Rebellion Now and Forever

Mayas, Hispanics, and Caste War Violence in Yucatan, 1800–1880

Terry Rugeley

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780804771306
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Mexican History
• Index: History

This book explores the origins, process, and consequences of forty years of nearly continual political violence in southeastern Mexico. Rather than recounting the well-worn narrative of the Caste War, it focuses instead on how four decades of violence helped shape social and political institutions of the Mexican southeast. Rebellion Now and Forever looks at Yucatán's famous Caste War from the perspective of the vast majority of Hispanics and Maya peasants who did not join in the great ethnic rebellion of 1847. It shows how the history of nonrebel territory was as dramatic and as violent as the front lines of the Caste War, and of greater significance for the larger evolution of Mexican society. The work explores political violence not merely as a method and process, but also as a molder of subsequent institutions and practices.

CHAPTER ONE

Men Newly Powerful

How Pueblo Politics Became a Caste War

In the first fifty years that followed independence in 1821, many parts of Mexico burned with strife, but few regions felt the fire as keenly as did the southeast. The fact was ironic, since the Yucatán peninsula constituted one of the most peaceful of all colonial provinces. Geographically isolated from the Republic, accessible only by boat, the peninsulars formed their own polity and culture early on. Economic doldrums helped perpetuate archaic colonial relationships between Maya and Spaniard, first as encomienda , or tribute, and later repartimiento, or the compulsory purchase of goods by hapless peasants. Corn, cattle, and honey remained staples, while henequen, later the fiber of fortunes, was only a glimmer in some entrepreneurial eye. Meanwhile, a series of interlocking and often conflicting authorities governed human life: the urban bureaucrat, the corrupt magistrate, the inflexible comandante, the church as both universal highway and local footpath, the landowner’s fiat, and the system of Maya community elders known as the repúblicas de indígenas, led by the batab, or cacique, and inherited from a past that no one could any longer remember.¹ In 1821, however, few intuited the dynamite hidden within this tranquil watercolor.

It was a land of localities and not a uniformity of nation. More than any single point, the grand city of Mérida—Jo’, as rural Mayas knew it—incubated the peninsula’s political turmoil. Mérida was the center, “the place to which all roads led and all gentility aspired.” Genteel perhaps, but the city’s well-to-do made it a hive of intrigues; gentlemen seldom carried out their own dirty work, instead relying on the city’s poor and artisan classes for acts of intimidation, mob violence, and rigged voting. Políticos had plenty of raw material, for by 1841 Mérida already enjoyed a large artisan population. The barrio of Santiago set the tone with no fewer than forty-one different trades, ranging from carpenters and shoemakers to the less familiar housepainters, musicians, soap makers, and well diggers. Laborers in these male-only callings eked out a living for their families, often laboring out of the home and employing one or more sons to assist them.² The lacuna of records regarding riots and popular uprisings suggests that middle and lower sectors found ways to bear the worst of times, but the precariousness of their lives allowed the tiny political class to control them—then as now—through patronage, propaganda, and simple repression.

From here a wagon wheel of roads radiated outward to secondary towns and subregions: northwestward through Hunucmá to the port of Sisal, south-southwestward along the camino real or royal highway leading to Campeche, eastward to Izamal and Valladolid, southward along the sierra to fertile lands around Ticul, Oxkutzcab, Tekax, and Peto. Of Mérida’s possible rivals, the first was the scenic port of Campeche, in decline by 1821. Campeche’s surrounding area was heavily Maya, and the court system, chronically ill-equipped with interpreters, repeatedly sought employees who spoke both languages.³ Still, Campeche’s role as a port focused its attentions outward toward the sea rather than inward to the peninsula’s complicated interior. Not so the other great secondary city: Valladolid, the Sultaness of the Oriente. It served as second capital for a secondary polity that traded in sugar, rum, and contraband from the southern border to the northern fishing village of Río Lagartos, and its elite resented Mérida’s ascendancy with a rage that only runner-ups can truly understand.

