Peripheral Visions : Politics, Society, and the Challenges of Modernity in Yucatan [1 ed.] 9780817383367, 9780817316808

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Peripheral Visions

O Arrecife

87°

Alacnin

GULF OF MEXICO

BAY OF

87°

Peninsula of Yucatan (Map by Eugene Wilson)

Peripheral Visions Politics, Society, and the Challenges of Modernity in Yucatan

Edited by Edward D. Terry, Ben W Fallaw, Gilbert M. Joseph, and Edward H. Moseley

THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS

Tuscaloosa

Copyright © 20IO The University of Alabama Press Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380 All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America In cooperation with the Alfredo Barrera Vasquez Center for Yucatecan Studies Typeface: Garamond

The paper on which this book is printed meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Peripheral visions: politics, society, and the challenges of modernity in Yucatan I edited by Edward D. Terry ... let al.l. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8173-1680-8 (cloth: alk. paper) - ISBN 978-0-8173-5564-7 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-8173-8336-7 (electronic) 1. Yucatan (Mexico: State)-Politics and government. 2. Politics and culture-Mexico-Yucatan (State)-History. 3. Yucatan (Mexico: State)Social conditions. 4- Social change-Mexico-Yucatan (State)-History. 5. Social classesMexico-Yucatan (State)-History. 6. Yucatan (Mexico: State)-Economic conditions. 7. Economic development-Mexico- Yucatan (State)-History. 8. Liberalism-Economic aspects-Mexico-Yucatan (State)-History. 9. Yucatan (Mexico: State)-Religion. IO. Catholic Church-Mexico-Yucatan (State)-History. 1. Terry, Edward Davis. F1376.P4720IO 306.2°972' 65-dc22

Cover: Street scene in 1990S Yucatan, courtesy of Edward D. Terry. An earlier version of chapter 4 appeared in Gender and the Mexican Revolution: Yucatdn Women and the Realities ofPatriarchy by Stephanie J. Smith. Copyright © 2009 by the University of

North Carolina Press. Used by permission of the publisher. www.uncpress.unc.edu.

Contents

Preface

Vll

Introduction Helen Delpar and Ben W Fallaw

1.

I

I: SOCIETY AND POLITICS The Caste War of Yucatan in Long-Term Perspective Marie Lapointe 17

2. Casting an Image of Modernity: Yucatan at the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 Helen Delpar 38

3. A Measure of Liberty: The Politics of Labor in Revolutionary Yucatan, 1915-1918 Paul K Eiss 54 4- Removing the Yoke of Tradition: Yucatan's Revolutionary Women, Revolutionary Reforms

Stephanie J Smith

79

5. The Crusade of the Mayab: Cardenista Modernization and Contestation in Yucatan, 1935-1940 Ben W Fallaw 101 6. Against Great Odds: Lebanese Entrepreneurs and the Development of Modern Yucatan Eric N BaklanofJ 128 7. The Decline and Collapse of Yucatan's Henequen Agro-Industry: Neoliberalism Reconsidered Oth6n Banos Ramirez 144

vi / Contents II: RELIGION 8. Jose Canuto Vela and Yucatan's "Benign" Clergy from Independence to the Reform, 1821-1861

Lynda S. Morrison

173

9. From Santa Iglesia to Santa Cruz: Yucatecan Popular Religion in Peace and War, 1800-1876

Terry Rugeley 187 The Resurgence of the Church in Yucatan: The Olegario Molina-Crescencio Carrillo Alliance, 1867-1901 IO.

Hernan Menendez Rodriguez with Ben W Fallaw

213

II. From Acrimony to Accommodation: Church-State Relations in Revolutionary-Era Yucatan, 1915-1940 Ben W Fallaw 227

12. Some Final Thoughts on Regional History and the Encounter with Modernity at Mexico's Periphery Gilbert M. Joseph 254

Contributors Index

271

267

Preface

The seeds for this work were planted when the Alfredo Barrera Vasquez Center for Yucatecan Studies of The University of Alabama and the Centro de Investigaciones Regionales "Dr. Hideyo Noguchi" of the Universidad Aut6noma de Yucatan organized an international conference on Yucatecan history and culture, "Colonizaci6n, Naci6n y Nacionalismo," which was held in Merida on October 89,1993. Following the conference the volume was slow to bloom, but happily not so slow as the region's signature henequen plant, which reportedly takes a hundred years. Sadly, the project was set back by the deaths of one of the editors and one of the contributors. It is to the memory of these two esteemed colleagues and longtime friends, Edward H. Moseley and Hernan Menendez Rodriguez, that we dedicate this book. Ed Moseley played a foundational role in the creation of Yucatecan studies in the United States, and his editorial hand is much in evidence here. Hernan Menendez, one of Yucatan's foremost journalists and researchers, also was instrumental in advancing historical studies of the region; indeed, no one worked harder to foment discussion and debate among local, national, and international scholars. The long editorial process had the compensation of enabling us to include contributions by a new generation of "Yucatec610gos," and thereby craft a collection that is intergenerational as well as international and interdisciplinary. Peripheral Visions contributes to a tradition of scholarship and publishing on the Yucatan Peninsula that began at The University of Alabama in the 1950S and has continued to the present. In a real sense this book traces its lineage to, and updates the crossdisciplinary research found in, Yucatan: A World Apart (University of Alabama Press, 1980), edited by Edward Moseley and Edward Terry. Significantly, all of the present editors, save the youngest, contributed a chapter to that volume. It is impossible to acknowledge all of the individuals who helped advance this project over the past fifteen years. We would especially like to thank Oth6n Banos Ramirez, Alejandra Garda Quintanilla, Luis Alfonso Ramirez, and Jose Luis Ponce Garda of Merida for their timely support of the project over the years. Special

viii / Preface thanks go to Eric Baklanoff, who critically read and commented on most of the essays, and to Helen Delpar, who also contributed her editorial skills and generously agreed to collaborate on the introduction after the death of Ed Moseley. Finally, we are grateful for the incisive comments of The University of Alabama Press's anonymous readers and for the patience and encouragement provided by the press's staff. Gilbert M. Joseph Edward D. Terry

Peripheral Visions

Introduction Helen Delpar and Ben W Fallaw

The disciplinary diversity of this volume-history, anthropology, sociology, economics-poses some enjoyable challenges to anyone introducing it. Helen Delpar places contributors in the context of Yucatan's ongoing struggle to come to terms with what was once called "modernization"-a slippery term that typically implies capitalism, individualism, and secularism. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, modernity was the imagined future of Yucatan. Independence, the Reform, the war against the Cruz' ob rebels, the revolutionary projects of Salvador Alvarado (governor, 1915-1918) and Lazaro Cardenas (president, 1934-194°), midtwentieth-century develop mentalist schemes like Cordemex, the neoliberal mirage of Carlos Salinas (president, 1988-1994)-all were seen as halting steps on the path to modernity. This book also represents the latest in a series of volumes published by The University of Alabama Press summing up Yucatecan studies. I With that in mind, Ben Fallaw surveys recent trends in the scholarly literature that have helped resolve scholarly debates and generate provocative new questions as well. Yucatan has been called "a world apart," cut off from the rest of Mexico by geography and culture. Yet, despite its peripheral location, the region experienced substantial change in the decades after independence. Much as was the case elsewhere in Mexico, apostles of modernization introduced policies intended to remold Yucatan in the image of the advanced nations of the day. Indeed, modernizing change began in the late colonial era and continued throughout the nineteenth century as traditional patterns of land tenure were altered and efforts were made to divest the Catholic Church of its wealth and political and intellectual influence. It is clear, however, that some changes produced fierce resistance from both elites and humbler Yucatecans, and modernizers were frequently forced to retreat or at least reach accommodation with their foes. Stretching from the early nineteenth century to the late twentieth century, the essays in this collection illuminate both the processes of change and the negative reactions that they frequently elicited. Reform in Yucatan generally followed one of two paths. In the first, elites pursued policies associated with economic liberalism, especially the development of new export commodities. 2 In the second, moderniz-

2

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Helen Delpar and Ben W Fallaw

ers sought to modify the behavior of women, peons, and others deemed in need of edification, often through changing the role of the Roman Catholic Church in Yucatecan society.

Economy, Society, and Politics Marie Lapointe's essay, "The Caste War of Yucatan in Long-Term Perspective" (chapter 1), explains the origins of the 1847 insurgency by using a global approach that takes into account a longue-durie, or long-term, perspective and the proximate conditions under which the conflict took place. As she points out, the Bourbon reformers of the late eighteenth century liberalized trade regulations (with mixed success) and abolished the encomienda (grant of a tribute-paying village), a vestige of the conquest period long defunct in most other parts of the Spanish empire. She emphasizes the significance of the post-independence alienation of public lands, long worked by the Maya, especially in the east and south. Creoles coveted these lands for the production of sugar and other commercial crops, but their loss disrupted traditional patterns of life for the Maya and their caciques. Marie Lapointe's perspective is just one of many that have recently enriched our understanding of the Caste War of Yucatan (1847-1901), which has been the subject of endless historical inquiry by both professionals and the general public. The idea that the Caste War was a racial conflict has long been used to define Yucatan, and politicians have used the supposed struggle of brown against white to advance their own interests. The practice began in the heat of battle and remains alive today. While many distinguished scholars long viewed the conflict in essentialist terms, recently scholarly literature has begun to shift our vision of the Caste War. Don E. Dumond not only recounted the long history of violent clashes, raids, and frustrated negotiations among Cruz' ob rebels, Mexicans, Yucatecans, and Belizeans, but he also began the process of questioning the idea of the Caste War as a Manichean power struggle fought largely along racial lines. 3 In recent years a new generation of historically minded anthropologists and historians informed by anthropological approaches has deepened our understanding of the war's ethnic complexities. Significantly, most of these new scholars speak and read Yucatec Mayan. 4 For instance, in Xuxub Must Die, anthropologist Paul R. Sullivan examines the 1875 sacking of a sugar estate and the murder of the Irish-North American owner by a raiding party headed by fearsome rebel caudillo Bernardino Cen. Sullivan uses the raid to tease out the complex frontier society that emerged between rebel and statecontrolled zones, showing how the expanding global export economy, Merida's political cliques, and factional struggles in the Cruzo' ob state all helped feed the Caste War bloodshed. 5 Wolfgang Gabbert's painstaking ethnographic and archival research places the revolt against the backdrop of the long-term evolution of racialized social strata on the Yucatan Peninsula. 6 Terry Rugeley's work, Rebellion Now

Introduction / 3 and Forever (2009), documents how decades of chronic Caste War violence warped the fragile liberal state, bled capital, and pushed thousands of war-weary people to the peripheries of the peninsula from Carmen to southwestern Quintana Roo. Rugeley's work also goes a long way to explain why many Yucatecans willingly accepted a Hobbesian bargain with the strongman of Tuxtepec, Porfirio Diaz. During the long period of apparent peace under the dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz (1876-19II), Yucatan emerged as one of the most prosperous states in Mexico because of the tremendous growth in the production of henequen, which got under way in earnest after 1880 in the northwestern quadrant of the state. In recent decades a number of important studies have rewritten the history of the henequen economy from its birth in the mid-ninteenth centuty to its bust a century later? In addition, Allen Wells and Gilbert M. Joseph moved beyond the old structuralist analysis of the hacienda to take into account how planters crafted an idiom of domination to control hacienda workers through persuasion as well as coercion. 8 Yucatan, like Mexico as a whole, wished to display its arrival among modern and civilized states by taking part in the world's fairs of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As Helen Delpar shows in "Casting an Image of Modernity" (chapter 2), Diaz sought a "worthy representation" for Mexico at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, as did Yucatan's leaders, whose contributions included samples of the state's agricultural and forest products. To elites, products such as these signified the actual or potential wealth of the state. Ironically, however, it was representations of the pre-Columbian Maya past that garnered the most favorable attention at the fair and paved the way for Yucatan's participation in two other modern forms of enterprise: archaeology and tourism. The Porfirian celebration of a Eurocentric, laissez-faire modernity was ended by the Mexican Revolution. General Salvador Alvarado's stunning victory over the Yucatecan planters' home guard in early 1915 seemed to mark the beginning of a new future. The northern-born general was the most visionary and ambitious of Venustiano Carranza's revolutionary proconsuls, to borrow Alan Knight's famous phrase, and his rule profoundly altered Yucatan. Since Gilbert Joseph's now-classic study Revolution from Without (1982), scholars armed with new methodologies encouraged by the "new cultural history" have invaded newly opened archives, such as the state judicial archives. 9 Recently several scholars have shed light on important contradictions in the emancipation promised by Alvarado and his successor, Felipe Carrillo Puerto (1922-1924). Two of them-Paul Eiss and Stephanie Smith-are represented here. In "A Measure of Liberty: The Politics of Labor in Revolutionary Yucatan, 19151918" (chapter 3), Eiss argues that Alvarado's liberation of peons on haciendas was ambiguous at best. Although his reforms were touted as freeing Yucatan's peons from conditions approaching slavery, the behavior of the presumed beneficiaries belied their supposed passivity and indolence. According to Eiss, hacienda workers regularly challenged planters and revolutionary officials. In response, these of-

4 / Helen Delpar and Ben W Fallaw ficials, who had hoped to see the emergence of a free market in labor, moved to control and co-opt workers in a pattern similar to that followed later by Mexico's authoritarian state. In "Removing the Yoke of Tradition: Yucatan's Revolutionary Women, Revolutionary Reforms" (chapter 4), Stephanie Smith describes how Alvarado and Carrillo Puerto aimed to mobilize women for the revolution by transforming them "from 'submissive' females into efficient citizens." She contends, however, that women themselves directly and indirectly shaped many of the government's policies. Elsewhere she has argued that women were the mainstay of the revolutionary schools founded by Alvarado. Even so, not only did they have to contend with low pay and a hostile workplace at times, but they also were frequently constrained by the limits of Alvarado's avowed feminism. His regime marginalized women who overstepped what was considered their boundaries. lo Smith has also examined how the introduction of divorce during the revolutionary era ironically emancipated men. II Smith's work builds on a long tradition of inquiry into feminism in revolutionary Yucatan. Anna Macias, a pioneer in Mexican women's history, devoted much of her pathbreaking monograph to Alvarado's and Carrillo Puerto's regimes. Alma Reed, a radical North American journalist who became engaged to Carrillo Puerto, helped publicize his initiatives, such as expanded educational opportunities for women, divorce, and the extension of citizenship to women. Her own story-rich with insights into the heady years of the Carrillo Puerto regime-was published in 2007, thanks to the heroic efforts of Michael Schuessler. 12 Carrillo Puerto's famous sister, Elvia, a leading feminist in Mexico, has also finally received serious scholarly attention. 13 The revolution challenged ideas about ethnicity as well as gender. Modernizers in Mexico, as in the rest of Latin America, usually hoped for the arrival of European immigrants who they believed would provide manpower, skills, and enterprise and improve the "race" through intermarriage with native populations. Unlike Argentina or southern Brazil, Mexico attracted few foreign immigrants, and they were not always deemed to be the most desirable. Among the latter were a small number of Lebanese Christians, who began arriving in Yucatan in the late nineteenth century. 14 In "Against Great Odds" (chapter 6), Eric N. Baklanoff explains how Lebanese immigrants in Yucatan became itinerant peddlers who traveled to villages and haciendas offering to the poor an assortment of wares not previously available to them, while Spanish and German merchants saturated the markets of socially prominent urban customers. Baklanoff emphasizes the interplay between the distinguishing characteristics of the Lebanese-their exceptional family and ethnic solidarity, radical future orientation, and unremitting laborand the often hostile Old World environment of the Yucatan Peninsula. These attitudes and propensities-their "entrepreneurial culture"-enabled their near descendants to prosper economically and ultimately gain social acceptance. Yucatan's tiny Lebanese community prospered despite, or perhaps because of,

Introduction / 5 the political and economic turmoil of the twentieth century. The rise of the Lebanese was the result of hard work and entrepreneurial zeal, but their close connections to the Socialist Party of the Southeast played an important role as well. I5 Felipe Carrillo Puerto enjoyed important Lebanese backing. 16 Neguib Simon, an old friend of Carrillo Puerto, became a crucial nexus between the Socialist Party and the Lebanese business community. Lebanese Mexicans in Yucatan and as far away as Puebla and Mexico City (including one Pedro Slim) helped bankroll Bartolome Garda Correa's 1929 gubernatorial campaign. I? According to Baklanoff, Yucatecan Lebanese entrepreneur Cabalan Macari acquired substantial interests in the state-run sector of the henequen economy under Garda Correa. He also acquired the large cattle ranch "San Antonio" in eastern Yucatan, thus becoming part of the landowning peninsular gentry. Pluck and political pull in equal measures explain his rise: Cabalan Macari reportedly started his first cordage factory with a jerry-rigged engine taken from an old automobile. 18 His close friendship with Garda Correa gave him entree into the highly regulated cordage industry. The Yucatecan Lebanese made their most impressive political and economic gains during the crucial but understudied period between Carrillo Puerto's murder in 1924 and the Cardenas years. We are still coming to grips with the checkered legacy of Bartolome Garda Correa, who dominated the Socialist Party of the Southeast from 1924 until the mid-1930S. His politicized economy and populist political style were the shaky pillars of the postrevolutionary order in the state. 19 In "The Crusade of the Mayab" (chapter 5), Ben Fallaw discusses the various facets of the modernization program introduced to Yucatan by President Lazaro Cardenas (1934-1940). According to Fallaw, the "cornerstone" of Cardenismo in rural Yucatan was the collective landholding unit known as the ejido, which was intended to bring about improved agricultural methods, raise the living standards of beneficiaries (ejidatarios), and create a reliable base of political support for the national government. Yet from the outset the ejidos did not perform as expected for a variety of reasons explored by Fallaw, and population growth in subsequent decades, as well as the global decline of henequen (and other hard fibers) as a profitable commodity, eroded the viability of Yucatan's ejidos. In "The Decline and Collapse of Yucatan's Henequen Agro-Industry" (chapter 7), Oth6n Banos reviews the history of the state's ejidos from their creation in 1937 to their demise in the late twentieth century. Starting in the 1980s, a new generation of modernizers moved to divide the collective ejidos into small farm units and to privatize the state's cordage manufacturing plants, which had been nationalized in 1964. Banos concludes that the "neoliberal medicine turned out to be deadly for the very sick, declining henequen agro-industry." Whether new opportunities for rural Yucatecans in urban commerce, services, and industry would prove adequate remained to be seen. Many Mexican and North American scholars have greatly expanded our knowledge of recent Yucatecan history, an era stretching from the watershed Cardenas

6 / Helen Delpar and Ben W Fallaw reforms to the present day. In this volume Oth6n Banos explores two of the most important transformations in Yucatan in the latter twentieth century: the rise of true opposition parties and neoliberal reforms that destroyed the developmentalism and subsidies that supported the henequen ejido. Much ink has been spilled describing the slow death of henequen as well as the inexplicable wealth enjoyed by politicians and bureaucrats close to state-run henequen agencies. 20 They have been slower to explain why Yucatan is the only southern state in Mexico to support the right-of-center National Action Party (PAN). Much of the political history of the late twentieth century remains to be written. In the 1970S and early 1980s the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) seemed on the verge of internal collapse. But the PRI enjoyed a surprising resurgence under Victor Cervera Pacheco, the last reputed strongman of the postrevolutionary era, who was twice governor (1984-1988, 1995-2001).21

Antidericalism Anticlericalism was the second path to progress for many reformers. Yucatecan liberals, like their counterparts in other sections of Mexico, supported a plethora of policies aimed at weakening the Roman Catholic Church, which was seen as an obstacle to modernization for various reasons. Its wealth and financial activities were thought to inhibit economic development while its prominence in education and intellectual life in general supposedly fostered ignorance and obscurantism. Clerics who served the Maya were accused of exploiting their charges, encouraging superstition, and generally hindering their adoption of modern ways of thinking and behaving. As several chapters show, however, the position of the church in Yucatan differed from that in other parts of Mexico because of the relative poverty of the region in the first half of the nineteenth century, the large numbers of Maya in relation to the total population, and the effects of the Caste War. In chapters 8 ("Jose Canuto Vela and Yucatan's 'Benign' Clergy from Independence to the Reforma, 1821-1861") and 9 ("From Santa Iglesia to Santa Cruz: Yucatecan Popular Religion in Peace and War, 1800-1876"), respectively, Lynda S. Morrison and Terry Rugeley discuss religion and the role of the clergy in the early and middle decades of the nineteenth century. Morrison stresses the generally positive image of the church in Yucatan, which led Benito Juarez to suspend enforcement of anticlerical measures there in 1861. She offers various explanations for this favorable perception and gives her own interpretation, using the career of Father Jose Canuto Vela (1802-1859) as a case study. She points to the increasing number of priests of modest origin after 1800, the participation of many in politics as moderate liberals, and their exemplary conduct during the Caste War. Morrison also sees a rupture between the clergy and the Maya by the mid1840s. Rugeley makes a somewhat similar argument in "From Santa Iglesia to Santa Cruz," his discussion of the origins of the cult of the Speaking Cross that arose in eastern Yucatan in the 1850s. Rugeley finds anticlericalism strong among mid-

Introduction / 7 dling Creoles and mestizos rather than members of the elite. Anticlericalism filtered down to rural Maya without, however, disrupting their folk Catholicism. In chapter 10 ("The Resurgence of the Church in Yucatan: The Olegario Molina-Crescencio Carrillo Alliance, 1867-1901"), the late Hernan Menendez Rodriguez, with Ben Fallaw, reviews the resurgence of the church in Yucatan during the Porfiriato, or Diaz era, through an alliance of two successive bishopsLeandro Rodriguez de la Gala and Crescencio Carrillo y Ancona-with the moderate liberal faction led by Olegario Molina, who became the most powerful economic and political figure in the state. Despite the fulminations of radical liberals, or puros, the church was able to regain substantial financial strength. Moreover, according to Rugeley in chapter 9, during this period Yucatan became a laboratory for the church's own modernization program. In "From Acrimony to Accommodation" (chapter II), Ben Fallaw describes how the coming of the Mexican Revolution to Yucatan in 1915 brought a revival of anticlericalism and new efforts to secularize society. These were especially strong during the governorships of General Salvador Alvarado and Felipe Carrillo Puerto. After 1925 anticlericalism diminished in Yucatan, even as it was reaching its peak in the rest of Mexico. Although President Cardenas kept the fires of anticlericalism banked, he promoted cultural reform as a corollary to his agrarian reform program in Yucatan. As Fallaw points out in "The Crusade of the Mayab" (chapter 5), various federal agencies trumpeted the virtues of sport, and plans for the construction of a large stadium got under way. Numerous attempts were also made to educate the populace about the evils of alcohol. Besides the promising new contributions to the history of Yucatecan Catholicism in this volume, much has been published elsewhere on syncretic or folk Catholicism. Terry Rugeley has challenged the dichotomy between elite and popular religiosity. Paul Eiss and Ron Loewe have revealed different aspects of the folk Catholic gremio, or confraternity. Eiss stresses its link to the commodification of nature while Loewe considers its role in reproducing social hierarchies. 22 Still, healthy disagreement over the role of the church remains. For instance, exactly what role did the church play in constructing the Porfiriato and sustaining debt peonage? Hernan Menendez has argued that the church blessed peonage; Franco Savarino sees the church helping to craft a Christian Democratic road to moderni ty. 23

Resistance and Accommodation Modernizers in Yucatan, whether they advocated private appropriation of public lands, anticlericalism, or cultural reform, frequently encountered resistance to their projects. The Caste War is the most dramatic example, for, as Lapointe states, the devastating effects of this bitter conflict were felt until the start of the twentieth century. In chapter II Ben Fallaw describes numerous instances of resistance to anticlerical ism and the institutions created to further its goals during the 1920S and

8 / Helen Delpar and Ben W Fallaw 1930S, such as the school in Espita that failed because parents believed it was disseminating ideas that were hostile to the church. In chapter 5 Fallaw shows that local resistance doomed the Cardenista crusade against alcohol,24 Similarly, according to the chapters by Eiss and Smith, neither hacienda workers nor women passively accepted or acquiesced in all the government's initiatives during the Alvarado and Carrillo Puerto administrations. Peons frequently defied officials and landowners to demand higher wages and lower prices at the hacienda store. In Smith's account, many prostitutes resisted regulations imposed by Alvarado, while other women used revolutionary tribunals and feminist groups to achieve their goals. Researchers have yet to fully tease out the complex relationship between political reforms "from above" and social change "from below" in the formative years of the PRI regime. In the 1930S federal schoolteachers were not always welcomed as modernizing missionaries. 25 Cardenas's embrace of the left and championing of land reform inspired much political ferment, and women's activism was especially notable. Yet the same infighting that doomed Cardenas's reforms as a whole was especially detrimental to women. 26 These essays also show that the outcome of clashes between modernizers and their foes was often accommodation, especially in the realm of religion. This tendency was apparent at an early date. The popular religious culture discussed by Rugeley was an amalgam of pre-Columbian and Roman Catholic practices and institutions adapted to the needs of peasants. The cult of the Speaking Cross reflected these religious traditions as well. Rugeley's chapter and the others dealing with the church reveal that it had a remarkable ability not only to resist but also, more significantly, to accommodate itself to changing conditions. This can be seen in the willingness of priests such as Jose Canuto Vela to participate in state and national politics. For his part, Rugeley observes that despite the Reform laws and other challenges, "Catholicism was not down for the count." During the Porfiriato a resurgent church adopted new techniques for funding and support, which tied it more closely to urban Yucatecans, while folk Catholicism flourished in rural areas. Menendez Rodriguez gives details about church revival while Fallaw's chapter "From Acrimony to Accommodation" explains how the governors who succeeded Carrillo Puerto preferred to come to understandings with Catholics and avoid conflict by muting anticlerical efforts. Mter an interruption of this detente in the mid-1930s, President Cardenas's decision to shelve radical attacks on the church, combined with successful civil resistance by Yucatecan Catholics, ended revolutionary anticlericalism in the state by the end of the decade. Quiet conciliation is also evident in the often conflicted relations between the state and federal governments, described by Lapointe as contributing to the outbreak of the Caste War. That Porfirio Dfaz's aim of expanding central authority over state leaders was only partly successful is evident from Menendez Rodriguez's account of the president's unwillingness or inability to control gubernatorial suc-

