Indigenista Dreams Meet Sober Realities

Indigenous Chiapas Before the INI

In order to fully appreciate the INI’s accomplishments in 1950s Chiapas, it is important to bear in mind what the indigenistas were up against. During most of the colonial period, Indians constituted the region’s only “natural resource” and were exploited as such. Ethnic divisions between the highland Maya and ladinos may have actually hardened in Chiapas after independence from Spain and the formal abolition of the colonial caste system. Powerful ladinos used liberal land laws to strip highland indigenous communities of most of their land. After 1890, the development of the plantation economy in the sparsely populated lowlands led to the development of a highly exploitative debt contracting system known as enganche. The planters’ agents, known as enganchadores, used guile, deception, and alcohol to recruit indigenous workers, although often it was enough to prey on their poverty and their need for a cash advance. Enganche persisted well into the postrevolutionary period, despite the fact that Mexico’s Constitution of 1917 outlawed the practice. The constitution also outlawed company stores (tiendas de raya), but most lowland plantations in Chiapas had them (Rus, 2003; Viqueira, 1995; Wasserstrom, 1983).

Conditions for the indigenous were no better in and around the highland commercial center of San Cristóbal de Las Casas. Indigenous men spotted on the streets of San Cristóbal after dusk were arrested for “public scandals” (escándalos en vía pública) or alleged drunkenness. They were freed the next day, but only after cleaning city streets and plazas. ¹ Indigenous women were particularly vulnerable to this brutal ethnic hierarchy. According to two reliable historians of modern Chiapas, in the 1920s and 1930s young ladinos from prominent families in San Cristóbal often rode up to nearby Tzotzil villages when the men were away on the lowland plantations and raped defenseless indigenous women as they worked in the fields. One well-known ladino confessed on his deathbed to participating in these “rape brigades.” Although remorseful and quite ashamed at what he had done 70 years earlier, he explained his actions and those of his friends by saying, “It was something that kids did” (personal communication, August 2009).

This shocking system of institutionalized racism was still firmly in place in 1951, when the CCI first opened its doors. Ladino hoarders still installed themselves at the entrances to the town and commandeered indigenous goods at a fraction of their market value. Once inside the town, the indigenous still lowered their eyes and ceded sidewalks to ladinos. As suggested by Rosario Castellanos’s (1960) short story “Modesta Gómez,” even the poorest, most miserable ladinas availed themselves of the region’s ethnic hierarchy to exploit the indigenous. It was in this bitterly polarized context that Mexican indigenistas sought to develop the highlands, educate and modernize the Tzeltal and Tzotzil Maya, and incorporate them into the Mexican nation.

The “Golden Age” of the CCI/INI (1951–1957)

Education was at the heart of the INI’s programs of development and assimilation, but the indigenistas faced an uphill battle in highland Chiapas. Thirty years after the federal Ministry of Public Education (Secretaría de Educación Pública— SEP) began building schools in rural Mexico, the CCI’s first director, Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán, needed several weeks to find 47 indigenous men able to read and write in Spanish and willing to collaborate with the INI as bilingual cultural promoters. ² Only three of them had finished the sixth grade. Once the first generation of promoters had been selected, the INI began training the Tzotzil men to impart the “preparatory grade” (pre-first grade) in their home communities in their native tongue. Most researchers agree that Mexico’s INI was the first modern government agency in the Americas to teach reading and writing in the mother tongue before it was attempted in the second, national language.

Introducing formal education in the Tzeltal and Tzotzil highlands involved negotiations at all levels. Cultural promoters persuaded their communities to set aside land for a new schoolhouse, a basketball court, and a gardening plot. Residents were then expected to build the schoolhouse. If they agreed to make adobe bricks, the INI offered bricklayers as well as materials like windows, doors, cement, and wood if none was locally available. Once the schoolhouse was built, the INI tried to provide it with a map, a flag, and a clock (for telling time and learning numbers), as well as primers (cartillas), pencils, notebooks, portraits of the Mexican heroes Miguel Hidalgo and Benito Juárez, and some publicity about vaccinations.

The negotiations did not stop once the school was built, because the INI needed parents’ cooperation to ensure adequate attendance. Promoters were negotiated, too. Residents at the hamlet of Yaltem, Chamula, promised to support a school and send a student to the CCI’s boarding school for training only if the INI promised to assign him to Yaltem. They threatened that if he were placed in another community they would all go to that community to bring him back. They would not accept a promoter from outside Yaltem, and “under no circumstances would they accept a ladino.” ³ This attitude was typical in the 1950s, although some deeply divided hamlets in municipalities like Zinacantán actually lobbied to have outsiders appointed as promoters to prevent any one faction from gaining the upper hand (Romano, 1980: 38).

