Yucatán: Una Guerra Escrita, Prelude

Chapter 3 begins by asking a deceptively simple question: why was the Caste War called the Caste War? By tracing the historical reach and geographic range of the concept-metaphor casta, it shows how the name of the war indexes Creole efforts to repurpose the historical legacy of colonialism and cast the future of liberal capitalist development in Yucatán. The chapter then shows how Creoles drew on casta’s nimble globality to articulate race, liberalism, and capitalism in the pages of a lively but unruly periodical culture that included reportage, historiography, and folletines or serialized fiction. This casta periodismo, in turn, reveals the lineaments of the powerful and yet tenuous social formation of casta capitalism.