Introduction / 9 cession in Yucatan. The limitations of presidential power are even more obvious in Fallaw's account of the failure of Cardenas's "Crusade of the Mayab." Regional cliques and local bosses blocked the formation of a united front of workers and peasants even as the Great Ejido Plan accepted by Cardenas placed the henequen ejidos and agrarian bureaucracy under state rather than federal control. After the mid-twentieth century, however, federal dominance prevailed as control of henequen production and cordage manufacturing passed to Mexico City. The ills that afflicted the industry brought massive federal subsidies that were eventually deemed unsustainable. Even after the application of neoliberal measures to Yucatan, however, the federal government continued its economic assistance to the henequen zone, thus perpetuating the state's dependency. In Othon Banos's view, the policies adopted by the federal government with respect to the ejido system were fundamentally political: they "changed according to the tide of politics ... in conformity with the dominant ideology of the president's six-year term." The research agenda of the twenty-first century will undoubtedly lead Yucatecologists in unpredictable directions. Still, a few major trends are discernable. One is politics after the decline of the PRl. What are the important institutions, practices, and discourses of politics in a post-postrevolutionary era? Yucatan seemed to be at a crossroads at the start of the new century, in the words of Yucatecan historian Sergio Quezada. 27 But will it turn left or right? A second trend is the scholarly demystification of the Maya. Anthropologists Quetzil Castaneda, Peter Hervik, and Juan Castillo Cocom have shown the difficulties of applying monolithic terms like "Maya" in a society where ethnic relations are often situational and ethnic boundaries are fluid. Castaneda's analysis of Chichen Itza and the neighboring community of Piste demonstrates that rather than being a timeless essence, Mayan identity is constantly being negotiated and contested. Similarly, Hervik's work shows how professional ethnography and popular media such as National Geographic magazine exoticized the idea of "the Maya." Perhaps most provocatively, Juan Castillo Cocom asks only half jokingly if he is "post-Maya. "28 Third, researchers are only beginning to grapple with the region's transition to a post-henequen economy based on tourism, migration, and the assembly plants known as maquiladoras. 29 The economic upheavals associated with globalization and neoliberalism will not only profoundly change where and how Yucatecans work, but they will also affect the structure of family and community. The peninsula's fragile karst topography and unique environment, which was transformed by henequen in the late nineteenth century, will undoubtedly have to confront new challenges, such as the impact of industrial hog farming. 30

Notes 1. See Edward H. Moseley and Edward D. Terry, eds., Yucatan: A WorldApart{I98o); Gilbert M. Joseph, Rediscovering the Past at Mexico's Periphery: Essays on the History of Mod-

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Helen Delpar and Ben W Fallaw

ern Yucatan (1986); Jeffery Brannon and Eric N. Baklanoff, Agrarian Reform and Public Enterprise in Mexico: The Political Economy of Yucatan's Henequen Industry (1987); Jeffery T. Brannon and Gilbert M. Joseph, eds., Land, Labor, and Capital in Modern Yucatan: Essays in Regional History and Political Economy (1991); and Eric N. Baklanoff and Edward H. Moseley, eds., Yucatan in an Era of Globalization (2008). z. Classical economic liberalism has been defined as "that corpus of ideology, theory, and policy prescription that sought to free economic activity from all constraints on the market and to promote the international division of labor through the alleged complementarity of parts of the world economy." See Joseph L. Love and Nils Jacobsen, eds., Guiding the Invisible Hand: Economic Liberalism and the State in Latin American History (New York: Praeger, 1988), vii. The study of Mexican liberalism has produced extensive literature. Important recent studies include Francie R. Chassen-Lopez, From Liberal to Revolutionary Oaxaca: The View from the South, Mexico, I867-I9IO (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, Z004); Jaime E. Rodriguez 0., ed., The Divine Charter: Constitutionalism and Liberalism in Nineteenth-Century Mexico (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005); and Peter Guardino, The Time ofLiberty: Popular Political Culture in Oaxaca, I7SOI8so (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005). 3. Don E. Dumond, The Machete and the Cross: Campesino Rebellion in Yucatan (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997). 4. For the new views of Maya ethnicity in Yucatan, see the special issue of the Journal of Latin American Anthropology 9 (Spring Z004), titled "The Maya Identity of Yucatan, 1500-1935: Re-thinking Ethnicity, History, and Anthropology," and Juan Castillo Co com and Quetzil Castaneda, Estrategias identitarias: Educacion y la antropologia historica (Mexico City: Universidad Pedagogica Nacional, 2005). 5. Paul R. Sullivan, Xuxub Must Die: The Lost Histories of a Murder on the Yucatan (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004). Robert Patch, Maya Revolt and Revolution in the Eighteenth Century (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, zooz), although chronologically in the late colonial period, is another important contribution to the new ethnohistorical approach to the Maya. 6. Wolfgang Gabbert, Becoming Maya: Ethnicity and Social Inequality in Yucatan since ISOO (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, Z004). 7. Allen Wells, Yucatan's GildedAge: Haciendas, Henequen, and International Harvester (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1985); Brannon and Baklanoff, Agrarian Reform; Othon Banos Ramirez, Ejidos sin campesinos (Merida: Universidad Autonoma de Yucatan, 1989); Allen Wells, "From Hacienda to Plantation: The Transformation of Santo Domingo Xcuyum," and Jeffery Brannon, "Conclusion: Yucatecan Political Economy in Broader Perspective," in Brannon and Joseph, Land, Labor, and Capital in Modern Yucatan; Ben Fallaw, "Bartocallismo: Calles, Garda Correa y los henequeneros de Yucatan," Boletin delArchivo Plutarco Elias Calles Z7 (April 1998): 1-32. 8. Allen Wells and Gilbert M. Joseph, Summer ofDiscontent, Seasons of Upheaval: Elite Politics and Rural Insurgency in Yucatan, I876-I9IS (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996). 9. See Gilbert M. Joseph, Revolution from Without: Yucatan, Mexico, and the United States, I88o-I924 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 198z). Duke University Press published a second edition with a foreword by Alan Knight and a new introduction

Introduction /

II

by Joseph in 1988. On the new cultural history, see Gilbert M. Joseph and Daniel Nugent, eds., Everyday Forms of State Formation: Revolution and the Negotiation of Rule in Modern Mexico (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994). See also Paul Eiss, "Redemption's Archive: Remembering the Furure in a Revolutionary Past," Comparative Studies in Society and History 44 (January 2002): 106-36. 10. Stephanie Smith, "Educating the Mothers of the Nation," in The Womens Revolution in Mexico, I9IO-I953, ed. Stephanie Mitchell and Patience Schell (Boulder, CO: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007), 37-51. II. Stephanie Smith, "'If Love Enslaves ... Love Be Damned!': Divorce and Revolutionary State Formation in Yucatan," in Sex in Revolution: Gender, Politics, and Power in Modern Mexico, ed. Jocelyn Olcott, Mary Kay Vaughan, and Gabriela Cano (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 98-III. 12. Anna Macias, Against All Odds: The Feminist Movement in Mexico to I940 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1982); Alma Reed, Peregrina: Love and Death in Mexico, ed. Michael K. Schuessler, foreword by Elena Poniatowska (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007). 13. Piedad Peniche Rivero, "Las ligas feministas en la Revolucion: El pensamiento de Felipe y Elvia Carrillo Puerto," Unicornio: Suplemento Cultural de Por Esto!275,July 7,1996, 8-II; Monique J. Lemaitre, Elvia Carrillo Puerto: La monja roja del Mayab (Monterrey: Ediciones Castillo, 1998). 14. For the Lebanese experience in other parts of Mexico, see Theresa Alfaro Velcamp, "Immigrant Positioning in Twentieth-Century Mexico: Middle Easterners, Foreign Citizens, and Multiculturalism," Hispanic American Historical Review 96 (February 2006): 61-91. 15. Other recent research on the Lebanese includes Teresa Cuevas Seba and Miguel Manana Plasencio, Los libaneses de Yucatdn (Merida: Impresiones Profesionales, 1990), and Luis Alfonso Ramirez, Secretos de fomilia: Libaneses y elites empresariales en Yucatdn (Mexico City: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, 1994). 16. Marisa Perez de Sarmiento and Franco Savarino Roggero, El cultivo de los elites: Grupas economicos y politicos en Yucatdn en los sigloSI9 y 20 (Mexico City: Conaculta, 2001), 164, 170, 183, 241. 17. Edmundo Bolio Ontiveros, ed., EI P.s.s. y el futuro gobierno del Profesor Bartolome Garcia Correa (Merida: Pluma y Lapiz, 1930), 53-57. 18. Carlos Loret de Mola, Los caciques (Mexico City: Grijalbo, 1979), 121-25; Rodolfo Lopez Sosa, Tarjeta presidential (Merida: Guerra, 1952), 6, 53; Diario del Sureste, December 16, 1931. 19. Ben Fallaw, "Dry Law, Wet Politics: Drinking and Prohibition in RevolutionaryEra Yucatan, 1915-1935," Latin American Research Review 37, no. 2 (2002): 37-64, and "Los fundamentos economicos del Bartolismo: Garcia Correa, los hacendados yucatecos y la industria del henequen, 193°-1933," Unicornio, October 19,1997,3-9, and October 26,1997, 3-9· 20. On the crisis of the henequen economy, see Brannon and Baklanoff, Agrarian Reform and Public Enterprise; Banos Ramirez, Yucatdn; and Othon Banos Ramirez, ed., Estructura agraria y estado en Yucatdn (Merida: Universidad Autonoma de Yucatan, 1990). 21. Rose Spaulding, "Political Parties in Yucatan: Regionalism, Strategy, and Pros-

12

/

Helen Delpar and Ben W Fallaw

peets for the PRJ," paper presented at the Twenty-first International Congress of the Latin American Studies Association, 1998, and "Opposition Politics, Party Pluralism, and Electoral Democracy in Yucatan," paper presented at the Twenty-second International Congress of the Latin American Studies Association, 2000. 22. Terry Rugeley, Of Wonders and Wisemen: Religion and Popular Cultures in Southeast Mexico, I800-I876 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001); Paul Eiss, "Hunting for the Virgin: Meat, Money, and Memory in Tetiz, Yucatan," CulturalAnthropology 17 (August 2002): 291-330; Ron Loewe, "Marching with San Miguel: Festivity, Obligation, and Hierarchy in a Mexican Town," Journal ofAnthropological Research 39 (Winter 2003): 463-86. 23. Hernan Menendez Rodriguez, Iglesia y poder: Proyectos sociales, alianzas politicas economicas en Yucatan (I857-I9I7) (Merida: Editorial Nuestra America y Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, 1995), 237-78; Franco Savarino Roggero, Pueblo y nacionalismo: Del regimen oligarquico ala socied4d de masas en Yucatan, I894-I925 (Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Estudios Hist6ricos de la Revoluci6n, 1997), 189-216. 24- For the failure of what Alan Knight calls "the radical cultural project of the Revolution" in Mexico as a whole, especially during the 1930S, see his "Popular Culture and the Revolutionary State in Mexico, 19IO-1940," Hispanic American Historical Review 74 (August 1994): 393-444· 25. Ben Fallaw, "Rethinking Maya Resistance: Changing Relations between Federal Teachers and Mayan Communities in Eastern Yucatan, 1929-1935," Journal of Latin American Anthropology 9 (Spring 2004): 151-78; Antonio Betancourt Perez, "La educacion y la izquierda en Yucatan, 1932-1937," Unicornio, February 13,2000,3-9, February 20,2000,3-9, and February 27,2000,3-9. 26. Jocelyn Olcott devotes a chapter to Yucatan in her pathbreaking work on women in postrevolutionary Mexico and concludes that Cardenismo ended with a whimper in the state "with regrettably little progress on the frontier of women's rights." See Jocelyn Olcott, Revolutionary Women in Postrevolutionary Mexico (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 20°5),201-31. 27. Sergio Quezada, ed. Encrucijadas de la ciudadania y la democracia: Yucatan, I8I22004 (Merida: Universidad Autonoma de Yucatan and Congreso del Estado de Yucatan, 20°5)· 28. Quetzil Castaneda, In the Museum ofMaya Culture: Touring Chichen Itzd (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996); Peter Hervik, Mayan People Within and Beyond Boundaries: Social Categories and Lived Identity in Yucatan (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1999); Juan Castillo Cocom, '''It Was Simply Their Word': Yucatec Maya PRInces in YucaPAN and the Politics of Respect," Critique ofAnthropology 25 (June 2005): 131-55. 29. Several of the essays in Baklanoff and Moseley's Yucatan in an Era of Globalization address these issues. On maquiladoras, see Eric N. Baklanoff, "Yucatan: Mexico's Other Maquiladora Frontier," 92-III, and Edward H. Moseley, "From Tallapoosa to Tixkokob: Two Communities Share Globalization," 147-63. On the impact of tourism, see Paula R. Heusinkveld, "Tinum, Yucatan: A Maya Village and the Lights of Cancun," II2-33; Alicia Re Cruz, "Chan Kom Tourism and Migration in the Making of the New Maya Milpas," 134-46; and Kathleen R. Martin and William A. Martin Gonzalez, "Embracing Community: An Alternative Tourism for Yucatan," 164-83. For an account of labor conflict in one

Introduction / 13 of Yucatan's new industries and the discourse that it generated, see Paul Eiss, "The War of the Eggs: Event, Archive, and History in Yucatan's Independent Union Movement, 1990," Ethnology 42 (Spring 2003): 87-108. 30. Betty Faust, Mexican Rural Development and the Plumed Serpent: Technology and Maya Cosmology in the Tropical Forest of Campeche, Mexico (Westport, CT: Bergin and Garvey, 1998); Sally Anne Humphries, "The Intensification of Traditional Agriculture among Yucatec Maya Farmers: Facing Up to the Dilemma of Livelihood Responsibility," Human Ecology 21 (1993): 87-102, and "Agricultural Diversification in Yucatan's Henequen Zone: Taking the Cue from the Peasantry," Canadian Journal of Latin American and Caribbean

StudieSl4 (1990): 129-44-

PART I SOCIETY AND POLITICS

I

The Caste War of Yucatan in Long-Term Perspective Marie Lapointe

Late in 1846, the adventurer Juan Vazquez raised an army of frontiersmen in the southeastern village of Yaxcaba. After seizing Peto, he advanced northward and on January 15,1847, assaulted Valladolid; Mayan, mestizo, and mulatto residents of the town's outlying barrios joined the attackers against the aristocratic Creoles who lived in the center of the town, wantonly destroying property, slaughtering white citizens, and even committing some acts of cannibalism. A wave of fear passed through the peninsula in this opening phase of what came to be known as the Caste War of Yucatan. 1 Devastating effects of this conflict were still felt in the region until the beginning of the twentieth century, and it continues to be a topic of major debate in Yucatan today.

Theoretical Approaches to Peasant Uprisings Scholars who have carried out research on the phenomenon of peasant uprisings have reached several important points of convergence. Theda Skocpol, in her article "What Makes Peasants Revolutionary?" states: "Peasants are only part of the story ... A holistic frame of reference is indispensable, one that includes states, class structures, and transnational economic and military relations."2 A decade later, Michael W Foley stressed the impact of international politics on the limited capacity of a given state to react to mass movements in its territory.3 The ideas of Skocpol and Foley were further developed by Friedrich Katz in a series of essays on agrarian conflict in Mexico titled Riot, Rebellion, and Revolution. 4 It is also important to mention an earlier consensus among French sociologists concerning the spread of peasant insurrections; Roger Bastide and Henri Favre contended that when leaders in a peasant society find themselves confronted with a colonizing or neo-colonizing society committed to rapid modernization, the subsequent spread of insurrection is assured. 5 The goal of this chapter is to combine the aforementioned approaches in an effort to explain the origins and long-range impact of the Caste War. It is my view that the conflict rests on a social formation that brings together many structures or links of various time spans. 6 Such an approach will allow us to analyze the conti-

18 / Marie Lapointe

nuities and ruptures within the colonial and neocolonial social fabric that contributed to the insurrection. Special attention will be given to the Yucatecan agrarian structure and the role of leaders within that society, both during the colonial era and the early decades of independence. At the same time, attention will be given to the situation that allowed the conflict to linger until 1901, in large part owing to the policies and activities of the British in Belize. 7 Throughout the long period under review, the agrarian structure was influenced by the natural environment, various forms of land tenure, different methods of production (including their links to domestic and foreign markets), and a variety of local, regional, national, and international sociopolitical relations. 8 In essence, the following analysis will use a comprehensive approach that takes into account the longue-durie, or long-term, perspective on the Caste War.

Shaping the Caste War's Boundaries: 1544-1700 The conquest of Yucatan was over for all practical purposes with the founding of Bacalar in 1544. At the time, few Spanish colonizers were brave enough to venture south of Champot6n and Valladolid, and the vast majority of residents established their homes in the northwest and west of the peninsula. 9 In the sixteenth century, Spanish officials and Franciscan friars reorganized the Maya who had joined in or succumbed to the conquest into villages called republicas indigenas under the governance of their own caciques. These local rulers were at first Mayan, but with the passage of time some mestizos, mulattoes (descended from Mrican slaves and Spaniards), and pardos (derived from Negroes and Indians) took over that role; the caciques obtained a wide range of powers and privileges. In turn, they assisted Spanish authorities in the collection of tribute and the organization of forced labor from their villages. Working with the Franciscan priests, they also collected the obvenciones (ecclesiastical contributions) for the church. The encomienda system, based on the grant of tribute-paying villages to Spaniards, though abolished in most of the Spanish colonies by the early seventeenth century, continued as a basic part of the society of Yucatan. 10 The system was disrupted, however, by pirate or corsair invasions and by the incessant rivalries between members of the regular clergy and encomenderos (holders of encomiendas) regarding the collection of tribute and use of the indigenous workforce. II The Maya who lived in the far south and southeast of the peninsula escaped most of the civilizing and enslaving powers of the encomienda system and, to some degree, even church pressures. In 1695, Pedro Martin de Ursua was given a royal order to pacify the scattered Indians in southern Yucatan and open roads into the Guatemalan Peten, or northern Guatemala. In direct contradiction to royal instructions that had been in effect since the early conquest, the commander was authorized to take control of the territory without having to wait for the Franciscans to convert the indigenous population. Spanish authorities were willing to make

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:431 million pesos in 1983, with an estimated average annual growth in subsidies of 5.8 percent, adjusted for inflation. Of this last amount, 3,019 million pesos were directed to financial investments, 725 million pesos went to support the current expenses of the Fideicomiso Henequenero (the Henequen Trust, created in 1978 to administer ejido credit and production), and 687 million pesos were allocated to the amortization of that institution's debt. In addition to that amount, the subsidy for the industrial phase in 1983 was two billion pesos. 13 The subsidy to the agricultural phase was for the direct production of henequen fiber by the ejidatarios, whereas the industrial phase subsidy went to Cordemex, with about five thousand workers, for processing and marketing the fiber. It is interesting to note that even after the serious debt crisis that Mexico suffered in 1982, the De la Madrid administration continued to increase henequen subsidies. In spite of such financial support, henequen production continued to fall. In the decade from 1970 to 1980, the total area under cultivation dropped from 150>460 hectares to 135,000 hectares, a diminishing average rate of I.I percent annually. As a result, production fell from II7,751 metric tons to 71,816, which represents an average annual decrease of 4.7 percent; consequently, the processing of fiber decreased from 0.78 metric tons of fiber per hectare to 0.50. The situation did not improve, and in 1982 production fell to 61,045 metric tons, at that time the lowest in the century. Thus, the total sales of Cordemex declined from 89,500 tons in 1978 to 57,100 tons in 1982, an average annual decrease of 14 percent. Unfortunately, production continued to decline even more dramatically in the following years (see table 7.1). According to the official state report, the critical situation in henequen production resulted from, among other causes, too many ejidatarios in the henequen zone, the deterioration of the cost-price structure, the decline of (worker) productivity, the deterioration of credit relations between the financial institutions and the henequen workers, and the erratic behavior of the market and fiber prices. These problems were exacerbated by the fact that the domestic and foreign demand for products manufactured from henequen had collapsed in 1975 as the petroleum crisis began to ease. These drastic changes that took place in the world market were the results of the production of polypropylene fiber, whose technical advantages and lower costs became highly competitive with twine of natural fibers, which, consequently, were forced out of the traditional markets. 14 Obviously, the solution to the economic problem in Yucatan was not to be found in henequen but rather in total development, especially in the selective expansion of industry. This point is very important because it led to a change of focus in 1977. From that time on, the

Table 7.1: Yucatan: Land in Full Production and Raw Fiber Production (1970-2006) Raw Fiber Production

Year

Land in Full Production (in hectares)

(metric tons)

(tons per hectare)

1970 1971 1972 1973 1974 1975 1976 1977 1978 1979 1980 1981 1982 1983 1984 1985 1986 1987 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1997 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006

150,460 154,591 173,786 174,785 168,928 160,000 157,000 159,556 150,375 135,000 135,000 135,740 121,553 118,167 109,100 96,525 117,355 114,572 126,250 53,545 55,003 52,627 76,541 53,589 52,974 62,068 48,982 49,198 46,154 42,949 20,314 12,406 9,707 9,050 8,518

117,751 113,493 113,848 109,188 111,983 101,421 98,530 85,697 80,007 70,442 71,816 75,772 61,045 62,421 56,510 50,031 65,800 63,000 50,500 25,440 35,156 32,170 38,270 27,007 27,812 30,742 23,859 24,096 17,763 17,519 8,286 3,901 4,486 4,374 4,135

0.783 0.734 0.655 0.625 0.663 0.634 0.627 0.537 0.532 0.522 0.532 0.558 0.502 0.528 0.518 0.518 0.561 0.550 0.400 0.475 0.639 0.611 0.500 0.504 0.525 0.495 0.487 0.489 0.385 0.408 0.407 0.314 0.462 0.482 0.485

Sources: 1970-1975: Secretaria de Agricultura y Ganaderia, Agencia General en Merida, Yucatan, Henequen I90I a I913 (Merida, 1974); Secretaria de Agricultura y Recursos Hidraulicos, Representacion en Yucatan, Yucatan en cifras, 20 alios de estadisticas agropecuarias (Merida, 1978); 1976-1989: Subdelegacion Agricola, Delegacion Estatal, Secretaria de Agricultura y Recursos Hidd.ulicos (SARH), 1991; Anuario Estadistico del Estado de Yucatan, Vol. II, 1992-1996, 1998, 2000,2001,2002,2003,2005,2006, and 2007, and Primer Informe de Gobierno, Vfctor Cervera Pacheco, 1996. A hectare is 2-47 acres; a metric ton is 1.102 short tons or 2,204 pounds.

Yucatan's Henequen Agro-Industry / 151 majority of federal and state resources would be directed outside the agricultural sector. Nevertheless, as indicated above, the PRI would continue large henequen subsidies for political and social purposes. The value of the ejido production fell in relation to the total resources furnished by the Banco Rural from 49 percent in 1978 to 26 percent in 1983. Consequently, the ejido losses increased from 631.4 million pesos in 1980 to 1,296 million in 1982. President L6pez Portillo instructed the Henequen Trust, whose directors were representatives of the governor of Yucatan, Bamural, Cordemex, and other important federal agencies in the state, to begin immediately to determine the proportion of the advances to the ejidos that was credit and to be repaid, and the proportion that was subsidy. Seventy percent of the advances for the harvesting of leaves and the maintenance of existing fields was considered to be credit, but only 30 percent of the advances for establishing new fields, purchase of equipment, and other long-term investments was considered to be credit, with the legal obligation to be repaid. The creation of the Henequen Trust in 1978 did let the government distinguish more clearly the subsidy being paid to the henequen ejidos, but the organizational changes that had been made were somewhat deceptive. The new agency was funded by and operated within Bamural, and the procedures and criteria for extending credit remained essentially unchanged. Consequently, this newarrangement did not solve the problem of the huge economic losses incurred by the ejidos, because the federal government did not reduce its expenditures on the henequenzone population. In 1983 the cost to produce one kilogram of fiber was 101.20 pesos, of which 57.50 pesos went to agricultural costs (field wages, transportation of leaves and fiber, and insurance) and 43.70 pesos to services-that is, welfare paymentsprovided to the ejidatarios who did not have land to cultivate or were unemployed, and to expenditures on administration and social programs, such as medical services and the distribution of food staples. The demographic pressure prevented the De la Madrid administration from improving the level of employment and income. For example, the number of workers was more than double the necessary labor force for the henequen industry. In 1983, 55,500 ejidatarios were members of the Henequen Trust; 49,013 of these campesinos were occupied in the cultivation of henequen and 6,487 in agricultural diversification. It is estimated that each henequen ejidatario received an average salary of 900 pesos a week, which was 48 percent of the minimum wage for the region; consequently, this situation promoted rural-to-urban migration and aggravated the problems of unemployment and underemployment in the cities. In 1980, 64.9 percent of the economically active population in Yucatan received an income less than the minimum wage. As a result of what we have seen so far, the federal government in 1984 came to several conclusions, some of a general nature and some of a specific one. In this way, the fate of henequen was decided-the federal government would see henequen as a dying industry and would thus begin to cut the subsidies. The state and na-

152 / Othon Banos Ramirez tional officials openly recognized that henequen was not nearly as important as it had been before the 1970s. At that time it was an important lever of regional economic development because of the high revenues it generated and the connections it established in world trade. Yet the general subsidy had not led to better productivity, because it gave the same treatment to all recipients of credit without making allocations according to their productivity or their capabilities. The butden of administrative expenses and social security fees, including medical costs, was excessive. Negative repercussions resulted from the deterioration of the relationship between the prices of the raw material and manufactured products, which fell from 51.9 percent in 1980 to 25.6 percent in 1983-that is, the ejidatarios were paid less and less for the fiber they produced. Some, of course, produced nothing, and obviously these ejidatarios were actually receiving welfare payments. In consideration of this situation, in 1984 the federal government created the Programa de Reordenaci6n Henequenera y Desarrollo Integral de Yucatan (Program for Reorganizing Henequen and Integral Development of Yucatan) in order to reduce subsidies and to redirect federal investment. The program was designed to achieve three results: first, to reorganize agriculture; second, to stimulate general economic activity in the state by means of an appropriate link of regional with national development; and third, to open foreign market opportunities. 15 Consequently, that same year the federal government planned a budget for Yucatan of 296,970,000 pesos, of which 2II,417,000 pesos was appropriated to encourage the economic growth of the state, 43,177,000 pesos to support the henequen industry, and 42,426,000 pesos for current local government spending. Thus, the majority of resources began to be directed toward diversified economic growth. The 1984 program's shift in priorities showed the political decision to let the henequen economy collapse under its own weight. The federal government was to redirect subsidies that once sustained henequen to tourism and the maquiladoras (assembly plants using foreign materials) that would be able to take the place of henequen as the basis of the state's economy. The program considered several important courses of action. First, it would aggressively support industrial development to introduce a new dynamic of growth, giving aid such as financial assistance to investors, fostering the processing industry, and generally extending the infrastructure to support industrial development. Next, it would diversify agricultural activities (both within and outside the henequen area) and intensively promote the fishing industry. In addition, it would foster the increased development of tourism in the Maya area, as well as develop the transportation and communication systems. Finally, it would strengthen commerce. 16 The 1984 program proposed modernizing economic relationships in rural areas on the basis of profitability. In order to do this, the government contemplated structural changes in all the productive processes of the henequen industry: first, it would plan henequen activity, adapting supply to demand, with production forecasts in medium- and long-term periods (which led to the so-called preferred

Yucatan's Henequen Agro-Industry / 153 henequen zone); next, it would replace the system of daily pay with a new compensation system based on the standards of operation of credit or on the anticipated price of the product. In this way, the ejidatarios would be paid only for what they produced; the program would then strengthen the ejido as the fundamental unit of henequen production, rural diversification, and credit by means of organizing production, gradually replacing the local credit companies and common interest groups; and finally, it would restructure the financial, industrial, and commercial administration of Cordemex, adapting its industrial plant and labor system to conform to the legal rights and changes recently made in labor relations in order to promote productivity. The government recognized the social problems that had resulted from the extremely low wages of the henequen ejidatarios. To minimize the social discontent, it sought to rescue the ejido by means of a new base credit relationship that was to transform the unproductive subsidies into productive ones. In reality, the program was not very specific in this respect and only stated that the clients, 520 credit recipients, were authorized to receive weekly services of credit and subsidy according to the number of workdays for which they applied. In this manner, a subsistence income was sustained that did not correspond directly to the workers' productivity. In order to overcome this situation and to reestablish the credit relationship, the standardized payment for each unit of land and the cost of production was separated from administrative and social spending, such as social security and excessive credit, thereby allowing for a more accurate calculation of labor costs in the productive process. It is important to note that the government insisted on the separation of credit and subsidy but did not consider abolishing the latter, only attempting to reduce it. Such a policy of new financial relationships was intended to be put into practice primarily with selected ejidos according to their actual capacity to produce the volume of fiber that the industry needed for its operation. Unfortunately, the Program for Reorganizing Henequen did not have the success that was expected. Production continued to decline, and the economic condition of the ejidatarios grew worse. Among other things, the program repeated the same errors of its predecessors: the ejidatarios were not involved in its implementation; intermediate institutions were not created nor were training programs started to handle the new challenges. In the final analysis, we can say that failure resulted from bureaucratic corruption and inefficiency, with the additional complication of deteriorating world market demand for natural fiber.

