Between the accession of Álvaro Obregón to Mexico's presidency in 1920, and the end of Lázaro Cárdenas’ presidency in 1940, the federal government sought to politically, culturally and economically ‘incorporate’ the country's Indian peoples into the nation-state, predominantly via the efforts of the maestros rurales (rural schoolteachers) of the Secretaría de Educación Pública (Secretariat of Public Education, SEP). The case of the Huichols of northern Jalisco (see Map 1) – described in the early 1920s by government officials as ‘an almost savage tribe’,Footnote 1 whose members ‘go around naked and subsist on hunting and fishing like prehistoric man’Footnote 2 – provides a particularly dramatic example of the failures of this assimilatory programme. However, despite the popularity of the Huichols with anthropologists, and of Revolutionary state-building with historians, the SEP's failures in the Sierra Huichola in the period have been mentioned only by Beatriz Rojas and Alexander Dawson, and then only briefly, and without reference to the 1920s.Footnote 3 Nor do most Huichols themselves remember the SEP's early ‘civilising’ mission in the Sierra Huichola, testament to its ultimate failure.Footnote 4
Map 1. The Huichol Communities of Jalisco
Although government officials tended to blame this failure on what they saw as the extraordinarily low ‘cultural level’ of the Huichols, I contend that Huichol resistance was the primary obstacle to their ‘incorporation’, and that it was both the nature of the federal education system itself, and, more importantly, the behaviour of its local representatives, that galvanised this opposition. Through an analysis of how Huichol participation in the Cristero rebellions and the Cardenista agrarian reform was conditioned by their relationships with federal schoolteachers, this article sheds light on the nature and outcomes of the Revolution in the Sierra Huichola, and also provides insights into the sometimes disastrous consequences of the discrepancies between official government policies and their local-level implementation, as well as the more radical effects of Revolutionary state-building on rural, and particularly indigenous, Mexican communities.Footnote 5
Some scholars have taken a relatively sympathetic view of Revolutionary efforts to assimilate Mexico's Indians. For example, Andrae Marak writes that while ‘the oppression that the Tarahumara suffered at the hands of local mestizos was self-interested and calculated … that which they suffered at the hands of the SEP, for whatever it was worth, was meant to improve their lives’.Footnote 6 However, such interpretations often reflect an overreliance on the discourse of SEP ideologues, and on the frequently exaggerated reports of rural teachers (whose jobs, after all, depended on their success in ‘civilising’ their charges). These views also frequently ignore the Indians’ own, more critical voices, and overemphasise the federal education system's attempts to socially and culturally ‘rehabilitate’ the nation's most marginalised groups, while underplaying the abuses of rural teachers,Footnote 7 the conflicts created by their attempts to open up Indian lands and resources to outsiders in the name of ‘progress’,Footnote 8 and the fundamental ethnocentrism of the SEP curriculum, which, especially in the 1920s, sought the destruction of Indian identity, language and culture in order to create a homogenous, Spanish-speaking Mexican nation.Footnote 9
Under Cárdenas, national-level SEP policy-makers did increasingly promote the material improvement of the conditions in which Mexico's Indian population lived,Footnote 10 and became more tolerant (or even, on occasion, admiring) of Indian cultural ‘difference’.Footnote 11 However, throughout the 1930s most of the SEP officials active in the Sierra Huichola continued to view Huichol language, autonomous power structures, subsistence-based economy and politico-religious customary practices – which for the Huichols were all inseparable parts of a complex known as el costumbre Footnote 12 – as obstacles to their assimilation. They therefore sought to destroy such ‘primitive’ beliefs and customs, or transform them into picturesque ‘folklore’ drained of all meaning.Footnote 13 Throughout the period, many Huichols therefore saw schools as directly challenging their political autonomy, ethnic identity and costumbre – the destruction of which, according to Huichol belief, would cause the world as a whole to disappear, or never to have been in the first place.Footnote 14 Even those more cosmopolitan Huichols who had had positive contacts with mestizos in the past, and were therefore less worried about such metaphysical threats, felt that the activities of several rural teachers directly threatened the physical integrity of their communities. I would therefore position the SEP's official programme in the Sierra Huichola between 1920 and 1933, and, more importantly, the actions of many SEP teachers and inspectors into the 1940s, as an example not only of Revolutionary efforts towards ‘forjando patria’,Footnote 15 but also within the educational paradigm that Mary Vaughan, drawing on the work of Marjorie Becker and Brian Street, describes as
[that] undertaken for the purposes of promoting state control and market penetration … [and] conceptualized and carried out within cultural constructs oblivious to the logic of local practices of productive, reproductive, and ritual labor. [Such programmes] are disruptive of the delicate ecological and social balances that sustain life upon a precarious resource base. The discourse between community and teachers is likely to be antagonistic, characterized by resistance, or absent.Footnote 16
Just as in the Indian communities of Sonora and Puebla that Vaughan uses as examples of this flipside to rural education's ‘empowering’ potential,Footnote 17 the nature and intensity of Huichol opposition to SEP programmes varied greatly from community to community, and depended heavily on the behaviour of its local representatives. Huichol resistance to their activities often involved the use of Scottian ‘weapons of the weak’ such as foot-dragging, noncompliance, evasiveness, obfuscation and the use of native language to confuse outsiders.Footnote 18 However, on occasions the meddling of SEP officials in local politics, their perceived facilitation of mestizo land-grabs, or their ‘forced recruitment’ (some would say kidnapping) of children became too much for local people to bear, which prompted their use of more violent forms of resistance. Sometimes this meant threats against teachers or even the selective assassination of these and other government officials; but as Adrian Bantjes found in Sonora, where a SEP-led anti-clerical campaign provoked a short-lived Mayo uprising in the 1930s,Footnote 19 the resistance of some Huichols to the cultural, political and, in particular, the territorial pressures exerted upon them by the actions of SEP teachers and their Huichol or mestizo allies extended to their open rebellion against the Mexican state.
