Agrarian Conflict in the Municipality of Cuetzalán (Sierra de Puebla): The Rise and Fall of “Pala” Agustín Dieguillo, 1861-1894

The purpose of this article is to assess the significance of the career of Francisco Agustín Dieguillo, a Nahua leader from the municipality of Cuetzalán in the Sierra de Puebla. He first appears in the documentation in November 1861, elected “Regidor 40 del Ayuntamiento Constitucional de Cuetzalán.” His final appearance is in January 1894, leading “a crowd of Indian ‘pelatones’ armed with machetes and staffs … against the police guard, taking control of the municipal palace and shouting, ‘Death to the gente de razón!’.” His career thus spans a third of a century, from the end of the Reform Wars to the consolidation of the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz.

The rise of Francisco Agustín to prominence in Cuetzalán was a direct result of his participation in the political and military struggles that brought Díaz to power. “Pala” Agustín (as he was known locally) fought at the battle of Puebla on May 5, 1862, when Gen. Ignacio Zaragoza’s hastily assembled Liberal army defeated the French expeditionary force. He then organized a company of one hundred Nahua Indians from Cuetzalán to serve under the command of the Sierra leader, Gen. Juan N. Méndez, in the patriotic resistance against French and Austrian attempts to pacify the Sierra. He participated in the defeat of the Austrian garrison at Puebla on April 2, 1867, going on to the final victory over the imperial army at Querétaro in June. During the Restored Republic, the Cuetzalán cacique again rallied his forces in support of the Sierra “sufragio libre” rebellions commanded by General Méndez (or by his close ally, Gen. Juan Francisco Lucas): in July and August 1868 against the state government and between November 1869 and June 1870 against the state and federal governments, between November 1871 and June 1872 in support of Díaz’s Plan de la Noria, and between January and November 1876 in support of the Plan de Tuxtepec, which finally brought Díaz to power.

From his service record, it might be concluded that Pala Agustín was, first and foremost, a military man, the client of a clique of leaders who, from the war with the United States, gradually achieved dominance of Sierra and state politics through their control of the National Guard.¹ This, however, would be to miss Pala Agustín’s principal concern, for “Capitán Ciudadano Francisco Agustín Dieguillo” had a central purpose in his service to the Liberal and patriotic cause: to prevent encroachment by non-Indians (known as gente de razón in the Sierra) upon the common land of the municipality of Cuetzalán, and thereby to avoid any substantial outside claims upon this land through the Ley Lerdo (applied in Puebla from December 1867). Although he failed to expel the gente de razón from the municipality, or even to block the adjudication to non-Indians of several extensive landholdings, the concerted collective action that he organized from the early 1860s until the mid-1890s was broadly successful in limiting the number and extent of non-Indian adjudications. As a result, Nahua Indians of Cuetzalán controlled most of the municipality’s land until quite recently.²

Was this a straightforward case of Liberal clientelism? In exchange for armed support for the Liberal cause, the land claims of Cuetzalán’s Indians would be upheld during the period of privatization of the municipality’s commons? Would that it had been so simple. Service to a higher political cause was a necessary but not sufficient attribute of any successful local movement. Pala Agustín was obliged to pursue a dual strategy, appropriate to the two political worlds that Indians in nineteenth-century Mexico inhabited. On the level of district and state politics, he and his followers offered steadfast and consistent military and material support for the political aspirations of the “Montaña” (the Liberal party of the Sierra).³ On the village level, and spreading on occasion into the neighboring districts of Tetela and Tlatlauqui, Pala Agustín and his followers organized an armed movement aimed at expelling non-Indians from their midst. This took the form of a three-year campaign of intimidation, commercial boycott, and the destruction of cattle pens and coffee plantations, accompanied by military encirclement of Cuetzalán (cabecera), where most of the municipality’s non-Indians resided. Such movements were not uncommon in Mexico during this period and were sometimes described as “guerras de castas.”⁴ Thus, Pala Agustín, patriotic captain of the National Guard and faithful servant of the Liberal cause in the Sierra, was also the leader of an Indian autonomist movement.

By exploring Pala Agustín’s career, this article will contribute, it is hoped, to a better understanding of a set of still largely unexplored themes in nineteenth-century Mexican historiography. These can be divided, broadly, between specific questions of policy and more general matters of political structure.

