The Model Indian: Negotiating Worlds in Nineteenth-Century Chiapas (original) (raw)

This paper explores the ways in which highland Indians in the state of Chiapas negotiated their lives in the nineteenth century through the experience of labor and the relationships they had with local elites. Little attention has been paid in the scholarly record to the experience of Indian life in the dynamics of a changing world. Expeditionary reports and travelogues by armchair academics beginning in the late 1890s offer forth impressions of savage peoples needing the firm hand and civility of white culture. Public discourse by the mid-nineteenth century tended to frame those on the side of civilization and the ideas of progress as against those whom society considered the enemy of modernization, Indians, locked in an eternal battle with their social superiors. This paper utilizes an obituary from 1872 of Salvador Gomes Tuxni, a Chamulan Indian, who was painted by the writer as a "model Indian" as an opening to question this world and the labor system known as baldiaje. All too often, Indians are cast in the role of submissive servant. Such an approach obfuscates the real experience of peoples who negotiated their lives within the confines of social constraints to the best of their abilities.