Indigenous Citizens

Local Liberalism in Early National Oaxaca and Yucatán

Karen D. Caplan

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780804772914
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Mexican History
• Index: History

Indigenous Citizens challenges the commonly held assumption that early nineteenth-century Mexican state-building was a failure of liberalism. By comparing the experiences of two Mexican states, Oaxaca and Yucatán, Caplan shows how the institutions and ideas associated with liberalism became deeply entrenched in Mexico's regions, but only on locally acceptable terms.Faced with the common challenge of incorporating new institutions into political life, Mexicans—be they indigenous villagers, government officials, or local elites—negotiated ways to make those institutions compatible with a range of local interests. Although Oaxaca and Yucatán both had large indigenous majorities, the local liberalisms they constructed incorporated indigenous people differently as citizens. As a result, Oaxaca experienced relative social peace throughout this era, while Yucatán exploded with indigenous rebellion beginning in 1847.This book puts the interaction between local and national liberalisms at the center of the narrative of Mexico's nineteenth century. It suggests that "liberalism" must be understood not as an overarching system imposed on the Mexican nation but rather as a set of guiding assumptions and institutions that Mexicans put to use in locally specific ways.

CHAPTER 1

National Liberalism, Local Liberalisms

IN APRIL 1846, A YUCATECAN OFFICIAL traveled through his jurisdiction, Motul, to inspect the villages and report on their condition to the state government. The picture the jefe político, or political chief, painted in his report was not favorable. Most striking was the near-universal neglect of public buildings. In town after town he saw that the casas consistoriales, buildings intended to house the municipal authorities elected under new republican rules, were near ruin. Jails and military barracks were ill maintained and thus inadequate for the enforcement of republican law. Schools worried the jefe as well. Many villages lacked them entirely, and where they did exist it was often impossible to find a qualified teacher, someone prepared to teach villagers the fundamentals of republican government. The jefe suggested that village authorities levy taxes to address some of these problems, but he recognized that in most cases there were simply no resources to tax. The jefe’s observations suggested that Mexico’s new institutions were failing to transform the country’s indigenous people from colonial subjects into liberal citizens. There was often little distinction in the villages between the older indigenous government bodies sanctioned by colonial Spain and the new republican town councils established for independent Mexico. Because traditional indigenous scribes were often the only literate villagers, the jefe observed, they often served as “perpetual mayors.” Thirty-four years after the transition to liberalism, and twenty-five years after Mexico’s separation from the Spanish monarchy and its establishment of a republican system, it appeared to officials across Mexico that in the villages little had changed.¹

Was this perception correct? Certainly, by the time the Yucatecan jefe made his report, there had been significant transformations in Mexican political life. Beginning in 1812, nearly all adult male Mexicans could go to the polls to elect representative legislative bodies, and they did so in large numbers. On a local level, Mexicans now had the opportunity to elect and serve as members of newly established town councils that would oversee affairs in all but the smallest villages. And after Mexico gained its independence and established the republic in 1824, Mexicans acquired a government the ultimate authority of which was located not in far-off Spain, but in Mexico itself, and, practically speaking, in relatively nearby state capitals like Oaxaca City and Mérida. The population had gone in a few short years from being subjects to being citizens, a change that brought with it new ways of organizing administration and new bases for demands on the state.

And yet in some ways little had changed. The range of both candidates and issues on which new citizens could vote was nearly as limited as it had been under Spain, and indirect elections quickly filtered out the intentions of the majority of voters. Long-standing village hierarchies were reproduced in local councils, and thus the new bodies tended to replicate colonial arrangements. Colonial structures, both economic and political, often remained intact even where they had been officially abolished. In Oaxaca and Yucatán—the Mexican states that form the core of this study—most indigenous villagers were still poor, and their labor was still the primary source of income for the nonindigenous elite. And, like their colonial Spanish predecessors, new republican government officials struggled daily with their limited capacity to ensure the cooperation of new citizens. All that had changed, it seemed, were the words that government representatives and indigenous villagers used to describe the political and economic order, and the specific institutions that facilitated its perpetuation.

This book argues that this new language and these new institutions were significant. Evidence from the villages shows that new Mexican citizens, whether indigenous villagers, elites, or state officials, went through the motions that liberalism demanded: elections, representative governance, land reform, and the military draft. Because there was also continuity in the structures of authority, many scholars have seen their compliance with new institutional rules as inconsequential, little more than a veneer. Yet as they went through the motions of liberalism, Mexicans also engaged with the content of liberalism. Crucially, this occurred even where physical evidence of state presence was slight. The book traces the transition to liberalism in the states of Oaxaca and Yucatán, where more than three-quarters of the citizenry was indigenous and where these indígenas ² composed the vast majority of those living outside of major cities. The Oaxacan and Yucatecan state governments—and certainly the federal government—had few resources to call on in controlling the everyday activities of this majority population, and the authority of the state was often in question. But changes in institutions nevertheless triggered intense negotiation between indigenous people and the state surrounding the meanings of liberal republican institutions, policies, and systems. The meanings that they could agree on became, for them, liberalism. Liberalism in nineteenth-century Mexico cannot be evaluated in reference to any liberal ideal. Rather, it was built in the context of politics on the ground.

