had engaged in multiple local bloody rebellions. In

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1908 Mexico was third in world sugar production, and the state of Morelos produced

over a third of the country’s sugar. In 1909, Morelos was going to elect a new governor.

This election fueled the pueblos’ older discontents originated on their loss of community

lands, which upraised against both the hacienda system and the state. When the new

governor of Morelos achieved his victory by military methods, many opposition leaders

went to the forefront. Among those were Francisco Madero and Emiliano Zapata.

Madero, a son of one of the richest families of northeastern region of the country,

declared himself the president of Mexico. Madero’s Plan of San Luis de Potosí promised

the restitution of the old corporate lands to the pueblos. According to many historians,

this convinced Zapata, a landowner with social and political roots in the state of Morelos,

to integrate Maderos’s revolution with millions of Indians and mestizos.13

Within this logic, Diaz’s regime failure to crush the localized revolts in the north

expanded the rebellion throughout the republic.“Rivalries between segments of the

provincial and local elites were rooted in Mexico’s vast geographic, economic, cultural

and political diversity” and dozens of local revolutionary movements took place

elsewhere.14 On August 1914, the new army of rebels occupied Ciudad de México, and

by the end of the year Porfirian Mexico was subverted by a shift in the political elite who

constituted the new State in 1917. In the 1930’s, after a twenty- year period of armed

confrontations, President Lázaro Cárdenas had definitely reconciled and institutionalized

the great number of local mobilizations through the National Revolutionary Party. Three

13 Alan Knight, another well-known historian of the Mexican Revolution, states that the rebel movement began in the closing months of 1910 “in the wake of the anti-re-election campaign, the fraudulent elections, and Madero’s call to arms.” By Knight’s account, the rural strategy was not a calculated option of the rebel movement, which earlier had established “a typical contrast between agrarian upheavals and industrial peace.”? For this author, the insurrection developed in areas where the Maderista organizers had not anticipated a great success: The mountain districts of western Chihuahua and Durango, and the Laguna country on the Durango/Coahuila borders.14 John Hart, Revolutionary Mexico, p. 73.

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sectors delimited political participation within the nation-state: Workers, peasants, and

popular/military. Each sector had one vote. The party’s peasant sector comprised the

absolute majority of the rural population. Nonetheless the unified vote of the popular and

military sectors granted the state’s control of the radical tendencies both of the peasants

and workers’ sectors.

At the end of the story of the Mexican Revolution, the great number of indigenous

mobilizations that arose against the government of Porfirio Diaz will require a stronger

and unifying state capable of making a modern nation necessary for achieving social

justice. The civilized mestizo citizen of a civilizing modern national state would

substitute the state of war both of the Porfirian old generals and of the multiple rural

movements. The victorious revolutionaries would have neutralized their own rebellious

movement, transformed it into a national corporate ideology, and became the new experts

of an efficient modern state. The tautological feature of this historiography recognizes in

the increase of the mercantile exchanges promoted by Díaz’s modernizing reforms the

causes of the Revolution’s local mobilizations and legitimates the rural uprisings.

However, it also demonizes the proliferation of uncontrolled social change, while

promoting the political mediation of the state in order to control the reproduction of the

state of nature and war of the Mexican Revolution. The national market is the center of

this narrative that understands that civilized practices of exhange between formally equal

mestizo subjects would substitute indigenous people’s pre-modern ways of living. This

rhetoric reinforces the Mexican State’s claim for civilizing the nation through the

institutionalization of the same prolific social movements that had given birth to the

Mexican Revolution. The leaders that emerged from the revolution continued the agrarian

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politics of Madero’s Plan de Potosí. The Constitution of 1917 considered the government

an active force bringing about national economic and social changes, and its article 27

gave the Mexican State the ownership of all lands and waters, and it established the

maximum size of private landholdings. In the 1930’s, after many years of armed

confrontations, President Lázaro Cárdenas had definitely reconciled and institutionalized

the great number of mobilizations of the Mexican Revolution through the National

Revolutionary Party.

As it had happened at the beginning of the rebellion against Díaz’s regime, the

presidential election of 1940 put again at stake the security of the now institutionalized

revolution. In order to consolidate President Cardenas’ reforms, the radical impulse of the

revolution finished. The president’s support of a moderate presidential candidate, Manuel

Avila Camacho against José Vasconcelos was a political move in this direction. Those

social forces that had been involved in the Mexican Revolution became institutionally

dependent on the state mechanisms of representation. The government controlled the

many indigenous social movements of the revolution, neutralized class struggles, and the

revolution was institutionalized by a front of popular organizations that agreed not to

participate in electoral activities outside the party. This precise moment, when Post-

Revolutionary Mexico’s falled again within the recursive cycles of negating the

modernizing dreams, marks again the country as a pre-modern nation and coincedes with

Manuel Gamio’s accomplishment of his life dream. In 1910 he had proposed to the

Congress of Americanists that were celebrating in Ciudad de México the first one

hundred years of the independence of the country to create centers of anthropological

research all along the continent. In 1942, Gamio became the director of the Interamerican

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Indigenist Institute, and since that moment until his death in 1960 he consolidated his

position as the father of Mexican anthropology while extending his redemption efforts to

“América Ibero-India” and becoming, by extension, the father of scientific Latin

American indigenism. This shift from a national to an international indigenism

repositions Gamio’s desires for international recognizment when a new pessimistic

period of critiques to the Revolution was beginning to close again Gamio’s domestic

modernizing dreams.

Nevertheless, the original question on independent Mexico’s difficulty for

achieving modernization has shifted on why Post-Revolutionary Mexico could not

achieve postcolonial utopian promises. The breakdown of international postcolonial

insurgencies against imperialist powers becomes now the key research question of

progressive intellectuals who imagine a Third World nationalism that could be

generalized to become the revolt of the world proletariat. The Theory of Dependence

reformulates again the initial question on the recursive modernizing failure of Third

World countries while proposing a Latin American community formation paralleling the

Cepal’s theory on the need for a common regional market. This theory shifts the

modernizing rhetoric on the need for a national market that had informed Mexican

revolutionary nationalism, to a Latin American space. Octavio Paz and Pablo González

Casanova, two contemporary Mexican intellectuals identified with Angel Rama’s Ciudad

Letrada, are representative authors whose modernization narratives have reconfigured

Mexican revolutionary nationalism.15 Paz places himself among those Mexicans who he

15 Octavio Paz. The Labyrinth of Solitude, Grove Press, New York (1961), 1985 and Pablo González Casanova. La Democracia en Mexico. FCE, Mexico, 1965. Octavio Paz wrote that “The minority of those Mexicans who are aware of their own selves do not make up a closed unchanging class. They are the only active group, in comparison with the Indian-Spanish inertia of the rest, and every day they are shaping the country more and more into their own image.

16

makes responsible for failing to create a modern nation-state on their own image while

thinking that the Indian and the Spanish roots constitute the stigma of the under-

development cycles of the country. González Casanova, a respectful and influential

historian who belongs to academic and political Mexican endogamy, also states that

ethnic heterogeneity constitutes the basic limitation for Mexico becoming modern.16 At

the turn of the twentieth century, Paz and Casanova’ positions return again to Mexico’s

racialization narratives on Mexican multicultural roots shaping a pre-modern heritage

responsible of Mexico’s underdevelopment.17 Drawing on the Dependency Theory,

Casanova has pointed out that Mexico’s domestic colonialism excludes Mexican Indians

from the national society.18 The entire argument of Casanova is based upon a chain of

16 …buscar asi una acción política que resuelva a tiempo, cívica, pacíficamente, los grandes problemas nacionales es el principal objetivo político que buscamos, sintiéndonos como nos sentimos corresponsables y partícipes del gran movimiento que se inció en 1910 y que, una y otra vez, lucha por salir del eterno retorno y alcanzar sus metas. Ibid., p. 72.17 Herencia del pasado, el marginalismo, la sociedad plural y el colonialismo interno subsisten hoy en Mexico bajo nuevas formas, no obstante tantos años de revolución, reformas, insdustrialización y desarrollo y configuran aún las características de la sociedad y la política nacional.Pablo Gonzalez Casanova, p. 7218This intellectual movement links Casanova to Roger Hansen, a US historian who aims at resolving the theoretical challenges, meaning the difficulty for understanding the Mexican Revolution through universalizing patterns, by comparative approaches.Roger D. hansen. The Politics of Mexican Revolution. Baltimore, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971. P. XI. In p. XIII, Hansen is more explicit regarding the dificulties for studying Mexican historical process: ‘Every student of Mexico will draw a different conclusion from an analysis of the trends and of the past four years. This, too, is a pattern familiar to Mexico and is a tribute to the mysteries of the Mexican political and socioeconomic systems and their πåtterns øf interaction, which have yet to be understood on anything approachˆng even an elemetnary level of comprehensivenesss. Threfore, this new introduction will attempt to distiguish between the major evetns andtrends on the one hand and our interpretations of them on the other.” Based on numerical data of the Comisión Económica para América Latina (Cepal), this author leaves some interesting question unanswered. He emphasizes the importance of the Revolution, which has created a new constitutional framework. The constitutional articles dealing with land reform and the rights of labor are the foundational frames of the inclusive capabilities of the Mexican political system. Hansen states that the social goals expressed in the 1917 Mexican constitution were revived between 1934 and 1940, during the Cardenas administration. The author focuses his key research questions on Cardenas’ presidential period when over 800,000 families recuperate by the state expropriation their land, and the labor force benefited from the great state support lent to workers’ organizations. This rural focus of the revolution is often described, although not explained, by the historiography. Additionally, it seems incongruous that a nation, which underwent a profound and violent confrontation, and framed a new constitution, reinforced an inequitable pattern of income distribution between 1940 and the early 1960s. The Mexican revolution seems to have acquired a special twist during the Cardenas’ administration. This key period during which the revolution institutionally shaped the power relations that characterized Mexico for a long while.

17

exploitation placing the final burden of capitalist development in the rural periphery, and

the marginal indigenous and mestizos become central to the existence of industrial

Mexico. This perspective focuses again on Post-Revolutionary modernization’s effects in

Mexico, which have polarized the country, making poorer the already poor populations

and richer the already rich elite. Corruption of Latin American governments constitutes

an alternative explanation for the failure that in the Mexican case is evidenced by the

post-revolutionary appropriation of the revolutionary redemption narratives.

Casanova and other intellectuals of the Dependency Theory correctly point out

that the aforementioned domestic description reproduces nationally what also happens

internationally, where the place of underdeveloped Third World nations within the world

capitalistic system parallel the place of subordinated regions within the domestic space. If

this is the case and the same patterns of power visible at an international level were also

distinguishable on intra- and inter-regional levels within the boundaries of a single

nation-state, then it becomes indispensable to simultaneously change the multiple orders

of hierarchical power relationships. At the end of the sixties, the struggles for national

liberation acquire a continental framework and marked a new beginning of Pan-American

modernizing dreams. Financial and industrial hegemony draw on unequal commercial

exchange relationships, and as a result social distance between colonizers and colonized

areas will always reproduce and polarize regions as well as peoples. The

conceptualization of a chain of metropolis-periphery relations, as it drew resources up

from the most remote hinterland toward the industrial or financial center, constituted a

vital element in the continued development of European, American, and Third World

capitalism.

18

In the scheme of the Theory of Dependence, the behavior of the elite of post-

colonial nations mediate the process the marginal nation’s achievement of modernization,

as well as within Manuel Gamio’s applied anthropology, scientific knowledge informed

the indigenist politics that would have to create the modern mestiza nation. This turn

integrates chronological historicism to spatial power relationships, and an international

re-mapping supplements previous historicist ways for modernizing Third World pre-

modern nation-states. U.S. third world women propose the rearticulation of a new

mestiza identity for (post)modern social movements’ trnasnational struggles in the

Americas. Nonetheless, as a Latin American woman I am also marked by the

aforementioned story of recursive failure, therefore to chronologically map

anthropologist Manuel Gamio’s indigenist and mestizaje politics constitutes my starting

point for explaining why these progressive attempts have failed.

His book Forjando Patria (1916) as well as his recopilation of essays Hacia un

Nuevo México (1935) proposes that the Mexican Revolution has to remake a new nation,

and subsequently, new Mexicans. 19 In both texts, Gamio’s initial words posit Mexican

middle class men’s anguishes for their admittance as equals within the international

community of civilized nations. This international community shares with Mexican male

middle class the idea that the Indian and mestiza condition of the Mexican population has

impeded the modernization of the country. A new mestizaje has to be born from the old

mestizo Mexico. Furthermore, Gamio’s need for international admittance and

19 See Juan Comas, “La vida y la obra de Manuel Gamio,” in Universidad Autónoma de México, Sociedad Mexicana de Antropología, Estudios Antropológicos publicados en homenaje al doctor Manuel Gamio, pp.17-26. See also Angeles González Gamio, Manuel Gamio, Una lucha sin final. UNAM, 1987. He wrote Forjando Patria, Pro-Nacionalismo (1916), that he dedicates to his father, when he began to get deeply involved in the Mexican state’s Post-Revolutionary politicies during Carranza’s presidency. His second book, Hacia un México Nuevo compilates 28 essays that he wrote within President Lázaro Cárdenas presidential period, when Gamio again felt the same hopes that previously had led him to write Forjando Patria at the initial institutionalizing moments of the revolution.

19

recognizment projects Mexico as an emblematic case for Indo-Ibera America community

formation.20

Many contemporary academics shared Gamio’s thoughts and recognized

the values of this “sabio.” They recognized in Gamio a pair specialized in Indigenous

matters in a country where “the masses” were Indigenous. “But among all his qualities,

the most admired in Dr. Gamio, is his passionate lucidity as a researcher, a quality that is

based in the love he feels for the indigenous groups that inhabit our territory, groups for

whom he fights to incorporate to the harmonious life of the forces of progress of the

nation.”21 When Enrique González Casanova pronounced the above words, Manuel

Gamio was 73 years old. First as a student, and afterwards as a functionary he has always

worked and lived by and for the Mexican corporative state administration. In

anthropological terms, his life as well as the life of other male figures of his family as the

“provider male” has not been easy. At the beginning of the twentieth century, nation-

states’ international competition marked with war the destiny of the modern world, and

the ruling classes of Latin American countries were highly worried about the viability of

their respective nation-states. Mexican middle class men, whose manliness was also at

stake, found within the state’s bureaucracy a safe place for reproducing the conditions for

their own survival. A century later, in the nineties, the reproductory power of bureaucracy

made Aurelio de los Reyes say in 1991, in the introduction of his book Manuel Gamio y

el cine, that when in 1990 he has looking for the files of Manuel Gamio, Franz Blom, and

20 Indo-Ibero America will constitute the imagined community that will emerge from the colonial and post-independence unbalanced mestizaje. But Latin American social movements and progressive goverments’ affiliation to Mexican revolutionary nationalism constitutes a more significant research question than Gamio’s expansionist perspective. The feminist genealogy of Latin American mestizaje that this dissertation does will illuminate the potential contributions embedded in this foundational concept for contemporary social movements’ community formation in the Americas.

21 Henrique González Casanova, p. VII.

20

Carlos Noriega, in the Agriculture Direction where functioned the Beaureau of

Anthropology, “It was insolit. They found them, but yet as active personel!”22

B. MANUEL GAMIO’S BROTHERHOOD

Today it is revolutionary Mexican men’s turn for grapping the mallet and girdling the forging apron

In order to make emerge from the miraculous anvil the new fatherland where iron andbronze will become funded

There is the iron…There is the bronze … Slap, brothersFor the great forging of America, the bronze and the iron of the virile races have slapped for centuries on

the Andes’ gigantic anvil(FP 5)

-“A new Mexico has to be born!” These are Manuel Gamio’s 1935 words. In

those days, the Mexican State re-inscribed the revolutionary uprisings of the Indians by

incorporating them within the peasants’ sector of the Revolution Party. Looking to

construct a nation-state free from Europe and safe from the United States, while

differentiating themselves from the Porfirian Regime, the new leaders of the revolution

began to build the future by using Indian history. “While an important segment of the

reformers looked abroad for cultural guidance, as Porfirian society had before it, the

revolution did not deny the ability of the native peoples to change for better.”23 Social

mobilizations would become civilized representations within the state’s corporate system,

and the heterogeneous population of the countryside would become rural classes of an

ejido-based development model of an oil producer country. Through this narrative, the

State incestuously reproduced itself by the violent conception of a mestiza nation that

will revitalize the decadent Díaz’s regime.24

22 Aurelio de los Reyes, Manuel Gamio y el cine, Mexico, UNAM, 1991, p. 6.23 Ramón Eduardo Ruiz U., “The Struggle for a National Culture in Rural Education,” p. 475.24 Manuel Gamio, Hacia un Nuevo México, Problemas Sociales. W/e, México, 1935, p. 1. In the acdemic as well in the political realm, Manuel Gamio was considered the “Mexico’s most distinguished anthropologist

21

At the beginning of the twentieth century, nation-states’power within a

competitive world market depended on territory and population. This was particularly

true for Mexico, a country that in Gamio’s words had lost his northern territory and has

been engaged in bloody and enless post-independence fratricide struggles on the basis of

this national weakness. Gamio made public this opinion since 1910. His friend and boss

at the National Museum, Genario Padilla, personally read at the Ciudad de México

Congress of Americanists, which were celebrating the first 100 years of the Independence

some months before Porfirio Díaz’ regime implosion, a paper drawing on the

anthropologist’s archeological work. Some years later, in a 1916 article re-published in

his book Forjando Patria, Gamio advocates again for the creation of a governmental

department of anthropology whose scientific knowledge on the Mexican population and

territory would lead to the success of the revolutionary government. The effect of seeing

the people and the territory as part of the national power and resources reinforces the

value of anthropological knowledge for implementing the indigenist and mestizaje

politics of a state which was promoting the formation of its own nation. Nonetheless,

examining this process of community formation through gender lens generates new

questions and answers. Which men and women were encouraged or discouraged to have

children and which immigration or emigration politics were promoted depended on the

hegemonic discourse constructing the nationalist project at each specific historical

moment. Within this optic, mestizaje and indigenist politics can be understood as racial

and sexual politics that became crucial tools for Revolutionary Mexico’s national

community formation. I argue that for evaluating contemporary reconfiguration of

fo the era.” Se Paul S. Taylor, “Introduction” V, in Manuel Gamio, The Life Story of the Mexican Immigrant. Autobiographic Documetns collected by manuel Gamio, Dover Publications, ed., New York, 1971.

