The Recent Boom
As regional studies have moved to the forefront of research in Mexican history over the past decade, work on Yucatán1 has been particularly well represented. Lured perhaps by the past glories of ancient Maya civilization whose ruins adorn the peninsula, its conquest by the Spaniards, the fierce resistance of the Maya to the Spaniards and later the Mexicans, and finally by the fabled riches of the henequen boom and its dramatic demise in the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution, anthropologists, economists, sociologists, geographers, and demographers have made important contributions along with historians. Of late, it must seem to many non-yucatólogos as though these specialists are literally swarming over the peninsula. This recent surge of interest in the Yucatecan past, particularly in the modern era (c. 1750 to the present), builds upon a long and distinguished tradition of social-science research on the region, dating hack to the celebrated nineteenth-century archaeological explorations of John Stephens and, more recently, to the golden age of lowland Maya studies presided over by the Carnegie Institution of Washington during the first half of this century.2 The current boom, which began in the mid-1970s, has witnessed (and, in turn, benefited from) an upgrading of archives and research collections, an increased commitment by government, academic institutions, and international foundations to professional training and investigation, and the creation of new journals and forums for the dissemination of research.3
Much of the recent historiography of modern Yucatán seems to rest on the basic assumption that great heuristic value may lie in the study of “exceptional regions.” There may be many Mexicos, but remote and separatist Yucatán has traditionally been viewed as more marked in its regional identity than any other entity within the republic.4 Nevertheless, yucatólogos have not marginalized the regional past as a special case. They acknowledge that in Yucatán and the southeast (and in certain other peripheral regions, such as the northwest), regional society developed with a degree of autonomy unmatched elsewhere in Mexico. Yet they contend that it was precisely this degree of autonomy that made such regions the kinds of exceptions that bring common historical experiences into focus and enable us better to appreciate the dynamics of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Mexican history as a whole.5 Now presenting the Yucatecan experience as a “limiting case” of a larger problem, now as a dynamic component of a larger whole,6 the regional historiography has illuminated broader discussions of capitalist agricultural expansion and peasant rebellion; plantation monoculture and possibilities for regional development; and revolutionary mobilization and strategies of social change—to cite some of the more relevant themes.
The recent boom has seen notable progress in professional craftsmanship and ingenuity. Yucatólogos have ranged far beyond standard institutional sources, the regional press, and rarer collections of folletería. Among a diverse constellation of materials, they have mined parish registers and notarial archives; searched out land titles, litigation files, agrarian censuses, and tax lists; collected Maya oral tradition and written records; and gained access to the papers of private estates and multinational corporations. To obtain a broader field of vision, historians of Yucatán’s modern past have consulted government and private collections in Mexico City and Belize, as well as in North America and Europe.7
The steady infusion of monographic research into the regional historical literature over the past five to ten years has established new interpretative trends and set the agenda for future investigation. The current generation of scholars has begun by challenging traditional static divisions of Mexican history based on national-level political phenomena.
Customary periodizations have never really suited the Yucatecan historical experience and have not been consistently applied even in the work of local political historians. Mexico’s three great political benchmarks—or “revolutionary cycles,” as they have often been termed in the literature—were not violent episodes in Yucatán and have not been recounted as prominently in the peninsula as elsewhere in the republic. The Grito de Dolores generated no immediate echo in the region, nor were there any “Wars of Independence” in Yucatán. Liberal yucatecos carried out a concerted campaign against clerical privilege decades before the “Wars of Reform” were waged throughout Mexico in the late 1850s, thereby ensuring that bloody partisan conflict was minimized in the peninsula. Similarly, the Mexican Revolution of 1910 was a rather non-violent affair in the southeast. The revolution did not even arrive in Yucatán until 1915, imported from without with little loss of life.
Yet Yucatán’s modern history has hardly been tranquil. If the popular Hidalgo Revolt did not resonate in the peninsula it might have been because, in addition to the peninsula’s remoteness, the Maya had anticipated it in an earlier rebellion of their own, led by Jacinto Canek in 1761, which was dealt a severely repressive blow. And although other Mexican regions experienced peasant rebellions and caste warfare during the early national period, nowhere were they so tragic and devastating as in Yucatán. The bloodiest, most militarily successful Indian rebellion in Latin American history, the so-called Guerra de Castas unleashed in 1847, also had much to do with the muting of Reform Era rivalries in Yucatán. While creole Liberals and Conservatives fought each other elsewhere in Mexico, the members of Yucatán’s dominant class were compelled to submerge, at least temporarily, their ideological differences and regionally based economic rivalries and confront a common Maya enemy who, in 1848, nearly drove them from the peninsula. Indeed, so bitterly contested was the Caste War and so indelible its memory, that it also affected the character of Yucatán’s participation in the Mexican Revolution. In addition to demographic dislocation and the tremendous loss of life and property that made a renewal of hostilities either unattractive or infeasible, the Caste War prompted Yucatán’s planter-merchant elite, once it had securely reestablished its control over the region, to implement a series of repressive political and social measures to ensure against the recurrence of another homegrown groundswell. Even today the Caste War remains the central historical event in the popular mind, and many Yucatecos (and other Mexicans as well) mistakenly assume that when one speaks of the revolution in Yucatán, one is referring to the Caste War.
Generally speaking, the new wave of historical writing on the Caste War period, as well as on other aspects of Yucatán’s modern past, has reexamined and often downplayed the traditional connection with national-level political phenomena, such as Mexico’s “revolutionary cycles,” and focused on the structural bedrock of the region’s historical development.8 Recent studies have given particular attention to the changing relations of land, labor, and capital and their impact on socioeconomic, political, and cultural processes and institutions. What has emerged is the foundation for a new periodization of Yucatecan history based upon an analysis of the dynamic process of capitalist development in a dependent economy. This has involved a younger generation of scholars in an inquiry into the evolution of regional systems of production, labor regimes, and the relations between social groups and classes. Since such problems are conditioned by the interplay of factors internal and external to the region, the framework of analysis has become more complex and frequently involved investigation at different levels of the world system. The following survey of recent historical writing on modern Yucatán, from the origins of the Caste War through the revolution, although painted in broad strokes, provides a conspectus of major interpretative trends as well as of some of the lively debates that have emerged.9
The Early Expansion of Commercial Agriculture and Its Consequences (c. 1750-1880)
By about 1880 Yucatán was transformed from the relatively isolated, marginally productive backwater it had been late in the colonial period into a dynamic commodity-exporting region intimately tied to the United States and the fluctuating rhythms of the world market. Marta Espejo-Ponce de Hunt, Nancy Farriss, Luis Millet Cámara, and particularly Robert Patch have collectively fleshed out the origins of capitalist agriculture in Yucatán, tracing the centuries-long process of agrarian transition from encomienda/estancia to mixed hacienda to tropical plantation and documenting the creole landed class’s progressive control over Maya land and water, labor, and, ultimately, the system of agricultural production itself.10 Building upon their examination of the late consolidation of the Yucatecan great estate (c. 1730-50), they have reached a broad consensus regarding the agrarian origins of the Caste War. Rather than being isolated as an apocalyptic race war,11 the 1847 revolt is now conceived as the terrible outcome of an extended dialectical process of commercial agricultural expansion and Maya response that began late in the colonial period.12 The very challenge of the term “caste war” and the increasing emphasis on establishing the socioeconomic roots of a “peasant rebellion” are indicative of the new thinking on the causes and character of the struggle.13 Unfortunately, the absence (and likely destruction in the war) of detailed hacienda records has thus far limited case studies of the development of commercial agriculture, particularly of the sugar hacienda and other commercial estates producing tobacco, cotton, and rice on the southeastern frontier. It has also dictated general conclusions regarding social relations on antebellum estates, based largely on government publications, the local press, and accounts of contemporary observers.14
Combining a rigorous ethnohistorical analysis of Maya language sources with research on more traditional materials from the dominant white society, anthropologist Victoria Bricker has provided a sophisticated understanding of Maya perceptions of the agrarian question and helped to clarify the racial or “caste” nature of the war.15 Because they believed that the law should apply to all people regardless of ethnic background, the free Maya clearly made a social revolution to erase caste distinctions. Yet Bricker contends that the fearful, skittish ladinos must bear major responsibility for redefining a social conflict into a brutal race war. Her argument turns on the creoles’ costly decision during the earliest days of the rebellion not to honor the distinction that then existed between rich, powerful, and often highly assimilated Indian caciques and the majority of poor, landless Indians. By persecuting and actually lynching members of this former privileged group, the ladinos forced such caciques to identify as Indians and contribute their leadership abilities to the rebel movement.16
Gaps continue to remain in our understanding of strategic aspects of the revolt, particularly the reasons for the rebels’ loss of momentum with victory nearly within their grasp. Although Bricker has found no relevant letters from Indian leaders to explain the Maya’s failure to pursue their advantage, oral tradition recorded several generations following the events indicates that the military campaign was interrupted by the beginning of the planting season: Maya ritual and the peasant economy demanded that the rebels return to their cornfields. Bricker also suspects that with victory so close, the rebels may have fallen to quarreling among themselves over the nature and leadership of the new order—a lead that should be explored.17 Finally, new research suggests that the creole comeback would probably not have been possible without the active support—or at least the acquiescence—of the northwestern Maya acasillados who had long been attached to haciendas.18