Of course, there was not always consensus that this kind of liberalism was indeed liberal. The content of local agreements, forged in the context of local exigencies, often clashed with a developing “official” liberalism—the ideas, policies, and institutions articulated at the level of the national government. Thus, throughout the first half of the century, national leaders struggled to control the meaning of liberalism and to impose their often-changing vision of national politics. In 1857, when this study ends, Mexico’s national state was beginning a concerted attempt to consolidate its control and regularize political practice across the country. It did not, however, do so in a vacuum. Liberalism, the guiding principle of Mexico’s latter-century national reform, had by that time become entrenched in the regions. If national figures did not see local practices as liberal, local people—both villagers and officials—often did; and, to them, the national government’s insistence on reform in the name of liberalism made little sense. A careful and locally grounded look at Mexico’s first transition to liberalism between 1812 and 1857 helps explain both the appeal—and indeed often the success—of liberal politics in the regions both before and after the beginning of the Reform and the obstacles faced by the national government in consolidating and controlling liberal politics across the nation.

For much of Mexico in the nineteenth century, at the heart of the contradictions of liberalism was the political identity of indigenous people. Among the central goals of liberals at the national level was the elimination of ethnic distinctions believed to hamper the development of rational economic and political development. But, locally, these ethnic distinctions were crucial to the relationship between state and society; often they lay at the heart of the state’s legitimacy among indigenous people. Any transition to new institutions had to take this into account. The indigenous question was, then, both at the center of the negotiation of local liberalisms and at the center of the contradictions between the local and the national. The relationships that developed in and around the dilapidated public buildings in villages like those in Motul were the foundation of the sometimes tenuous legitimacy of both state and national governments after independence. Precisely in the places where the Yucatecan inspector saw a severe disjuncture between liberal ideals and indigenous reality, it is possible to observe the negotiation of the terms of liberal citizenship and the roots of conflict over what those terms would be.

Why “Liberalism”?

It is necessary at the outset to explain my choice of the term liberalism to describe early nineteenth-century Mexican politics and government. The broad constellation of institutions and practices that characterized Mexico in these years could certainly be called by other names—republicanism or constitutionalism and perhaps even democracy. In a strict sense, these descriptors are more accurate; liberalism as an ideology does not imply a precise set of institutions or a particular way of structuring polities. Scholars have used other phrases such as democratic revolution or the transition from the Old Regime or even the advent of modernity to describe the broad global process of which the emergence of new Mexican institutions was a part. Yet liberalism best describes the political, ideological, and institutional changes of the early nineteenth century, in large part because it aptly describes what Mexicans understood to be shared by the numerous regimes that governed Mexico after independence.

To be sure, even if Mexicans could agree that the new system was liberal, there was little consensus about what, exactly, liberalism meant. Nineteenth-century ideological liberalism assumed, in Nils Jacobsen’s words, a “bewildering array of guises,” ranging from “a doctrine of emancipation to one of justifying a given status quo.”³ In the first half of the nineteenth century, those who actively espoused liberalism could agree, in general, that the state should be limited and that both its limitations and its duties were determined by the fundamental rights of citizens as detailed in constitutions.⁴ Yet within this broad definition, numerous strands of thought emerged, coalesced, and evolved over the course of the first half of the century.⁵

Also significant is that this loose conglomeration of liberal ideas was not actively set against “conservatism.” Liberalism and conservatism have often been treated as opposites, the differences between them forming the fundamental dividing line between nineteenth-century thinkers in Mexico reaching back to independence. But the tendency to project a liberal/ conservative divide onto this early era is anachronistic. Scholars have shown that in early national Mexico, all elite political thought evolved from European liberalism. There were certainly those who were more “traditionalist” and others who were more “radical.” But traditionalist and later centralist thought emerged out of the same body of influences—in particular, the ideas underlying the 1812 Spanish Constitution of Cádiz— as did more radical or moderate thought. The word conservative was not used to describe political ideology until the later 1840s. Before that, it referred to conservative values, which were often as apparent in the words of moderate and radical liberals as in those of more traditionalist thinkers. The terms that politicians did use, especially federalism and centralism, are not analogous with liberalism and conservatism. Federalists and centralists were nearly all republicans, and federalists and centralists alike were reformers; they differed most clearly on the questions of how and how fast reform should occur. Even the group most often identified with an unrelenting conservatism, the church, participated in this general liberal consensus. At least until the 1850s, the church hierarchy defended itself not by assaulting liberalism but rather by claiming its own rights within it. The major coalitions that characterized postindependence Mexican politics developed as versions of the same basic beliefs that had not, before the 1850s, diverged to the point that any of them were no longer “liberal.”⁶

