Una utopia inconclusa: Espaillat y el liberalismo dominicano del siglo XIX (review)
morphic with broader geographic divisions. The institution of the communal work of tequio is another mode of economic exchange and just one of several customs operating to foster social integration. Chapter 4 attempts to sketch the basic elements of the Triqui’s worldview, language, and religious and ceremonial life, including their connection with traditional healing practices. Finally, in chapter 5, García Alcaraz offers a short synthesis of the material through a brief historical outline of the relationship of the Triqui of Copala with the dominant society in which they have been immersed. The abundance of carefully collected data in the book is supported by several tables, which supply information ranging from kinship terms to the exact prices of coffee in 1971–72. García Alcaraz’s rather orthodox materialist emphasis on ecological adaptation can be somewhat reductive: women, for example, figure in the ethnography almost exclusively in terms of their symbolic association with the land and their direct role in social reproduction. Nevertheless, García Alcaraz’s ethnography shows fastidious attention to detail, allowed by his having close contact with the Triqui for a period of time not normally possible for anthropologists. The result is a sensitive work which, despite its theoretical biases, creates, almost by default, a vivid account of Triqui life. The new edition is without the photographs of the original, and the bibliography (as in the first edition) is minimal, yet it contains transcriptions of various rare documents from the colonial period pertaining to land tenure, in addition to a “Codice Triqui” and “Stories and Legends of Copala.” Though much of this ethnography’s information is now obsolete, its global analytic framework is still timely. Today, almost 30 years after this study was first published, the Triqui’s struggle continues. However, they are now global actors more than ever, migrating in large numbers to California for tomato harvesting and defending their rights through participation in binational and national indigenous rights organizations including, since 1989, the Unified Movement for the Triqui People (MULT), one of Oaxaca’s best-known and strongest indigenous rights groups. For historians this work’s appeal probably lies in the finely detailed and precise ethnographic study of one of the most dynamic and least described indigenous groups in Oaxaca.