Questions of policy include:

1. The impact of the Ley Lerdo (the law of June 25, 1856, which gave to all those in possession of property belonging to civil and religious corporations the right to denounce and gain private individual title to this property) in remoter, mountainous Indian districts which had recently been facing immigration by non-Indian entrepreneurs intent upon the commercial exploitation of commodities such as sugar, cattle, and coffee. The Cuetzalán case demonstrates the degree to which Indians, through a combination of clientelism and collective action, were able to influence the process of community land privatization.⁵

2. The impact of the establishment of new political institutions in place of autonomous repúblicas/pueblos de indios. From the late eighteenth century, coinciding with the start of non-Indian immigration into the sierras of central and southern Mexico, gente de razón gained legitimate access to a political world that had been exclusively Indian. The Indian communities’ loss of political autonomy was compounded by the establishment of centralizing offices on the district and provincial level—the intendant, the subdelegate, and in 1814 the jefe político. These institutions, often under a more democratic guise, persisted after independence. The conflict in Cuetzalán illustrates the local repercussions of these changes, particularly in the growing political gulf between traditionally governed barrios sujetos and the now constitutionally regulated pueblos cabeceras (ayuntamientos constitucionales).⁶

3. The impact of the establishment of the Guardia Nacional in an area that had been effectively demilitarized since the conquest. Indians in the Puebla Sierra took advantage of the immunities accompanying guard service, the right to possess weapons, and the possibilities of gaining positions of military command. The traditional balance of ethnic power within the Sierra was irrevocably upset.⁷

4. The Liberals’ abolition of compulsory and unremunerated personal services (faenas and topiles) to church and state, which was particularly attractive to Francisco Agustín and his followers. This further challenged the traditional pattern of ethnic dominance and subservience in the Sierra.⁸

Questions of political structure include:

1. Pala Agustín’s movement as an example of the local-level, martial caciquismo, common throughout central and southern Mexico during the war-torn middle decades of the nineteenth century. Support from such caciques was essential for the effective prosecution of the political initiatives of regional-level caciques/caudillos such as Juan Francisco Lucas or Juan N. Méndez.⁹

2. The Cuetzalán Indian movement as an example of a particular kind of Liberal clientelism, demonstrating the ability of certain Liberal leaders to harness traditional groups by establishing a clear contractual and reciprocal basis for the relationship between patron and client. The attraction of Indians to certain aspects of Mexican Liberalism, and their willingness to “pay tribute” to the Liberal cause, suggest that a revision is needed for the still prevalent view that midnineteenth-century liberalism was an urban-based, middle-class, minority movement, which was anathema to rural, community-based, and (especially) Indian Mexico.¹⁰

3. The Cuetzalán Indian movement as a caste war. To the gente de razón, Francisco Agustín’s movement was perceived as being (or, at least, was reported to higher authorities as being) a “war to the death” against the white race. This study suggests that the term “caste war” was an inaccurate and emotive description of the means adopted by Cuetzalán’s Indians to obtain their objectives. Although a much more modest movement than its Chiapaneco counterpart, the movement led by Francisco Agustín at times evoked the same kind of hysterical response among non-Indians. Hence, its study serves as a prism for looking at the state of mind of both Indians and non-Indians.

Cuetzalán Before the Reform

Much of the discussion that follows requires an appreciation of Cuetzalán’s remoteness. Until the construction of a paved road during the 1950s that linked Cuetzalán del Progreso with the district capital of Zacapoastla, this was one of the least accessible municipalities in the Sierra. Cuetzalán occupies an extensive swathe of tierra cálida on the eastern slopes of the Sierra Madre Oriental between the Apulco and Tazán tributaries of the Río Cempoala. Throughout much of the year, this altitude (six hundred to twelve hundred meters) is obscured by clouds bearing moisture from the Gulf of Mexico, making Cuetzalán ideally suited to the cultivation of coffee, for which the area became famous during the early twentieth century.¹¹ In 1870, Cuetzalán (cabecera) and its four outlying barrios sujetos—San Andrés Tzicuilan, San Miguel Yancuitlalpan, Santiago Tzinacapan, and Xocoyolo—contained a population of just over eight thousand.¹² The Cuetzaltecos remain uniformly Nahua linguistically although they resemble their Totonac neighbors to the north in many aspects of family organization (a strong patriarchal and patrilocal pattern), dress (quesquémitl blouses and woolen headdresses), and ceremonial life (the dance of the voladores). In spite of the cultural receptiveness of Nahua Cuetzaltecos, and of continuous commercial exchange and agricultural co-operation, there is still very little intermarriage between mountain Nahuas and lowland Totonacs.¹³ In the period being examined, non-Indians (gente de razón) formed a tiny, albeit growing minority of the municipality’s population, concentrated in the cabecera and the barrio of Xocoyolo.