22

mestizaje by transnational social movements it is indispensable to examine post-

revolutionary Mexico through gendered lens.25 Drawing on the transanational dimension

of this proyect, Gamio’s long commitment with the Interamerican Indigenist Institute

transforms him in one emblematic case for initiating the chronological mapping of the

foundational concept of mestizaje. For enacting this perspective, the chapter interprets

Gamio’s post-colonial manliness within the history of Mexico recursive modernizing

failure.

25 Jorge Hernández Díaz, Los Chatinos, Etnicidad y Orgnaización Social, p. 12: “A pesar de las contradicciones de la política colonial, la población de Nueva España reflejaba el impacto de dos fenómenos: la miscibilidad racial y la asimilación cultural: dos procesos singualres qeu fueron fundidos en el término mestizaje.” Garcia-Canclini’s reflections the impossibility of translation and his remarks on Latin American mestizaje, U.S. affirmative action, and French miscegenation are points that can be introduced in the last part of the chapter, the one on Canclini.

23

Fragmentation of the indigenous patria

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

33

34

35

36

37

38

39

Populism, welfare state and women: Indigenism and Mestizaje

The official reason for Indigenismo is the welfare of the ‘nation.’ Gamio’s vitalist

perspective integrates blood and culture. He mentions “language’ as the tool for

integrating this imagined community to which every body belongs. For representing the

communal body he refers to “that shout which is in the top of everything, because it is

life’s voice, the mysterious force that unifies material elements and avoids disintegration.

In socieites in which national conflict exists between two national groupings which

compete on the same territory, similar importance has been given to the demographic

balance.” Within this discursive strategy for constructing the nation, women should not

have the right to abort future defenders of the nation, as Gamio complains of white

women. Of course the height of coercion of women to breed children for the sake of the

nation took place when Mexican men were encouraged to father as many children as

possible with women. Gamio does not agree on birth control, while for him “the state

needs to evaluate if it would be appropriate or not to instruct on birth control within the

sexual program education.” Men were not expected to marry the women and state would

take care of the mothers and the children. Within this discourse, whose women’s children

were promoted to be born and who were the fathers of these children? Exogamy parallels

brotherhood community making. In 1940, Gamio was one of the main lectureres of El

Dia del Indio. In front of the Mexican president General Manuel Avila Camacho, he

reminds the audience that “isolation, miserable economy, inferior cultural level, and

40

endogamic habits” mark the “fatal destiny of the nomadic and more primitive” of the

indigenous groups, as for example, the Lacandones and the Seris. The exportation of

women is on of the basic tools of Gamio’s mestizaje. Which is the role that Gamio

assignates to the Indigenous man within mestizaje? “La funcion biologica que los grupos

indigenas desempenhan respecto a los grupos mestizos, asi como la que pueden

desempenhar con los grupos blancos o de origen extanero, es de la mas alta importancia.

Antes se dijo que el desarrollo biologico de los Indios es generalmente deficiente, pero

hay que tener en cuenta que eso no se debe a causas propiamente hereditarias, sino que es

proucido por las malas ocndiciones economico-culutrales que por tantos siglos han

gravitado sobler la poblacion aborigen, no obstante lo cual esta ha logrado sobrevivir.

Puede afirmarse enfaticamente que en igualdad de condiciones de vida los elementos de

sangre indigena poseen mayors defenses biologicas contra las enfermedades autoctonas y

los efectos adversos del ambiente geografico americano que los elementos de origen

extanjero, lo cual es debido a la seleccion y a la adaptacion de que aquellso fueron

oobjeto en dicho ambiente durante millares de anhos, en tanto que en el organismo de

estos tales defensas apenas comienzan a construirse.26” This has been part of eugenist

discourse on national reproduction. Paralleling Darwinist evolution of nations to cultures,

“[t]anto la cultural autoctona como la extranjera ostentan altas virtudes y adolecen de

desventajas.” La primera es mas natural, espontanea y pintoresca, entre otros motivos,

porque ha sido elaborada durante millares de anhos bajo la influencia del mismo

ambiente geografico en que hoy florece; pero precisamente esa persistencia desde tna

remotos origenes es la cuasa de que en algunos de sus aspectos y especialmente los de

caracter material, sea incapaz de satisfacer las exigencies el a vida humana

26 MG, Consideraciones sobre el problema indigena en America. p. 5.

41

contemporanea.” … “Por otra parte, la cultura indigena es la verdadera base de la

nacionalidad en casi todos los paises americanos y se distingue entre otras cosas por su

bella y epica tradicione, altas manifestaciones eticas y esteticas, excepcionales dotes de

persistencia contra toda clase de obstaculos y adversidades, mucho menor sujecion al

extremo y prejudicial egoismo individualsita que impone la cultura extranjera.” “La

cultura de origen extranjero ofrece el conocimiento cientifico como el elemento mas

importante.”27 Scientific knowledge would be the tool of eugenics. “Ya hemos indicado

que a fin de que se normalice el deficiente desarrollo en que desde hace tanto tiempo

vegetan los grupos indigenas se hace necesario analizar y claificar sus caracterisitcas de

vida material e intelecutal para despues conservar y estimular las que son perjudiciales,

substituir las deficientes por otras mas eficaces y por ultimo, introducir muchas de las que

hoy carecen y que les son indispensables, dadas las exigencies de la sexistencia humana

en estos tiempros.”28 For Gamio the scientific method does not take into account

“exclusive and isolated personal experiences.” It rather takes into account a great number

of observations and comprobations.29 Indigenous concrete study needs to simultaneously

take into account: “regional bio-geographich environment, historical evolution, bio-

tipology, economic situation and cultural development.”30 Gamio ‘s faith in the method of

science led him to state that “in all the countries, and particularly where the population is

constituted by indigeneous elements, is socially transcendent that hygiene, medicine

trade, professional responsibility of doctors, and other factors that go together toward

making better the biological development, need to be controlled by scientific criteria.”

27 MG, Consideraciones sobre el problema indigena en America, p. 15.28 MG, Consideraciones sobre el problema indigena, p. 15.29 MG, CPI, p. 16.30 MG, CPI, p. 40

42

And Gamio adds that a great number of countries have provided of dictatorial power to

the authorities in charge of taking care of public health.”31

Concerns about the kind of integration that the new Mexico wanted were not

unanimous and will acquire differentiated meanings according to the manliness to be

constructed through this new mestizo Mexico to be built. Indigenismo was an official

program of induced culture change, which figured prominently in public policy toward

indigenous areas of Mexico as well as of other Latin American countries for a number of

decades to come. Mexican state’s promotion of mestizaje was the supplementary politics

of sexuality. “Indigenismo” rested on the conviction that the indigenous groups were

culturally distinct from the rest of the Mexican nation-state and therefore required special

study before particular ways of attacking their livelihood problems could be worked and

put into effect. Whether the result of indigenismo was the complete incorporation of these

separate cultures into the dominant mestizo culture, or the preservation of some elements

of indigenous culture felt to be particularly valuable, was to become an element of

debate.32 All indigenistas stood together, however, in their insistence that general

programs of rural modernization could not be applied to the countryside without

adaptation to the reality of a number of specific indigenous cultures. Mexican

revolutionaries agree in opposition to Porfirian científicos and in the nativist rhetoric of

the nationalist government, but they have different positions in regard the value of the

Indian heritage. What is more important, all of them agree in the woman’s role within the

national community to be created.

31 MG, EPI, p. 17.32 Gamio oscillated between the poles of complete or selected incorporation.

43

Durante el Porfiriato, las clases dirigentes veina en la gente blanca y extranjera la

soclucion de los problemas nacionales y ofrecieron las mejores tierras a una ilusioria

migracion europea que nunca llego. La ideologia que justifico la negacion de los valroes

indigenas fue la concepcion de la modernidad. El estado que surgio en la Segunda mitad

del siglo se convirtio en el instrumento de un poder obsesionado por implantar los

principios politicos del liberalismo europeo, aun cuando esos valores chocaroan con las

tradiconales que nutrian a la mayoria de los pobladores. El vehiculo que integro estas

neuvas funciones del estado fue el nacionalismo, una ideologia que se desarrollo con gran

fuerza despues de la invasion norteamericana y la francesa. El nacionalismo mexicano,

como sus semejantes hispanoamericanos, antecedio al europeo y se manifesto con rasgos

originales.33El nacionalismo se incio en el patriotismo criollo alimentado por la

conviccion de que las potencialidades de la poblacion y del territorio patrio no podrian

florecer mientras persistiera el lazo que ataba al pais con un poder extranjero. Mas tarde,

la invasion norteamericana de 1847 y la francesa de 1864-1867 convirtieron ese

nacionalismo incipiente en un discurso antieimperialista y anticolonial. A partir de esta

derrota, el liberalismo doctrinario de la primera mitad del siglo fue remplazado, de 1867

en adelante, por un liberalismo pragmatico, una practica politica fundada en su capacidad

para transformar la realidad.34 Una de las expresiones mas vigorosas de esa nueva politica

fue la creacion de los simbolos y los ritos que en adelante representaron a la nacion.

33 Bease Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, pp., 47-65 y 91, nota 9; la tesis sobre el caracter precursosr del nacionalismo hispanoamericano la vuelve a reiterar Anderson en las conclusions del libro colectivoe coordinado por Remo Guideri, Francesco Pellizzi, y Stanley J. Tabiah, Ethnicities and Nations, Houston, The Rothko Chapel, 1988, pp. 402-406. Otras caracterisitcas del nacionalismo y su pugna con los pueblos indigenas pueden verse en la obra de Eriksen, Ethnicity and Nationalism.34 Charles H. Hale. El liberalismo mexicano en la epoca de Mora and The Transformation of Liberalism in Late Nineteenth-Century Mexico, Princeton, Princeton Univesity Press, 1989. Los principales cambios que experimento el liberalismo en la epoca de Diaz, pueden verse en la multicitada obra de Guerra, Le Mexique.

44

Francois-Xavier Guerra ha senhalado que para los liberals de la Republica restaurada la

necesidad de educar al pueblo era un medio indispensable para formar a la nacion. El

libro de escuela y el museo integraron la memoria desmembrada del pais en un relato

coherente, que comenzaba con el lejano tiempo prehispanico y concluia con el relato

porfirista. Esto le dio a la historia mexicana una profundidad tan antiguo como el de las

naciones europeas. “De este modo, el relato historico sembro en el imaginario colectivo

la idea de que los mexicanos estaban ligados a un proyecto historico cuyos origenes se

hundian en los tiempos mas antiguos, y la conviccion de que, a pesar sus notorias

diferencis, formaban parte de una misma familia cuya diversa genealogia s anudaba en

lso avatars del proceso historico.”35 Fue aqui que comenzo a nacer la comunidad politica

imaginada de Anderson.36 Comunidad politica donde el estado aparecia como el marco

que limitaba con las fronteras de otras naciones. “El nacionalismo que predico el Estado

uniformo las creencias colectivas y cero en la poblacion un sentimiento de parentesco que

se manifesto, entre otras cosas, en la concepcion del Estado como madre y madre de la

extensa familia nacional.37 Lado monstruoso del nacionalismo. The Porfirian model of

nation excluded the indigenous populations. Francisco G. Cosmes otorgated the paternity

of Mexican nation to Cortes and negated to the indigenous any participation. “There are

two components in the Mexican nation: one of them is proper for civilization, the one that

descends, from blood or spirit, from the Sapnish; and the other one, completely improper

for the progess, the indigenous one.38 Those authors who defended the indigenous

35 Florescano, Etnica, nacion… p. 497.36 Anderson, Imagined Communities, pp. 5-7.37 See Eriksen, Ethnicity and Nationalism, pp.104-113, and Bruce Kapferer, Legends of People, Myths of State, Washington and London, Smithsonian Instite Press, 1988, pp. 1-8, and 33-48. See also Partha Chatterje, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World, A Derivative Discourse? Tokyo, Zed Books for the United Nations University, 1986. p. 83.38 In Leopoldo Zea, El positivismo en Mexcio, Mexico, Fondo de Cultura Economica, 1984, pp. 166-178. See also Agustin Basave Benitez, Mexico mestizo. Analisis del nacionalismo mexicano en torno a la

45

populations, made their arguments on the base of the historical Indian, without

mentioning the alive indigenous populations, that at that time were struggling against the

Porfirian army. At the end of the century, politicians and intellectuals identitfied the

nation with the mestizo population.

One of the best achieved figures of Porfirian nationalist ideology was the idea of

the mestizo as the synthesis of what is Mexican. Andres Molina Enriquez, influenced by

Comte and Spencer, wrote in 1906 a book titled La Reforma y Juarez, constructs an

argument that Manuel Gamio overlapped few years later:

Como los mestizos estaban unidos a la raza indigena por la sangre; como llevaban

consigo una gran suma de energia; como no tenia tradiciones monarquicas; como no

tenian tradiciones regligiosas; como no tenian tradiciones aristrocraticas; y como al

preponderar dentro del pais mejoraban de condicion, podian decir con jsuticia que eran

los verdaderos patriotas, los verdaderos fundadores de la nacionalidad, lobre de toda

dependencia civil, regiliosa y tradicional.39

These ideas had a more original reconfigurations in Molina’s book Los grandes

problemas nacionales (1909). According to the Venezuelan author Arnaldo Cordova, the

political thesis of this text “constitute the true platform of principles with which the

Revolution gave the historical battle against the Ancien Regime while constructing the

new political order.”40 In opposition to the racial or political classification that separated

Creole, mestizos and Indians, Molina explains the difference by the demographic weight

of each group, their economical situation, social relations and cultural traditions. He

identified a greta diversity and an extreme ecomical difference: “unas cuantas clses

mestizofilia de Andres Monina Enriquez, Mexico, Fondo d eCultura Economica, 1992, pp. 38-41.39 Brading, Mito y profecia, p. 185.40 Aranldo Cordova, in the preface of Molina Enriquez, Los grandes problemas nacionales, pp. 24-26.

46

trabajadoras, en su mayoria indigenas, soportan el peso colossal de doce clases superiors

o privilegiadas.” “Por ahora, nuestro cuerpo social es un cuerpo desproporcionado y

contrahecho, del torax hacia arriba es un gigante, del torax hacia abajo es un ninho. El

peso de la parte de arriba es tal, que el cuerpo en conjunto se sostiene dificilmente. Mas

aun, esta en peligro de caer, sus pies se debilitan dia por dia.41” Following the same

argument that Gamio will follow some years later, Molina staes that “in a general sense,

between the indigenous and the Creole elements, there is a complete physical difference,

there is a complete opposition of cultures, there is an enormous evolutive distance and

there is a true contradiction of desires, purposes and aspirations. The only issue in

common, and also this under different forms, is the catholic religion, and also partially

the language.” When he compares the indigenous to the mestizos, he positied thaht

“while the differences are minor, there are also deep. There are those of origien, due to

the European blood, of physical type (for the same reason), of customs, of languages.

This happens partially becasues the mestizos do not speak indigenous languages and also

have a great evolutive distance. Within this diversity of traditions, Molian signaled that

the mestizos constituted “the most interesting ethnic element of the Mexican nation.” In

total oppositon with the romantic proposal of the liberals and with the segregation of the

Creoles, or of the social Darwinists of the positivists and the scientifics of the Porfiriato,

Molina Enriquez promoted radical changes in the territorial property in order to unite to

the “social body.”

His emphasis en the distribution of property came from his conviction that the

identity of the human groups is based on the possession of a specific territory. For him,

the nation is stronger as deeper are the roots that a social group has in the territory that

41 Molina Enriquez, Los grandes problemas nacionales, pp. 304-305.

47

occupies.” He had a significant knowledge of the rural Mexico and he promoted the

distribution of the gran hacienda and of the small and mediana property.”42 For him each

indigenous locality was a special and autonomous patria. For him, in complete opposition

to Gamio, the greater obstacle was the existence of the great territorial property which

impeded the integration of the nation. According to him it was necessary to follow the

French revolution, and to fragment the large property. John Kenneth Turner, Mexico

barbaro y su coleccion de impresionantes fotografias.43

While the majority of indigenists integrate a developmental conception of culture

to revolutionary nationalism, a group of intellectuals were equally interested as

indigenistas in bettering the livelihood conditions of rural Mexicans, but inclined to feel

that treating indigenous groups separately would only increase their low status in the

national society. For men like José Vasconcelos, who became minister of Education in

1921, it seemed indispensable to provide all rural families in the nation with certain basic

elements of national culture. “They were Mexicans, and furthermore they were citizens of

the world.” Since the early revolution Vasconcelos follows Mexican elite men

requirement for hegemonic recognizment. “The founders of the United States were

fortunate in not finding in this territory a very large Indian population, and so it was easy

for them to push the Indian back. But the importation of the Negro has brought to this

nation, as we all know a harder problem, no doubt, than any known before.” The “strict

avoidance of matrimonial relations with the colored race” could finally solve in the

United States the “tremendous problem involved in the coexistence of two races.”

Vasconcelos argues that “you cannot destroy a race,” and that in the case of Mexico

42 Molina Enriquea, Los grandes problemas nacionales, pp. 192-195. 43 John Kenneth Turner, Barbarous Mexico. An Indictment of a Cruel and Corrup System, London, New York, Canel and Company, 1911.

48

“there is nothing left for us to do, but to follow the Spanish tradition of eliminating the

prejudice of color, the prejudice of race in all of our social procedures.” The basis of the

mestiza Raza Cósmica lies in Vaconcelos’ complaint that “no matter what our theoretical

opinions might be, we have to start from the fact that the mestizo is the predominating

element in Mexico.”44 In addition, the role of the woman within this type of mestizaje is

also clear in Vasconelos’ politics, as it will become evident.

