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Rural Political Violence and the Origins of the Caste War*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 December 2015

Terry Rugeley
Terry Rugeley*
Affiliation:
University of OklahomaNorman, Oklahoma
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Extract

Between 1840 and 1847 the Mexican province of Yucatán witnessed a remarkable explosion of rural political violence. Contemporaries were well aware of the trend, for they referred to it through vivid phrases such as “uprisings,” “murder and other excesses,” “restless and turbulent spirits,” and “the storm which threatens us close at hand.” And by all accounts these episodes were something new to the society. Indeed, Yucatán had suffered a good deal less violence than had other regions of Mexico. Until 1847 nothing here had remotely approached the chaos of the Hidalgo revolt or the Morelos insurgency. It is impossible for historians, just as it was for contemporary observers, to avoid connecting the violence to the Caste War, the massive rural rebellion which would erupt in 1847. But what was the connection? And what does the political violence tell us about the nature of rural Mexican society?

Type
Research Article
Information
The Americas , Volume 53 , Issue 4 , April 1997 , pp. 469 - 496
Copyright
Copyright © Academy of American Franciscan History 1997

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Footnotes

*

Support for this research came from the Fulbright-Hayes Foundation and from junior faculty research grants from the University of Oklahoma Research Council and the College of Arts and Sciences.

References

1 Archivo General del Estado de Yucatán (AGEY), Poder Ejecutivo (PE), Ayuntamientos, I, expediente 31, January 10, 1841; exp. 25, February 3, 1841; AGEY, PE, Gobernación, XII, August 6, 1840.

2 The rebellion of Jacinto Canek in 1761 was atypical, and its circumstances and significance remain very much in dispute. See Rugeley, Terry, “Jacinto Canek revisitado,” Unicornio, No. 294, November 17, 1966, 3–7 Google Scholar; see also, Bricker, Victoria, The Indian Christ, the Indian King: The Historic Substrate of Maya Myth and Ritual (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), pp. 70–76 Google Scholar.

3 Taylor, William B., Drinking, Homicide, and Rebellion in Colonial Mexican Villages (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1984)Google Scholar. Taylor holds that apparent evidence of social deterioration may in fact conceal underlying cultural integrity.

4 In one of the few documented cases, the peasants of the village of Acanceh became so incensed over the hegemony of the estates that they “maimed” the mayordomo of the hacienda Tepich, who only escaped death by the timely intervention of the owner, who also happened to be the local magistrate. The village cacique led the action. Acanceh’s proximity to Mérida did not imply political quiescence, nor was the Maya elite invariably more compromised by creole interests. See AGEY, PE, Tierras, XIV, 49, December 5, 1843.

5 A dissertation-in-progress by Chris Gill of Yale promises to shed much light on the issue of Maya gender relationships and domestic violence.

6 On cattle theft, see Pineda, José Arturo Güémez, “Everyday Forms of Mayan Resistance: Cattle Rustling in Northwestern Yucatán, 1821–1847,” in Land, Labor, and Capital in Modern Yucatan: Essays in Regional History and Political Economy, eds. Brannon, Jeffery T. and Joseph, Gilbert M. (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1990), pp. 18–20, 29–50 Google Scholar. Regarding the more sensational crimes, see AGEY, 1844 court dockets for Tekax, September 16, 1845. The listing is presumably only partial.

7 Clearly, nineteenth-century travellers’ accounts of Maya passivity on such grand estates as Uxmal told only part of the story. Within a year of John Lloyd Stephens’ visit, the peasants of this vast estate murdered the mayordomo, a certain Castillo. On October 20, 1844, the governmental assembly upheld the death penalty for five Maya peasants who had committed “murder and other excesses” on the haciendas Uxmal and Chetulix. Stephens, Incidents of Travel in Yucatan, I, pp. 139–142; AGEY, Fondo Justicia, box 17, G, October 20, 1844.

8 Scott, James C., Weapons of the Weak: Everyday forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), pp. 255–273 Google Scholar; see also, Scott, , Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), pp. 183–201 Google Scholar.

9 The vision of ethnic apartheid features strongly in Reed, Nelson, The Caste War of Yucatan (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1964 Google Scholar) and Navarro, Moisés González, Raza y tierra: La guerra de castas y el henequén (México: Colegio de México, 1970)Google Scholar. Both also tended to equate the Caste War with discontent over the growing institution of the hacienda. Of analyses drawn from later Quintana Roo ethnography, the most important is Rojas, Alfonso Villa, The Maya of East Central Quintana Roo (Washington: Carnegie Institute, 1943)Google Scholar. For further historiographical discussion, see the preface to this issue.