The INI’s first-generation promoters were true pioneers, and several of them played critical roles in the political, economic, and social life of the highlands in the second half of the twentieth century. In addition to teaching literacy skills in both their native language and Spanish, male promoters were expected to promote the INI’s infrastructure projects, such as roads and piped water, and instruct members of their communities in agricultural science and general hygiene. Starting in 1956, a smaller number of female promoters introduced “modernity” to the girls and women of their communities in the form of Western medicine, Singer sewing machines, courses in hygiene and food preparation, and instruction in agriculture and animal husbandry. The promoters were clearly the INI’s most effective negotiating tools, even if most of them were barely literate themselves and had limited command of Spanish. Although many schools were plagued with problems such as low attendance (especially among girls) and conflicts with resistant elements inside and outside of the communities, by the middle 1950s the INI’s education program was firmly rooted.

The INI’s health program was also a top priority in the 1950s. The state of health care in Chiapas was shocking by any measure. Not a single public or private medical clinic existed in the indigenous highlands. A poorly provisioned civil hospital operated in the small mountain town of San Cristóbal, but indigenous patients reported suffering discrimination there. Moreover, as one of the CCI’s first doctors noted, “the commonly held belief that the Civil Hospital is in fact an antechamber to the cemetery is not totally unfounded.” ⁴ Close to 80 percent of the indigenous population suffered from some form of parasitosis. Gastrointestinal and respiratory illnesses, including enteritis, bronchitis, whooping cough, typhus, and measles hit the child population particularly hard. Adults suffered from these and other ailments, including rheumatism and extreme malnutrition, as well as illnesses that they picked up during stints on lowland plantations such as malaria, onchocerciasis (river blindness), uncinariasis, and amebic dysentery (Acción Indigenista, 1954). The infant mortality rate hovered around 50 percent in many municipalities. Water sources in the highlands were often contaminated. The Tzotzil and Tzeltal shared living quarters with pigs, dogs, and poultry; they slept on flea-infested blankets on dirt floors in poorly ventilated homes; they defecated outside, in the open air, but children (and animals) often defecated on the dirt floors. ⁵

Tackling these matters in a population that lacked a modern understanding of illness was no easy matter. Where the CCI’s indigenistas saw people suffering from preventable diseases, the Tzeltal and Tzotzil believed that illness was the work of witchcraft, an angry relative, or a divine curse. The indigenistas wanted to protect water sources by encasing them in cement, but the indigenous believed that gods resided in the springs; encasing them would only provoke their wrath. And when the INI built health clinics in the highlands and staffed them with ladino doctors and nurses, the indigenous continued to prefer traditional healers, who spoke their language and treated them in their own homes where they were surrounded by family and loved ones. No dimension of the INI’s development program more directly clashed with the spiritual underpinnings of Tzeltal and Tzotzil society than the health program.

Given the amount of anthropological research that preceded the creation of the CCI in highland Chiapas, the INI should have been prepared for indigenous resistance to modern medicine. But it was not. The INI seemed surprised that its health clinics were underutilized—the first patient at the Chamula clinic was a lamb that had been mauled by a coyote—and its early vaccination campaigns sometimes involved the use of force because the indigenous would often flee at the sight of the vaccination brigades. At Chamula, the two Tzotzil promoters who worked with the ladino doctor and nurse essentially doubled as bodyguards (Holland, 1963: 214). Elsewhere in the INI’s zone of operations, clinics were still virtually empty, doctors carried pistols for their own protection, and the medical outposts were in total disarray. The CCI’s health program soon entered into a severe crisis.

In early 1955, the CCI’s lead doctor, Roberto Robles Garnica, met with the center’s director, Agustín Romano, to propose a fundamental reorientation of the division. Robles did not mince words; the medical outposts, in particular, were “bad institutions that feebly attempted to replace traditional medicine.” The nurses that staffed them were “notoriously ill-prepared,” and several of the INI’s bilingual indigenous health promoters had still not bought into Western medicine. This created a “vice-ridden work ethic that was antiscientific and subject to criticism from the communities for its notorious inefficiency.” Robles believed that the INI should shift almost exclusively to preventative medicine, especially vaccinations, DDT campaigns (to eliminate the fleas that carried typhus), and the protection of water sources. He also proposed training bilingual midwives to work directly with pregnant women. Romano accepted Robles’s recommendations, temporarily closing five medical outposts and endorsing the proposal to shift the emphasis of the health division to preventative medicine and education. ⁶

