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Growing Up Indio during the Mexican Miracle: Childhood, Race and the Politics of Memory

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 February 2022

Timo Schaefer
Timo Schaefer*
Affiliation:
University of Oxford
*
*Corresponding author. E-mail: tschaefer0109@gmail.com, timo.schaefer@history.ox.ac.uk
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Abstract

This article explores the childhood of a Mexican Indigenous activist, Raúl Javier Gatica Bautista, who was born in 1963 in the Oaxacan market town of Tlaxiaco. Growing up in poor circumstances, Gatica would become a leader in the social movements that between the 1980s and early 2000s pushed Mexico toward gradual democratic reform. The article seeks to describe what it was like to grow up poor and Indigenous at a time (later dubbed the Mexican Miracle) of impressive social and economic advances. Paying special attention to the experience of racial abuse, the article also asks how Gatica's childhood came to inform his political militancy. While other historians have linked the phenomenon of political radicalism in twentieth-century Latin America to particular social conditions, or to the influence and adaptation of global ideologies, this article seeks the origins of Gatica's radicalism in the experience of a racialised childhood.

Spanish abstract

Spanish abstract

Este artículo explora la niñez de un activista indígena mexicano, Raúl Javier Gatica Bautista, quien nació en 1963 en el pueblo comercial oaxaqueño de Tlaxiaco. Habiendo crecido en circunstancias de pobreza, Gatica habría de volverse un líder de los movimientos sociales que entre los años 1980 y 2000 impulsaron una reforma democrática gradual en México. El artículo busca describir lo que significaba crecer pobre e indígena en un periodo de impresionantes avances sociales y económicos (después llamado el Milagro Mexicano). Poniendo atención especial a la experiencia del abuso racial, el artículo también pregunta cómo la niñez de Gatica vino a configurar su militancia política. Mientras que otros historiadores han conectado el fenómeno del radicalismo político en el siglo XX latinoamericano con condiciones sociales particulares, o con la influencia y adaptación de ideologías globales, este artículo busca los orígenes del radicalismo de Gatica en la experiencia de una niñez racializada.

Portuguese abstract

Portuguese abstract

Este artigo explora a infância de um ativista indígena mexicano, Raúl Javier Gatica Bautista, que nasceu em 1963 na cidade mercantil de Tlaxiaco em Oaxaca. Tendo crescido em condições precárias, Gatica se tornaria um líder dos movimentos sociais que, entre os anos 1980 e o início dos anos 2000, empurraram o México para uma reforma democrática gradual. O artigo busca descrever como era crescer pobre e indígena em uma época (mais tarde chamada de Milagre Mexicano) de avanços sociais e econômicos impressionantes. Dando especial atenção à experiência de abuso racial, o artigo também questiona como a infância de Gatica veio a determinar sua militância política. Enquanto outros historiadores vincularam o fenômeno do radicalismo político na América Latina do século XX a condições sociais particulares, ou à influência e adaptação de ideologias globais, este artigo busca as origens do radicalismo de Gatica na experiência de uma infância racializada.

Keywords

social movementschildhoodpoliticsoral historyIndigenousmovimientos socialesniñezpolíticahistoria oralindígenasmovimentos sociaisinfânciapolíticahistória oralindígenas
Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Latin American Studies , Volume 54 , Issue 2 , May 2022 , pp. 181 - 202
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press

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References

1 In political terms, San Miguelito was an agencia of the municipality of Tlaxiaco. Agencias were subordinated to municipalities but had certain administrative functions. On the political and administrative organisation of the Mixteca, see Ravicz, Robert, Organización social de los Mixtecos (Mexico City: Instituto Nacional Indigenista, 1965), p. 93Google Scholar, and Alejandro Marroquín (ed.), La ciudad mercado: Tlaxiaco (Mexico City: Instituto Nacional Indigenista, 1957), pp. 58–60.