Indigenismo, Caciquismo and Factional Conflict in the Sierra Huichola
While both ‘New Age’ anthropologists and the Mexican public at large have tended to see the Huichols as eternally resisting the intrusions of the outside world in order to preserve their ‘ancestral’ way of life, recent research has done much to locate Huichol political identities, territoriality and costumbre within wider Mesoamerican or Mexican contextsFootnote 20 (although their participation in the Revolution remains little studied).Footnote 21 In line with this newer scholarship, I argue that the story of Huichol interactions with the SEP in the Revolutionary period is not exclusively one of resistance. For although the Mexican state failed to directly impose control on the Sierra Huichola by means of schools, my research again coincides with that of Vaughan in showing that the state did manage to exert some influence on particular Huichol communities when, rather than employing force, it tried to negotiate with local people.Footnote 22
That such negotiations could be carried out in the first place, however, was largely due to the fact that different Huichol communities, factions, and individuals – particularly the caciques – attempted to use the federal schools, and, more to the point, the teachers in charge of them, to their own ends. As in much of Mexico, those Huichols most willing to negotiate with the state were ambitious young men with vested interests in promoting Revolutionary political and economic change, which they hoped would open up to them avenues to power and wealth previously inaccessible in their traditionally gerontocratic and subsistence-based societies.Footnote 23 As further reward for their cooperation, they also sought the government's support for their communities’ agrarian or territorial claims,Footnote 24 taking advantage of the links that the teachers provided with a government that officially promoted the idea of agrarian reform to shore up its legitimacy.Footnote 25
However, my conclusions as to the success of such negotiations for either party do not always coincide with Vaughan's findings that ‘factions of villagers who welcomed and allied with teachers pushed SEP policy in specific directions and not in others’.Footnote 26 Despite the evolution of SEP policies in the 1930s, the only teacher to really advocate for Huichol rights in this period (Inocencio Ramos; see below) quickly lost his job. Meanwhile many of his colleagues’ activities continued to provoke Huichol opposition, which by 1938 had forced the suspension of SEP efforts to ‘incorporate’ them. In fact, if anything the SEP's programme in the Sierra Huichola provided a generation of future Huichol leaders with new ways to avoid assimilation in all but its most superficial aspects. Contact between mestizo teachers and a small group of young Huichol men enabled the latter to become literate in the national language, form connections with government officials and learn about the culture and politics of the mestizo-ruled nation-state then being constructed on the edges of their homeland.Footnote 27 As Johannes Neurath points out,
[f]or the Huichols, knowing how mestizos think, and knowing how to be a mestizo, is strategically beneficial. They practice accumulation of contradictory identities in shamanism, but also in everyday life. For them the alternative is not to be Indian or Mestizo, but Indian or Indian and Mestizo.Footnote 28
In many other parts of Mexico, literate Indian ‘scribes’ and bilingual teachers used their positions as ‘link-men’ between their communities and state officials to increase their wealth and power, and by the late 1930s constituted a new class of communal-level cacique,Footnote 29 often just as corrupt, violent and exploitative as their predecessors.Footnote 30 In contrast, many of their Huichol equivalents refrained from advancing overly individualistic or factional agendas, and, while representing the state within their communities, simultaneously opposed those government programmes – such as mining, logging and road-building projects – that they saw as threatening communal integrity and autonomy. State weakness, the superficial nature of federal schooling efforts in the region, the traditionally extreme decentralisation of power within Huichol communities, the continued, ritually-legitimised moral authority of elders over the population, and a strong sense of collective identity and widespread belief in magical sanctions for transgressive leadersFootnote 31 limited the extent to which younger, ‘cosmopolitan’ Huichols abandoned older patterns of thought and behaviour in the 1930s and beyond.Footnote 32 Instead, they used what they had learned from the SEP in the Revolutionary period to manipulate official discourses of ‘patriotism’ and ‘nationhood’, not only to win state concessions for themselves and their followers, but also to facilitate and legitimise their defence of communal territory and identity from external pressures.Footnote 33 Thus throughout the twentieth century, and both despite and because of the SEP's efforts, the Huichols were able to hold on to a higher level of cultural, territorial and political autonomy than either their mestizo neighbours, or other Indian peoples such as the Yaquis, Mayos, Purépechas or the highlanders of Chiapas.Footnote 34
The Sierra Huichola, from Conquest to Revolution
At the turn of the twentieth century, the vast majority of the Huichol population – then conservatively estimated at around 4,000 individualsFootnote 35 – were dependent on subsistence agriculture and lived in small settlements scattered across the mountains of northern Jalisco.Footnote 36 These settlements, or rancherías, were inhabited by extended families whose lives were governed by politico-religious leaders based at the nearest tuki, or Huichol temple (pl. tukite). These leaders, called kawiterusixi, officiated over rituals involving all the inhabitants of the surrounding rancherías, which reaffirmed the politico-religious and kinship links between participants, and guaranteed both their own and the annual maize crop's health.Footnote 37 At a higher level, the different tukite and their dependent rancherías came together to form four distinct Huichol comunidades: Santa Catarina Cuexcomatitlán, San Sebastián Teponahuaxtlán, Tuxpan de Bolaños (which was partially politico-religiously dependent on San Sebastián),Footnote 38 and San Andrés Cohamiata (whose tuki district of Guadalupe Ocotán was by this point semi-independent) (see Map 1). Each comunidad was ruled by a gobierno tradicional – made up of cargo-system officials and the leaders of each community's constituent tukite – based at a ceremonial centre, or gobernancia, named after the comunidad itself, and which housed little more than a Catholic church, a tuki, a jail, and the houses and headquarters of the gobierno tradicional. Communal festivals, celebrated at both the church and the tuki, regulated and legitimised the power of the gobierno tradicional, and emphasised the overall unity of the community, regardless of the frequent rivalries between different tuki districts.Footnote 39
These politico-religious structures developed during the Colonial and Independence periods, during which the Huichols enjoyed a high level of cultural, political and territorial independence vis-à-vis both Church and state, comparable to that of the Yaqui or perhaps the ‘pagan’ Tarahumara.Footnote 40 However, from the mid-nineteenth century, the Mexican state encouraged mestizo ranchers and hacendados to ‘colonise’ Huichol landholdings in the name of ‘productivity’. Especially after 1873, when the government finally defeated and killed regional bandit chieftain-turned-agrarian revolutionary Manuel Lozada and began to reassert itself over his former strongholds, the physical integrity of the Huichol communities was threatened by settlers from nearby mestizo towns and haciendas.Footnote 41
