Nathaniel Morris. Soldiers, Saints, and Shamans: Indigenous Communities and the Revolutionary State in Mexico’s Gran Nayar, 1910–1940. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2020. Illustrations. xx + 371 pp. $55.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8165-4102-7.
Reviewed by Julie Gibbings (University of Edinburgh)
Published on H-LatAm (April, 2021)
Commissioned by Casey M. Lurtz (Johns Hopkins University)
Nathaniel Morris’s Soldiers, Saints, and Shamans in the Gran Nayar is an important new book that brings into focus both a long-neglected region and the active participation of indigenous peoples in the Mexican Revolution. Morris’s work focuses on the Gran Nayar, an ethnically diverse region, home to the O’dam, Wixárika, Náayari, and Mexicanero peoples as well as a Spanish-speaking mestizo minority. As Morris painstakingly shows, the indigenous peoples of these regions played active roles in the complex events that shaped the Mexican Revolution from the overthrow of Porfirio Díaz in 1910 to the land reforms, socialist education programs, and political violence of the 1930s. In doing so, Morris counters long-standing mythologies of the region as outside of Mexican history, as populated by indigenous people worthy of ethnographic study for their rich cultural traditions and languages but not for their political importance to the course of national events. Morris instead demonstrates how indigenous participation in revolutionary violence and state-building projects reveals many of the tensions and contradictions of the Mexican Revolution itself.
The Gran Nayar is a diverse region at the intersection of four states: Nayarit, Jalisco, Durango, and Zacatecas, composed of at least five different ethnic groups. While each of the regions’ ethnic and linguistic groups are distinct, they are also linked by culture, history, geography, trade, and religious practice. Throughout the book, Morris carefully dissects the divergent histories and experiences of different communities within the Gran Nayar and uses these differences to illuminate broader processes and patterns. To do so, he uses an innovative methodology that blends archival research with insights gleaned from ethnographic fieldwork.
The book is divided into six chapters, along with an epilogue and introduction. In the first chapter, Morris examines the history of the region from the conquest to the outbreak of violence in 1910. Tracing regional history over a long period, Morris demonstrates how indigenous communities held onto their ethnic identities and communal lands, while also retaining a high level of autonomy vis-à-vis both the church and state. Still, the efforts of mestizo migrants to usurp lands and erode indigenous autonomy set the stage for Náayarite, Wixáritari, O’dam, and Mexicaneros participation in the armed phase of the revolution between 1910 and 1920. In the following chapter, Morris demonstrates why different individuals joined the serranos, who were inspired into political action to defend their political and/or cultural autonomy, and the agraristas, who were driven by the usurpation of local lands. As Morris illustrates, allegiance to the serranos and agraristas depended greatly on local and historical contexts, yet by the end of the revolution most had pledged allegiance to Venustiano Carranza’s Constitutionalist faction, often in exchange for weapons and recognition as legitimate revolutionary actors.
In chapter 3, Morris illustrates how across the 1920s, Mexican revolutionaries sought, like nationalist programs elsewhere, to incorporate indigenous peoples into the nation-state. They envisioned the erasure of primitive indigenous political structures, languages, and superstitious practices by imposing corporatist, state-managed agrarian reform, anticlerical crackdowns, and education programs to replace native languages with Spanish. In part due to the region’s history of cultural, political, and territorial autonomy, these programs and spaces became sites of conflict, rather than operating as new forums for exchange and negotiation between indigenous peoples and the state. These programs thus set the stage for the Cristero Rebellion in the Gran Nayar after 1926. While historians have argued that the Cristero Rebellion was the product of the cultural, social, and political consequences of the revolution on Catholic practice, indigenous peoples of the Gran Nayar reveal other contours to the Cristero Rebellion. In the Gran Nayar, people did not join the revolt to protect their Catholic practice. Rather, as Morris details, the O’dam guerrillas joined, even though they had never been baptized as Catholics and they arrived at the events after having celebrated shamanic rituals that the church itself condemned. Rather, they joined to defend their cultural, political, and territorial autonomy. The participation of indigenous peasant communities from the Gran Nayar also helped to produce some of the most severe defeats for the Mexican revolutionary government.
The following two chapters detail further state-building efforts in the Gran Nayar and illustrate how those who rose to power in the community through the decades of political violence had a vested interest in promoting the initiatives of the revolutionary state. The radical land reforms of President Lázaro Cárdenas, for example, facilitated the usurpation of indigenous lands by mestizo ranchers. Resistance to state-led development led to violent conflicts over land, to the burning of schools and the murder of teachers, and contributed to the second Cristero Rebellion after 1935. Then, locals used the rebellion to further their efforts to reestablish their communities on the basis of indigenous costumbres. Through these chapters, Morris complicates both the view of teachers as martyrs of the revolution and popular liberation and narratives of the Cristero Rebellion as driven by pious Catholic peasants or wealthy landowners to overthrow the popular revolution.
In Soldiers, Saints, and Shamans, Morris thus deftly highlights the contradictions and ambiguities of the Mexican Revolution and sheds new light on important historiographical debates about the Cristero rebellions and the project of postrevolutionary state formation in Mexico. Deeply researched and carefully written, the book also offers historians of nineteenth and early twentieth century a window into the rewards of blending historical and anthropological methods. Confronting a dearth of archival sources—many of which were lost to rebel attacks, weather, and local customs of burying or hiding documents—Morris fills the gaps in the archival record with an anthro-historical approach. He supplements archival records with participant observation, gossip, and common sense obtained through fieldwork. This fieldwork gives him a deep appreciation for the importance of indigenous costumbre and for the region’s varied and rich topography and climate. Throughout the book, this ethnographic knowledge deepens Morris’s historical interpretations and insights and in particular helps him to reveal new insights about what motivated indigenous peasants.
Finally, Morris’s Soldiers, Saints, and Shamans will be of interest to scholars interested in indigenous-state relations in Latin America, and elsewhere. Like María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo in The Revolutionary Imagination in the Americas and the Age of Development (2003), Morris demonstrates that even progressive movements often understood indigenous peoples as regressive actors, who needed to be reformed in order to be historical agents and actors. Morris provides us with a case study of not only how revolutionary actors thought about indigenous peoples as needing reform but also how these indigenous peoples, with differing aims and goals, redeployed these institutions and opportunities, and sometimes engaged in violent resistance, to defend their cultural, political, and territorial autonomy.
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Citation:
Julie Gibbings. Review of Morris, Nathaniel, Soldiers, Saints, and Shamans: Indigenous Communities and the Revolutionary State in Mexico’s Gran Nayar, 1910–1940.
H-LatAm, H-Net Reviews.
April, 2021.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=56055
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