The CCI’s preventative medicine campaigns were ultimately more successful than its clinics, but there was nothing easy about carrying them out. The indigenous generally did not understand why preventative medicine was being applied to healthy people, and they recoiled when vaccinations caused mild reactions. The center’s indigenistas decided that its first major preventative campaign should target typhus, even though other diseases like whooping cough were also prevalent and were more likely to be fatal. The reason? Typhus was easily eradicated by applying talcum powder containing 10 percent DDT to clothing and directly onto people. As Robles explained, “Once the campaign has been objectively successful and the population sees that the fleas—which transmit the illness—have diminished or disappeared along with the typhus, it becomes possible to undertake a vaccination campaign against whooping cough, which is a bit more complicated because of the reactions that the immunized children often suffer.” The typhus campaign therefore met several INI objectives—it was relatively noninvasive, it promised quick, visible results, and killing fleas and lice was something everyone could appreciate (Romano, 2003: 145).

One of the most important lessons drawn from the health division’s rocky start was the need to educate the indigenous before launching health and hygiene campaigns. Fortunately for the indigenistas, by 1955 the CCI’s Department of Visual Aids had created the Teatro Petul, a bilingual traveling hand-puppet troupe. The Teatro Petul’s indigenous puppeteers put on lively shows that entertained audiences and promoted literacy, school attendance, INI construction projects, consumer cooperatives, and the importance of learning Spanish and knowing Mexican laws (Lewis, 2011). The Teatro Petul also became a key ally in the CCI’s 1955 typhus campaign. The puppeteers put on dozens of performances encouraging the Tzotzil and Tzeltal to allow INI personnel to dedetizar (apply talcum powder containing 10 percent DDT to) their homes, their clothes, and their bodies. ⁷ During the second half of 1955, the CCI’s health brigade applied 8,000 kilos of talcum powder with 10 percent DDT directly onto 51,167 people and 413,082 articles of clothing. As a result of this massive effort, the Center reported no typhus outbreak in the Chiapas highlands during the winter of 1955–1956. ⁸ One year later, Robles reported that out of the 10 municipalities subjected to dedetización in 1955, only Chamula and Chenalhó still reported cases of typhus. ⁹

When the decision was made to carry out a major vaccination campaign against whooping cough in 1958, the Teatro Petul was again given a central role. It gave dozens of educational performances to encourage women to vaCCInate themselves and their families. In the play entitled “Petul, Health Promoter,” the lead puppet (named Petul) explained that whooping cough was caused not by witches but by microbes, which could be controlled by vaccinations. He also explained that it took three shots to protect against whooping cough; even if children had an adverse reaction to the first shot, it was still necessary to get the second and third shots (Castellanos, 1963: 5–14). Although some parents still hid their children from the vaccination brigades, the INI was satisfied with the 1958 campaign; 71 percent of those who received the first dose of DPT vaCCIne received the second dose, and 58 percent received the third. These numbers compared very favorably to those obtained by the Ministry of Health (Secretaría de Salud y Asistencia) in urban areas. ¹⁰

Anthropologically informed negotiation tactics helped the CCI work with the indigenous to establish INI schools and launch successful preventative health campaigns, but the stiffest resistance that it encountered came not from the indigenous but from local ladinos. In this complicated corner of southern Mexico, coletos (lifelong residents of San Cristóbal) fiercely defended their historic autonomy from Mexico City. They viewed the INI with great suspicion, if not open hostility, and they fiercely opposed several of the indigenistas’ more ambitious economic development programs. As a result, many of the INI’s bolder plans fell by the wayside, including a proposal to industrialize San Cristóbal de Las Casas. ¹¹

The indigenistas’ sharpest confrontation with ladinos involved brothers Hernán and Moctezuma Pedrero. The Pedreros owned a powerful, entirely illegal statewide alcohol monopoly that had consolidated its power just as the CCI opened its doors in 1951. The monopoly enjoyed the support of the Chiapas state government and had thoroughly corrupted the state’s alcohol inspectors, tax collectors, and police. When Tzeltals and Tzotzils began producing clandestine aguardiente (literally “burning water,” a rough cane alcohol) as an alternative to the costly, often toxic posh sold by the monopoly, the Pedreros led fierce raids aimed at seizing clandestine stills and terrorizing the population. When indigenistas at the center protested these raids, state government officials responded with threats. This prompted the INI to commission a study in 1954, ostensibly to research indigenous alcoholism in highland Chiapas. Under the leadership of Julio de la Fuente, however, the commission in fact zeroed in on the Pedreros’ alcohol monopoly. Over the span of six months, the commission consulted state and federal documents, conducted interviews, and visited 24 municipalities. The final product was a 319-page report with 82 charts, 25 pages of conclusions, and 694 pages of supporting material. It told the history of the monopoly, exposed its abuses, and called particular attention to the complicity of the state government (Lewis, 2004).