Both Church and state also attempted to culturally and politically assimilate the Huichols into mainstream Mexican society. Catholic schools were established in San Andrés and San Sebastián as part of new missions run by the Zacatecan ‘Josefino’ order,Footnote 42 and the Bishop of Zacatecas took several Huichol children to be educated in a seminary in that city.Footnote 43 The missionaries also encouraged mestizo settlement in San Andrés and San Sebastián, to help them ‘civilise’ the ‘savage’ Huichols.Footnote 44 Furthermore, government-run schools were also opened in San Sebastián in 1888,Footnote 45 and a decade later in Guadalupe Ocotán and San Andrés, where, according to official propaganda, ‘only a few years ago … Huichol fire worshippers sacrificed human victims’.Footnote 46 However, the inhabitants of Guadalupe Ocotán soon caught their teacher stealing mules and forced him to leave,Footnote 47 while San Andrés’ teacher ‘coerced and extorted them’, and was also expelled.Footnote 48 But although the Huichols thus resisted the abuses of those charged with ‘civilising’ them, they struggled to defend their communal landholdings against the incursions of mestizo ranchers, which exacerbated territorial conflicts between the different Huichol communities themselves.Footnote 49
However, just as missionaries, government officials and foreign explorers and anthropologists began to forecast the imminent demise of the Huichols as a people,Footnote 50 the outbreak of the Revolution in 1911 gave them an opportunity to reclaim their political and territorial autonomy.Footnote 51 By 1916, many Huichols had organised themselves into ‘Defensas Rurales’: these were militias armed by the Carrancista Revolutionary faction and played a key role in defeating the Villista remnants then roaming northern Jalisco.Footnote 52 The leaders of the Huichol militias also violently expelled almost all of the mestizo settlers and missionaries from their communities,Footnote 53 and at the same time increasingly contested political control of their communities with the traditionally paramount cargo-holders and elders.Footnote 54
After 1920, however, the Huichol Defensas and gobiernos tradicionales began working together to try and stall renewed mestizo land-grabs, which were encouraged by municipal authorities who coveted access to the forests, pastures, watering holes and mineral riches of the Sierra Huichola.Footnote 55 In response, many Huichols – particularly those of San Andrés and Santa Catarina – looked to the state and federal governments for support. Much like their Porfirian forebears, however, Mexico's Revolutionary politicians and ideologues saw the Huichol communities as isolated bastions of savagery that needed to be ‘incorporated’ into Mexican civilisation for their own good.Footnote 56 Given the conflicted relationship between the Huichols and the municipal authorities, and the weakness of the federal army's presence in the Sierra Huichola, the state's main instrument in its attempts to assimilate the Huichols was the SEP, founded by José Vasconcelos in October 1921.Footnote 57
Before the Revolution, Carl Lumholtz reported that the Huichols ‘[did] not want schools’, because of the abuses committed by the teachers, and because they believed that literacy and contact with outsiders would lead their children to ‘lose their native tongue and their ancient beliefs’. Lumholtz thus recommended that ‘the white teacher's aim should be to incite the desire for instruction rather than to force his pupils to listen to his teachings; not to destroy the Indian's mental world, but to clear it and raise it into the sphere of civilisation’.Footnote 58 However, Vasconcelos and other early SEP policy-makers saw the destruction of ‘primitive’ Indian political structures, languages and ‘superstitions’ as essential to liberating them from poverty, ‘improving’ them racially, uniting them around a Revolutionary and nationalist ideal, and opening up for the nation's benefit the previously untapped human and natural resources of the countryside.Footnote 59 Many Huichols therefore saw this project as a threat to their culture, language, and family-unit agricultural production.Footnote 60 ‘Our parents wouldn't let us go [to school]; they told us, “You'll come out of school and never want to help [in the fields], you'll sell out your community.”’Footnote 61 Some also saw the presence of mestizo teachers in their communities, and especially their involvement in questions of agrarian reform, as compromising their own continued control of communal political life, lands and resources.Footnote 62 Just as Vaughan and Dawson observed in other indigenous regions,Footnote 63 the SEP's early activities therefore provoked concerted Huichol opposition.
However, some of the Huichol Defensa leaders who had come to power during the Revolution – and were more accustomed to dealing with mestizos – saw cooperation with the SEP, and thus with the state itself, as a route to amassing further power and wealth, and winning government protection of their lands and a measure of autonomy within the new Revolutionary Mexico. This version of autonomy would, however, be safely overseen by themselves and a few other members of the emerging elite of young, ambitious Huichols who, even if they had yet to be incorporated into the national political system, had at least been exposed to the cultural and economic influence of mestizo society. As in much of Mexico, the SEP therefore became caught up in factional and generational conflicts then emerging within the Huichol communities.Footnote 64
The SEP's Early Efforts in the Sierra Huichola, 1922–6
In June 1922, Diego Hernández became the first of the SEP's maestros misioneros (missionary schoolteachers) charged with ‘civilising’ the Huichols. However, Hernández was reluctant to give up the comforts of the regional mestizo hub of Colotlán, and claimed that heavy rains, the Huichols’ concern for their crops, and their dispersed settlement patterns, would make heading directly for the Sierra a waste of time and effort.Footnote 65 Thus the communities of the Sierra Huichola were largely ignored until late 1923, when a new SEP budget allotted 200,000 pesos for the founding of ‘indigenous cultural centres’ across the country,Footnote 66 and 690 rural ‘missionaries’ and teachers were sent out into the countryside.Footnote 67 In September 1923 Hernández suggested founding schools in San Sebastián and Santa Catarina, as their inhabitants, ‘usually so opposed to education, are interested in having schools’.Footnote 68 However, the teachers Hernández nominated to run these schools refused to transfer to either community, and in November a school was instead opened in Tuxpan.Footnote 69
According to the reports of Tuxpan's teacher, the school was an extraordinary success. Forty-nine children and 40 adults were initially enrolled,Footnote 70 and in December not a single student dropped out and attendance averaged at only one below the maximum possible; while in January 25 new students enrolled, with average attendance now standing at 95.Footnote 71 These figures were almost certainly grossly inflated, but the school, surrounded by test-plantings of modern commercial crops such as coffee, oranges, avocados and bananas,Footnote 72 did at least exist, and Hernández and his subordinates were thus by now actively engaged in trying to transform the Huichols into ‘true industrialists who would know how to exploit the natural resources they possess’.Footnote 73
The Delahuertista rebellion of late 1923 put a temporary stop to these efforts. However, after the rebels’ defeat, Tuxpan's school was reopened, and another was established in San Sebastián.Footnote 74 A rather outlandish and completely inaccurate total of ‘45 Huichols’ (‘21 children and 18 adults’), all of them male, were apparently enrolled at the latter.Footnote 75 It is interesting that Tuxpan and San Sebastián – which had still not demanded agrarian reform – were chosen as sites for the Sierra Huichola's first schools, rather than San Andrés and Santa Catarina, which were in much closer contact with the Revolutionary state. Perhaps, precisely because they lacked contact with the state, it was regarded as more important to bring the former communities into the national fold. However, it is also possible that the local municipal authorities, motivated by their interest in San Sebastián and Tuxpan's landholdings, influenced the SEP's decision.