In the countryside a certain sameness permeated economic life. Poor resources had rendered colonial Yucatán a backwater—harsh news for the conquistadors and their descendants, but a godsend for the indigenous Mayas, who were able to perpetuate many features of late postclassic life. And wherever the location, the lifeblood of the Maya peasantry was milpa agriculture. In this ancient practice, farmers slashed and burned the overgrowth in spring, planted seeds of corn and beans, then let the summer rain coax out the crops. Yucatán’s thin soil allowed only one or two years in a single field before forcing the cultivator to move on to fallow land. Although almost as old as peninsular human settlement, by the nineteenth century the dependence on milpa generated headaches of both nomenclature and tenure. To Mayas, fallow land was k’aax, and cultivated land kool; Spanish-speakers used the terms monte and milpa, respectively. Spanish colonialism had consolidated Maya subjects into new villages back in the sixteenth century; each town—pueblo in Spanish, kaaj in the native tongue—had its guaranteed lands, borrowing on the ancient Iberian concept and term ejido, and those lands were worked on a first-come, first-served basis, but also integrating pockets of private property. Some land remained common land, while other sections came under private control. Over the course of the colonial period, Spaniards, tempted by the attraction of urban markets, began to acquire significant properties in the countryside, some within ejido space, others beyond the village limits in untitled land know as terreno baldío, and which in theory belonged to the faraway king of Spain. The result was a mosaic of tenure and access practices that frustrated even the most persevering bureaucrat. Some peasants worked village lands; others migrated temporarily to farm distant baldío; still others abandoned their homes but never returned, preferring to build new communities around recently discovered fields; finally, some Mayas worked on a part- or full-time basis on private estates. This hodgepodge of approaches functioned reasonably well until the growing population, together with increasing commercial land usage from 1700 onward, began to generate pressures too great to be ignored.⁴

The majority of private properties were Hispanic-owned, but they also included a small class of Maya rancheros, a native elite who tilled and accumulated and patiently built.⁵ Almost everywhere people raised livestock and stole honey from bees, all the time tending corn, beans, chiles, fruits, and tobacco. True, some towns did have trademark specializations. By the mid-nineteenth century, Bécal was already famous for producing straw hats, a fact that owed to the abundant palm fronds and equally to the cool, moist caves where locals cured and wove the palm fibers. Maxcanú was a potter’s community, whose craftsmen sold their wares both at home and in Mérida.⁶ Coastal villagers fished, as they do today; henequen thrived in the hot, dry north-center; cotton prospered around Valladolid and Tizimín. Men logged dyewood and mahogany in riverine areas such as the Belizean river systems, the Usumacinta and Grijalva, and the Laguna de Términos region of what is now Campeche state. The deeper, rain-watered soils of the south and east invited sugarcane. The Tekax region was then undergoing a transformation of ethnic composition and major redefinitions of both land tenure and local political structure, all favoring Hispanics but not excluding successful Mayas of the region .⁷ Only the poor roads of the deep south slowed the Hispanic expansion. On the eve of the Caste War, a project was under way to connect Champotón eastward to Bacalar (roughly today’s Highway 186), but as of 1842 it had only reached just beyond Dzibalchén, at which point engineers discovered that they had gone terribly astray.⁸ Failure to complete this line eventually worked in the Caste War rebels’ favor, since the southeast remained disconnected. The project never reached its goal, but it made authorities aware that small, isolated, and autonomous Maya settlements commonly termed rancherías still persisted throughout the south.⁹

The peninsula also existed within a larger web of trade and travel. The major ports sent goods to New York, Veracruz, and Havana, while Yucatecans of the Oriente funneled foodstuffs and aguardiente, or cheap cane rum, to the lumber camps of northern British Honduras; the British colonials in turn smuggled in finished goods such as textiles, glass and metal ware, perfumes, clocks, and paper—luxuries that Mexico could not supply at suitable cost to its citizens. Smuggling insinuated itself everywhere; hidden ranchos doubling as warehouses dotted the coastline, and raids on private homes periodically turned up bounties of contraband. The most critical artery was the line of villages extending from Bacalar to Valladolid, and the trade lines fostered a subregional identity that contributed to the Caste War. Finally, the Petén drove hogs and cattle to British Honduras and was beginning to send laborers to the Spanish-speaking logging camps of Tabasco, whereas the latter supplied horses and cacao to its neighbors.