The New Agrarian Policy of Salinas As a result of the new neoliberal plan for modernization, the federal government made a profound reorientation not only in the economic system but also in the political system throughout Mexico during the 1980s and 1990S. This study will

154 / Othon Banos Ramirez show, however, that Yucatan's case demonstrates the fact that the structure of the politics of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional remained the same, as national economic policies were rapidly changing during the administration of President Salinas. It should be noted that institutional and decision-making structures were not altered and that the president merely changed the direction of financial supports in order to create a market economy in the agrarian sector and other branches of the economy throughout the entire country. Mexican agriculture in general, not just henequen, was the sector hardest hit by debt-crisis austerity and economic restructuring, largely because it was already enmeshed in a long-standing crisis of its own. From 1970 until the onset of the debt crisis in 1982, Mexican public-sector expenditures on ejidal agricultural development programs were massive; but rather than fostering efficiency, the results were negative in many ways. 17 Although under neoliberal economic policies the huge expenditures were supposed to cease in order to promote wide-ranging rural development, they were actually continued for political purposes under the De la Madrid and Salinas administrations. During the 1980s the average annual growth of agricultural production was only 0.3 percent; consequently, some call this the last decade of Mexican agriculture. 18 There are two official statistics that clearly reveal this disaster: first, agriculture's contribution to the Gross Domestic Product fell from 17 percent in 1960 to 7.7 percent in 1990. During this thirty-year period, the economically active population of the agricultural sector decreased from 50 percent of the national total to slightly more than 20 percent. In addition, forty million poor Mexicans, seventeen million of them extremely poor (five million of whom were campesinos), were in need of cheap, basic food. A technological lag, one stemming from both a lack of economic resources and a lack of technological expertise, resulted in a decreased production, which caused the agricultural sector to suffer significant decapitalization. This situation brought about the importation of agricultural products for which Mexico had always been self-sufficient. 19 For President Salinas, the most practical way to overcome the prolonged crisis in Mexican agriculture was to implement an agricultural revolution within the ejido sector. This could not be put into effect, however, with government financing nor under the rigid agricultural laws that considered the ownership of ejidos permanent. From the beginning of his term, Salinas constantly said that agricultural reform should enter a new era. In his first annual government report, in 1989, the president referred to the legal security of land ownership as a foundation for the modernization of the countryside, because he thought that agricultural activity at that time held few incentives for growth, partly as a result of the uncertainty of land titles stemming from the federal government's mandatory policy for open and permanent land distribution. He stated that "the massive distribution of land has ended. Whoever maintains that millions of hectares still exist to be distributed is lying to the almost two million land applicants and the more than four million agriculturallaborers."2o Although the statement is correct, according to some special-

Yucatan's Henequen Agro-Industry / 155 ists he simply was "trying [to find a strategy] to adapt the agricultural structures that the neoliberal model considers necessary for the economic growth and the reorganizing, globalizing, and restructuring phases of the Mexican economy."2l Consequently, the new agricultural policy of President Salinas, begun in Yucatan in 1990 with the Programa de Reorganizaci6n de la Industria Henequenera (Program for Reorganization of the Henequen Industry), provided for the privatization of Cordemex, which will be discussed later, and the "individualization" of the collective ejidos. 22 The new policy would serve five essential objectives: to offer security in land ownership; to increase the number of small farms by means of fostering associations with private capital; to diminish gradually and significantly the subsidies for agricultural consumables such as fertilizers; to reduce the role of the federal government in the ejidos and in the commercialization of agricultural products; and, finally, to dismantle the system of social agencies in agriculture. This new program and its predecessor in 1984 affected the old economic structures of the henequen industry to such an extent that it virtually disappeared. In light of the unfavorable results of these two programs, in May 1992 a new one was put into effect: the Programa de Desarrollo de la Zona Henequenera (Program for Development of the Henequen Zone), sponsored by the Programa Nacional de Solidaridad (Pronasol), the National Solidarity Program. Unlike the new measures begun after 1984, however, the earlier programs had come from ideologies that questioned neither the distribution of public land after the revolution nor government intervention. By comparison, these new programs of neoliberal inspiration differed in form and content. 23 The Salinas administration recognized the state's inability to direct the process of agricultural modernization, the principal challenge of which was to recapitalize the countryside; consequently, the president wanted to let it be done by marketdriven private investment. As a result of this decision, the reforms of Article 27 of the constitution went into effect in February 1992 with the new agrarian law and reflected the Salinas policy of modernization that discarded the past rigid agriculturallaws. 24 This new statute allowed several forms of economic organization in the agricultural sector, such as unions on ejidos and in communities, rural collective interest associations, societies of rural producers in unions, and different types of enterprises. An ejido, if it so desired, could simultaneously be part of two or more ejido unions. In addition, the ejidos could make business contracts with private investors for a maximum limit of thirty years. Moreover, the new law eliminated the obstacles that had kept mercantile societies from participating in agricultural activities. In Article 126, the new agrarian law of 1992 stated that "non-profit organizations and corporations cannot hold as private property agricultural lands, pasture lands, or forests of greater extension than the equivalent of twenty-five times the limit on small, individual plots of private property."25 It also continued to limit the holdings of foreign investors to no more than 49 percent of the stock, a restriction that changed with NAFTA, of course.

156 / Othon Banos Ramirez

The goals of this new agrarian statute were the reorganization of the Mexican Coffee Institute and the reorientation of the functions of the Compania Nacional de Subsistencias Populares (Conasupo), the state food distribution agency. In addition, this law was the beginning of a process of reform of the agricultural institutions, particularly in the Secretada de Agricultura y Recursos Hidriulicos, SARH (the Ministry of Agriculture and Water Resources). As previously indicated, the government had already begun with the reorganizing program of 1984 to eliminate economic intervention in the collective ejidos that it controlled. 26 All of these ejidos were drowning in accumulated debt and consequently were not eligible for the new commercial criteria for credit agreements. The government believed that the ejidatarios, without entrepreneurial ability and without the minimum capital to operate, had definitely failed and would continue to fail in their efforts to operate the ejidos profitably under the management of Bamurai. The case of almost three hundred collective henequen ejidos in Yucatan clearly illustrates this shortcomingY Beginning in 1990, the ejidos that previously had been worked cooperatively were divided into individually owned plots so that each ejidatario would personally decide when and how much to produce. This is the government action that I call "individualization" of the ejidos. The purpose of this action was to eliminate paternalism, corruption, and bureaucracy. Similar measures were taken in other parts of the country and for other types of crops; such was the case with cotton in the state of Coahuila in the north and with coffee in the state of Veracruz on the Gulf coast.

The Neoliberal Reform of Henequen The critical situation of henequen agriculture continued and apparently had reached a dead end. The first ideas about "privatization" emerged in 1986 and eventually led to the privatization of the collective ejidos. It is important to note that this division of the collective ejidos was not yet authorized in the agrarian law in force at that time; consequently, it was a purely administrative, illegal measure. This new approach appeared in the fourth annual report of the government of Yucatan (by interim governor Victor Cervera Pacheco) in January 1986. The governor stated that the henequen ejidatarios would receive no more credits in an indiscriminate manner and that there would be a new relationship based on their effort, equity, and responsibility.28 This action was in line, of course, with the new economic policies of the De la Madrid administration. Wilbert Chi Gongora, director of the Liga de Comunidades Agrarias de Yucatan (League of Agricultural Communities of Yucatan), expressed support for this policy, saying that his group had begun a campaign to convince the henequen ejidatarios of the necessity of changing the credit system. 29 This project was not implemented quickly, however, but almost three years later. Naturally, there was resistance to the change, not only on the part of the ejidatarios but also from all

Yucatan's Henequen Agro-Industry / 157 the other agents already involved, whether directly or indirectly, in the henequen industry. In 1988, a few months after a new state government headed by Victor Manzanilla Shaffer was installed, the director of the Fondo de Apoyo a las Actividades Productivas de Yucatan, FAAPY (Support Fund for the Productive Activities of Yucatan), said that this new administration was seeking to promote the "individualization" of the responsibilities of the ejidatarios. At the national level, President Salinas announced the continuation of the free market policy and the reduction of federal expenditures-that is, subsidies and welfare payments. Thus, those who received credit in the henequen industry would have to pay for the support services they received so that they "would feel like proprietors" of the land and understand that they were not employees of FAAPY. Governor Manzanilla also reported that the 1988 budget for the fund would allocate 61 percent for economic diversification and 39 percent for henequen. Significantly, with these measures the state planned to diminish henequen fiber production on the ejido to a minimal level and thereby reduce its support of the industry. Clearly the state government was attempting to go along with the new neoliberal doctrine of President Salinas de Gortari. The additional cuts in subsidies and credit that were ordered would cause drastic decline in the production of henequen (see table 7.1), and especially in the precarious income of the ejidatarios. In his first annual government report, in January 1989, Governor Victor Manzanilla Schaffer said that the system of collective ejido work had fallen into the "slump of corruption, inefficiency, and paternalism," which showed a lack of responsibility and decreased revenues. 3D Certainly, the collective henequen ejido did not function as it did in theory (it should have been a unit of self-managed production), because the bureaucracy had created an organization for ejido work in accordance with political interests that did not conform to the interests of the members.3l The state government allowed the institutionalization of antidemocratic and corrupt political practices in the supports allocated for the ejidos; consequently, the system was considered inefficient by the general public. This failure of the collective ejido was not anticipated by its original promoter, President Lazaro Cardenas, or later by President Luis Echeverria. Nevertheless, the henequen ejido's organization was a product of the struggle between the federal government and ejidatarios, pressing their popular demands. Unfortunately, the triumph of federal domination forced the ejido to become something like an official contractor; as a result, it was very much a prisoner of bureaucratic dynamics. In this case, a good theory, that of self-managed production, was not accompanied by good practices that would have allowed it to succeed. Although the privatization of ejidos was not an immediate imposition, there is no doubt that it was being planned in coordination with federal policy. This measure was intended to eliminate two significant problems at once. It would re-

158 / OthOn Banos Ramirez

duce the amount of the subsidies and also would shrink the number of henequen ejidatarios receiving financial aid. In early 1989 the director of FAAPY declared that the new system of ejidal privatization and the granting of credits to the ejidatarios would reduce the number of campesinos active in the cultivation of henequen from forty-three thousand to thirty thousand, and eventually to twenty-five thousand. 32 After an intense campaign by officials for the new individualization program, passive resistance by the ejidatarios to the change appeared to remain strong. 33 Although the federal government had already convinced a small number of ejidatarios, it did not have a clear strategy to promote the general adaptation to a system of individual work in a market economy. In the meantime, the increase of unpaid debts by the collective ejidos continued to preoccupy the government; therefore, the plan to individualize the collective ejidos became urgent. In January 1990, Gonzalo Tamayo, director of the FAAPY, stated: "The low rate of repayment of the loans made to the henequen workers no longer will be a burden for the ejido, nor an impediment for the federation that allocates resources to this activity, because individualizing the responsibilities will divide the debts among the producers and this will guarantee payment. "34 In order to plan future payments of subsidies and loans to the ejidatarios, FAAPY used theoretical calculations of the number of hectares an ejidatario needed to work in order to live solely from his henequen production, the number of plants that would be produced, the number of leaves to be harvested, and the price that Cordemex would pay, according to their quality-for the three types of leaves, "A," "B," and "c," with "1\' being the best quality. The fund also estimated the various expenditures for production and thus was able to calculate theoretically the expected profit per hectare each year for the ejidatario. The anticipated profits were totally unrealistic, because the existing ejidos did not produce the estimated number of plants per hectare, nor was there sufficient land to distribute to the ejidatarios in an adequate number of hectares with good soil quality; consequently, the campesinos failed to earn the living wage that FAAPY had calculated they would. Evidence of this problem is that various ejido commissioners declared that the privatization of the collective henequen ejido had aggravated the economic situation of the farmers, who already had little income on account of the previous low "credits" (subsidies) they had been granted. The small plots that some of them received were of such poor quality that they did not produce leaves for fiber, and therefore there was nothing to sell for a cash income. The commissioners said in 1990 that they were afraid that within two years the production of henequen would stop on many of the lands that had been allocated that year. 35 They were not mistaken; four years after the privatization of the ejidos, most of them had disappeared. Indeed, by 1993 practically nothing remained of the henequen zone but its name.

Yucatan's Henequen Agro-Industry / 159 Table 7.2: Cordemex: Raw Fiber Received, Manufactured Production, and Number of Workers, 1983-1988 Year

Raw Fiber Received (in metric tons)

Manufactured Production (in metric tons)

Number of Workers

1983 1984 1985 1986 1987 1988

58,259 50,100 41,472 53,000 47,000 48,202

55,427 48,224 38,988 47,000 44,500 43,411

5,330 5,114 4,984 5,247 5,302 5,392

Source: Diario de Yucatdn, April ro, 1991.

Of the more than sixty thousand farmers (ejidatarios and small proprietors) who had been involved in the cultivation of henequen, only six thousand remained; and production had dropped from nearly 76,000 tons in 1981 to 17,763 tons in 2000 and, even worse, to 4,I35 tons in 2006 (see table 7.1). As previously noted, the decrease in fiber production resulted in part from the systematic cuts in subsidies and, above all, the sharp reduction of essential credits. Consequently, the amount of fiber received by Cordemex during 1983-1988 fell by about 10,000 metric tons, and the productivity per worker decreased from an average of 10.4 tons in 1983 to 8.05 in 1988 (see table 7.2). It should be noted that in 1988 Cordemex had to import 12,577 tons of fiber from Brazil; and one year later it bought 7,200 tons more so that the factory could cover commitments to its clients. The situation continued to worsen, and the demand of the local cordage industry was 36,000 tons in 1993; consequently, the rest of the fiber again had to be imported from Brazil. 36 This was considered "a great shame for Yucatan," the land where henequen had originated. A slight improvement in production took place in 1990 (see table 7.1), which really was brought about by the action taken by the ejidatarios as a result of the grave situation that was occurring in the privatized ejido's cultivation of henequen. The majority of those who received parcels of land found themselves in bad financial condition; this emergency led to the overcutting of leaves and, of course, made future harvests impossible. They had no other option, however, for it was necessary to take this action or die of hunger if they did not choose to seek employment elsewhere. In brief, the privatization of the collective ejidos helped to hasten the ruin of many ejidatarios who, owing to their desperate economic needs or their lack of experience in the management of cultivation, did not maintain the henequen plants and thus ended up with no source of income. Worse yet, privatization fragmented the little political strength that the ejidatarios had retained, because each

160 / Oth6n Banos Ramirez campesino opted to resolve his problems individually while attempting to obtain his income as a salaried worker off the ejido and in another community.37 The policy of agricultural liberalization and fostering of individual production, which theoretically should have produced more income in the whole country, failed. 38 It did not resolve the social or economic problems of the campesinos, which are related to the extreme poverty in which they live and the technological lag that they suffer. 39 Because of this situation, Pronasol (or Solidarity, as it is better known in the United States), created in 1988 to confront poverty, became stronger by promoting a variety of social and production-increasing projects that were not guided by profit-seeking priorities. The national Solidarity program's budget was increased from 657,5°0 pesos in 1989 to 2,OII,000 pesos in 1993; along with this budget increase, the number of "beneficiaries" and the bureaucratic structure became about as large as that which had existed previously. Therefore, the notion of eliminating federal control was not realized. The traditional relationship between the national government and the campesinos changed only in appearance with Solidarity.40

The Privatization of the Historical Ejido The henequen ejido was not just an economic collective; it was also a cultural entity, a complex organization that made the ejidatario a social actor. One can say that in spite of the fact that many spent their productive lives on the collective ejido, they never made it their own; instead, they regarded it exactly as they had the hacienda before expropriation in 1937. Nevertheless, the ejidatarios assumed that the expropriation of the henequen haciendas by the Mexican government gave them a right to federal subsidies. In order to understand a little better this mentality of the henequen ejidatarios, we shall look again at the plan for privatization. In 1990, as mentioned previously, a new Program for the Reorganization of Henequen was initiated. Governor Manzanilla Schaffer explained that the new initiative was the beginning of a "process of transformation of the production relationships between the government, the institutions, the ejidatarios, workers of other crops, and small proprietors." This package of measures replaced the Ley de Explotacion, Cultivo e Industrializacion del Henequen (Law of Cultivation, Exploitation, and Industrialization of Henequen) because it was considered unjust and authoritarian. In addition, the new law would open the henequen market, and the producers would be able to sell their fiber to whomever they wanted, inside or outside the state. Therefore, FAAPY would stop financing the ejidatarios. A new agency, Desfibradoras de Yucatan (Desfiyusa), would finance the new planting of the ejidos and would take charge of the fourteen defibration plants that Cordemex was to divest. All henequen ejidatarios over the age of sixty would receive a pension of $29.80 each month and retain medical services. Expired credits would be "fro-

Yucatan's Henequen Agro-Industry / 161 zen" so that they would not incur normal interest or have deadlines. These debts, however, were later canceled in 1995. The labor authorities would see that the private fiber workers would abide by the law in their employer-employee relationships and comply with their financial obligations. The price of "iV.' -quality leaf would be raised 48.3 percent, and the price of "B" - to "c" -quality leaf would be raised 58.7 percent. Cordemex would pay 15 percent more for the fiber that it received and would sell its unproductive assets. Finally, FAAPY would redirect its support for the means of production to municipal credit committees. This reorganization implied increasing the privatization of the ejidos, although this purpose was not stated. FAAPY would pay an additional $2.50 for every thousand leaves only to the ejidatarios of divided parcels of the previously collective ejidos. This $2.50 represented an additional 30 percent of the "guaranteed price" of $8.10 for leaves of ''/\' quality and 38 percent of the minimum price of $6.50 for leaves of "B" to "c" quality. It is interesting to note that not one ejido opposed the FAAPY plan of privatization. At the same time that the "modernization" of the henequen industry began in 1990 with the new program, FAAPY put into practice a process of exclusion that sought to reduce in one year the number of ejidatarios to be subsidized from forty thousand to between seventeen thousand and twenty thousand. The federal government agreed to allocate to each "individualized" ejidatario two hectares for production of henequen and two for other crops, not for technical reasons but because this was the average of the division between the quantity of hectares cultivated and the number of ejidatarios that would remain active after the reduction. With this policy, the federal officials hoped to have the ejidatarios make the decisions and be responsible for the agricultural production of henequen. Once the government delivered the cultivated parcel, each ejidatario would have the legal capability to decide when and how much to produce. In other words, it was a totally theoretical decision and, practically speaking, an impossible method for attaining successful henequen production. Such a division of ejidos, in practice, turned out to be unequal, because the henequen on them was in various levels of productivity; some ejidos were in excellent condition for production while others were in serious decline with relatively few henequen plants per hectare. Finally, in some cases the ejidatarios received various subdivisions of haciendas in distant locations. Ironically, this is similar to what had happened in 1937. What is important here is that as a result of these conditions, by 1994 most of the ejidos had disappeared. The privatization program was a method by which to phase out the historical ejido. It was not affected as a plot of public land, because the new legal statute of the collective ejido was not put into effect until later, that is, with the new agrarian law of 1992. Privatization was actually an administrative measure that although it did not change the legal character of collective henequen ejidos, in practice-at

162 / Oth6n Banos Ramirez

least with regard to the cultivation of the land-it converted such ejidos into individual parcels. The collective ejido was also a part of an intricate and contradictory political web. The privatization program was an unprecedented measure that broke up the old control structure of the collective ejidos. On occasion this structure had been used to resist the former hacendados; more often it had served to guarantee a political clientele for the government of the PRI, long the dominant political party. Breaking up the ejidos did not accomplish the stated goals of the government but only aggravated the already extremely difficult problems of the ejidatarios. Neoliberal reforms had been applied to the coffee producers in Veracruz and had resulted in more poverty there, too. 4 ! The actual, unstated goal of the government was to solve the enormous social, economic, and political problems of the historical ejido. These measures of the henequen industry restructuring program were perfectly in line with the neoliberal policy that was driving every sector of the national economy. The government knew that many ejidatarios, owing to their urgent need of money, would eventually sell their inefficient plots of land that had been divided during the individualization program. This action was illegal, of course, because the constitutional reform of Article 27 that made the ejido land private was not enacted until two years later, in 1992. But the ejidatarios were not able to survive as farmers from one day to the next, nor did they have resources of their own to finance the development of a new ejido. The privatization program did not bring about an organized protest from the ejidatarios, because, as we have seen, additional "benefits" were delivered to the privatized ejidatarios; moreover, the Confederaci6n Nacional Campesina (or CNC, the National Confederation of Farmers) had sold them on the idea that privatization would bring them lasting benefits. Finally, many ejidatarios saw privatization as just one more of the many temporary measures that the government had taken with respect to ejido production. Nor did the ejidatarios defend the status quo as they had done at other times, because inflation had strongly weakened their political capacity for resistance; in effect, economic hardships had undermined their will to resist. The precarious conditions in which these workers lived was a heavy burden that obliged them to make a decision: either they could fight politically to get a more dignified wage for their labor on the privatized ejidos and for their part-time work in the city, one that would help offset the rapid pace of inflation; or they could keep up the appearance of working but devote their energies to other, complementary activities. The conditions did not exist for the first option; moreover, many ejidatarios thought the minimum but permanent wage, a dole for most of them, would never be cut by the government. The CNC was not able-or, better, did not want-to organize them to fight. On the contrary, now as always, it showed itself in favor of the new government measures. The collective ejido, in general terms, had never really functioned well economi-

Yucatan's Henequen Agro-Industry / 163 cally and certainly had not succeeded in improving the standard of living for the ejidatarios, who had always suffered a tremendous lack of resources. The problem, then, was more complex and did not turn only on poor administration. Moreover, the ejido had not been economically profitable and granted subsidies since 1937because it was politically expedient to do so. Thus, as in the past, the factor that determined the time to "modernize" the historical ejido was political and not economic. The collective ejido disappeared when the Salinas administration, addressing the heavy losses over the years, decided to change political strategy and force the neoliberal plan for modernization. The privatization of the collective ejidos led to friction among the local leaders who found themselves stripped of their influence. A new configuration of political strengths quickly began to work against many of the CNe's caciques, so they decided to organize their followers into the opposing political parties. Consequently, these leaders left the PRI and their union, the CNC. As a result, the elections of 1990 were the most contested for the state government since the PRI first came to power, and even some of the henequen districts fell into the hands of opposition parties, such as the National Action Party (PAN), Authentic Party of the Mexican Revolution (PARM), Labor Party (PT), and others. 42

The Reprivatization of Cordemex The program of 1990 also focused on the reorganization of Cordemex and the eventual dismembering of units related to the industrialization of henequen, such as the steroid production plant. 43 A speaker from the Secretarfa de Programaci6n y Presupuesto (SPP, Department of Programming and Budget) declared that Cordemex would be reorganized so that it could operate as a private company, according to market criteria. This process actually consisted of a reprivatization in two stages. The first step in the reorganization was the liquidation of its ancillary units, such as the dairy program and the defibration plants. These desfibradoras were transferred to Desfiyusa, which was to operate the plants on a basis of profitability. On March IS, 1990, the transfer of the fourteen cordage factories of Cordemex began; at the same time, the severance pay of 1,500 nonpermanent workers was set at approximately 3,523,000 pesos. 44 The federal government contributed 9,866,000 pesos, which Cordemex needed to cover the total expenses of its reorganization. This amount also included the severance pay of 1,750 labor union workers of the desfibradoras. There was no opposition to these measures, because the unions were controlled by leaders who were subordinate to the PRI, and the few complaints were easily overcome. The second step, the reprivatization of the Cordemex manufacturing plants, took place one year later. Formally, the activities of Cordemex ended on April 9, 1991. The supervisors suspended work in their factories and prepared for the dismissal of personnel. Thus, after thirty years of being the economic center of the state, Cordemex passed into bankruptcy.