The rash of agrarian revolts and caste wars that erupted in several key Mexican regions in the aftermath of Independence points up both the disintegration of the imperial central state and the political and economic disenfranchisement of Indian minorities during the early national period. Other nineteenth-century indigenous peasant rebellions would last longer than the Caste War of Yucatán (e.g., the Yaqui rebellion in Sonora), encompass a greater geographical area (the Sierra Gorda revolt in central Mexico), or range more freely in their depredations against ladino society (the Cora rebellion of Manuel Lozada). Yet none drew upon as many advantages as the rebel Maya: a homogeneous ethnic base still animated by a vigorous pre-Hispanic cultural tradition; the absence of serious natural obstacles (mountains, rivers, and so forth), which reinforced this ethnic identity and strategically facilitated mobility across the frontier of white settlement; the proximity of British arms and supplies from Belize; and finally, the weak economic, political, and logistical ties between Yucatán and central Mexico, which permitted the revolt to proceed for a long time without federal intervention.19
It is not surprising, therefore, that the Yucatecan rebellion was the most violent of this turbulent age, or that its regional consequences were likely the most profound. Writers have differed in their attempts to capture its immense significance. Some continue to regard the rebellion as an anticolonial war, the last in a series of failed Maya attempts to cast off Western domination.20 Four decades ago, Cline viewed the Caste War in ultimately more positive terms, as the killing ground of colonialism in the region: “after [the Caste War] the foundations of modern Yucatán evolved rapidly, serving as a base for new aspirations and outlook.”21 Several local writers later built on this insight, regarding the conflict as essential to the rise of a more durable form of agricultural capitalism, the henequen monoculture that eclipsed sugar during the second half of the nineteenth century.22 Generally speaking, the new historiography has stepped back from such broad generalizations and reexamined the wars consequences in the context of more circumscribed historical investigations, usually focusing on demographic trends, specific socioethnic groups, economic sectors and classes, or geographical subregions.23
Further study is needed, however, of both the short- and long-term consequences of the conflict if the Caste War’s full demographic, socioeconomic, political, and cultural impact is to be gauged. While a healthy debate continues to rage over the issues of whether the war caused the late-century fiber boom and delimited the henequen zone,24 scarcely any research has been done on the rebellion’s impact on agrarian structures outside the northwest25—although the ethnohistorical literature on the political and cultural dimensions of the rebel Maya states that existed across the southeastern frontier until the turn of the century is well advanced.26 Similarly, we must flesh out more precisely the changing relationship between the ascendant northwestern henequen zone and its increasingly peripheral hinterland in the southeast, tracing the relationship from the end of the Caste War through the Porfirian henequen boom and into the revolutionary era.27
The Political Economy of Monoculture (c. 1880-1915)
Like so much of regional Mexico, Yucatán was thoroughly transformed by the requirements of North American industrial capitalism during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The invention of a mechanical knotting device for the McCormick reaper-binder (1878) revolutionized the grain industry and expanded demand for fiber and twine geometrically. The production of henequen increased furiously in the Yucatán during the Porfiriato, when annual exports rose from 40,000 bales of raw fiber to more than 600,000 bales. Contemporaries chronicled how, by the turn of the century, the green cornfields and idly grazing cows of the northwest’s colonial-style haciendas had been replaced by endless rectilinear rows of bluish-gray spines and the brisk factorylike pace of the modern plantation. They observed that Mérida, the regional capital, was no longer the dingy, muddy, overgrown village it had been before the Caste War. Now the republic’s “White City,” it was immaculate and modern, a fitting seat for Yucatán’s newly minted henequen millionaires. Yet the writers of the day also captured another Yucatán: the isolated and miserable world of the plantation peón, who, though he underwrote urban Yucatán’s rapid modernization with his labor, knew none of its wealth and amenities.28
Surprisingly, only recently has serious work been done on the political economy of henequen or, for that matter, on the major trends in regional life from the time Yucatán was stabilized after the Caste War until it was again disturbed by the revolutionary movements of the 1910s. When Howard Cline first took stock of regional historiography in 1945, he reported that “there is a vast bibliography on henequen, but most articles deal with its botanical features or the technical process whereby the leaves of this agave are converted to useful fiber, rather than with the social implications and its impact on Yucatecan institutions.”29
Since the mid-1970s, local and international scholars have actively sought to redress this imbalance. Indeed, at present no topic is more studied than the structures of the henequen export economy, and no period of regional history is under closer scrutiny than the Porfiriato or Old Regime (1876-1915).30 The first fruits of long-term research efforts have begun to appear, most notably two solid monographs by historian Allen Wells and anthropologist R. Laura Batt. Based extensively on municipal and state archives, including notarial, property tax, and estate records, these studies examine elite formations, agrarian structures, and social relations within the henequen zone and on its more peripheral, agriculturally diversified eastern fringe, respectively. Wells’s and Batt’s contributions, together with a proliferating article literature, constitute the beginnings of a critical mass of empirical and theoretical scholarship that is broadly interdisciplinary and has already generated interpretative debates.31
Wells and other writers have detailed the planters’ late nineteenth-century campaign to acquire ever greater amounts of land, labor, and capital in order to expand production and meet world demand.32 Lured by windfall profits, northwestern proprietors rapidly converted their mixed haciendas to monoculture on a grand scale.33 The process whereby the great estate devoured the remaining peasant villages in the northwest is now well documented,34 and although the communal sector seems also to have been eroded in the southeast, broad generalizations about agrarian structures outside the henequen zone will remain hazardous until additional local studies appear.35
Most modern students attribute the great profitability of the Porfirian henequen estate in large part to the planters’ systematic, often brutal exploitation of their dependent workforce. Although they are reluctant to appropriate the “black legend” in John Kenneth Turner’s Barbarous Mexico and other contemporary accounts, recent scholars have clearly found Turner’s muckraking to be more plausible than the arguments of henequenero apologists.36 Judging conditions on estates in terms of such diverse criteria as diet, availability of medical care and educational instruction, workload, real wages, access to cash advances and corn plots, physical coercion, and mobility, historians have found that treatment of laborers was bad and tended to get worse as the world market intensified throughout the period. The majority have concluded that as the local economy became more engaged by, and ultimately subordinated to, the demands of international capitalism, working conditions became “involuted,” with the traditional system of debt peonage gradually transformed into a neoslave regime.37 And while subregional variations must be taken into account in evaluating working conditions—particularly the continuation of a watered-down version of paternalism on some estates in the marginal southeast38—recent scholarship suggests that on the whole, social relations on Yucatecan plantations were among the most brutal in the tropical southeast, a region that maintained perhaps the most onerous labor regime in the republic.39
Beyond this broad consensus on working conditions, yucatólogos must still resolve a variety of empirical questions regarding the mechanism of dependent labor on late Porfirian estates. Only additional local studies will determine whether workers’ debts were usually hereditary, clarify the exact relationship between debts and wage levels, and flesh out the precise role that the hacienda store played in the peón’s indebtedness.40
In general, the social history of the rural working class remains to be written. Conditions during the late Porfiriato may indeed have been intolerable for all types of hacienda workers, yet to lump all jornaleros together as “slaves” may not only be misleading but prevent a better understanding of the cultural and political responses that different categories of workers—e.g., Maya campesinos, Yaqui deportees, and Oriental indentured laborers—could make in the face of their oppression. Only recently have some historians begun to appreciate that Yucatán’s rural workforce was more than the inert mass of docile peones that contemporaries portrayed.41 Nevertheless, workers’ mentalités, their own perceptions of the worsening labor regime, remain virtually unexplored.42 Unfortunately, surprisingly little effort has been made to interview the ancianos who lived through the época de esclavitud, and very few can now be found.43 One other rich, virtually untapped source of data on how various groups of workers responded to their circumstances is the Archivo General del Estados Ramo de Justicia. Wells reports that spot checks there revealed legal actions brought by Maya villagers forcibly removed from their milpas and taken onto planters’ estates. How often did Maya campesinos seek redress in the state’s courts? Were they ever successful? Were other groups of workers in a position to pursue such redress within the legal system?44