Among the motors of political conflict stood the mahogany boom along the Río Hondo. After 1798 the British established definitive control of the area. This advance, coupled with the departure of the Spanish Empire in 1821, expanded Britain’s long-controversial logging practices and opened Belizean commercial ties with Central America. Indeed, the issue of frontier logging rights simmered well before the outbreak of the war. At some unspecified point before 1843, for example, two Yucatecan residents of Bacalar (José Lucio and Crisostomo Manjarres) had sold Belizeans logging rights to an extensive strip along the northern bank of the Río Hondo. Selling mahogany trunks to foreigners was legal, but the state balked at the idea of foreign logging camps on national territory. Referring back to an item of 1832 legislation, the Yucatecan government voided the contract and ordered the Belizeans to decamp; in the future, Yucatecans who wished to deal with the Belizeans would have to cut the lumber themselves.¹⁰ The Lucio-Manjarres project probably reflected a practice that was already proliferating, and the 1843 ruling an undermanned bureaucracy’s attempt to rein in logging impresarios. As with later laws mandating the privatization of public lands, these logging concessions merely ratified a process that had been under way for some time, usually without benefit of legal claim.

To the extreme south of Yucatán lay British Honduras and the Petén, the vast and thinly inhabited northern frontier of Guatemala. The region was a flat to rolling forestland surrounded by low-lying mountains to the south and west. Rivers such as the San Juan and the Pasión coiled their way through the hills and flats. The area enjoyed some seventeen lakes, together with innumerable small water holes knows as aguadas. In the area near Belize, old-growth rain forest still covered much of the land. Harsh sunlight seldom reached the floor, keeping it moist and chilly. The ancient rain gods were alive and well here; as one traveler noted, “The rain is announced by winds so violent and contrary that they make the timbers of the houses crack; they raise the palm leaf roofs, and it has happened that many of them have been thrown down at once.” The abundant water and shade also produced hordes of mosquitoes, as well as their distinctive gift, malaria. These hardships combined with geography and economic malaise to keep out settlers, at least until the Caste War.¹¹ British Honduras remained a decentralized region inhabited by English-speaking colonials and slaves turned freedmen loggers and small farmers. Understaffed crown officials exerted little control over events outside the dingy port capital. In fact, Spaniards had only conquered the Petén in the late seventeenth century: first, by the Guatemalan president Gabriel Sánchez de Berrope, advancing northward to what is now the town of Dolores; and second, through Yucatecan governor Martín de Ursúa’s conquest of the Petén Itzá in 1699. Political authority rested in military officers titled comandantes, and even in the days of the Guatemalan dictator Rafael Carrera (1838–65), that term still remained interchangeable with the proper civilian title of corregidor . Yucatán continued to claim the territory as far south as the lake, but actual practice fixed the border at San Pablo Nohbecán (just south of 19° latitude, and well into the territory of modern Campeche state).¹² Doubts concerning the Petén’s nationality persisted: in 1823 factions within the ayuntamiento, or town council, wanted to annex the region to Yucatán, but were defeated.¹³ Although within Guatemala’s political domain, the Petén also belonged to the archbishopric of Yucatán, the traditional source of its missionaries. Guatemala paid a small subsidy to support the two or three priests active in the region.¹⁴ But few wanted the job, and it fell by default to untalented and undisciplined men who eventually helped turn peteneros into Guatemalans.¹⁵

In all places family life was officially patriarchal, but numerous countervailing tendencies reinserted women into the equation. The family remained the fundamental unit of economic life, and gender its basic division of labor. Maya women raised the children, prepared the food, and produced clothing. Men were more likely to travel in search of land and work, leaving women as the link to a family’s village of origin. The church recognized this fact in the 1770s, when it made women responsible for the service fees in cases of intervillage marriages.¹⁶ Midwives delivered all babies and even administered basic religious rites in the absence of the priest.¹⁷ Prosperous Hispanic women passed their youth in “the most hothouse existence that Europeans could imagine,” but once married they too constituted the true locus of the family. The more affluent Hispanic widows found new life as entrepreneurs, and women of whatever ethnicity discovered that religion offered them a multifaceted role outside the home, so that throughout the cities and towns pious matrons prayed fervidly for a Kingdom of Goodness that never seemed to arrive.¹⁸

Peninsular ethnic relations defy one-line summary. Regional poverty thwarted the ambitions of the early Spanish conquistadors, who contented themselves to reside in the cities. Mayas, meanwhile, reconstructed their lives but with the additions of European tools, livestock, religious vocabulary, and political oversight. The batab and república still handled most daily administration. Men practiced slash-and-burn agriculture, hunted, and built the simple homes; women...