2 Interviews with José Gatica, Pueblo Nuevo, Oaxaca, 30 Oct. 2019, and Raúl Gatica, Vancouver, 17 Feb. 2020; phone interview with Refugio (‘Virginia’) Gregorio, Raúl's sister, 26 March 2020. All those interviewed for this article have given their permission to the author for their words and names to be cited. Passages from the interviews have been translated by the author and edited for clarity and coherence.

3 Marroquín (ed.), La ciudad mercado, p. 65.

4 The 1950 population figures are taken from United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Dynamics, ‘File 12: Population of Urban Agglomerations with 300,000 Inhabitants or More in 2018, by Country, 1950–2035 (thousands)’, in World Urbanization Prospects: 2018, available at https://population.un.org/wup/Download/ (last accessed 20 Dec. 2021).

5 Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán, ‘El problema humano de las Mixtecas’, in Marroquín (ed.), La ciudad mercado, p. 18.

6 On the history of the Mixteca, see Rodolfo Pastor, Campesinos y reformas: La mixteca, 1700–1856 (Mexico City: Centro de Estudios Históricos, Colegio de México, 1987); María de los Ángeles Romero Frizzi, Economía y vida de los españoles en la Mixteca Alta, 1519–1720 (Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, Gobierno del Estado de Oaxaca, 1990); Terraciano, Kevin, The Mixtecs of Colonial Oaxaca: Ñudzahui History, Sixteenth through Eighteenth Centuries (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001)Google Scholar; Ronald Spores and Andrew K. Balkansky, The Mixtecs of Oaxaca: Ancient Times to the Present (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2013).

7 Interview with Raúl Gatica, Vancouver, 17 Feb. 2020.

8 Palemón had completed one or two years of primary school. Merced had left primary school after a few days or at most weeks of instruction because she could not reconcile schoolwork with her household tasks: phone interview with Virginia Gregorio, 8 April 2020.

9 Interview with José Gatica, Pueblo Nuevo, Oaxaca, 30 Oct. 2019.

10 Diego Osorno, Oaxaca sitiada: La primera insurrección del siglo XXI (Mexico City: Grijalbo, 2007), pp. 31–2.

11 Contributions to that large discussion include Guillermo O'Donnell and Philippe C. Schmitter, Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Tentative Conclusions about Uncertain Democracies (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986); Alberto J. Olvera (ed.), La sociedad civil: De la teoría a la realidad (Mexico City: Colegio de México, 1999); Oxhorn, Philip, Sustaining Civil Society: Economic Change, Democracy, and the Social Construction of Citizenship in Latin America (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2011)Google Scholar; Rubin, Jeffrey, Decentering the Regime: Ethnicity, Radicalism, and Democracy in Juchitán, Mexico (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997)Google Scholar; Sonia E. Alvarez, Jeffrey W. Rubin, Millie Thayer, Gianpaolo Baiocchi and Agustín Laó-Montes (eds.), Beyond Civil Society: Activism, Participation, and Protest in Latin America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017); Geoffrey Pleyers and Manuel Garza Zepeda (eds.), México en movimientos: Resistencias y alternativas (Mexico City: Universidad Autónoma de Ciudad Juárez/Universidad Autónoma Benito Juárez de Oaxaca, 2017).

12 On the APPO, see Saavedra, Marco Estrada, El pueblo ensaya la revolución: La APPO y el sistema de dominación oaxaqueño (Mexico City: Colegio de México, 2016)Google Scholar; Carlos Beas Torres (ed.), La batalla por Oaxaca (Oaxaca City: Ediciones Yope Power, 2007); Víctor Raúl Martínez Vásquez, Autoritarismo, movimiento popular y crisis política: Oaxaca 2006 (Oaxaca City: UABJO-Instituto de Investigaciones Sociológicas, Centro de Apoyo al Movimiento Popular Oaxaqueño, A.C., Educa y Consorcio para el Diálogo Parlamentario y la Equidad, 2007); Lynn Stephen, We Are the Face of Oaxaca: Testimony and Social Movements (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013); Bayona, Berenice Ortega, ‘“El tiempo nos alcanzó”: Huellas de la Asamblea Popular de los Pueblos de Oaxaca en el contexto de la alternancia’, Estudios Sociológicos, 35: 103 (2017), pp. 91–117Google Scholar.

