It is puzzling that so little scholarship on the nineteenth-century conflict conventionally called the Caste War of Yucatan (1847–1901) addresses the war through the analytic of political violence. Too often, popular and scholarly discourses reduce the conflict to a primeval race war whereby Maya rebels supposedly aimed to “exterminate the white race” in Yucatan (p. 252). Wolfgang Gabbert's reframing complicates these stereotypical and propaganda-based portrayals of the war that continue to permeate the literature. For this reason alone, Violence and the Caste War of Yucatán is a most welcome addition.
Gabbert situates his arguments in the broader context of rural revolts and secessionist insurrections that occurred in the wake of independence from Spain across Latin America. He contends that the Caste War is unique within this sphere because of its duration, magnitude, and establishment of an independent insurrectionist polity, one that controlled the southeastern portions of the peninsula for a...