Recent studies have linked the brutal, repressive nature of the late Porfirian hacienda regime to the henequeneros’ pressing need for United States capital and their vulnerable position in the henequen marketing structure.45 Yet a consensus has never been reached regarding either the terms of North American corporate involvement in Yucatán’s monocrop economy after the turn of the century or the extent of its impact.46 Indeed, there is perhaps no more enduring historiographical controversy in the region’s past than the debate over whether the International Harvester Company established an informal empire in Yucatán on the eve of the Mexican Revolution. While the controversy is likely to continue, recent contributions have sharpened the terms of the debate, highlighting contrasting methodological approaches as well as differences in evidence.47 The vast majority of local and foreign, popular and scholarly writers continue to claim that, collaborating with powerful local oligarchs, Harvester exerted monopsony power over Yucatán’s henequen industry.48 A dissenting view, vigorously put forward by North American neoclassical economists and economic historians, and supported by International Harvester, however, disputes such control, adducing less visible, macroeconomic variables to account for dramatic fluctuations in the local fiber trade.49 It seems unlikely that we will ever know with certainty whether larger market forces or local power relationships exercised greater sway over the regional monocrop economy. Both were crucially important and interlinked. Above all, the controversy over the role and impact of North American capital serves to remind us that history is ultimately an interpretation, a calculation of probabilities, conditioned in great part by one’s theoretical orientation.50
Imported Revolution and the Crisis of the Plantation Economy (1915-40)
No region of Mexico experienced the turbulent Mexican Revolution in as relatively nonviolent a manner as Yucatán. On the other hand, few regional populations have found the long-term process of social change that was unleashed by the revolution of 1910 to have been more jarring and roller-coaster-like than did the Yucatecos. An isolated bastion of the Old Regime as late as 1915, once occupied by Constitutionalist forces, Yucatán became a fertile ground for radical social experimentation and agrarian reform during 1915—24 and 1934-40. Yet in the decade between these two eras of revolutionary activity the agrocommercial elite successfully stalemated a redistribution of wealth in favor of the masses, and after 1940 many of its members skillfully adapted to the new order and maintained a privileged position in the regional power structure. The former principal source of the bourgeoisie’s wealth and of the Maya campesinado’s livelihood, henequen monoculture, did not fare as well. Though the plantation economy entered the revolutionary period at the height of its expansion, it emerged from it in 1940 in serious decline. Since that time, numerous critics of the institutionalized revolutionary regime and a smaller number of apologists have endlessly circled the issue of regional economic decline and heatedly debated its relationship to the revolutionary process.51 Only recently, however, have professional scholars begun to transcend this tradition of narrative and invective and suggest that the political economy of decline is highly complex, turning on a set of intersecting relationships involving Yucatán, Mexico City, the United States, and the international fiber market.
The historical literature on Yucatán’s participation in the Mexican Revolution is somewhat less developed than the body of work on either the Caste War or Porfirian boom eras. Most recent contributions focus on the early phase of Yucatán’s revolutionary experience, particularly on the celebrated, socially active administrations of General Salvador Alvarado and civilian Governor Felipe Carrillo Puerto (1915-24). Verifying contradictory local accounts against contemporary press reports and archival sources, yacatólogos David Franz, Ramón Chacón, and Gilbert Joseph have now fashioned a clear and accurate political narrative of the complex chain of events that transpired between 1910 and 1924.52 Joined by fellow historians Moisés González Navarro and Graham Knox, sociologists Francisco Paoli and Enrique Montalvo, and anthropologist Rlanca González, they have also mapped out the social and economic contours of the revolutionary projects put forward by the Socialist Party of the Southeast (PSS), initially led by the reform-minded Alvarado and, subsequently, by militant Marxist Carrillo Puerto.53 The political economy of the PSS’s frustrated revolution has been presented in a convincing fashion. Yucatán’s debilitating monoculture, which subordinated the local economy to a foreign-dominated market and severely limited the possibilities for broad-based political mobilization, as well as the regions continued marginalization within the national power structure, have been identified as conditions under which a social revolution proved futile.54
Much less emphasis has been given, however, to gauging the impact that the Mérida-based party and its programs actually registered at the local level, especially outside the dominant henequen zone. For example, what consequences did the peones’ liberation and subsequent agrarian distributions have for local labor supply and patterns of investment and production? Did the responses of campesinos and hacendados vary from the henequen to the maize zones?55 How successful were Alvaradista and Carrillista cadres in transmitting ideology in the pueblo and hacienda communities? Did Carrillo Puertos new socialist education centered around rational schools and a new socialist iconography really transform attitudes in the campo? Or did it only serve to confuse or anger large numbers of traditionally devout campesinos?56
Moreover, additional research is needed on the politics of revolutionary caciquismo. Joseph has argued that in the absence of a widespread grassroots mobilization, which would take time to carry out, Carrillo Puerto was forced to bestow patronage upon local bosses in order to keep his Socialist regime in power.57 Yet the intricate, hierarchical networks of patronage and clientele in which these strongmen recruited and maintained their followers and were, in turn, incorporated, require further elaboration. 58 These are merely some of the questions that recent studies have raised, which might profitably be investigated by social historians and anthropologists. Laura Batt’s detailed microstudy of the municipio of Espita represents a valuable precedent for this kind of investigation.
Finally, still virtually ignored by scholars is the period following Carrillo Puerto’s assassination in 1924, which culminated during the late 1930s in the problematic expropriation of Yucatán’s henequen plantations by the national regime of Lázaro Cárdenas.59 Traditional historiography provides little insight into the failure of a socialist road in Yucatán during the decade following Carrillo’s death (1924-34) because it focuses narrowly on personalities and political factions and ignores underlying social and economic relationships.60 Similarly, although Yucatán was subsequently one of the showcases for Cárdenas’s collective ejido strategy, and documentation for the Cardenista period (1934-40) is extremely rich, at present the agrarian expropriation of 1937 remains largely in the realm of partisan polemic.61
All in all, recent studies have demonstrated the relevance of the Yucatecan case to the larger field of Mexican revolutionary history. For if, in certain respects, Yucatán seems to have experienced a “different revolution”—one later to arrive, less violent, and probably more radical in its first decade than elsewhere in the republic—embedded in the Yucatecan case are important implications for understanding the larger revolutionary process. Yucatán’s new revolutionary historiography is particularly helpful in illuminating such central problems as caciquismo and informal networks of power; the dilemmas of agrarian reform; the relationship between ideology and practice; and the larger impact of dependent capitalist structures on popular participation in the revolutionary process.62 Recent contributions have suggested that in a fundamental way, Yucatán’s revolutionary experience reinforces the emerging “revisionist” interpretation of the character of the larger struggle: a bourgeois revolution that was, more often than not, made from above and imposed from without upon Mexico’s regions and classes.63
Retrospect and Prospect
Perhaps the most exciting aspect of the rediscovery of Yucatán’s past has been a new conceptualization of the physical boundaries of historical space. Like their counterparts in other key regions, the new generation of historians and social scientists working on Yucatán has demonstrated the ability of regional and local analysis to provide multilayered (even globally oriented) studies of the patria chica’s past. If it is to remain vital, Yucatán’s new regional history should continue to engage the past at a variety of levels, perhaps reassessing and enlarging existing frameworks of analysis. For example, Batt’s microstudy of agrarian structures and class formation outside the dominant henequen zone should shatter former notions that such peripheral areas of the peninsula were unimportant to the social history and political economy of Yucatán. An examination of such marginal areas raises issues that do not ordinarily arise in the study of the dominant sector of the dependent regional economy, such as the limits to capitalist expansion created by ecology, demography, and culture; the internal articulation between marginal and metropolitan areas; and the different forms that inter- and intraclass relations can take in such peripheral areas. One hopes that additional historical studies will soon appear not only for southeastern Yucatán64 but also for areas in neighboring Campeche and Quintana Roo. These areas are similarly marginal to the peninsula’s northwestern hub, and their study would deepen our understanding of the impact of capital penetration and the nature of class formation in the nonmetropolitan sector. Especially overdue is an examination of the political economy of the chicle and forest industries in Quintana Roo and Campeche during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Unfortunately, the municipal and state archives of Yucatán’s neighbors are in poor condition (although much documentary material has been preserved in Belize), and an oral history strategy would seem essential to such a project.65
In general, microstudies, particularly of individual pueblos and hacienda communities, have much to contribute to the new regional historiography. Such local studies hold out the promise of integrating political, economic, and cultural levels of activity into a complex but manageable whole, as well as verifying the findings of regional-level research. Community studies by North American and Mexican scholars have long occupied a place in the anthropological literature on modern Mexico and Yucatán. Yet owing to their inherent methodological limitations, such standard ethnographies have been of little value to regional historians. Typically, ethnographers have tended to view communities as discrete entities on the margins of regional or national political and economic structures, and have made little effort to reconstruct the historical process that has shaped the ethnographic present.66 As one recent critic of the genre put it: “Often the only acknowledgment of the relevance of historical process consists of a rapid and mechanical race through several centuries of complex change designed to whet the appetite for the real meat of the study, namely a synchronic account of the present-day structure of a given community.”67
Recent work in the Mexican field by economic anthropologists and ethnohistorians, however, has displayed a heightened concern for the historical dimensions of communal change and explored the interface between local and external spheres. The last decade has witnessed a proliferation of studies of “brokers” and middlemen, whose operations bridge micro and macro levels of analysis.68 An increasing emphasis on “collaborators” and “compradors,” caciques and caudillos in recent Yucatecan historical studies reflects the current trend and promises a continuing infusion of anthropological (and other social science) methods into the historical literature.
