The Caste War of Yucatán: Revised Edition 9781503619067

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The Caste War of Yucatan

The Caste War of Yucatan REVISED

EDITION

Nelson A. Reed

Stanford University Press Stanford, California

Stanford University Press Stanford, California

© 2oor by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Reed, Nelson A. The Caste War of Yucatan I Nelson A. Reed.-Rev. ed. p. em. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN o-8047-4000-3 (alk. paper)ISBN o-8047-4oor-r (pbk. : alk. paper) r. Yucatan (Mexico: State)-History-Caste War, r847-r855· 2. Mayas-Wars-Mexico-Yucatan (State) 3· MayasMexico-Government relations. I. Title. F1376 .R43 200! 200!0200!9 972'.65os-dc21 Original Printing 2001 Last figure below indicates year of this printing: IO

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Contents

List of Maps and Illustrations Foreword to the First Edition

IX

Preface to the First Edition Preface to the Second Edition

Xlll

XI

XV

PART ONE

The Two Worlds of Yucatan I

The Ladino World

2

The Mazehual World

3 4I

PART TWO

The Caste War 3 4 5 6 7 8

Revolt, I847-I848 The Crisis, I848 Ladino Recovery, I848-I849 Stalemate, I849-I85o The Coming of the Cross, I85o-I852 A Campaign to End the War, I852-I85 5

59 84 I08 I32 I46 I62

PART THREE

The Speaking Cross Venancio Puc, I85 5-I863 The Acereto Brigade, I86o

I97 220

Coup and Countercoup, I86I-I863 An Empire and the Cross, I86}-I866

233

I2 I}

The Empire of the Cross, I867-I895

255

9 IO

rr

243

Contents

Vlll

I4

15 16

Generals Porfirio Dfaz and Ignacio Bravo, 1879-1910 Francisco May, 1912-1969 Yucatan Revisited, 1912-1996

279 307 322

Postscript, 1959 Post-Postscript, 1997

339 349

Glossary Maya Political and Religious Leaders

365 370

Chronology Notes Bibliography

374 379 401

Index

415

Maps and Illustrations

View of the Plaza de Armas, Merida

r5

View of the waterfront at Campeche

17

Map of Yucatan, r84 7

22

Governor Santiago Mendez

30

Governor Miguel Barbachano

38

"Fr. Pepin de Misionero" (Gahona woodcut)

47

The well at Tepich

49

"The Companies Began to Form" (Gahona woodcut)

68

"Officers on the Day of Corpus Christi" (Gahona woodcut)

76

"The Same Officers on the Day of Battle" (Gahona woodcut)

77

Street fighting in Valladolid

82

Map of Maya offensive, August r847-May r848 Bacalar and the Fort of San Philipe

104 128

Stone "tree" with offerings in the cave of Balankanche

149

Cenote and Chapel of the Speaking Cross

15 5

Map of the Dfaz de la Vega campaign

r66

Incident on the trail

173

View of Noh Cah Balam Na Santa Cruz

216

"D. Ginesillo" (Gahona woodcut)

223

Map of Defeat of the Acereto Brigade

2 30

Colonel Daniel Traconis

248

General Manuel Cepeda Peraza

25 3

Map of military groups and actions, 1857-86

259

"Song of Discord" (Gahona woodcut)

280

The barge Chetumal

291

General Ignacio Bravo

294

X

The fort at Okop General Salvador Alvarado Plan of Tixcacal Guardia Map of Maya villages of today Six pages of photographs follow Chapter 8

Maps and Illustrations

Foreword to the First Edition

The War of the Castes in Yucatan is one of the least known but most colorful episodes in Mexican history. Indeed, if told offhand that as recently as r848 the descendants of the ancient Maya, after centuries of subjugation, fought their way across the peninsula of Yucatan and came within a hair's breadth of driving their white masters into the sea, one might suspect a literary hoax. But this is what happened. The military campaigns of the Caste War subsided after seven years, but not because the rebel Maya had been decisively conquered. Yucatecan patriots, Mexican generals, and even American mercenaries, facing what we now call guerrilla tactics, simply gave up hope of winning a total victory. Despite huge losses in action, recurrent famine, and the ravages of cholera, the rebels held control of the jungles of eastern Yucatan for the rest of the century. Occasional raids brought them food, guns, alcohol, and prisonerswhite men and women who ended their days as slaves in Maya villages. And, beginning with the cult of the Speaking Cross, which sprang up in the darkest days of the war, the Maya developed their own society, a new synthesis of the Spanish colonial and ancient Maya cultures. Mr. Reed is not a professional historian, and he might have used this sort of material to write either a narrow military history or a swashbuckling historical novel. Fortunately, his ambitions lay elsewhere. He has put the complicated details of the war into coherent order; he has used contemporary newspapers, letters, and memoirs to make men and events come alive; and he has placed the war and its repercussions in the context of the whole history of Yucatan in the nineteenth century. For scholars, the main contribution of this book lies in the information it presents on the existence of various independent Maya states after r85 5, and on what a contemporary source called "the mummeries of the Talking Cross." Until now, very little has been written on these matters, chiefly because contemporary Yucatecans, their pride hurt by the success of the rebels, ignored them as best they could. Mr. Reed's quest for information thus led him to unexploited British, German, and Yucatecan sources, and

Xll

Foreword to the First Edition

finally into the jungles of Quintana Roo, where he talked with Indians whose grandfathers fought in the Caste War. Few of our historians of Mexico, including the Mexican ones, have been willing to stray on a mule that far from the comforts of archives and libraries. Perhaps a word about annotation will forestall unwarranted suspicions among professional historians. When I first saw the manuscript, it was devoid of all scholarly apparatus, and no source citations were appended to it. Mr. Reed, acting on outside advice, eventually supplied me with a bibliography and a considerable number of source notes. But having checked my own sources at some length, I was already convinced of the accuracy of his work, and his efforts only strengthened my conviction. Thus I found myself in an odd position; I had to tell him that the source citations, at least, seemed undesirable and should be abandoned. Scholars, I said, would be able to see that he had followed the ground rules of their craft, and many of them might find the annotation an annoying and unnecessary display of technique; and general readers and scholars alike would doubtless find copious footnotes an annoying drag on the brisk pace of his narrative. This, I soon learned, had been his own feeling from the beginning, and I am certain that he accepted my recommendation with a certain satisfying sense of irony. And so, after many months of systematic harassment from his friendly critics and editors, Mr. Reed has been allowed to write the kind of book he wanted to write-which is a privilege more rare than might be supposed. For my part, I think he has earned it, and I am happy to have had a share in arranging the publication of his work. I am also pleased that I can put aside my old notion of writing a comprehensive history of the Caste War. Mr. Reed has written that book for me, and he has done it very well indeed. HOWARD F. CLINE

