Research | A. S. Dillingham

Research & Publications

Book

Oaxaca Resurgent: Indigeneity, Development, and Inequality in Twentieth-Century Mexico (Stanford University Press, 2021)

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 anti-colonialism, 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.

"Thoroughly researched and wonderfully written, Oaxaca Resurgent vividly portrays how bilingual teachers and other indigenista brokers managed to resist, selectively accept, and reshape developmentalist policies and multicultural state projects throughout the 20th century. Based on surveillance documents from Mexican Intelligence Services as well as oral interviews he conducted in Spanish and Mixtec, a language he learned as his intellectual and personal life became increasingly intertwined with the destiny of Oaxaca, Dillingham works with care and empathy, persuasively arguing that Oaxaca's gift for our contemporary world resides in the indomitable energy and plurality of vision of its many Indigenous communities." ―Cristina Rivera Garza ― author of The Restless Dead: Necrowriting and Disappropriation

"Oaxaca Resurgent provides a wide-ranging analysis of the tug of war between Mexico's developmentalist policy and historic strategies of Indigenous resistance. With careful attention to state projects and grassroots initiatives, Dillingham offers a compelling picture of the institutions, actors and ideologies that shaped the politics of indigeneity in the complex and dynamic terrain of Oaxaca." ―Tanalís Padilla ― author of Rural Resistance in the Land of Zapata

"A. S. Dillingham's meticulous archival and oral reconstruction places Mixtec intellectuals and activists at the center of indigenista thinking and development schemes: authoring, appropriating, retooling, and transforming every aspect of indigenismo for their own purposes, from the postrevolutionary period to the neoliberal present. Dillingham brings to life three generations of activists who came to political maturity under that mantle of indigenismo, transforming its meaning from the inside out, and tracing how these Mixtec actors contributed to the resurgence of Indigenous anticolonial and autonomy movements that swept the hemisphere in the second half of the 20th century. A must read for hemispheric Native American and Indigenous scholars." ―María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo ― author of Indian Given: Racial Geographies across Mexico and the United States

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.

"Indigenismo Occupied: Indigenous Youth and Mexico’s Democratic Opening (1968-1975)” The Americas, Vol. 72, No. 4 (October 2015): 549-582.*

*Awarded the Antonine Tibesar Prize for most distinguished article published in The Americas by the Conference on Latin American History.

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.