Cuetzalán’s physical and administrative remoteness was highlighted in 1807 when the municipality’s Indian leaders put up fierce resistance to granting formal political status to a barrio of non-Indian corn farmers, who had established a settlement at the “rancho de Xocoyolotepeque” during the Great Famine of 1785-86. The creation of the barrio of Xocoyolo represented the start of a process of erosion of the Cuetzalán Nahuas’ hitherto autonomous political world. The hiatus accompanying the birth of Xocoyolo, involving attacks upon the priest and crown officials, illustrates certain features of Cuetzalán’s Indian government that we shall return to later: village rule by a panel of elders (pasados), their prerogative in the allocation of land, resistance to outside political interference and to compulsory services, the expectation that payment of parish fees should allow village leaders (rather than the priest) discretion in timing of sacraments and the organization of the religious calendar, and, above all, their determination to deny newcomers a political identity or the ownership of land. This, then, was the basis of the autonomist position sustained later by Pala Agustín: a willingness to tolerate the presence of non-Indians but a refusal to concede to their demands for formal political identity, fundos legales, or land ownership.

The judicial enquiry into the conflict did not reveal unmitigated hostility between the Indians of Cuetzalán and outsiders. Indeed, one witness hinted at an important basis for reciprocity. José Martínez, a Spaniard of fifty who had settled in Xocoyolo in 1786, described how important ties of mutual interest had developed between the ranchos of the immigrants and the Indians of Cuetzalán (cabecera). The latter in spite of their abundance of land had grown accustomed to buying maize from Xocoyolo, preferring to occupy themselves with “the trade in virgin indigo, chilpotle [el chile poctle], panela, and beans and fruit, sowing only very little maize.”¹⁴ Two conclusions can be drawn from this testimony. The first is that Cuetzalán contained a body of quite specialized Indian farmers producing commodities of sufficient value to be able to free themselves from the “slavery of corn,” buying their maize from non-Indian farmers.¹⁵ Secondly, non-Indian immigration to Cuetzalán at this stage appears to have been of modest peasant maize farmers with quite different interests from later migrants. The early migrants lived on poor land (Xocoyolo possesses thin soil and is almost in tierra fría) that the Indians had left vacant. From here they would move down the mountain to work land rented from Indian communities during any one of the three short subtropical annual maize cycles (three maize harvests annually are possible in Cuetzalán). Their presence in Cuetzalán was, therefore, short term. The xocoyolenses shared the Indians’ disinterest in owning the land they worked, since every two or three years they would move their maize cultivation to a freshly deforested milpa. By contrast, the later migrants were primarily interested in establishing livestock farming and subtropical agriculture, especially coffee. They chose to farm Cuetzalán’s best land, close to the center of the principal Indian communities (particularly Cuetzalán and San Andrés Tzicuilan), and to occupy it permanently.¹⁶ Thus, later migrants competed with Indians not only for the best land, but also in agricultural specialization (nonsubsistence activities), cheek by jowl, in the center of their communities.¹⁷ Herein lay the basis of the conflict that would grip Cuetzalán throughout much of the second half of the nineteenth century.

Preconditions and Precipitants of Cuetzalán’s “Guerra de Castas”

The settlement of the barrio of Xocoyolo by migrants from the plateau during the Great Famine was part of a broader movement from the original areas of Spanish colonization—the towns and cities of the central plateau—to the sierras of central and southeastern Mexico and the north. This historic shift in New Spain’s settler population has its roots in the demographic recovery of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Migration to the sierras was also facilitated by the abolition in 1786 of the repartimiento de comercio and the restrictions upon direct trade with, and residence within, Indian communities. In the province of Puebla, migrants were pushed by economic stagnation, continued demographic growth, and recurrent subsistence crises on the plateau as well as lured by the easy availability of land for rent from Indian communities and by the increasing prices of sugar and other tropical commodities more easily cultivated in the Sierra.¹⁸