Library of Congress November r963

Preface to the First Edition

The idea of this book first came to me when I visited Bacalar in 1948. Knowing nothing about the place, I was surprised to find the overgrown ruins of a Spanish colonial town, including a church and a moated fortress picturesquely situated on a hill above a lake. A few people live there, and a missionary priest had partially repaired the church, but street after street of roofless stone buildings stood as evidence of its past. In answer to my questions, I was told that the place had been destroyed by Indians in something called the War of the Castes. On returning home from that trip, I looked into the literature on the subject, particularly Alfonso Villa's The Maya of East Central Quintana Roo; I was fascinated with his sketch of how the Maya Indians had revolted against their masters, almost taken the peninsula of Yucatan, and then withdrawn to the deep forests of Quintana Roo to establish an independent society and to worship a "Speaking Cross." Included in Villa's work was Howard F. Cline's "Remarks on a Selected Bibliography of the Caste War and Allied Topics," a blueprint of a book begging to be written. My studies had been in archeology rather than anthropology or history, and I thought in passing that Cline would probably publish the results of his research. Years passed, and from time to time the Caste War came up in my reading and each time the thought of Cline's bibliography was at the back of my mind. Then I read Serapio Baqueiro's Ensayo hist6rico sabre las revoluci6nes de Yucatan, which gave further details on the early years of the revolt, and I was caught: I decided that if no one else was going to write the book Cline had outlined, I would do it myself. Then came a year of tracking down Cline's sources, finding the work which has come out since his, searching through libraries and archives in Merida, and going though the government archives in British Honduras. I had traveled through much of the area before, but now I made specific trips, returning to Bacalar, to the east coast of Quintana Roo, into the forest, and finally to the former shrine capital of the Maya, Chan Santa Cruz. It was an enjoyable time, with all the pleasures of research: finding

XlV

Preface to the First Edition

the detail that corrects a misunderstood situation, discovering the facts that light up a particularly dark corner of history. There should be enough battles in this book for anyone's taste, but the reader must be warned that the shooting doesn't start until Chapter Three. Without intending to write a history of Yucatan or a cultural study of the Maya, I felt that some background information on these subjects was necessary to an understanding of the Caste War, and I have tried to give the essentials in the first two chapters. I have also included, in the later chapters, a certain amount of political and economic history, to explain or give perspective to post-Caste War developments among the Maya. My sincere thanks go out to Howard F. Cline for his many suggestions and recommendations; to J. G. Bell for his warm support in the face of considerable odds; and to Gene Tanke, for his most intelligent assistance in the editing of the manuscript. NELSON REED

St. Louis, Missouri November r963

Preface to the Second Edition

In reviewing what I wrote forty-five years ago I am astonished at my presumption in writing this book in the first place. I was too young to know any better. I was not, and am not, a professional historian, but Howard Cline gave me protective cover on matters of style and lack of footnotes from those who were. It seemed to have worked, for there was little criticism, but then almost no one except Cline and Villa knew or cared about this corner of history, and I had neutralized them with admiring comments. Of the ror titles in my bibliography only twelve besides theirs were dated after World War II, so most potential critics were no longer in a condition to criticize anything. The field is no longer so lonely. At a Congreso on the Caste War in Merida in 1997, fifty-seven papers were presented on the subject, and of the more than rso new titles in my bibliography, most of them are by historians living and working today. I had the good fortune to stumble on this subject before the rush. The new information collected and the interpretations developed by many of these people have been a major factor leading me to revise this book; and this fact requires that those source citations not thought necessary in the first edition should be present now. Among those works most important to me have been those of Michel Antochiw, Miguel Alberto Bartolome and Alicia Mabel Barabas, Alfredo Barrera Vasquez, Allen F. Burns, Lorena Careaga Viliesid, Don Dumond, Nancy Farriss, Jorge Franco Caceres, Grant Jones, Marie Lapointe, Fidelio Quintal Martin, Luis A. Ramirez Aznar, Luis A. Ramirez Carrillo, Silvia Teran and Christian H. Rasmussen, Terry Rugeley, Luz del Carmen Vallarta Velez, and Burkhard Wilhelm. I am also grateful to David Yah Balam of Carrillo Puerto, Sixto Balam Chuc and Santo Garcia of Senor, Marcelino Poot Ek of Tixcacal Guardia, the extended Cruz family of Chancah Vera Cruz, and all the universally hospitable Maya of Quintana Roo and Yucatan. E-mail and conferences have removed the isolation in which I previously worked. Rugeley is to be thanked for re-enlisting me in this war, pushing me to give a paper, the research for which reminded

XVl

Preface to the Second Edition

me of how much the past has progressed; Bricker for her book The Indian Christ, the Indian King, my copy of which is now as ragged as my copy of Villa's The Indians of East Central Quintana Roo. Though Dumond's solid and deeply researched The Machete and the Cross came out too late for most of my revision, it was very useful for checking facts. Special thanks to Anna Eberhard Friedlander for help through the jungle of editing, to Lorena Careaga for rich loads of material shared, to Paul Sullivan for extreme generosity with his trove of information found nowhere else, and to Hilario Hilare, interpreter and ambassador to the Maya of the villages. As is customary, none of my errors are attributable to anyone mentioned here, and my thanks go out to them for being fellow travelers along a luminous and now well-charted trail. NELSON REED