13 David Slater, ‘New Social Movements and Old Political Questions: Rethinking State–Society Relations in Latin American Development’, International Journal of Political Economy, 21: 1 (1991), pp. 32–65; Arturo Escobar and Sonia E. Alvarez, ‘Introduction: Theory and Protest in Latin America Today’, in Escobar and Alvarez (eds.), The Making of Latin American Social Movements: Identity, Strategy, and Democracy (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992), pp. 1–18; Evelina Dagnino, ‘Culture, Citizenship, and Democracy: Changing Discourses and Practices of the Latin American Left’, and Kay Warren, ‘Indigenous Movements as a Challenge to the Unified Social Movement Paradigm for Guatemala’, in Sonia E. Alvarez, Evelina Dagnino and Arturo Escobar (eds.), Cultures of Politics/Politics of Cultures: Re-visioning Latin American Social Movements (New York: Routledge, 1998), pp. 33–63 and 165–94; Sonia E. Alvarez, Gianpaolo Baiocchi, Agustín Laó-Montes, Jeffrey W. Rubin and Millie Thayer, ‘Introduction: Interrogating the Civil Society Agenda, Reassessing Uncivic Political Activism’, in Alvarez et al. (eds.), Beyond Civil Society, pp. 1–25.

14 For examples of the fruitfulness and versatility of such an approach in the context of twentieth-century Latin American history, see e.g. Daniel James, Doña María's Story: Life History, Memory, and Political Identity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001); Manuel Llamojha Mitma and Jaymie Patricia Heilman, Now Peru Is Mine: The Life and Times of a Campesino Activist (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016); Jeffrey W. Rubin and Emma Sokoloff-Rubin, Sustaining Activism: A Brazilian Women's Movement and a Father–Daughter Collaboration (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013); Flor de María Salazar Mendoza, Antonio Rocha Cordero: Etapas inéditas. 1912–2012 (San Luis Potosí: Universidad Autónoma de San Luis Potosí, 2014).

15 French, John D., ‘How the Not-So-Powerless Prevail: Industrial Labor Market Demand and the Contours of Militancy in Mid-Twentieth Century São Paulo, Brazil’, Hispanic American Historical Review, 90: 1 (2010), p. 111CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16 Raúl was a student first at a post-secondary school, pre-college Escuela Preparatoria and then at an Escuela Normal Superior or teacher-training college, both in Oaxaca City. On the importance of Escuelas Normales for social mobility in rural, post-revolutionary Mexico, see Alicia Civera Cerecedo, La escuela como opción de vida: La formación de maestros normalistas rurales en México, 1921–1945 (Mexico City: Colegio Mexiquense, 2008).

17 See most of the contributions to Barbara Potthast and Sandra Carreras (eds.), Entre la familia, la sociedad y el estado: Niños y jóvenes en América Latina (siglos XIX–XX) (Madrid: Iberoamericana/Frankfurt am Main: Vervuert Verlag, 2005); Tobias Hecht (ed.), Minor Omissions: Children in Latin American History and Society (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002); and Susana Sosenski and Elena Jackson Albarrán (eds.), Nuevas miradas a la historia de la infancia en América Latina: Entre prácticas y representaciones (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas, 2012). For studies of twentieth-century Mexican childhoods see also Sosenski, Susana, ‘Diversiones malsanas: El cine y la infancia en la ciudad de México en la década de 1920’, Secuencia, 66 (2006), pp. 37–64CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and ‘Entre prácticas, instituciones y discursos: Trabajadores infantiles en la ciudad de México (1920–1934)’, Historia Mexicana, 60: 2 (2010), pp. 1229–80; Ann S. Blum, Domestic Economies: Family, Work, and Welfare in Mexico City, 1884–1943 (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2009); Daniela Lechuga Herrero, ‘Entre el ocio y el trabajo: La infancia popular en las calles de Ciudad de México en la década de 1930’, Trashumante. Revista Americana de Historia Social, 17 (2021), pp. 198–218; and Eileen Ford, Childhood and Modernity in Cold War Mexico City (New York: Bloomsbury, 2018). For rare studies of Mexican childhood that foreground children's own voices, see Elena Jackson Albarrán, ‘En busca de la voz de los herederos de la Revolución: Un análisis de los documentos producidos por los niños, 1921–1940’, Relaciones, 132 (2012), pp. 17–52, and Seen and Heard in Mexico: Children and Revolutionary Cultural Nationalism (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2014). For an exemplary study of the impact of childhood experiences on generational aesthetic and political sensitivities, see Mary Kay Vaughan, Portrait of a Young Painter: Pepe Zúñiga and Mexico City's Rebel Generation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015).