Chiapas Governor Efraín Aranda Osorio soon realized that he had been outmaneuvered by de la Fuente’s commission. Seeking to avoid embarrassment and prevent the publication of the report, he agreed to negotiate with the INI. As a result, the Pedreros lost their monopoly over the production and sale of aguardiente in the highlands. The state alcohol inspectors were officially disbanded on the last day of 1954, and responsibility for controlling the production and sale of alcohol passed to the federal government. But these important victories came at a price. The INI agreed not to extend its reach into the Pedreros’ ranches, where indigenous resident debt peons labored into the 1970s. The INI also began pacifying the Pedreros and other ladinos by privatizing its operations, particularly its consumption and transportation cooperatives (Rus, 1994: 289). Over time, San Cristóbal’s well-heeled ladinos co-opted much of the INI’s privileged class of bilingual bicultural promoters. This important shift eventually fostered a new type of bossism in the highlands, the consequences of which Chiapas has been living with ever since (Pineda, 1993; Pozas, 1976; Rus, 2005: 169–200). As a final concession to the Pedreros and the Chiapas state government, the INI promised to suppress de la Fuente’s damning report. A slightly abridged version was finally published in 2009 (Lewis and Sosa Suárez, 2009).

The INI’s brave stand against the Pedrero alcohol monopoly is one of the proudest moments in the history of Mexican indigenismo. Yet the brokered agreement defined the limits of INI jurisdiction, privatized and compromised INI projects, and pacified powerful ladinos. Ironically, the INI’s successful negotiations with indigenous communities in highland Chiapas and its inability to produce larger structural changes fostered a development model that focused inward, on the indigenous communities themselves, and avoided clashes with powerful interests. This strategy allowed the INI to perpetuate itself and survive politically for five decades in Chiapas and the rest of Mexico, but it greatly limited the extent to which Mexican indigenismo could effect real change in indigenous communities (INI, 1978; Rus, 2004: 203–205).

The CCI at a Crossroads (1957–1963)

If local opposition forced the INI into moderation by the middle 1950s, financial woes undermined the INI’s modest agenda later in the decade; 1958 was an election year in Mexico and a time of penury for the INI and for the CCI in San Cristóbal. The CCI ran a deficit of 172,000 pesos that year and largely financed its operations on credit. In May it closed its medical outposts for a month, and it lacked the cement to finish various sanitation projects such as encasing springs and building water tanks. In early 1959, when the center was not given a budget sufficient both to cover the previous year’s deficit and to finance its current operations, it literally ground to a halt for four weeks. “The complete lack of funding forced the paralysis of most of our vehicles for lack of fuel, lubricants, and parts, which we had been acquiring on credit,” wrote CCI director Alfonso Villa Rojas. “Now we have reached our credit limits at the businesses and agencies that supply us.” The Teatro Petul was grounded because there was no money to gas up the INI’s jeeps. The sanitation brigade’s DDT campaign was interrupted several times because most brigade members were not being paid or reimbursed for their travel expenses. INI promoters and staff were directly affected. “Salaried workers like the peones in our experimental agriculture fields, macheteros, masons, and road construction workers have also suffered a delay in the payment of their salaries. We can no longer afford to contract their services,” wrote Villa Rojas. “The workers will surely lose enthusiasm for their work because their families are experiencing an anguishing economic situation.” ¹²

Most distressing for Villa Rojas was the fact that communities “continue to solicit our collaboration for different projects for which the indigenous people contribute the greater part of the expenses. Even then, the CCI finds itself unable to satisfy their demands.” For example, when the Oxchuc hamlets of Pachtontikjá and Tuxaquiljá asked the INI to help defray the cost of the 30,000-peso schoolhouses that they were building, the INI could only offer each community nails worth 200 pesos. In short, it was becoming difficult for the CCI to maintain the confidence not only of its workers but also of the indigenous people who had come to believe in it. ¹³

The budget crisis put a severe strain on all INI programs, including education. In a sense, the CCI was a victim of its own success. By the late 1950s it sustained roughly 60 schools and employed about 70 cultural promoters. As communities dropped their resistance to INI schools, the CCI suddenly found itself unable to meet demand. Furthermore, as students advanced through the lower primary grades, the need for quality fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-grade instruction became more urgent. A handful of promoters tried to teach their advanced students with fourth-grade textbooks, but since most of them had not completed primary school themselves they were not up to the task. A more formal, institutional response was needed. The CCI had little choice but to forge a closer relationship with the federal education ministry, the SEP.

