Volumes on local history seem to resemble each other no matter where they are written. This study deals with a small town and municipio on the lower slopes of the Sierra Madre Oriental a bit north of Veracruz. The author is a professional local historian, a native of the region but not the town, and he has assembled the limited documentary references to Tlapacoyan and neighboring centers to pad out a volume that will inform the visitor and please the natives. Its publication commemorates the centennial of the occasion when the town figured prominently in Mexican history with a furious but unsuccessful defense against the Imperial forces.
The only new and substantive material in the book is a detailed but curiously undocumented account of the struggle over landholdings and boundaries between the Indian community of Tlapacoyan, Spanish recipients of land grants, and neighboring Indian communities. The legal proceedings continued through the entire eighteenth century, serving to sustain to some degree the integrity of the Indian community. After Independence and assignment of land to individual Indians, mestization and essentially complete loss of the Totonac language followed promptly.
The character and content of this volume may imply more about modern Mexican intellectual life than it says explicitly about the history of Tlapacoyan. Most evident are the handsome printing and binding; pride in the citizen’s home town, even though it be a small and quite ordinary place, is deemed worthy of substantial subsidy. The unselfconscious, uncritical glow of national patriotism so characteristic of modern Mexico is fully apparent, but issues that might still divide the country on ideological grounds are played down. Ejidos are accepted as a part of the modern landscape, but they receive neither encomiums as a solution to social ills nor criticism for their economic inefficiency. The reforms of Juárez directed against the economic power of the Church are duly noted, but in general that institution is represented as beneficent. Finally a good half of the study concerns itself with the development of the Totonacapan prior to 1519. Though not an archaeologist, Ramírez Lavoignet has used other scholars’ reports and analyses of codices and chronicles to present a detailed and perceptive, though necessarily somewhat speculative, history of the region over the two millennia prior to Cortés’ arrival. Even at the local level and in places of only modest archaeologic import, Mexico’s interest in its Indian background is considerably greater than one would find in the United States.