Inspector Hernández enjoyed a cordial relationship with the cacique (and then municipal president) of Villa Guerrero, Adolfo Valdés y Llanos,Footnote 76 to whom Hernández presented himself on 5 October 1923 as a prelude to his first major expedition to the Sierra,Footnote 77 and who approved the seemingly unreliable reports submitted by the teachers of San Sebastián and Tuxpan (in place of the presidents of Mezquitic and Bolaños, the municipalities to which these communities respectively belonged).Footnote 78 The Valdés family, who together with the Sánchez controlled the economic and political life of Villa Guerrero,Footnote 79 were united by close commercial, familial and political ties with the Guzmán family of Bolaños and the Muñoz family of Huajimic (across the state border with Nayarit).Footnote 80 These families had, during the nineteenth century, seized almost all of the formerly communal lands on the southern edges of the Sierra Huichola,Footnote 81 and were now actively working to take over the lands of Tuxpan and San Sebastián.Footnote 82
Hernández, on his first visit to San Sebastián's new school, dedicated his time to what he called the ‘bringing together of mestizos and Indians’. This involved bringing Luis Huerta, Petronilo Muñoz and Leandro and J. Guadalupe Sánchez to visit the school and meet with the community's governor.Footnote 83 Together, these men represented the main cacical clans of the region; Leandro Sánchez, for example, was a rich landowner and rancher whose family led the takeover of the lands of the nearby Tepecano community of Azqueltán during the Porfiriato;Footnote 84 while Petronilo Muñoz (son of Nieves Muñoz, cacique of Huajimic) had only the year before seized lands belonging to Guadalupe Ocotán,Footnote 85 and in 1928, under cover of the Cristero Rebellion – or ‘Cristiada’ – stole more than 2,000 hectares of San Sebastián's communal territory.Footnote 86
Seen in the light of Hernández's plans for the community's school and for the community itself, and in the context of San Sebastián's future agrarian conflicts with these same men and their families, it is difficult to believe the meetings that Hernández organised and facilitated did not, at least in part, concern the potential mestizo settlement of Huichol lands. Typical of the indigenista rhetoric espoused by SEP policy-makers in this period,Footnote 87 Hernández saw the Huichols as ‘poor Indians, living monuments to our glorious people’,Footnote 88 who failed to understand that ‘man needs to work, and he who works hardest will live most comfortably’.Footnote 89 To that end he actively advocated that ‘the lands of the Sierra in which the “Huichol” lives, be populated by honest and hardworking [mestizo] families, whose resolve, honour and work will infect, forgive me the word, the semi-savage “Huichol”’, which he believed would bring about ‘the miracle of civilisation in these lands abandoned to indifference and selfishness’.Footnote 90
Hernández's view of the commercial potential of Huichol communal lands – which he claimed possessed ‘natural riches which have never been exploited to anyone's benefit; sites for bountiful timber, cattle, mineral and agricultural production’Footnote 91 – was similar to those of the region's mestizo caciques who, using almost identical arguments, had long been trying to seize them.Footnote 92 Hernández, together with his patron, Valdés y Llanos, and the scions of the cacical clans who came with him to San Sebastián's school, were therefore natural allies. And it was perhaps because of their combined influence, motivated by both ideology and economic self-interest, that Tuxpan and San Sebastián were chosen as the first Huichol communities to receive federal schools, which Hernández himself openly envisaged as springboards from which to launch the colonisation – or recolonisation – of indigenous lands by ‘hardworking’ mestizos. Although there is no documentary ‘smoking gun’ that proves beyond doubt that this was indeed the case, Huichol opposition to such plans on the part of Hernández and his mestizo allies would also help to explain the closure of the schools in San Sebastián and Tuxpan shortly afterwards,Footnote 93 as well as the subsequent complaints of San Sebastián's authorities that ‘the municipal authorities and private individuals have long abused our ignorance in order to rob us of our lands’.Footnote 94
Hernández petitioned hard for the reestablishment of San Sebastián's school, and the establishment of new schools in Santa Catarina and San Andrés.Footnote 95 In response, in April 1925 a school was approved for San Andrés for the first time since 1912, where the scale of Huichol resistance to the meddling of Hernández and his colleagues in communal agrarian problems was soon brought into clearer relief. As mentioned above, the new school's antecedents were far from positive, and, in choosing Antonio Reza to run the school,Footnote 96 Hernández repeated the same mistakes as his predecessors, for Reza was already an unpopular figure in San Andrés. Reza had been one of several ‘huicholitos’ taken from San Andrés to Zacatecas before the Revolution to receive the ‘great benefit’ of a religious education. In 1917, Calixto Guerrero, former head of San Sebastián's Josefino mission, described these Huichol students as having been ‘corrupted by the vices’ they were exposed to in the city, and notes that on returning to their homes, they became ‘real monsters of dishonesty and sin, forcing the Huichols, in view of the evils these learned men caused them, to join together in taking their lives or driving them into exile’. The people of San Andrés killed one of them during the Revolution, but two others, including Reza, had ‘miraculously’ escaped this fate in spite of the ‘continuous torment’ they had inflicted on their community.Footnote 97
Reza had returned to San Andrés by March 1925, when he reappears in the documentary record as the author of a request for agrarian reform for the community – in spite of the fact that ‘restitution’ proceedings had already been initiated by the community's leaders in 1921.Footnote 98 Such a unilateral action, taken by an already unpopular figure and without the approval of the community as a whole, would have met with local opprobrium, which we can assume was compounded by the activities of unnamed SEP officials who, in 1925, recruited Huichol children for the recently established Casa del Estudiante Indígena (House of the Indigenous Student) in Mexico City ‘using unconstitutional measures’Footnote 99 – that is, by forcibly ‘seizing them from their lairs’.Footnote 100 Whether or not Reza was directly involved, local people would naturally have associated him, as a representative of the SEP, with such abuses. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that in September 1925 Reza was ‘assassinated by the tribe’.Footnote 101 It was furthermore alleged that they ‘they lynched [Reza] in the community's TUKI’,Footnote 102 suggesting that the community's kawiterusixi at least approved Reza's murder, and indicating that the opposition of conservative elders towards the work of the SEP, and its ‘cosmopolitan’ Huichol representative, had become a matter of life or death.
Reza's killing left the Sierra Huichola once again bereft of schools, and was a ‘clear demonstration of the feebleness of our strength, given the scale of this work’.Footnote 103 It is also a clear indication of the depth of the resistance of many Huichols to the practical application of the Revolutionary nation-building project. This resistance was by now matched by that of the region's mestizos, who were affronted by the increasingly anti-clerical policies of both the Jalisco state and federal governments.Footnote 104 Faced with growing opposition in both the Huichol communities and the surrounding mestizo-inhabited regions, the SEP's activities in northern Jalisco were paralysed from late 1925, and definitively cancelled from August 1926 after the outbreak of the Cristiada.