St. Louis, Missouri May I999

The Caste War of Yucatan

ONE

The Ladino World

The death of billions of Tertiary and Holocene creatures; their deposit at the bottom of a warm, shallow sea; their formation into one great limestone bed; the eventual rising of that mass above water to become the peninsula of Yucatan-these remote events helped to shape the troubles of r847. Despite a heavy annual rainfall, water was a major problem for the inhabitants of Yucatan. Rainwater seeped through fifty to several hundred feet of limestone down to the water table, which flowed through cavities in the rock, acid in the soil helping to eat out interconnecting tunnels that ran for many miles and eventually drained into the sea; these caves offered a dependable if inaccessible supply of water. Often the roof of these tunnels or caves collapsed to form an open sinkhole-a cenote in the Maya language-the basic source of water. The Maya also got water from small rain-filled pools in rock called sartejenas. God told San Pedro to make cenotes in various places. San Pedro said "cenote" and it was there. Later San Pedro thought another place would be more convenient, and without asking God he said "cenote." All he got was a sartejena. 1 Sartejenas were refilled during the rainy season, as were the larger aguadas (natural low spots), or catchment basins, built by pre-Columbian Maya. And when these went dry it was necessary to go deep into caves, sometimes several hundred feet below the surface, and carefully carry water up by ladder. 2 The importance of water is shown in the ten villages with compound names that included the word ha, water; eleven with the word cenote; and seventeen with the word chen, such as Bolonchenticul (meaning "nine wells"), and Chichen Itza (the mouth of the well of the Itza). Cenotes varied, from that large circular hole that still carries a sense of mystery, to the miniature palm forest, the vines and rich foliage along the protected sides of the cenotes of Yaxcaba, to the clear subterranean pool at Dzitnup, lit

4

THE TWO WORLDS OF YUCATAN

by a shaft of light from a hole in the roof from which stalactites and vines hang. Whoever controlled the water controlled the country. Geology enforced other limitations. It was impossible to plow the Yucatecan soil, which was found in pockets a few inches deep. In the land of trees and rocks (Ich lumil che, ich lumil tun), 3 the planting of wheat and other crops that required well-cultivated earth was impossible. The only practical tool in such conditions was the planting stick, and the only successful plants were those that gave a large yield from a few seeds, such as corn, beans, and squash. Because the soil was thin it was quickly exhausted; every third year the farmer was forced to clear new land. To be near his corn patch he lived in hamlets and villages rather than in towns, and this isolated settlement pattern encouraged considerable independence and resistance to change. The natural vegetation that could survive on this rocky foundation varied with the rainfall. Both rain and vegetation were lightest in the northwestern corner of the peninsula, and there the dry bush was seldom over thirty feet tall. Then, spreading in rough arcs toward the east coast and the south, the dry bush gave way to dry forest and then to dense rain forest, where mahogany, sapodilla, and ceiba trees, jammed together and festooned with lianas and parasitic air plants, reach over a hundred feet high in competition for the sun. This was also an area of seasonal swamp, and of the akalche, flooded forests difficult to impossible to cross. This high forest ran in a belt some forty miles wide along the east coast, cut across the base of the peninsula, and then merged with the vast wilderness of the Peten, on maps at least a part of Guatemala. The north was largely flat, broken by a range of the Puuc hills, which were no more than three hundred feet high but impressive by contrast. They lay in an inverted V, with one arm on the Gulf of Mexico at Champoton, the northern point near the town of Maxcanu, and the other arm ending at the Bay of Chetumal. Their elevation made water even more difficult to reach. For these reasons, the bulk of the population clustered in the relatively more desirable northwest. The eastern forest and the land south of the Puuc was largely uninhabited; there were no real roads to neighboring countries (that empty forest belt served both as a refuge zone for those who could survive there and as a barrier to the white population). The island quality of this near island was strongly accented. The disaster that was to threaten Yucatan in r847 would have to be met initially with resources from within this isolated state. 4 Although oceans separate, they also join, and in that sense Yucatan

The Ladino World

5

did have neighbors. To the northeast was that last relic of the Spanish Crown, Cuba-a market, a place of exile, and a possible source of aid. To the north, the expanding and bellicose United States had in 1847 just won a war with Mexico, and over the years that nation would have important and pervasive influence. To the west was Mexico, a week to three weeks away by boat, sometimes the same country, sometimes the enemy. Yucatan had been administered separately under Spain. Large entities formed after independence; the Central American Federation, which then split into five republics, was reassembled and came apart again, borders and loyalties not yet fixed. To the south beyond the endless woods was Guatemala, with more woods; and to the southeast the English establishment of Belize, an underpopulated trading settlement that though difficult to reach would have a major influence on events to come. Yucatan was conquered by the Spanish in 1546, after nineteen years of struggle. Then came a series of revolts, quickly and brutally suppressed; starvation, caused by the dislocation of war; and plague, spread by new germs attacking the unprotected systems of the Maya Indian. Finally, a numb peace came to a sadly diminished land. Even this was disturbed as foreign priests hunted among the ruins, sniffing after brimstone and the old gods, whipping heresy from the survivors. Time solved that problem -time, Franciscan schools, a growing Spanish tolerance, and partial acceptance by the Maya of an obviously successful God. The foreign invaders replaced the shattered class of native nobles and priests at the top and organized the country on supposedly European lines, much adapted on the local level. A new balance, a new Spanish/Maya cultural blend, was achieved. This state of affairs continued with only slight apparent changes until late in the colonial period, and by the time Europe had moved through the Renaissance and Enlightenment into the early Industrial Age, Yucatan had become a social fossil. But the colonial sleep was a time to recover strength. Fewer than 30o,ooo Mayas survived the Spanish Conquest, and this number was more than cut in half by 1700, some indication of the power of smallpox and social disorganization. With peace and readjustment, however, the population began to climb with a slowly accelerating force. From a low of 13o,ooo in 1700, the count of Maya, mestizos, and Spaniards rose to 358,ooo in 18oo, and to 58o,ooo in 1845. More people meant the need for more food, and thus a struggle for land began. The Maya saw new villages spring up to share his forest, watched the white man's rancho and hacienda crowd around him, and he worried. To the shopkeeper, more