During the first half of the nineteenth century, as a result of the continuation of this migratory movement, a steadily increasing number of gente de razón took up residence in the municipalities of the tierra cálida of the Sierra, a zone in which they had been few, having earlier confined themselves to the district capitals of the tierra fría. In Cuetzalán, most of these new migrants settled in the cabecera, rather than, as earlier, in Xocoyolo. Yet, by the middle of the century, the non-Indian population of Cuetzalán remained small: around thirty families among an overwhelmingly Indian population still hostile to outsiders. Between 1807 and 1871, Cuetzalán’s population increased from one thousand to almost eight thousand, principally it seems from natural increase rather than immigration.¹⁹ Indeed, immigrants found Cuetzalán an uncomfortable place to live and the Cuetzaltecos hostile hosts, and many chose to move on to the neighboring municipalities of Xochitlán, Nauzontla, Tuzamapa, and Jonotla where Indians were reported to be more pliant. As one contemporary commentator put it:

In spite of its poor hospitality, remoteness, and inaccessibility, by the 1850s Cuetzalán had become the most important town in the district after Zacapoastla. Thus, a rapidly growing Indian population confronted an intensified influx of more ambitious and wealthy (compared with previous immigrants) gente de razón, who chose to settle in their midst rather than at a discreet distance.

During the Reform Wars and the French intervention, Cuetzalán became directly involved in the political and military conflicts that gripped much of the republic. The town became a refuge for the clergy and for leading Conservative families from the district capital, pursued by Liberal forces that controlled much of the Sierra throughout this period. They were attracted by Cuetzalán’s remoteness from the principal theater of war and by its proximity to lowland Indian districts (Tuzamapa, Totonac and Jonotla) where the clergy hoped to be able to maintain its influence, raise revenues (especially tithes), and limit the impact of Liberal reforms.²¹ The focus for this Conservative camarilla was the parish priest of Cuetzalán, José de Jesús Antonio Castrillo, who built up considerable wealth and influence during the 1850s and early 1860s as a result of his control of church revenues and his lending activities to local entrepreneurs.²² In contemporary historical accounts of the wars, the storming of Cuetzalán by Liberal forces commanded by Juan Francisco Lucas in November 1864, followed by the sacking of the properties of the gente de razón, the burning of the municipal archive, the desecration of the parish church, and the flight of Castrillo and the Conservative families, is treated as an important watershed in the history of the Sierra, signifying the passing of the ancien régime and the emergence of a new Liberal order.²³

But more important than this single episode in bringing Cuetzalán suddenly into the nineteenth century was the cumulative impact of the guerrilla warfare that gripped much of the Sierra for five years. The wars disrupted trade routes between the highlands and lowlands, caused the requisitioning of mules and the loss of livestock, brought the widespread mobilization of Indians by both the Liberal and European armies, and prompted hurried and ill-considered application of liberal economic reforms (the expropriation of the capital funds of the cofradías being among the most damaging in its impact). By 1867, the Sierra was quite a different place than when the French had arrived in 1862.

How all this affected Cuetzalán specifically is uncertain. Contemporaries noted how in Zacapoastla (the district capital) deference among Indians toward gente de razón had disappeared.²⁴ Pala Agustín’s participation in the victory at Puebla on May 5 and his successful organization of a company of National Guard infantry would certainly have increased his prestige among the Sierra patriotic leaders, even as it added to the anxieties of local gente de razón,²⁵ But perhaps more damaging to the old order in Cuetzalán than the arming of Indians for the National Guard was the abolition of compulsory and unremunerated services, coinciding, as it did, with the Liberal political challenge to the clergy and Conservative families, who had most benefited from such favors. The law on compulsory services also harmed district and municipal administration, which counted on the provision of compulsory Indian labor for public works as well as for day-to-day operations. Yet the various tiers of civil and religious administration were affected quite differently by the law.²⁶

The law abolishing compulsory services was applied energetically from the district level by Liberal-patriotic military commanders keen to consolidate support among the Indian population. It was also enforced at the level of the municipality. But the law appears to have been completely ignored by Cuetzalán’s five Indian communities. Here, the pasados (in effect, the community elders), the mayores, and the topiles faithfully continued to provide unpaid services to their Indian alcaldes and justices of the peace.²⁷ This differential application of the reform tended to reenforce the growing gulf between gente de razón, who swiftly lost interest in occupying municipal posts once the obligations grew to outweigh the advantages, and the Indian population, who maintained their intensive and obligatory form of local government.²⁸

It is unlikely that the ayuntamiento constitucional of Cuetzalán, given the smallness of the non-Indian population and its recent arrival, had ever been particularly strong or assertive, and the loss of control over Indian labor would have weakened still further the controls which gente de razón were able to exercise over Indians. This weakening of the ayuntamiento was compounded by fiscal decline resulting from the effects of war and the requirement that municipalities auction off their propios (hitherto important sources of revenue). During the 1860s, the ayuntamiento always had vacancies, renunciations were common, and the jefe político frequently had to impose alcaldes during anguished periods when a local candidate was not forthcoming.²⁹ The weakening of the ayuntamiento and the potential assertiveness of the civil government of the barrios are clearly important to bear in mind when accounting for the breakdown of order in the municipality following the French intervention.