Vasconcelos and his supporters sought to the total incorporation of the Indians to

the new Mexico. Attempting for cultural and national unity, they pursue to make the

Mexicans less Indians or the Indians to become Mexicans, as President Lázaro Cárdenas

stated in Patzcuazaro. Unike Vasconcelos, other revolutionary Mexicans recognized no

inherent values in the Indians and blamed Mexico’s backwardness on the Indians. For

President Plutarco Elías Calles “the salvation of Mexico lay in improving the national

racial stock through the encouragement of European immigration.” “Who will till the soil

if we educate the Indians,” argued Elías Calles, “if we do not rid ourselves of them, we

must leave them in their present state, saving those who are physical and intellectual

superiors.”45 Dr. Manuel Gamio was President Plutarco Elías Calles’ vice-Minister of

Education in 1924 when the actual administration asked Gamio’s renouncement due his

public disagreements regarding financial managements.46 But other Mexicans were in

opposition to the assimilation trend and advocated for the assertive recognition of the

Indian cultural heritage of Mexico.47 Molina Enríquez raised hard critiques for

Vasconcelos and his followers. “I say that the melioration of the Indians must take place

44 José Vasconcelos, “The Latin-American Basis of Mexican Civilization,” p. 88, in José Vasconcelos and Manuel Gamio, op. Cit.45 Ibid.46 Lo que hizo durante su estadía en los Usa y too cita.47 Not only words were opposite to incorporationist discourses. The Chamulas in the neighborhood of San Juan, Chiapas, rebelled against the attempts to assimilate them.

49

on the basis of their own ideas. The whites are neither infallible nor do they have a

superior culture.”48 Vicente Lombardo Toledano, the labor revolutionary leader wanted to

organize Mexico through Indian republics based on ethnic and linguistic considerations,

instead of the actual political organization. “Our revolution,” affirmed Lombardo

Toledano, “has only demagogic aspects, exalting nationalism and arriving at nothing

better than folklore.” “We have coined a magic phrase: ‘incorporate the Indian to

civilization.’ Which of the many, whose sum total does not add up to one European

civilization.”49

Alcántara “Another group sought to blend the Spanish past and the Indian

heritage into the revolutionary Mexican identity. The idea that the roots of livelihood

problems in the Mexican countryside lay in unjust economic relations rather than

‘backward’ systems of belief, and that local cultures should in fact be respected and

preserved, formed a basic element in the work of Vicent Lombardo Toledano and Luis

Chavez Orozco. These leaders insisted that land, credit, and technical assistance were

indispensable prerequisites for raising the level of living or rural people. They changed

their mind when it became clear, in the course of the 1930s, that only a strong and united

Mexican nation could deal successfully with the international pressures unleashed by

Cárdenas’ supoort of agrarian reform and the petroleoum industry reapprpriation.

Lombardo Toledano labor leadership played a decisive role, within the Confederation of

Mexican Workers, in molding the policy of the national government toward the working

class, both urban and rural. It was this revolutionary tendency who provided the kind of

grass-roots organization of t he rural proletariat on the large foreign landholdings of the 48 Cited by Ramón Eduardo Ruiz Q., p. 479.49 Buscar referencia. It is important to observe that Lombardo Toledano argued the fascist feature of the Plan Sexenal of Lázaro Cárdenas in 1933. However, Lombardo Toledano changed his mind and began to work on Cárdenas bais looking to establish social in Mexico. Cf. Francisco Rodríguez, pp.351-352.

50

richest agricultural areas of the country required to support agrarian reform during the

1930s.” “And in the newly formed mestizo ejidos, or agrarian communities, constituted

following the reappropriation of those capitalist holdings, a proletariat was given a new

form of community self-government designed to increase local decision-making authority

at the same time that it allowed integration into hierarchy of regional and national

pressure groups.”

“Saénz was more aware than many other contemporaries of the positive aspects of

indigenous populations. His essays contain many referneces to elements of culture which

should be respected by the larger society, indigenous governmetn being one ot the msot

important. Such a concern was to receive considrable political support during the

presidency of Lázaro Cárdenas, from 1934 to 1940. The anthropologist Moisés Sáenz

proposed to “incorporate civilization to the Indians.” There was no other solution “than to

take the civilization of the white man, which in our case is some what colored, to the

Indian, and let him through assimilation transform it into what will be the Mexican

version.” One of the principal architects of the remarkable effort made to utilize

education as a tool of community development during the 1920s and early 1930s was

Moisés Sáez, linked to the principles of Dewey’s action school. After studying in

Columbia, he returned to his ocuntry to assuem the post of Director of Education in the

state of Guanajuato, roughtly at the same time Gamio was promiting the establishmetn of

his Dierection of Anthropology in the Ministery of Agriculture. By 1925, Dáez become

Vice Minister of Public Education, charged precisely with the integrated program of rural

community development which had made Gamio’s separate anthropolgical efforts

relatively irrelevant. Rural schools in all communities wer to become laboratories for

51

experimetnation in socioeconomic change, and rural teaches were to serve the interests of

the whole population. They were assisted in their task by mobile Cultural Missions

containing teams of specialists in the fields deemed useful for community development:

doctors, nurses, veterinarians, home eocnomiss, carpenters, musicians and others. It was

assumed, as Gamio had assumed, that physical and sociculutral isolation was the reason

for rural backwardness, and that education was the proper tool for ameliorating the most

pressing problems of rual people.”

The constant visits made by Moisés Sáenz to rural areas where the programs of

the Ministry of Education were under way made him doubt of a single approach to

community development. He began to question certain aspects of the “incorporationist”

bias which underlay his own (as well as Gamio’s and Vasconcelo’s) work. Around the

turn of the 1930s, Sáenz became an indigenista, appreciating the cultural differences

which made it necessary to take the special situation of indigenous groups into account

when designing policy. As the decade advanced, one could see in his work the suggestion

of a new kind of indigenismo: that which defended cultural plurality within the Mexican

countryside and rejected complete incorporation as a policy goal.

The indigenist mestiza ideology constitutes Gamio’s as well as Revolutionary

Mexico’s tool for guaranteeing their own reproduction, actually engaged in a surviving

race within the competitive world of the first half of the twentieth century.50 As Gamio

and other men of his generation and class understood the Mexican patriotic task, the birth

of the new Mexico linked Indians and Mestizos to the Mexican race, and to the evolution

50 See Francisco Javier Rodríguez Garza, “Sobre el pensamiento corporativista en el México de entreguerras,” in Marcos Toatiuh Aguila M. and Alberto Enríquez Perea (eds.), perspectivas sobre el Cardenismo. Ensayos sobre economía, trabajo, política y cultura en los años treinta, México, Universidad Autónoma de México, 1996, pp. 295-327. It is specially interesting to evoke the relatiosn of the Mexicans and the North Americans anthropolgoists, the reference of the author to Theodor Roosevelt governamental consigna that in 1932 stated “Roosevelt want you to organize yourself.”

52

of the cosmic progress of civilization. Although Gamio believed that Indians and

Mestizos were in special danger due to a regressive racial stock framed by the insane

environment where they lived, he also believed that selected racial mix policies,

education, and economic improvement would made it possible to achieve the most

complete manhood that had ever evolved. The cosmic race could lead the nation to a

great future. Evolution’s Lamarckian mechanism would make it possible for

anthropologists’ Indigenism to help Mexico’s Indians and Mestizos to evolve toward the

cosmic race. Gamio realized the limitations of racial t theory in the biological field. He

ambiguously developed, in the cultural field, an evolutionary proposal that will remake

Mexico. The cosmic race combined the Indian and the civilized, qualities whose pervious

mutual exclusion led Mexico to permanent revolutions. The dilemma was solved, and the

state was no going to be again a prisoner of its won developmental strategies.

As an anthropologist of post-revolutionary Mexico, Manuel Gamio embodied the

anxieties and the dreams of many Mexican and Latin American middle class intellectuals

of his time. Identifying himself as a Mexican white man of Spanish ascendance, he

believed that the way through which the colonizers racialized the continent had forged

unviable nations, and that post-colonial Mexico has been marked by an unbalanced

mestizaje that made it impossible modernize the country. At the same time, in order to be

acknowledged as modern, as a post-colonial as well as a post-revolutionary Mexican elite

man he needed European and North American equals’ admittance and acknowledge.

Gamio feels that unlike other post-colonial men, he shares with the Spanish colonizers

their culture, and more specifically their women. Within this argumentation, Gamio

ambiguously mentions the example of South Africa without being explicit if he is making

53

reference to the English or the African post-colonial elite men as those whose position he

parallels to the one of Mexican men in relationship to Spain. He has a paradoxical need

for the modern European men’s acknowledgment to be admitted by the civilized world

with which he totally identified as a white middle class intellectual man but at the same

time confronting great difficulties for accomplishing the domestic roles that this

recognizment required. For Gamio the “middle class is the source of intellectual

activities, of the appropriate leader brains.” (FP, 28) In addition, he firmly believed that

Mexico would never become the powerful nation-state that he himself needed to be

represented as a civilized Latin American elite man unless the Mexican indigenous

populations will become a modern nation, as both beginnings of his two recopilation

books express.

Gamio projected his developmental narrative of cultures to the international space

where nation-states also competed within an increasingly marketed world, a turn that the

Dependency Theory also embodies. Following Darwinist patterns he believed in a

developmental chain linking nation-states modernizing succes to national elite men’s

success. Gamio’s male post-colonial condition requiring the recognizment of equal pairs

depended on Mexico’s success in modernizing itself, an anxiety paralleling his own

difficulty as a middle class man needing to support an extended family in a country

where male provider roles became increasingly competitive. In other words, Gamio re-

codified Darwinism by creating a developmental narrative on world nation-states’

cultures. Nonetheless, his conception of culture is very peculiar: a vitalist perspective

where women play a fundamental role for integrating the spiritual and the material

aspects of the different ways of living. Gamio’s state-centric conception made him embed

54

a nationalist discourse, which at the same time draw on a perspective of homogenous

nations that made him link nation-states demographics to eugenics.

This anthropological approach provided scientists with an explanation of the

mechanisms by which any individual could inherit her/his parent’s learned traits. Thus,

human evolution could be consciously aided by making certain that each new generation

could “automatically” pass its racial improvement on to its children. Here Gamio draws

on the millennial subtexts inherent in ”civilizaiton.” Like his contemporaries, Gamio

believed that modern intelligence was the highest, final evolutionary development of the

“advancement of civilization.” Gamio was in the best scientific company in believing that

civilized western men were at the top of the evolution. This logic posits racial

egalitarianism as unscientific. Thus, following Gamio one must also recognize that

Indians and Mestizos acted “savage” not because they are bad or willful, but because it

was their nature at that stage of evolution and in the actual economic conditions they

lived. Rather, the Mexican revolutionary state and ambitious Indigenism was there to

improve the conditions of life of the Indians. Gamio believed that by making a scientific

diagnostic of the Indian and Mestizo’s Mexico’s inhabitants, he would transform them

into modern Mexicans. Deeply ambivalent about Indian’s virtues and barbarism, Gamio

believed it was necessary and possible to extract through education the con contaminated

primitive forces of the ethnic groups. Gamio has begun to look for ways to neutralize and

simultaneously revitalize the countryside inhabitants. The civilized power of “higher

races” will remake Indians and Mestizos, and new Mexicans would have the vitality to

resist domestic and international tasks. Gamio solved the social conflicts that initiated the

Mexican Revolution by representing the revolutionary task as the shaping of different

55

stages in an ongoing (re) evolutionary process. Gamio represented the Indians and the

Mestizos as the “larva” of civilized Mexicans. The peasant branch of the party, as well as

the Indigenist national structures were the channels to such metamorphosis.

Juan Comas es un refugiado español

As an anthropologist, Gamio felt he could remake Mexico by making Mexicans, literally.

For what was the new birth of Mexico if not the making of the armed revolutionary

Indian and Mestizo peasants into civilized urban Mexicans? Gamio believed he could

study through scientific ways the exact situation of the 50 ethnic Mexican groups in order

to develop them into modern and civilized Mexicans.51 “It is unquestionably urgent, most

urgent to investigate scientifically, for until this is done thoroughly, social contacts

cannot be normalized and oriented authoritatively, a thing by all means desirable since it

requires convergent racial, cultural, and spiritual fusion to secure unification of tongue

and equilibrium of economic interests. This, and only this, can place the Mexican nation

as a nation, upon a solid, logical, consistent, and permanent base.” (Incorporating the

India, 117)

Gamio was deeply affected by the danger of the social revolution and framed an

ethnic theory which would protect the future of the middle-class society. The years of the

Mexican Revolution [busier en Knight] the Coon Indians movement in Panama,

Peasants’ mobilizations on Guatemala and, the Andean Indigenism in Peru were visible

contemporary examples of the social disconformity of the Latin American Indigenous

countryside (quitter retries de la reunion indigents). Gamio solved this danger. He

51 For Gamio, civilization and urvan life were synonimous. He states: Esto se debe a que la capital y las ya citadas ciudades son verdaderas escuelas espontáneas de la vida modern, que no sólo enseñan el abecedario y los conocimientos teóricos indispensables a los individuos de otros tipos culturales infoeriores, sino que los influencian, los fuerzan a abandonar sus retrasadas condiciones de existencia y a adquirir, en cambio, las de la civilizacion moderna, que son mas utiles y satisfacorias.” “Los varios mercados mexicanos” in Hacia un nuevo mexico, p. 115.

56

suggested a new way to prevent peasant’s rebellions by reconceptualizing the relationship

between the Mexico’s Indian poverty and Mexico’s revolutionary modernization and

economic improvement of the Mexican population. As Gamio came to see it, the

polarization was related not dualistically but developmentally. Poor Indians were not

irreconcilable opposites of civilized Mexicans; they were merely different stages of one

developmental process. Through economic improvement and evolution, Indian barbarism

became civilization. The state’s ignorance of the Indian’s necessities was the cause of

their justified discontent.

Tal ha sido frecuetnemente uno de los motivos que en el fondo originan las revoluciones mexicanas, pues cuando los indigenas de los estratos inferiores han querido ascender en la escala social, acudieron a la rebelion armada, por no poseer armas culturales para conseguir pacificamente su objeto. De semejante situacion no tienen la culpa los elementos indigenas, sino los blancos que no han sabido educarlos eficazmente, pues cuando intentaron hacerlo se limitaron a enseñarles a leer y a escribir, de acuerdo con el viejo concepto educativo, dejandolos en cambio en las miserables cndiciones de vida en qeu se encontraban antes. Lo conveniente seria suministrarles una enseñanza integral que en princippio contribuyera a mejorarlos economica y bilogicamente para enseguida procurar su desarrollo intelectual. (“Nuestra dinamica social en Mexico y en los Estados aundios, 133-34).

By this strategic touch Gamio simultaneously justified himself as an indigenist

anthropologist, and the Mexican State as a corporativist administration. The key was to

focus on the developmental process itself –on Indian and Mestizo’s evolution toward

civilized Mexicans, and to replace the social forces of the dangerous revolution with a

different kind of population, the homogeneous Mexicans. By redefining the relationship

between the dualism of the local and Indian countryside versus the centralized and

Mexican State, in terms of the developmentalism of barbarism versus civilization,

Manuel Gamio believed to have solved the historical Mexican instability.

57

(Gamio’s colleagues, if not totally in sympathy with this thoughts, also

recognized the necessity of a racially and culturally homogeneous Mexico. In their desire

to find a pattern of unity, they believed that, barring minor physical and cultural

characteristics, all Mexican are alike. They saw no validity in Indianist theories of Indian

peoples different from the rural mass of peasants. If there were ethnic groups culturally

not totally assimilated, they were still simply Mexicans. So far as the program of social

reconstruction and nationalismo of the revolution, nothing was achieved by an

ethnographic analysis of the population.)

(Unity and nationality were the symbols of total “incorporation.” There were no

Indians, yet if there were, “assimilate” them. “Go to them with weapons of persuasion

and, above all, of kindness. Attract them to you as the [Catholic] missionaries of the

colonial period did,” editorialized the newspaper Excelsior. “Treat them like children and

persuade them to abandon their mountain hide-outs and to forget their century-old

distrust.” Other, more to the point than Excelsior, held that the salvation of the “Indians

depended on the hacendados and industrialistas. When the businessmen had guarantees

for their property, and freedom to work, they could care for the Indians.) Gamio

considered that:

The immediately succeeding racial contact, upon conquest, had no ethical, social, or eugenic tendencies, but was exclusively physical. The white man possessed the native woman wherever and whenever he saw fit. Therefore the offspring of these inharmonious and forced unions had none of the advantages of a normal origin.52

Gamio empowered his civilizatory discourse with the scientific origin of his theory.

Historically, modern science and control have been always intimated tied. The natural

sciences searched nature control and the social sciences searched society’s social control.

52 Gamio, Aspects of Mexican Civilization, p. 110.

58

Anthropology ties both the natural and the social sciences; it also constructs the scientific

knowledge of the researcher and the other.

In the first half of the twentieth century, Lamarckian and Darwinist theories were still

popular among anthropologists. The natural race has changed to social culture. This

change means that communication through language, instead of blood through

inheritance, transmitted the cultural traits. The evolutionary approach still remained there,

although race has strategically twisted to culture. Now culture was inherited through

language, familiar, kinship, and national ties. History and national territory were the

necessary screens for the national state formation (Hobswamm??)

Gamio compares the “aborted small Azteca, Maya-Kiché and Inca patrias to the

two national states of China and Japan.” When Cristopher Colombus arrived with other

men, other blood and other ideas, this national option disappeared. “But this first

mestizaje between the indigenous blood and Mexican national intellectuals could not be.”

One of the more original innovations of Gamio’s narrative justifying the new Mexico

mestizaje links actual power of “modern scientitic reaserchs” states that the Spanish

conquerors have not been the first immigrants to arrive to the continent. He narrates the

American indigenous population as the first immigrants and conquerors who arrived to

America. While this narrative pretends to elevate the memory of these seminal

indigenous, by yuxtaposing to them the successful wave of Spanish

immigrant/conquerors he constructs an equalizing framework that naturalizes the violent

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origin of “Ibero-Indo America’s” mestizaje while delegitimating indigenous manliness.