6

THE TWO WORLDS OF YUCATAN

people meant an expanding market, and a merchant class began to form. The politician found more scope for his activities, more rewards for office, and office became a prize to be fought over. A look at the population figures and some simple multiplication suggested that Yucatan would soon have a population of several million, and provincial Ladinos began to toy with thoughts of independence. 5 To the uneducated Maya and his half-educated master, life was a series of cycles; one was born, one died, and on earth nothing changed, or could change. Social structure, agricultural methods, religion-none of these could be altered, for Providence guided the world. To the farmer, a lost crop meant that a personal God (or gods) was angry with him and that only prayer could bring food to his hungry family. There was little a reformer could do with people who believed that all debts would be squared in heaven, that the whipped serf would ascend to Glory while his master would pay below. The ambitious found their outlets in the church, social position, political office, and scholarship, all of them accepting the changeless state of the world. But the world did change. Distant Madrid came to understand that it had not been a careful master of its empire and began sending decrees to the Philippines, to Peru, to Mexico, and finally to Yucatan. The Maya chiefs had always collected the royal taxes, and this task was taken over by newly appointed jueces espaiioles. Local taxes, those used to support the republicas, the village governments, were also taken in hand, since expenses always seemed to balance income. It was suspected that the village chiefs had not always collected the full amount and had wasted money on drunken annual fiestas. The Spanish officials turned that around, raising the balance in the account from 4,086 pesos in 1777 to 516,757 pesos thirty-nine years later. 6 The local bishop recognized a good thing when he saw it. Thus he decided that the land set aside for support of village fiestas and church expenses under local organizations called cofradias could be better administered by the diocesan chancery and ordered this land seized and auctioned. It was acquired by local hacendados, often on the basis of a mortgage, with no money down, expanding their previous holdings manyfold. Since the bush or forest was largely used to raise cattle on an open range, the effect went beyond the limits of the grant; the cattle got into Indian milpas, their cornfields, and drank up the water in those rocky holes the Maya had used. Money raised by these auctions or taken from the cofradia treasuries was doled out at a much reduced level for the fiestas, which had been

The Ladino World

7

the original purpose. As noted, the fiestas were not as religious as the Ladino priests thought they should have been-they were a hubbub of drinking, fireworks, paganism, public disorder, and sin. The funds raised from cofradia land could be better spent elsewhere. In fact the monies were largely wasted under lax church control and in the end were appropriated by the Crown. Another improvement was the assignment of subdelegates to each of the eleven districts. These men, always white, were able to administer the law far more correctly and in detail because they were on the spot rather than in far off Merida. Their judgments replaced those of the village chieftain, the batab. Their presence allowed the Indios to appeal a batab's decision, or to bypass him entirely, undercutting his traditional authority and limiting his ability to order public whippings, the power that made his people kneel before him. And European ideas of reason and the perfectibility of man and human progress-applied by English colonists to their business problems in the New World, accelerating as they recrossed the ocean to level the Bastille, and carried by an army of citizens across the face of Europe-reached quiet Yucatan in faint and ebbing waves. In Campeche a French monk talked of the Encyclopedists; a priest questioned dogma at the Seminary of San Ildefonso in Merida; his students, absorbing his doubts, formed discussion groups, read forbidden books, and dreamed of a truly new world. And if those young colonial aristocrats worried about the extension of the newfound ideas to Yucatan, and wondered whether liberty must mean equality even for the Indios, they could find reassurance in the careers of Patrick Henry and Thomas Jefferson, gentleman patriots and slave owners. A second wave of ideas, a stronger one, then crossed the Atlantic. In r814, Spain, briefly free of both Napoleon and Ferdinand VII, formed a congress that passed revolutionary laws for Spain and her empire: freedom of the press, local elections, no forced labor, no tribute to the Crown, no church tax. And with each decree came a mighty howl from a threatened vested interest. In Yucatan the Maya paid the royal tribute and the church tax, together with the heavy cost of collection; and from pulpit and collector's office came the warning that the natives would not work unless forced to, and that unless they were forced the provincial economy would collapse. Their concern was premature. Napoleon fell, Ferdinand returned, and the laws were vetoed. As the king's portrait was carried in solemn procession by local aristocrats to the Merida cathedral, the more

8

THE TWO WORLDS OF YUCATAN

prominent liberals found themselves on their way to San Juan de Ulua, a fortress prison off Vera Cruz, and liberal churchmen were driven from classrooms to restricted lives in monastic cells. The ideas, however, could not be locked up. The laws had been published and understood by the Maya, who not only refused to pay church taxes but also stopped attending services and sending their children to church school, left the haciendas, and refused to work. These rights, briefly granted and then snatched away in r814, were burned into the Maya memory-a bitter outrage that would be remembered in the years ahead. 7 All over Mexico, conservatives consolidated their positions; after crushing the social revolution led by Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, they turned and won their own reactionary independence from Spain in r821. The Spanish governor of Yucatan resigned without a fight, and despite the tradition of a separate royal administration and distance from the governing state, the peninsula joined the Mexican Union. For liberals of the independence generation, the struggle was against the church and the Crown, against the Middle Ages. Spain had suppressed Yucatan's monasteries, thirty of them in the last year of its rule, and this suppression was allowed to continue by the new ruling class, which had inherited extensive monastic fields. The two hundred monks were secularized. The local church never recovered from this blow and from that time on had only a minor role in Yucatecan politics. Aristocracy was voted out of existence with the abolition of the fuero militarthe New World equivalent of the knight-a status giving special privileges and immunities and the obligation to fight the king's enemies. The enemies were few, for the title had never meant more than prestige, and most of its thousand-odd inheritors were interested in a very different future. Enthusiasts erected scaffolding to chisel away the royal coat of arms that decorated the cathedral facade and even mutilated the escudos (coats of arms) over their own front doors. Another ancient custom, the entail of land, ended for the Casa Montejo, home of the conquistador of Yucatan and the most important private residence in the state; for the first time in its 283 years, after sixteen generations in the family, it was sold. To the traditional gentleman nothing was more important than his coat of arms, and nothing lower than trade; yet the aristocratic homes around the plazas of Merida and Campeche were altered to accommodate shops, offices, and cantinas. The commercial age arrived with legal recognition of the corporation, which was first used for a henequen plantation and then for a coach line, a paper mill, a gunpowder factory, and