164 / Orhon Banos Ramirez With the disappearance of this "parent" company, four private incorporated enterprises were formed, completely distinct and independent from one another. These successor companies manufactured the agricultural twine, felt, rope and materials, and carpet. To sell these four businesses, SPP gave several kinds of incentives, among them soft credits and a grace period. The government calculated that it would spend from 16,807,000 pesos to 22,624,000 pesos to subsidize the process of reprivatization. In this second stage, 2,730 employees were terminated, 2,378 of whom were affiliated with three trade unions. The government officials said that this process of termination was carried out to remove an "enormous weight" (pasivo laboral) from Cordemex. The only condition that the governor put on the new private company managers was that they would commit to buy local fiber. The reasons given for this reprivatization were financial losses stemming from the decrease in fiber production and the high cost of the labor force; the latter was due to the terms of labor contracts that resulted in many more workers on the payroll than needed. Although all of this is true, one should not lose sight of the fact that the liquidation of Cordemex was comparable to the fate of a broad array of similar parastatal enterprises, such as Fertimex, Tabamex, and the Instituto del Cafe, in other parts of the country-all of which were privatized during the six years of the Salinas presidency.

Summary and Conclusions The guidelines for national and regional policies during the decade of the 1980s were formed by the idea that private property and a free market policy would provide the solution to economic crises. The measures enacted succeeded in dismantling the social institutions that had resulted from the Mexican Revolution, but neoliberalism did not economically better the lot of workers and peasants. Nevertheless, one could say that the results of this new strategy were favorable to the free market system. 45 The decline and collapse of Yucatan's henequen agro-industry is an example of the disastrous effects produced by the new neoliberal approach. The new economic model that from 1984 on guided federal developmental policy imposed on Yucatan ignored the region's unique history as well as the unique social and cultural characteristics of henequen, the Yucatecan ejidatarios, and their families. Largely for these reasons, the neoliberal medicine turned out to be deadly for the very sick, declining henequen agro-industry. As in the past, the failure of this policy was concealed and in fact was placed upon the shoulders of the ejidatarios and of the workers, because the government refused to recognize that the excessive controls and bureaucratic corruption ended up only damaging the productive performance of those involved. Worse yet, as a result of the social discontent erupting from the collapse of the henequen ejidos and the cordage plants, the government hastened to implement new economic assistance programs for the ejidatarios, such as the Programa Nacional de Solidari-

Yucatan's Henequen Agro-Industry / 165 dad. Thus, it revived the very critical subsidies and the vote-buying philosophy of the industry's prime benefactor: the federal government. After viewing the results of the elections in 1990, it was clear that the PRIcontrolled central government had suffered a serious deterioration of its dominance in Yucatan. Consequently, political urgency, driven by the social discontent generated by the privatization program, caused Solidarity to become active in the henequen zone in the middle of 1992.46 The old clientelistic pact was revived in the form of a new program. Although completely bankrupt from the previous welfare state schemes, the PRI-controlled agency responded to the need to maintain political and social stability in agriculture with additional subsidies from the federal government. Over the previous twenty years, the essential credits were the weak thread of bureaucratic domination that dictated where, when, and how much to plant. By means of federal control of resources, the political bureaucracy and the administrations that changed according to the tide of politics made and unmade the ejidal system, in conformity with the dominant ideology of the president's six-year term. This practice of spending on social programs was still in place in 1994, having changed only in form.47 Although my purpose has not been to demonstrate which scheme is more politically profitable, whether the traditional henequen ejido or the new programs of Solidarity, it is appropriate to point out that in the municipal elections of 1993 the rural vote in the henequen zone was the factor that swayed the balance in favor of the PRI. The municipalities that in 1990 had fallen to the opposition were recovered, with the exception of Merida, where more than 40 percent of the total population of the state was concentrated. On the other hand, the new neoliberal development model has yet to demonstrate that it is capable of generating rates of economic growth that even begin to approximate the average of 6 percent per annum achieved during periods of Mexican import-substituting industrialization from about 1950 to 1980. 48lt should be noted, however, that Mexico's rapid economic growth rate from 1970 to 1980 was associated with an explosive rise of external public debt and an extreme dependence on oil exports-both of which were not sustainable. This situation brought about the country's severe 1982 debt crisis and a decrease in the rate of economic growth. Nevertheless, the neoliberal strategy has seemingly brought about socioeconomic changes in Yucatan since the 1980s and permitted new employment options for the young people of the countryside, not in agriculture but through significant advances in commerce and services concentrated in the city of Merida and its suburbs (e.g., increased tourism and maquila [assembly plant] production, chicken and pork processing, and truck farming, among others). I say "seemingly" because we still need to ponder what weight in this process of structural accommodation the tremendous wave of Yucatecan migrants to Cancun has had in mitigating social pressures caused by galloping unemployment and underemploy-

166 / OthOn Banos Ramirez menr. The combination of the advance of industrialization and a severely deteriorating agricultural economy experiencing a decline in subsidies utterly transformed the henequen zone. What was once an agricultural area has become an extension of a regional urban system, with labor migration and business expansion serving as the bonds that connect rural and urban dimensions. 49

Notes I want to express my appreciation to Byrt Womack and Donald Wehmeyer for their comments and criticism of an earlier version of this essay. I am also grateful to the late Dr. Edward H. Moseley, to Dr. Gilbert M. Joseph, Dr. Edward D. Terry, Dr. Eric N. Baklanoff, and Dr. Ben W. Fallaw for their critical reading of and suggestions for this study. 1. I should clarify that some cordage factories and defibering plants remain in operation in Yucatan; in 2006 the state reported that 8,518 hectares were harvested, yielding 4,135 tons of henequen fiber. Anuario Estadistico de Yucatdn, vol. 2, Instituto Nacional de Estadfstica, Geograffa e Informatica (Aguascalientes, 2007.) Such production seems insignificant when one considers that in 1970, hardly the industry's best year, the state reported production of II7,751 tons of fiber. 2. Jeffery Brannon and Eric N. Baklanoff, Agrarian Reform and Public Enterprise in Mexico: The Political Economy ofYucatdn's Henequen Industry (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1987), 40, 66, and 71. For a more detailed discussion of the economic and class structure of Yucatan, see Asael T. Hansen and Juan R. Bastarrachea M., Merida: Su transflrmaci6n de capital colonial a naciente metr6poli en I935 (Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Antropologfa e Historia, 1984); and David Arthur Franz, "Bullets and Bolshevists: A History of the Mexican Revolution and Reform in Yucatan, 1910-1924" (PhD diss., University of New Mexico, 1973), 5-22. 3. Othon Banos Ramirez, Neoliberalismo, Reorganizaci6n y Subsistencia Rural: El caso de la zona henequenera de Yucatdn: I98o-I992 (Merida: Universidad Autonoma de Yucatan, 1996),6,7,121, 123-24. 4. Javier Arzuaga, "Apuntes para leer eI neoliberalismo," Convergencia I, no. 3 (1993): 26. Arzuaga states that in a little more than fifteen years, Reagan and Thatcher not only satutated the ears of the world with the "new gospel," but little by little moderate liberals, populists, social democrats, and even the most select leaders of the communist parties of Eastern Europe became faithful subscribers to the good news. 5. Gerardo Otero, ed., Neoliberalism Revisited: Economic Restructuring and Mexico's Political Future (Boulder, co: Westview Press, 1996). 6. Under President Echeverria the central government took a much more active role in many aspects of society, including the distribution and marketing of basic products. There were state-owned retail establishments under the Compania Nacional de Subs istencias Populares (Conasupo) that competed with the many small, privately owned shops throughout the nation. Within a short time, stores with the yellow and red Conasupo logo not only furnished poor neighborhoods with tortillas, beans, and other basic goods but also spread into fashionable neighborhoods such as the Zona Rosa in Mexico City; there they offered luxury items in competition with supermarkets and department stores, all with fed-

Yucatan's Henequen Agro-Industry / 167 eral subsidies. See Kenneth Johnson, Mexican Democracy: A Critical View (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1971), II9, 230. 7. Brannon and Baklanoff, Agrarian Reform, 174. 8. Edel Cadena Vargas, "Una decada de neoliberalismo en America Latina: El caso de Mexico," Convergencia I, no. 3 (1993): 171. 9. For a theoretical and critical assessment of the contradictions of the welfare state, see Claud Offe, Contradicciones del Estado del Bienstar (Mexico City: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, Alianza Editorial, 1990); for a study of the Mexican situation, see Carlos Bazdresch et al., eds., Mexico: Auge, crisis y ajuste (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Econ6mica,I992). 10. Marilyn Gates, "The Debt Crisis and Economic Restructuring: Prospects for Mexican Agriculture," in Otero, Neoliberalism Revisited, 43-44; Wayne A. Cornelius and David Myhre, eds., The Transformation of Rural Mexico: Reforming the Ejido Sector (San Diego: Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies, University of California-San Diego, 1998). II. Brannon and Baklanoff, Agrarian Reform, II4-I6. 12. Ibid., 117-19, 133-35. 13. Banos, Neoliberalismo, 102-03; Programa de Reordenacion Henequenera y Desarrollo Integral de Yucatdn (hereafter, PRHDIY) (Mexico City: Gobierno del Estado de Yucaran y Gobierno Constitucional de los Estados Unidos Mexicanos, 1984), 20. The discussion and data presented in the remainder of this section are derived from Neoliberalismo, 102-07. 14. Brannon and Baklanoff, Agrarian Reform, II4-16, 129-30. 15. PRHDIY, 10. 16. The program also considered additional courses of action, such as to foster education, to strengthen social socurity and health, to encourage urban development and housing, and to prevent and control environmental pollution. Banos, Neoliberalismo, 104-06. 17. Marilyn Gates, "The Debt Crisis and Economic Restructuring: Prospects for Mexican Agriculture," in Gerardo Otero, Neoliberalism Revisted, 43-44. I8. Rosario Robles, "La dec ada perdida de la agricultura mexicana," EI Cotidiano 50 (September-October I992): 9. I9. Cornelius and Myhre, Transformation ofRural Mexico. 20. Hector Lugo, et a!., Modernizacion del sector agropecuario mexicano (Mexico City: Instituto de Proposiciones Estrategicas, 1990), 20. 21. Emilio Pradilla Cobos, "Campo y ciudad en la nueva politica agraria," Ciudades 4, no. I5 (I992): 9· 22. Banos, Neoliberalismo, 107-09. 23· Ibid., 5. 24. Ana Maria Aragones, "Nuevas condiciones productivas y migraci6n rural," Ciudades 5, no. I9, (I993): 10. 25. Banos, Neoliberalismo, 70; Nueva Legislacion Agraria (Mexico City: Gaceta de Solidaridad, I992), 68. 26. Odile Hoffman, "Renovaci6n de los acto res sociales en el campo: un ejemplo en el sector cafetalero de Veracruz," Estudios sociologicos 10, no. 30 (I992); Flavia Echanove Huacuja, "Las politicas neoliberales y la desaparicion del 'oro blanco' de nuestro pais," paper presented in the "Seminario Internacional sobre Nuevos Procesos Rurales en Mexico," Taxco, Guerrero, Mexico, 1994.

168 / Othon Banos Ramirez 27. These ejidos that dominated raw fiber production after agrarian reform responded to the incentives and disincentives of the highly politicized federal agencies Banco Nacional de Credito (Ejidal National Bank) and Cordemex. See Brannon and Baklanoff, Agrarian Reform, 8. 28. Diario de Yucatdn (hereafter, D. Yuc.) , January 27, 1986. 29. Ibid., January 29,1986. 30. Ibid., January 6, 1989. 31. Othon Banos Ramirez, Yucatdn: ejidos sin campesinos (Merida: Universidad Autonoma de Yucatin, 1989). 32. D. Yuc., February 9, 1989. 33. Ibid., July 21, 1989. 34. Statement by Gonzalo Tamayo Sobrino, director of FAAPY. D. Yuc., January 25, 1990 . 35. The ejido superintendents interviewed were Juan Sanchez from Santa Cruz in the municipality of Sinanche, Hermenegildo Zamorano Alvarez from Telchac, and Mauricio Yam Poot from Dzina. D. Yuc., August 28, 1990. 36. D. Yuc., May 5, 1994. 37. Jorge Pacheco Castro, "La reordenacion henequenera de los 90: iUna politica de campesinizacion?" in Campesinos y sociedad: Ayer y Hoy, Othon Banos Ramirez, coord. (Merida: Ediciones de la Universidad Autonoma de Yucatin, 1992), 223-52. 38. Robles, "La decada perdida." 39. Aragones, "Nuevas condiciones productivas," IO. 40. Denise Dresser, Neopopulist Solutions to Neoliberal Problems: Mexico's National Solidarity Program (La Jolla, CA: Current Issue Brief, Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies, 1991). 41. Hoffman, "Renovacion de los acto res sociales." 42. For a broader analysis of the political process, see "Entre el autoritarismo moribundo yel parro ciudadano (el gobernador Victor Manuel Cervera Pacheco)" Espiral: Estudios sobre Estado y Sociedad8, no. 24 (2002): 137-67. 43. For additional background information about this multiplant cordage enterprise, see Brannon and Baklanoff, Agrarian Reform, chapter 6. 44. D. Yuc., March 16, 1990. 45. Jonathan Fox, "Political Change in Mexico's New Peasant Economy," in Maria Lorena Cook, Kevin M. Middlebrook, and Juan Molinar Horcasitas, ed., The Politics of Economic Restructuring: State-Society Relations and Regime Change in Mexico (San Diego: Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies, University of California-San Diego, 1994), 243-76. 46. See Othon Banos Ramirez, "El regreso (itardio?) del ogro filantropico: El caso de la zona henequenera de Yucatan," Revista de la Universidad Autonoma de Yucatdn II, no. I96 (I996): 31-38. For the national level, see Denise Dresser, "Bringing the Poor Back In: National Solidarity as a Strategy of Regime Legitimation," in Wayne Cornelius, Ann Craig, and Jonathan Fox, ed., Transforming State-Society Relations in Mexico: The National Solidarity Strategy (San Diego: Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies, University of California-San Diego, 1994). 47. After falling sharply in the austerity budgets of the De la Madrid government, from 1988 to I993 spending on social programs was increased by more than 85 percent in real

Yucatan's Henequen Agro-Industry / 169 terms. Wayne Cornelius, "Foreword," in Cook, Middlebrook, and Horcasitas, Politics of Economic Restructuring, xv. 48. Ibid., xii. 49. Orh6n Banos Ramirez, "Reconfiguraci6n rural-urbana en la zona henequenera de Yucatan," Estudios Sociologicos II, no. 32 (1993); and also Banos, "Tendencias recientes del desarrollo regional: el caso de Yucatan," Comercio Exterior 46, no. 8 (1996).

PART II RELIGION

8 Jose Canuto Vela and Yucatan's "Benign" Clergy from Independence to the Reform, 1821-1861 Lynda S. Morrison

Yucatan's struggle with modernity, as in other regions of Mexico, always involved ambivalent attitudes toward the Roman Catholic Church and its clergy. When Pope John Paul II visited the peninsula in 1993, reporters commented on the historically good relations between the church and the Yucatecan state. These were never as violent as in Mexico as a whole. However, as Hernan Menendez Rodriguez attests in chapter 10 of this volume, the seeming harmony has not been without periods of deep controversy and complex political maneuvering. Throughout the nineteenth century, Yucatecans struggled to reconcile conservative and liberal philosophies regarding the power of the Roman Catholic Church, especially in the period between independence and the Reform. One clergyman whose life almost exactly spanned the critical period from the end of colonialism to the beginning of the Reform was Jose Canuto Vela. His career reflected these trends toward changing class and political activism. Vela would profit personally from some of the changes brought about by independence, but he would also contribute to a renewed respect and appreciation of a Yucatecan church damaged by liberal reforms. His participation in parish affairs and regional politics allowed him to act as a peacemaker with rebels during the Caste War and between political factions as well. Charles A. Hale, who analyzed the evolution of liberal thought in Mexico during the pre-Reform era, pointed out that because of the political turmoil following independence, a faction of liberal leaders in the country between 1830 and 1833 began making subtle changes in their proposals for reform. Mexican liberals agreed upon a federalist system of government, but some were convinced that the true source of Mexico's problems lay in the customs, laws, and abuses inherited from the old monarchical absolutism. As Hale stated, these liberals were moving from a constitutionalist phase to an anticorporate phase. They were prepared to consider reform of Mexican society in order to achieve the individualism they most valued. Liberal thinkers such as Jose Maria Luis Mora sought to institute the utilitarian ideal by which the individual would be freed from corporate loyalties and restrictions in order to pursue rationally his own interests. They argued that the privileged orders or corporate entities of the church, army, Indian communities, guilds, and

174 / Lynda S. Morrison universities should be abolished or suppressed. The liberal regime of 1833-1834 was an expression of this new determination. The reform program of Valentin Gomez Farias included goals such as the disentailment of church property, the abolition of fueros (privileges), support for public education, curtailment of monasteries, and establishment of a civil register to record vital statistics. l This experiment lasted only briefly and, Hale contends, did not establish conclusively a deep liberal-conservative cleavage. Nor were all the laws passed by the 1833 regime later abrogated by the conservatives. It was not until 1846 that a militant conservatism appeared in Mexico, crystallizing the ideological conflict between liberals and conservatives and forcing each side to address more profound issues than preferences over the form of government that had originally defined them. A brief resurgence of radical liberal rule from 1846 to 1847 during the war with the United States succeeded only in fomenting revolt by conservatives. As in 1833, anticlericalism became a focus of the radicals but caused division even within the liberal ranks. Moderates balked at a program that attacked church property to finance the war. The moderate liberal regime that followed seemed most concerned that Mexican society was "out of joint. " Its answer was to initiate a program ofEurope an immigration in order to strengthen the middle class. Only another conservative challenge in 1853 prompted liberals to focus on a bold liberal reform program that would free the country from corporate privilege. 2 Under an energetic, more socially conscious and pragmatic new leadership, this renovated liberalism ushered in the movement known as the Reform, which toppled a conservative regime in 1855 and embodied liberal reforms in the country's constitution of 1857. Laws that limited fueros and forbade ecclesiastical and civil corporations to own land led some members of the church hierarchy to react strongly. They threatened excommunication of all public officials who took the required oath of loyalty to the new constitution. Reactionaries siding with the church occupied the capital city, and the Three Years' War (also known as the War of the Reform) soon ensued. During this struggle, Benito Juarez, who had been declared president of Mexico by the liberal forces, retaliated against church support of the conservatives with laws confiscating without compensation all ecclesiastical property except church buildings, establishing freedom of religion, and suppressing all monasteries. By January 1861 the liberals once again effectively controlled the country. They especially distrusted the church hierarchy, which they viewed as both corrupt and opportunist. In Yucatan local and outside observers of note reported that the Yucatecan clergy offered little threat to the liberal order. This attitude was evident when General Juan Suarez y Navarro issued his report to the national government in 1861 concerning the fractured state ofYucatecan politics. He commented that, unlike their counterparts in other regions of the country, the secular clergy had for many years deferred to regulation by civil authorities. He characterized the Yucatecan clergy as few, poor, and never inclined to interfere in the business of the state. The gen-

Jose Canuto Vela and Yucatan's "Benign" Clergy / 175 eral claimed an absence of animosity toward the clergy in the peninsula and even implied a degree of sympathy.3 These attitudes also pervaded a report written by Justo Sierra O'Reilly in 1859 concerning the ecclesiastical incomes of the Yucatecan church. In this document he vigorously defended the patriotism and cooperation of the Yucatecan clergy, who by demonstrating their goodwill and respectful obedience to the laws deserved the just protection of the state. 4 Both documents were sent to Benito Juarez and were among the factors that influenced the president to respond in a most dramatic way. In a decree issued on December 9, 1861, Juarez contravened in Yucatan all reform laws relating to the clergy that had been enacted up to that moment. Not surprisingly, the liberal local authorities balked at having to carry out the president's decree, which would mean a loss of the state's authority and income. A struggle between supporters of the church and those upholding the state's authority ensued. Analysis of these attitudes and events in Yucatan has yielded a variety of explanations by scholars. Hernan Menendez Rodriguez discounts the accuracy of the original documents written by Sierra O'Reilly and Suarez y Navarro. In the latter case he impugns the motives and politics of the messenger, Suarez y Navarro, who fought on the side of the conservatives in the War of the Reform. Sierra O'Reilly, he explains, ill and near death in 1859, was overly influenced by the clergy who were caring for him in the convent of La Mejorada. 5 But these circumstances do not entirely explain this support of the Yucatecan clergy that was so unusual in Mexico in 1861, nor do they thoroughly discredit the statements contained in those reports. Juarez was aware of the backgrounds of his correspondents and yet responded positively and emphatically to their petitions. Howard Cline attributed positive sentiments by non-Indian Yucatecans toward the church and churchmen to the fact that by the time of independence the clergy were secular and therefore drawn from the local population, particularly the elite families. Cline noted that Justo Sierra O'Reilly tended to be especially sympathetic because his brother, Manuel, was a priest, and similar circumstances existed within influential families throughout the peninsula. 6 Cline further explained the poverty of the church and its clergy, noted by General Suarez y Navarrro in 1861, by stating that the Catholic Church in Yucatan had never been especially wealthy and posed little threat to the civil authorities who sought to develop the peninsula's economy after independence. Thus, the secularization of the clergy, the poverty of the Yucatecan church and churchmen, the ties between clergy and the elite families of the state, and the church hierarchy's cooperative attitude in the face of new liberal policies have all been adduced to explain the relatively harmonious tenor of churchstate relations. Studies conducted in the past few decades, however, have revealed a more complex interaction between the church and other institutions and groups within Yucatecan society during and preceding the reform era. For example, in Maya Peasantry and the Origins ofthe Caste Win; Terry Rugeley states that "the church's parish

176 / Lynda S. Morrison system served as one of the key organizing principles of the countryside," and "the church provided the economic backbone of the peninsula" through such institutions as church taxes and private sources of capitaU Fine-grained examinations of the careers and lives of individual clergymen offer important insights that both support and contradict previous assertions regarding the seeming lack of anticlericalism in Yucatan during the early 1860s. These studies reveal a tendency toward less elite backgrounds among the clergy, political activism on their part, and some contradictory data regarding their economic status. Participation in politics offered priests of lower status the opportunity to achieve higher position and prestige and, at the same time, to protect the church's interests against radical liberalism. An examination of the life and career of Jose Canuto Vela provides insight into the roles and composition of the clergy during the critical period between independence and the Reform. Born in January 1802 to Creole parents of no great distinction or wealth, Vela was a provincial from Tekax, the commercial capital of the sugar-growing region of the Sierra. H Living in a town with a high percentage of Maya residents, he became exceptionally fluent in their language. Once his early education at the local Franciscan school ended, Jose was expected to begin a career in commerce. As a teenager in the waning years of colonial rule, however, he was able to continue his formal education in Merida with the aid of a mentor, Jose Matias Quintana. A merchant, renowned publicist, self-taught man of letters, and devout Catholic, Quintana had been imprisoned for his constitutionalist activities during the captivity of Ferdinand VII between 1812 and 1814. One of his sons was the noted independence leader Andres Quintana Roo. Probably residing in the Quintana household, Vela took Latin lessons from the Franciscan Manuel Jimenez Solis, who with other members of the reformist Society of San Juan had formed the dissident Casa de Estudios in opposition to the seminary of San Ildefonso and suffered imprisonment upon Ferdinand's return to the throne in 1814. Vela also learned philosophy in the class of the famous Pablo Moreno, the combative teacher at the seminary of San Ildefonso whose classes were the source of many sanjuanistas (members of the Society of San Juan). As independence grew nearer, Vela was unable to continue his studies under Jimenez in Merida and had to take lessons with a priest outside the capital while earning his living by teaching Latin. It was during this period that he decided to pursue holy orders and applied to the diocese in 1821. Vela could not afford to attend the seminary and chose instead to accept the offer of Tomas Domingo Quintana Roo, a son of Jose Matias Quintana, to study informally for ordination under the tutelage of the priest at his parish in Yobain. The professional association of the two men continued after Vela's ordination in 1825, and they remained life-long friends. The Quintanas' political activism as economic liberals and conservative Catholics helped establish Vela's credentials and develop his interest in Yucatecan politics. 9 Over the next decade, Vela studied and served under Tomas Domingo Quintana

Jose Canuto Vela and Yucatan's "Benign" Clergy / 177 Roo in various parishes in and around Merida. An attempt to earn a seminary degree after his ordination ended sadly for the young priest, but his continued association with Quintana led to advancements until he obtained his own curato (parish) in 1834. Meanwhile, like Quintana, Vela held political office during periods of liberal domination. In 1842 the distinguished traveler John L. Stephens observed that Vela was a man of vigor and polish who was closely associated with Merida but whose "feelings and sympathies were identified with the people under his charge." 10 Vela's ecclesiastical career climaxed in 1850 with his appointment as cura (priest in charge) of Izamal, the most prestigious of the predominantly Indian parishes in the peninsula. Simultaneously, his political career brought him appointment and election to several offices, including deputy to the national congress. Meanwhile, his talents and political connections also won him his most famous role, head of the various ecclesiastical commissions that sought to pacify the rebellious Maya during the Caste War. Jose Canuto Vela exemplified the ambitious and talented young men who entered the secular priesthood from outside the elite class. His life and career illustrate the interplay of relationships between the clergy and secular authorities during this transitional period in the history of Yucatan and Mexico. But was he typical of other clergymen from the same era in terms of family background, economic activity, and participation in politics? A study by Raymond Harrington of 770 priests ordained in the diocese of Yucatan between 1780 and 1850 confirms that a majority of clergymen had origins in the elite or upper-middle classes. Seventy-five percent of priests ordained in the late colonial era (1780-1814) and included in the study were members of the elite class. Mter 1805, however, the numbers of candidates for the priesthood from these classes dropped. Between 1815 and 1850 their numbers had declined to 52 percent, according to Harrington. Furthermore, many priests ordained in the diocese after 1815 were without seminary degrees. Eighty percent prepared informally or never completed the lengthy process toward graduation.!! Priests who studied informally usually could expect to receive less prestigious appointments than those with seminary training. Although Jose Canuto Vela represented the trend toward lower status with respect to both background and preparation, his training under Quintana, a respected scholar, somewhat countered the effects of each. The scant evidence available, therefore, confirms to a degree Howard Cline's observations that familial ties with the elite class may have softened anticlericalism, but the evidence also indicates a transition toward lower status that by the 1840S had an effect on the church's ability to defend itself from liberal reforms. Although participation by individual priests in politics may have protected the church's interests, an examination of the history of church-state relationships between independence and the Reform suggests that the state more often interfered in the affairs of the church in Yucatan than vice versa. Once independence was achieved in 1821, change in the peninsula proceeded at a rather slow, balanced pace

