In September 1925, the Ministry of Education (SEP) sent Antonio Reza, a teacher, back to his hometown of San Andrés, Jalisco, Mexico, to serve his fellow Wixárika people. SEP officials hoped Reza would “act as an intermediary between local people and the SEP” (107). Instead, the Wixárika murdered him. They feared that a land reform committee headed by Reza intended to steal land and that his arrival signaled further state encroachment. Everyone understood Reza was Wixárika; they only questioned what kind of future he sought.
Such compelling examples of Indigenous resistance to both the state and to one another fill the pages of Soldiers, Saints, and Shamans, Nathaniel Morris’s gripping account of how, from 1910 to 1940, the Náayari, Wixárika, O’dam, and Mexicanero peoples of the Gran Nayar—a mountainous stretch of Mexico encompassing parts of Nayarit, Jalisco, Durango, and Zacatecas—fought state bureaucrats, armies, outsiders, and notably each other to...
