Oaxaca Resurgent: Indigeneity, Development, and Inequality in Twentieth-Century Mexico

Winner of the 2023 María Elena Martínez Prize in Mexican History, sponsored by the Conference on Latin American History

Winner of the 2022 Erminie Wheeler-Voegelin Award, sponsored by the American Society for Ethnohistory

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,
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