18 Interview with Virginia Gregorio, Pueblo Nuevo, Oaxaca, 29 Oct. 2019.

19 Ibid.

20 On urban growth rates in twentieth-century Mexico, see Gustavo Garza, La urbanización de México en el siglo XX (Mexico City: Colegio de México, 2003), pp. 30–3, table 4.

21 Oscar Lewis, The Children of Sánchez: Autobiography of a Mexican Family, 50th anniversary edition (New York: Vintage Books, 2011), pp. xxxviii–xxxix. See also Lewis's earlier treatment of the ‘culture of poverty’ among poor Mexican families in Five Families: Mexican Case Studies in the Culture of Poverty (New York: Basic Books, 1959). Both books represented a departure from Lewis's initial more optimistic assessment of the ability of rural migrants to make a life in the city in ‘Urbanization without Breakdown: A Case Study’, The Scientific Monthly, 75: 1 (1952), pp. 31–41. That study had argued against overemphasis on ‘the negative aspects [of rural–urban migration], such as personal maladjustment, breakdown of family life, decline of religion, and increase of delinquency’ (p. 31). On the development of Lewis's thinking on urban poverty, see Antuñano, Emilio de, ‘Mexico City as an Urban Laboratory: Oscar Lewis, the “Culture of Poverty” and the Transnational History of the Slum’, Journal of Urban History, 45: 4 (2019), pp. 813–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

22 For overviews of twentieth-century urban theory, see Brodwyn Fischer, ‘A Century in the Present Tense: Crisis, Politics, and the Intellectual History of Brazil's Informal Cities’, in Fischer, Bryan McCann and Javier Auyero (eds.), Cities From Scratch: Poverty and Informality in Urban Latin America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), pp. 9–67, and Kees Koonings and Dirk Kruijt, ‘The Rise of Megacities and the Urbanization of Informality, Exclusion and Violence’, in Koonings and Kruijt (eds.), Mega-Cities: The Politics of Urban Exclusion and Violence in the Global South (New York: Zed Books, 2009), pp. 8–27.

23 Lewis's view was thus considerably more nuanced than those of US scholars and policymakers who used his thesis to deplore the values of poor, Black families in the United States. For discussions of the global reception of Lewis's work see Fischer, ‘A Century in the Present Tense’, pp. 33–40, de Antuñano, ‘Mexico City as an Urban Laboratory’ and Rosemblatt, Karin Alejandra, ‘Other Americas: Transnationalism, Scholarship, and the Culture of Poverty in Mexico and the United States’, Hispanic American Historical Review, 89: 4 (2009), pp. 603–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24 Lewis, The Children of Sánchez, p. xxxix.

25 Interview with Virginia Gregorio, Pueblo Nuevo, Oaxaca, 12 Nov. 2019.

26 Virginia and Palemón carried on their parents’ trade as petty merchants, while José and Raúl became teachers (José after first working for some years as a veterinarian). In his subsidised, single-room Vancouver flat, Raúl probably leads the most materially modest life of the siblings, as he pours the majority of his money and energy into his political work, now on behalf of Latin American migrant workers in Canada.