The majority of the inhabitants of San Sebastián, under the leadership of Juan Bautista, enthusiastically joined the ‘Cristero’ rebels. Although the rebels saw the Huichols as ‘heathens’, they shared common enemies in the form of the government schools and maestros rurales,Footnote 105 as well as the mestizo caciques of Mezquitic, Bolaños, Villa Guerrero and Huajimic, who sided with the government.Footnote 106 However, the leaders of San Sebastián's semi-autonomous anexo of Tuxpan refused to declare allegiance to the Cristeros due to long-standing political tensions with their ‘mother’ community.Footnote 107 Santa Catarina's leaders also remained loyal to the federal government, due to a similar long-running feud with San Sebastián, their continued faith in the state for a solution to their agrarian problems, and furthermore – as no government rural school had been established in Santa Catarina between 1920 and 1296 – their lack of contact with abusive or exploitative teachers who might otherwise have turned them against the government. However, a dissenting minority faction took the opposing, pro-Cristero side, and many more of those who wanted to stay neutral fled their homes to escape the fighting. San Andrés was also split by the rebellion, as the community's leaders remained hopeful that the state would help them resolve their agrarian conflicts, but local hostility toward the SEP, made explicit with the murder of Antonio Reza, seems to have tempered local enthusiasm for the federal government and its representatives, and even led some comuneros to side with the rebels.Footnote 108
The SEP's Return to the Sierra Huichola, 1930–4
In June 1929, a treaty – ‘Los Arreglos’ – between the government and the rebels officially brought the Cristiada to an end. The fighting had devastated northern Jalisco, and, regardless of which side they had taken, all the Huichol communities had suffered famine, depopulation and the destruction of their gobernancias and tukipa (temple complexes), which had weakened their control over communal landholdings.Footnote 109 In fact, San Sebastián was still being attacked more than a year after the conflict officially came to an end, when it was reported that ‘the Chief of Mezquitic's Defensa Social … is stealing the few cattle they still have left’.Footnote 110 However, despite the ongoing violence, in 1930 the federal government renewed its efforts to incorporate the Huichols into the fabric of the Revolutionary Mexican nation-state. The SEP was once again the main vehicle for these efforts; this would have been impossible without the support of pro-government Huichol leaders, who continued to act as mediators between the SEP's regional representatives and their home communities.
As in previous years, however, conservative cargo-system officers and kawiterusixi, and anxious Huichol parents, contested the influence of mestizo schoolteachers and their Huichol allies, especially as new SEP campaigns against ‘superstition’ increasingly targeted the costumbre that regulated Huichol religious, social, political and economic life.Footnote 111 In the name of increasing rural ‘productivity’, or with a view to personal gain, certain SEP officials also again encouraged mestizo attempts to ‘colonise’ Huichol lands.Footnote 112 Huichol resistance to both the cultural and territorial threats posed them by the SEP, mestizo ranchers and regional municipal authorities thus continued to obstruct their ‘incorporation’, and also exacerbated inter-communal and inter-factional conflicts rooted in the recent violence.
In early 1930, Inspector Ramón Durand was sent to the Sierra Huichola and instructed, in line with national-level policy, to recruit more Huichol students for the Casa del Estudiante Indígena in Mexico City, rather than set up schools in the shattered Huichol communities.Footnote 113 Victorio Poirett, a teacher working near Colotlán, warned Durand that ‘we will not manage to recruit them through persuasion’, and instead suggested sending ‘some armed men to surprise the Indians in their huts and grab their kids’, just as had been done in 1925. Poirett added that the mestizos of Mezquitic, Bolaños or Chimaltitán, the towns closest to the Sierra Huichola, could be counted on to help them in this endeavour – reflecting the violence that typified the relations between the Huichols and their mestizo neighbours. Alternatively, Poirett suggested that ‘a very pro-government Huichol friend of mine’ could assist them, as long as they did not try to recruit children in San Sebastián, because ‘this Huichol cannot meet those Indians, as they are Cristeros’ – demonstrating the extent to which tensions between pro- and anti-government groups continued to dominate life in the Sierra Huichola.Footnote 114 Durand forwarded Poirett's advice to his superiors, who recognised that arming local mestizos to forcibly recruit Huichol children for the SEP would only create new tensions between the Huichols and the state, and replied that ‘if it is impossible to get the Indians to come of their own free will, it would be preferable not to bring them at all’.Footnote 115 Shortly after, however, another local teacher, Genaro Rodríguez, delivered five Huichol children to the Casa.Footnote 116 He did not explain how he had recruited them, but given that they ran away within a month, it appears they were unenthusiastic about leaving their homes and their families, perhaps forever, for an education in Mexico City.Footnote 117
In the wake of this failure, and with national indigenous education policies once again promoting the establishment of schools for Indian children within their own communities,Footnote 118 Inocencio Ramos replaced Durand as inspector in the Sierra Huichola in late 1930. In line with the increasingly radical indigenista discourses emanating from the SEP's national offices,Footnote 119 and in sharp contrast to the actions and attitudes of the officials previously sent to the region, Ramos was determined to defend ‘the interests of the Indian … with a prudent attitude and within Constitutional norms’,Footnote 120 and quickly won the cooperation of Huichol leaders by bringing their problems to the attention of the federal government.Footnote 121
In San Sebastián, for instance, Ramos drafted a complaint on behalf of the communal authorities, informing his superiors that local pro-government Defensas were stealing their cattle, and asked that they ‘give [them] guarantees. Because otherwise [they] are in danger, and you have said we have to open our eyes to the Indian.’Footnote 122 Ramos also began to help the Huichol communities with their various agrarian claims, which had been frozen since 1926 as a consequence of the Cristiada,Footnote 123 and which the municipal authorities, who supported the mestizo settlement of Huichol lands, were trying to block.