Just as more effort must be made to integrate locality and region, the new regional historiography must also remain open to conceptual approaches inserting the region into larger interregional, national, and supranational contexts. For example, ultimately yucatólogos might pool their knowledge with colleagues studying other parts of southern Mexico, perhaps with a view to producing synoptic histories of the Porfirian hacienda or of the epic and institutionalized phases of the revolution. Indeed, regional scholars might go further, transcending the nation-state as a sacrosanct unit of analysis and contemplating history on a Braudelian scale. Two Mexican revolutionary specialists recently speculated on a future study of the “Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean in the Age of Obregón.”69 For a region that has looked outward toward the Gulf and the Atlantic since the early nineteenth century and has maintained longstanding economic and cultural links with both Cuba and the United States, such transnational projects must sooner or later find their way onto the research agenda.
Beyond a receptivity to more global formulations, Yucatecan specialists must continue to think comparatively about Mexican history. There is more at stake here than failing to see the forest for the trees: a lack of attention to broader theoretical and comparative questions embracing national processes and institutions may deny them an opportunity to showcase their rich findings. Even today, despite recent recognition, yucatólogos (like students of other regions on the distant periphery) always run the risk that their work will be perceived as outside the mainstream of Mexican historical concerns. Consequently, regional specialists should now work to incorporate their monographic research into larger state-of-the-art discussions of such themes as the great estate, dependent labor systems, campesino and revolutionary movements, family networks and elite establishments, and other questions of regional development.
Finally, the new surge of historical writing on Yucatán challenges us to approach old regional concerns from a fresh perspective. More attention should be given to examining central problems across temporal boundaries: for example, we might profitably trace mechanisms of social control and protest from the Porfiriato through the process of revolutionary institutionalization, or build greater longitude into existing studies of land tenure. Moreover, it is time to write a new political history of modern Yucatán. This new scholarship would transcend the traditional narrative and institutional format and approach politics in the light of new social history research on the consolidation and realignment of dominant parentescos and their relationship to the state from late colonial times through the revolutionary era.70
In a similar vein, the related theme of Yucatán’s strained relationship with the central government might also be reappraised. Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Mexican history only makes sense in terms of the continuing struggle between an increasingly modern, centralized state and the nations diverse regions, fighting to protect their autonomy. Invariably, these larger struggles were related to bitter rivalries among regional factions for state-level control.71 Thus, although it was previously written in the parochial idiom of traditional diplomatic history, Yucatán’s relationship with the central state is now being reexamined in the perspective of political economy. Here, as elsewhere, a new synthesis of Yucatán’s past is emerging, one that integrates locality, region, and nation within the overall framework of the global expansion of capitalism. And rather than being touted as “another Mexico” or “a world apart,” Yucatán is increasingly assuming its place within the national and world systems.
The term Yucatán is subject to changing definitions. Geographically, the Yucatán peninsula today includes three Mexican states (Yucatán, Campeche, and Quintana Roo), as well as smaller parts of newly independent Belize and the Guatemalan Petén. Before the separation of Campeche (1858) and Quintana Roo (granted territorial status in 1902 and statehood in 1975), the original state of Yucatán comprised virtually the entire peninsula and, on several occasions during the nineteenth century, actually attempted to secede from the Mexican republic. While the dream of national autonomy has largely been laid to rest, many Yucatecos, arguing common geographic, economic, cultural, and historical bonds, continue to call for the reunification of Yucatán within the Mexican federation and regard the entire peninsula as their native region. See Marvin Alisky, “The Relations of the State of Yucatán and the Federal Government of Mexico, 1823-1978,” in Edward H. Moseley and Edward D. Terry, eds., Yucatán: A World Apart (University, Ala., 1980), pp. 245-263; and A. J. G. Knox, “Regionalism as a Problem in Mexican National History: Yucatán, A Case Study, 1821-1940,” mimeographed (University of Calgary, 1973). Events and actors in the densely populated state of Yucatán have traditionally shaped the history of the rest of the peninsula—perhaps never more so than during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The combined historical writing on Campeche and Quintana Roo is scant, and these neighboring states as well as Belize (formerly British Honduras) will receive attention in this article only insofar as events, generated in Yucatán, spilled across their borders, such as occurred during the Caste War era.
For a discussion of these and other currents in the early development of social science scholarship on Yucatán, see Gilbert M. Joseph, Rediscovering the Past at Mexico’s Periphery: Essays on the History of Modern Yucatán, forthcoming, chap. 2.
These trends are discussed in some detail in ibid., chap. 1.
It was not until the end of World War II that Yucatecos were even connected by land with the rest of Mexico. Before that, communication by sea with the port of Veracruz often took longer to reach the peninsula than from many points in the United States. Among other things, Yucatecos eat different food, wear different clothes, and great numbers continue to speak a vastly different Indian language (Maya) in the countryside than do their central and northern Mexican counterparts, who are the partial product of the Nahua tradition. There are none of Mexico’s impressive sierras (and indeed, only a few rolling hills), or any lakes or rivers in Yucatán. The state might best be characterized as a flat sheet of limestone rock, verging at various points in the northwest upon a desert environment. Poor soil and lack of water discourage most agricultural production, but favor cultivation of the obstinate, hardy henequen plant, a cactus from which agricultural twines and ropes are made. For a succinct, incisive analysis of the impact of geography on the regional economy, see Robert Patch, “Agrarian Change in Eighteenth-Century Yucatán,” HAHR, 65 (Feb. 1985), 21-49. For a delightful glimpse of how geography can influence a regions cultural tradition, see Hermann Bellinghausen, “Trova yucateca: La península cantable,” Nexos (Mexico City), 6 (Aug. 1983), 51.
E.g., see G. M. Joseph, Revolution from Without: Yucatán, Mexico, and the United States, 1880-1924 (Cambridge, 1982), and Héctor Aguilar Camín, La frontera nómada: Sonora y la Revolución Mexicana (Mexico City, 1977). Cf. Moseley and Terry, eds., Yucatán: A World Apart, which, despite its title emphasizing the uniqueness of Yucatecan society, also approaches the region as a “cultural and social laboratory, a microcosm of Latin American and Mexican society” (p. ix).
For a discussion of these categories of regional analysis, see Joseph L. Love, “An Approach to Regionalism,” in Richard Graham and Peter H. Smith, eds., New Approaches to Latin American History (Austin, 1974), pp. 137-155.
Students of the regional past received an unexpected windfall early in 1984 when the Universidad de Yucatán acquired the extraordinary photographic archives of Guerra and Company, for decades one of Mérida’s most prominent commercial studios. Housed on the campus of the university’s Escuela de Ciencias Antropológicas, where it is now accessible to researchers, the collection is made up of hundreds of thousands of glass negatives documenting the political, social, and cultural life of the region, c. 1870-1930.
Of course, this trend is part of a broader current within Mexican history, Latin American studies, and the larger social science community. Mexican historian Luis González would argue that the new generation of yucatólogos is merely obeying what he calls the “regionalist impulse of our time”: a search for identity in the authentic world of local, often rural, traditions in the face of disorienting modernization and stifling centralization. Other scholars regard this predilection for regional and “microhistory” to be part and parcel of a “historiographical revolution, a shift in the locus of historical initiative from the institutional superstructure to the level of local regions, communities, and interest groups; a move away from political and institutional history in and from the perspective of the metropolis to social and economic history and the study of political economy in and from the perspective of the periphery. E.g., see Luis González y González, Invitación a la microhistoria (Mexico City, 1973), pp. 8-72; James Lockhart, “The Social History of Colonial Spanish America,” Latin American Research Review (hereinafter LARR), 7:1 (1972). 6-45; David C. Bailey, “Revisionism and the Recent Historiography of the Mexican Revolution,” HAHR, 58 (Feb. 1978), 62-79; Joseph, Rediscovering the Past, chap. 1; and Eric Van Young, “Mexican Rural History since Chevalier: The Historiography of the Colonial Hacienda,” LARR, 18:3 (1983), 5-61, esp. 34, 45-46 n.47, who distinguishes parochial “local history of the traditional, antiquarian stamp” from “microhistory,” which reflects “broader regional or national themes in local realities.”