The Ladino World

9

a cotton mill. The sons of the patriots of r82I accepted their fathers' victories over the past and made their own revolution, the creation of a mercantile society. There was a feeling of excitement in this second generation, a belief that Yucatan had a brilliant future. In fact, nature had given them little to work with. Under the rigid control of Spain, the peninsula had exported small amounts of hides, beef, and tallow to Havana; some beeswax, woven cotton, salt, and handicrafts to Mexico; and dyewood to Europe. With the loss of Spanish protection, Argentine cattle supplied the Cuban market; beeswax and woven cotton, which had come from the tribute of the Maya, were lost when the tribute was abolished. Dyewood, cut mainly in the south along the waterways that fed the Laguna de Terminos, was collected at the port of Isla Carmen for shipment to Europe. Although dyewood was the most valuable export, competition from Belize had driven prices down, wasteful cutting had ruined the best stands of timber, and labor was hard to get. With traditional money crops failing, Yucatecans were forced to experiment. Henequen, a special type of cactus raised for the fiber taken from its leaves, had always been grown in a small way by the Maya, and it was used to make rope for the Spanish merchant marine. An overseas market was gradually developed, and in r83 3 the first commercial plantation was established on eighty acres of land. Until then henequen had only been grown in small clusters in gardens and orchards. Incorporation was necessary for this project because it took eight years for the plant to mature to the point that the leaves could be harvested, and few men could afford the cost of development. The experiment was a success. The native plant was acclimated to that rocky ground, indeed flourished on it, and the hacendados gradually began converting their cattle ranchos to the new crop. They did so slowly at first, without affecting the customary raising of corn and cattle, so there was little dislocation or change for the Maya workers. By r846 the crop stood second in export value, employed more labor than any other industry, and had created a need for seven separating mills in Merida. At the port of Sisal, which gave its name to this green gold, a new pier was built primarily to handle the shipment of the tightly packed bundles of fiber. Sugar cane had a very different history. Introduced in and grown since early colonial times, it had been consistently banned by the Crown, which wanted neither alcoholic peons nor competition for Spanish wines. Independence ended the ban, and with encouragement from the state govern-

IO

THE TWO WORLDS OF YUCATAN

ment, plantations were started in I823. Although sugar cane required much better soil than henequen, it was also more lucrative; the harvest of the second year usually paid all costs, and profits after that often ran to 700 percent annually. With these prospects the forest became important to the enterprising Ladinos. Except for the small amount owned by hacendados and villagers, all land had formerly been part of the monte del rey, the king's forest. Under the republic it was called terreno baldio, uncultivated land. As monte del rey it had belonged to all-both the cattle-raising hacendado who paid a token grazing fee, and the Maya who raised his corn unmolested by theories of property rights. As terreno baldfo it was public land that should be cultivated and could be sold. Sales were against the interests of the Maya and the older class of hacendados who had never bothered to purchase more than the ground that their buildings actually stood on; but neither group could resist the pressures of the new age. State land was the major asset of a continually bankrupt state treasury. Nothing could be simpler than to erase impossible debts by dispensing land at a low valuation; and though the creditor had no choice in the matter, it now became his concern to develop that land to recover his money. Land, together with tax reductions, could attract recruits for the various revolutionary armies. The Indio was accustomed to holding land communally by lineage or by village, with each member free to use what he needed, to own the planted crop and harvest but not the land. This right had been recognized by the Crown in a type of village holding called ejido. To the Ladino legislator, the ejido was as much a product of the past as the fuero militar was, and he did all he could to convert common land into private property. Various laws limited and attacked the institution. The burden of proving ownership was placed on the village rather than on a prospective Ladino buyer; the presence of a small settlement need not prevent the sale of land; private rental was allowed within the ejido, and finally, in I845, Indians were ordered to pay taxes to cultivate their own land. Reaction to this was so strong that the idea was quickly dropped. Throughout the I83os the all-important water rights had been protected. In I84I this protection was removed, and a cenote that had served an area from time immemorial suddenly became private property to be exploited for private gain. The digging of wells, the construction of raincatching water tanks, and the restoration of ancient tanks abandoned since the Conquest were more constructive ways of developing the arid forest,

The Ladino World

II

but access could be denied and the Maya would pay dearly to drink what had been free. Because of the population increase, new and larger Indio villages joined in the competition for water. With the terrenos baldfos of the settled land filling up, a migration began toward the south and southeast by men of both races. New names appeared on the empty parts of the map, strange names for that county. Dzitnup, Put, and Cholul became Barbachano, Moreno, and Libre Union; Nojacab, Dzibinocao, and Kokobchen became Progreso, Iturbide, and Zavala. Once only the names of Merida and Valladolid had recalled Spain, and they were still called T'ho and Zaci by the Maya. Iturbide rose from an Indian hamlet to a bustling village in a few years. John Stephens, the American travel writer who visited there in I843, was told that since the land had belonged only to the natives, it had been considered free to all comers. The villages of Hopelchen, Bolonchenticul, Tihosuco, and Peto all grew to around five thousand in population and the frontier region from I2o,ooo to 2oo,ooo-increasing its population from one-fifth to one-third of the state population. More than land was needed for the sugar plantations. Harvest time put the planters at the mercy of what they considered an irresponsible population. Unfortunately, according to white belief, the Indio was lazy. In six months of work in his field he was able to raise the necessary thirty bushels of corn for himself and his family and thirty more to trade for salt, cotton, and gunpowder; with this he was content. Clearly that attitude stood in the way of progress; someone had to give the extra sweat needed to raise Yucatan to the level of other nations of the world, and it was obviously not going to be the white hacendado. Besides, they were the planners. And so they planned. In the more settled areas around Merida, where henequen plantations were being developed, there were established practices to fall back upon. There, older haciendas had been served by a class of natives who were serfs in the true sense of the word; they came with the property, whether inherited or through purchase, and could not leave or marry without the master's consent. In the days of subsistence farming, this Indio's duties had not been onerous-tending an extra cornfield for his seiior, putting in an occasional day's work around the big house. He was called a lunero because he usually did a day's work every Monday (tunes). At the time of independence, the Maya were declared free along with all other citizens, but it was intended that "the customs of the land"-the

I2

THE TWO WORLDS OF YUCATAN

relationship between master and servant-would be maintained. Custom is hard to change, particularly when it is comfortable for those in charge. It was then said that the natives worked for the hacendado in exchange for the personal use they made of his land and his water. The noria, the mule-driven pump with water tank, the source of that water, was normally built between the big house and that of the overseer and guarded by that authority. But old customs did not satisfy the new requirements. Borrowing from the dyewood contractors, the sugar and new henequen planters organized a self-perpetuating system of debt peonage. Workers were given an advance on their wages in the form of aguardiente (alcohol distilled from sugar cane), corn seed, or a cheap shotgun, and the advance would be entered into a book as chichan cuenta, Maya/Spanish for "little bill." The amount being small, the native would forget it, thinking he would repay the next time he was given his wages. But most often he never repaid. If he thought of leaving his master, he was presented with the nohoch cuenta (the big bill) and would find the sum of many small transactions hopelessly beyond his reach. Juggling the accounts was common, and many hacendados kept no books at all. No native could be hired without a release from his former master or without his debt being assumed by his new employer; a native without a release paper was fined as a vagrant, and the fine would be sold to a planter who needed labor. It was a tidy system. Villagers who avoided the apparently generous "gifts" and loans were not exempt from exploitation either. As citizens, they were liable for taxes assessed by the jefe politico, a white local official of the hacendado class; failure to pay meant debt servitude. Orphans were considered the state's responsibility, but prey would be a better word; they were collected by the authorities-even when they had uncles, older brothers, or other close relatives able to support them-and sold for twenty-five pesos to townsmen or hacendados as servants. Any property of a deceased villager was attachable for his debt, a practice that reduced his survivors to a compliant attitude about accepting loans; and the debt was legally the obligation of the son. And if all else failed, there were famines, conveniently spaced every few years, when at the expense of a little charity a life-long servant could be found. Thus white-written and white-administered laws guaranteed that the expanding agricultural enterprises would not be left to the whim of that "irresponsible population." These lawmakers were liberal democrats. As they gradually tightened their economic grip on the Indio, they gave him