“El descubrimiento de la Isla de San Salvador en 1492, no costó la vida de un solo

hombre, en tanto que el del continente Americano, viniendo desde Asia en tiempos

neolíticos, fue, sin duda, la mas trágica y heroica epopeya de que puede enorgullecerse la

humanidad.” “Modernas investigaciones científias permiten asenar que el indígena

americano no es originario de este Continente, sino immigrante y por lo tanto el veradero

descubridor y conquistador del Nuevo Mundo, hazañas que evectuó con elementos

incomparablemente inferiores a los de Colón, Cortés y Pizarro. (180-181). “Millares de

libros se han escrito y grandes bibliotecas se forman desde hace cuatro siglos, con el fin

de encomiar la Conquista de América por los europeos. En cambio nada se escribe ni se

hace encaminado a ensalzar la obra de quienes fueron sus primitivos conquistadores.”

“Los conquistadores hallaron en los indígenas americanos, enemigos inermes, dado que a

sus armas blancas y de fuego y a sus corceles pifantes, sólo oponían frágiles puntas de

obsidiana y escudos de piel curtida, lo que por otra parte, en nada disminuye el valor

heroico de los guerreros invasores. La colonización española fue, en estricto análisis,

tarea mucho más fácil que la primera conquista, pues la nueva tierra no sólo ofrecía toda

clase de subsistencias, indumentaria, habitaciones y riquezas, sino que la mano de obra

era profusa, gratuita y adiestrada por siglos de experiencia y adaptación al medio.” Cita

de cuando habla de los indígenas y estos aparecen como fuerza laboral, y todo su

pensamiento sobre que hay que estudiar como es que consumiendo tan poco pueden ser

tan exitosos: economia politica de la vida.

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For Gamio, Spanish colonizers’ mistake had been to create incomplete “patrias”

that have generated a wrong Latin American modern male subject. He draws on the act of

funding “the virile bronze and iron metals” as the foundational metaphore for speaking

about Latin American population as a sculpture made of different races. Spaniards have

emphasized the role of“the steel Latin race” while abandoned as a scoria the “hard bronze

of the indigenous race.” The original sin of negating the relevance of the indigenous part

of mestizaje has marked Latin American evolution. Within this teleological epic

narrative, Independence from Spain becomes a new step also marked by the original sin:

“al alborear el más brillante de los siglos pretéritos, varones olímpicos empuñaron el

mazo épico y sonoro y vistieron mandil glorioso. Eran Bolívar, Morelos, Hidalgo, San

Martín, Sucre…. Iban a escalar la montaña, a golpear el yunque divino, a forjar con

sangre y pólvora, con músculos e ideas, con esperanza y desencantos, una peregrina

estatua hecha de todos los metales, que serían las razas de América.” “En Panamá, donde

se besan mares y continentes llegó a vislumbrarse entre resplandores de epopeya una

maravillosa imagen apenas esfumada de la gran Patria Americana, única y grande, serena

y majestuosa, como la cordillera andina.” (FP 5,6)

Gamio states that these original mestiza nations were not perpared for being a

unique and great continental Patria. By following the colonial administrative lines, the

continent became multiple and weak patrias. Initial Post-colonial mestizaje also failed. “It

pretended to sculpt the statute of those patrias with Latin origin racial elements while

leaving abandoned, dangerous erasure, the indigenous race, which served as the humble

bronze pedestal unable of supporting an inconsistent and fragile statue that reapeatedly

followed down, while the base increased.” “Y esa pugna que por crear patria y

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nacionalidad se ha sostenido por más de medio siglo, constituye en el fondo la

explicación capital de nuestras contiendas civiles.” (Fp, 6) Fatherlands and nationalities

cannot be constituted by so different “elements” which ignore each other, as can be

confirmed by observing countries like Germany, France, Japan, which constitute real

nations in Gamio’s views. “Los alemanes, los franceses, los japoneses, los que poseen

verdadera nacionalidad, son hijos de una gran familia. Al viajar por sus países

encontrarán en hombres, mujeres y niños verdaderos hermanos, porque de ellos se

levanta el grito solemne de la misma sangre, de la misma carne, ese grito que está por

encima de todo, pues es la voz de la vida, la fuerza misteriosa que agrupa a la materia y

se opone a su desintegración. En las almas de todas esas gentes hallará los mismos

mirajes en que se recrea la suya. De los labios brotarán añejas como vino generoso o

remozadas y alígeras las palabras de un mismo idioma, del idioma de todos. Cuando así

se vive se tiene Patria.” (FP, 8-9)53

This historiography effaces the identity of those leaders that accordingly to this

same narrative have failed in modernizing the country, while at the same time defines

women as the structural contaminating, and indigenous populations as the pre-modern

others of these failed authors. This is a crucial point for Mexican anthropologist Manuel

Gamio. His own admittance as an equal within the civilized men actually leading the

great social changes that the world experienced all along the first half of the twentieth

century depended of Mexico’s success in becoming a modern nation-state.

53 Gamio’s writings parallel his travelling as a Mexican state functionary. He travelled to Japan when the coercive 1930s campaign to ‘breed and multiply’ for the good of the Japanese empire, and he wrote pages of great admiration for this ethnic empire. En el Japón, el proceso de unificación étnico cultural requirió dos mil años, según quedó expuesto, debiéndose advertir que entre los grupos sociales que se fundieron, existían más afinidades étnicas y similitudes culturales que entre los indeigenas y los blancos de México.

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C. MANUEL GAMIO

The subject of Gamio’s narrative is the intellectual post-colonial man who places

himself as the indispenable mediator for transforming the unknown and amorphous

country into an efficient government. Indigenous peoples and women are constituted the

objects of Gamio’s narrative. In 1915, anthropologist Manuel Gamio wrote an article

which makes a diagnostic on the Mexican government’ limitations for controlling its

territory and populations.54 In this booklet he states that only through the scientific

support of applied anthropology knowledge, the new government would be able of

constructing a powerful mestiza nation-state capable of disrupting the recursive cycles of

instability and poverty that have marked the country since independence,

El futuro engrandecimiento material e intelectual de la Nación depende, en buena parte, de las condiciones de desarrollo de la población, de la productividad y habitabilidad del territorio y de la eficiencia del Gobierno. Ahora bien, en todas las épocas de nuestra historia, el desarrollo de la población fué anormal, la productividad del territorio defectuosa y la gestión del gobierno deficiente. Por qué esa fatal y continua repeteción, si en algunas ocasiones el Gobierno procuró de buena fe hacer alcanzar a la población etapas de mejoramiento y progreso?55

Gamio firmly believed that “una patria fuerte y unida con un profundo

sentimiento de nacionalidad” were the indispensable tools for making viable a modern

Mexico within an increasingly competitive international community. He perceives that in

the 1930s the world was shaked by renovation movements which confirmed Darwin’s

“inevitable law of evolution” and that all those peoples and nations which did not fit into

actual humankind’s progress will fatally disappear. Gamio always identified Mexico as

54 This article was introduced in 1916 in Forjando Patria.55 Manuel Gamio, El Gobierno, la Población, el Territorio, México, 1917, Departamento de Talleres Gáficos de la Secretaría de Fomento.

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well as himself within this biologist perspective. But Gamio reconfigured Darwinism

from a Mexican post-revolutionary man perspective. In effect, Gamio encarnates a

vitalist perspective while drawing on the incorporation of both the blood and the

intellectual forces of Latin American incomplete nations for making a solid Pan-

American culture. The intersection of the “brown arm of the Atahualpas and the

Moctezumas” produced “a miracoulous miscengenation” that mixed and confused the

flesh of the peoples of the continent. Gamio’s conception of mestizaje constitutes a

cultural need for the government’s politics of national community formation. “Can be

thought as patrias and nations, countries where the two great elements that constitute the

population are fundamentally different in all their aspects and ignore each other?”

Gamio’s phobia for differences makes him believe that a new mestiza identity constitutes

the solution for Latin American wrong modern subjectivity. Within this interpretative

perspective, it is relevant to differentiate between “the virile bronze and iron races”

within the politics of mestizaje as well as woman’s roles within the creation of the patria,

an analytical strategy that will provide evidence of the significance of Gamio’s manliness

interference within his scientific and political rhetoric. Gamio’s conception of mestizaje

as the main tool for his indigenism.

As a Mexican man of Spanish ascendance and as an anthropologist validated by

the U.S. academy, Gamio considers himself an equal of modern European or American

men. But he also understands that Mexico’s modernizing failure projects on him a wrong

modern subjectivity.56

56 “La investigación progresiva y el continuo contacto con instituciones e intelectuales mexicanos y extranjeros, de ideología avanzada, nos hace ir con las novísimas corrientes del pensamiento actual; somos y seguiremos siendo internacionalistas convencidos, sobre todo cuando vemos más allá de nuestras fronteras. En cambio, en nuestro carácter de compatriotas, de hermanos, de diez millones de seres que se debaten en la civilizacón indígena retrasada de varios siglos, pensamos de otra manera, somos nacioanlsitas. … Descendemos hasta aquellos mexicanos parias, vivimos su vida y penetramos en su alma,

64

a) Becoming Mexican men thanks to Gamio’s women

Manuel Gamio was born in Mexico City in 1882. In 1840, Lorenzo Gamio

Echevarria became the first Spanish/American Gamio. Lorenzo became Mexican Manuel

Gamio’s grandfather. He emigrated from Irurita, a small Navarra town, looking for

“adventures in the New World.” The first generation of Mexican Gamios maintained

strong links with Europe, and the peninsular relatives paid special attention to the proper

heritage as well as education of their Latin American male descendants. Trying to make

short their son’s sojourn in Mexico, Lorenzo’s parents conserved until his return to Irurita

“the lands and properties that, according to Spanish heritage customs, corresponded to

him.” However, the Spanish Gamios lost control of their Mexican grandchildren when

Manuela, Lorenzo Gamio’s wife, decided to definitely return to Mexico after her husband

passed away while the entire family was gathering in Navarra. Back in Mexico, she got

married again to the man who has been her husband’s business partner, and who had been

taking care of the Gamio family’s properties since Lorenzo’s death. When the news of

Manuela’s marriage to Lorenzo’s business ex-partner arrived to Irurita, the Spanish

Gamios attempted to make their grandson return to Navarra. They offered Gabriel to

become the administrator of all the family business while making him their legal heir.

But Gabriel’s life took a different road. Gabriel Gamio, who was to become

anthropologist Manuel Gamio’s father, was in France when he knew about the French

a fin de conocer los medios propios para ayudarlos a reincorporarse , lenta, pero efectivamente, hasta que lleguen a ser elemetnos sociales comparables a los que constituyen poblaciones de países aptos para formar uan federación internacional.” (HNM, 4) “El término internacionalismo connota una federación de naciones. Cómo, pues, México y otros muchos países de la América Indo-Ibera podrían formar parte de tal federación si todavía no constituyen verdaderas nacionalidades?” (HNM, 5) “Hoy, como hace veinte años, que iniciamos esta campaña nacionalista, creemos que es de urgencia: equilibrar la situacion económica, elevando la de las masa proletarias; intensificar el mestizaje, a fin de consumar la homogeneización racial; substituir las deficientes características culturales de esas masas, por las de la civilización moderna, utilizando, naturalmente aquellas que presenten valores positivos; unificar el idioma, enseñando castellano a quienes sólo hablan idiomas indígenas.” (HNM, 5)

65

invasion of Mexico. He immediately returned to America. From therein, thanks to

complex links between women’s decisions, international invasions, and business the

Navarra Gamios became Mexican Gamios.

However, it has been increasingly hard for the Gamio men to reproduce in

Mexico a life style homologous to their Spanish pairs’. Manuel Gamio’s father “had ever

provided evidence of being committed to hard working, ” and after Manuel Gamio’s

mother died when he was eight years old, his father lost all the family fortune after living

a “strongly dissipate life:”

Don Gabriel, ya sin el freno de la esposa, agudiza su carácter irascible y dilapida en gastos excéntricos y malos negocios la fortuna propia y la de su difunta mujer. Los hijos son atendidos por niñeras mientras hay recursos para ello, y después por las hermanas. Ellas padecen los celos exagerados del padre, quien les ahuyenta todos los pretendientes, haciendo que todas se quedaran solteras, excepto la menor que se casa ya madura una vez que el padre ha fallecido. (AGG 17)

In 1916, by dedicating his first book, which he significantly named Forjando

Patria to his father, Gamio symbolically incorporated the dead father to post-

revolutionary brotherhood community. “Although all his defects, to which his intellectual

limitations need to be added, Manuel Gamio felt great love and respect toward his

father.” (AGG 19) This same year, Gamio got married to doña Margarita Martínez. His

father’s death, has been a “great sentimental and economical discharge.” “Seguramente

su desaparición fue uno de los factores que le permiten contraer matrimonio, aunque

continua ayudando a las hermanas solteronas pero en menor medida. For doña Margarita,

Gamio’s wife, “la cosa no fue tan fácil” in economical terms. “Afortunadamente al

fallecer la madre de Margarita en … reciben una herencia de unas 64 viviendas en la calle

de Arcos de Belén. Eso le da un ingreso fijo aunque pequeño.” (AGG, 55) Nuevamente la

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fortuna marca el destino de este científico liberal y progresista en … cuando

“afortunadamente, aunque suene mal decirlo, en 1933 fallece una tia maternal de Gamio,

y nuevamente hereda”.

b) Initiation rituals of a Modern Mexican anthropologist

As we have seen, the Mexican Manuel Gamio was of a middle class, not too

prosperous family. When he finished his secondary studies, he vacillated between

studying engineering, as his father wanted, or Law. “As a disciplined son,” he enrolled

himself in the Mines Department of the Mexican National University.57 But he left his

just initiated studies and went to work in Santo Domingo, on a farm that belonged to his

family and was located in an indigenous region. De las historias que más le gustaba

platicar a sus nietos, estaban sus diversas aventuras durante la estancia en Santo

Domingo. Manuel Gamio’s father bought Santo Domingo’s hulera hacienda, which was

located in the margins of the río Tonto, in the border region formed by the states of

Veracruz, Puebla and Oaxaca with the money that he received after “selling the late

jewelry of his wife.” Ángeles González Gamio, the grand-grand-daughter of Gabriel

Gamio sees him man as the Porfirian well situated classes’ typical son.” He bought these

lands partly “drawing on the believe that gentlemen of good estirpe always needed to

own an hacienda, which could or could not be a good business, but that always provides

prestige.” In his father’s Santo Domingo hacienda, Gamio enters in contact with “ this

other México that fascinated him.” (AGG, 21)

Gamio, una vez que se da cuenta de lo inútil que es tatar de hacer producir la

finca, se dedica a conocer a la gente que habita la zona, aprende su lengua: el náhuatl.

57 Some of his actual schoolmates became expert collaborators in the anthropological activities that he led all along his administrative career.

67

Ahí despierta esa vocación que lo impulsa toda la vida. In 1956, in a magazine of El

Nacional Gamio rememebers this time, when he became “seduced” by this other Mexico:

Empecé a interesarme en la población indígena, cuando viví cerca de tres años, en un rancho de mi familia, llamado “Santo Domingo.” Mi hermano Rodrigo y yo éramos dizque administadores de ese rancho palúdico, incrustado entonces ente salvajes bosques milenarios. Como era natural, dada nuestra falta de experiencia fracasó a la postre esa explotación agrícola, pero alcancé en cambio, una ventaja y fue la de aprender algo del idioma náhuatl, que hablan casi todos nuestros trabajadores procedentes de la cercana sierra de Puebla.

Following anthropologists’ tradition, Gamio also worked all along his life with a native

informant, José Antonio, who translated for him the indigenous world. En 1906 escribe

un cuento corto que narra un episodio con quien luego fue un personaje determinante en

su vida de antropólogo.” Este cuento corto fue publicado después (1937) en un volumen

de novellas cortas titulado De Vidas Dolientes:

Cierto día, estando a la vera de ese río, bogaba en medio de él un indio que erguido en una estrecha piragua siguió mirando impasible hacia el horizonte, sin atender a las repetidas voces con que le pedí que se acercara; disparé al aire mi rifle de caza para llamar la atención, pero no hizo aprecio. Entonces le dirigí algunas palabras en su idioma e instantáneamente viró la canoa, vino hacia mí y disculpó su desdeñoso silencio ; dijo que no quería a quienes hablaban “castilla” o sea español pues había sufrido maltrato y ofensas cuando trabajó con ellos pero como yo hablaba el idioma indio seríamos amigos. (AGG, 22)

Ángeles González Gamio narrates that one of his grandfather’s favorite stories referred to

his travel con José Antonio in Santo Domingo. Within this grandfather’s story,it does not

lack a single othering element. “A raining storm led him and José Antonio to refuge

themselves in a choza where he saw a small human figure in the stove, which horrified

him; nonetheles it resulted to be a monkey, a very popular food in the region.” Gamio

lived amongst families and peons of Aztec ethnicity who resided in his family lands. As

an article that he wrote in the bilingual journal Modern Mexico, published for a U.S.

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audience and for which he worked as a free lance journalist, denounced, these peasants

worked without paid. Para completar sus ingresos Gamio consigue el puesto de secretario

de redacción de la sección en castellano de la revista Modern Mexico, vistosa publicación

dedicada a difundir los atractivos de Mexico. Algunos títulos: “Riquezas que se pierden.

Los desmontes tropicales” “El porvenir de México. El transporte de abonos para la

agricultura.” AGG (28) In his father’s hacienda Gamio learned the language of the

peons.58 However, Gamio does discover more than a “universe of injustices and misery.”