10 Two broad studies explore Maya colonial adaptations. See Farriss, Nancy M., Maya Society Under Colonial Rule: The Collective Enterprise of Survival (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984)Google Scholar; and Restall, Matthew Bennett, “The World of the Cah: Postconquest Yucatec Maya Society” (Ph.D. Diss. University of California Los Angeles, 1992)Google Scholar.

11 Patch, Robert W., “Agrarian Change in Eighteenth-Century Yucatan.” Hispanic American Historical Review 65:1 (1985), 21–49 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 For an example of such an arrangement, see the case of Chicxulub (AGEY, Justicia, III, 12, July 20, 1831).

13 The visitas pastorales which took place every 15–20 years were insufficient to counteract decentralization of church power. See Archivo Histórico de la Arquidiócesis de Yucatán (AHAY), Visitas Pastorales.

14 To take only one example, Fr. José Manuel Berzunza of Tixcacaltuyú became the nucleus of resistance against the subdelegado of Sotuta, José Francisco de Castro, one which grew to include peasants and townsfolk. See AHAY, Concursos a Curatos box 34, “Informe que da el cura párroco de Tixcacaltuyú de orden superior,” December 5, 1831.

15 For a description of these prosperous elites, see Wells, Allen, Yucatán’s Gilded Age: Haciendas, Henequen, and International Harvester, 1860–1915 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1985), pp. 61–88 Google Scholar.

16 AGEY, PE, box 26, Gobernación, April 12, 1847.

17 One of the most interesting studies of such cultural activities is found in Grant, D. Jones’s analysis of the rural vaquería or bullfights, in “Symbolic Dramas of Ethnic Stratification: The Yucatecan Fiesta System on a Colonial Frontier,” Papers in Anthropology (Norman: University of Oklahoma, 1981)Google Scholar, vol. 22, no. 1.

18 Coe, Michael D., The Maya (London: Thames and Hudson, Ltd., 1987), pp. 144–148 Google ScholarPubMed.

19 For a fuller discussion of the role of these institutions, see Rugeley, Terry, “The Maya Elites of Nineteenth-Century Yucatán,” Ethnohistory 42:3 (1995), 477–493 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20 Haliczer, Stephen, The Comuneros of Castile: The Forging of a Revolution, 1475–1521 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1981), pp. 231–233 Google Scholar. Despite the profound differences, there were also similarities between the time of the comuneros and the heady decades before the Caste War in the east. The most important of these was the emergence of a local bourgeoisie that resented political control of the metropolis.

21 For a review of town government’s regulatory dimension, see Anne Staples, “Policía y Buen Gobierno: Municipal Efforts to Regulate Public Behavior, 1821–1857,” in William H. Beezley, Cheryl English Martin, and French, William E., eds., Rituals of Rule, Rituals of Resistance: Public Celebrations and Popular Culture in Mexico (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1994), pp. 115–126 Google Scholar. Personal communication from Nelson Reed, May 19, 1996.

22 See, for example, the case of Enrique González, juez de paz of Conkal. AGEY, Justicia, III, 13, August 4, 1831.

23 The first arbitrio schedules appear in AGEY, Fondo Colonial, “Impuestos Propios y Arbitrios,” various dates, 1812–1814. Though suffocated following Ferdinand VII’s restoration in 1814, the arbitrios returned following independence.

24 Centro de Apoyo a la Investigación Histórica de Yucatán (CAIHY), “Sociedad patriótica de Tekax,” Boletín comercial, 1842.

25 Sosa, Ermilio Cantón and Estrella, José Armando Chi, “Los orígenes de la institución militar en el Yucatán independiente: La milicia activa en el Partido de Tizimín (1823–1840)” (Licenciatura Thesis: Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán, 1993)Google Scholar.

26 See, for example, Victoriano Rodríguez’ successful attempt to move his rancho Hobonox from Tituc to Kancabchen, citing innumerable but unspecified injuries from the former (AGEY, PE, Gobernación, III, 65, October 27, 1842).