I78 / Lynda S. Morrison

that did not immediately or excessively threaten any interest group. Bishop Pedro Augustin Estevez y Ugarte, a Spaniard, participated in the assembly of notables who declared Yucatan independent from Spain. By r827, however, there was already a great deal of political interference in ecclesiastical affairs on the part of civil authorities. Interference was inevitable once the state assumed patronage rights originally held by the Spanish king. Between r827 and r834 a political struggle took place in Yucatan over the selection of a new bishop. When the names of nominees were presented to the legislature, liberals tried to block the election of the conservative candidate, Jose Maria Guerra, and to prevent his installation. Such secular-ecclesiastical conflicts might suggest a politically powerless clergy, but apparently this was not the case. Many priests served in the new government. Five were in the constitutional congress, twenty-four served in the state legislature between r822 and r835, and twice that number were electors for their districts. Those participating in the political process before r830 included the two strongest contenders to replace Bishop Estevez: Jose Maria Guerra, the conservative, and Jose Maria Meneses, the more liberal candidate. Tomas Domingo Quintana also actively participated as a member of the state legislature in r827.12 The church came more strongly under attack during the liberal Valentin Gomez Farias national administration of r833-1834. Among other reforms, the Gomez Farias administration moved to secularize education, end mandatory payment of the tithe, allow priests and nuns to forswear their vows of celibacy, admonish priests who preached politics from their pulpits, and secularize the Franciscan missions in California. By this time younger priests from less prominent families were also assuming roles in Yucatecan politics. Vela, for example, then served as a coadjutor, or assistant, under Quintana at Hocaba. The young priest's election to the state legislature during the liberal interim government of r833 to r834 was indicative of the political diversity of Yucatecan clergymen. Both he and Quintana also participated in the concursos a curatos, or examinations, that the Mexican government forced on the church in r834 in order to fill parish vacancies caused by the absence of bishops. This submission to the state's claim to patronage authority, however, did not seem to hurt the career of either priest once the conservative Jose Guerra was consecrated bishop of Yucatan in 1834. Both Quintana and Vela earned new appointments in Guerra's first concurso of r836. The bishop also accommodated Vela's participation in civic affairs by allowing him to move closer to the capital in 1840.13 The implication is that the church was benefiting from Vela's political activism. When disagreements with the Mexican government led to a declaration of Yucatecan independence in 1840, influential clergymen participated in drafting the new constitution. These included Bishop Guerra's former rival, the wealthy Jose Meneses, and three liberal Campechano priests who helped draft some of the most progressive articles in the document. 14 Political factions in the peninsula began to coalesce around two regions and in-

Jose Canuto Vela and Yucatan's "Benign" Clergy / 179 dividualleaders by the 1840s. Santiago Mendez led the Campeche interests while the more charismatic Miguel Barbachano became the champion of Merida's causes. Jose Canuto Vela associated with the latter and continued his political activism from his parish at Tecoh. He was elected deputy to the national congress in 1845 under the Barbachanista banner. Following the revolt by the Campeche faction in 1847, Jose Meneses served as president of the extraordinary assembly at Ticul. In the new elections called that same year, few Barbachanistas attained office. Vela was an exception, once again winning the position of deputy to the national congress on the heels of the Mayan uprising. Vela continued his political activism into the Caste War era. He played a significant role by helping to arrange the resignation of Governor Santiago Mendez in favor of Miguel Barbachano in 1848. It was their common connections with the Barbachano faction that motivated Vela to contact Jacinto Pat, the rebel chief, for peace negotiations. The priest also managed to maintain harmony within the liberal party by engineering a reconciliation between his friend and confidante, Colonel Jose Eulogio Rosado, and Governor Barbachano in 1850. Colonel Rosado had not supported Governor Barbachano's choice of candidates in the close presidential elections that brought General Mariano Arista to power in 1851. Vela helped arrange a public ceremony that formalized their accommodation. I 5 When conciliation was a high priority, government officials continued to call on the diplomat, priest, and patriot Jose Canuto Vela. In 1855, while serving as the cura at Izamal during his final years, he became one of the seven counselors who helped to establish the principles of the Plan of Ayutla in Yucatan at the end of President Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna's last dictatorship. 16 Vela and other clergy, therefore, did not, as General Suarez y Navarro suggested, refrain from interfering in the affairs of state. On the contrary, they often participated fully in the political process. In the absence of a bishop between 1827 and 1834, their participation may have assuaged political passions and balanced the influence of radical liberals bent on attacking the privileges of the church. The presence of a clergyman such as Vela, a man with diplomatic acumen, in the liberal legislature of 1833 and 1834, and his participation in politics during the 1840s, represented the church to laymen as more progressive. On the other hand, it is also possible that the clergy were so divided in their own political opinions that they offered no unified threat to civil authority. I 7 As to the second claim of a financially weakened church and clergy in the peninsula, this is difficult to assess with any accuracy. Throughout the colonial era, the church in Yucatan remained relatively poor owing to the poverty of the region itself. Financing differed between Maya and non-Indian communities. The tithe, which was levied on agricultural products, and fees paid for baptisms, marriages, burials, and special masses were the bases of clerical support in non-Indian communities. Indians were required to contribute alms or obventions to their local priests as well as pay sacramental fees and provide some labor. By the early nine-

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teenth century, parish priests received substantial salaries from revenues collected by the state that averaged 1,800 pesos per year for a cura, and 175 to 250 pesos for each assistant. 18 The Yucatecan church after independence did not suffer financially at first from radical liberal legislation. Before 1822 all but about thirty Franciscan priests had been secularized-that is, forced to leave their order to become secular priestsand most of the order's properties and funds were placed under control of the local bishop. Church haciendas owned by the brotherhoods, or cofradias, still operated into the 1830S despite orders by civil authorities to sell them. Obventions levied on Indians continued, and labor requirements and sacramental fees were not regulated by the state during these early years. Priests were often able to take advantage of church funds for personal loans. Vela, for example, borrowed five hundred pesos from Franciscan funds in 1827. Individual clergymen sometimes contributed generously to civic causes, such as the war effort against Spain in 1828. 19 The greatest crisis for the Yucatecan church occurred in the 18405 when its income became a pawn in the political upheavals that plagued the state and country. Yucatecan officials were desperate to find financing for economic development and for military operations against the Mexican armies dispatched to bring them back into the union. In 1842 a joint ecclesiastical and civil commission was formed to consider reforms of church income. A reduction in obventions and a termination of tithe collections by the state had already occurred. The reformers now abolished obventions and replaced traditional fees with government subsidies. By 1846 the government was in arrears on its payments by almost fifty-nine thousand pesos, and the church was in fiscal crisis. Clergymen tried to make up shortfalls by reducing services or increasing sacramental fees in their parishes. These actions caused a great deal of resentment among Maya parishioners. Once the Caste War began, rebels repeatedly charged clergymen with excessive avarice. 20 The effects of these measures upon the incomes of individual priests is difficult to determine. Notary records indicate that clergymen such as Vela were still able to take advantage of cofradias and endowment funds for loans with which to purchase property or cover losses. Under colonization legislation, public lands were converted to private property at a rapid rate, and some priests participated in this process. Harrington, however, reported finding in notary records few purchases of these terrenos baldios (public lands) by priests; indeed only six transactions were recorded. Vela and twenty-four other clergymen, however, did invest in established haciendas, solares (family compounds), and houses. During the 1845-1846 crisis period, eight clergymen sold properties while six others actively invested; therefore, it is difficult to prove a sudden financial crisis on the part of clergymen. 21 Vela accumulated relatively small holdings in the northeast until the time of his death in 1859 in spite of the uncertainties of war and shrinking church incomes. Active in politics and a cura in his own right by the time of crisis, Vela seems not to have suf-

Jose Canuto Vela and Yucatan's "Benign" Clergy / r8r fered excessively from financial losses. In r850 he declared for tax purposes that he owned rural property valued at seventeen hundred pesos in the parish of Cacalchen near Izamal. At the time of his death he held three haciendas near Cacalchen, three others near Izamal, and a seventh in the parish ofTunkas. 22 An ecclesiastical career during these postindependence years, therefore, still offered an ambitious and able clergyman the opportunity to accumulate a modest fortune by Yucatecan standards. 23 Vela, however, may have been the exception among those of his postindependence generation. Harrington found only eight wills filed by other priests between r825 and r849. Vela's assets far exceeded those of the others. By r859 Justo Sierra characterized the Yucatecan clergy generally as "pobrisimo por demas [extremely poor]."24 Perhaps circumstances other than clerical cooperation in state affairs and general poverty also explain the muted anticlerical ism of Yucatecans reported by Sierra and Suarez y Navarro at the time of the Reform. Historically, the role of the clergy had been to hold the fabric of traditional society together. By r86r the recent periods of upheaval and national emergency had emphasized this fact in dramatic ways. The urban elite especially could appreciate men of the cloth holding back the "hordes of savages" from the gates of "civilized" cities as in the darkest days of the Caste War. The clergy's responses to crises in Yucatan over the previous thirteen years of conflict were sometimes short-sighted and self-serving but often cooperative, beneficial, and even courageous. At the time of independence the authority of priests probably was recognized by the popular classes as more legitimate than that of civil authorities. Clergymen had greater daily contact with Maya communities than any other group of Creoles. Not only did they perform a wide range of educational, liturgical, and social tasks, but they also rendered significant service during periods of national emergency, such as the cholera epidemic that swept Yucatan and Mexico in r833. Priests like Vela and Quintana at Hocaba remained at risk to their own lives in towns where no professional medical assistance was available. They organized the community's resources, comforted the sick, and buried the dead. One-fourth of the Yucatecan clergy died in this and related epidemics by r835. 25 Such service ameliorated the effects of abuses committed by individual clergymen, which were also evident to parishioners.26 Many Yucatecans, however, sensed a rupture in the traditional relationships between priests and Maya parishioners by the mid-r840s. Archbishop Crescencio Carrillo y Ancona attributed the breakdown in the social order to the secularization of the Franciscan order, which had traditionally manned Maya parishes. Creole secular priests such as Vela, unlike the regulars, were distracted by business investments and political activities that took them away from their parishes. They had interests in common with other members of the Creole community that they sought to protect. By the r840s less authority was being shared with the Maya ca-

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ciques, and the perception was that education of the young and care of the poor by clergy had declined. Clerical roles in Maya communities were impaired generally because of the financial crisis and political conflicts of the eraY Indicative perhaps of the rift that had developed between the clergy and their Maya parishioners, priests were among the early victims of the Caste War. However, they were also viewed by both sides as an important part of the solution. During the first years of the war, about twenty clerical diplomats sought to negotiate peace with the Maya rebels. Beginning in early 1848, Bishop Guerra selected Jose Canuto Vela to head the ecclesiastical peace commissions to be located at Tekax (Vela's hometown), Valladolid, and Sotuta. At great risk to his own life, Vela met with Jacinto Pat, rebel leader and fellow Barbachanista, in order to negotiate a peace. His efforts led to the ill-fated Treaty of Tzucacab in April 1848.28 As Maya forces nearly overran the entire peninsula in late spring that same year, the clergy continued to play important roles. Bishop Guerra did not abandon Merida at its darkest hour, hoping his presence would help keep morale high among the citizens and defenders of the capital. The prelate agreed to sell much of the cathedral's treasure in order to resupply soldiers in arms. Sales produced at least forty-five thousand pesos in revenues. 29 Priests such as Vela also remained to assist in organizing relief for the refugees who had flooded into the city. When the crisis passed, by early July he and others continued their efforts to negotiate peace and to resettle those Maya who had surrendered to militia forces. Their presence near the front lines and on various expeditions into Maya strongholds helped secure pacification of some rebels, reestablish a sense of order in war-torn towns, and encourage humanitarian action on the part of troops. Although the complaints of the rebels included various accusations of mistreatment, bias, or neglect against individual priests before the war, the Maya also valued the services of captive clergymen as translators, negotiators, and advisers once hostilities began. Priests acted in these capacities for Yucatecan militia forces as well. In spite of occasional disagreements over the commissioners' efforts to arrange truces, military and civil officers alike seemed to hold the priests in high regard and often sought their services. 30 Vela became a close friend of the prominent commander Colonel Jose Eulogio Rosado and frequently translated dispatches between Maya leaders and government authorities throughout the Caste War. Vela also used his political contacts to condemn abuses he saw committed by greedy opportunists with government contracts to supply the troops. He witnessed many campaigns and accompanied Mexican General R6mulo Diaz de la Vega on his expedition in 1852 to Chan Santa Cruz, the Maya stronghold. Another priest, Juan de la Cruz Hoil, negotiated the initial but short-lived peace of 1851 with the rebels at Chichanha. Working for a settlement of the conflict, soldiers and priests alike shared many hardships and dangers. These experiences cemented friendships and gave all reason to question the wisdom of earlier political actions. Under these circumstances, further attacks on the church and its clergy by 1861

Jose Canuto Vela and Yucatan's "Benign" Clergy / 183 must have seemed senseless, perhaps even dangerous, to Yucatecans from the elite class like Justo Sierra. The motives behind his plea to the Mexican government to protect the Yucatecan church from additional financial burdens and his praise of the clergy's restraint in the face of prior reform measures become clearer when one considers the history of civil-ecclesiastical relations during the previous two decades. In their struggle to modernize Yucatan following independence from Spain, Yucatecan liberals had instituted reforms regarding the church and its clergy, but those who later experienced the Caste War perhaps came to regret the instability created by these measures and to respect the clergy for its responses. In summary, recent findings do not entirely support conjecture that a high degree of close familial ties between clerics and the elite class explains the muted anticlericalism of Yucatecans. Research to date seems to indicate a declining social status among clergymen who entered the priesthood between the late colonial period and 1850. Such a change must have represented ebbing influence among the elite class but at the same time increased opportunity for talented and ambitious priests of lower status to achieve positions of responsibility and prestige. 3l One means through which such clergymen could protect the church's interests and moderate radical liberalism was through political participation. They often held positions within rather than outside the political system. By 1845-1846, on the eve of the Caste War, however, Yucatan's desperate financial situation led to reforms that further weakened an already relatively poor Yucatecan Catholic Church. It is uncertain whether individual clergymen suffered excessive financial losses during the same period, but the ability of the clergy to function in Maya communities was severely impaired. This diminished capacity proved dangerous to the interests of the elite class. The conduct of the clergy during times of national emergency, however, was exemplary in the eyes of civil authorities. Clergy acted in various capacities but especially as peacemakers with the rebels and between members of political factions in the state. By the era of the Reform, officials were arguing that the Yucatecan church deserved protection from additional drains on its income. These would cause further damage to the society as a whole. Benito Juarez responded positively in 1861 to these official requests. His actions seem to confirm further the perception that the clergy in Yucatan did, in fact, enjoy a degree of sympathy and respect toward the church that was rarely expressed by members of the victorious liberal national regime during that era.

Notes 1. See Charles A. Hale, Mexican Liberalism in the Age ofMora, I82I-I8S3 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1968). 2. Ibid., 33-35, 296. 3. Juan Suarez y Navarro, "Informe sobre las causas y carkter de los frecuentes cam-

184 / Lynda S. Morrison bios politicos en el estado de Yucatan y medios que el gobierno de la uni6n debe emplear," in Yucatan ante la creaci6n del estado de Campeche (Mexico City: Ediciones de la Muralla, 1979),18-19. 4. Justo Sierra O'Reilly, "Informes sobre rentas eclesiasticas en el estado de Yucatan," in Yucatan ante la creaci6n, 84, 96. 5. Hernan Menendez Rodriguez, Iglesia y poder: Proyectos sociales, alianzas politicas y econ6micas en Yucatan (I8S7-I9I7) (Mexico City: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, 1995), 27-40. 6. Howard Cline, "Regionalism and Society in Yucatan, 1825-1847: A Study of 'Progressivism' and the Origins of the Caste War" (PhD diss., Harvard University, 1947), 597. 7. Terry Rugeley, Maya Peasantry and the Origins of the Caste Wtzr (Austin: University of Texas, 1996), xv-xvi. 8. According to his birth records, Jose's parents were Andres Vela (or Bela) and Petrona Rojas. The name Canuto can be attributed to a saint, Canute of Denmark, whose feast day is the same as Vela's birth date of January 19. 9. The information regarding Jose Canuto Vela's background is drawn primarily from various documents in the Archivo de la Mitra located in the Yucatan Collections at The University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and The University of Texas at Arlington, Texas. Especially useful were the documents in the Legajo de documentos particulares del Sr. Cura D. Jose Canuto Vela at The University of Alabama and a short biography published by Francisco So sa in Manual de biographia yucateca (Merida: Espinosa e Hijos, 1866). For a more complete treatment, see Lynda S. Morrison, "The Life and Times of Jose Canuto Vela: Yucatecan Priest and Patriot (1802-1859)" (PhD diss., University of Alabama, 1993). IO. John L. Stephens, Incidents of Travel in Yucatan (Merida: Produccion Editorial Dante, 1990), 1:82-83. II. Raymond Harrington, "The Secular Clergy in the Diocese of Merida de Yucatan, 1780-1850: Their Origins, Careers, Wealth, and Activities" (PhD diss., Catholic University of America, 1983), 79-80, 130, 160-61. 12. Ibid., 54, 74; Cresencio Carrillo y Ancona, "EI Sr. Cura de Santiago Dr. D. Tomas Domingo Quintana, Rasgo biogrifico," La Guirnalda (Merida: Espinoza, 186r), 132. 13. "Concursos a Curatos," documents dated May 2,1834, May 29,30,1836, and June r3, 1836, in the Yucatan Collection at the University of Texas at Arlington, Texas (hereafter, UTA), reel 213; Sosa, Manual de biografla yucateca, 2IO-II. 14. Hernan R. Menendez Rodriguez, "EI sueno de una nacion Yucateca: La constituci6n de 1841," Por Esto! Unicornio, April 7, 1991, 14; Moises Gonzalez Navarro, Raza y Tierra: La guerra de las castas y elhenequen (Mexico City: EI Colegio de Mexico, 1970), 69. Among the progressive reform principles contained in the 1841 constitution were freedom of religious beliefs, abolition of all fueros and privileges for the clergy, and direct election of members to the executive and legislative branches of government. 15. Serapio Baqueiro, Ensayo hist6rico sobre las revoluciones de Yucatan desde el ano de I840 hastaI864, ed. Salvador Rodriguez Losa (Merida: Ediciones de la Universidad Autonoma de Yucatan, 1990), 2:145-53,4:150-55; Juan Francisco Molina Solis, Historia de Yucatan desde la independencia de Espana hasta la epoca actual, 2 vols. (Merida: Talleres Grificos de "La Revista de Yucatan," 1921), 2:90-91, 235-36. 16. "Legajo de documentos particulares del Sr. Cura D. Jose Canuto Vela," document

Jose Canuto Vela and Yucatan's "Benign" Clergy / 185 dated April 10, r855, in Yucatan Collection, University of Alabama, Y:I reel 4; Molina Solis, Historia, 2:275-76. The Plan of Ayutla outlined the means of reestablishing a republic after the dictatorship of Santa Anna. r7. This theory seems to gain support in light of the subsequent struggles within and without the church during the Porfiriato. See Menendez Rodriguez, Iglesia y poder. r8. Harrington, "Secular Clergy," 38-39. 19. Cline, "Regionalism," 601-04; Archivo Notarial, Patron, r827, no. 124, documents dated September 20, 1827, and April 27, r827, in Yucatan Collection, UTA, reel 50; Harrington, "Secular Clergy," 54, 74. Church funds also served as capital for the business ventures of laymen. This role of the Yucatecan church during the same period merits further study. Vela continued to borrow from such funds until r845, but by r847 his source for capital became a laywoman. This change corresponds to the dates of the church's greatest financial crisis in Yucatan. 20. Cline, "Regionalism," 605-06. 21. Harrington, "Secular Clergy," 287-93, 327-29. 22. Archivo Notarial, Patron, r859, document nos. 83-86, entered August II, r859, in Yucatan Collection, UTA, reel 71; El Siglo Diez y Nueve, December 6, r850, 2. 23. An interesting comparison can be made between the careers of Padre Doctor Don Raymundo Perez y Gonzilez and Vela, whose lives overlapped. Perez was ordained in the latter years of the colonial period, received a seminary degree, with the help of Jose Matias Quintana Roo obtained a lucrative curato, and amassed a fortune. More conservative than the younger Vela, he denounced the sanjuanistas but later defected to the independence party, perhaps in order to co-opt the movement in an independent Yucatan. He dabbled in politics but later came to disdain them. Perez's education, wealth, and power within the church far exceeded that of Vela, but each took advantage of liberal economic policies to enhance their financial positions. Terry Rugeley, Of Wonders and Wise Men: Religion and Popular Cultures in Southeast Mexico, I8oo-I876 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001), 39-63. 24. Harrington, "Secular Clergy," 284-85, 333; Sierra O'Reilly, "Informes sobre rentas," 96. 25. T. G. Powell, "Priests and Peasants in Central Mexico: Social Conflict during 'La Reforma,'" Hispanic American Historical Review 57 (May 1977): 297, 30r; Harrington, "Secular Clergy," 30, 56. 26. Complaints against clergymen were recorded in the letters of rebel leaders; see Victoria Bricker, The Indian Christ, the Indian King (Austin: University of Texas Press, 198r),92- 103· 27. Crescencio Carrillo y Ancona was convinced that secularization of the Franciscan clergy and liberal measures directed against the finances of the church were the causes of the social breakdown leading to the Caste War. He expressed this conviction in his work EI

Obispado de Yucatdn: Historia de su fundaci6n y de sus obispos desde el siglo XVI hasta elXIX seguida de las constituciones sinodales de la di6cesis (Merida: Fondo Editorial de Yucatan, 1979) and in his Vida del V Padre Fray Manuel Martinez, celebre Franciscano Yucateco 0 sea estudio historico sobre la extinci6n de la orden Franciscana en Yucatdn y sobre sus consecuencias (Merida: Gamboa Guzman y Hermano, r883). Vela's report to the government, published in EI Siglo r9, no. r (1850): r-3, reflected similar sentiments.

186 / Lynda S. Morrison 28. Baqueiro, Ensayo hist6rico, 2:175-79. The Treaty of Tzucacab was signed by Jacinto Pat and Miguel Barbachano but was rejected by rivals in both camps, in part because it gave the two leaders exceptional powers. 29. Carrillo y Ancona, Obispado, 2:39-41. 30. Baqueiro, Ensayo hist6rico, 4:67-77; E! Penix, December I, 1850, 2; El Penix, January 10, 1851, I; Bo!etin Oficia!, April 22, 1850, 4. 31. Declining influence among the elite would help explain the determination of the church's hierarchy to reassert that influence during the latter years of the nineteenth century through whatever means possible, as Hernan Menendez Rodriguez has noted in the works cited above.

9 From Santa Iglesia to Santa Cruz Yucatecan Popular Religion in Peace and War, 1800-1876 Terry Rugeley

In July 1847 the peninsula of Yucatan erupted in a prolonged rural rebellion known as the Caste War. The uprising grew out of a complex welter of tax problems, political violence, land issues, and stresses on the traditional Maya elites. Peasant insurgents swept westward toward Merida, but within a year their initiatives faded into defeat as a reorganized state army reclaimed town after town and compelled an agonizing retreat into the forests of the east. Rebel leaders responded with the Speaking Cross, an oracle/deity that preached war to the death. The cross, which variously appeared in trees, grottos, and special tabernacles, exceeded all expectations by rallying the loyalties and energy of the demoralized peasant rebels, dominating eastern forest society for many decades to come, and eventually outliving the conflict to become a Maya Catholic sect that is still prevalent in the rural areas of Quintana Roo. 1 What were the cultural origins of this new sect? Rather than focusing on preColumbian roots, this essay proposes to explore how various social functions and dynamics, prevalent and well documented in Yucatan for the first half of the nineteenth century, continued in the rebel territory of Chan Santa Cruz. 2 The generals who created and directed this cult drew upon the peninsulas long religious traditions-above all, the strains of popular piety and impiety. In particular, it is possible to trace at least three major strands of historical experience from the late colonial and early national period into the formation of Chan Santa Cruz culture and society. Chief among these are the norms and practices of the Yucatecan priesthood, the rise of popular anticlericalism, and the icon cults that existed in both town and country. The trappings of colonial Catholicism, as well as its dissensions and ambiguities, continued in the religion of the new society, which had its own disjunctions between elites and masses. Needless to say, the matter of popular culture raises some thorny issues, particularly about that culture's problematic relationship with the official doctrines promulgated by elite hierarchies. The world of the people is seldom a simple reversal of official knowledge, I would argue. 3 The view of popular culture as an inverse mirror of the elite world-a world turned upside down-has some truth, but this viewpoint's extremity, its singular lack of subtlety, disqualifies it as the exclu-

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sive tool of analysis. Nor does popular culture operate by a totally different set of symbols and beliefs, even though in regions such as Yucatan, where a foreign empire imposed its ways on a conquered people, much of the indigenous culture usually survives. 4 Rather, the two cultural modes tend to overlap. The elites and lower classes of society share some points, differ radically on others, and in other cases maintain beliefs and activities that have no counterpart in the other culture. To the historian the shared traits and beliefs are often the most interesting, since they point to moments when a colonialized people try to solve their problems using artifacts of a culture they reject but also have internalized and accepted to a large degree. 5 It is this dissonance that gives form, and often poignance, to their story. And there are few better case studies of such dissonance than the story of how the cult of the Speaking Cross came to be.