Close to the río Tonto, “he also discovers beauty, goodness, and force.“ To synthesize the

ritual feature of this initial contact with the indigenous other world, in Santo Domingo

“he made many friends, and according to what Gamio talked to his male grandsons he

had a romance with a beautiful indigenous woman.” (MGG) This reference to the “india

bonita” will appear again in Gamio’s discourse of applied anthropology, as can be notice

in his article “Nuestras Mujeres” in Forjando Patria, “El Naturismo indígena y el

celibato” in Hacia un México Nuevo, or in El Universal journal article titled “La India

Bonita.”

c) Becoming an indigenist anthropologist

After the failed ritual initiation as middle-class independent man, and after entering in

contact through jungles, rivers and women with the other indigenous Mexico, Gamio

obtained a position as teacher assistant in history in the National Museum of Mexico in

1908. En el museo Gamio escribe una guía que comprende “la descripción y

representación gráfia de los monumentos existentes enel territorio Nacional.”En el museo

Gamio se relaciona con los antropólogos norteamericanos que están realizando

investigaciones en México y van a ser determinantes en su vida. He knew the American

58 Comas, libro rojo, p. 2.

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archeologist Zelia Nuttal who obtained for him a grant from the Columbia University in

New York. His friend Genaro García, the director of the museum, guaranteed him his job

when Gamio would come back from the United States, thus he went to the Columbia

University. El trabajo que desarrolló para el museo en 1910 ameritó que David Strug

dijera en 1972, “En este trabajo ya se nota un análisis profundo, una disposición metódica

de las referencias hitóricas previas y una tendencia a cuantificar datos.” (Strug, David.

“Manuel Gamio, La Escuela Internacional y el Origen de las excavaciones estratigráficas

en las Américas” en Arqueología e Indigenismo. SEP/Setentas, México, 1972, pp., 207,

220 y 234, en AGG, 27) From 1909 until 1911 he studied anthropology with Frantz

Boas.59 In 1909, when Gamio returned to Mexico from the United States, he he looked

for the foundation of the Anthropology Bureau in the Ministry of Agriculture and

Fomento, due to the fact that the engineer Pastor Rouaix was the chair of the ministry.

Pastor Rouaix, of maternal indigenous ascendance, had great sympathy toward Gamio’s

works, as well as the next Minister, Ramón Denegri also had.”60 He was the chair of the

Anthropology Bureau since 1917 to 1924. In the introduction of Anthropology Bureau

plan, again Gamio states that Mexican population is unknown, heterogeneous, abnormal

developed, and with actual differences according to “their inherent contemporary

features.” Gamio classifies Mexico in ten geographical regions to study “the racial

characteristics, material and on-material cultural expressions, languages and dialects,

economic situation, and the physical and biological environment of the population.” The

next task of the bureau will be the study of the correct methodology that will change the

59 George W. Stoking’s Race, Culture and Evolution. Essays in the History of Anthropology wa a very helpful refernce to the ideas of this paper regarding Gamio’s links to Boas. Chapter 9, where Stocking suggests to substitute “civilization” with “race” and remake the reading of Franz Boas ideas, was specially useful. However, any misunderstandin is my own responsibility.60 Antología, p. XIX.

70

actual Mexican organizations in order to increase the development of the Mexican

population. Once hat the above research will give the factual information that the

government need, the bureau “will prepare the ‘racial’acercamiento, cultural ‘fusión,’

linguistic unification and economic balance of the Mexican groups. Through this only

way, the different ethnic groups will frame a coherent nationality and a defined and true

motherland.”61 Gamio finished only one of the ten region studies in 1922. The final words

of the report suggest what the government has to do in order to benefit the Indian

development. The links of the North American anthropologist with Gamio and the

Mexican anthropology are institutionalized in 1910 with the creation of the International

School of American Archeology and Ethnography in Mexico. Eduardo Seler, Frantz

Boas, George Engerrand, Alfred Tozzer, and finally Manuel Gamio were the successive

chairs of the school. Cynthia Hewitt de Alcantara62 and Alan Knight.63 La Universidad de

Columbia, la Escuela internacional de arqueología y etnografía americanas: Frantz Boas,

nacido en Prusia, funda la escuela bajo el patrocinio de Prusia, Francia, México y

Estados Gamio Unidos. (1910) Boas queda como secretario perpetuo del Comité

directivo.

1912-1916: La inspección general de monumentos arqueológicos “Urgido de encontrar

trabajo, Gamio acude a Francisco Vásquez Gómez, a la sazón secretario de Instrucción

Pública, quien le da empleo adscribieendolo a la Inspección General de Monumentos

Arqueológicos, el 23 de febrero de 1912.” (AGG,39) Trabajos de arqueología. Publica:

61 Manuel Gamio, “El programa de la dirección de Antropología y las poblaciones regionales de la Republica,” in Introducción. La población del valle de Teotihuacana, I, pp. X-Xii, México, 1922.62 Cynthia Hewitt de Alcantara, Anthropological perspectives on rural Mexico, Koutledge & Kegan Paul press, London, 1984.63 “Estado, revolucion y cultura popular en los años treina” in Marcos Tonoatiuh Aguila M. and Alverto Enríquez Perea (eds.), Universidad Autónoma de México, 1996, pp. 263-297.

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Metodología sobre investigación, exploración y conservación de monumentos

arqueológicos (Museo Nacional, 1914)

Administrative offices and commissions.

c) Profesor Auxiliar de Historia en el Museo nacioanl de México (1907)d) Profesor de Arqueología en el Museo Nacional de México (1911)e) Profesor Auxiliar de Historia del Arte Mexicano en la Academia Nacional de Bellas

Artes (1915)f) Inspector General de Monumentos Arqueológicos de la Secretaría de Educación

(1913-1916)g) Director General de la Escuela Internacional de Arqueología y Etnología Americana

(1916)h) Director de Antropología en la Secretaría de Agricultura y Fomento (1917-1924)i) Fundador, propietario y director de la revista Ethnos, México (abril 1920-mayo 1925)j) Subsecretario de Educación Pública (diciembre 1924-junio 1925)k) Magistrado del Supremo Consejo de Defensa y Prevención Social (1930-1932)l) Director General de Población Rural, Terrenos Nacionales y Colonización. Secretaría

de Agricultura y Fomento (1934).m) Director del Instituto de Investigaciones Sociales, en la Secretaría de Educación

Pública (1938)n) Jefe del Departamento Demográfico, en la Secretaría de Gobernación (1938-1942)o) Director del Insituto Indigenista Interamericano (1942-1960)

Add comisiones and organizaciones.- Asiste como delegado de México a los Congresos Internacionales de

Americanistas (1912, 1916, 1922, 1939 y 1949)- Pablo González Casanova, quien ya había sido compañero de clases de Gamio en

el colegio Soriano, en Tacubaya, trabaja, al regresar de Alemania, como traductor del proyecto de Gamio en Teotihuacán.

Las famosas artesanías de Canclini:- (1917-1920): En San Juan de Teotihuacán enseña a los pobladores: “Nos

consiguió unas herramientas y organizó un tallercito para que saquen la obsidian y aprendan a tallarla, pueden copiar estas figures y vendérselas a los turistas.

- En el Valle sugiere que se fomente el mestizaje y que se estudie la conveniencia o no de hacer accessible el control de la natalidad.

- En 1922 recibe el doctorado de la Universidad de Columbia. Título: La Población del Valle de Teotihuacán. El medio en que se ha desarrollado. Su evolución étnica social. Iniciativas para procurar su mejoramiento.

- En 1920 funda la revista Ethnos, revista bilingue dedicada al “estudio y a la mejoría de la raza indígena en México.”

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- En 1924 Gamio pasa varias semanas en los USA dictando conferencias y presentando una exposición sobre los grupos indígenas de México: su arte, costumbres, indumentaria y principales caractereisticas culturales. (Revista Mexican American lo reseña)

- 1926-1930: años de gran actividad internacional. Da una serie de charlas en la universidad de Chicago en 1926 invitado por el Harris Institute. Otros invitados: Vascncelos, Moisees Sáenz y Herbert I. Priestly. Las conferncias de Vasconcelos y Gamio se publican en el libro Aspects of Mexican Civilization. El tema general de Vasconcelos es: las bases latinoamericanas de la civilización mexicana, y el de Gamio es: las bases indígenas de la civilización mexicana.

- En las dos primeras conferencias Gamio habla del problema indígena, pero en la última que denomina “Algunos aspectos de las Relaciones Diplomáticas entre los Estados Unios y México”, expone sus puntos de vista sobre las consecuencias del desonocimiento muto. Menciona como ejemplo el patético caso del embajador norteamericano cuya inademisible ingerencia tuvo tan lamentables conseuencias en la revuelta contra el presidente Madero. Propone asesorarse de los científicos que estuidan afondo los problemas.

- 1928: delegado de México a la Segunda Conferenia Internacional de Emigración e Inmigración, celebrada en La Habana, Cuba.

- 1929: asiste como delegado latinoamericano a la Tercera Conferencia dle Institute of Pacific Affairs en Kyoto.

- 1929, arteiculo en la revista México Guía de Turismo redactada en ingles y en español. En el número de Julio de 1929, Gamio escribe el ensayo “El Trascendental Aspecto del Turismo en México.” En él da una original version del porquee es particularmente intersante conocer Meexico, además de “sus bellezas naturals y su artístico abolengo precolombino y colonial.”

By performing as the expert anthropologist of the pre-modern Mexico he will

produce simoultaneously the modern Mexico while achieving his admittance within the

leading men of the civilized world. To become the father of Mexican anthropology and of

Latin American indigenism transcends the powerful dimensions of a metaphorical

language acknowleding Gamio’s double paternity of scientific knowledge and of the

subjects that he creates through that knowledge. He positions himself as the privileged

author of the universal ontologic of the state. Within this narrative, the indigenous

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population is represented (both in the sense of portrayed and speaking for) as the main

obstacle for Mexico becoming a modern nation-state as well as the cause of the

government’s impossibility for defending either its international frontiers or controlling

its domestic population. As a result of this self-reflexive rhetoric, an efficient nation-

state-centric system would be the indispensable instrument for modernizing Mexico,

while mestizaje and indigenism becoming the strategic tools for both community and

subject-formation of the to be citizens the Post-Revolutionary Mexico.

Hay otro aspecto importantísimo en México que no existe en Europa y que sin embargo casi nunca es mencionado. En México se reproducen, ante el viajero, vivientes y palpitantes, las etapas de civilización que ha escalado la humanidad desde hace más de cien centurias hata la fecha … En estos tiempos, investigadores y turistas forman Buena proporción en el movimiento viajero mundial. Su anhelo de conocer el aspecto humano de los países que rocrren, tiene un vasto cmapo de acción en México. Cuando esteen entre nosotros, sentirán palpitar isócronamente en derredor de la vida de cien siglso, en uno de los más vstos e interesantes laboratorios sociológicos con que cuenta el mundo.

Fines del 30: Magistrado del Consejo Supremo de Defensa y Prevención Social que le ofrecen por instrucciones del recién electo presidente Pascual Ortiz Rubio. Se da cuenta de que no existe información suficiente ni fidedigna, ni se conocen las causas ni los orígenes de la delincuencia. (copiar art. En p. 98 de AGG)

“Informe sintético sobre investigaciones relatives a la prevención social, que se han estado haciendo en el Consejo por la Sección de Sociología” las referidas estadísticas sobre la delincuencia.

“Cuando se instituyó el Consejo, no se contaba con estadísticas integrals de delitos y delincuentes, ni estaban localizadas ls zonas de degeneración y delincuencia, po lo que esta Sección se dedicó desdeluego a formarlas. Para ello se seleccioanron, clasificaron y tabularon, los datos relativos existents en 8,552 sentencias que los tribunals penales y correccionales han remitido al Consejo desde el 15 de diciembre de 1929 has Julio de 1931 o sea un período de 18 meses.” (En AGG, 99, quien cita al archivo del Insitituto Indigenista Interamericano) A continuación expone una serie de datos estadeisticos sobre los diferentes aspectos que se mencinan. Posteriormente lleva a cabo estudios estadísticos sobre el perfil psicológico de los delincuntes y apoya la creación del Insituto de Medicina Legal en el DF.-Revista Mexicana de Derecho Penal.

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His life involved the question of how to remake Mexico. Manuel Gamio, like many of his

contemporaries, was obsessed with the “indigenous problem” that hindered the progress

of Latin American countries, and Mexico among them. He never questioned what

modernization meant, although he religiously believed that a scientific education would

construct Mexicans.64 He shared the widespread “scientific belief that Mexico was

negatively marked by the Indians’ presence as well as by environmental limitations

which impeded Mexican modernization. Eugenic discourse was present in his

anthropological discourse. “The racial contact has been very far away of being eugenic

and thus the product of miscegenation emerged defectively and slowly.”65 (El desarrollo

anormal de nuestra población, Las etapas evolutivas de la cultura humana en México,

HNM) Yet, as a cultural anthropologist, he believed he held the key to revitalize Mexico.

Modern and civilized Mexicans could be made. According to Gamio scientific

diagnostics would reveal the appropriate methods to raise the new Mexicans through

education, miscegenation, and economic improvement of life conditions.66

Debe tenerse en cuenta que el mestizaje conviene a Mexico, no sólo desde el punto de vista étnico, sino principalmente para poder establecer un tipo de cultura mas avanzado que el poco satisfactorio que hoy presenta la mayoria de la poblacion, y si bien esto πuede conseguirse valiendose de la educacion y otros medios, esta tarea se consumara mas pronto si se intensifica el mestizaje, pues este traera consigo automaticamente un efectivo progreso cultural, como resultado de la eliminacion o substitucion de las caracterisitcas culturales retrasadas del tiπo indigena.67

64 Manuel Gamio, “Evolución demográfica de los pueblos indios,” p. 19; “Nuestra estructura social, el nacionalismo y la educación,” pp. 31-53.65 MG, Evolucion geografica de los pueblos indo-iberos, p. 16.66 MG, “nuestra estructura social, el nacionalismo y la educacion,” 31-5267 MG, el desarrollo anormal de nuestra poblacion, 27

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The key to building modern Mexico, as Gamio saw it, was to civilize the Indians, through

miscegenation, education and better economic conditions.68

A recurrent and basic issue in actual anthropology was the Indian

classification by race, ethnicity or language differentiation.69 As Henrique González

Casanova emphasizes, “those years not only allow Gamio to learn their language, rat her

also to know and comprehend their inferior life conditions.” Education was the key to

Mexicanize the Indians.70 Gamio was rhetorically ambiguous in this regard, although in

the practice he was consequent with his racist attitudes. In Hacia un Nuevo Mexico he

states that the solution for Latin American heterogeneous handicaps lies in the

intensification of miscegenation, increasing and unifying the life cultural level, and by the

generalization of an unique and only language. Gamio reminded that the Mexican census

of 1930 establishes that 12.5% of the total population, was of 16 millions, “cannot

express satisfactorily it s necessities to the State, which thus can not satisfy them.” Gamio

states that in same cases it will be correct that the state would teach the Indian languages

among those who speak Spanish. However, Gamio states that it is better to teach Spanish

to the Indigenous people in order to avoid the permanence of plurality of indigenous

languages, because “these languages have certain utility in some scientific fields, as are

ethnographic and folkloric studies.”71 A nationalistic interest moves Gamio. The

68 MG, (Incorporating the Indian, 121-2). The discussion among anthropologiss about race, ethnicity, and laguage, as well as among other social scientists, was a significant issu. See George W. Stocking, Race, Culture, and Evolution. Essays in the History of Anthropology and Hewitt de Alcantara, Anthropological perspectives on rural Mexico. Howerver, in Assimilation in American Life. The role of Race, Religion, and National Origins by Gordon Milton’s, the arguments were similar for the United States, although thirty years later, and regarding other ethnics. “The liberal expectancy” ws t hat industrialization would bring national systems of education, communication, eocnomics, and politics, which would in turn reduce older distinctions among peoples.69 Regarding ethnicity, language, and education, see Rubio U., Gonzalo, “La antropología social y la preparacion de los maestros,” 457-72, and Ruiz U., Ramon Eduardo, “The struggle for a national culture in education,” 473-91 in Unam, Estudios Antropologicos publicados en homenaje al doctor manuel gamio. 70 Cardenas en el I congreso de patzcuaro, y el art. Sobre los maestros en el libro gordo rojo.71 MG, Hacia un Nuevo Mexcio, p. 51.

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“Mexican Constitution states that education must be socialist, and somebody can

mistakenly believe that I support to establish in Mexico an exotic national nationalism or

communism.”

Gamio was a poor farmer but what he learnt was a successful initiation ritual as

anthropologist. From that moment on to his death, Gamio was a scholar associated with

the revolutionary corporative government.72 He lived as an organic intellectual of the

government of the revolution, yet he never participated in the social movement of the

Mexican Revolution.

After the failed ritual initiation as middle-class independent man, Gamio studied

anthropology and obtained a position as teacher assistant in history in the National

Museum of Mexico in 1908. He knew the American archeologist Zelia Nuttal who

obtained for him a grant from the Columbia University in New York. His friend Genaro

García, the director of the museum, guaranteed him his job when Gamio would come

back from the United States, thus he went to the Columbia University. From 1909 until

1911 he studied anthropology with Franz Boas.73 The links of the North American

anthropologist with Gamio and the Mexican anthropology are institutionalized in 1910

with the creation of the International School of American Archeology and Ethnography

in Mexico. Eduardo Seler, Branz Boas, George Engerrand, Alfred Tozzer, and finally

72 Poner los cargos que desempeñó73 George W. Stoking’s Race, Culture and Evolution. Essays in the History of Anthropology wa a very helpful refernce to the ideas of this paper regarding Gamio’s links to Boas. Chapter 9, where Stocking suggests to substitute “civilization” with “race” and remake the reading of Franz Boas ideas, was specially useful. However, any misunderstandin is my own responsibility.

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Manuel Gamio were the successive chairs of the school. Cynthia Hewitt de Alcantara74

and Alan Knight.75

The political agitation of the Mexican Revolution disrupted his entire network and he found himself without a job upon returning from the United States. Life was then difficult for the Mexican middle-class, and a few men achieved economic independence. Manuel Gamio had married Doña Margarita Lón Ortiz, “who has been through the ‘tribulation’ of 44 years of conjugal life, a model wife and mother.” In 1924 Gamio and Doña Margarita appear in a picture with four of their five children.76

- 1921: viaja a los USA por problemas con Calles.