Collaboration with the SEP was not without its dangers. By the late 1950s, it was a far cry from the institution that tried to “bring the revolution” to Chiapas in the 1930s (Lewis, 2005). But the CCI had little choice, and by late 1959 the SEP was covering the salaries of 5 INI promoters. One year later, that number increased to 13. Along with the savings, however, came headaches that would multiply as the SEP covered more and more positions. “At least two of these promoters think that they are now SEP teachers and get the same vacations that federal teachers enjoy,” wrote education director Fidencio Montes. “They forget that they have always been promoters of this center and that they must abide by this center’s program and school calendar.” ¹⁴ In the 1960s, the CCI increasingly farmed out its innovative bilingual education program to the SEP, with disappointing and ominous results.

Budgetary woes also affected the center’s agriculture programs. Given the profoundly rural nature of the Chiapas highlands and the fact that the entire population was engaged in farming, one would expect that some of the INI’s best work would be in this area. This is especially the case since the Mexican government’s industrialization plans counted on the countryside’s ability to produce abundant agricultural goods to hold down food prices in the cities. However, the indigenistas were hamstrung by several factors beyond their control. For one thing, the Chiapas highlands have always been difficult to farm. Even the casual tourist will notice the steep, rocky hillsides and the lack of large bodies of water to facilitate irrigation. All along the steep 40-mile highway from Chiapa de Corzo in the lowlands to San Cristóbal de Las Casas (elevation 7,280 feet), Tzotzil farmers plant corn on steep, 45-degree slopes. Many of these slopes have been eroded, and where the soil has not been washed away it is very thin.

Other factors prevented a major revival of agriculture in the highlands. It made little sense to try to pull the indigenous out of their subsistence economy until roads were built to facilitate the transport of goods to regional markets. And until meaningful land reform occurred on a large scale, a structural transformation in agriculture was simply out of the question. In fact, the term “subsistence farming” is a misnomer in highland Chiapas, since most indigenous people did not farm enough land on which to subsist. One constant throughout the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s was the need for most heads of household to supplement their meager farming output with stints on lowland plantations (Wasserstrom, 1983). ¹⁵

The INI took modest steps to address these matters. After overcoming some initial resistance, the CCI helped build a network of highways and rough access roads that extended slowly but steadily across the highlands. The land issue was much more problematic. In the 1950s, even before the demographic explosion that was to come, land was already scarce in many municipalities. Men fortunate enough to have been part of the land reform in the late 1930s and early 1940s still had enough land to farm, but 60 percent of indigenous lands were in the form of communal land (terrenos comunales) that the indigenous had held before postrevolutionary land reform took place. Tzeltal comuneros in the 1950s averaged only 2.6 hectares each and Tzotzils only 1.6 hectares. In some land-starved Tzotzil municipalities such as Chamula, Mitontic, and Zinacantán, they farmed on even less (Romano, 2003: 198–200).

That left land reform, and on this front the CCI’s record was disappointing, especially in the Tzotzil zone. By the late 1950s, the land reform effort was stalled on all fronts in Chiapas. This demoralized the INI and the people that it served. The indigenistas assisted the indigenous as they applied for land, applied to expand existing ejidos, asked to have temporary holdings made permanent, tried to resolve boundary disputes, and defended themselves from land invaders. But the formal agrarian reform mechanism was in the hands of a huge, slow, often corrupt bureaucracy. Alfonso Villa Rojas, who directed the CCI in the late 1950s, explained: ¹⁶

A high percentage of the indigenous population lacks land. Most of the agrarian reform inquiries have not been resolved. In many cases, indigenous lands are invaded, usually by mestizos. Last of all are the countless legal formalities in the agrarian reform process for which the indigenous population is not prepared. All are factors that favor the exploitation of the indigenous, from the invasion of lands to the unpaid work performed by baldíos [landless tenants] to the numerous fees that they must pay to supposedly resolve their agrarian inquiry.

In short, the CCI’s agronomists and promoters had little choice but to chart a very modest course. They began by introducing improved seeds for crops that the indigenous already grew. In time, they introduced terraced agriculture to prevent erosion and taught indigenous farmers how to use insecticides and fertilizers to protect their corn and beans and increase output. Fertilizers, insecticides, and fungicides were accepted almost immediately, and the CCI sold these products at reduced prices. These inputs became increasingly necessary over the years as the population boom forced people onto smaller and smaller plots. By 1975, it was estimated that the average family plot in Chamula was just a quarter of an acre (Romano, 2003: 216).

Modest projects yielded modest returns; Romano reports that by 1970, after nearly 20 years of agricultural promotion, output had increased by about 25 percent. Given the various factors that restricted the CCI’s range of action, this result is not surprising. In his words, technical agriculture was “complicated” for the indigenous. “It requires, at the very least, easy access to capital or credit and constant, timely technical support, at least during a certain period. These were all elements that the coordinating center could not provide with its scarce economic and human resources.” Over time, writes Romano, “the center’s agricultural program began to decay and, as happened in other areas, it eventually ceded to other government programs” (Romano, 2003: 209, 215–221).

