Dissertation Fellow 2001-02
Julia Cummings O’Hara (History)
Indiana University, Bloomington
Transforming the Sierra: Missionaries,
Indians, and the State
in Chihuahua, Mexico, ca. 1900-1960
This project examines how religion, ethnicity, and the national
politics of the “Indian problem” have intersected throughout
the 20th century in the Sierra Tarahumara region of Chihuahua, Mexico.
In recent years, historians of Mexico have initiated a vigorous
debate over the nature of the post-revolutionary state and the process
of state formation. The question of how local traditions and expectations
influenced the post-revolutionary state is particularly germane
to my research. The revolution failed to eradicate the powerful
presence of the Catholic church in Mexican society; the state could
not successfully push its anticlerical message without risking the
destabilization of the regime. In the case of the Sierra Tarahumara,
I argue, the state in fact assimilated significant elements
of Catholic culture, in particular the methods of missionaries among
the Indians, a “tradition” in the Sierra with a complicated
history extending back to the colonial period. Local people in the
Sierra Tarahumara recognized the strong resemblance between the
post-revolutionary state’s agenda for the Indians and that
of the missionaries with whom they had a long history of contending.
Indeed, their longstanding relationship with the missionaries of
the Catholic church provided a template from which to construct
a relationship with the new “cultural missionaries”
of the post-revolutionary state.
Similarly, I contend that the perpetuation of the Tarahumara as
missionary subjects has many implications for local/regional as
well as national history. One such implication is that, because
state-sponsored “missions” to the Indians have reverberated
with the Tarahumaras’ long experience with religious evangelization,
they have served to fuse the Tarahumaras’ national and religious
identities, rather than heightening their sense of a national identity
as the post-revolutionary state sought. Furthermore, the Tarahumaras’
status as subjects of the missionary enterprise in the twentieth
century has perpetuated a racialized discourse that, in the Sierra,
permeates not only religion, but also politics, economics, land
tenure, and culture. This has allowed non-indigenous people in the
Sierra and throughout the state of Chihuahua and northern Mexico
to reject the homogenizing discourse of mestizaje (race
mixture) and the unified ethnic-national identity that the post-revolutionary
state has tried throughout the twentieth century to implant.
|