For a more detailed periodization of Yucatecan political economy, 1750-1940, and finer analysis of historiographical trends, see Joseph, Rediscovering the Past, chaps. 3-5.
Marta Espejo-Ponce de Hunt, “Colonial Yucatán: Town and Region in the Seventeenth Century” (Ph.D. Diss., University of California at Los Angeles, 1974); idem, “The Process of the Development of Yucatán, 1600-1700,” in Ida Altman and James Lockhart, eds., Provinces of Early Mexico: Variants of Spanish American Regional Evolution (Los Angeles, 1976), pp. 33-63; Nancy M. Farriss, Maya Society under Colonial Rule: The Collective Enterprise of Survival (Princeton, 1984), particularly pp. 366ff.; idem, “Propiedades territoriales en Yucatán en la época colonial: Algunas observaciones acerca de la pobreza española y la autonomía indígena,” Historia Mexicana, 30 (Oct.-Dec. 1980), 153-208; Luis Millet Cámara, “De las estancias y haciendas en el Yucatán colonial,” in Millet Cámara et al., Hacienda y cambio social en Yucatán (Mérida, 1984), pp. 11-37; Robert Patch, La formación de estancias y haciendas durante la colonia (Mérida, 1976); idem, “A Colonial Regime: Maya and Spaniard in Yucatán” (Ph.D. Diss., Princeton University, 1979); idem, “El mercado urbano y la economía campesina en Yucatán durante el siglo XVIII,” Revista de la Universidad de Yucatán (hereinafter RUY), 20 (May–Aug. 1978), 83-96; idem, “Apuntes acerca de los orígenes y las características de la hacienda henequenera,” Yucatán: Historia y Economía (hereinafter YHE), 2 (Sept.-Oct. 1978), 3-15; idem, “Agrarian Change in Eighteenth-Century Yucatán ; and idem, El fin del régimen colonial en Yucatán y los orígenes de la guerra de castas: El problema de la tierra, 1812-1846,” Boletín de la Escuela de Ciencias Antropológicas de la Universidad de Yucatán (hereinafter BECA), in press. These authors have based their pioneering work on the transformation of regional agrarian structures primarily on church (including tithe and cofradía estate records), notarial, municipal, and state archives.
Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century creole writers, the products of a society that bitterly hated and feared the Maya for the destruction they had visited on the interests of white Yucatán, had initially argued that the outbreak of the 1847 war was due principally to Indian ethnocentrism, to the well-known Maya “hatred of foreigners” that had been fanned by several centuries of European rule. In their view, owing to a series of unfortunate internecine political squabbles that shattered creole unity in the 1840s, the Indians were enabled to vent their dammed-up hate in a race war that almost drove the whites from the peninsula. For a discussion of creole interpretations of the Caste war, see Joseph, Rediscovering the Past, chap. 3.
Patch, “El fin del régimen”; idem. La formación de estancias y haciendas, Moisés González Navarro, Raza y tierra: La Guerra de Castas y el henequén (Mexico City, 1970); Víctor M. Suárez Molina, “La guerra de castas y el problema de la tierra,” RUY, 19 (Jan. -Feb. 1977), 49-55; Lawrence J. Returners, “Henequen, the Caste War and the Economy of Yucatán, 1846-1883: The Roots of Dependence in a Mexican Region (Ph.D. Diss., University of California at Los Angeles, 1981); Jean A. Mever, Problemas campesinos y revueltas agrarias (1821-1910) (Mexico City, 1973), pp. 66-67; Fidelio Quintal Martín, Yucatán: Carácter de la guerra campesina en 1847 (Mérida, 1976); Eric Villanueva Mukul, “Las causas de la guerra campesina en 1847,” YHE. 1 (Mar. -Apr. 1978), 42-49. Marco Bellingeri, “Proyecto de investigación: La hacienda y la sociedad yueateca en el siglo XIX,” YHE, 1 (Nov.–Dec. 1977), 3–13, while not dismissing the advance of capitalistic agriculture as a cause of the war, chooses to highlight the local oligarchy’s stubborn attempt following independence to reintroduce colonial-era tributary relations in the form of “new” civil and ecclesiastical exactions upon Maya peasant production. These recent contributions build upon an earlier generation of North American scholarship. See Howard F. Cline, The Sugar Episode in Yucatán, 1825-1850,” Inter-American Economic Affairs, 1 (Spring 1948), 79-100; idem, “The Henequen Episode in Yucatán,” Inter-American Economic Affairs, 2 (Autumn 1948), 30-51; idem, Related Studies in Early Nineteenth Century Yucatecan Social History, Microform Collection of Manuscripts on Middle American Cultural Anthropology, no. 32, University of Chicago Library, 1950 (3 parts); Arnold Strickon, “Hacienda and Plantation in Yucatán: An Historical-Ecological Consideration of the Folk-Urban Continuum in Yucatán,” América Indígena (Mexico City), 25 (Jan. 1965), 325-363; and Nelson Reed, The Caste War of Yucatán (Stanford, 1964).
E.g., see the works by Patch, Meyer, Suárez Molina, Quintal Martín, and Villanueva Mukul cited in the preceding note.
Patch’s and Millet’s works are strongest on the consolidation of corn and cattle haciendas in the arid northwestern quadrant of the peninsula. For the rise of the first modest sugar, tobacco, rice, and cotton estates in the more fertile soils of southern and eastern Yucatán, see Patch, “Agrarian Change in Eighteenth-Century Yucatán”; Farriss, “Propiedades territoriales”; Remmers, “Henequen, the Caste War,” pp. 65-297; Carlos Bojórquez Urzáiz, “Yucatán: Plantaciones colonialistas y sistema de trabajo a fines del siglo XVIII,” YHE, 6 (Sept.-Oct. 1982), 28-34; Sergio Quezada, “El origen de la producción y el capital comercial en la provincia de Yucatán, a mediados del siglo XVIII,” BECA, 5 (Jan.-Feb. 1978), 12-29; Víctor M. Suárez Molina, “El tabaco en Yucatán en el siglo XIX,” RUY, 16(May-Aug. 1974), 16-25; and idem, “Espíritu y características de las regiones yucatecas en la primera mitad del siglo XIX,” RUY, 20 (Mar.–Apr. 1978), 69-83. In reconstructing conditions on antebellum haciendas, Strickon, Reed, and particularly Cline, in his series of publications on sugar and the origins of the Caste War (n.12 supra), made especially good use of such classic accounts as John L. Stephens, Incidents of Travel in Yucatán, 2 vols. (New York, 1963; originally published in 1843), and José M. Regil and Alonso M. Peón, Estadística de Yucatán,” Boletín de la Sociedad Mexicana de Geografía y Estadística (Mexico City), 1:3 (1853), 237-339. More recent studies, while they are based on a larger body of printed and documentary materials, have not challenged their line of interpretation. In general, little attention has been given to social relations on estates producing tropical cash crops other than sugar.
Victoria R. Bricker, The Indian Christ, the Indian King: The Historical Substrate of Maya Myth and Ritual (Austin, 1981), chap. 8, and “The Caste War of Yucatán: The History of a Myth and the Myth of History,” in Grant D. Jones, ed., Anthropology and History in Yucatán (Austin, 1977), pp. 251-258. According to Bricker, although Maya documents provide little mention per se of the expansion of commercial agriculture, they are quite explicit about its effects, particularly debt peonage and physical abuse on frontier sugar plantations, the loss of accustomed access to milpa land, and increased taxation on peasant agriculture.
The role played by Indian caciques in the origins of the Caste War, as well as in its later millenarian phase, is a central theme in the comparative research project of Todd A. Diacon. See “The Brazilian Contestado Movement and the Caste War of Yucatán: The Social Origins of Millenarian Movements (Ph.D. Diss., University of Wisconsin, Madison, forthcoming).
Bricker, The Indian Christ, p. 102. The oral tradition was originally presented in Edward H. Thompson, People of the Serpent: Life and Adventure among the Mayas (Boston, 1932), pp. 70-71. Less plausible (and more self-serving) is the argument of traditional creole writers, which praises the bravery of their forefathers in holding their ground outside the gates of Merida and Campeche against overwhelming odds. E.g., see Serapio Baqueiro, Ensayo histórico sobre las revoluciones de Yucatán desde el año de 1840 hasta 1864, 3 vols. (Mérida, 1878-87), II, 3-59.
