In the second half of the 1930s, a cluster of Mexican leftist ethnographers and public intellectuals began to call for territorial self-determination for the country’s Indigenous peoples. This was a distinctive and novel current of thought within Mexican policymaking and knowledge-production around the Indigenous question, yet neither its transnational origins nor its impact have been fully explored. Drawing on his research in Mexican and Russian archives, Tony Wood shows how Mexican advocates of Soviet-style self-determination came to adopt these ideas, and argues that their view of Mexico’s Indigenous peoples as “nationalities” within a composite nation foreshadowed later demands for Indigenous autonomy.

Tony Wood

Tony Wood (Ph.D., New York University) is a political and social historian of modern Latin America. His current work focuses on transnational radical debates on race, class, and nation in the 1920s and 1930s, tracing connections between Mexico, Cuba, and the Soviet Union. Wood initially trained as a specialist on Russia and the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and is the author of Chechnya: The Case for Independence (2007), and Russia without Putin: Money, Power and the Myths of the New Cold War (2018). He was deputy editor of New Left Review from 2007 to 2014 and is a member of its editorial board. He has written on a range of subjects for the London Review of Books, n+1, The Nation, and the Guardian (UK), among other outlets. While at Princeton, Wood will be preparing his dissertation for publication, as well as working on a journal article about the migration, citizenship, and the state in post-revolutionary Mexico.

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