- El estudio del immigrante mexicano: (AGG, 88-9) Pese a problemas de financiamiento Gamio logra terminar el estudio consistente en dos trabajos (1926-1927) que se publican en sendos volumenes por la universidad de chicag en 1930. Años despuees, en 1969 la unam publica la traduccion de uno de ellos.

“Los repatriados y la educación de las masas incultas” Around a million of Mexican immigrants have returned from the United States since 1910, and many more are expected to arrive.Esos individuos, que generalmente emigraron movidos por el malestar económico son en gran mayoría de filiación étnica indígena y mestiza y su standard de vida material e intelectual correspondía antes de que salieran de México a un inferior nivel de cultura. Durante su permanencia en Estados Unidos casi todos ellos mejoraron de situación económica y se acostumbraron a comer mejor, a vivir en habitaciones más sanas y confortables y a vesir indumentaria más apropiada a las exigencias orgánicas que las que antes usaban.

Los inmigrantes mexicanos sufrieron amargas humillaciones y penalidades, pero en cambio ese país desempeñó el papel de gigantesca universidad en la que un millón de compatriotas de las clases incultas, aprendieron a templar su carácter … los braceros mexicanos alcanzaron en el país vecino una etapa cltural mucho más avanzada que la de millones de sus compatriotas que nunca han salido del suelo nativo. (HNM, 55)

El ambiente geográfico-climatérico extremoso y bien distinto de aquel en que se habían desarrollado, eliminó a alunas cuya constitución no pudo resistir, pero los restantes supieron defenderse acudindo a las mismas defensas del organismo que la gente de allá empleaba. Dieta. (56) La más interesante de sus conquistas fue, como ya

74 Cynthia Hewitt de Alcantara, Anthropological perspectives on rural Mexico, Koutledge & Kegan Paul press, London, 1984.75 “Estado, revolucion y cultura popular en los años treina” in Marcos Tonoatiuh Aguila M. and Alverto Enríquez Perea (eds.), Universidad Autónoma de México, 1996, pp. 263-297.76 Comas, libro rojo, 5

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dijimos, la adquisición de teecnica y de disciplina en el trabajo.(56) “Un indefectible proceso de regreión (57) -

1933: Encabeza la redacción del programa de acción del PNR para el candidato presidencial.

Gamio tiene una gran simpatía por Lázaro Cárdenas quien toma posesión como presidente en 1934. 1934: Comisión Teecnica Consultiva cambia el nombre por el de Instituto de Orientación Socialista.

En el curso de los años en los que colabora como asesor del Nuevo proyecto educativo de Cárdenas, Gamio escribió los 28 ensayos que constituyen al libro titulado Hacia un México Nuevo.

En la introducción Gamio muestra su entusiasmo por Cárdenas y dice sentir renacer las esperanzas que veinte años antes lo llevaron a escribir Forjando Patria.

1939: Departamento Demográfico en la secretaria de gobernación. Gamio soñaba con exigir a los inmigrantes instalarse en la provincia, pues era la manera de ir logrando un desarrollo equilibrado de todas las zonas del país, y así evitar la centralización.

1939: Conferencia Interamericana de Higiene Rural.

1940: inicia la revista Migración y Población. Aquí Vasconcelos habla en contra de la immigración española, y Gamio contesta.

AGG cita a conversación entre Gamio y Vasconcelos: “Mira Manuel, yo te doy lo que quieras para la arqueología, pero no para esos indios; a lo que Gamio respondió furioso: si tú quieres hablar mal de los indios, comenzaree por ti, que eres más indio que yo.” (Entrevista con M. León Portilla, marzo 1984).

El ultimo periodo al servicio del indigenismo interamericano:1940: se crea el III en Pátzcuaro, Michoacán.

- 25 de marzo de 1942: Gamio es nombrado director a los 59 años.- El III se sustenta con las aportaciones de los paises miembros y el subsidio del

gobierno de México. Proyectos: alimentación, salud, artes, indio y democracia.- Actividad editorial a través de América Indígena y del Boletín Indigenista. (AGG

usa como fuente a Elio Masferrer, 1980)- Las editorials de Gamio ls publicó luego el III, “Consideraciones sobre el

Problema indígena, 1948-1960). Importa el editorial, “La política de una institución no política.” “El instituto aspira a que se normalice el deficiente desarrollo biológico del indígena, mejoren efecivametne las inferiors condiciones económico-culturales en que desde hace tanto tiempo vegeta, se respete a su personalidad y tradición y sean abolidos los abusos.” La tarea más difícil fue la

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defensa de las propiedades comunales, la tierra y el reparto agrario. Gamio defendió los derechos indígenas y condenó el sistema de haciendas. La opinion del III manifesto su rechazo a los intentos de dissolver y privatizar las tierras comunales y apoyo las reformas agrarias en el continente. Todas las estrategias impulsaban un “indigenismo integral” destinado a lograr no la asimilación de los indigenas, sino su integración en una “América Indoibeerica” que unifique lo major de ambas tradiciones.

- 1953: El III se establece como organismo especializdo de la OEA.- A fines de los 50 la Oea colabora con la OIT para preparar personal idinentista.

Proyecto 208 es un programa destindo a crear centros internaiconals de adiestramiento para técnicos indigenistas. John Collier colabora mucho con le proyecto.

- 1948: Prologo de gamio al libro de Nathan Whetten.- 1948: termina su primer periodo como director del III. Gamio es reelectos dos

veces mas como director del III. El ultimo período no lo termina; fallece en 1960.- Su obra continua: en 1963, bajo la direccion del III y con fondos del Porgrama de

Cooperación Técnica de la Oea se crean los Centros Interamericanos de Adiestramiento que prepara a profesionaels en el area antropológica.

- Discurso de Enrique González Casanova, director de publicaciones de la unam; Walter Dupoy quien too escribe en 1943/ cuando viajo Gamio a Caracas (AGG, p. 153 y yo tengo las fotocopias.)

Inscribing a new nation

Gamio identifies himself as the scientific author of modern Mexico. He is the

organic intellectual in between “internationalism” and “nationalism” whose

anthropological knowledge of the Mexican territory and population constitutes the

indispensable guide for the good government of the new country to be done.77

Manuel Gamio never really wanted a new Mexico to be born. The new Mexico

was to have some old and some new characteristics. The makeup of this change is just

what is at stake. As a respected anthropologist linked to the bureaucratic administration,

he had every reason to uphold the revolutionary institutionalized state. Rather he

specially wanted to control the Mexican Indians and Mestizos who participated in the

77 It is interesting to notice that M. Gamio rarely mentions directly the United States. However, when he supplements the anthropological with the geographical methodology he states that: “the main cause of Mexico’s loss of the territory actually in the hands of the United States, consisted in the geographical distance of this territory in relationship with the rest of the country which implied differences and antagonism in the nationalist ideas.” (FP, 10)

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Mexican Revolution, a bloody movement that underwent a profound social reform.

(Why? Dice Monteon, buscar texto de Hansen)

To transform the rebellious feelings into patriotism, was one of the ways the

revolutionary leaders addressed the institutionalization of the social movement that

placed them in office. The political instability of Mexico was represented as the result of

an ethnic heterogeneity and wakness. Indigenism was going to “cure” it. Civilization was

seen as an unquestioned attribute of great states, and the United States was the example to

follow.78 Interpreting the ethnic weakness of the Mexican nation as a sickness implied the

necessity of scientific men and of a state that will frame the nation-state. Mexico’s future

seemed bleak –unless a way could be found to reverse the destructive trends of his

history. To build a new country powerful enough to withstand the disintegrating domestic

tendencies as well the higher northern civilization was the patriotic task.

The construction of a great Mexico was a vital task. Nation-states expanded as the

consequences of “civilization,” and the viability of Mexico was challenged by the

presence of a great and menacing state at the frontiers. The construction of a great

Mexican state was a matter of survival, at the domestic and at the international level, as

Pablo González Casanova stated some years later. Indeed, that was precisely the point.

Like many men of his generation, Gamio was worried about the viability of the nation-

state. At the domestic level, with the social and rural forces that destroyed Mexico during

the unstable and uncontrolled years of the revolution, and at the international level with

the expansionist presence of the United States. If the cultural characteristics of Indians

and Mestizos are the basis of Mexico’s actual problems, ethnicity is the center of the 78 See Milton Gordon, Assimilation, p. 80. To pfofound the study of intermarriage and ethnicity. This author states that intermarriage is the ultimate form of assimilation, the step by which a minority group finally loses its distinct ethnci identity and is obliterated in a mass of homogenoeneous and dominant Anglo-American culture.

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debate. Social scientists, who see ethnicity as culture, see intermarriage in the context of

acculturation. Gamio joined in the widespread miscegenation and civilizatory discourse

to remake Mexico.79 However, the Inter-American Indigenismo was created as the

official administrative structure to grant more complete acculturation ad assimilation.

Indigenism was a one way process of giving up Indian culture in favor of a modern

Mexican substitute.

-

C. THE MOTHERS OF INDIGENIST MESTIZAJE

Postcolonial Female Sexual Agency and People as a power require Mexican

mestizaje: Market, producers, consumers, Latin American patria, citizens

El feminismo no está en la ocupación, ni en la profesión, sino en el carácter; debiera denominarse “masculinismo”, porque es la tendencia que tienen algunas mujeres de

masculinizarse en hábitos, en ideas, en aspecto en alma y … hasta físicamente, si estuviese a su alcance conseguirlo.

Manuel Gamio, “Nuestras Mujeres”

“Por esto y otras causas no discutiremos aquí el mestizaje se ha efectuado entre nosotros de manera mucho más lenta, ya que después de cuatro siglos de contacto entra las dos razas, la proprociónde mestizos es casi igual a la de indígenas, en tanto que el número de blancos es muy corto. Aun cuando no existen estadísticas satisfactorias, la probable proporción numérica de esos tres grupos étnicos podría establcerse así: mestizos, seis a siete millones; indios, cinco a seis millones; blancos, de tres acuatro millones. Si respecto a tan trascendente cuestión social (papel del celibato en la mujer blanca), para México, tan prolongada espera sería muy peligrosa, ya que la continuación

79 Paul R. Spckard in Mixed Blood, Intermarriage and Ethnic Identity in Twentieth Century America. P. 5 mentions two viewpoint regarding the issue by the turn of the twentieth century in the United states, just the time when Gamio was studying in the Columbia University. One, “drawing on the Anglo-Saxon racialism that foulrished in the latter nineteenth century, said ethier “Americanize” non-Anglos –force them to give upo distinctive cultural traits, or remove them.” The other, called for continued social and marital mixicng, to make America a vast, homogeneous melting pot.”

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durante medio siglo de malestar económico, de frecuentes revoluciones y de otros fenómenos sociales que son directametne derivados de la heterogeneidad de la población, traería consigo no sólo la persistencia de períodos de retroceso y estancamiento en nuestra evolución, sino también amenazadores conflictos internacionales. Felizmente, en el reciente programa presidencial hemos visto que se alude concretametne a la importancia que para México reviste la unificación nacional, que es ante todo entendida en teerminos raciales a travees del cuerpo de la mujer, como estrategia de unificación espacial. Racializing poltics of coloniality, positions differentially postcolonial men and women. “

Since his 1916 primigenius book, Forjando Patria, Gamio establishes the main

points which he later reconfigures in his 1935 text, Hacia un México Nuevo. For him, in

order to create the new Mexico, blood and culture need to be masterly integrated through

indigenous and European male leaders’ bodies. Within this framework, to make a new

post-revolutionary mestizaje becomes a nationalist goal of a government that empowers

the state through the production of the proper population and the criminalization of

female sexual agency. The central question for this narrative on the “common origin” of

the Mexican nation (and in Gamio’s words, drawing on Mexico’s emblematic role, also

of the Latin American identity) refers to women’s role for the construction of the national

and continental collectivity. According to Gamio, the Atahualpas and Moctezumas

warriors provided the bronze blood and the Spanish the steel. But his vitalist

interpretation of culture understands that only through life’s love can these two different

metals be ammalgamated. First, Gamio’s anthropological narrative of Mexico and Latin

America identity establishes that indigenous peoples do not originally belong to the

continent. His equalitarian equation of indigenous and Spanish as immigrants of the

American continent introduces within an equalizing narrative of immigrations those men

who were not born into the original collectivity but became part of it. The only way

‘outsiders’ can conceivably join the Mexican or the Latin American community might be

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by women’s bodies. Gamio racializes through a narrative of mestizaje the formation of

Latin American and Mexican community. Nevertheless, this representation of mestizaje

intersects specific racializing and sexuality strategies. Gamio’s racializing policies need

imply that some sexual reproductions conceive the new national community, while other

ones represent steps toward backwardness. However, in terms of sexuality and gender

politics, all women (Indians, mestizas or Spanish) accomplish the same reproductory role

although Gamio’s developmental narrative of cultures construct a complex hierarchy of

women’s bodies embodying the nation. While the position of indigenous, mestiza and

Spanish origin women, can be differentiatelly affected by the Post-Revolution

construction of boundaries, natal policies for the biological and cultural reproduction of

the nation affect the lives of all women in the nation. To construct the Post-Revolutionary

mestizo Mexico, rather than the common origin, the crucial factor in the constitution of

the nations, is an implicit and many times explicit, hierarchy of desirability of women

bodies’ origin and culture which underlies the nation building process. “It seems that in

this disocurse of biolgoy/identity some women are more directly linked with the Mexican

identity than others. Women as wombs and the commodification of women’s

reproductive powers. This commodification also has an international dimension in

Gamio’s story. As such, the relationship here is not only between individual women but

also between men of less and more powerful national collectiviteis, whith higher and

lower national reproductive rates. At this point, the welfare nature of the post-revolution

Mexican state includes immigration and nation policies.

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The Indigenous man lives to be labor force to become consumers and citizens. Gamio

describes and classifies them.

Discursive strategies on women:

“El celibato y el naturismo indígena” La cuestión más trascendente para México es el desarrollo de su exigua población.” “Por esta razón deberian ser considerados otros

tópicos de carácter sexual que convergen hacia la misma meta, por ejemplo el de los desastreosos efectos que produce entre nosotros el celibato.”

Dos puntos de vista se ofrecen, desde luego, a discusión: 1o. El celibato en función de la raza, y 2do. El celibato en función con la situación económica.

FP, 173)

In addition, this foundational step led me to identify in Gamio’s Indigenism three

major discourses on women tending to dominate Mexican indigenist and mestizaje

policies of community formation. They are the strategy of women as slaves; as

reproductory wombs; and as feminists. Drawing on Gamio’s post-colonial manliness, the

following section of the chapter, describes these three discourses, while also examines

closely the actual processes of implementation of indigenism and mestizaje as well as

indigenous and women’s responses to them. This analytical strategy draws attention to

the social context in which these policies took place while providing an angle to

illuminate the hybrid condition of contemporary Mexican national formation.

Gamio specifically writes on Mexican women in the Forjando Patria’s chapter

entitled “Nuestras Mujeres.” Nonetheless his conception of the woman’s roles within the

Mexican nation can be identified along his entire work, while to others perceive Gamio’s

representations of the woman and of women it is necessary to capture the hidden web of

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subject’s positions laying behind the author’s indigenism. In order to be fair to Gamio

and to make justice to women, this section introduces the author’s explicit words on

women while also articulating his life as a Mexican indigenist antropólogo to post-

revolutionary Mexico’s sexuallity and racializing politics, in other words, to the

government’s “revolutionary nationalism.”

“Nuestras mujeres,” the title of the chapter signals that identification for the

Mexican woman is a matter of men’s belongings (FP, 119-. Unlike the elite and middle

class Mexican man lives the dilemma of needing the recognizment of the other modern

me for being considered a recursively failing modern subject and threfore a (wronged)

sovereign subject, the Mexican woman is first of all an object that belongs to Mexican

men. The Mexcian woman is an object of the Mexican man and as subject of study of the

anthropologist. Drawing on these assumptions, Glamio defines three types of Mexican

woman. “La mujer sierva” nace y vive para la labor material, el placer o la

maternidad, esfera de acción casi zoológica impuesta por las circunstancias y el

medio. La “mujer feminista” siente un placer deportivo más que pasional, vive la

maternidad como una actividad asesoria, no fundamental, posee tendencias y

manifestaciones masculinas, considera al hogar un sitio de reposo, subsistencia y

gabinete de trabajo. Este tipo de mujer se originó y se ha propagado profusamente en los

grandes centros de población como fruto lógico del ambiente social. La “mujer

femenina” –denominación que Gamio sabe que encierra redundancia, pero que prefiere

usar por oportuna en su poder expresivo- es la mujer intermedia, igualmente alejada de

los dos tipos anteriores, esta es la mujer ideal, la preferida generalmente por que

constituye el factor primordial para producir el desarrollo armónico y el bienestar

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material e intelectual del individuo y de la especie.” (FP, 119) But Gamio’s main

interest for this classification comes from the un-balanced proportion of the three groups

that according to him exists within the Mexican population. He empowers his opinions by

quoting “tratadistas de ciencias sociales que dicen que la jerarquía de la mujer

corresponde al estado de civilización de su país” and along these lines “all Mexican

women would have been considered as slave women, due to the fact that in our

population, the illiterate people achieve almost the 80% and the uncult –from the

European point of view, constitute a 95 or more per cent.” (FP, 120) However, Gamio

notices that in Mexico “there are less slave and feminist and more feminine women than

those expected to be,” according to the cultural stage “that is adjudicated to our country.”