27 AGEY, PE, box 17, Gobernación, August 4, 1844.

28 AGEY, box 20, Gobernación, May 8, 1845; May 25, 1845.

29 See Rugeley, Terry, Yucatán’s Maya Peasantry and the Origins of the Caste War, 1800–1847 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996), pp. 40–57 Google Scholar.

30 These plans are found in AGEY, Fondo Colonial, “Impuestos Propios y Arbitrios,” various dates, 1812–1814.

31 AGEY, PE, Ayuntamientos, I, 31, May 15, 1825.

32 Regarding other complaints, see AGEY, Ayuntamientos, I, 23, January 2, 1825 (Peto); I, 24, January 11, 1825 (Temax); I, 26, February 2, 1825 (Nohcacab); I, 29, May 7, 1825 (Campeche); II, 1, Octuber 12, 1826 (Yaxcabá); II, 2, December 10, 1826 (Tekax); II, 25, January 8, 1829 (Maxcanú); II, 28, February 13, 1829 (Maxcanú); and II, 30, March 18, 1829 (Tiholop).

33 AGEY, Ayuntamientos, February 14, 1822 (unjust fines in Chikindzonot); May 6, 1822 (unspecified abuses in Cansahcab); and January 14, 1823 (arbitrary removal from office in Kanxoc).

34 See the national government’s decrees for the formation of local office, preserved in AHAY, Decretos y Oficeos 102, June 6, 1837.

35 An account of this unusual plan appears in Archivo Histórico de la Defensa Nacional (AHDN), XI/481.3/1196, August 25, 1836.

36 Travelling with the pontoon boats, for example, was a force of 236 local recruits, with more to follow (AHDN, XI/481.3/1154, November 29, 1836). The history of the Active Batallions appears in Cantón Sosa and Chi Estrella, “Los orígenes de la institución militar.”

37 AGEY, PE42, Censos y padrones, town of Tizimín, May 15, 1841.

38 AGEY, PE, Gobernación, XI, 23, January 7, 1840, “Información sumaria hecha en averiguación…”

39 AGEY, PE, Ayuntamientos, legajo IV, expediente 30, May 4, 1840.

40 AGEY, PE, Gobernación, XII, August 6, 1840.

41 The pattern was similar to that described for rural Colombia in the years between the Thousand Days’ War and the violencia. See Bergquist, Charles W., Coffee and Conflict in Colombia, 1886–1910 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1986), p. 96 Google Scholar.

42 Of course, the northeast was no stranger to violence: well into the 1830s pirates operated between the islands and the coast, raiding and burning ranchos and making off with canoes. Centro de Apoyo a la Investigación Histórica de Yucatán (CAIHY), “Correspondencia de Valladolid,” July 29, 1837, 10.

43 AGEY, PE, Ayuntamientos, I, 31, May 10, 1841; 25, February 3, 1841.

44 AGEY, PE, Gobernación, V, 130, May 15, 1841.

45 AGEY, PE, Ayuntamientos, I, 32, February 14, 1841; 26, March 3, 1841

46 The 1845 census reports 11,457, making it the third largest after Mérida (24,090) and Campeche (15,357). The 13,580 inhabitants assigned to the tiny village of Xul was almost certainly a mistake. See CAIHY, Exp. VII, 54, various dates, 1845.

47 AGEY, PE, box 2, Poblaciones, census of Valladolid, May 18, 1841.

48 Archivo General de la Nación de México (AGNM), Bienes Nacionales, 19, 2, February 2–6, 1851.

49 Bonifacio Novelo’s signature appears on a petition defending the legitimacy of Valladolid’s 1841 ayuntamiento elections. See AGEY, PE, May 7, 1841. See also, AGEY, PE, Ayuntamientos, I, 2, May 25, 1841; 21, June 1, 1841.

50 In this regard, pre-Caste War Yucatán had many parallels to the camarrillas or vertical political affiliations that Allen Wells and Gilbert Joseph have described for the porfirian and early revolutionary years. See Wells, and Joseph, , Summer of Discontent, Seasons of Upheaval: Elite Politics and Rural Insurgency in Yucatán, 1876–1915 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), pp. 27–33 Google Scholar.

51 AGEY, PE, Justicia, I, 3, misc. dates, March 1842; PE, “Correspondencia de la jefatura política del partido de Yaxcabá,” I, 7, misc, dates, March 1842.

52 AHDN, XI/481.3/1992, July 5, 1843, report of General Matías de la Peña y Barragán; XI/481.3/1986, December 11, 1843, report of Manuel María Sandoval.