Carlos Bojórquez Urzáiz, “Regionalización de la política agraria de Yucatán en la segunda mitad del siglo XIX,” RUY, 21 (May-Aug. 1979), 32-45: Patch, La formación de estancias y haciendas, pp. 39-40; and Philip C. Thompson, personal communications, Mérida, 1974-75. It is precisely the likely participation of a significant segment of the Maya population on the creole side that prompts Patch to argue that, even in the most basic sense, the “War of the Castes” is “badly named.” Mexican historian Leticia Reina, Las rebeliones campesinas de México (Mexico City, 1980), pp. 365-366, concurs, adding that, conversely, white and mestizo regulars in the creole army occasionally defected to the Indian side and, in some cases, actually led the rebel Maya or instructed them in military tactics.
On the indigenous agrarian rebellions of the period, see Meyer, Problemas campesinos; Moisés González Navarro, “Las guerras de castas,” RUY, 21 (Sept.-Oct. 1979), 25-53; Miguel Mejía Fernández, Política agraria en México en el siglo XIX (Mexico City, 1979) , esp. pp. 74-83; Gastón García Cantú, El socialismo en México, siglo XIX (Mexico City, 1969); and Reina, Las rebeliones campesinas.
E.g., Iván Menéndez, “Aproximación a la historia de Yucatán,” RUY, 22 (May-Aug. 1980) , 60-77.
Howard Cline, “Remarks on a Selected Bibliography of the Caste War and Allied Topics,” appendix to Alfonso Villa Rojas, The Maya of East Central Quintana Roo (Washington, D.C., 1945), pp. 165-178.
See below, n.24.
For years, Howard Cline’s “The War of the Castes and Its Consequences,” in Related Studies, remained the best general treatment of the war’s short- and long-term effects on the region. Recently, at least for northwestern Yucatán, it has been superseded by Remmers’s encyclopedic “Henequen, the Caste War.” Other lucid accounts of the demographic and economic realignment brought about by the conflict are Salvador Rodríguez Losa, “Población y ‘guerra de castas’,” RUY, 20 (Nov.-Dec. 1978), 123-135; Sherburne F. Cook and Woodrow Borah, “The Population of Yucatán, 1517-1960,” in their Essays in Population History: Mexico and the Caribbean, 3 vols. (Berkeley, 1971-79), II, 1-170; and Víctor M. Suárez Molina, La evolución económica de Yucatán, 2 vols. (Mérida, 1977), I, esp. 47ff.
Yucatecos Renán Irigoyen, ¿Fué el auge del henequén producto de la guerra de castas de Yucatán? (Mérida, 1947), and Fidelio Quintal Martín, Carácter de la guerra campesina, cling to the affirmative in the face of a growing list of opponents. E.g., see Remmers, “Henequen, the Caste War,” pp. 371-432; Salvador Rodríguez Losa, “El henequén; Hoy, ayer y mañana,” mimeographed (Mérida, n.d.); Patch, La formación de estancias y haciendas, pp. 40-42; idem, Apuntes,” 6—10; and Roland E. P. Chardon, Geographic Aspects of Plantation Agriculture in Yucatán (Washington, D.C., 1961), pp. 138-142, 164.
Even Remmers’s economic history of the Caste War and its consequences is weighted much more heavily toward the consolidation of henequen monoculture in the northwest. Once he demonstrates the magnitude of the war’s devastation on the interior economy, Remmers turns his attention almost exclusively to the henequen zone. Recently, however, in several promising essays based on preliminary archival investigation, Yucatecan historian Carlos Bojórquez Urzáiz sketched a variety of themes basic to an agrarian history of the postbellum frontier zone and posed insightful questions for future research. See “Regionalización de la política agraria”; “Estructura agraria y maíz a partir de la ‘guerra de castas’,” RUY, 20 (Nov.-Dec. 1978), 15-35; and Crisis maicera de la comunidad campesina yucateca en la segunda mitad del siglo XIX,” BECA, 6 (Mar.-Apr. 1979), 46-52.
This literature is reviewed in Brieker, The Indian Christ, chap. 8; D. E. Dumond, “Independent Maya of the Late Nineteenth Century: Chiefdoms and Power Politics,” in Jones, ed., Anthropology and History, pp. 103-138; Miguel A. Bartolomé and Alicia Barabas, La resistencia maya: Relaciones interétnicas en el oriente de la península de Yucatán (Mexico City, 1977); and Marie Lapointe, Los mayas rebeldes de Yucatán (Zamora, Michoacán, 1983). Also see A Maya Apocalypse: Contemporary Maya Prophecy in Ethnographic and Historical Context, Paul Sullivan’s forthcoming study of ideology and cultural forms accompanying changing agricultural conditions among the Xcacal Guardia rebel group and their twentieth-century descendants.
The articulation of metropolitan and peripheral sectors of the regional economy is treated most successfully in Allen Wells, “Economic Growth and Regional Disparity in Porfirian Yucatán: The Case of the Southeastern Railway Company,” South Eastern Latin Americanist, 22 (Sept. 1978), 1-16; and R. Laura Batt, “Capitalist Class Formation in Dependent Economies: The Case of Espita, Yucatán” (M.A. Thesis, University of Kentucky, 1981), chap. 3 and passim.
E.g., see Frederick J. T. Frost and Channing Arnold, The American Egypt: A Record of Travel in Yucatán (New York, 1909); Henry Baerlein, Mexico: The Land of Unrest (Philadelphia, 1913); and John Kenneth Turner, Barbarous Mexico (Chicago, 1910).
Cline, “Remarks on a Selected Bibliography,” p. 177.
Before the recent boom, apart from the enduring polemic generated by critics and apologists of the rural labor regime (discussed below), students of the period had recourse only to the better political narratives, such as Eduardo Urzáiz’s Del imperio a la revolución, 1865-1910 (Mérida, 1946), and Edmundo Bolio Ontiveros’s Yucatán en la dictadura y la revolución (Mexico City, 1967), plus Moisés González. Navarro’s highly professional but general socioeconomic survey, Raza y tierra. Synthesizing agrarian and social questions from colonial times up until the present, González Navarro devotes but a single chapter to the Porfirian political economy.
Allen Wells, Yucatán’s Gilded Age: Haciendas, Henequen, and International Harvester, 1860-1915 (Albuquerque, forthcoming); also see his “Family Elites in a Boom-and-Bust Economy: The Molinas and Peóns of Porfirian Yucatán,” HAHR, 62 (May 1982), 224-253, and Batt, “Capitalist Class Formation,” esp. chaps. 2-3. Representative of the best work on the henequen auge by a new generation of local social scientists is Blanca González R. et al., Yucatán: Peonaje y liberación (Mérida, 1981), and Millet Cámara et al., Hacienda y cambio social.
Wells, Yucatán’s Gilded Age, chap. 5; Joseph, Revolution from Without, chap. 1; Gilbert M. Joseph and Allen Wells, “Corporate Control of a Monocrop Economy: International Harvester and Yucatán’s Henequen Industry during the Porfiriato,” LARR, 17:1 (1982), 69-99; Ramón D. Chacón, “Yucatán and the Mexican Revolution; The Pre-Constitutional Years, 1910-1918” (Ph.D. Diss., Stanford University, 1982), chap. 1; Blanca González R., “Henequén y población en Yucatán; Dzemul a manera de ejemplo” (Tesis de Licenciatura en Antropología Social, Universidad de Yucatán, 1979), esp. chap. 3; Alejandra García Quintanilla, “Historia de la producción en Yucatán, 1850-1915," mimeographed (Departamento de Estudios Económicos y Sociales, Universidad de Yucatán, 1983); Keith Hartman, “The Henequen Empire in Yucatán: 1870-1910” (M.A. Thesis, University of Iowa, 1966).
By Mexican standards, the Yucatecan henequen estate was small: a few exceeded 5,000 hectares, but the majority of plantations were between 1,000 and 2,000 hectares. Nevertheless, monoculture was remarkably lucrative. Contemporaries reported that the average return per investment during the decade 1900-1910 was no less than 50 percent and as high as 400 percent. Some modern scholars have judged the planter’s gains to be only slightly less extravagant. On plantation size, see Joseph, Revolution from Without, chap. 1; and Chardon, Geographic Aspects, p. 35 and chap. 4. For estimates of profitability, see Frost and Arnold, The American Egypt, pp. 366-367; and cf. Hartman, “Henequen Empire”, pp. 84-85 (a minimum of 18 percent profit), and Wells, Yucatán’s Gilded Age, chap. 5 (9 percent profit).