Priests and Parishioners A first and critical contributor to popular religious culture was the church's authoritarian tradition. The generals of Chan Santa Cruz drew from a long-established system in which the Catholic Church claimed exclusive religious authority, and in which its religious power abetted state rule at virtually all points. The central figure in this system was the village priest. Then as now, the Catholic Church worked through a system of local curas, or pastors; however, in those days the cura enjoyed much greater discretionary powers, particularly with regard to his indigenous parishioners. Higher religious authorities such as the pope or even the bishop in Merida occupied little space in the minds of locals, but the cura's decisions touched almost every aspect of village life. Clerical authority and privilege comprised a basic plank of nineteenth-century Mexico's conservative political movement. Sometimes dismissed as mindless reaction, Catholic conservatism drew from deep concerns facing late-colonial and early national society. Many elite adherents of this cause feared the potential fragmentation of a people split along lines of race, class, and province, and they clung to Spanish Catholicism as the one heritage capable of uniting those fragments. Perhaps they argued tendentiously, since social peace also preserved their own highly privileged positions, but their analysis was nonetheless an important part of the political landscape. This position found articulate and thoughtful spokesmen in priests like Raymundo Perez, whose polemic in the 1813 newspaper El aristarco lays out an intellectual manifesto for clerical autonomy. 6 Society, he argued, needed the self-governing priesthood as a counterbalance to potentially corrupt secular governments. Perez also insisted that the society's general acceptance of Catholic rites and doctrines necessarily created the onus of subsidizing the institution through taxes and obedience. Meanwhile, lay cultural conservatives dominated most of the extant pre-Reform literary production of the peninsula, and many of their works, such as the articles and essays of El registro yucateco, underscore the importance of

Yucatecan Popular Religion in Peace and War / 189 hierarchical social orderings based on dogmas of race and a colonial Catholicism. One of the journal's regular contributors, Juan Jose Hernandez, put the matter nicely in a poetic epigram: "All society is arranged / with every station according to its station / To that end the people keep plowing / and the priests of the altar keep praying."? Despite Hernandez's rather pat formula, however, the clergy's relation with its most important clientele-the indigenous peasantry-defied simple categorization. Indeed, so important was the cura that even though a part of the official church, his status and spiritual ministrations had integrated themselves into folk consciousness. There can be little doubt that rural Maya accepted and indeed demanded the rites of the church as a normal part of life passages; births, marriages, and, above all, deaths demanded priestly services. 8 Many of these dovetailed gracefully with preexisting Maya beliefs; baptism, for example, served as a kind of warm-up for the Maya ceremony of jetz-mek, in which the sponsor carries the infant on his hip.9 Peasants also honored church rites for the deceased. The colonial church had redefined sacred space, over time making churchyards the accepted repository of departed loved ones; Maya demanded church burial except in those periods of fiscal crisis when they lacked money, or when curas momentarily drove up fees. 10 Peasants kept somewhat more aloof from matrimony, since sexual mores often put them at odds with church doctrines of the permissible, but it is nonetheless probable that the majority of unions enjoyed official sanction. Curas offered more worldly benefits as well. They provided an enormous amount of patronage at the local level, whether through the Maya church staff or through their economic patronage. In those days rural churches were maintained in much finer condition than the picturesque near-ruins that one finds today, and the upkeep of the building and grounds provided monetary incentives for launderers, messengers, candle makers, gardeners, and, above all, albafiiles, or masons. Yucatecan church construction peaked between the late 1600s and the end of the eighteenth century, when curas undertook at least thirty major construction or remodeling works. I I But refurbishing and repair remained important projects for ambitious curas. For example, when Padre Raymundo Perez first came to the parish of Hoctlin in 1806, he paid for massive refurbishings that employed numerous Maya construction workers.12 The same is true for Antonio Mais of Tihosuco, whose 1835 reconstructions after a lightning storm are still commemorated in the church's interior. l3 Priests provided the necessary capital and administrative expertise for community projects like well digging or the sale of products to markets beyond the village. At critical moments, then, they served as the linchpin of rural employment and growth. Peasants also found the cura a valuable ally in the innumerable conflicts, quarrels, and lawsuits that beset rural life. His wealth, his literacy, his skill in negotiations and legal matters, and his broader political horizons made him the senior partner in many a patron-client relationship. One of the many cases of priest-

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peasant alliance came in 1832: when peasants living on the outskirts of Tixcacaltuyu went to advance their suit against the subdelegado (at that time, a rural tax official) of Sotuta over rights to a certain rural property, they solicited the assistance of the local cura, Jose Demetrio Berzunza, in carrying their petition to the authorities in Merida. 14 Independent peasant action was not impossible, but it certainly prospered with the help of Hispanic allies. At the same time, priests enjoyed an enormous and frequently exploitative power over their Maya parishioners. The first and most important came in the form of obventions, an annual head tax of twelve and a half reales for men and nine for women-no mean sum for people who in many instances lived on the outskirts of the money economy.IS Maya appear to have paid these in a combination of products and hard currency. However, by 1821 it had become a common practice for 10cal landowners to front the obvention fees for an entire village and then call upon the peasants to work off their collective debt in labor on the landowner's estate. Obvenciones, together with a multitude of assorted church fees, thus provided the key device for capital accumulation (as much as two thousand pesos annually in the more populous parishes) and the leverage mechanism for recruiting peasant labor. IG Priests also imposed an extensive moral scrutiny, one not always welcomed by the Maya peasants who were its principal objects. Continuing a tradition born in the Spanish conquest, the rural padres struggled to keep indigenous peasants gathered into villages in order to better access and supervise them. The congregational imperative inherently conflicted with the peasants' tendency to scatter in search of fresh milpa land. Moreover, the peninsula witnessed ongoing jurisdictional quarrels between priests of the village of origin and priests of the area to which peasants had emigrated. The church also imposed strict guidelines on marriage, particularly with regard to unions that European custom defined as too close in bloodline. Nevertheless, Maya learned to work the church system of dispensas, or dispensations, whereby borderline cases could obtain special permission to marry for a fee. The records show, for example, that Maya widowers had the habit of marrying the sisters of their late wives, something that called for the dispensa de ajinidad (whereas Hispanics were much more inclined to seek dispensas de consanguinidad, or permission to marry blood cousins) .17 The extensive use of such special permissions was a compromise between Spanish and Maya cultures. Finally, the official religious structure established or at least supervised many of the niches in which Maya peasants would apply their creative energies. Women played critical roles as pious seculars known as beatas, or else acted as the midwives who administered their own form of prayers at birth. 18 Although the more formal institution of cofradia, or lay brotherhood, declined from the 1770S onward, various forms of prestigious piety continued after 1821. 19 These included processions, novenas (nine-day prayer rituals), and even cofradfa behavior that was now internalized in the setting of the hacienda. 20 The church also sponsored an official

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staff of Maya church assistants. These included musicians; groundskeepers; the fiscal (building superintendent) of the church; the maestros de doctrina, who taught the fundamentals of catechism to Maya children; and the maestros cantores, who memorized and recited Catholic prayer for a variety of circumstances. These individuals enjoyed prestige within their village, even though their roles were not part of a rigid civil-religious hierarchy as found in other parts of Mexico and Guatemala: once a maestro, always a maestro. 21 Beyond that, certain other perquisites accompanied their permanent tenure, including a modest salary and the highly favored exemption from taxes. The church also utilized the (pivotal) services of the batab, the indigenous village headman or cacique who enjoyed special access to and influence over his people. Batabs performed or assisted in three critical church functions: they conducted censuses of the local population; they saw to it that local peasants observed the mass and the sacraments; and they collected church taxes. This latter duty would prove most critical in later years, since they routinely received a 4-5 percent cut on the collections as well as privileged access to the church's fund of loan capital; loss of church patronage in the 1840S contributed directly to the emergence of discontent among these important Maya elites. 22 Hispanic priests, however, were not the only ones who enjoyed special powers in dealing with the supernatural. Various figures of the Maya world also commanded varying status as seers, holy men, and servants of the Spirit. Many dabbled in the mysteries of herbal healing, yet beyond them in both learning and occult power stood the h-men ("he who does"), a shaman direct from pre-Columbian times. These figures knew highly syncretized prayers to the ancient rain gods of the four directions and could predict the future or find the cause of illness by looking into their seer-stones, or saastunes; moreover, they understood the luxuriant variety of supernatural devils and denizens and protectors that the Maya had maintained alongside the official Christian god and saints. The h-men prospered not only in the remote interior, but also in villages close to Merida. Of all the practices of rural folk culture, this one alone found no place within the gamut of orthodoxy; hence, it existed beneath the level of officialdom. 23 In strictly ethnic terms, it is often hard to pinpoint where one culture ended and the other began. For the inhabitants of rural society, whether Spanish, Maya, or some combination thereof, the constituent parts of the religious complex could be broken down and reassembled to a considerable degree. Certainly at one extreme lay high orthodoxy, and at another, perhaps in some remote hinterland of the south, pre-Hispanic remnants still prospered; but for the majority, the truth about the supernatural world lay somewhere in between. Mayas remembered the gods known as pahatunes or chaakswho brought the rains, but they also venerated Jesus Christ and the saints, who were never, in fact, entirely distinguishable from their pre-Columbian equivalents. The Spanish and mestizo peoples who were gradually gaining in the countryside thought of themselves as good Catholics, but they too knew something about the ancient lore of the land, and more than once they

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dabbled in the cures and prophesies that the Maya wise men offered. Certainly this was the case in Conkal in 1845, when the h-men offered rain ceremonies on behalf of numerous farmers, including certain local Hispanics. 24 And it is still the case today, when a good h-men, a seasoned practitioner with a talent for battling evil spells, can draw high-paying clients from Merida and Campeche. Remote cornfields were not the only scenes of religious heterodoxy. The cities and towns also witnessed behaviors that were probably not what Pope Alexander VI had in mind when he entrusted Spain with evangelizing the Americas. Feast days like Corpus Christi invited revelers whose behavior was anything but pious, and its processions involved men dressed as giants and painted devils. Spending on public piety at times degenerated into costly competitions. Urban religious events of almost every sort became opportunities for gambling, drinking, bullfights, extravagant clothes, dancing, and sexual flirtations. Just as rural religiosity expanded to include the vast palette of syncretic folk beliefs, so too urban piety expanded to include almost anything that nineteenth-century Yucatecans found entertaining. 25 In sum, the colonial Catholic Church bequeathed to the nineteenth-century Yucatecans a structure, a set of roles, and a body of doctrines and rituals that informed popular knowledge of the sacred. It allowed people to know where they stood with the Almighty; it gave them the tools to set things right in times of trouble. It prescribed a strict set of rules regarding acceptable beliefs and behaviors, but in popular application these rules were often violated. The village priest was the central figure in this system. He and his doctrines did not entirely displace older Maya beliefs, but the customs and structures surrounding him proved to have an enormous permanence in rural affairs. Strands and themes of this official cult continue to inform popular religiosity, just as they did during the emergence of Chan Santa Cruz.

The Anticlerical Mood Catholicism may have had no rivals as the official religion, but hegemonies breed counter-hegemonies. So it was that the people whom the church took as its congregation demonstrated a persistent streak of hostility to the institution and its servants. In a sense the church had cornered itself by its own absolutism. Protestantism exercised virtually no influence in Yucatan, and for most of the century dissenters found no alternative religions to which they might gravitate. Like Spain or Italy, nations where Catholicism has enjoyed a virtual monopoly, anti-Catholicism thus became a kind of creed in itself: a religion of antireligion, an unsystematized disbelief in which the individual defined himself through a negative posture toward the church, its doctrines, its regalia, and, above all, its priests. Hence the anticlerical mood, not only in Yucatan but in all of nineteenth-century Mexico. Why was there a hatred of priests? In large part the anticlerical mood drew from

Yucatecan Popular Religion in Peace and War / 193 an increasingly secular and individualistic worldview that formed one of the common threads of Mexican liberalism. This hydra-headed movement had complex origins that included economic growth, a rise in both rural and urban populations, increasing literacy and communication, a new worldview emphasizing rationality and individual rights, and the Spanish Bourbon administration's steady assault on the Crown's old partner in colonialism, the church. Regarding this last point, William B. Taylor's recent study of priests and parishioners in Central Mexico documents the steady erosion of church prerogatives throughout the eighteenth century; while linked to state-level initiatives, and aimed in many ways at redefining the role of Mexico's indigenous peasantry, the changes often put village priests in the middle of social conflict. 26 Indeed, the village cura stood in the way, both socially and economically, of the social currents of economic individualism. Priests had privileged access to peasant taxes, a protected status as accumulators of loan capital, and a degree of literary and legal abilities usually superior to those of the average Hispanic-facts that did not always endear the padres to their congregation. Anticlericalism formed one of the most common features of liberalism: an issue often more emotional than reasoned, one that resonated to some degree among the indigenous masses whose labor and scant resources underwrote the preReform church. Judging by its cometlike returns (in 1900-1905 and 1924-1929, for example), anticlerical ism was also one of the most enduring contributions of Mexico's nineteenth-century political thought. 27 As nearly as can be determined, the anticlerical mood of Yucatan's early national period did not find its most strident voice among prominent oligarchs and landowners. Such men had intimate family and economic relations with the church, and consequently found little motive to rain blasphemies on the land. The best and perhaps most ironic example of this fact was Santiago Iman, the forty-yearold Tizimfn merchant and military officer who launched a successful break with Mexico in 1839 by promising his peasant soldiers relief from church taxes. Iman's family had long connections with the church; his father had made much of his wealth by taking contracts as a tithe collector for the church. Santiago Iman himself remained on good terms with numerous priests (including his own nephew) after the revolt, and appears to have adopted his anticlerical platform only from sheer expediency.28 It would be a secondary level of Creoles and mestizos who spearheaded the anticlerical assault. Such men dreamed of opportunity regardless of the social cost. Less propertied and less scrupulous than the great patriarchs, they resented the privileged position that priests enjoyed in municipal life, and they found that peasants, while otherwise devout Catholics of the folk variety, responded to demagogy against clerical authority and church taxes. Knowledge of rural life thus filtered upward through the mestizos and lesser Hispanics to men like Iman and, by extension, to state political life. A Belizean official who met one of the most important of

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Iman's lieutenants (Vito Pacheco) in 1849 during the height of the Caste War dryly remarked that he "does not appear to be very partial to padres in general"; the remark could have applied to scores of others. 29 One of the most interesting and best documented of the anticlerics was Joaquin Leston. Nothing is known of this Yucatecan heretic's past, but he appears to have emerged from the ranks of lesser Hispanics-his rootlessness disqualifies him as an oligarch. In the 1820S and 1830S Leston wandered from town to town offering his own version of antichurch rhetoric and his own peculiar vision of human life and the cosmos. In regard to the sacrificial wine of the mass, he once remarked that the priests had a saying: " 'The smell for thee and the broth for me,' that's what the priests say-then they take a shit." These sorts of blasphemies raised eyebrows when spoken under the bucolic porticos ofYaxcaba, where saintly Padre Bartolome del Granado Baeza, famous for his 1813 ethnology of the Maya peasants, had so long presided over the faithful. Clearly a new and impious age was dawning. And human nature? Leston explained to scandalized townsmen that the soul died with the body, "as happens with the beasts and the plants." Men "are born as plants are born," a kind of naturalist philosophy that smacked of the French Enlightenment. 3D Baeza drummed him out of town, but Leston resurfaced a few years later in Valladolid, now as a minor political official bringing charges against the local clergy.31 For all of its processions and pious brotherhoods, then, Yucatan concealed a darker, more disdainful side of religious thought. Anticlericism overlapped with a larger spectrum of complaints and dissatisfactions regarding the job performance of rural priests. An examination of the complaints filed against parish priests in the years before Mexico's 1857 Reform provide some idea of what locals expected of their clergy and how they were often disappointed. Carelessness or incompetence in performing clerical duties ranked high. The charge covered enormous ground. Some priests failed to maintain the buildings, leading townsfolk to grow disgusted with a deterioration that reflected badly on the whole community.32It was also true that people wanted to hear their spiritual beliefs clearly articulated-through sermons, through conversation, through teaching. For the more learned members of the clergy, such as the incomparable Dr. Raymundo Perez y Gonzalez of Hoctlin, this presented no problem. 33 But many lacked his talent and training, and their rambling performances antagonized even the most patient. 34 Another common charge was sexual indiscretion. In many ways the ant iclerics were making the easy accusation, since everyone knew that priests took vows of chastity. But the complaints were sufficiently common, and often enough acknowledged, to reveal that clerical laxity was common. 35 One such case involved Ignacio Romero, a secularized Franciscan who in 1821 found life outside the monastery too difficult, and so took up with a certain Guadalupe Gonzalez to ease his burdens. Romero ultimately lost Gonzalez to another man, but his story would repeat itself several times over the coming years. 36 Without a lengthy review of this

Yucatecan Popular Religion in Peace and War / I95 and similar cases, suffice it to say that the issue was not self-defining, bur rather depended on a matrix of issues. Rural folk tolerated a priest's affair when the individual in question was mature and responsible and the relationship carried on with discretion. Sexual relations were usually consensual. But morality issues went arm in arm with questions of local ecclesiastical aurhority. When some priest, official, or hacendado (large landowner) trespassed into someone else's bailiwick, he risked having his dirty laundry brought up before the authorities in Merida. While many of the allegations were mere embellishment, they often contained a core of truth. A second source of anticlerical discourse was the overtaxed and over-scrutinized peasantry. Historical writings have tended to regard liberal opposition to the church as anathema to the socially conservative rural peasantry. This may have been true in other parts of Mexico, but Yucatec Maya nursed a deep anticlerical streak that often led them into alliances with ambitious secular locals. Peasants probably nursed this sort of ambivalence toward any authority figures-they understood that patrons can be exploiters as well-but in Yucatan the relationship with curas was particularly strong, and particularly problematic. Indeed, the origins of the Caste War remain incomprehensible if we fail to take into account Maya participation in this "folk liberalism."37 Peasant hostility to exorbitant church taxes, for example, served as the critical leverage point during the military recruitments of the I840s. Indeed, there is no documentary evidence that Santiago Iman's recruiters offered land, debt forgiveness, or anything else other than an abolition of the hated church obventions. 38 A certain ambivalence therefore permeated Maya peasant attitudes toward the village cura, an ambivalence that still survives imprinted upon the recorded Maya folklore. In numerous tales, villagers depend upon the cura to bless the bullets used to kill such monsters as the huay chivo (were-goat), or to exorcise scenes habituated by the devil.3 9 But curas could also be the burt of jokes, as with the story of a priest who accidentally acquires a magic ring that, during mass, causes his penis to grow to unnatural sizes. 40 This hatred of obventions emanated more from the lower class of peasants. Maya elites, on the contrary, lived by and for the tax collection process, and enjoyed not only a percentage of the take bur also privileged access to church funds as loan capital. They guarded their tax-exempt status jealously, and when threatened could defend themselves with a surprising vigor, turning on their old patrons the priests if necessary. Perhaps the best example of this comes from Tepich, the small eastern hamlet where the Caste War erupted. When the local minister demanded personal taxes from batab Juan Bautista Canul, the latter whipped up support among the local Maya by denouncing priests and church taxes. Once a pillar of the system, Canul even hatched an unsuccessful plan to throw the minister off the roof of the church, bur the bishop's office eventually interceded in the conflict. 41 This unusual case shows how tightly anticlerical hostility had woven itself into the daily patterns of life, even among those who were the institution's supposed allies. Such ways of thinking eventually became a point on which Hispanic and peas-

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ant agreed, something that led the Maya into the tenuous and shifting ideologies of liberalism. The tendencies evident in the story of Juan Bautista Canul came to a head in the 1840S when the peninsula's revolt from Mexico empowered peasants to free themselves from church control. The peasant leaders previously charged with collecting these taxes increasingly found that their own position as middlemen and cultural negotiators was eroding, and a critical few, located in the economically separate east, decided to place themselves at the head of popular initiatives, thus giving birth to the Caste War. It was no mere accident that shortly before the war, armed peasants could be heard boasting that "they could kill any priest they wanted."42 Surprisingly, much of this rhetoric faltered in application. Caste War rebels in fact did very little of such killing (only about three or four known cases exist), and were more likely to make special allowances for priests in the communities they raided. Either old reverences, deeply internalized after three centuries of colonialism, continued to stay their hand, or else the rebels were at bottom a kindly people whom circumstances had driven to violence, and who could be momentarily awakened from that violence by values and attitudes symbolized by the church and its representatives.

Icons Few aspects of popular religious piety mattered more than icons. Many people in nineteenth-century Yucatan-and not only Maya peasants-believed that the santos (saints) rose up and walked at night. Such beliefs did not prevent the faithful from working as rational political actors on many occasions, but it did ensure that the santos at times became matters of both public and private disputes. What did they promise for mankind? What did they demand in return? And finally, to whom, if anyone, did they belong? The tendency to idols and icons had deep roots. As the great archaeological ruins document, Maya religiosity had always been iconographic. During the classic period an elite class had controlled and manipulated public religiosity through public monuments to gods and a deified nobility. The same held true for the postclassic Maya states. With the final dissolution of Yucatan's various political leagues in the early 1400s, supernatural authority devolved to the local and even familial level. 43 Like the modern-day Lacandones, the rural Yucatec Maya at the time of the conquest had their own household effigies, which friars like Diego de Landa extirpated only partially and with great effort. 44 Idolatry persisted throughout the colonial centuries as people clung to the old ways, and because the church, eager to stress elements of Christianity that had a counterpart in native experience, urged faith in the power of the saints and reverence for their physical representations. Santos lived in a peculiar world between spiritual essence and worldly property, one that enjoys no ready corollary in the minds of secular moderns. Faith in the literal powers of the object bridged Maya and Spanish culture, particularly

Yucatecan Popular Religion in Peace and War / 197 among the poor. At the same time, however, they were material possessions that Yucatecans bought, sold, traded, stole, borrowed, and bequeathed. In the wills of the state's notarial archives, icons are a commonly mentioned form of property, along with land, houses, debts, and moveable goods. These items typically passed from generation to generation. Among the most intriguing notarial documents in this respect is the will of Gregorio May, the batab of Oman who, condemned to death for purported complicity in the Caste War uprising, bequeathed his santos of Christ and San Antonio, together with instructions for their care and veneration, to his four daughters. The icons had come to him in similar manner from his grandfather Juan de Dios May.45 Like the relics of medieval Europe, icons won adherents to the Catholic faith and for that reason had always been part and parcel of church practice. But they also muddied the waters that the authoritarian church had labored so hard to clear. Like the arrival of money and wage labor, icons enjoyed the potential of being a kind of objectifying medium, a source of spiritual power and authority independent of the person of the priest. By acknowledging such power the priests allowed some fragment of their own religious and worldly authority to slip from their fingers and into peasant hands. It was the same ideological give-and-take that had allowed the church to extend itself throughout disparate European peoples after AD 400, and with similar concessions to local beliefs. 46 Icons also leveled the differences among the Maya themselves: an h-men might possess icons, but so could the average peasant. Part of these icons' appeal lay in their accessibility. Much of church regaliaobjects such as holy oils (santos oleos), relics, vestments, host presses, and of course religious officials and doctrine themselves-remained centrally allocated and controlled. Indeed, designated messengers carried holy oils from Merida to places as far away as Peten, GuatemalaY But if the church wrote the cantos, it was people who carved the santos. Then as now, Maya craftsmen produced effigies of popular saints from the wood of the countryside, the preferred raw material being soft Yucatecan cedar.48 The classic Yucatecan cross-two boards mounted on a pedestal and painted dark green-was even more accessible, given the simplicity of its construction. Not all icons were created equal. Peasants clearly favored certain figures over others, a point documented in both surviving documents and modern anthropological fieldwork. The cross, of course, enjoyed enormous prestige, for the simplicity of its design and construction, its overwhelming importance in Christian symbolism, and perhaps for some indirect associations with pre-Hispanic cosmology. The standard Yucatecan cross was and is dark green, decorated with standard motifs of the crucifixion: these included Jesus' cloak, the Roman soldiers' dice, the tools of torture, the crowing rooster at dawn. As William Christian points out in his study of sixteenth-century Spain, "generalist" santos, those with broad powers and purviews, tend to displace their more specialized counterparts, since

198 / Terry Rugeley the faithful can attribute to them a wider range of miracles, cures, and benevolent intercessions. 49 The widespread popularity of Yucatan's santa cruz (holy cross) would seem to support this argument; unlike, say, Saint Apolinaria of the toothache, the cross might respond to any problem, any dilemma. However, certain individual santos still retained enormous popularity. Yucatecans revered San Antonio for his ability to bring sweethearts; moreover, rural cultivators considered his feast day, June 13, to be the last possible day for rains to begin and hence the last hope for successful plantings. We must also include San Isidro, the patron saint of agriculture, whose own feast day of May 15 coincided, approximately, with the spring rains. Standard iconography represents San Isidro as a farmer wandering the forest with his satchel, his staff, and his faithful pup. Among the common people of the east, the Three Wise Men of Tizimfn promised far greater spiritual protection and guidance. 50 Mother Mary, however, wielded considerably less influence, and her supreme manifestation, the Virgin of Guadalupe, amounted to an import by huaches-the Mexico City elites for whom Yucatecans had little useY The major exception was the famous Virgin of lzamal, but that remained very much an official cult, not one that allowed much control outside a limited circle of Hispanics; moreover, the cult went into a profound decline when fire destroyed the original virgin statue in the early 1840s.52 The pre-I900 history of other peninsular Marian cults, such as Candelaria Virgin of Tibol6n, have thus far received little attention. 53 The complete history of peasant santo cults will never be written, because relations between the poor and their capricious supernatural patrons took place at a secret, unofficial level. The story, however, peeps through in surviving documents, allowing us to point to certain tendencies prevalent throughout the peninsula. At odd moments, one particular icon might come to enjoy a special prestige; the reasons are seldom apparent, but it presumably had to do with the purported apparitions that happened from time to time, or else a favorable turn of events for one of the santo's adherents. Present as well, we must assume, was some untraceable proclivityon the part of the santo's patron/owner, some motive for miracle that led to the cult's promotion and growth. The documents remain silent on this point of santogenesis, although various cases suggest that it had to do with the temperament of a new proprietor, one who was inclined to use the santo in an almost entrepreneurial fashion. One of the most sensational episodes of peasant religious cults took place on the hacienda San Jose outside of Nunkinf in the year 1822. A statue of San Diego belonging to the widow Catalina Pan began attracting local attention as peasants from surrounding pueblos and properties came to pay their respects and advance their requests. Eventually the cult became so profitable that Pan and her sons gave up farming altogether. The church initially countenanced these practices, but when San Diego's revenues began to rival their own, and when the fiestas and drinking rounds to the santo became too obstreperous, the local cura began to apply pressure to end them. Pan ostensibly complied, but in reality relocated her cult to a more re-

Yucatecan Popular Religion in Peace and War / 199 mote part of the parish, where the whole affair resumed again. This time the church staged a raid, confiscated San Diego, and completely ended the cult. 54 Another such case was the cult of San Antonio de la Ciruela. The story began when Santiago Kantun, a Maya peasant of Chablekal, inherited an effigy of San Antonio from his late parents. After several years Kantun began to promulgate a miraculous reputation for the santo; this particular San Antonio, it was said, resided in the trunk fashioned from the ciruela, an indigenous plum tree; waters that Kantun withdrew from a nearby receptacle had the powers to heal. San Antonio de la Ciruela became so popular that peasants made pilgrimages from as far as fifty miles to pay their respects. Kantun operated the cult in partnership with his wife, who also enjoyed special prestige as the santo's guardian. The local church, based in Conkal, tolerated this until the Kantuns began to solicit obventions of their own. The priest at Conkal promptly expropriated the unorthodox San Antonio and kept it in the parish church, despite Kantun's legal protests. 55 In sum, the cult of iconography flourished in a cultural and ideological demimonde. Encouraged by the official church, reverence toward iconography often threatened to take on a life of its own, one that inverted the colonial structure and placed power, both symbolic and material, in the hands of Maya peasants. It was an ambiguity that the church never resolved, and one that would continue in Yucatan in the coming years.