In return for his help, San Sebastián's elders gave Ramos permission to establish a school ‘under the roof of their courthouse’ until new classrooms could be built,Footnote 124 while Tuxpan's communal assembly also approved a new school.Footnote 125 A few months later, San Andrés’ authorities similarly sought to demonstrate their loyalty to the government by not only approving a school, but also promising to set aside 50,000 square metres of land on which teachers could demonstrate new crops and improved agricultural techniques, the products of which would support the school and its pupils.Footnote 126
Ramos must have felt buoyed by these successes, and by the increased importance that Narciso Bassols, appointed Education Secretary in October 1931, accorded to indigenous education.Footnote 127 Bassols was a Marxist, an anti-clerical and a prominent supporter of agrarian reform, and immediately set about reforming the curriculum, ‘supplement[ing] existing policy emphasising peasant behaviour reform with an intensified attack on superstition [and] religious practice’,Footnote 128 which he sought to repackage as ‘folklore’,Footnote 129 or, when this was incompatible with social and economic ‘progress’, to replace with civic celebrations.Footnote 130 He also ordered SEP officials across the nation to introduce anti-alcohol and sanitation programmes into the communities in which they worked,Footnote 131 set up local postal services, encourage sporting eventsFootnote 132 and establish boarding schools – internados indígenas – which he viewed as the best means of transforming Indians into productive members of Mexican society.Footnote 133 All of the federal schools would teach Indian children Spanish, basic literacy and numeracy, and introduce improved agricultural techniques, logging, tanning, and other small-scale industries into their communities.Footnote 134 Just as in the schools set up for Indian and Aboriginal children in the United States and Australia at around the same time, in the Sierra Huichola ‘the manual labor of young children [was seen as] critical for the efficient conduct of the schools’.Footnote 135
Knowing that winning government support for Huichol land claims was key to keeping them on his side, and encouraged by Bassols’ agrarista tendencies,Footnote 136 in late 1931 Ramos travelled to Guadalajara to secure a land registry certificate for San Sebastián.Footnote 137 This secured him the friendship of former Cristero leader Juan Bautista, who – contrary to Phil Weigand's assertion that, after the collapse of the rebellion in 1929, he continued fighting a ‘defensive war’ in the mountainsFootnote 138 – had instead returned peacefully to his community, where Ramos described him as ‘President of the Indians’.Footnote 139 Bautista probably saw supporting the government school as a way of reconciling with the state and saving the lives of himself and his followers, and he agreed to become head of the local ‘education committee’.Footnote 140 On 12 July he helped organise a meeting between Ramos, a federal military commander and San Sebastián's traditional authorities. With Bautista translating, Ramos explained to them
the mission that the teachers, on behalf of Jalisco's Federal Education Department, in its grand desire for learning, would develop among the Huichol tribe, so as to bring them closer to the Civilised Peoples … [The Huichols] understand they must send their children to the school that, from the 1st of this month, has been opened for their instruction, and they are satisfied with the benefits that the government gives them.Footnote 141
In return, the communal authorities demanded ‘the government's frank and effective protection, as this tribe has long been harassed by elements at the service of the neighbouring municipal authorities’.Footnote 142 Ramos’ advocacy of these claims seems to have surprised and perhaps even worried Jalisco's Director of Federal Education, who responded by warning his own superior, Rafael Ramírez, that ‘I am about to bring the complaints of [Ramos] and the Indians to the appropriate authorities … but I am letting you know in advance in case this will provoke any difficulties’Footnote 143 – probably a reference to potential conflicts between government agencies sympathetic to the Huichols’ plight, and the municipal authorities accused of persecuting them.
Ramírez did not obstruct Ramos’ activities, which now included petitioning for the ‘restitution’ of Huichol lands on behalf of San Sebastián and Tuxpan.Footnote 144 The traditional governors of both communities, as well as local caciques Cenobio de la Cruz, Zenón Romero, Santos de la Cruz, Pascual González and Juan Bautista, all signed Ramos’ petition. These men had fought one another during the Cristiada, and would soon be divided again by the so-called ‘Segunda’ Cristiada. For the moment, however, their collective anxiety over the security of both communities’ landholdings triumphed over the long-standing tensions between them.
In January 1932, the process of ‘restitution’ for San Sebastián and Tuxpan officially began. The authorities in Mezquitic attempted to block the communities’ joint claim, arguing that ‘titles or documents mentioning the theft of lands about which the indigenous complain are inexistent … Furthermore … this authority is not responsible for these imaginary dispossessions.’Footnote 145 However, in February the communities’ claim was published in the Diario Oficial,Footnote 146 and in July 1932 Ramos and a commission of Huichols again travelled to Guadalajara, where they received a provisional title to San Sebastián and Tuxpan's lands. Shortly after, three agronomists arrived in San Sebastián to survey the community's territory, which they judged to be larger than needed, and tried to surreptitiously reduce by around 30,000 hectares.Footnote 147 However, the agronomists’ activities aroused Huichol suspicions and, as ‘experience has taught these people that such pretexts are used to seize their lands’, Ramos accompanied the community's authorities to Mexico City ‘to prove their case with titles in hand at the National Land Registry’. There they managed to have the agronomists’ decision overturned and file a new claim for the restitution of all their traditional territory.Footnote 148
While Ramos provided invaluable assistance to various Huichol communities, few Huichols reciprocated by sending their children to the new schools. In San Sebastián, despite Ramos’ attempts to organise farming and logging cooperatives, build separate classrooms for boys and girls, and sow five hectares of communal land to supply grain for the school and its pupils,Footnote 149 attendance remained low. As in many other parts of Mexico,Footnote 150 the community refused to allow girls to attend until a female teacher could be found for them,Footnote 151 while the majority of the boys who attended were orphans or fatherless children who lacked clothes and food.Footnote 152 When supplies of maize – the only food available – were exhausted, such pupils returned home until Ramos could secure enough grain to feed them again.Footnote 153 In the run-up to the rainy season, even the few Huichol children who were sent to the school to learn Spanish and other skills, rather than just to get free meals, were withdrawn by their parents to help with family-unit agricultural labour, often at rancherías several days’ walk from the school.Footnote 154
Meanwhile, schools in San Andrés, Tuxpan and Santa Catarina had ceased to function due to the ‘lamentable failures of the teachers charged with establishing them’.Footnote 155 However, as Ramos’ superiors refused to dismiss these indifferent and inefficient teachers, preferring instead to transfer them to mestizo villages in less remote areas,Footnote 156 the Huichol schools remained unstaffed.Footnote 157 Conflicts within Jalisco's SEP administration,Footnote 158 together with the brief rebellion of a group of former Cristeros in the Jalisco–Zacatecas borderlands, soon forced even San Sebastián's school to close,Footnote 159 and further delayed any new SEP initiatives in the Sierra Huichola.
The defeat of the rebels, and appointment of Erasto Valle as Jalisco's Director of Federal Education, which put an end to internal SEP conflicts,Footnote 160 allowed Ramos to reopen San Sebastián's school in February 1933, and establish another in Santa Catarina in March.Footnote 161 Luis Carrillo, one of the few Huichol alumni of the Casa del Estudiante Indígena not to have returned to ‘the customs of his race, with tendencies to continue the nomadic life of their ancestors’,Footnote 162 was put in charge in Santa Catarina.Footnote 163 Meanwhile Valle himself announced a project to establish boarding schools for the Huichols on state-owned land. Referencing the colonial policy of ‘congregation’,Footnote 164 and Vasconcelos’ more recent ideas of teachers as ‘missionaries’, Valle envisaged the dotación (concession) of state lands to Huichol families as a way of concentrating the population, ‘as in the remote past they congregated around churches’. In turn, this would solve the problems that dispersed Huichol settlement patterns had long presented the SEP.Footnote 165
In March, Valle set off on a tour of the Sierra to find potential sites for the planned internados. On his return, he reported that the Huichols numbered around 5,000, were ‘greatly attached to their customs and reluctant to assimilate themselves to the customs of the whites and mestizos’, and lived ‘miserable’ lives due to their ‘ancestral laziness … preferring to hunt rather than raise animals and [being] resistant to farming, except in a small-scale and rudimentary manner’.Footnote 166 However, despite having suffered ‘the worst disillusion on realising that from this tribe one can expect neither material nor moral aid’,Footnote 167 Valle suggested establishing internados in San Sebastián, San Andrés and Las Latas (one of Santa Catarina's most important tukipa). Foreshadowing the emphasis that the SEP under Cárdenas would put on improving material conditions in Mexico's indigenous communities,Footnote 168 each of Valle's planned Huichol internados would be staffed by a male director and a female assistant, who would together teach 50 pupils to speak, read and write Spanish, raise crops and animals more efficiently, build ‘better’ houses, eat ‘better’ food, and wear ‘better’ clothes.Footnote 169 Once they had been trained, the Huichol graduates would receive agricultural equipment and plots of land near the school, while local teachers would try to ensure that the graduates ‘do not disconnect themselves morally and intellectually from [either] the school or their families’.Footnote 170
However, the huge projected cost of the project – at 42,300 pesos per year – led Valle's superiors to reject his plans,Footnote 171 while the Huichols themselves also used mestizo ignorance of the Huichol language to undermine Valle's attempts to impose on them a ‘foreign’ culture.Footnote 172 In San Andrés, for example, one of Valle's subordinates managed to win local approval for the establishment of an internado. But just as a communal assembly was to officially confirm its support,
An old Huichol … asked in his language that [the traditional governor] pause, and then bowing his head three times spoke a few words [in Huichol] to the others, which they discussed animatedly. Then the governor asked me: ‘You will yourself direct the school and be responsible for the other teachers who come?’ ‘No’, I said, ‘I have no academic titles or diplomas and furthermore, the government will decide whom to send.’ He [the governor] replied: ‘The community doesn't want the school if you will not direct it, and so we will not [approve it].’Footnote 173
Given their past experiences with mestizo teachers, it is not surprising that the elders of San Andrés would trust only those whom they had already met and who would take personal responsibility for any conflicts that their presence might cause. Thus the errors of Valle's predecessors in dealing with the Huichols now scuppered his own plan to establish new internados in their communities.