27 Interview with José Gatica, Pueblo Nuevo, Oaxaca, 30 Oct. 2019.

28 Interview with Virginia Gregorio, Pueblo Nuevo, Oaxaca, 29 Oct. 2019.

29 Ibid.

30 Ibid.; interviews with Josefa Bautista and Benito Jiménez, Pueblo Nuevo, Oaxaca, 30 Oct. 2019; Clemencia Bautista, Pueblo Nuevo, Oaxaca, 3 Nov. 2019; José Gatica, Pueblo Nuevo, Oaxaca, 30 Oct. 2019; and Palemón Gregorio (Raúl's brother), Pueblo Nuevo, Oaxaca, 5 Nov. 2019.

31 Alessandro Portelli, The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories: Form and Meaning in Oral History (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1991), p. 2.

32 Interview with Raúl Gatica, Vancouver, 24 Feb. 2017.

33 Interviews with Raúl Gatica, Vancouver, 11 Nov. 2016 and 24 Feb. 2017; José Gatica, Pueblo Nuevo, Oaxaca, 30 Oct. 2019; and Palemón Gregorio, Pueblo Nuevo, Oaxaca, 5 Nov. 2019.

34 Interview with Raúl Gatica, Vancouver, 11 Nov. 2016.

35 Interview with Virginia Gregorio, Pueblo Nuevo, Oaxaca, 29 Oct. 2019.

36 Interviews with José Gatica, Pueblo Nuevo, Oaxaca, 30 Oct. 2019, Virginia Gregorio, Pueblo Nuevo, Oaxaca, 29 Oct. 2019, Palemón Gregorio, Pueblo Nuevo, Oaxaca, 5 Nov. 2019, and Raúl Gatica, Vancouver, 11 Nov. 2016 and 16 Feb. 2020.

37 Interviews with Raúl Gatica, Vancouver, 11 Nov. 2016 and 16 Feb. 2020.

38 Interview with Raúl Gatica, Vancouver, 11 Nov. 2016.

39 Interviews with Raúl Gatica, Vancouver, 11 Nov. 2016 and 16 Feb. 2020.

40 Ibid., and interview with Palemón Gregorio, Pueblo Nuevo, Oaxaca, 5 Nov. 2019.

41 Interview with Raúl Gatica, Vancouver, 11 Nov. 2016.

42 Mexican courts, furthermore, frequently ruled that workers employed in domestic-adjacent businesses but living in their employers’ households fell under the legal category of domestic workers. Sara Hidalgo, ‘The Making of a “Simple Domestic”: Domestic Workers, the Supreme Court, and the Law in Postrevolutionary Mexico’, International Labor and Working-Class History, 94 (2018), pp. 55–79.

43 Interview with Raúl Gatica, Vancouver, 11 Nov. 2016. The social, cultural and racial pretensions of Tlaxiaco's leading families are described in Marroquín (ed.), La ciudad mercado.

44 Interviews with Raúl Gatica, Vancouver, 11 Nov. 2016 and 17 Feb. 2020.

45 Historians of childhood in post-revolutionary Mexico City have noted the frequency with which poor children appropriated public spaces, where it was often possible to combine informal labour with a measure of freedom and diversion. Sosenski, ‘Entre prácticas, instituciones y discursos’; Lechuga Herrero, ‘Entre el ocio y el trabajo’.

46 Interview with Raúl Gatica, Vancouver, 12 April 2019.

47 Interview with Raúl Gatica, Vancouver, 11 Nov. 2016.

48 Raúl Gatica, ‘Natalia’, in Personajes prestados / Borrowed Characters (Mexico City: Centro de Estudios Antropológicos, Científicos, Artísticos, Tradicionales y Lingüísticos, 2009), p. 57.

49 Interview with Raúl Gatica, Vancouver, 11 Nov. 2016.

50 On Mexican comic books in this era see Anne Rubenstein, Bad Language, Naked Ladies, and Other Threats to the Nation: A Political History of Comic Books in Mexico (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998).

51 For discussions about memory as a historical source, see e.g. Paul Thompson, Voice of the Past: Oral History, 3rd edition (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 125–9, 133–4, 143–4, and James, Doña María's Story.