In addition to the works by Wells, González, and Chacón, see Roland E. Chardon, “Hacienda and Ejido in Yucatán; The Example of Santa Ana Cucá,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 53 (1963), 174-193; and idem, Geographic Aspects, pp. 33-34, 81-127, 169-193.
Batt, “Capitalist Class Formation,” pp. 54-130; Friedrich Katz, “El sistema de plantación y la esclavitud,” Ciencias Políticas y Sociales (Mexico City), 8 (Jan.-Mar. 1962), 103-135, esp. 130; and idem, “Labor Conditions on Haciendas in Porfirian Mexico: Some Trends and Tendencies,” HAHR, 54 (Feb. 1974), 14-23.
In addition to Turner, outspoken critics of the hacienda regime included Frost and Arnold, The American Egypt, and Baerlein, Mexico: The Land of Unrest. For the contemporary defense of labor conditions, see Alberto García Cantón, Memorias de un ex-hacendado (Mérida, 1965); International Harvester Company, The Binder Twine Industry (Chicago, 1912); and Gustavo Molina Font, La tragedia de Yucatán (Mexico City, 1941). For an insightful critique of the traditional debate, see Allen Wells, “Violence and Social Control: Yucatán’s Henequen Plantations,” in Thomas Benjamin and William McNellie, eds., Other Mexicos: Essays on Regional History, 1876-1911 (Albuquerque, forthcoming).
E.g., see Katz, “Labor Conditions,” 17-19; Bellingeri, “Proyecto de investigación,” 9-11; Joseph, Revolution from Without, pp. 71-75; Marie F. Labrecque, “La herencia maya del proletariado rural de Yucatán,” YHE, 5 (Jan.-Feb. 1982), 25-38; A. J. Graham Knox, “Henequen Haciendas, Maya Peones, and the Mexican Revolution Promises of 1910: Reform and Reaction in Yucatán, 1910-1940,” Caribbean Studies, 17 (Apr.-July 1977), 55-82; José Luis Sierra Villarreal, “Hacia una economía política de la hacienda henequenera, YHE, 4 (July-Aug. 1980), 16-22; Wells, “Violence and Social Control”; Chacón, “Yucatán and the Mexican Revolution,” chap. 1; and González R. et al., Yucatán: Peonaje y liberación, passim.
E.g., see Batt’s findings for the municipio of Espita, “Capitalist Class Formation,” p. 110.
Katz, “Labor Conditions,” 14-23.
For a detailed discussion of current research on these questions, see Joseph, Rediscovering the Past, chap. 4.
Wells, Yucatán’s Gilded Age, chap. 6, and “Violence and Social Control”; Joseph, Revolution from Without, pp. 88, 327-328 11.49.
In chap. 6 of his forthcoming monograph, Yucatán’s Gilded Age, Wells presents some valuable insights for penetrating the ideological and cultural dimensions of working-class life that should be tested in local studies of specific haciendas and municipios.
But see Esther Iglesias, “Historias de vida de campesinos henequeneros,” YHE, 2 (May-June 1978), 3-15, which anticipates a full-length oral history by Iglesias focusing on the social relations of henequen production before and after the Mexican Revolution.
Wells and Gilbert Joseph are currently investigating legal and extra-legal responses to the plantation regime by peones and villagers during the final years of the Porfiriato.
Katz, “Labor Conditions,” 19; and “El sistema,” 107-114; Joseph, Revolution from Without, chaps. 1-3; Wells, Yucatán’s Gilded Age, chaps. 2-3, 6; Joseph and Wells, “Corporate Control.”
There is, however, general agreement on the manner in which planters obtained North American capital and marketed their fiber before the turn of the century. E.g., see Katz, “El sistema,” 104-107; Remmers, “Henequen, the Caste War,” Part III; Joseph and Wells, “Corporate Control,” 73-75; Raquel Barceló Quintal, “La oligarquía henequenera. Un estudio de caso: La familia de Escalante” (Tesis de Licenciatura en Antropología Social, Universidad de Yucatán, 1982); idem, “El desarrollo de la banca y el henequén,” YHE, 5 (Jan.-Feb. 1982), 3-24; and Suárez Molina, La evolución económica, I, 41-66.
See particularly the recent freewheeling exchange of views in LARR, 18:3 (1983), 193-218.
Thomas Benjamin, “International Harvester and the Henequen Marketing System of Yucatán, 1898-1915: A New Perspective,” Inter-American Economic Affairs, 31 (Winter 1977). 3-19. provides a comprehensive discussion of the historiographical debate and extensive bibliographical references for the major positions before the surge in scholarly production beginning in the 1970s. Recent contributions asserting Harvester’s increasing control over the monocrop economy include the aforementioned works by Katz, Joseph and Wells, Suárez Molina, Chacón, Labrecque, Knox, and Barceló Quintal, as well as Ross Williams, “Yucatán Henequen: A Study in Microeconomics” (M.A. Thesis, University of the Americas, 1972): David A. Franz, “Bullets and Bolshevists: A History of the Mexican Revolution in Yucatán, 1910-1924” (Ph.D. Diss., University of New Mexico, 1973); Renán Irigoven, ‘‘Origen y trayectoria del henequén,” RUY, 15 (Mar.-Apr. 1973), 114-128; Gerald Barber, “Horizon of Thorns: Yucatán at the Turn of the Century” (M.A. Thesis, University of the Americas, 1974); Francisco J. Paoli and Enrique Montalvo, El socialismo olvidado de Yucatán: Elementos para una reinterpretación de la revolución mexicana (Mexico City, 1977); Jorge Montalvo, “Apuntes sobre el capitalismo y el henequén en Yucatán,” YHE, 1 (Sept.-Oct. 1977), 36-43; Alejandra García Quintanilla, “La formación de la estructura económica de Yucatán, 1850-1940,” YHE, 2 (Nov. 1978-Apr. 1979), 44-60; José Luis Sierra Villarreal, “Oro amarillo, oro verde y oro negro: Tres colores y ¿una misma dependencia?” YHE, 5 (July-Aug. 1981), 23-54, and Iván Franco C., “Casta divina y monopolio,” in González R. et al., Yucatán: Peonaje y liberación, pp. 45-57.
Benjamín, “International Harvester and the Henequen Marketing System”; Jeffrey Biannon and Eric N. Baklanoff, “Corporate Control of a Monocrop Economy: A Comment,” LARR, 18:3 (1983), 193-196; Fred V. Carstensen and Diane Roazen Parrillo, “International Harvester, Molina y Compañía, and the Henequen Market: A Comment,” LARR, 18:3 (1983), 197-203, and Diane Roazen Parrillo, “U.S. Business Interests and the Sisal Industry of Yucatán, Mexico, 1876-1924” (Ph.D. Diss., University of Chicago, 1984).
Gilbert M. Joseph and Allen Wells, “Collaboration and Informal Empire in Yucatán: The Case for Political Economy,” LARR, 18:3 (1983), 204-218.
See Joseph, Revolution from Without, pp. xiv, 295-297, for a discussion of the debate and citations.
Franz, “Bullets and Bolshevists”; Chacón, “Yucatán and the Mexican Revolution”; idem, “Salvador Alvarado and the Catholic Church: Church and State Relations in Yucatán, 1914-1918,” Journal of Church and State, in press; idem, “Rural Educational Reform in Yucatán: From the Porfiriato to the Era of Salvador Alvarado, 1910-1918,” The Americas, in press; Joseph, Revolution from Without.
González Navarro, Raza y tierra; Knox, “Henequen Haciendas, Maya Peones”; Paoli and Montalvo, El socialismo olvidado; Enrique Montalvo, “Caudillismo y estado en la Revolución Mexicana: El gobierno de Alvarado en Yucatán,” Nova Americana (Turin), 2 (1979), 13-36. idem, “Historia y política: Los usos de la historia y el Partido Socialista del Sureste,” YHE, 1 (Mar.-Apr. 1978), 22-34; González R., “Cuatro proyectos de cambio en Yucatán,” in Millet Cámara et al., Hacienda y cambio social, pp. 75-102. Also see Guillermo Boils Morales, “Las reformas progresistas durante el gobierno de Salvador Alvarado en Yucatán,” YHE, 1 (Mar.-Apr. 1978), 14-21; Douglas Richmond, “Yucatán durante la época carrancista,” paper presented at the “Segunda Semana de la Historia de Yucatán,” Mérida, 1980; and Beatriz González Padilla, “La dirigencia política en Yucatán, 1909-1925,” in Millet Cámara et al., Hacienda y cambio social, pp. 103-166. For an explicit comparison of the Alvarado and Carrillo regimes, consult the monographs by Paoli and Montalvo, Joseph, and Franz, as well as González R., “Cuatro proyectos.” For their different approaches to feminism, which reflect their broader strategies of mobilization, see Anna Macías, Against All Odds: The Feminist Movement in Mexico to 1940 (Westport, Conn., 1982), chaps. 3-4. Of great value to these professional historians has been the earlier work of Yucatecan economic historian Renán Irigoyen. E.g,, see “El impulso a la economía de Yucatán durante el gobierno de Alvarado,” RUY, 7 (Mar.-Apr. 1965), 45-71.