The Ladino World the vote and saw no contradiction. The theory behind the land and debt laws was that the Maya must become participating citizens. Theirs was a conscious plan to destroy the old ways of the self-sustaining villages and replace them with rules of economic cooperation and progress. When philosophy and greed combine, their strength is hard to contest. 8 The importance of cash-crop farming must not be overestimated. Ninety-five percent of the laboring force was still engaged in corn farming, but the new industries affected many aspects of Yucatecan life. Transportation became important, and most of the roads in existence by r84 7 had been built since independence. Wagons could haul goods more economically than pack animals, so the sugar planters demanded wagon roads. Their construction was accomplished by drawing on an ancient custom called fagina, the responsibility of every citizen to work from four to six days a year on a public-works project-or pay the equivalent, one real (twelve and a half cents a day). Because the pay was so paltry, only brown citizens actually toiled in the sun. Roads made personal travel possible; a scheduled stage line was instituted between Merida, Sisal, and Campeche, and two-wheeled carts carried passengers through the back country. But these were not highways. The country might have looked flat from the top of a church tower or from a ruined pyramid, but at ground level it had its ups and downs. Exposed rock on the many small ridges could break an axle if not negotiated carefully, and the low spots became lakes with poor drainage in the rainy season. Many preferred to travel by colche-a covered litter or hammock hung between two cross pieces, fastened to two ten-foot poles, and carried by teams of four natives; one was almost always available through a village chief. Travel helped disperse the isolated groups of the past, the patrias chicas (little homelands), the local district and neighborhood that claimed a man's first and strongest loyalties. When travel had been difficult and uncertain, people stayed home. Before there was a market for surplus goods, the people had limited themselves to subsistence farming. Villagers in the neighborhood of Tekax considered that place their capital and never went to Merida or Campeche, and the same had been true of residents of a dozen sleepy back-country towns. In the Yucatan of r847, there were four definable areas-four patrias chicas-with distinct economic, political, and social problems. These were Merida and the northwest, Campeche, the frontier, and Valladolid. Merida was the center of the Yucatecan Ladino world. It had been the resi-

THE TWO WORLDS OF YUCATAN

dence of the captain general under the Crown, the seat of the governor during union with Mexico, and later the capital of the independent state -home of the legislature, the high courts, and the ruling bishop. The center of Merida was the Plaza de Armas. This square-vast and undeveloped, dusty in dry times, muddy in the rain, glaring white beneath a tropical sun-was crowded with herds of mules, wagons and carts, and trade goods during the busy hours. It was surrounded by the most important buildings in the city. To the east stood the cathedral of San Ildefonso, completed in 1571, with a flat, plain facade, two faintly dissimilar towers, and bells so long out of pitch that only strangers noticed. Its neoclassical interior was perhaps the finest in Central America. Adjoining it to the south was the bishop's palace, a bare two-story building with a door large enough to admit a coach to the interior court; it was adorned with a large wooden cross to identify it. The Palacio Municipal, of Moorish style and topped with a clock tower, was on the western side; and the governor's palace, part of a long arcaded block, ran across the northern side of the plaza. Arcades or galleries, an architectural feature inherited though Spain from the Greek stoa, bordered the plaza of every Yucatecan town that aspired to urban civilization. Although Merida's principal market was elsewhere, vendors set up their stands in the cool shade of those arches and laid out mats displaying their wares: tamales, roasted corn, and pumpkin seeds for the hungry; sashes, scarves, coral necklaces, and cheap hand mirrors for the vain; and for the lucky the cry "para hoy, para hoy" and a ticket that could bring riches from the daily lottery. Behind the arcade was a row of more formal opportunities: the barber shop, the billiard hall, the cantina and card room. A crowd of eager dark-eyed boys waited for those who wore boots and might need them polished, while their fathers looked for the odd job or begged. Here a man could meet his friends, arrange a business deal, smile at the latest scandal or at a pretty half-caste, read a newly posted decree and complain about the government, or simply watch the people and the hours go by. The galleries were the living heart of Merida. Facing onto the plaza and scattered throughout the nearby streets were the homes of the gente decente-the "decent people," the leaders of this provincial world. These houses were much alike from the outside. Their ornamentation was limited to carved details around the huge doors and the tall projecting windows; the walls were thick; inside, life focused on the patio and garden. Undoubtedly the finest of these houses was the Casa

The Ladino World

Plaza de Armas, Merida

Montejo, built by the conquistador and Yucatan's first governor, Francisco de Montejo, and owned in r847 by the wealthy Peon family. Its doorway was flanked by carved panels. Corinthian columns, together with a male caryatid said to represent the architect, supported a putti-encrusted balcony. Above, on each side of the Montejo crest, were two armored pikemen standing in Gothic pride, each with a foot on a wailing Indian. Merida was a city of light, of open sky, of square buildings built of white stone with flat roofs. Breaking the skyline were thirteen churches, two monasteries, and the largest building after the cathedral, the fortress of San Benito. San Benito had been the monastery of San Francisco, a complex of several large churches with a two-story cloister for the monks, an infirmary, and a school, all surrounded by a six-sided wall forty feet high and eight feet thick. Bastions at each corner had been added in the middle of the eighteenth century, out of fear of pirates or a Maya uprising. One side of the cloister had a chamber with a corbeled arch, relic of an earlier past. The monastery had been built on top of the temple Pocobtok ("shining flint knife") of the Maya city of T'ho. 9 After the monks were expelled in r82o, it was used as a military barracks and prison, the object of the many coups d'etat staged in the city. Beyond the center of the city, the domain of the Creole aristocracy, the