53 CAIHY, Decretos no. 61, March 27, 1844, 14–15.

54 AHAY, Capellanías, box 5, expediente 27, various dates, 1843.

55 CAIHY, Decretos, December 18, 1844, 143; June 14, 1845, 207.

56 The appeal of his brother Vicente Solís Novelo failed to free him (AGEY, PE, Justicias, May 6, 1846). These rebels were apparently related to the later and more famous revolutionary Bonifacio Novelo. The Novelo clan in Valladolid was extensive.

57 AGEY, PE, Report from Agustín Acereto, subdelegado of Valladolid, June 15, 1847.

58 Pérez, Louis A. Jr., Cuba Under the Piatt Amendment, 1902–1934 (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1986), pp. 139–143 Google Scholar.

59 The problem of peasant demobilization had already surfaced once, following the Spanish constitutional crisis; see Rugeley, pp. 48–57. The same process would repeat itself with the coming of huertismo to the peninsula in 1913; see Wells and Joseph, pp. 252–261.

60 AGEY, PE5, G, IV, 101, March 30, 1841.

61 Tales of a prehispanic tribal peoples known as the “huits” are a myth. The term “huit” was originally a patronymic found in the area of Tizimín and Espita. In the nineteenth century, only one reference to the term huithes exists; it derives from the same geographical area—not from the original Caste War towns—and apparently refers to peasants who were skilled in moving through the backwoods. We find this sole reference in Baqueiro, Serapio, Ensayo histórico sobre las revoluciones de Yucatán, vol. I, (Mérida: Manuel Heredia Arguelles, 1879) pp. 86–87 Google Scholar.

62 AGEY, Fondo Colonial, Militar, I, 16, March 21, 1801; AGEY, Fondo Colonial, “Correspondencia de various autoridades,” I, 3, March 30, 1801; May 18, 1801; May 31, 1801; August 5, 1801.

63 Tihosuco ranked after Mérida, Campeche, and Valladolid. See CAIHY, Exp. VII, 54, various dates, 1845.

64 AGEY, Fondo Colonial, “Correspondencia de los gobernadores, varios partidos,” III, March 3, 1818.

65 The personal lives of the Caste War’s two most famous caudillos serve as examples of this. Jacinto Pat, the leader from Tihosuco, was married to a woman named Feliciana Puc, a patronymic rare in Tihosuco but extremely common among the Mayas around Chichimilá (see AHAY, “Matrícula de Tihosuco,” uncatalogued document, 1828). Cecilio Chi, the leader from Tepich, had in fact lived in Tihosuco in the 1830s (AGEY, PE, Censos y Padrones, I, 12, October 5, 1832). Moreover, elements of the two families had intermarried; Teresa Chi was the wife of Cecilio Pat, apparently the uncle of the more famous Jacinto. Beyond these evidences is the obvious mutual familiarity of the local Maya elites in the early stages of the war.

66 CAIHY, “Estado que manifiesta las leguas de distancias que tienen entre sí los pueblos y ranchos de población…,” November 29, 1845.

67 To take one of several examples, we find the signatures of the Pat family, including Jacinto Pat, on the plebiscite to reunite Yucatán with Mexico in 1843. See AGEY, PE, box 14, Ayuntamientos, December 31, 1843; box 15, G, January 21, 1844.

68 The first major property went to Antonio Mais (Archivo Notarial del Estado de Yucatán, January 28, 1845, p. 22), who had in fact been on a waiting list for terrenos baldíos since 1837 (CAIHY, “Documentos 1819–1865, November 1837). Subsequent awards soon went to Imán’s military officers. These included Antonio Trujeque (ANEY, March 17, 1845, pp. 68–69); Vito Pacheco (October 11, 1845, pp. 92–24); and Miguel Bolio (April 17, 1846, pp. 128–130). For further information on the denuncia program, see Robert W. Patch, “Decolonization, the Agrarian Problem, and the Origins of the Caste War, 1812–1847,” in Land, Labor, and Capital, pp. 51–82.

69 Pat had filed his own claim in August 1846. See CAIHY, “1845–1846: Registro de las denuncias de terrenos baldíos,” August 18, 1849, p. 49.