See especially Joseph, Revolution from Without, and “Mexico’s ‘Popular Revolution’: Mobilization and Myth in Yucatán, 1910-1940,” Latin American Perspectives, 6 (Summer 1979), 46-65.
Batt, “Capitalist Class Formation,” pp. 131-163, and Luis Aboites, “La Revolución Mexicana en Yucatán: El caso de Espita, in Gonzalez R. et al., Yucatán: Peonaje y liberación, pp. 166-177, are particularly successful in exploring the impact of revolutionary reforms on land tenure and production in the eastern municipio oí Espita, but more local studies must be done before comparative judgments can be made. Recently, the Historical Section of the Centro Regional del Sureste del Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia launched a substantial project on the PSS, its bases of support, and its impact throughout the region.
Paoli and Montalvo, El socialismo olvidado, pp. 171-172, and Joseph, Revolution from Without, p. 222, suggest that Carrillo Puerto’s anticlerical approach to education likely encountered stiff resistance in the countryside. But cf. Iglesias, “Historias de vida,” 12-13, which provides enthusiastic endorsements for Carrillo’s rural schools by former peons who claim their education enabled them to overcome alienation and passivity. The most comprehensive examination of Carrillo’s educational philosophy and program is found in Mary Kay Vaughan, TheState, Education, and Social Class in Mexico, 1880—1928 (DeKalb, Ill., 1982), pp. 98-115. Carrillo’s politico-religious syncretism and the hagiographic cult that grew up in the campo following his execution in 1924 have drawn the attention of German scholar Manuel Sarkisyanz (University of Heidelberg), whose study, Felipe Carrillo Puerto: Säkulare Hagiographie aus Dem Revolutionären Mexiko, is forthcoming.
Joseph, Revolution from Without, chaps. 7 and 9, and “The Fragile Revolution: Cacique Politics and Revolutionary Process in Yucatán,” LARR, 15:1 (1980), 39-64. Perhaps owing to a lack of archival research, sociologists Paoli and Montalvo, El socialismo olvidado, assume the reality of a widespread popular mobilization and take no notice of Carrillo’s cacique allies. Nor do traditional historical accounts of the PSS’s rise and fall rigorously address the problem of mobilization. For a discussion of conflicting interpretations of the Carrillista regime regarding questions of land reform and ideology as well as mobilization, see Joseph, Revolution from Without, chaps. 7-9.
Joseph’s disparate data on the social background and political careers of these caciques were pieced together during the course of year-by-year archival and press research for 1910—24. Documentary evidence was corroborated in certain instances by interviewing at the local level. Joseph’s research on these local bosses has afforded but a glimpse of their participation in the revolutionary process.
Several social science investigations are currently in progress. Joseph is working on a regional history of the 1920s and 1930s, focusing on the process of centralization by which Yucatán and its party, the PSS, were incorporated into Mexico’s emerging corporatist state, as well as related political-economic questions concerning the declining henequen industry. Daniela Spenser (Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social) has begun a comparative study of southeastern Mexican socialist parties (Yucatán, Chiapas, Tabasco) in the 1920s that will further clarify their relationships with an increasingly powerful bourgeois state. French anthropologist Marie Lapointe is undertaking a study of the economic and cultural impact of Cardenista land reform on Maya campesinos in both the henequen zone and more peripheral maize-producing zone.
E.g., Antonio Bustillos Carrillo, Yucatán al servicio de la patria y de la revolución (Mexico City, 1959); Fernando Benítez, Ki: El drama de un pueblo y de una planta, 2d ed. (Mexico City, 1963). On the other hand, judging from recent preliminary findings, social scientists have attempted to explain the political and economic prostration that Yucatán experienced from 1924 to 1934 by focusing on the severe constraints that larger economic and political structures placed upon a revolutionary party tied to a dependent monoculture. E.g., see Joseph, Revolution from Without, pp. 288-304; Eric Baklanoff and Jeffrey Brannon, The Political Economy of Agrarian Reform and State Enterprise: The Henequen Industry of Yucatán, forthcoming, chap. 3; Knox, “Henequen Haciendas, Maya Peones,” 77-82.
Although the history of Cardenismo in Yucatán remains to be written, certain contributions have already been made, chiefly by anthropologists. In addition to the works cited in the preceding note, see Eric Villanueva Mukul, Así tomamos las tierras (Mérida, 1984), a brief case study of agrarian struggle in the pueblo of Dzidzantiin, based on interviews with former agraristas; Esther Iglesias, Estado y alianza de clases en la reforma agraria cardenista: El campesinado henequenero (Mexico City, forthcoming); Marie La-pointe, “Indigenisme et réforme agraire au Yucatán, 1937-1940,” paper presented at the 44th International Conference of Americanists, Manchester, U. K., 1982; Nathaniel C. Raymond, “The Impact of Land Reform in the Monocrop Region of Yucatán, Mexico” (Ph.D. Diss., Brandéis University, 1971); Rodney C. Kirk, “San Antonio, Yucatán: From Henequen Hacienda to Plantation Ejido” (Ph.D. Diss., Michigan State University, 1975); and Oscar M. Pintado Cervera, Estructura productiva y pérdida de la indianidad en Yucatán en el proceso henequenero (dos ensayos) (Mexico City, 1982).
E.g., see Joseph, “Mexico’s ‘Popular Revolution’”; idem, “Revolution from Without: The Mexican Revolution in Yucatán, 1910-1940,” in Moseley and Terry, eds., Yucatán: A World Apart, pp. 142-171; Chacón, “Yucatán and the Mexican Revolution,” pp. 1-20; and Knox, “Henequen Haciendas, Maya Peones.”
For a discussion of “revisionism” and other trends in the regional historiography of the Mexican Revolution, see Bailey, “Revisionism”; John Womack, Jr., “The Mexican Economy during the Revolution, 1910-1920: Historiography and Analysis,” Marxist Perspectives, 4 (Winter 1979), 80-123; Barry Carr, “Recent Regional Studies of the Mexican Revolution,” LARR, 15:1 (1980), 3-14; and W. Dirk Raat, The Mexican Revolution: An Annotated Guide to Recent Scholarship (Boston, 1982).
Economic anthropologist Margarita Rosales González’s recent preliminary articles on the Puuc subregion hold out the promise of a monograph similar to Batt’s. See “Etapas en el desarrollo regional del Puuc, Yucatán,” YHE, 3 (Mar.-Apr. 1980), 41—53, and La actividad comercial en el poblado de Oxkutzcab entre 1900 y 1950,” RUY, 25 (Apr.-June 1983). 159-172.
Herman Konrad, an ethnohistorian at the University of Calgary, is undertaking a study of the production of chicle following the Caste War.
For a critique of ethnographic studies of Yucatán, see Joseph, Rediscovering the Past, chap. 2.
Carr, “Recent Regional Studies,” 5-6. Cf. William B. Taylor, “Time and Community Studies: Four Books on Rural Societies in Contemporary Mexico,” Peasant Studies, 4 (Apr. 1975), 13-17; idem, “Revolution and Tradition in Rural Mexico,” Peasant Studies, 5 (Oct. 1976), 31-37.
E.g., see Paul Friedrich, Agrarian Revolt in a Mexican Village, 2d ed. (Chicago, 1977). and Barbara L. Margolies, Princes of the Earth: Subcultural Diversity in a Mexican Municipality (Washington, D.C., 1975).
Carr, “Recent Regional Studies,” 11, 14 n. 33; cf. Luis González, “El oficio de historiar,” Nexos, 6 (Sept. 1983), 31-35.
Particularly lacking is a new political history of the Yucatecan Porfiriato. Two recent Brazilian studies provide a model for examining the links between a regional political elite and the dominant economic class. See Linda Lewin, “Politics and Parentela in Paraiba: A Case Study of Oligarchy in Brazil’s Old Republic” (Ph. D. Diss., Columbia University, 1975), and Barbara Weinstein, The Amazon Rubber Boom, 1850-1920 (Stanford, 1983).
Cf., e.g., Stuart F. Voss, On the Periphery of Nineteenth-Century Mexico: Sonora and Sinaloa, 1810-1877 (Tucson, 1982), and Ian Jacobs, Ranchero Revolt: The Mexican Revolution in Guerrero (Austin, 1982).
Author notes
Some of the research on this project was supported by a grant from the University of North Carolina’s Faculty Research Council.
