Provocatively titled, La historia secreta presents a complex portrait of henequen production in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Yucatán. Based on archival sources at the Archivo General del Estado de Yucatán and the Simón Peón papers at the University of Texas– Arlington, Piedad Peniche Rivero brings together several different strategies of argumentation. Microhistorical treatments of individual court cases are joined with large-scale analyses of wages and population profiles. Catholic rituals of marriage, baptism, and confirmation are brought into dialogue with theories of resistance as well as statistical evidence for outmigration.
Individual chapters place relations between hacienda owners and workers within both larger- and smaller-scale contexts: transnational ties linking the production of henequen to markets in the United States, on the one hand; ideas about the sacred and traditions of resistance within Maya communities, on the other. Chapter 1 considers the development of commercial agriculture in the Yucatán from the sixteenth...
