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Soldiers, Saints, and Shamans: Indigenous Communities and the Revolutionary State in Mexico’s Gran Nayar, 1910–1940 by Nathaniel Morris (review)

2024; The Catholic University of America Press; Volume: 110; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/cat.2024.a921763

1534-0708

Terry Rugeley,

Latin American and Latino Studies

Reviewed by: Soldiers, Saints, and Shamans: Indigenous Communities and the Revolutionary State in Mexico's Gran Nayar, 1910–1940 by Nathaniel Morris Terry Rugeley Soldiers, Saints, and Shamans: Indigenous Communities and the Revolutionary State in Mexico's Gran Nayar, 1910–1940. By Nathaniel Morris. (Tucson, AZ: The University of Arizona Press, 2022. Pp. 392. $35. ISBN: 978-0-81-654693-0.) Not many Mexican citizens, and even fewer foreign nationals, ever make it to a place called the Gran Nayar, a rugged chunk of the western Sierra Madre that straddles five states and four major ethnic groups. And to judge from the historical record, the people of the Gran Nayar prefer to keep things that way. Making use of both archival sources and personal interviews, Nathaniel Morris now offers a revealing ethnohistory of the Gran Nayar for the tempestuous three decades of the Mexican revolution. The four ethnicities of this obstacle course of a region—Náayari, Wixáriki (Huichol), O'dam, and Mexicanero—all spoke a language of the Uto-Aztecan family. Blending pre-contact culture with imports from Spanish Catholicism and material culture, they lived by hunting and gathering, raising a few cattle, and farming the ancient triad of corn, beans, and squash. Elders governed the communities through a system in which men rose in importance by assuming different cargos, or ceremonial responsibilities. Above all, it was the mitotes that held things together. As Morris describes them, "Mitotes usually involve long sessions of fasting and feature sacrifices to the gods, the hunting of deer, the use of 'holy water' gathered at sacred springs to bless adults and baptize children, and often the consumption of specially brewed alcoholic beverages and/or peyote" (24). This rocky land and its equally hard lifestyle appealed little to outsiders, who mostly gave the place a wide berth. Early attempts to make the Gran Nayar part of the Spanish-speaking world predictably faltered. After the brutal entry by conquistador Nuño Beltrán de Guzmán came the Mixton War (1532–42), followed by a colonial doldrum, leaving the region a "shatter zone" of fugitives, hold-out rebel redoubts, and sullen, unco-operative villages. The coming of settlers and officials from the Mexican state, with their claims on the land and their talk of a mysterious thing called reform, brought [End Page 215] on a region-wide revolt under Manuel Lozada (1853–1873). And while Lozada was eventually captured and executed, his indigenous lieutenants remained prominent figures among their people for decades to come. Here as elsewhere in Mexico, the rise of strongman Porfirio Díaz in 1876 marked a decline of open violence, but the changes begun in the early national period continued to filter into the Gran Nayar, often pitting one indigenous group against the other in an effort to survive in the harsh new world of commercial agriculture. The revolution first arrived in a way that no one welcomed. When Pancho Villa's great army was defeated in April of 1915, his surviving soldiers broke up into marauding bands that lived off whatever they could carry away. In the face of this banditry the Nayar peoples sided with Villa's victorious rival Venustiano Carranza. They had never so much as seen their whiskered, patrician ally, but they did recognize the guns he provided. Outside alliances naturally favored bilingual, bicultural leaders who became the Gran Nayar's real power brokers, a phenomenon also found among the nineteenth-century Yaquis and Yucatec Mayas (with their respective rebel leaders José María Leyva and Bonifacio Novelo). As the revolution wound down, government-appointed schoolteachers replaced bandits as the agents of mestizo culture: less dangerous perhaps, but scarcely more welcome. Their efforts to transform local thinking and practices gave way to Nayar participation in the brutal Cristero War (1926–1929), followed by a second round of the same in 1935–1940. These wars shattered much of the Nayar world, but those who did survive managed to pick up just enough pieces of their old customs to allow their lives to go on. Soldiers, Saints, and Shamans has a few weaknesses but far more strengths. The attempt to include many different peoples and actors at times...