Gamio suggests that there are two reasons for this unbalance: first, the unfair

classification of “inculto” that is applied to Mexico “por el sólo hecho de que su

civilización no es la misma que ostentan los países europeos y los Estados Unidos.” (FP,

120); and second, for the social legacy that the Mexican woman has received. “In effect,

the contemporary Mexican woman comes from two other women: the Renacentis

Spanish and the Aztec Indigenous women.” He mentions the female feature of the Atzces

teology, while providing a detailed representation of these women. “No se oía hablar en

aquella época a Luisas, Mercedes o Elenas, ni Sinforosas, Petronilas o Atenodoras. El

nombre que hoy llamamos cristiano se daba a la mujer tomándolo generalmente de la

naturaleza, con lo que un grupo de esas dulces vírgenes morenas, era una égloga viviente:

“jolla preciosa,” “avecilla que remonta el vuelo,” “corriente mansa y critalina,” “brisa

fugitiva,” “flor perfumada”… eran nombres corrientes en aquel entonces.” (FP, 122-123)

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Gamio cita un breve texto de procedencia náhuatl prehispánica en el que se

describe la figura ideal de la mujer indígena. (poesía, p. 123 de FP)

“Naturalmente que las mujeres indígenas descendientes de las que en tiempos

anteriroes a la Conquista eran ya siervas, por pertenecer a las tribus primitivas de que

hemos hecho mención, es probable que sigan siéndolo mientas no cambien para ellas las

condiciones del ambiente social; las mujeres actuales lacandones, seris, etc., etc., no

pueden ser, en efecto, otra cosa que siervas.” (FP, 126-127)

Gamio razona sobre la herencia social femenina, como una de las causas

primordiales de su gran proporcionalidad. “Examinemos ahora causas complementarias.”

“Lo que en síntesis, hace excepcional a nuestra mujer femenina, es su innata

aptitud para conesar, para refundir armónica y fructíferamente, características que o son

antagónicas o se excluyen entre sí o coexisten en dirección paralela, pero casi nunca

convergen.” Estas son justamente las características que Gamio identifica en las carencias

de una comunidad nacional mexicana. “Vive a la vez cerca de la tierra y cerca del cielo,

en lo natural y en lo artificial, con la materia y con el alma.”

Por ser madre de una patria que necesita hijos es que la mujer mexicana es

valorada como femenina: “Cuando México sea una gran nación, lo deberá a muchas

causas, pero la princippal habrá de consistir en la fuerte, viril y resistente raza, que desde

hoy moldea la mujer femenina mexicana.” La mujer como molde moldeador.

Para Gamio en Forjando Patria p. 131 Es INADMISIBLE LA HERENCIA DE

APTITUDES MENTALES, COSA QUE NO LE PERMITE EXPLICAR PORQUE LA

MUJER FEMENINA MEXICANA ES INTELIGENTE.

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“Una mujer que con tan sabio y hondo instinto crea la familia y se constituye en

esperanza de la raza, al mismo tiempo que hace florecer y ensancharse de continuo en su

alma soñadora, los senderos idealistas que conducen a la humanidad hacia el bienestar del

espíritu, es la mujer suprema, la Mujer por excelencia. Así es la mujer femenina

mexicana.” (FP, 132.)

La capacidad de trabajo que transmiten las mujeres mexicanas: FP 139

La lógica de la revolución, super interesante como cita:

“Dos grandes causas de orden histórico: La Conquista y el carácter de la dominación

española motivaron los siguientes desfavorables fenómenos sociales: desnivel económico

entre las clases sociales, heterogeneidad de razas que constituyen a la población,

diferencia de idiomas y divergencia o antagonismo de tendencias culutales. Estos

obstáculos son a su vez los obstáculos que se oponen a la unificación nacional, a la

encarnación de la pagria, a la producción y conservación del bienestar genral. La

Revolución actual y las de todo género habidas durante nuestra vida independiente, no

son otra cosa que movimientos sociales de defensa, de propia conservación, pues tienden

a transformar aquellos fenómenos, de desfavorables, en favorables al desarrollo

nacional.” (FP, 167, 168)

El tipo de belleza humana en la raza indígena (HNM, 169-172)

La clasificación anterior de 1916, ahora hace referencia al celibato:

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“Entre las agrupaciones de raza indígena, el celibato no existe, o su proporción es

insignificante, en tqanto que en la población de raza blanca, su proporción es

exagedaramente alta.” “La abrumadora proporcieon de ceelibes, principalmente de sexo

femenino, que se observan en los centros urbanos, donde predomina la población blanca,

en tanto que en los pueblos y rancherías indígenas, son tan conados, que casi no se

percibe su existencia. En nuestra opinión esas diferencias son debidas a que la raza

indeigena es eminentemente naturista, es decir, sigue con fidelidad los dictados de la

naturaleza, mientras que la raza blanca está cada vez más alejada de los sistemas

naturales. … Para el indígena no existen las mil barreras económicas y sociales que en la

raza blanca obstaculizan el matrimonio, pues la pubertad es el unico indice que senala

sabiamene la epoca en que debe inicarse la conjuncion d elos sexos. Toda mujer indigena

goza del supremo don del amor, y puede aspirar a la gloria de la maternidad. “ (HNM,

174)

Cifras sobre poblacion en Teotihuacán.

“Qué contraste en la raza blanca y en la mestiza, en que predomina este tipo (se refiere al

celibato)! Gran número de mujeres aptas para la maternidad, y dispuestas al amor,

vegetan, sin embargo, miserable, ridícula, ignominiosamente célibes y enloquecidas por

ver satisfecho el legítimo deseo de sus entrañas sedientas. Amarga resignación,

fanatismo, histerismo, perversión sexual y prostitución, son resultados fatales del

convencional e ilógico sistema que la civilización impone al matrimonio.” (HNM, 175)

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“Ya hemos indicado que el carácter de la situación económica en que viven los indígenas

no influye en la nupcialidad, la cual está automática y fisiológicamente reglamentada. En

cambio, en la población blanca de la Capital y grandes ciudades de la República, el factor

económico es el principal obstáculo que se opne al matrimonio, y en seguida el prejuicio

de clases.’ (HNM 175)

Párrafo de hombres y mujeres que vegetan frente a frente (HNM, 176)

Lo bueno y lo malo de la civilizacion versus lo indigena narrado en funcion del

matrimonio.

Gamio applies his research universal methodology for scientifically explaining

these facts. “No pueden determinarse las necesidades de un pueblo ni por lo tanto

procurar su mejoramiento sin conocer su estadística.” “Para el éxito de cualquier

gobierno que realmente quiera hacer obra eficiente y de nacionalismo, es indispensable

que por todos los medios posibles sea fomentada la adquisición de datos estadísticos

correctos, a fin de que la población se conocida, no solo cuantitativa, sino también

cualitativamente.” (FP, 27-31). La Estadística étnico-demográfica es de capital

importancia en países donde la población es heterogénea en raza, cultura, idioma, sistema

de alimentación, etc.” (FP, 34) These concerns in an ethnic-demographic statistics are

originated in Gamio’s interests in the proper government for the diverse Mexican

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population. “La Estadística vital, o sea la que explica el ascenso y descenso numérico de

nacimientos, defunciones y matrimonios y sugiere los medios para disminuir las

defunciones y acrecentar los nacimientos fue objeto de mayor atención, pero en esfera tan

restringida que no permite generalizar.” (Fp, 34). “En los países en que reinan ciertas

condiciones biológicas y la base de alimentación es el trigo, las estadísticas vitales

demuestran que para que un hombre rinda producción normal de trabajo, debe acusar ante

el dinamómetro determinada energía derivada de la estructura muscular. En México lso

resultados son otros: las razas indígenas cuya alimentación es a base de maíz, suministran

proporción normal de trabajo, y sin embargo su escasa musculación no corresponde

teóricamente a aquella normalidad, por más que su resistencia sea notable.” (FP, 35). Una

razon mas de que gamio busque un mestizaje de base indigena:trabajan mejor que otras

razas, y de todas maneras la clase media de ascendencia europea, es la reservada hasta

ahora al trabajo intelectual.

Entre las agrupaciones de raza indígena, el celibato no existe, o su proporción es

insignificante, en tanto que en la población de raza blanca, su proporción es

exageradamente alta. Nadie necesita, pra comprobar esto, documentarse profusamente,

pues basta para ello con observar directamente la abrumadora proorción de célibes,

principalemnte de sexo femenino, que se observan en los centros urbanos, donde

predomina la población blanca, en tanto que en los pueblos y rancherías indígenas son tan

contados, que casi no se percibe su existencia. En nuestra opinión, esas diferencias son

debidas a que la raza indígena es eminentemente naturista, es decir, sigue con fidelidad

en sus costumbres y en su vida fisiológica, los dictados de la naturaleza, mientras que

la raza blanca está cada vez más alejada de los sistemas naturales; sus hábitos se

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artificializan rápidamente, su funcionamiento fisiológico está acomodado a exigencias y

conveniencias sociales, más que a necesidades orgánicas. Para el indígena no existen las

mil barreras económicas y sociales que en la raza blanca obstaculizan el matrimonio,

pues la pubertad es el único índice que señala sabiamente la eepoca en que debe iniciarse

la conjunción de los sexos. Toda mujer indígena goza del supremo don del amor, y

puede aspirar a la gloria de la maternidad. Esta normal evolución sexual explica la

proverbial honestidad de la mujer indígena, pues está exenta de los perjuicios fisiológicos

y las otras repugnantes perversiones que trae consigo el celibato.” (HUNM, 175)

Although Gamio’s passages just quoted classify the Mexican women, they also

give the predominant impression that Mexican women are alike. In spite of the

differences in pigmentation and social class between mujeres siervas and mujeres

femeninas, for instance, they all share a common trait. The implicit desire to sexual

contact with the Mexican man in order to create the mestizo Mexican subject can be

generalized to any Mexican woman. Taking into account Gamio’s struggle for modern

acceptation, which is premised on a pre-modern/modern narrative, Gamio’s classification

of the women is marked by their non-differentiation, by the paradoxical quality of

indisguishability and universality.

At the same time, as in all Gamio’s statements, in the evolution toward modernity,

women who live in the big cities are represented as degenerated by the social

environment. His developmental approach to culture (that he understands interwined to

blood) while positioning the indigenous populations as traditional communities also

perceives a degenerative menace of civilization.

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The quote makes clear Gamio’s strategy: decadence of the modern life and

women conceived as objet of the men for the “harmonious development and the material

and intellectual bienestar of the individual and the species.” This is a problem of the

sexuality of the Mexican woman whose body builds the mestiza nation, of the

legitimation and delegitmation of which is crucial to the Mexican national community

formation. Desentrañar la construcción étnica bajo esta clasificación.

Before we examine Gamio’s descriptions of the sexuality of women, I would like

to dwell on how Gamio behaved with women in his life. “Even though women faciliate

communication and thus community relations, women themselves are not considered as

initiatios of communication or active partners in community formation (Gayle Rubin, The

Traffic of Women).” “WHAT DOES THE WOMAN OF COLOR WANT? The women of

color want to have sexual realtions with white men because it is their means of upward

social mobiity, their way of supposedly ‘saving the race.’ Men see as innocent victims

and women as active agent in terms of politics of sexuality.” In this sense, his discourse is

against women’s reproduction power.

MGG (104): “Gamio lleva a la práctica esas teorías con sus hijas: Margarita, la mayor estudia en la Facultad de Filosofía y Letras de la Universidad Nacional y se recibe de Maestra en Ciencias Históricas. María de los Ángeles se gradúa de Cirujano Dentista, también en la Universidad Nacional de México y Gabriela estudia para secretaria.”

“Uno de los atributos más importantes para Gamio en las mujeres es la inteligencia; sin dejar desde de ser desde luego profundo admirador de la belleza física. Cuando veía auna mujer hermosa y estaba en convianza, solía exclamar con entusiasm, está como un fuste! (MGG, 104)

“Como director del III, uno de sus primeros proyectos es la investigación de los problemas de la mujer indígena en varios países del continente americano, con miras a diseñar acciones concretas para su mejoramiento.” (MGG, 104)

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“Quizás el aspecto más sorprendente del “feminismo” de Gamio es su percepción de las necesidades físicas de la mujer. Esto se observa claramente en un artículo suyo de la revista Ethnos de 1923, reproducido en 1935 en el libro Hacia un México Nuevo, época en que la impantación de la “educación socialista” por el gobierno de Cárdenas, desencadena entre otras, la discusión relativa a la educación sexual. Gamio escribe en un capítulo titulado “El celibato y el naturismo indígena:”

AGG (35-36)Las estudiantes de Barnard son consideradas las chicas más avanzadas de su tiempo. Son la imagen de la coquetería y la audacia y hacen todo lo possible por corresponder a ella: su lema es “tu study hard and frolic fast.” Parece que Gamio colabora asiduamene a que las chicas de Barnard cumplan cabalmente con su lema. Su hijo Manuel recuerda que Gamio le platicó cómo en algunas ocasiones presto prendas de ropa a algunas de las chicas para que disfrazadas de varones, se “colaran” a los dormitories de hombres.

In another part of the same aforementioned “Our Women” article: Erróneamente, se califica de movimento feminista, la tendencia que se ha venido

intensificando en la mujer mexicana, de procurarse bienestar por sí misma y de manera honesta cuando no pueden suministrárselo sus familaires. Este modo de pensar, o mejor dicho, de no pensar, es característico de los mexicanos que todavía padecen celos cavernarios; la mujer mexicana, debe decirse muy alto, no pierde su índole femenina al transformarse en mecanógrafa, médica, abogada, dentista o dependienta: por el contrario, en esas mujeres debe alabarse que, además de permanecer femeninas, hayan tenido la entereza de afrontar el sacrificio que impone la intensa labor diaria. (FP, 128)

“Nuestras Mujeres” en Forjando Patria (1916) (Será que las mujeres son de loa hombre?) Hace una clasificación de las mujeres en tres clases:

- Sierva “que nace y vive para la labor material, el palacer o la maternidad, esfera de acción casi zoological impuesta por las circunstancias y el medio; la “feminista” para la cual el placer es deportivo más que pasional, la maternidad actividad accesoria, no fundamental, sus tendencies y manifesaciones masculinas, el hogar, sitio de reposo y subsitencia y gabinete de trabajo. Ese tipo de mujer se originó se propagado profusametne en lso grandes centros de población como fruto lógico del ambiente social. La “mujer femenina” es la mujer inermedia, peferida generalmente por que consityue el factor primordial para producier el desarrollo armónico y el bienesar maerial e intellectual del individuo y de la especie.

Como director del III, uno de sus primeros proyectos de investigación se refirió a la mujer indígena en varios países del continente.

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Artículo enviado a Jaime Torres Bodet para su publicación por la Unesco: (cita p. 105 de AGG y too lo he vista en América Indígena).

Necesidades físico-afectivas de la mujer. Revisa Ethnos de 1923, reproducido luego en Hacia un México Nuevo, época en que la implantación de la “educación socialista” por el gobierno de Cárdenas, desencadena entre otras cosas, la discussion relativa a la educación sexual. Gamio escribe “El celibato y el naturismo indígena,” pp. 173-177.Gamio cannot bond with women, thus he bonds with “the people.” Ambivalence in Gamio’s use of the terms.

Rey Chow: By portraying the ‘native’ and the people in this ambivalent light –now

totally deprived, now possessed of resistive energy; now entirely at the mercy of colonial

domination, now definetley the soruce of rebellion against the coloniser- Fanon retains

tehm as empty, mobile figures, figures of convenience onto which he, like other

revolutioarny male thinkers, can write his own script.” (22) This point introduces the

post-colonial intellectual, as Gamio has been …

(Este punto es parte de las estrategias discursivas sobre las mujeres) Gamio’s

Eugenicist Discourse: women, immigration, marriage. Eugenics, a pseudo-science

concerned itself not with the size fo the nation but with its quality. Concerns about the

quality of the nation have been shared, of course, by much wider circles than self-

declared eugenicists. It was concern for the motivation for establishin the Britis welfare

state system. Better health, education and housing for the poor have been promoted as

necessary for improving the quality of the welfare nations. Eugneics, however, did not

concern itself with better nurturing of children, but attemprted to predetermine the quality

of the nation via ‘nature’ in the way of selecctive breeding.

Inspirados en esa alusión, sugerimos que se precipite la foramción del mestizaje, como mejor medio de procurar la unificación de la población mexicana. Los dos siguientes procedimientos de tendencias convergentes, pronto conducirán a tal

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reultado: 1o. Elevar la proporción numérica del grupo blanco, hasta que se igualen siquiera las cifras del indígena, trayendo para ello millones de inmigrantes europeos, convenientemente seleccionados, desprovistos de prejuicios raciales y adaptables a nuestras condiciones climateericas. 2o. elevar efectivamente por meetodos científicos y prácticos, a la vez, el nivel económico, social, cultural, etc., del indígena, a fin de que pueda mezclarse con el inmigrante blanco y con los grupos ya existentes de la misma raza, pues si aumenta la población blanca y el indio permanece en las miserables condiciones que durante siglos lo han caracterizado, no habrá mezcla, quedando en pie, epro en proporciones más alarmante, el urgente y serio problema de la heterogeneidad social de nuestra población. (HMN, 220-221)

“But eugenistic constructions of national reproduction concern much more than

the physical’health’ of the next generation; they concern notions of ‘national stock’ and

biologization of cultural traits. Culture and tradition become essentialized and biologized

into notions of genealogical difference and which were at the heart of the fear of being

swamped by immigrants.