r6

THE TWO WORLDS OF YUCATAN

houses became less pretentious; first they lost the decorative touches that gave charm to blank walls; farther out, flat-beam and lime cement roof construction gave way to the thatched roof of the indigenous choza-a rectangular hut with rounded corners and walls of stone or wattle covered with plaster, the most common form of dwelling on the peninsula. The regular grid of streets continued to the barrios of Santa Anna, Mejorado, San Sabastian, and Santiago, arranged clockwise starting in the north, apparently survivors of pre-Columbian villages, The mestizo and Maya people-the servants, craftsmen, and laborers-lived in these suburbs. There were over forty-eight thousand people living in Merida in r847. The city dominated the old colonial country of the northwest, including the towns of Maxcanu, Ticul, Sotuta, lzamal, and Motul. At the beginning of the century, half of the state's population lived in this area; by midcentury, it was closer to one-third, and Merida's position of dominance was threatened. Her trade via Sisal was primarily with Cuba and the United States, while Campeche's business was with Mexico. This would cause trouble when the state was faced with war and blockade and a choice of enemies. Merchants in the capital felt one way about taxes and importexport duties on rum; sugar planters felt quite another way. Liberals in Merida could write laws for the protection of the Indios, but these might be ignored by hacendados on the frontier. The day had passed when the rest of Yucatan would patiently accept instructions and commands from the capital. Campeche, the second city of the peninsula and the only port until the development of Sisal, was in a slow decline. It was famous for its wall, which had been built against the repeated pirate attacks of an earlier time, and had been valuable in the recurring civil wars; the wall had never been successfully assaulted and earned for the city the title of "New Troy. " 10 The slim-towered cathedral of the Immaculate Conception, ornately worked in the baroque style, its stone walls turned to an ocher tint by time and the sea wind, was considered the handsomest church in Yucatan. It stood on the northern side of the plaza, while to the west were the palaces of the government and municipality and the customs house-all with arcaded galleries on two levels and backed up against the sea wall. Campeche had a population of twenty-one thousand, many churches and monasteries, a poorhouse, a hospital, a naval school, and a theater. Its streets were narrow and cramped within the walls, with the smell of fish and the sea hanging in the sultry air; vultures grew fat on the leavings from the fish market along the rocky beach; and there were mosquitoes.

The Ladino World

I7

The waterfront at Campeche

The suburbs where the lower classes lived were more attractive, with orchards and gardens and rows of palms. A wharf projected qo yards out into the bay, which was of little use to ships of any size because it stood dry at low tide and gave no protection when the wind was from the north or northwest. Campeche was inhabited by a restless, vital people, active in politics and trade. It was the traditional port of entry to the country, with a larger percentage of white citizens than any other district. After the decline of the dyewood trade, the collapse of Campeche's shipyards and merchant marine further reduced Campeche's income. The special rebates on duties that had existed under the Crown to assist Yucatan and protect Mexican shipping were lost in the years following independence, a heavy blow to the port city. More than two thousand of Campeche's male citizens had been sailors or shipwrights in I8n, but by I845 only 4 70 were thus employed. Increased duties imposed by Merida and Mexico encouraged smuggling, particularly of English goods through Bacalar, and contraband exceeded legal imports. Sisal was developed in I8n as a port for Merida and quickly grew into a serious competitor, with the advantage of proximity to the more populated area of the state and served by a better network of roads. Neither location was a natural port; tenders were necessary for oceangoing vessels, and there was no protection from the dreaded norte, which brought fierce storms from the north. By I845 Sisal was handling cargo worth twice that of Campeche. Sisal had a little fort for protection, but it never grew be-

I8

THE TWO WORLDS OF YUCATAN

yond one long street crowded with wagons, oxen, mules, whorehouses, and cantinas, which ended at the wharf and customs house. All of it was built on a sand bar and surround by salt marshes. The profits made in Sisal were controlled and collected in Merida, and the struggle between that place and Campeche grew from arguments in the counting house into civil war. The frontier began about eighty miles out on a radius from Merida and had four main sectors: the dry Chenes (well) country to the south; the area from below Peto to the vicinity of Valladolid to the southeast; Valladolid to the east; and the outpost Bacalar, which could be reached by a six- to eight-day pack trip through uninhabited forest. Bacalar stood on a bluff on the western shore of the riverlike lake of the same name, opposite the mouth of a small stream, the Chaak, which led to the Rio Hondo and thence to the Bay of Chetumal and the Caribbean Sea. It had been built as an outpost against the English at Belize with a moated stone fortress called San Philipe. Queen Elizabeth, good Protestant and businesswoman that she was, had seen no reason to accept the gift of half the world by the bishop of Rome to the king of Spain and considered that all unoccupied territory in the New World was available to anyone who could take and hold it. In the fifty years following her reign, English settlements were established at Carmen, in the Laguna de Terminos, along the Honduras coast, and at Belize. Of these, only Belize survived the continuous defensive efforts of the Spanish; it was relatively isolated on a difficult lee coast and its land was of questionable value. But money could be made there cutting dyewood. The early English settlers had been part-time buccaneers, or irregular members of the British navy, depending upon whose view one took; the Spanish and later the Yucatecans took the darker one, long after the reality had passed. There were never very many of themabout a thousand whites with five thousand black slaves and free mulattoes, plus a scattering of Maya and Carib Indians. Technically forbidden by a compromise treaty to raise more than subsistence crops to support their lumber interest, they searched the jungle rivers for good stands of dyewood and later, mahogany. By I847, Belize had developed into a mercantile beachhead for English goods, transshipped throughout Central America, usually without payment of duty. 11 Trade operated by a curious formula. There was little market in other parts of Yucatan for corn raised in the fields of eastern Yucatan, around villages like Tixcacalcupul, Ebtun, and Xocen. But there was a real need to the south, and lines of mules packed cargas of corn to feed black lum-