This was reflected in the institutions that emerged in the first half of the nineteenth century. With one important exception, both the federalist and centralist governments established between the fall of the Spanish empire and 1857 were deeply influenced by liberal ideology writ large.⁷ Practically speaking, this translated into a basic set of institutions, including most importantly elections for both local and supralocal offices that, although they varied in form, persisted throughout much of the period. In this sense, liberalism was not just an ideology but also a system of government. Certainly, it is possible to trace the origins of conservatism in these years and in these institutions, especially in the centralist regime of the late 1830s. But centralism was still deeply concerned with liberty; if it privileged liberty over equality, this does not make it antiliberal but rather, as Josefina Vásquez has argued, liberalism of a different kind.⁸ Before the 1850s, liberalism remained a loose and expansive term, one that described not just a set of political beliefs but most importantly described the postcolonial system itself.

For most Mexicans in the early nineteenth century, it was liberalism as a system—as a set of institutions and practices—that mattered most. Mexicans, regardless of their social position and regardless of their particular political beliefs, understood that they now lived under a system that was fundamentally different from what had come before. This was not a monarchy; there was no longer an unquestioned source of authority that bound people to the state. What replaced the overarching notion of subjecthood, with its implication of subordination, was the idea of citizenship, backed up by the notion of liberty. Whatever precise institutions governed at any particular moment were understood to be informed by this fundamental change. As James Dunkerley has written, “imagination mattered throughout” the nineteenth century in Latin America; in the first half of that century, no matter what it actually looked like, “liberalism” was a central element of what Mexicans imagined they were doing, and Mexicans imagined they were doing something new. This book defines liberalism as the concept that best captures the political and ideological context that Mexicans believed that they shared.⁹

In proposing this definition, I make distinctions between liberalism as a proactive movement, liberalism as a system, and liberalism as a political culture. The first of these is least important here. In the first half of the nineteenth century there was no consolidated liberal “movement” in Mexico; there were certainly political activists who could be called “liberals,” but their ideas and plans encompassed a broad spectrum of both ideas and institutions. More important is that in these years Mexico was consistently governed under a new set of institutions that could also be called liberal, including elections, a new tax structure, new definitions of land tenure, and new methods of allocating the military draft. As these were implemented, the people who participated in them—economic elites, political officials, urban plebeians, or indigenous villagers—had to abide by their basic terms. Finally, with this shared system came a shared sense of the transformation of local, regional, and national politics. The political culture of liberalism developed out of this shared sense, as Mexicans strove to incorporate new institutions and sought to make them meet their needs and conform to their beliefs.¹⁰

The incorporation of new institutions was made easier by the fact that those institutions were themselves notably hybrid, encompassing radical innovations but also constructed in ways that allowed for continuity with the Old Regime.¹¹ Even so, for many Mexicans, the process of implementation would raise contradictions. Colonial political cultures were deeply rooted in both the reciprocal obligations of monarchs and subjects and a fundamental distinction between Spanish and indigenous people. Liberal institutions, with their emphasis on individual citizenship and the erasure of ethnic differences, threatened many of the assumptions that had made colonial government function. These fundamental changes in political identity were not universally desired by either indigenous people or representatives of the state. The former, although they did gain certain advantages from their new juridical equality, were also reluctant to give up the privileges that the colonial system had offered. And the latter, although they saw ultimate advantages in a liberal transformation, worried that the elimination of colonial bonds and distinctions would make governance itself impossible. The challenge of Mexico’s liberal experiment was to find ways to make liberalism’s basic precepts compatible with those of deeply rooted political cultures. As they negotiated ways to make this happen, Mexicans created new political cultures, new sets of discourses and actions that gave liberal institutions and languages specific meaning and incorporated them into everyday political life.

In light of this process, it would not make sense to say that either government officials or indigenous people resisted liberalism, per se. Government officials were obligated to enforce the new national agenda, and they often agreed with the precepts that underlay it. When that agenda interfered with their ability to govern, they used their authority not to contradict new laws but to implement them in a way that was more acceptable but still recognizably “liberal.” And indigenous people were not inherently unwilling to embrace the institutions of the new government, even though they threatened their ethnically defined political identity. Instead, they used them; as Antonio Annino puts it, they had an “extraordinary capacity . . . to use a liberal category like ‘citizenship’ to defend themselves from the liberal State.”¹² Indigenous people and government officials, through their words and actions in response to institutional change, and through their negotiation with each other, pushed the boundaries of what liberalism as a system of government could mean. By doing so, they shifted that meaning often significantly. In majority indigenous Oaxaca and Yucatán, this would be the central process in the creation of unique liberal political cultures...