The Caste War Tracing the filaments of religious experience through the war requires some care. A persistent romanticism has tempted us to see the return of pre-Columbian religion in all corners of the war. Religion played a key role, but often it drew from the shared historical experiences of the prewar decades. All of the three dynamics sketched above-the role of the priest, the anticlerical mood, and the cult of iconography-ultimately survived in one form or another when Yucatan's Maya peasantry rose in rebellion in 1847. The iconographic nature of the cross cult is selfevident, but other continuities with pre-1847 Catholicism, together with the evolving role of religion in the Caste War, merit close examination. First and foremost, the Caste War differed from many of the uprisings found in the literature on colonialized peoples in that it did not evolve directly from either a nativist religious movement or from the exhortations of some millenarian prophet. 56 An extensive search of archival materials has thus far revealed no evidence of eitherY The Caste War was not Tomochic. 58 Nor does it seem to have had any relationship to the possible survival of a prophetic Maya calendar. Rather, the conflict grew out of more pedestrian material factors: the intersection of an emerging subregional identity, Hispanic factional strife, thwarted ambitions of the Maya elite, and heightened peasant expectations for tax relief.59 It is true that the war's instigators made certain tall promises that bordered on the millenarian: the testi-

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monies of Maya peasants captured early in the conflict reveal that Jacinto Pat and Cecilio Chi, the initial leaders of the revolt, held preliminary meetings in which they promised to reduce non-Maya males to slavery and females to sexual servitude. GO Mestizo leaders as well, men such as Bonifacio Novelo, repeatedly spoke of tax abolition. G1 But these never verged into the realm of the magical, as in either the Taqui Onkoy of Peru or the santidade movement of sixteenth-century Brazil. G2 Once under way, however, the conflict did assume religious overtones, particularly when the rebels' fortunes started to crumble. To begin with, Pat and Chi understood perfectly the appeal of religious power and iconography on the masses who followed them. They tried to preserve as much as possible the Catholic religious institutions with which the masses were familiar. In 1848, after occupying the town of Peto, Pat conscripted Macedonio Tut, an aspiring maestro cantor who had studied both Spanish and Latin with a local priest, to serve as a kind of substitute clergy for his troops. Significantly, little in Tut's performance suggests other than a carbon copy of the standard Catholic priest, a range of functions that everyone in rural society understood. He was nearly blind but had apparently memorized a great deal of religious formulae. Jacinto Pat also gave him a captured host press that he then used to administer the Eucharist to southern troops, presumably using corn instead of the much rarer wheat. The army captured Tut in 1851 near Bolonchen and carried him to Merida, where he underwent extensive interrogations. Some evidence suggests that his activities were more than his own rather modest accounts would have it: southern military officers, for example, blamed him for preaching millenarian doctrines. The captured "priest" was eventually released. G3 His fate is unknown, but as late as 1858 the official rural clergy still labored to track down and undo the numerous marriages thatTut had performed. G4 But Macedonio Tut served only as a stopgap. Rather, it would be the invention of the Speaking Cross that somehow crystallized rebel needs with religious precedent. The identity of this cult's inventor has sparked some controversy, as is often the case with such movements. G5 Despite a body of essentially speculative literature, however, there is no reason to believe that the cross was anything other than a creation of the generals, whose interests the cross's public utterances always served; the idea of a flesh-and-blood religious prophet named Juan de la Cruz lacks historical credibility.GG The body of captured correspondence found in Mexico's National Defense Archives suggests that initially the cross served as a political instrument of Jose Marfa Barrera, one of the four or five rebel officers who vied for supremacy between 1849 and 1852 after the assassination of Jacinto Pat. G7 A five-year period of transition followed Barrera's assassination in 1852, during which time leadership remained shifting and fragmented. But by 1857 a new general, Venancio Puc, came to dominate Chan Santa Cruz. Puc's manipulation of the cross was both obvious and unquestioned. Under his rule it was the political and economic world, not the religious complex, that carried the greater weight. The Speaking Cross routinely decided in favor of alliances with the Belizean merchants, only moving

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against them when larger questions of political sovereignty were at issue, or when British emissaries failed to act with proper circumspection before the cross's harddrinking and often mercurial patrons. Venancio Puc's own assassination in January 1864 ushered in a period of religious rourinization; nevertheless, the cross cult remained a basis of political authority for the triumvirate of generals-Bonifacio Novelo, Bernabe Cen, and Crescencio Poot-who followed. 68 The functions and ceremonies that surrounded the cross borrowed heavily from the colonial church's own pomp and circumstance. By the time of the cult's apogee under Puc in 1858, choirboys heralded its arrival, while designated priests attended it during state functions, much as the Catholic Te Deums had finalized important acts of state in Yucatan's early national period. 69 The oracle had humble origins in a grotto, but over time its people constructed a massive temple that imitated the style of the old colonial churches, a temple that still survives, intact and much used by the mainstream Catholic Church, in modern-day Felipe Carrillo Puerto. Daily functions also followed long-familiar Catholic ritual; when not prophesying war, the cross heard confessions, meted out punishments, and took in masses and sacrificial candles. Of greater importance, the cross cult followed colonial Catholicism in its need to obliterate other creeds and to inculcate loyalty to the state-in this case the shifting handful of generals who ruled in Chan Santa Cruz. Significantly, one traditional Maya religious authority that did not figure highly in Chan Santa Cruz society was the h-men, the pre-Columbian seer and shaman. The generals understood these individuals' hold over their peasant soldiers; in their quest for centralized power, they crafted a system of religious authority that once more relegated the h-men to a strictly unofficial capacity.l° There are parallels to this response in lower-class revolutions. The former slaves who came to rule Haiti after 1804, for example, became the nation's foremost extirpators of voodoo, in which they accurately discerned a force capable of influencing the masses.71 But like the colonial Catholic Church, initial leaders of the cross cult failed to eliminate their rivals. Given the results of anthropological fieldwork in Quintana Roo throughout the twentieth century, no one can deny that h-men knowledge and activities continued, and as they had done in prewar Yucatan, beneath the level of the state. Even in the 1920S and 1930S, when Alfonso Villa Rojas composed his ethnography of cross villages such as X-cacal and Tusik, and by which point the stratified nature of early rebel society had flattened somewhat, the h-men still remained outside the ranks of the cross cult itself. 72 The old ways had an enormous permanence. Another survival of prewar church religious behavior was the church's role as a clearinghouse for labor. Chan Santa Cruz needed foreign goods and support to survive; consequently, Maya peasants who once worked as jornaleros (day laborers) on haciendas in order to payoff their church taxes now found that the Speaking Cross directed them to serve as labor gangs, usually for the purpose of cutting mahogany along the RIo Hondo. Even after the cult shed some of its more absolutist tenden-

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cies, the ruling generals still relied on their authority, validated in part through religious ideology, to provide chicle tappers for the extractive tropical industry that grew so markedly after 1880,73 Significantly, however, the cross encountered some of the same problems that had dogged the colonial Catholic Church. For all its legendary powers, the Speaking Cross never enjoyed an absolute monopoly on supernatural authority. Devotion tended to follow political-military allegiances, with wayward generals remaining skeptics. We know, for example, that Bonifacio Novelo, a mestizo who was critical in the emergence of the war and who eventually rose to become patron of the cross, had earlier tried to encourage his own rival cult, one dedicated to the Virgin, but apparently without success?4 Nor was Novelo's rival Jose Maria Barrera easily able to bring militarily independent commanders of the south, men such as Florentino Chan, into the cult. 75 Some of these generals had their own santos, for the most part taken from plundered churches. In Mesapich, for example, General Jose Tiburcio Briceno maintained his own Senora de la Concepcion, a santo that was the gift of no less a person than the bishop of Yucatan, Jose Marfa Guerra. 76 As late as 1869, a certain General Eugenio Arana of Xcanha threatened war with Peten Guatemala unless the authorities there returned his potent icon of Santa Rita, carried off by war-weary deserters. 77 The appearance of these less famous santos simply continued the tendency of peasant cult formation that was already evident before 1847. There was also the cross's influence over the masses. This, clearly, was enormous. Individual officers wrote to Chan Santa Cruz asking for pieces of the melted wax of candles lit in the cross's honor; even these thirdhand fragments of the divinity held sway among the masses?8 At various times the cross, or at least the strategic conditions under which it flourished, attracted anywhere from twenty-five thousand to fifty thousand people. However, even here the peasant masses demonstrated the kind of foot dragging and unorthodox ideological adaptations that they previously applied to officials of the Yucatecan church and state. In 1851, when the eastern rebels were reeling under famine and military defeat, numerous Maya soldiers took advantage of amnesty offers by claiming that the cross had in fact instructed them to surrender?9 Like the radical sects during the English Civil War, these foot soldiers of the cause found that God spoke directly to them as well. 80 Individual ownership of particular santos not integral to the cross cult persisted in the east; the practice was alive and well in the twentieth century.81 Finally, the earlier prestige and power of the Speaking Cross was insufficient to prevent divisions in later rebel society, as discontented factions broke off to form their own polities, each built around its own crosS. 82 Both rebels and pacificos continued to demonstrate a profound ambivalence toward the orthodox church and its human agents, the priests. Folk Catholicism still coexisted with the anticlerical tendencies that had been prevalent before 1847. Gen-

Yucatecan Popular Religion in Peace and War / 203 erals occasionally admitted the Catholic clergy as temporary guests into their closed societies, usually to satisfy popular taste for sacraments such as marriage, baptism, and confession. 83 However, there was seldom any doubt as to who made the decisions when orthodox religious authorities came to visit. The generals turned uncooperative and suspicious as soon as they decided that the priests had sufficiently attended the needs of the people. Typical in this regard was the visit of certain unidentified priests in the mid-1850s; their initial warm reception suggested that the church had at last forged a beachhead in Chan Santa Cruz. But within a week's time, General Crescencio Poot suddenly "discovered" that the priests were in fact imposters-possibly true, since imposter priests did indeed operate in those turbulent times. 84 Mter a brief trial, Poot and his fellow officers sent the imposters packing. The southern padfico commanders maintained much the same arrangement. 85 This controlled engagement with outside religious forces satisfied the people's demand for basic services (here, periodic baptisms and marriages) without surrendering the regime's real authority.

Later Peninsular Religiosity While various peasant-officiated cults persisted in unpacified territories,86 Yucatecan society experienced its own changes in religiosity. The liberal Reform of the mid-1850s drew heavily on the anticlerical mood of earlier years. Liberal statesmen bent on removing the church as an economic force discovered that the institution owned little real property on the peninsula, but the reforms of the 1850S did secularize some 900,000 pesos in church-held mortgages and saw to it that the old mechanisms of church finance-in particular, the obvenci6n, or peasant head tax-ended forever, thus preventing recapitalization. Periodic conservative interregnums (the two governorships of Agustin Acereto in 1859-1860 and 1860-1861, together with the French Empire of 1863-1867) did little to change this, since renewed Caste War and struggles for political control trumped church funding as a priority. For devout Catholics, rock bottom probably came under the presidency of Sebastian Lerdo de Tejada (1872-1876), when, if we are to believe the despairing correspondence of rural curas, church financing reached virtual bankruptcy and popular devotion descended to vestigial levels. But Catholicism was not down for the count. The fall of Lerdo in 1876 also brought down his peninsular ally, Governor Eligio Ancona, and while subsequent administrations remained liberal in rhetoric, Yucatecans took their cue from President Porfirio Diaz and let up on attempts to break the church. Manifestations of popular religiosity-cofradias, processions, priests publicly clad in clerical garball made a comeback. With persecutions on the decline by 1877, Campeche's archconservative Jose Maria Oliver de Casares took the opportunity to pen an unpublished history of his city's chapter of Santisimo Sacramento, a bourgeois lay

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organization whose sponsored public events nevertheless became scenes for public rowdiness. 87 An institution that had defined Mexico from 1519 onward now suddenly stepped back from the precipice. Still, the new urbanism by no means brought religious consensus. The revived cofradias shared Porfirian disdain for the rabble and the backward; cofrades now focused on ostentatious piety, not on the primitive mutualism that bound together an older (and more economically precarious) generation. Antique customs lost favor, and public events like the February carnival increasingly fell under staid elite management. Just as rural peasants had developed their own syncretic spirituality, which favored peasants themselves, a small class of educated urbanites also carved out independent paths. The old anti religion of anticlerical ism continued, finding a voice in the governorship of old-guard liberals like Carlos Peon and resurfacing during the years of revolutionary proconsulship under General Salvador Alvarado (1915-1918). Protestant sects remained unknown until the Reverend Maxwell Phillips launched his Presbyterian mission in Merida in 1877.88 More exotic but also more influential was the short-lived but potent spiritualist movement. Drawing on the teachings of the French mystic Allan Kardec, a handful of Merida's intelligentsia threw themselves into seances, Ouija boards, and spirit photography with a gusto bordering on fanaticism. In their view, spirits and humans exchanged communication in a mutual effort to evolve toward supreme knowledge and serenity. The spiritualists received and published messages from such deceased luminaries as Napoleon and Miguel Hidalgo, but above all from a guiding entity known only as Peralta. Not surprising, perhaps, these otherworldly correspondents brought wisdoms gratifying to late ninenteenth-century urban professionals: that the Catholic Church suffocated true spiritual knowledge, that education advanced the process of universal growth, and that revolutions, while they might have had their place in Mexico's past, had probably outlived their usefulness. These and many similar messages found their way into La ley de am or (The Law of Love), a heady and highly creative newspaper that for three years served as one of Mexico's defining spiritualist publications. Spiritualism justified a break from hierarchy and Catholic intellectual supervision, attempted to reconcile scientific progress with religious belief, and placed lay urbanites at the center of religious creativity. The movement appears to have fallen apart in the late 1870S, but dissident religious beliefs-theosophy, Rosicrucianism, and the old trusty bower of spiritualism itself-lived on into the twentieth century, eventually passing their legacies to future religious dissidents. Indeed, the Law of Love still twinkles deep inside the crystals of a New Age movement that is alive and well in modern-day Merida. 89 The strategies that priests adopted to deal with this crisis enabled the church to go on, but at the same time had unintended consequences. Most curas reacted through programs of voluntary contributions and publications aimed at the urbanites. These proved reasonably effective, but at the same time they cut the church off from a rural base. Never a great supplier of services or assistance, it now pro-

Yucatecan Popular Religion in Peace and War / 205 vided virtually nothing for the rural peasantry. This situation had numerous and often contradictory consequences that enabled the wonders of popular religiosity to flourish unmolested into the twentieth century. Even today, most households know something of the popular creencias, or beliefs, that forecast the weather, offer predictions, and tell of how to guard against hexes and bad luck (for example, a dragonfly in the house means a visitor is coming). Maya peasants typically opposed the iconoclasm of revolutionary leaders such as Salvador Alvarado, but less through clerical direction and more because burning santos affronted popular religious sensibilities. Indeed, the recourse to urbanism weakened church influence over rural affairs when the revolution came to call in 1915, and certainly made it a spindly force beside Maya-oriented programs of socialist leaders like Felipe Carrillo Puerto. But as a long-term strategy, the jump to the city succeeded brilliantly. The urban world was Mexico's future, and once securely established there, the church had only to wait until revolutionary fervor declined and government-sponsored public schools bogged down in bureaucracy, underfunding, and elite hostility to the idea of a classless education system.

Conclusions By 1821 the inhabitants of the Yucatan Peninsula had learned to speak a certain shared vocabulary of religion. 90 That vocabulary included understood norms for the role of religious officials and a veneration of icons as religious forces in and of themselves. These were not the beliefs of Hispanics alone. Though forcibly imposed through colonialism, and at all points negotiated with the conquered people, most of the Catholic Church's doctrines, roles, and structures had achieved a widespread acceptance among the Yucatec Maya, despite the simultaneous persistence of spiritual beings and practices that had no Christian counterpart. It was as though they had fulfilled the words of the Chilam Balam, which prophecied that before war would come a time when "two people tried on each other's hats."91 At the same time, the prewar religious vocabulary papered over profound conflicts that carried over into the Caste War. Peasants both respected and resisted their priests. Hispanics were torn between a deeply entrenched Catholic culture and the need to subordinate the church as part of a national economic project; these needs translated respectively into the conservative and liberal movements, whose mutual hostility persisted even as Porfirio Diaz and henequen brought ostensible peace to the peninsula. 92 Catholicism remained intimately linked with the anticlerical mood. The Speaking Cross perpetuated many of these same dynamics. The cult borrowed from certain themes long present in Maya society, but at its core was a peasant composite of elite institutions, heavily informed by the exigencies of military defense. Seen thus, it was less an attempt to defend a beleaguered Maya culture and more the peasant attempt to administer a cultural institution that permeated

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rural society and that was now pressed into service of a dictatorship of the peasantproletariat and geared first, last, and always to political survival. Like colonial Catholicism, it remained vulnerable to heterodoxies and counter-interpretations that reflected the disparities of power and conflicts of interest inherent in rebel society. The cult was first and foremost a creation of the Caste War generals. It struggled through a long period of confusion and competition and only became hegemonic as the particular set of officers who controlled Chan Santa Cruz eliminated rivals or lost them through desertions, peace treaties, or emigration. Even so, it is apparent that other santo cults continued to exist. Moreover, there is little evidence that the Speaking Cross had much influence outside the political space of the rebel leaders; those who remained behind in the Hispanic-dominated territory had little affinity for the cross and its oracular utterances. The generals, like the priests and bishops before them, could not make their doctrines airtight or universal. Novel, heretical viewpoints crept in because rebel doctrines had their basis in a particular view of society that accepted both inequality and the need for periodic adaptations and changes. What emerged, then, was a series of strategies for dealing with popular needs and hostilities. Rebel religion provided an evolving dialogue in which the popular voice-as persistent as that of San Diego of Nunkinf-made itself known in small but important ways.

Notes Much of this chapter is a summary of material presented at greater length in the author's Of Wonders and Wise Men: Religion and Popular Cultures in Southeast Mexico, rSoorS16 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 200I). 1. Regarding the origins of the Speaking Cross, see Don E. Dumond, The Machete and the Cross: Campesino Rebellion in Yucatan (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), 179-98. For some recent ethnographic observations on cruz (cross) religion in Quintana Roo, see Miguel Alberto Bartolome, La dindmica social de los mayas de Yucatdn: Pasado y presente de la situaci6n colonial (Mexico City: Instituto Nacional Indigenista, 1988); Jorge Franco Caceres, "Religiosidad y convivencia mayas," Unicornio 249, January 7,1996,3-7; Caceres, "Eclesialidad cat6lica maya," Unicornio 278, July 28,1996,3-9. 2. Several studies have already pointed to larger contours of religious continuity and change from the colonial to the Caste War period. See Nelson Reed, The Caste war of Yucatan (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1964), 209-20; Victoria Bricker, The Indian Christ, The Indian King: The Historic Substrate ofMaya Myth and Ritual (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 87-n8; and Nancy M. Farriss, Maya Society under Colonial Rule: The Collective Enterprise ofSurvival (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984). New studies on the Caste War include Lorena Careaga Viliesid, Hierofonfa combatiente: Lucha, simbolismo y religiosidad en la Guerra de Castas (Mexico City: Universidad de Quintana Roo, Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnologia, 1998); Paul Sullivan, Xuxub Must Die: The Lost Histories of a Murder on the Yucatan (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004); Martha Herminia Villalobos Gonzalez, El bosque sitiado: Asaltos armados,

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concesiones flrestales y estrategias de resistancia durante la Guerra de Castas (Mexico City: ClESAS, CONACULTA, 2006); and Lean Sweeney, La supervivencia de los bandidos: Los mayas icaiches y la polftica fronteriza del sureste de la penfnsula de Yucatdn, I847-I904 (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, 2006). 3. Early works on the relationship of cultural power relationships tended to paint popular culture as a mirror inverse of dominant culture, the broadest theoretical statement coming from Ranajit Guha in his Elementary Aspects ofPeasant Insurgency in Colonial India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983). For an application of the same theoretical approach, see Irene Silverblatt's Moon, Sun, and Witches: Gender Ideologies and Class in Inca and Colonial Peru (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), 176-81. However, both of these treatments now seem relatively formulaic, and instead have been followed by studies stressing more subtle interpenetrations of institutional and popular religion. For example, see William B. Taylor, Magistrates of the Sacred: Priests and Parishioners in Eighteenth-Century Mexico (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996); and Martin Austin Nesvig, ed., Local Religion in Colonial Mexico (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006). 4. For discussion of some of the problems associated with analyzing popular culture, see Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (Hants, Eng.: Scholar Press, 1978), xiv-xxvii; David Hall, "Introduction," in Stephen L. Kaplan, ed., Understanding Popular Culture: Europe from the Middle Ages to the Nineteenth Century (New York: Mouton, 1984), 1-18; Jacques Ie Goff, "The Learned and Popular Dimensions of Journeys in the Otherworld in the Middle Ages," in Kaplan, Understanding Popular Culture, 19-37. 5. James C. Scott in particular has stressed the importance of studying cultural interfaces and deciphering from the opposed meanings. Among other publications, see Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990). 6. Hemeroteca Jose Maria Pino Suarez (hereafter, HPS), El aristarco 18, 1813. 7. HPS, "El pueblo y el clero," Museo yucateco I (1841): 80: "Todo en la sociedad esta

arreglado / Cada estado subsiste en su estado; / Por eso el puebl se mantiene arando / Y los ministros del altar orando." 8. The massive numbers of Maya registered in these sacraments gives some idea of their participation. Extant marriage records for the pre-Reform period are to be found in the church registries of the Merida cathedral. 9. Robert Redfield and Alfonso Villa Rojas, Chan Kom: A Maya Village (Washington, DC: Carnegie Institute of Washington, 1934), 188-90; Robert Redfield, The Folk Culture of Yucatan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1941), 123-25. IO. Stephanie Jo Smith explores peasant reactions to burial fees during times of crisis in ''A Reconstruction of Early Nineteenth-Century Valladolid, Mexico" (Master's thesis, University of Oklahoma, 1997), 43-44II. Secretaria de Hacienda y Credito Publico, Catdlogo de construcciones religiosas del estado de Yucatdn (Mexico City: Talleres Graficos de la Nacion, 1945), misc. pages; Miguel A. Bretos, Iglesias de Yucatdn (Merida: Produccion Editoriales Dante, 1992), 16. 12. Archivo Historico de la Arquidiocesis de Yucatan (hereafter, AHAY), Cuentas de Fabrica, Hoctun, misc. dates, 18n. 13. AHAY, Decretos y Oficios, September 26, 1835, Tihosuco. Mais's initatives were hampered by the cholera epidemic, which dispersed his peasant laborers.

208 / Terry Rugeley 14. AHAY, Concursos a Curatos, box 34, June 26, 1826. 15. See Terry Rugeley, Yucatan's Maya Peasantry and the Origins of the Caste Wiu; I800I847 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996), 25-26. 16. See ibid., 72-78. 17. AHAY, "Libro en que se toma raz6n de las dispensas de parentezco, comenzado el 24 de abril de 1834 hasta 23 de mayo de 1846," unclassified document. 18. The 1803-1804 pastoral visits make repeated references to the critical-and unsupervised-role of midwives; see AHAY, Visitas Pastorales, misc. dates. 19. Farriss, Maya Society, 371-74; Robert Patch, Maya and Spaniard in Colonial Yucatan (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), 187-88. 20. For a case study of one such hacienda-cofradia, including the use of novenas and processions, see Terry Rugeley, "Cofradia, hacienda y pueblo: El culto de San Antonio Xocneceh," Unicornio 222, July 2,1995,3-8. 2I. Features that did not exist in Yucatan included several of the hallmarks of Chiapan fiesta systems, including a ladder of ceremonial office and the alternation between civil and religious hierarchies. On the Chiapan systems, see Jan Rus and Robert Wasserstrom, "Civil-Religious Hierarchies in Central Chiapas: A Critical Perspective," American Ethnologist 7, no. 3 (1980): 466-78; and John K. Chance and William B. Taylor, "Cofradias and Cargos: An Historical Perspective on the Mesoamerican Civil-Religious Hierarchy," American AnthropologistI2, no. I (1985): 1-26. 22. See Rugeley, Yucatan's Maya Peasantry, 29, 100-0I. 23. On the role of the h-men, see Redfield and Villa Rojas, Chan Kom, 74-77, 132-33, 15 8- 60. 24. AHAY, Decretos y Ordenes, August 25, 1845. 25. For a detailed examination of urban piety, see Rugeley, Of Wonders and Wise Men, chapter 3, "The Bourgeois Spiritual Path." 26. See Taylor, Magistrates ofthe Sacred. 27. James D. Cockcroft, Intellectual Precursors ofthe Mexican Revolution, I900-I9I3 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1968), 9I-IIO; Peter Lester Reich, Mexico's Hidden Revolution: The Catholic Church in Law and Politics since I929 (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame

Press, 1995), 1-34· 28. On the history of Iman, see Rugeley, Yucatan's Maya Peasantry, II7-23. 29. Archives of Belize (hereafter, AB), Records 29, February 4,1849,227-29. 30. The story of Joaquin Lest6n appears in AHAY, Decretos y Oficios, May 17, 1824; May 18, 1824; May 21, 1824; and June 22, 1824. 3I. Archivo General de la Naci6n de Mexico (hereafter, AGNM), Bienes Nacionales, legajo (hereafter, leg.) 20, expediente (hereafter, exp.) 10, 1830. 32. See, for example, the investigation of Fr. Jose Leocadio Espinosa of Oxcutzcab in AGNM, Bienes Nacionales, leg. 7, expo 24, November 29, 1852. 33. For a biography of this important but now forgotten individual, see Terry Rugeley, "La vida de Raymundo Perez: El clero yucateco en el periodo temprano nacional," Unicornio 270, June 2, 1996, 3-II. 34. As, for example, in the complaint against Francisco Maria Carrillo of Hopelchen; see AGNM, Bienes Nacionales 15, 28, December 8, 1856.