Meanwhile northern Jalisco's mestizo ex-Cristeros were again on the warpath.Footnote 174 Armed ‘fanatics’ now posed a growing threat to the region's SEP officials, one of whom was murdered near Colotlán in August,Footnote 175 and by December many local schools were unable to function because it was no longer safe to travel on local roads.Footnote 176 In January 1934 Bassols added sexual education classes to his controversial ‘socialist’ curriculum,Footnote 177 which further enraged both Catholic parents and ex-Cristeros, many of whom, a month later, declared war on the Revolutionary state.Footnote 178 Throughout the new rebellion, Santa Catarina's authorities remained as strongly pro-government as they had been during the first Cristiada. The leaders of Tuxpan's pro-government Defensa also continued to look to the federal government to protect them from mestizo land-grabs,Footnote 179 and with Ramos’ recent support in their agrarian petitioning and their feud with San Sebastián's ex-Cristeros still fresh in their minds, they remained pro-government throughout the Second Cristiada. Meanwhile both Cristeros and pro-government militiamen threatened San Andrés’ lands,Footnote 180 and the community tried again to remain neutral, while many in San Sebastián again sided with the rebels, at least in part as a reaction to the provocative actions of the teacher Apolonio González (see below).
The SEP and ‘La Segunda Cristiada’, 1934–40
In August 1933, Inocencio Ramos was dismissed from his post on charges of ‘exploiting the Huichols’. However, these accusations were never substantiated,Footnote 181 and seem unlikely given his well-documented advocacy on behalf of Tuxpan and San Sebastián, with which he persisted, first in a private capacity, and later as an employee of the Departamento de Asuntos Indígenas (Department for Indigenous Affairs, DAI). In fact, it was probably precisely this advocacy, and the ire it aroused amongst the region's mestizo caciques, which led an unknown but clearly influential claimant to level these accusations against him in the first place. After all, even Valle himself had noted that those who exploited Mexico's Indians often used the support of ‘very influential persons’ to evade charges brought against them by conscientious indigenista teachers; this ‘sometimes leads to the punishment of the teacher himself, which makes the Indian lose his faith on seeing that [the teacher] is powerless to do anything in his favour’.Footnote 182 Reinforcing the hypothesis that powerful local interests orchestrated Ramos’ dismissal is the fact that his successor, a mestizo from just outside Mezquitic named Apolonio González, was closely connected to the region's mestizo elite, and had in fact co-founded Mezquitic's Defensa force,Footnote 183 which his close friend Griseldo Salazar now commanded.
Soon after González took up his post in the community, he and Salazar, ‘with wicked intentions and [taking] advantage of the ignorance of the Huichol Indians’, together applied on behalf of San Sebastián for a government dotación de ejidos (roughly speaking, ‘communal land grant’), in an attempt to void the community's existing application for ‘restitution’ and so ‘take control of these lands for themselves’.Footnote 184 González's flagrant abuse of his position to threaten the community's landholdings, in partnership with no less than the hated Griseldo Salazar, was compounded by his selling mezcal from inside his classroom,Footnote 185 and contributed to Juan Bautista drawing back from reconciliation with the Revolutionary government and realigning himself with the region's resurgent ex-Cristeros. However, San Sebastián's traditional authorities were reluctant to back Bautista's new rebellion, given their suffering during the first Cristiada, and the positive relationship they had enjoyed with Inocencio Ramos.Footnote 186 The community was left divided,Footnote 187 and many of San Sebastián's families fled to pro-government Tuxpan in an attempt to escape involvement in the conflict.Footnote 188
Rebel violence reached the Huichol communities in December 1934, when two bodies were found near San Sebastián's contested boundary with Santa Catarina. Griseldo Salazar used this as an excuse to step up his Defensa's attacks on San Sebastián.Footnote 189 In the same month, Apolonio González was forced by Bautista's rebel fighters to flee back to his home near Mezquitic,Footnote 190 where he was killed soon afterwards by Cristeros led by Juan Bautista's mestizo compadre, Pepe Sánchez.Footnote 191 A few weeks later, Bautista and Sánchez joined forces and ambushed and killed Commander Salazar himself, somewhere in the Sierra near San Sebastián.Footnote 192
Even as at national level the number of SEP teachers in the countryside reached a high of 16,079,Footnote 193 and Jalisco's school inspectors boasted that across the state ‘the teacher … is [now] the soul of the community’,Footnote 194 the renewed violence disrupted the SEP's mission in the Sierra Huichola, and the last school in the region, in Santa Catarina, was closed in April 1935, due to ‘the tenacious resistance of the Huichols to the National Government's cultural work’.Footnote 195 Although no replacement schools could be set up in the Sierra Huichola itself,Footnote 196 plans were nonetheless made to establish an internado for Huichol children in Bolaños, where it would be guarded by the local Defensa. Once again, the SEP hoped to congregate the dispersed Huichol population around the internado in order to better ‘attract them to culture’, while, in line with the materialist bent of the SEP's programme under Cárdenas, its staff would promote ‘the exploitation of the region's raw materials … taking into account that as the Huichols are hunters, they have the necessary components for the manufacture of shoes’.Footnote 197
The internado in Bolaños opened its doors in late 1936, but few Huichol parents would send their children there. The building was windowless and in terrible condition, the students were neglected and mistreated, and one Huichol child died there as a result.Footnote 198 The school's director ‘responded to these problems by acting [in an] increasingly authoritarian [manner]’,Footnote 199 and asked President Cárdenas to send federal troops to ‘visit the indigenous pueblos in order to convince them to contribute a contingent of students to the school’.Footnote 200 Such coercive tactics only increased the opposition of parents and children to the school,Footnote 201 while Bautista and Sánchez's rebels frequently ambushed the teachers, pro-government Huichols and their armed escorts during their recruiting missions.Footnote 202 In early 1938, Cristero attacks and general Huichol resistance forced the internado to close.Footnote 203 The ongoing regional violence, the dispersal of the Huichol population in the face of the fighting, and, most of all, their by-now extreme distrust of schools, prevented the SEP from establishing replacements in the ruined Huichol gobernancias, even after local support for the rebels evaporated with Bautista's death at the hands of Tuxpan's Defensa in 1940.Footnote 204 Thus SEP policy-makers, already disillusioned by their previous failures and stretched for funding, abandoned any further attempts to ‘incorporate’ the Huichols until well into the 1940s,Footnote 205 and teachers would not return en masse to the Sierra until the launch of the regional ‘Huicot’ development plan in the late 1960s.Footnote 206
