Gobernar el Quenamitlan. Jacques Soustelle en Argelia (1955)

Abstract

In February 1955, the mexicanist ethnologist and politician Jacques Soustelle was appointed Governor General of Algeria for one year, at the very beginning of the period that was to become the Algerian War. He designed and implemented a series of reforms called the “Soustelle Plan”, which were inspired in part by the Mexican model of integration and indigenism as he had observed during his ethnographic fieldwork in Mexico in the early 1930s. After recalling Soustelle’s analyses of Mexican indigenist policy, the article reviews some of the emblematic measures of the Soustelle plan that are rooted in social engineering of the indigenist policy.

Keywords

• indigenism
• Mexico
• integration
• Soustelle
• Algeria