… Para ello, el remedio indicado consiste en fomentar la inmigración. (HMN, 25)

Debe tenerse en cuenta que el mestizaje conviene a México, no sólo desde el punto de vista étnico, sino principalmene para poder establecer un tipo de cultura más avanzado que el pco satisfactorio que hoy preenta la mayoría de la población (pareciera que quiere mejorar a la poblacion no por ellos mismos, sino para engrander al pais) y si bien esto puede conseguirse valiéndose de la educación y otros medios, eta tarea se consumará más pronto si se intensifica el mestizaje, pues éte traerá como consigo automáticamente un efectivo progreso cultural, como resultado d ela eliminación o substitución de las características culturales retrasadas indígenas. (HMN, p, 25)

Casi todos los pueblos de América todavía no están nacionalmene integrados … Tan desfavorable situación puede corregirse intensificando el mestizaje y unificando el standard cultural de vida, generalizando el uso de un solo idioma, mejorando la situación económica d elas masas paupérrimas y multiplicando las vías y vehículos de comunicación. (HMN, 36)

Economía orgánica, variaciones biológicas entre indígenas y españoles. Edad de casamiento entre las niñas de climas tropicales es aceptado (p. 45)

Después de esto vienen los inmigrantes…

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Los varios mercados mexicanos, p. 103 HMN; exchange of women and the national market.

p. 117, marcha evolutiva culturalracismo blanco, p. 133 HMN

Políticas diferenciadas para cada grupo etnico. Confrontacion entre Vasconcelos y

Gamio por educacion, y proyeccion para el continente. While ‘pure ….’ Were made to

breed thorugh a variety of economic and social incnetives, a programme of forced

sterilization was carried out for the feeble minded and other kinds of life unworthy of life.

This type of programme was not a Nation invention. In 1927, for instance, the US

Supreme Court upheld the constittionality of Virginia’s similar involuntary sterilization

law … The demographic race has been prominent in Gamio and indigenist politics. In his

role as indigenist, Gamio hs said that “Politics is a matter of demography, not geography”

when explaining … In the ‘people as power’ discourse, the future of the nation is seen to

depend on tis continuous growth. Sometimes this growth can be based also on

immigration. At other times, it depends almost exclusively on the reproductive power s of

women who are called upon to have more children. The need for people, can be for a

variety of nationalist purposes, civil and military. In Mexico, the call has been to create

the New Mexicans. A certain ‘critical mass’ of people was seen as crucial for the viability

of the nation building process. Although immigragion was encouraged as a quick way to

achieve this goal, measures were originally taken to keep ‘undesierable elemetns’ out,

such as the Anglos Europeans. In this case, the desired immigration was even more

exclusive. The resistance to this discourse of nation building. In order to encourage

Indian women to have more children, a variety of policies have been developed,

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including child allowances, maternity leave and, for some years after the establishmetn of

the state, declaring an award of ‘heroince mothers’ who had ten children or more.

According to his anthropolgical beliefs, Spanish roots could easily be erased by

Mexican environment’s threatens to the new waves of Europeans who continue arriving

to Latin America and Mexico. Gamio erases the violent origin of the conquerors’

metizaje and positions himself always as a man who looks for his pairs’ recognizment as

an elite modern man of a pre-modern country. The greater his insistance in Mexico past,

the greater the difficulty that these creole men confront in order to make a great nation of

this “orogrpahich and Vasconcelo’s words. For Gamio and other post-revolutionary men,

the conceptualization of the new Mexico alternative to the colony is thus inseparable

from a heightened awareness of being Mexican as a limit to be recognized as a man of

European ascendance. As an anthropologist, as a politician, and as a man Gamio and

many of the other Mexican indigenists are always talking to hegemonic modernity. The

sight of the referential modern right man always evaluating Mexican elite men failure.

Within this rhetoric, the indigenist ideology of the revolution that stated that the Indians

were an integral part of Mexico acquires a mediating meaning for the post-revolutionary

ruling class.

E. LATIN AMERICAN INDIGENISM

Mexican Mestiza identity would serve to project the new nation-state all through

Latin America. “We might produce in our country a civilization to serve as the norm to

Mestizo America,” states Moisés Sáenz. The Interamerican Indigenist Institute converges

both the individual and the national task of the above policy, and Dr. Manuel Gamio, who

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become the chair of the institute due to Sáenz’ death, belongs in soul and body to the

latter group.

El artículo sobre las diferentes estéticas del inmigrante mexicano en USA y el

europeo de Usa sirve para entender como Gamio traspasa al ámbito cultural y dice qué

parte que de la cultura moderna se resultará beneficiada por el mestizaje. Es su misma

concepción sobre el medio ambiente y la cultura como una resultante entre el ser

humano, el medio y el tiempo, lo que le hace concluir que en América es oportuno el

mestizaje:

Descendiendo a las industrias artísticas, puede afirmarse que actulmente se desaprovechan las actividades de millares de emigranes que podrían contribuir con su obra de arte, a contrarrestar, hasta cierto punto la “estandarización” mecánica qeu empobrece el aspecto artístico de la ciudad y del hogar americanos. (Gamio contrapone esética y pragmatismo).

(HUNM, 40-50) “El arte de los grupos sociales de origen europeo carece de la espontaneidad, la fuerza y el carácter que tiene el de los grupos indígenas, porque aqueellos son recieen llegados en América, y en consecuencia, su mente todavía no siente ni expresa con plenitud e intensidad la emoción estética que el nuevo ambiente geográfico y aun social pueden producir solamente en quienes han sido objeto de un largo proceso de adaptación y selección. Quienes descienden de europeos todavía obedecen a algunos estímulos de los que, desde tiempos ancestrales, hicieron reaccionar continuamente a sus ancestros en el viejo mundo. De allí que su arte frecuentemetne adolezca de aspectos híbridos o bien sea por reproducción del arte europeo, reproducción pobre por cierto, ya que tampoco puede competir con la obra de europeos que han contnuado viviendo en el mismo ambien

If the international community does not admit the Mexican nation -because of its

indigenous people-, then this very indigenous presence would now become the basis of a

new community, the basis of entry into and recognition by the modern international

world. But how does the indigenous race operate as a new type of communal bond?

Gamio uses two strategies for creating the revolutionary imagined community created:

The issue of evolution and sexual difference. Before establishing Gamio’s tools for

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creating Mexico as well as Latin American vitalizing mestizaje, I will insist in the

rhetoric behind this discourse on miscegenation. El artículo sobre las diferentes estéticas

del inmigrante mexicano en USA y el europeo de Usa le sirve a Gamio para justificar la

parte que de la cultura moderna que se resultará beneficiada por el mestizaje. Es su

misma concepción sobre el medio ambiente y la cultura como una resultante entre el ser

humano, el medio y el tiempo, lo que le hace concluir que en América es oportuno el

mestizaje. Gamio justifica al mestizaje con un razonamiento completamente diferente a

como lo hace Vasconcelos, por ejemplo. Vasconcelos … while Gamio …(Alcántara)

ALARCON: TRADUTTORA, TRADITRICE: Gamio’s construction of the indigenous

woman.

The Malthusian discurse

The story is somehow different in many developing countris where there is a fear

that the uchecked continuous growth (explosion) of the population might bring a national

or international disaster. Woman of color as potentially if not always a whore, a sell-out,

and hence a traitor to her own ethnic community. Woman of color are shameless people

who forsake their own origins for something more universally deirable and profitable,

association with the white world. Women of color have a very specific given agency:

What kind of admittance in the nation does Gamio give to the woman of color?

Conscious wishes and unconscious desires. Gamio’s articles’ justaposition and what it

reveals in relation to classified women, in relation to indigenous men. Jump to hidden

rape of woman of color.

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“A feature of nationalist discourse that has generated considerable consensus is its janus-

faced quality. It presents itself both as a modern project that melts and transforms

traditional attachments in favor of new identities and as a reaffirmation of authentic

cultural values culled from the depths of a presumed communal past. It threfore opens up

a highly fluid and ambivalent field of meanings which can be ractivated, reinterpreted

andoften reinventde at critical juncturs of the histories of nation-states. These meanings

are not given, but fought over and contested by political actors whose definitions of who

and what constitutes the nation have a crucial bearing on notionsof national unity and

alternative claims to sovereignty as well as on the sorts of gender realtiosn that should

inform the nationalist project.” (Deniz Kandiyoti in Rey Chow, pp. 20-21)

b) Gabriela Mistral

LUIS CABRERA Y TOLEDANO EN PP. 19 y 20 de version entregada a Monteon

Agregar sobre Gabriela Mistral y los nacionalismos latinoamericanos

Buscar “Beaurau of Indigenous Affairs”

a) Historia de la tierra comunal, privada y de la mujer en mexico

El partido como aglutinador de los multiples mexicos (corporativismo)

Some of them were reacting to the effects of Porfirio Díaz’s liberal suppresion of the

ejidos’ communal property of the lands (Ley Lerdo, 1856).

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Gamio e indigenismo (mestofilo), p. 96

Mestizaje y marxismo, p. 97

Uso de los terminos en cada lugar

El mestizaje en la provincia de mexico

In those same days, Dr. Manuel Gamio states that Mexico continued being “a country of

great orographic and climatic differences and even constrasts,” and this was a

circumstance “which would in any case have been an obstacle to social unification,

without the added difficulty of resistance on the part of the natives.”80 Heterogeneity was

considered as the basic difficulty to modernization. Rather, the country was living an

enthusiastici reshaping of Mexico. Those who saw the Indians as the great problem of

Mexico, grounded their optimism in “civilization,” and in “indigenism.” The latter was

an administrative branch of the revolution policies. In 1940, The Inter-American

Conference on Indian Life institutionalized “indigenism” in the Americas. This

institution meant by “inidgenism” a theoretical and practical activity fo the nation-states

and academic centres that will implement policies for the solution of the “indigenous

problem” on the basis of the “progressive integration and assimilation” of the Indians to

the national societies.81

80 Manuel Gamio, “incorporating the Indian to the Mexican Population,” pp 108-109 in José Vascon celos and Manuel Gamio, Aspects of Mexican Civilization, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1926.81 Interamerican Conference on Indian Life, p. 4. Cf., Comité Organizador del IV Congreso Indigenista Interamericano, Actas Finales de los Tres Congresos Indigenistas Interamericanos, Publicaciones del Comité Organizador, Cidudad de Guatemala, 1959; David Vela, Orientación y Recomendaciones del Primer Congreso Indigenista Interamericano, Publicaciones del Comitee Organizador del IV Congreso Indigenista Interamerricano, Ciudad de Guatemala, 1959. For a critical perspective of Indigenism in the Americas, see Omar Rodríguez, Contribuciones a la crítica del Indigenismo.

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Gamio’s Indigenist politics embodied this nation-state centric narrative, both of rural

insurgencies to be institutionalized and of indigenous populations to be transformed into

mestizo citizen-subjects. He himself, as an anthropologist has been one of the main

artifices of this process.

Para ilustrar este vinculo entre mujeres y construccion nacional veamos algunas

de las voces que en mexico han protagonizado esta discusion: p. 148, Gamio, “Nuestras

mujeres”

C. LAS PATRIAS: Gabriela Mistral and his exile to California after working with

Vasconcelos’ educational project. Nonetheless, under Vasconcelos’ banner on Mexican

indigenous conceived as Mexicans, and furthermore citizens of the world, Gamio’s

Department of Anthropology was dismantled in 1925, as was the Deparment of Indian

Culture within the Ministry of Education. For a decade thereafter (1925-1935) a wide-

ranging program of rural education and modernization was carried in mestizo and Indian

regions alike, without benefit of the organized participation of anthropolists in policy-

making.

Representación intelectual: Generalmente ha prevalecido en nuestro pais el prejuicio fatal

de alejar de la politica a los hombres de ciencia, periodistas cultos e independientes,

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artistas de valer, etc., etc., l que hizo que el criterio imperante en las cámaras fuera

siempre incoloro, mediocre, ya que además de ser insignificante el numero de

intelectuales que las integraron, tuvieron estos por consigna la de ver, oir y callar, en

tanto que una mayoria de cretinos bostezaba o tejia los insulsos temas impuestos desde

“arriba.’ ” (FP, 77)

P, 170 de FP: gamio da cifras de crecimiento en poblacion, en la rev. y despues.

Al final de FP hay bastante informacion directa sobre las politicas de la revolucion en

cuanto a tierra y hace aqui tambien una clasificacion de los indigenas (ya no mujeres) de

mexico.

Toda mujer indígena goza del supremo don del amor, y puede aspirar a la gloria de la maternidad.

Every indigenous woman enjoys with pleasure the supreme gift of love, and may aspire to the glory of maternity.

Manuel Gamio, “El celibato y el naturismo indígena.”

Drawing on Gamio and García Canclini differences and similarities,

and on Chela Sandoval’s third world mestizaje, the chapter introduces a

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feminist perspective for making a liberatory Pan-American mestiza

identity.

In 1935 Gamio points out that “ultramodern criteria” look for the abolition of “the

geographic frontiers.” He juxtaposes that while “this is a worth humankind’ s goal,” this

is not “América Indo-Ibera’s case,” which he defines as a double-faced space:

Quienes sólo conocen las capitales y principales centros urbanos de esos países, no nos entenderán; pero los que se hayan asomado a la vida indígena de los campos, habrán visto que allí alienta otro mundo, otra raza, otra alma, bien distintos de los que caracterizan a las poblaciones urbanas. … Por una parte, individuos de alto tipo cultural, como sucede en las naciones culturalmente avanzadas de Europa, y por la otra, individuos que viven la existencia de hace cuatro siglos, y algunos hasta la paleolítica, como sucede con grandes grupos indígenas de Brasil, México, Colombia, Ecuador, Perú, etc. (HMN, 4)

Gamio needs to be recognized by “the culturally advanced Europe” as a Mexican

intellectual, and the more he translates the indigenous Mexico to the modern nations of

the world, the more he believes that he distances himself from Latin American men’s

wrong modern subjectivity. In order to open spaces for transantional social movements’

community formation, I privilege manliness among the many conditions that could be

quoted for explaining Manuel Gamio’s complex identifications to Mexican revolutionary

nationalism.

He participated as a consultant of Lázaro Cárdena’s presidential campaign, and

when he makes public the expectatives that this man represents for him, it becomes

evident

Parecían agotadas las fuentes de nuestro optimismo. En cinco lustros han desfilado por el suelo mexicano pujantes revoluciones que alentaron nobilísimos ideales y encendieron el entusiasmo de hombres honrados; pero sus más altos principios fueron tan frecuentemente conculcados con

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prevaricaciones indignas, claudicantes retrocesos y traiciones sin nombre, que casi se perdió la esperanza de ver resurgir la doctrina revolucionaria, otra vez erguida, honesta, redentora. Era ese un pesimismo injusto, pues tenía que venir y ha llegado para el pueblo, el brillante amanecer que tanto anhelaba.Inmaculado patriotismo, rectitud y energía, que hacen añorar a Juárez, inspiran hoy al Poder Público, reviven ideales, señalan el rumbo.Un México nuevo, empieza a vivir!

Our sources of optimism seemed agotadasFor five years pushing revolutions have defilado through Mexican sueloPromoting nobilisimos ideals while firing honrados men’s enthusiasmBut their higher principles have been so frequently conculcados with indign prevaricaciones, claudicant regressions and nameless traitions, that the hope of seeing reemerge the revolutionary doctrine, erguida, honest, redentor. That one was an unfair pessimism, thues it had to come and has come for the people the brilliant sunrisint that they desired so much.Immaculated patriotism, rightness and energy, that make to remind to Juárez, inspire at present days the Public Power, relive ideals, mark the road.A new Mexico begins to live! Patrician agitates las fuentes de nuestro optimismo.En cinco lustros han desfilado por el suelo mexicano pujantes revoluciones que alentaron nobilísimos ideales y encendieron el entusiasmo de los hombres honrados; pero sus más altos principios fueron tan frecuentemente conculcados por prevaricaciones indignas, claudicantes retrocesos y traiciones sin nombre, que casi se perdió laesepranza de ver resurgir la doctrina revolucionaria, otra vez erguida, honesta redentora. (HNM, 2)

Gamio wrote these words in 1935. He was full of hopes in President Lázaro

Cárdenas’ government. As this new hope has appeared in his horizon, he engaged again

in politics, which for him meant to provide scientific knowledge on the Mexican

population, “which constitutes the raw material with whom and for whom the

government works.”

In turning to Mexican revolutionary nationalism, then the questions that I would

like to explore are not questions about the racializing process per se, but rather: how has

been the mestiza community articulated in relation to race and sexuality? Which are the

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implications for transantional social movements of the indigenist politics of the Mexican

Revolution?

The definition of culture utilized by all anthropologists working in Mexico from

the time of Gamio onward was basically that proposed by Taylor in 1857: that body of

learned social behavior which differentiated men from animals, and one group of isolated

human beings from another. Gamio turns the functionalistic colonialist origin of the

scientific anthropology into a nationalistic perspective. In Gamio’s thoughts,

anthropology is the science of humanity, thus a revolutionary government needs its

knowledge to theoretically respond to popular necessities. Gamio rationalizes the above

justification all along his administrative and intellectual career, and his last article,

“Comentario sobre la población indígena de América” (?) shows the same theoretical and

content references.

Manuel Gamio states that Mexico continued being “a country of great orographic

and climatic differences and even constrasts,” and this was a circumstance “which would

in any case have been an obstacle to social unification, without the added difficulty of

resistance on the part of the natives.”82 Heterogeneity was considered as the basic

difficulty to modernization. The country was living an enthusiastici reshaping of Mexico.

82 Manuel Gamio, “incorporating the Indian to the Mexican Population,” pp 108-109 in José Vascon celos and Manuel Gamio, Aspects of Mexican Civilization, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1926.

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Those who saw the Indians as the great problem of Mexico, grounded their optimism in

“civilization,” and in “indigenism.” The latter was an administrative branch of the

revolution policies. In 1940, The Inter-American Conference on Indian Life

institutionalized “indigenism” in the Americas. This institution meant by “indigenism” a

theoretical and practical corporativist activity fo the nation-states and academic centres

that will implement policies for the solution of the “indigenous problem” on the basis of

the “progressive integration and assimilation” of the Indians to the national societies.83

83 Interamerican Conference on Indian Life, p. 4. Cf., Comité Organizador del IV Congreso Indigenista Interamericano, Actas Finales de los Tres Congresos Indigenistas Interamericanos, Publicaciones del Comité Organizador, Cidudad de Guatemala, 1959; David Vela, Orientación y Recomendaciones del Primer Congreso Indigenista Interamericano, Publicaciones del Comitee Organizador del IV Congreso Indigenista Interamerricano, Ciudad de Guatemala, 1959. For a critical perspective of Indigenism in the Americas, see Omar Rodríguez, Contribuciones a la crítica del Indigenismo.

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