Yucatecan Popular Religion in Peace and War / 209 35. One of the most well-documented cases is that of Padre Manuel Matias Mendoza of Tekanto; see AGNM, Bienes Nacionales, leg. 15, expo 52, misc. dates, 1855. 36. AGNM, Bienes Nacionales, leg. 35 expo 8, July 28, 1824. 37. On liberalism, see Alan Knight, "Elliberalismo mexicano desde la Reforma hasta la Revolucion (una interpretacion)," Historia Mexicana 35, no. I (1985): 59-91. 38. Rugeley, Yucatdn's Maya Peasantry, II9-20. 39. Andres Tec Chi, "X-waay chiva," in Cuentos sobre las apariciones en el mayab (Merida: INI/SEDESOL, 1993), 40-44, from the Maxcanu area; Roldan Peniche Barrera, "Damaso yel demonio," in Relatos mayas(Merida: Maldonado Editores, undated), 20-22. This latter volume consists of stories collected from an elderly resident in the region of Hunucma. 40. "EI hombre del pene pequeno," in Cuentos mayas yucatecos, Hilaria Maas Colli, ed., vol. I (Merida: Universidad Autonoma de Yucatan, 1990), 473-81. Manuel J. Andrade of the University of Chicago collected this tale in 1930 in the area of Chichen Itza. 41. AGNM, Bienes Nacionales leg. 20, expo 42, March 23, 1832. 42. AHAY, Decretos y Oficios, February 13, 1847; February 6, 1847. 43. T. Patrick Culbert, "The Maya Downfall at Tikal," in Culbert, ed., The Classic Maya Collapse (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1974), 74-80. Most aspects of postclassic Maya civilization suggest a successor culture going through the motions of its more accomplished, more innovative, and presumably more organized predecessor. 44. The Lacandones, a people strongly influenced by the Yucatec Maya, have maintained household idols for as long as outsiders have been able to observe. See Archivo Historico de la Arquidiocesis de Guatemala, Cartas 1864, June 4, 1865, Lorenzo Maria de Mataro to the Bishop of Guatemala; and Alfred M. Tozzer, A Comparative Study ofthe Mayas and the Lacandones (New York: Macmillan, 1907), 38. 45. Archivo Notarial del Estado de Yucatan (hereafter, ANEY), September 17,1847,84. 46. Patrick J. Geary, "The Ninth-Century Relic Trade: A Response to Popular Piety?" in James Obelkevich, ed., Religion and the People, 8oo-IJoO (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979), 8-19. 47. Transportation of holy oils is a common motif in Cathedral-parish correspondence. See, for example, AHAY, Decretos y Oficios, August 28, 1859, Flores. 48. Relatively little is known concerning Maya craftsmen of the colonial and even national period. Some preliminary information appears in Miguel A. Bretos's enchanting Iglesias de Yucatdn (Merida: Produccion Editorial Dante, 1992), a study of various Yucatecan churches, with photographs by Christian Rasmussen. See, for example, pp. 20 and 27-28 on the development of indigenous sculptors and artisans. 49. William A. Christian Jr., Local Religion in Sixteenth-Century Spain (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981), 21. Christian raises the argument to help explain the spread of the Virgin cult in Spain. 50. A recent review in a Merida newspaper hypothesizes that the origins of this still extremely popular cult lie in the Three Wise Men's association with the town's three cenotes, or natural limestone wells: Boox Ch'e'en (Dark Well), Ko'oj Ch'e'en (Rich Well), and Siis Ch'e'en (Cold Well). See Por Esto! (Hemeroteca Pino Suarez), January 7,1996. 51. Moreover, as William B. Taylor has argued, the Virgin of Guadalupe's cult originally appealed to Spaniards in Mexico City and Tepeyac and did not find an ethnically or geo-

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graphically wider audience until aggressively promoted from the I750S onward. See Taylor, "The Virgin of Guadalupe in New Spain: An Inquiry into the Social History of Marian Devotion," American Ethnologist 14 (1987): 9-33. 52. AHAY, Decretos y Oficios, November IO, 1842. 53. Gerardo Can Pat's brief but interesting monograph, La Virgen de la Candelaria: Etnohistoria de la Patrona de Tibolon (Merida: INIISEDESOL, 1993), basically explores the cult's contemporary activities, with a bit of twentieth-century history by way of introduction. 54- AHAY, Decretos y Oficios, April 19, 1822; April 23, 1822. 55. AHAY, Decretos y Oficios, May 5, 1824; May 7,1824. San Antonio de Padua is a santo of the highest importance among the Yucatecan Maya, outranking even the Virgin Mary in popular devorion. One source of his appeal lies in the fact that his feast day (June 13) is considered to be the last possible day for the annual planting rains. He is also the patron of anyone seeking a spouse and seems a particular favorite of girls coming of marriage age. 56. As described in Michael Adas, Prophets of Rebellion: Millenarian Protest Movements against the European Colonial Order (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979). 57. I refer to Reed's account of the h-men forecasting the revolt in prophetic sacred seeds. See Reed, Caste ~r, 53. 58. For the most recent studies of the religious-based community uprising of Tomochic, see Paul J. Vanderwood, The Power of God against the Guns of Government: Religious Upheaval in Mexico at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998); and Jesus Vargas Valdez, ed., Tomochic: La revolucion adelantada (Ciudad Juarez: Universidad Autonoma de Chihuahua, 1994), 2 vols. 59. See Rugeley, Yucatdn's Maya Peasantry, particularly chapters 5 and 6, for a more complete discussion of these dynamics. 60. Archivo General del Estado de Yucatan (hereafter, AGEY), Poder Ejecutivo, box 26, Justicia, August 1847. 61. AGEY, Poder Ejecutivo, box 26, Justicia, April 24, 1847. 62. Steve J. Stern, PerU's Indian People and the Challenge of Spanish Conquest: Huamanga to I640 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982), 52-67; Stuart B. Schwartz, Sugar Plantations in the Formation ofBrazilian Society: Bahia, I550-I835 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 47-49. 63. AGNM, Bienes Nacionales, leg. 19, expo 9, July 15, 1851; September 20, 1851; El ftnix 198, July 25, 1851. 64. AHAY, Decretos y Oficios, August IO, 1858. 65. A classic example of the vagaries of origin in colonial cults is that of the John Frum cargo cult; see Peter Worsley, The Trumpet Shall Sound: A Study of "Cargo" Cults in Melanesia (London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1957), 153-60. Even the meaning of the term "John Frum" is in doubt. 66. The argument for a prophetic Maya leader first appears in Bricker, Indian Christ. More recently, Nelson Reed has taken up the same view; see "Juan de la Cruz, Venancio Puc, and the Speaking Cross," The Americas 53 (1997): 497-523. I remain skeptical of this interpretation, as it is largely based on attempts to derive historical data from prophetic writings of unknown origin.

Yucatecan Popular Religion in Peace and War I 2II 67. Archivo Historico de la Defensa Nacional (hereafter AHDN), xii 481.3/3257, March 22, I85I, Jose Maria Barrera to Jose Maria Torrens, presents a representative letter of Barrera invoking the cross to underscore his own authority. 68. AB, Records #96, November I5, I867, 395-99· 69. Bancroft Library, British Foreign Office Records (Microfilm) 395-99, February 25, I858. 70. The description of Chan Santa Cruz found in Tulane University's Yucatan Collection #26, box 2, folder I4, attests to the persecution of hechiceros, a category that mayor may not have included the h-men; whatever the case, it is clear that these latter individuals did not play visible roles in the cult. 7I. David Nicholls, From Dessalines to Duvalier: Race, Colour and National Independence in Haiti (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, I996), 3I-32. 72. Redfield and Villa Rojas, Chan Kom, 74-75. 73. Herman Konrad, "Capitalism on the Tropical-Forest Frontier: Quintana Roo, I880s ro I930," in Land, Labor, and Capital in Modern Yucatan: Essays in Regional History and Political Economy, eds. Jeffery T. Brannon and Gilbert M. Joseph (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, I990), I43-7I; GabrielA. Macias Zapata, "Soldados, indios y libre comercio en Quintana Roo, I893-I903," Relaciones (Colegio de Michoacan) 49 (I992): 129-52; Macias Zapata, "Economfa y poHtica entre los mayas icaiches de Quintana Roo, I893-I980," unpublished paper presented at the Annual Congress of Mayanists, Chetumal, July 5, I995. 74. Centro de Apoyo ala Investigacion Historica de Yucatan XLIV, 57, January 5, I854, Jose Eulogio Rosado to Jose Canuro Vela. 75. Archivo Historico de la Defensa Nacional, xii 481.3/3257, February 24, I85I, Bonifacio Novelo to the Santa Cruz. 76. AHAY, Decretos y Oficios, March I, I866. The statue became a controversial item after his death, as various factions sought to control it. 77. Archivo General de Centroamerica, B, 28624, 232, November 28, I869. For additional information on the career of Arana, see Dumond, Machete and the Cross, 283, 384-85. 78. AHDN, xi/481.3/3257, March I7, I85I, Pedro Regalado Ek ro Manuel Nauat. 79. AHDN, xi! 481.3/3256, April 24, I85I, summary of a report on the testimony of rebels surrendering to the military canton in Tixcacal. 80. As described in Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas during the English Revolution (New York: Viking, I972). 8I. Thomas W. F. Gann, The Maya Indians of Southern Yucatan and Northern British Honduras (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Bureau of American Ethnology, I9I8),4 0 . 82. Don E. Dumond, "The Talking Crosses of Yucatan: A New Look at Their Hisrory," EthnohistorJ32 (I985): 29I-308. 83. The pacificos, or so-called pacified rebels, had laid down their arms in exchange for near-total autonomy in the southern part of the peninsula. The Catholic clergy organized out of Merida apparently sent occasional missions to Chan Santa Cruz, though without lasting effect. 84. The foregoing information comes from AG EY, PE 65, G, J efatura PoHtica de Izamal, November 8, I856.

212 / Terry Rugeley 85. AHAY, Decretos y Oficios, March II, r858. 86. Regarding later variations of peninsular folk religion, see the essays collected in Genny Negroe Sierra and Francisco Fernandez Repetto, eds., Religion popular de la reconstruccion historica al analisis antropologico (aproximaciones casuisticasj (Merida: Universidad Aut6noma de Yucatan, 2Oar). 87. Oliver de Casares's remarkable unpublished account is to be found in the Archivo Parroquial del Obispado de Campeche, Noticia historica de la fundacion de la antigua cof radia y de otros hechos relativos a ella, found in Cofradias, box 2/3, I878-I880. Sadly, parts of the manuscript are severely deteriorated, but those that survive paint a vivid picture of popular life in nineteenth-century Campeche. 88. See Landy Elizabeth Santana Rivas, "Protestantismo y sus implicaciones sociales en el campo yucateco" (licenciate thesis, Universidad Aut6noma de Yucatan, Facultad de Antropologia, I987), 43-46. The principal study of early Protestantism in Mexico, Deborah J. Baldwin's Protestants and the Mexican Revolution: Missionaries, Ministers, and Social Change (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, I990), deals primarily with the north of the country, but one of the dynamics Baldwin describes also applies to Yucatan: early Protestant efforts made their beachhead with the nascent Porfirian middle class. As with other parts of southeast Mexico and Central America, the biggest phase of conversion took place in the postI940 wave of evangelicalism, mostly by more recent sects such as the Jehovah's Witnesses and the Seventh-Day Adventists. According to statistics published in the Diario de Yucatan (March 6, I994), Yucatan is currently 85.8 percent Catholic, 9.3 percent Protestant, and 4-3 percent "other." Conversion rates appear to be slowing from the boom of the I970s. 89. The basic features of Yucatecan spiritualism have been reconstructed from La ley de amor (3 enchanting volumes, I876-r878), found in Merida's Hemeroteca Pi no Suarez. 90. This conclusion seems consonant with a number of recent studies that have questioned how absolute the separation between Maya and Hispanics actually was. In particular, see Wolfgang Gabbert, Becoming Maya: Ethnicity and SociallnequalitJI in Yucatan since ISOO (Tuscon: University of Arizona Press, 2004). 9I. Munro]. Edmonson, trans., The Ancient Future of the Itza: The Book of Chilam Balam of Tizimin (Austin: University of Texas Press, I982), I74-75. 92. For a recent treatment of the ongoing conservative-liberal split, particularly in reference to religious issues, see Hernan Menendez Rodriguez, Iglesia y poder: Proyectos sociales, alianzas politicas y economicas en Yucatan (r857-I9Ioj (Mexico: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Anes, I995), which presents a rather negative view of Yucatan's Porfirian-era church; and Franco Savarino Roggero, Pueblos y nacionalismo, del regimen oligarquico a la sociedad de masas en Yucatan, I894-I92S (Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Estudios Hist6ricos de la Revoluci6n Mexicana, r997), whose own view is considerably rosier.

10

The Resurgence of the Church in Yucatan The Olegario Molina-Crescencio Carrillo Alliance, 1867-1901 Herndn Menendez Rodriguez with Ben W. Fallaw

In the middle of the nineteenth century, liberal reformers headed by Benito Juarez enacted sweeping legislation intended to modernize Mexico by remaking it along the lines of North America and Western Europe. The Roman Catholic Church emerged as the most steadfast opponent of these reforms, because they would restrict its privileges and curtail its influence over education and public life in general. The constitution of 1857 institutionalized liberal modernization, but conservative and praetorian revolts-always with strong clerical support-prevented their immediate implementation. Just when the liberals prevailed, Napoleon III intervened on behalf of the conservatives. French troops proceeded to replace Benito Juarez with the Hapsburg Ferdinand Maximilian. Mexico's Second Empire (1862-1867), though never in complete control of the country, generally backed the church. With the return ofJuarez to power in 1867, the reform legislation was once again the law of the land. Not only did civil authority predominate over that of the clergy, but liberal authorities also nationalized most property holdings of the church and sold them off to their supporters. Mter the death of Juarez, the basic ideals of liberal modernization continued under President Sebastian Lerdo de Tejada (18721876), but from time to time popular elements rose in favor of the church, and the clerical party was never completely eliminated. Our story starts in 1877, in the springtime of Porfirio Diaz's dictatorship (187619U). Diaz had received reports of a "special situation" in Yucatan from his informant Juan de Luz Enriquez. Enriquez uncovered "influence in a social milieu that opposes republican ideas," a thinly veiled reference to the church, which he attributed to "the lack of political education in the state."l This was a serious matter, as Diaz still headed the Liberal Party, which was formally committed to secularizing Mexico. Don Porfirio would soon discover that the church in Yucatan intended to evade anticlerical legislation and recapture its central place in provincial society. Over time Diaz slowly became aware of the continuing influence of the church among the great majority of Mexican citizens, not just Yucatecans. Influenced by his wife and her conservative family, and guided by his own sense of political expediency, Diaz would eventually seek to quietly pursue reconciliation with the church. During his extended rule, known as the Porfiriato, he healed the liberal-

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conservative rift across Mexico by moderating the state's anticlericalism, conciliating the church, and inviting both liberal and conservative elites to share in the fruits of the revived economy, a strategy mirrored in Yucatan by Olegario Molina. Although the broad outlines of this national process are well known, the regional process has been largely ignored in Yucatan. Through a study of the fractious political cliques, or camarillas, in Yucatan, it is possible to gain insight into several key factors that led liberal modernizers in the state to abandon anticlericalism. In particular, Olegario Molina emerged as the dominant political and economic figure in Yucatan through a strategic partnership with the church. By the outbreak of the revolution in 1910, Molina had ascended to the president's cabinet (the last Yucatecan to do so) and was by far the wealthiest man in the state. Over the previous decades the liberal bourgeoisie developed a project to modernize Mexico. It prescribed decisive state action to secularize and expand education, upgrade financial institutions and infrastructure, and rationalize the legal code to stimulate capitalist development. But during the Porfiriato, control of the liberal project in Yucatan would be contested between Olegario Molina and his great rival, Carlos Peon Machado. When they controlled the levers of state government, each tried to implement quite different versions of liberal modernization. The radical, or pura (pure), liberal faction led by Peon championed zealous enforcement of anticlerical measures and would remake Yucatan along the lines of the secular state of France after the French Revolution. Olegario Molina's moderate or opportunistic wing of liberalism (originally headed by Manuel Romero Ancona) would shelve most of liberalism's secularizing mission in return for the support of the church in both political and economic realms. To complicate the situation further, there was a third contender for power: the conservative clique headed by Francisco "Pancho" Canton. Diaz's agents sent to Yucatan found themselves caught in a political crossfire between rival liberal factions and their old conservative foes and were never able to control Yucatan's fratricidal politics. Diaz's emissary, General Protasio Guerra, encountered this convoluted situation when he was sent to report on Yucatecan politics in 1877. He found a "fractured liberal party, full of passions and hatreds." Even more distressing, some Yucatecan liberals were "seeking popularity, sympathy, and support through alliances with the Jesuits."2 This amounted to a direct accusation against two prominent Yucatecan liberals: Manuel Romero Ancona, who would soon claim the governorship, and his protege, Olegario Molina Solis, who would govern the state a quarter century later. Born to a poor white family, Molina served in 1866 as private secretary to Manuel Cepeda Pedraza, liberal hero of the war against the French. Molina went on to take his law degree and launch a long career as a businessman, judge, and sometime educator, being named (in 1867) as the first director of the Literary Institute, Yucatan's first public secondary school, which served as the vanguard of liberalism in the state. His foes long suspected him of being an ambitious and amoral social climber; radical liberal Manuel Jose Castellanos criticized Molina's

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rise to prominence as early as 1873, not only because of his links to the clergy but also because of his "abandoning his responsibilities in the Literary Institute to seek political positions. "3 Indeed, it would soon be clear that the opportunistic liberals headed by Molina and Romero would seek an alliance with the old foes of the liberals, the church and conservatives, for personal advantage. The year after Guerra's report, Diaz's viceroy, the military commander in the state, General Lorenzo Vega, rebuked Governor Romero for appointing followers of Francisco Canton-in other words, the conservative clerical camarilla-to high posts in his administration. Romero bluntly replied that he had "political commitments to honor, and that he alone was responsible for them." The general reproached him for his risky behavior of appointing such suspect men at a time when the church, though shorn by the liberal reforms of much of its economic power, still retained tremendous influence. 4 Romero's apparent betrayal of liberal anticlerical ism revealed a complex situation that Diaz and his national agents were only dimly aware of at the time. Not only would the alliance between Romero's protege, Molina, and the church seriously alter the liberals' modernization project, but in the end it would also playa crucial role in vaulting Molina to unchallenged economic and political dominance of the peninsula.

Carlos Peon and the Failure of Secular Education Before he sought an understanding with the church, Diaz himself favored Molina's nemesis Carlos Peon and his radical brand of liberalism. In 1878 he supported Peon and his ally, Manuel Donde, over liberals who waffied on the religious question, but the moderate Romero won the governorship. Like Diaz, Peon and Donde had been key leaders in the fight against Maximilian's empire. Indeed, the two were among the thirty Yucatecan republicans about whom Empress Carlota had been explicitly warned before her visit to Yucatan during the Second Empire. 5 Diaz instructed these "educated" and "enlightened" men "to destroy the influence of traitors" whose power reached into the heart of the Liberal Party and included members of the Yucatecan elite. 6 To stop the clerical resurgence, Peon sought not just political power but also to secularize Yucatecan society and culture via education, until that time a virtual monopoly of the church. To that end he sponsored new, secular schools for boys and girls. The fact that the roots of the puros' educational project could be traced back to Masonic lodges did little to reassure Catholics. In order to promote tolerance, the two schools would, in Peon's own words, "respect all beliefs and teach only the universal principles of Science and Universal Morality, leaving religious education to the care of the children's parents."? But even this bulwark of the Jacobin project faced infiltration by church supporters. 8 A few months later Peon discovered that a religious course was being taught in the boys school. He also learned that the principal was reading passages from the

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Bible to the students at the girls school every morning before classes. Governor Romero, a moderate liberal, stepped in to mediate the resulting dispute. Eventually the Instituto de Nifias was established at the same location with a new principaJ.9

The Making of the Moderate Liberal-Church Alliance: The Politics of the Ecclesiastical Succession of 1884 and the Gubernatorial Election of 1885 We have seen how the church's persistent, subtle strength dismayed Porfirian proconsuls and opened a rift in Yucatecan liberalism between the radical supporters of Carlos Peon and the supporters of moderate governor Manuel Romero. The church's power would only grow because of an alliance between the church hierarchy and the opportunistic and moderate wing of Yucatecan liberalism, a pact initiated by Romero and consummated by Olegario Molina. The alliance in fact began during the administration of Governor Romero (1878-1882). As we have seen, he reached out to pro-church conservative leader Francisco Canton and to Jose Maria Ponce Solfs, the Canton camarilla's main political operative. IO After the death of Manuel Romero, his brother Martin further strengthened the alliance and became one of Canton's closest allies, even serving in his gubernatorial campaign. 11 As we shall see, Olegario Molina, Romero's successor as leader of moderate liberalism, would forge even closer political and economic ties to the church. Following his lead, Olegario's brother Ricardo, along with his close collaborators Nicanor Ancona and Fernando Cervera, bonded with the church. Olegario was ably assisted by two of his brothers who were priests, Jose Maria and Pastor Molina. They negotiated an alliance with Bishop Leandro Rodriguez de la Gala and an even more important one with his successor, Bishop Crescencio Carrillo y Ancona. The Molina-Carrillo pact would be the nexus between the moderates and the church, a mutually advantageous and enriching relationship. The alliance can be understood only in the context of the church's strategy of recovery and its own internal divisions. Not only did the church want a rollback of liberal secularization, but it also needed to rebuild its economic base by participating in the economic modernization of Yucatan. Rodriguez de la Gala was consecrated as bishop in 1869 after having been de facto head of the diocese of Yucatan for six years. 12 Although Rodriguez's successor described him as humble and modest, the new bishop had consistently displayed strong economic ambitions for the church. Specifically, Rodriguez hoped to revive the church's flagging economic fortunes by restoring mandatory tithing, which had been abolished by the liberal reforms. 13 Even before death interrupted his plans, his poor health set off an internal struggle that would ultimately be decided by the moderate liberals' discreet intervention. As Bishop Rodriguez's health declined, Norberto Dominguez and Crescencio Carrillo y Ancona jockeyed for the miter. Although both were theologically con-

Resurgence of the Church in Yucatan / 217 servative, Dominguez's seniority and education won him the support of most of the high clergy, especially those linked to Canton's conservatives. Carrillo's fame as a prominent writer, linguist, and historian earned him the support of national Porfirian authorities and, more importantly, the backing of Rome. Carrillo's links to opportunistic liberals, such as Romero and Molina, however, aroused suspicions among the more traditional clergy, who were still firmly tied to the conservative camarilla of Francisco Canton. 14 Canton was the traditional paladin of the church in Yucatan and had, after all, chosen Dominguez's brother Manuel as his personal secretary. On the other hand, in 1861 Carrillo had invited a young Olegario Molina to collaborate on his newspaper, EI Repertorio Pintoresco. Molina returned the favor in 1865 and 1866 when he selected four priests-including two of his own brothers-to teach in a school he had founded. 15 In this atmosphere it is no surprise that secular politics spilled over into the crucial matter of succession. In November 1883 Bernardo Ponce y Font, a known Cantonista sympathizer, urged the appointment of a coadjutor to assist the ailing bishop. The individual named to this position would have the right to succeed Bishop Rodriguez. Cantonista expectations that Dominguez would be named to the position were parried by Bishop Rodriguez, who chose Carrillo instead, putting him in charge of the diocese in 1884.16 Mter the death of Rodriguez three years later, Carrillo was consecrated as bishop. Once the decision in favor of Carrillo had been made, the Cantonistas sought to restore political balance to the ecclesiastical equilibrium by turning to the state of Campeche, which, though separated from Yucatan in 1858, remained under the jurisdiction of the bishop of Yucatan. Supported by Pedro and Joaquin Baranda, who controlled the state and were half-brothers of General Canton, the Cantonistas sought the creation of a separate diocese for Campeche, a goal achieved in 1895.17 Why did the church in the end favor Molina over Canton in the struggle over the see of Yucatan? The answer lies in the gathering momentum of economic modernization as well as the political success of the opportunistic liberals. True, personal connections mattered, but the church leadership probably opted for the latter on purely pragmatic grounds. With their personal clout, the Molina family could fight secularizing influence over education and work to reverse the reform laws that burdened the church, while Francisco Canton's conservatives were still barred from office because of their support for the French intervention. The Molina clan could also help rebuild the church's economic base, which had been undermined by the Caste War's destructiveness and the Reform laws, which had nationalized the church's real estate, destroyed its banking institution, and limited the collection of tithes. These new laws had deprived the church, Carrillo recounted, of "a million pesos."18 Hence, the liberals' economic project was the opportunity to recoup these losses. In short, Molina offered the political protection and financial acumen that the church so desperately needed. The weak economic position of the church was an especially pressing problem.

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Many rich Yucatecans-conservatives as well as liberals-refused to pay tithes now that the reform laws made such payments optional rather than legally binding. 19 Only Olegario Molina with his powerful influence could make them obligatory again. In explaining his choice of Carrillo, Bishop Rodriguez obliquely revealed his reasoning. When he wrote of the "divine will" behind his selection of Carrillo, Rodriguez referred to the church's "lack of political and social influences" that must be remedied. 20 More to the point, Rodriguez's choice of Carrillo consummated an economic, social, and political alliance between the church in Yucatan and moderate liberalism. The tie was binding out of shared personal links and joint political and economic ambitions. By selecting Crescencio Carrillo as his successor, Bishop Rodriguez de la Gala cemented his alliance with the Romero-Molina faction of the Liberal Party and fortified the church against Peon's anticlerical wing of Yucatecan liberalism. The confluence of clerical and secular politics did not only help choose the next bishop, but it would also help select a governor. With Molina as its conduit to state power, the church wanted to insulate itself against J acobin attacks by helping to nominate a sympathetic governor in the next election in 1885. This was not an idle concern; Bishop Rodriguez had already felt the wrath of radical liberalism. He had been exiled for an offending pastoral letter issued in 1877.21 In 1885 Rodriguez's anxiety mounted when Peon's puro liberals nominated Eligio Ancona, a strong candidate and distinguished writer, for governor. 22 The church helped assure the support of Francisco Canton's conservatives for moderate liberal (and former governor) Manuel Romero Ancona to take him on. The church in Yucatan had another card to play. It asked the leader of the church in Mexico to lobby Diaz, who was already moving toward much closer relations with the church on the national level. 23 The archbishop of Mexico wrote to Don Porfirio on May 26,1885, asking him to support Manuel Romero. 24 Because of previous commitments, Diaz could not endorse Romero, yet he frustrated the radical liberals by choosing a third candidate, General Guillermo Palomino, over Ancona.

Olegario Molina and the Economic Resurgence of the Church in Yucatan As we have seen, in his time of physical decline, Bishop Rodriguez de la Gala urgently needed to strengthen the diocese economically and patch over cracks in the fa