52 Interview with Raúl Gatica, Vancouver, 17 Feb. 2020.

53 By ‘motif’ I mean a category of thought that is generative rather than precise, less an idea than a cluster of patterned perceptions from which different ideas might be made.

54 Interview with Raúl Gatica, Vancouver, 17 Feb. 2020.

55 Interview with Raúl Gatica, Vancouver, 11 Nov. 2016. A similar dynamic is described in Susana Drucker's ethnography of a Oaxacan town, Cambio de indumentaria: La estructura social y el abandono de la vestimenta indígena en la villa de Santiago Jamiltepec (Mexico City: Instituto Nacional Indigenista, 1963), pp. 41–5.

56 While some Mexican anthropologists developed a more radical indigenismo, defending the value of cultural pluralism rather than assimilation, their position did not become part of the political mainstream: Luis Villoro, Los grandes momentos del indigenismo en México, 3rd edition (Mexico City: Colegio de México/Colegio Nacional/Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1996), pp. 228–57; Paula López Caballero, ‘Anthropological Debates around the Indigenous Subject and Alterity, 1940–1948’, and Diana Lynn Schwartz, ‘Displacement, Development, and the Creation of a Modern Indígena in the Papaloapan, 1940s–1970s’, in Paula López Caballero and Ariadna Acevedo-Rodrigo (eds.), Beyond Alterity: Destabilizing the Indigenous Other in Mexico (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 2018), pp. 199–221 and 222–43; Alan Knight, ‘Racism, Revolution, and Indigenismo: Mexico, 1910–1940’, in Richard Graham (ed.), The Idea of Race in Latin America, 1870–1940 (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1990), pp. 71–113; María L. O. Muñoz, Stand up and Fight: Participatory Indigenismo, Populism, and Mobilization in Mexico, 1970–1984 (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 2016), chap. 2; Stephen E. Lewis, Rethinking Mexican Indigenismo: The INI's Coordinating Center in Highland Chiapas and the Fate of a Utopian Project (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 2018); A. S. Dillingham, Oaxaca Resurgent: Indigeneity, Development, and Inequality in Twentieth-Century Mexico (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2021).

57 In the first two decades after the revolution a full 10 per cent of Mexico's federal budget was allocated to the Ministry of Education: Mary Kay Vaughan, Cultural Politics in Revolution: Teachers, Peasants, and Schools in Mexico, 1930–1940 (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 1997); Stephen E. Lewis, ‘The Nation, Education, and the “Indian Problem” in Mexico, 1920–1940’, in Lewis and Mary Kay Vaughan (eds.), The Eagle and the Virgin: Nation and Cultural Revolution in Mexico, 1920–1940 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), pp. 176–94; Engracia Loyo, ‘El conocimiento del indio: Nuevo camino para su asimilación (1930–1940)’, in María Bertely Busquets (ed.), Historias, saberes indígenas y nuevas etnicidades en la escuela (Mexico City: Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social, 2006), pp. 69–94; Alexander S. Dawson, Indian and Nation in Revolutionary Mexico (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 2004); Nathaniel Morris, Soldiers, Saints, and Shamans: Indigenous Communities and the State in Mexico's Gran Nayar, 1910–1940 (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 2020), chap. 3 and 5.

58 See Ariadna Acevedo Rodrigo, ‘Las apariencias importan: Indumentaria e higiene personal como marcas de civilización y ciudadanía en la educación para campesinos e indígenas, México, ca. 1921–1943’, in Ariadna Acevedo Rodrigo and Paula López Caballero (eds.), Ciudadanos inesperados: Espacios de formación de la ciudadanía ayer y hoy (Mexico City: Cinvestav/Colegio de México, 2012), pp. 131–66, and Schell, Patience, ‘Nationalizing Children through Schools and Hygiene: Porfirian and Revolutionary Mexico City’, The Americas, 60: 4 (2004), pp. 559–87CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

59 Dillingham, Oaxaca Resurgent, p. 54.

60 Aguirre Beltrán, ‘El problema humano de las Mixtecas’, p. 18.

61 Ibid. The first director of Mexico's National Indigenist Institute, Alfonso Caso, in 1953 similarly proclaimed the need for ‘achieving the social and cultural unity of all Mexicans’. Quoted in Lewis, Rethinking Mexican Indigenismo, p. 7.

