On the night of 28 March 1936, gunmen linked to a cacique killed a young peasant leader in the village of Kinchil in western Yucatán. Such incidents proved far from rare in rural Mexico of the 1920s and 1930s, as factional disputes over land or local power often played out violently. What is exceptional about the murder in Kinchil is that the murdered community leader was a woman, Felipa Poot.
Poot’s life and death inspired a series of writers, journalists, and amateur historians. For example, in 1938, Poot appeared in a short story penned by Martín Luis Guzmán.1 Yucatecan intellectuals later cast her as the victim of reactionary landlords who sought to halt agrarian reform and thus legitimize the postrevolutionary regime. In 1986 journalist Jesús Solís Alpuche published a series of articles based on oral history for the pro-government Mérida newspaper Diario del Sureste. Several subsequent intellectuals focused...