Back in 1952, when the CCI’s founding director Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán handed over the reins to Julio de la Fuente, he advised him to “carry out the agricultural extension and experimentation programs with extreme prudence.” In the short run, he advised against “introducing improved corn varieties and new techniques since we lack personnel to advise on the wisdom of these policies.” ¹⁷ As Aguirre explained elsewhere, certain conditions had to be met before transformations in agriculture could take place; agricultural innovation could only be part of a larger, integral development strategy (1976: 33):

Agrarian reform is one of the prerequisites, but there are others generated internally by the indigenous communities or induced by development programs that motivate favorable attitudes toward change, among them the secularization and individualization of the [local governing] institutions, the weakening of the power of the traditional hierarchy, an increase in geographic and social mobility, worsening demographic pressures, an improvement in interethnic relations, the construction of a transportation network and an educational system that combats illiteracy and monolingualism in the population. In sum, [what is needed is] the implementation of an integral strategy that takes into account all aspects of the group’s culture.

Until these prerequisites are met, agricultural work, defined as a process of disseminating a new technology, should be carried out with caution. . . .

Some of Aguirre’s conditions were never met in highland Chiapas, among them agrarian reform. Others, such as secularization, individualism, increased mobility, population pressures, and an improved transportation and education infrastructure, occurred in the 1960s and 1970s, when the CCI in San Cristóbal was past its prime, suffering the effects of meager budgets, bureaucratization, and uninspired leadership. Change did come to highland agriculture, but for the most part it was not the direct result of INI programs.

Indigenismo’s Toll on Indigenistas

Indigenista work in San Cristóbal was often frustrating. As the discussion above suggests, it required working long hours for little pay in a hostile environment. Local ladinos generally considered the indigenistas to be meddlesome outsiders. Chiapas-born writer Rosario Castellanos, who worked with the Teatro Petul in the middle 1950s and wrote many of its plays, noted that her relatives who lived in San Cristóbal were shunned once she began working for the INI. As anthropologist Carlos Incháustegui observed in 1972, “We are permanently on the verge of conflict.” ¹⁸

Because indigenista work in Chiapas was so difficult, observers and inspectors were unusually attuned to the overall mood at the center. Morale was generally good in the early to middle 1950s, when the INI’s programs were taking root. However, by the late 1950s morale had suffered and some of the CCI’s most creative collaborators had resigned their positions. This unfortunate trend continued into the early 1960s. According to the illustrator Alberto Beltrán, Carlos Jurado, Adolfo Mexiac, and others left largely because “the INI’s budget did not grow. It remained the same for many years while the Mexican peso lost value; what you could do in 1950 was no longer possible seven or eight years later with the same amount of money.” Beltrán too resigned after the strapped CCI abandoned most of its visual aid programs. For him the problem went beyond inadequate funding. He also cited a feeling of impotence. “We could only watch as the enganchadores of the coffee plantations contracted peons and took them to the Soconusco in the worst conditions, sometimes paying part of their salaries in aguardiente,” he recalled. “Indigenous communal lands were invaded by the finqueros, with the usual ill effects. The indigenistas had to resign themselves to these economic realities because of their weakness and the lack of support” (Gómez Montero, 1978: 190–191). The effect was demoralizing.

Perhaps the most devastating manifestation of malaise at the CCI came in October 1957, when Rosario Castellanos resigned her post. After nearly three years of working with the Teatro Petul, she wrote a devastating letter of resignation to Marco Antonio Montero, who served as the INI’s director of education in Mexico City. Although she did not identify the target or targets of her rage, her letter is still worth reproducing here at length: ¹⁹

You’re aware of the reasons I came to San Cristóbal, of how I enthusiastically tried to overcome my lack of technical preparation to carry out a position at this Coordinating Center. I’ve defended my hopes with all the tenacity that I could muster; I was willing to resist many disappointments. But what I’ve found here far exceeds my most pessimistic calculations. The situation gets worse every day, and those who dare to fight to defend the generous ideals that motivated the INI’s founding are expelled, harassed, rendered impotent . . . or bought. . . . It’s impossible to describe the atmosphere here in a letter.

Her close collaborator, the linguist Carlo Antonio Castro, resigned at the same time, citing their quixotic (and ultimately futile) struggle against “ignorance, incomprehension, irresponsibility, bureaucratization, and mediocrity.”