70 Tihosuco’s initial plan for arbitrios appears in AGEY, FC, Impuestos Propios y Arbitrios, I, 37, October 1, 1813.

71 Archivo General de Centroamérica, section B, legajo 28543, expediente 279, July 11, 1848.

72 To take only one example, we find Vito Pacheco and Antonio Mais locked in a quarrel over urban property; see Archivo Histórico de la Arquidiócesis de Yucatán (AHAY), Concursos a Curatos, box 35, May 23, 1846.

73 I have drawn this account from a recently discovered anonymous narrative of the Caste War entitled Guerra de castas en Yucatán: Su origen, sus consecuencias y su estado actual (unpublished manuscript, dated 1866), pp. 74–92. This volume exists in the book collection of the CAIHY; special thanks to Michel Antochiw for calling it to my attention.

74 AHDN, XI/481.3/1992, May 31, 1843, report of Sebastian López de Llergo.

75 Records of Tepich reveal that as of 1829 Cecilio Chi was not part of the república de indígenas. See AGEY, PE, Empleos, II, 45, April 29, 1829.

76 Other leaders included the Vázquez family and Fr. Marcos Aviles, Tihosuco’s assistant minister. In addition to Guerra de castas en Yucatán, p. 89, see AHAY, Decretos y Oficios, February 6, 1847.

77 Anonymous, Guerra de castas, pp. 88–99.

78 See note no. 2 above.

79 AGEY, PE, box 26, Justicia, February 10, 1847.

80 Greene, Thomas, Comparative Revolutionary Movements: Search for Theory and Justice (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1990), pp. 141–143 Google Scholar.

81 Trujeque arrested and imprisoned his officer Bonifacio Novelo for leading the worst of the violent excesses in the raid, even though it was clear that Novelo was merely doing Trujeque’s “dirty work.” See AGEY, PE, Valladolid court docket, April 24, 1847.

82 Archives of Belize (AB), Records no. 28, February 27, 1848, 191, from the report of José Irina in Bacalar to Domingo Martínez.

83 Archives of Belize, R28, February 18, 1848, 220 (Pat to John Kingdom).

84 Rulings on many of these petitions for exemption appear in AGEY, PE, box 36, “Disposiciones y decretos en respuesta a exposiciones y solicitudes,” 1849.

85 See, for example, the quarrel between the jefe político and the military colonel in charge of forces in Sotuta (AGEY, PE, box 49, Gobernación, February-April 1852).

86 During the worst days of 1851, for example, soldiers in the deep south were reduced to eating palm hearts. See AHDN, XI/481.3/3255, January 18, 1851.

87 AHDN, XI/481.4/8574, February 5, 1861, report of Anselmo Cano; XI/481.4/8533, November 18, 1861, report of Liborio Irigoyen; XI/481.4/8393, December 11, 1861 (Irigoyen); XI/481.4/8924, April 1862 (Irigoyen); XI/481.4/8929, December 2, 1862 (Irigoyen).

88 See, for example, AGEY, PE, box 171, Milicias-Tekax, misc. dates, 1868.

89 The critical action was Buenaventura Martínez’s revolt in Hunucmá. See AGEY, PE, box 113, Gobernación, Comandancia Militar, June 8, 1866.

90 On prerevolutionary municipal struggles, see Wells and Joseph, 147–156, 176–181; on post-1920 municipal politics, see Fallaw, Ben, “Peasants, Caciques, and Camarrillas: Rural Politics and State Formation in Yucatán, 1924–1940,” (Ph.D. Diss. University of Chicago, 1995), pp. 103–110 Google Scholar.

91 AHDN, XI/481.3/3475, December 16, 1853 through January 1, 1854.

92 Rugeley, “The Maya Elites,” pp. 486–489.

93 Joseph, Gilbert M., Revolution from Without: Yucatán, Mexico, and the United States, 1880–1924 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1988), pp. 207–213 Google Scholar.

94 Wells and Joseph, pp. 193–197.

95 Diario de Yucatán, September 3, 1995.

96 This view appears in Cline, Howard F., “Regionalism and Society, 1825–1847: A Study of ‘Progressivism’ and the Origins of the Caste War,” (Ph.D. Diss. Harvard University, 1947), pp. 575–577 Google Scholar; in Patch, “Decolonization”; and more recently, in Arturo Güémez Pinedo, Liberalismo en tierras del caminante: Yucatán, 1812–1840 (Zamora, Michoacán: Colegio de Michoacán, 1994).

97 See Rugeley, Yucatan’s Maya Peasantry.