Just as Mexico was entering the North American Free Trade Association, its legacy of ethnicity and identity of indigenous peoples reappeared with surprising fury. In Chiapas, the Zapatista Army for National Liberation occupied a major city and dramatically changed contemporary Mexican politics. Identity and ethnicity in Mexico are issues long clouded by the official politics of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which has maintained the dual objectives of using indigenismo both as a banner of pride and separateness from the United States and as a mode of integrating native peoples into the national state.
Corn Is Our Blood takes a look at historical and contemporary aspects of identity and ethnicity through the lives of people in an out-of-the-way village in Veracruz. In this small, Nahuatl-speaking agricultural community of 110 households, remote from the main highways and communication networks of modern Mexico, the national discourse of identity and ethnicity continues to be carried out through the performance of everyday activities.
The book mixes ethnohistory, a contemporary community study, and an ethnography of ritual practices. Alan Sandstrom describes the thick ritual and religious life of the village—which includes an elaborate purification ritual involving the burning of paper figures—and the complex cosmology of Nahuatl religion today. The book is organized like traditional ethnographic community studies: after a chapter on fieldwork, Sandstrom describes the village setting, social organization, household economy, and religion, concluding with a theoretical chapter on identity and change.
Sandstrom bases his information on extensive stays in the village: he conducted his first fieldwork between 1972 and 1977 and returned for additional research in 1986. Anthropologists describe the lives of people they study in an “ethnographic present,” or the time of primary fieldwork; in this case the descriptions and analysis of life in this small community are all true to the 1970s. Yet while many things have changed in the intervening 20 years, the basic issues of village life—land, social conflicts, and the persistence of a religious system that has withstood five hundred years of attempts to eradicate it—continue.
Sandstrom is at his best describing and itemizing the vital details of everyday existence—household possessions, the price fluctuations of corn and beans. He also gives a fine description of an indigenous work ethic. An example of his insight concerns the way people approach work: “[This] feature of Nahua culture … is more difficult to characterize. It is manifest in an approach to work and an attitude toward time. … The people of Amatlán are task oriented in that they work diligently to finish what needs to be done. They attack and complete projects that appear to the outsider to require almost superhuman endurance” (p. 227).
Sandstrom’s theoretical contributions are less compelling than his descriptive skills. In the final chapter, for example, village identity is portrayed as changing because of missionary activity and young people’s temporary wage migration. Sandstrom concludes that the complex of motor habits, agriculture, indigenous cosmology, and local social structure has provided and will continue to provide an identity that allows villagers both to resist and to interpret changes that occur through the globalization of local communities. While he argues against the idealistic visions of Mexican villages in early ethnographic studies, Sandstrom is unable to advance very far beyond a nostalgic view of the strength of tradition. The transformations, adaptations of new knowledge, and strategies for coping with change in Mexico are not as important in this analysis as the continuity of culture.