Conclusions
Between 1920 and 1940, then, the Huichols managed to defy the attempts of the Revolutionary state to ‘incorporate’ them into the Mexican nation, confounding turn-of-the-century predictions that they would ‘soon disappear by fusion with the great nation to whom they belong’.Footnote 207 In part, their survival as a distinct people was due to the willingness of some Huichol leaders to compromise with the state. By portraying themselves as eager for education, these individuals won (limited) federal government support for communal claims, which at the very least resulted in the launching of the restitution process for San Sebastián and Tuxpan in the early 1930s. However, examples of rural teachers and Huichol leaders working together for the good of the community – epitomised by Inocencio Ramos managing to bring together former Cristeros and pro-government Defensa leaders in order to work towards winning official recognition of their joint landholdings – are few and far between. And even Ramos’ own efforts, in line with shifts in national-level SEP policy towards working with rural people to ‘identify and defend communal interests’,Footnote 208 were undermined by the provocative actions of other teachers and government agronomists, and by the cupidity and obstructionism of regional actors who coveted Huichol landholdings.
For despite evidence that, during Cárdenas’ presidency, rural teachers across the country faced up to ‘their own limitations and … vigorous community defence of cultural practices’ and moderated their often iconoclastic zeal,Footnote 209 most SEP officials continued to see the Huichols as ‘backward’ and ‘savage’ throughout the Revolutionary period. They depended on coercion to recruit Huichol students for unpopular schools, and even, in some cases, used agrarian legislation and their ties to municipal authorities to machinate against their Huichol hosts. Ultimately, these officials caused as many problems for the Huichols as the Huichol leaders’ demonstrations of loyalty to the Mexican state could solve.
The Huichol response to the threats posed by federal and municipal officials and their local mestizo allies to their political, cultural and territorial autonomy was thus also typified, throughout the Revolutionary period, by widespread resistance. Huichol use of ‘weapons of the weak’, and more violent tactics such as assassinations or even, in the case of San Sebastián and minority factions elsewhere, armed rebellion against the state, obstructed their assimilation into the Mexican mainstream. Even in pro-government Santa Catarina, local opposition and regional violence forced the community's school to close in the mid-1930s. Thus towards the end of the Revolutionary period, a single internado was left to serve the entire Huichol population of northern Jalisco, and, in the face of rebel attacks and the refusal of Huichol parents to allow their children to attend, even this was forced to close.
While the Huichols suffered greatly during the two decades of tumult that followed the end of the armed phase of the Revolution in 1920 – a period in which many tukipa and the communal gobernancias were destroyed and an unknown number of Huichols were killed and many more were forced to flee their homes as refugees – the Huichol population as a whole therefore emerged from the Revolutionary period still in possession of a distinct culture, a high level of political autonomy, and vast areas of communal land.Footnote 210
This does not mean, however, that federal government agencies, regional caciques and local mestizo ranchers ceased to threaten them. Towards the very end of Cárdenas’ presidency, the agronomists whom the Huichols had long been asking for finally arrived in the region. However, far from helping the Huichols to defend their territorial claims as might be expected of representatives of Cárdenas’ indigenista regime, they reported, using language close to that of their Porfirian predecessors, that ‘demarcation [of their lands] will not resolve the Indians’ problems, as these are not agrarian, but rather economic, racial and ambient’.Footnote 211 They then reiterated Inspector Hernández's earlier proposals: that, in order to ‘improve this terrible situation, migrations in both directions must be brought about; that is, colonise Huichol lands, and attract large numbers of [Huichols] to the major population centres’.Footnote 212 This was already happening in practice, as mestizo ranchers from Nayarit, supported by that state's government, embarked on violent new incursions into the territories of Tuxpan, San Sebastián and San Andrés, while the federal government provisionally awarded an insultingly small title to its long-term allies in Santa Catarina.Footnote 213
Many Huichol leaders – including some who had previously believed that supporting government schools would win them government support for their agrarian struggles – saw the agronomists’ recommendations, the resumed mestizo land-grabs and the outcome of Santa Catarina's struggle for title to its lands as a betrayal. They accused all the federal government's representatives – including those they now described as the SEP's ‘inept and unsympathetic teachers’Footnote 214 – of being as committed to destroying their communities as were the mestizo ranchers. Thus into the 1940s, even the ‘cosmopolitan’ Huichol elite became more combative in their dealings with the Mexican state,Footnote 215 as at the same time a new generation of Huichol leaders began to emerge, many of them former students of the short-lived federal schools.
However, in contrast to the situation in many other Indian regions,Footnote 216 and testament to the ultimate failure of the SEP's programme in the Sierra Huichola between 1920 and 1940, schooling had not transformed these men (and they were all men) into ‘Mexicans’ amenable to cooperation with regional elites and the federal government, but rather into resolutely ‘Huichol’ leaders who were now better equipped to negotiate communal demands with the emergent PRIísta regime.Footnote 217 By manipulating the official discourses of ‘patriotism’ and ‘nationhood’ that they had picked up from the maestros rurales, as well as their ability to speak, read and write the national language, leaders like the Huichol teacher Agustín Carrillo Sandoval were able to facilitate and legitimise their continued use of subversion, accommodation, evasion, and active, sometimes violent resistance,Footnote 218 in defence of the cultural, political and territorial autonomy of their communities that the SEP, between 1920 and 1940, had tried so hard to destroy, and which, despite its subsequent efforts alongside other government agencies, the Huichols of northern Jalisco still enjoy today.
