| Review | Journal of Social History, 39.1

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| Review | Journal of Social History, 39.1 | The History Cooperative

REVIEWS

Indian and Nation in Revolutionary Mexico. By Alexander S. Dawson (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2004. xxvi plus 222 pp. $45.00).

In 2001, the Mexican government approved a constitutional amendment that purported to give indigenous communities important new rights and thus to address the most imperative demands put forth by the indigenous guerrillas of the state of Chiapas. In fact, the new law did no such thing and essentially confirmed the status quo. Indian and Nation in Revolutionary Mexico, by Alexander Dawson (History, Simon Frasier University), reminds us that 2001 was hardly the first time that official initiatives meant to address Mexico's "Indian Problem" have fallen short of their promise. The book covers the period between 1917 and 1946, when a succession of scientific and educational institutions attempted to understand and modernize indigenous people and, in one form or another, to integrate them into the Mexican nation. Dawson is not the first scholar to trace the rise and eventual ossification of revolutionary indigenismo, or "indigenism," but he writes from a strikingly fair-minded vantage point and refuses to flatten out the complexities of indigenist initiatives or of native people's response to them. As a result, Indian and Nation represents a major contribution to the historiography of revolutionary state formation and ethnohistory in Mexico.

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