Castellanos’s letter of resignation is a clear (if somewhat hyperbolic) indicator of the crisis in Mexican indigenismo in the late 1950s. The INI’s pilot coordinating center was at a crossroads. Budgets were chronically meager, local opposition to INI programs remained tenacious, and some of its most talented, creative staff were submitting angry resignation letters. Would the INI’s growing cooperation with the SEP solve its budget woes? Would indigenismo remain as a major state- and nation-building priority? Could the INI still attract Mexico’s best and brightest to its ranks? Or would it continue down the path of mediocrity and bureaucratization?

Decline and Decadence after 1963

The decline of the CCI in San Cristóbal and the INI in general was irreversible after 1963 and manifested itself in many ways. One was the quality of the personnel. The CCI’s directors in the 1960s were quite simply inferior to the giants of Mexican social science who directed the project in the 1950s—Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán, Julio de la Fuente, Ricardo Pozas, and Alfonso Villa Rojas. Increasingly, directors dedicated themselves to the mundane tasks of paper shuffling and supervision, although, in their defense, they lacked the personnel, the budget, and the mandate to aspire to much else. After 1963, the INI forged an even closer relationship with the SEP, ceded its health care program to the federal Ministry of Health, and gradually shuttered its forestry division because it was no longer able to outflank the private interests that preyed on timber-rich indigenous ejidos. No longer in charge of major development programs, the CCI found itself acting as a junior partner to larger, better-funded state and federal ministries, obliged to do unpopular “mop-up” work like relocating indigenous and mestizo peasants from land about to be flooded by major hydroelectric projects. ²⁰

When INI old-timers try to explain the decline of the indigenista project in Chiapas, they usually point to the INI’s growing inability to train and supervise its cultural promoters. In late 1963, the SEP assumed financial responsibility for the INI’s schools in Chiapas and at the INI’s other coordinating centers in Oaxaca (Huautla de Jiménez, Jamiltepec, Papaloapan, and Tlaxiaco), Chihuahua (Guachochi), and Guerrero (Tlapa). The SEP agreed to allow the bilingual pre-first grade to be taught in its schools by bilingual cultural promoters, while the INI agreed to provide bilingual teaching materials to SEP schools in indigenous regions. ²¹

The SEP also began training all new bilingual cultural promoters and teachers. It trained new promoters in just one year and gave entry-level teaching positions (Maestro “A”) to all INI promoters nationwide who had graduated from secondary schools. This was more than a change of nomenclature—cultural promoters who became federal teachers got a raise, abided by the SEP’s school calendar and its vacation schedule, joined the national teachers’ union, the National Union of Education Workers (Sindicato Nacional de Trabajadores de la Educación—SNTE), and no longer felt obliged to use the lengua materna or to direct community development projects. This, in short, is how the INI lost control over its primary agents in the field and how the former promoters came to embody ideas and agendas that had little to do with indigenismo (Greaves, 1991: 193; Modiano and Pérez Hernández, 1976: 64; Pineda, 1993: 80, 110).

On paper, at least, the SEP’s influence and especially its financial resources had a positive effect on education in the INI’s zone of influence in Chiapas. By 1969, roughly 12,000 Tzeltals and Tzotzils attended slightly more than 200 schools in the INI’s zone of influence. The teaching corps was also more robust, as roughly 350 teachers and promoters offered their services. According to statistics compiled by SEP and INI education inspectors, school attendance had noticeably improved. ²²

However, what the INI gained in quantity it lost in quality. The effect was felt immediately in INI schools that now fell under SEP supervision. In summer 1964, residents in Huixtán, Chamula, and elsewhere threatened to withdraw support from their schools if they were not returned to INI supervision. Many teachers sent by the SEP to fill vacancies in Chiapas abandoned their posts after a couple of weeks and tried to return to their home states. Most had been trained at urban normal schools in Puebla, Oaxaca, Nayarit, and Guerrero and were therefore unprepared—pedagogically and otherwise—for the challenges of teaching indigenous students in highland Chiapas. Last of all, the SEP and the SNTE blamed the INI for anything that went wrong. ²³

When the INI contemplated a closer working relationship with the SEP, it had not factored in the potentially negative influence of the teachers’ union. Less than a year after the SEP and the INI formalized their collaboration, education director Andrés Santiago Montes was dismayed by the SEP-trained promoters. “Most of them lack initiative, turn in falsified reports, fail to show up for work, and have a rebellious attitude toward complying with official orders,” he wrote. As a result, education in the affected communities was “at a standstill.” Santiago blamed a “false union education” for these problems. “It’s to the point where more than one promoter has stated, ‘We aren’t the slaves of the inspectors.’” ²⁴

Agustín Romano, who returned to direct the CCI in the mid-1960s, also noted the pernicious influence of the SNTE on the INI’s former employees. As union members, they were required to participate in union meetings, congresses, and political rallies. Some got involved in union politics. Before long, they aspired to local office, especially once the salaries of municipal presidents rose above those of teachers. As Romano notes, “with few exceptions, those who ran for office were motivated more by money and power than the desire to help their communities.” Furthermore, union membership “guaranteed the teachers almost total impunity to neglect their teaching duties and, of course, their work in the communities, because this was not the work of a ‘true’ teacher” (Romano, 2003: 44–47).