The Ladino World berjacks in British Honduras, men who sweated and toppled trees in the forest. Logs were floated down the Rfo Hondo, hauled aboard ships in the bay, shipped to Liverpool, and converted there into ponderous sideboards that gave prestige to Victorian parlors. And from Manchester through Liverpool rolls of well-made, inexpensive cotton were shipped back to Belize, packed up through the woods to avoid a 25 percent tariff, and sold in Xocen, Ebtun, or Tixcacalcupul, saturating the market and bankrupting the cotton mill in nearby Valladolid. By I847 the ancient antagonism with Bacalar had settled down to a peaceful distrust, and Bacalar, with five thousand people, worked to meet the needs south of the river. Although it was the customs collecting point, many of those people were involved in the free side of the trade. During bad years, Maya from the north went there to work, and race relations were good. Belize and Bacalar would be vital elements in the events to come. 12 The frontier was considered Yucatan's hope for the future. In the thirty years before I84 5 its population had grown from a fifth to a third of the state's total; it raised two-thirds of the corn crop and over 90 percent of the sugar. All along the frontier, new towns were springing up and old ones were booming. The market towns for the area were Tekax, Peto, Tihosuco, and Tizimin, each with a population of four to five thousand. Though the white settlers in these towns had similar goals-free land, debt laws to entrap workers, and low taxes on aguardiente-they were too isolated to make a common cause. These frontier border towns also lacked the rigid class structure of the more settled areas, and their residents mixed more easily with their Indio neighbors. At the same time their ambitions drove them into direct conflict with the other race. The one pocket of resistance to the frontier movement and point of view was Valladolid. Its citizens, relying too much on their past, considered themselves the elite of the state. They called their city "the Sultaness of the East," and the principal streets were lined with mansions with Castilian coats of arms above their doorways-though many were roofless and abandoned. In this city of the Hidalgo (from hijo de alga, the son of someone), the citizens were obsessed with racial purity and excluded both the Indio and the mestizo from the center of town and from any position of authority. These gentlemen looked down on work, except the gentleman's occupation of raising cattle (which was done from a horse), and sugar plantations were not organized near the city. The camino real to Merida was little used, and the products of neighboring Espita and Tizimin were shipped out by sea or hauled west on branch roads. There was

20

THE TWO WORLDS OF YUCATAN

no school, no doctor, no druggist, no cobbler, and no builder in stone in this city of fifteen thousand. Yet they had seen what progress could mean; outside interests had established a steam-driven cotton mill there, possibly the first in Mexico, with looms, a steam engine, and even an engineer from the United States. The mill employed II7 workers, produced four hundred yards of cloth daily, and created a market for local cotton planters. Yet it could barely compete with those goods from England, and when it was denied duty-free access to the Mexican market in I846, it failed. As Yucatan moved away from its colonial tradition, the Creole leaders of Valladolid found themselves more and more out of step. Their social privileges were questioned by the other classes; and the mestizo, aware of the advancement of his group in other parts, became restless, rebellious. While sugar and cotton planting was neglected, cattle ranches were extended on land bought or expropriated from the Indios. The proximity of cattle forced the natives to build dry stone walls to protect their cornfields, a heavy extra labor for them since each field lasted only a few seasons. And there was bad feeling about the seizure of land and cenotes that the Indios thought belonged to them. Very few white men lived outside the city, or even in the barrios. There were seven natives for every white man in the district, the highest ratio in Yucatan. Merida, Campeche, Valladolid, and the frontier-these were the four little homelands within the peninsula. Sharing much, but with conflicting interests, each would someday find itself ready to take up arms against the others. These conflicting interests divided the patrias chicas; these flaws in the Yucatecan Ladino society explain a great deal of the later talk about patriotism and sacred ideals. Just as Yucatecan Ladinos separated themselves from Mexico, so within Yucatan itself they would break up into petty quasi-republics, creating anarchy within their own world and an opportunity for the long-abused Indio. Progress brought a changing class relationship. Under the Crown, Yucatecan society had been dominated by men of Spanish birth. The royal captain general, his lieutenant, and the bishop all came from the mother country-along with most of the higher judges, officials, and army officers. After them in status came the Creoles, people of supposedly pure white blood but born in the New World. Next stood the mestizos, far down the ladder, of mixed white and Indian blood, and a few mulattoes of white and Negro blood. The Pardos, of Negro and Indian blood, came from several hundred ex-slaves in neighboring Tabasco as well as a group

The Ladino World

2I

who survived a shipwreck and formed a village in north central Yucatan, but they were never important in number. At the bottom of the ladder were the Indios. Independence discredited or expelled the Spaniards, and their positions were taken over by the gente decente, or upper class. This class dressed according to contemporary European fashion, if a few years behind it: the women with off-the-shoulder, pinched-waist, fullskirted dresses, using perhaps more color and more lace than was considered stylish abroad, but pleasing by all accounts; the men wore tight vests, fitted black swallow-tailed coats, loose white pants, and top hats or billed caps. Town life was the only existence they knew or could tolerate, and when not abroad they could be found in Merida, Campeche, or perhaps Valladolid. Owning haciendas they seldom saw, they considered Merida their true home, the center of all that made life worth living. In Merida, fiesta followed fiesta, all building up to the day of Corpus Christi, when the part-time militia officers could strut before fan-hidden glances in all their shakoed, epauletted, tightly buttoned glory. Religious processions filed through the streets beneath floral arches to the solemn music of a half-Moorish Spain. Gaudily dressed images were carried on litters-a gruesomely suffering Christ ("Christ of the Blisters," a crucifix that had survived a village church fire and was considered miraculous) and a doll-like virgin-over the heads of the faithful through a blue haze of incense. The processions continued all day and by torchlight far into the night. Bands played hymns and the latest Italian opera for a people who enjoyed their religion. They played concerts in the plaza and in the uniquely Yucatecan bull rings, constructed of a temporary scaffolding of poles lashed together for a provincial version of the Fiesta Brava. What the musicians lacked in skill, they made up for in enthusiasm and variety, playing quadrilles, contredanses, gallopades, and waltzes for the balls that climaxed each fiesta and each change or attempted change of government. And always there was gambling, the passion of both sexes, of all ages and all classes: the choice ran from lotteries, raffles, dice, and the cockpit to the glories of the political coup. In Merida it was even possible to watch the distinguished aeronaut, Jose M. Flores, ascend seven thousand feet into the heavens in his gaily decorated balloon. The mestizo was in the typically uncomfortable position of the man between, looked down upon by the white man and despised by the Indio. When skin and features ran to the mother's side, a Spanish name was often the only distinguishing mark of the mestizo; when the father's genes predominated, local attitude was decisive. Mestizos were excluded from

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