62 That effort of vigilance and self-discipline also comes through in anthropological accounts, e.g. Drucker, Cambio de indumentaria; Judith Friedlander, Being Indian in Hueyapan: A Study of Forced Identity in Contemporary Mexico (New York: St Martin's Press, 1975); Reck, Gregory G., In the Shadow of Tlaloc: Life in a Mexican Village (Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland, 1978)Google Scholar.

63 Interview with Raúl Gatica, Vancouver, 11 Nov. 2016.

64 Phone interview with Raúl Gatica, 4 June 2020. Raúl was at the time teaching at a teachers’ college. His brother José was a veterinarian.

65 Interview with Raúl Gatica, Vancouver, 16 Feb. 2020.

66 Figueroa, Mónica G. Moreno, ‘Historically Rooted Transnationalism: Slightedness and the Experience of Racism in Mexican Families’, Journal of Intercultural Studies, 29: 3 (2008), pp. 293–5Google Scholar, and ‘Distributed Intensities: Whiteness, Mestizaje and the Logics of Mexican Racism’, Ethnicities, 10: 3 (2010), p. 394. Reports about appearance-based racial prejudice also pepper the anthropological and oral-history literature on Mexican everyday culture: see e.g. Lewis, The Children of Sánchez, pp. 23–4, 63, 65, 68, 110; Friedlander, Being Indian in Hueyapan, pp. 4–5; Vaughan, Portrait of a Young Painter, p. 56.

67 Waterbury, Ronald, ‘Non-Revolutionary Peasants: Oaxaca Compared to Morelos in the Mexican Revolution’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 17: 4 (1975), pp. 410–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Francisco José Ruiz Cervantes, La revolución en Oaxaca: El movimiento de la soberanía (1915–1920) (Mexico City: Instituto de Investigaciones Sociales/Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1986); Margarita Dalton, Breve historia de Oaxaca (Mexico City: Colegio de México/Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2004), pp. 228–35.

68 ‘It [the insult] only has meaning because it has been used by so many earlier speakers’, Eribon continues. Didier Eribon, Returning to Reims, trans. Michael Lucey (Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e), 2013), p. 198.

69 Mary Weismantel, Cholas and Pishtacos: Stories of Race and Sex in the Andes (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2001), p. 14.

70 Interview with Raúl Gatica, Vancouver, 24 Feb. 2017.

71 Raúl used to act as a ‘macho’ in the strong sense of that term, which ‘connotes men who expect the superior place in a vigorously defended gender hierarchy and the societies informed by such a hierarchy’: Víctor M. Macías-González and Anne Rubenstein, ‘Introduction: Masculinity and History in Modern Mexico’, in Macías-González and Rubenstein (eds.), Masculinity and Sexuality in Modern Mexico (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 2012), p. 2. On the history of the term ‘macho’ in Mexico, see Paredes, Américo, ‘The United States, Mexico, and Machismo’, Journal of the Folklore Institute, 8: 1 (1971), pp. 17–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar (first published in Spanish in 1967). On male dominance in Mexico's culture industry, see Hind, Emily, Dude Lit: Mexican Men Writing and Performing Competence, 1955–2012 (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 2019)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On male dominance in the political imagination of the Cold-War Latin American Left, see Ileana Rodríguez, Women, Guerrillas, and Love: Understanding War in Central America (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). On male-dominated gender relations in mid-twentieth century Mixteca, see Ravicz, Organización social de los Mixtecos, pp. 120–44.

72 Interview with Raúl Gatica, Vancouver, 12 April 2019.

73 Ibid.

74 Interview with Virginia Gregorio, Pueblo Nuevo, Oaxaca, 12 Nov. 2019.

75 Phone interview with Raúl Gatica, 11 April 2021.

76 Interview with Raúl Gatica, Vancouver, 11 Nov. 2016.