A. S. Dillingham
Research & Publications
Book
Winner of the American Society for Ethnohistory's 2022 Erminie Wheeler-Voegelin Book Award and the Conference on Latin American History's 2023 María Elena Martínez Prize in Mexican History.
Oaxaca Resurgent examines how Indigenous people in one of Mexico's most rebellious states shaped local and national politics during the twentieth century. Drawing on declassified surveillance documents and original ethnographic research, A.S. Dillingham traces the contested history of indigenous development and the trajectory of the Mexican government's Instituto Nacional Indigenista, the most ambitious agency of its kind in the Americas. This book shows how generations of Indigenous actors, operating from within the Mexican government while also challenging its authority, proved instrumental in democratizing the local teachers' trade union and implementing bilingual education. Focusing on the experiences of anthropologists, government bureaucrats, trade unionists, and activists, Dillingham explores the relationship between indigeneity, rural education and development, and the political radicalism of the Global Sixties.
By centering Indigenous expressions of anticolonialism, Oaxaca Resurgent offers key insights into the entangled histories of Indigenous resurgence movements and the rise of state-sponsored multiculturalism in the Americas. This revelatory book provides crucial context for understanding post-1968 Mexican history and the rise of the 2006 Oaxacan social movement.
Peer-Reviewed Articles and Chapters
“Mexico’s Turn Toward the Third World: Rural Development under President Luis Echeverría,” in México Beyond 1968: Revolutionaries, Radicals, and Repression During the Global Sixties and Subversive Seventies, ed. Jaime M. Pensado and Enrique C. Ochoa (Tucson, AZ: The University of Arizona Press, 2018), 113-133.
Este articulo ha sido traducido y publicado en una revista mexicana de ciencias sociales, Cuadernos del Sur. Para quienes prefieren leerlo en español, se encuentra aquí.
Articles
"Murder at Sea," London Review of Books blog, November 3, 2025
"Trails of Tears," London Review of Books blog, March 18, 2025
"What an Indigenous perspective on U.S. and Mexican history reveals," The Washington Post, February 10, 2023
“Wakanda Forever’ arrives just in time to dispel Thanksgiving myths,” The Washington Post, November 23, 2022
"Why the anti-Indigenous remarks of the L.A. City Council sparked protest," The Washington Post, October 20, 2022
"Mexican Activist Protests Femicide at Oaxacan Festival," NACLA, August 16, 2022
“Mexico’s Classroom Wars,” with René González Pizarro, Jacobin, June 24, 2016
Dillingham's research has been funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and American Council of Learned Societies, the Inter-American Foundation, the National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Smithsonian Institution.
Book Reviews