Collaboration with the SEP also had the unintended—and ironic—effect of undermining bilingual education in highland Chiapas. When the SEP agreed to accept the preparatory grade in its classrooms, it represented a moral victory of sorts for the INI. However, the training that promoters and teachers received at SEP teacher institutes had nothing to do with bilingual education. All instruction was in Spanish, and the teachers-in-training were never shown how to apply their new skills to a bilingual setting. The unspoken message at the SEP’s training institutes was clear. Spanish meant progress; indigenous languages had no practical use in a school setting; and teachers who wanted to advance their careers were wise to leave their indigenous language and customs at the door (Arana de Swadesh, 1978: 242). After a few years of operating in the SEP’s system, many indigenous teachers identified culturally with ladinos and had adopted hostile attitudes toward indigenous people, refused to speak their mother tongue, and lived like ladinos in San Cristóbal de Las Casas. ²⁵

Concluding Thoughts

In the early 1950s, indigenistas went to great lengths to encourage Tzeltals and Tzotzils to lean on the INI and its programs. A few years later, they had largely succeeded in this effort. By the late 1950s, however, the INI could no longer uphold its end of the bargain. What’s more, it was losing relevance and shrinking. With each passing year the INI lost more control over its bilingual cultural promoters. By the middle 1960s, the agriculture programs did little more than distribute fruit trees to the indigenous. The animal husbandry program limited itself to distributing stud livestock, calves, and poultry to a handful of ejidos. The roads department disappeared in the late 1960s, and the forestry program lost its ability to persuade and advise indigenous ejidatarios.

Budget cuts had also taken their toll on the INI’s health care programs. Beginning in the mid-1960s, a series of agreements were signed between the INI and the federal Ministry of Health; in the words of Agustín Romano, the ministry began to “invade the coordinating center’s work area” (Romano, 2003: 130). In 1967 it took charge of the campaign against typhus; three years later it took control of immunization campaigns in the highlands. Meanwhile, the CCI’s health-related projects became increasingly modest. In 1968 the health program dug just one well, encased just four springs, and installed only 30 latrines. When the indigenous asked for help in obtaining piped water, they were told to refer their request to the Ministry of Health. ²⁶ The CCI’s clinics also suffered from a lack of trained personnel. In the 1950s it had gone to considerable lengths to train bilingual indigenous nurses, men and women, to staff the medical outposts. By the late 1960s, however, it had resorted to the expedient of taking on unpaid pasantes, medical students who were performing their one-year social service internships, because it simply could not afford to staff all of its clinics and outposts with full-fledged doctors and bilingual nurses. Of the urban-based pasantes the CCI’s chief physician, Gregorio Alapisco González, complained, “[They] know nothing about the cultural characteristics of the indigenous groups and the problems they face, nor are they interested in solving these problems.” Their principal concern, he said, was to earn extra income for their return to the city. ²⁷ Pasantes certainly had more formal training than ladino and indigenous nurses, but they lacked a long-term commitment to the indigenous, and the quality of health care delivery in the highlands was clearly compromised.

By 1970, the pilot CCI in San Cristóbal was a debilitated institution with an outdated assimilationist mission. This made it, along with the INI in general, an easy target for a generation of young anthropologists forged by the political and ideological struggles of the late 1960s. The historical record suggests that the decline and decadence of the Western Hemisphere’s most ambitious and innovative postwar indigenista project was incremental. From the start, the INI lacked the power to impose its will on state and local governments. In Chiapas, the CCI’s efforts to protect the rights of indigenous people and establish new, less exploitative links to the larger economy precipitated confrontations with local planters, ranchers, and politicians. Each clash ended in a truce that forced the CCI to moderate its development plans. By the late 1950s, the INI had learned that it was easier to induce change in Indians than to challenge the overarching political and economic systems that exploited them. This realization coincided with the INI’s permanent budget crisis. Those who remained often resigned themselves to office work. The decline of the CCI and the INI was certainly not inevitable, but it is hard to imagine a different outcome in a country that had privileged monopoly capitalism, political pragmatism, and industrialization over rural interests since 1940. While it is true that the INI deserved most of the criticism that it received after 1968, it is also true that it was never given the political muscle, the mandate, or the financial resources that it needed to succeed.