A further consequence of the declining legal power over labor and the falling income from propios suffered by ayuntamientos was that those who did choose to serve on councils often did so for the wrong reasons. During the late 1860s, when councils were expected to administer the momentous task of transferring the ownership of land from corporations (the ayuntamiento, the church, the confraternities, and the community itself) to individuals, the opportunities for abuse of power were great. For a time the council served as little more than a real estate office, with alcaldes and their agents frequently reserving first choice in the purchase of municipal property, while denouncing communal property on their own behalf.³⁰ The authority of the ayuntamientos among Indians was, consequently, further diminished.

If the political hold of the gente de razón over their new area of settlement was weakened in certain respects by the Reform Laws, the same cannot be said of the economic position of non-Indians within the municipality of Cuetzalán. The political disruption of the Sierra caused by war accelerated the process of non-Indian settlement upon, and intensified the commercial exploitation of, Cuetzalán’s common land. It also encouraged the movement of many Indian Cuetzaltecos farther into the tierra caliente, particularly into Jonotla, Tuzamapa, and Tenampulco, in the neighboring district of Tetela, where communities were less pressured and land was more abundant.³¹ Also affecting settlement and land use was the accelerated development of the aguardiente industry in Cuetzalán, as gente de razón extended their commercial ties with the Indians who grew the sugar and produced the sugar loaf in the tierra caliente. Cuetzalán offered a perfect location for the new distilling enterprises, close to the source of panela supply while conveniently remote from the fiscal authorities in the district capitals of tierra fría. Several of the principal non-Indian residents in Cuetzalán owned refineries.

The resulting change in Cuetzalán’s agrarian structure can be discerned from contemporary census reports. In August 1861 the municipality was reported to contain one cabecera, four villages, no haciendas, six rancherías, no ranchos, and “more than one thousand predios rústicos,” the latter consisting of “small areas of sowing land which, because of their insignificant size, do not have a particular name but are included in the rancherías.”³² Ten years later, in 1871, the population of the cabecera and its four barrios sujetos was settled upon 20 ranchos and 595 rancherías, as predios rústicos, which received no particular labeling in 1861, were now listed. They had diminished from “more than one thousand” to a mere 595.³³ From these figures alone, it would seem that the gains for non-Indian commercial agriculture on larger units (ranchos) were made at the expense of Indian small-scale (ranchería) farming. But there is an ambiguity here, to do with landholding nomenclature and different forms of agricultural enterprise.

While the rancho, like the hacienda, was a single agricultural enterprise with a clear territorial expression and recognized boundaries (although ranchos in the Sierra would generally have comprised land rented from communities rather than private property until the desamortización), ranchería was a term with a much looser meaning. A single ranchería in 1871 would often have supported more than one family unit. Indeed, in 1871, the municipality of Cuetzalán’s 595 rancherías was defined as “an infinity of small fractions, the owners of which give them the title of ‘ranchos,’ but they do not deserve this for being of less than half an almud [3½ hectares].” A single ranchería might therefore contain several family plots (“ranchos,” if one takes the Indian rather than the official denomination). The figure of 595 rancherías must, therefore, be an underestimate of the number of “Indian” agriculturally-based household enterprises in 1871, given that 7,599 people resided in the municipality. The unreliability of the global estimates of Cuetzalán’s landholdings is further confirmed by the number of rancherías reported in 1869 and in 1870, falling from 846 to 653. Yet between December 1867 and August 1870 well over fifteen hundred denuncias of agricultural plots were filed for adjudication as private property within the municipality of Cuetzalán, a number that probably better reflects the number of individual agricultural enterprises in the jurisdiction.³⁴

The significance of these quantitative data is, therefore, not that the number of smallholdings decreased between 1861 and 1871 (probably the reverse was the case given the natural population increase) but that the number of relatively large-scale agricultural enterprises—the ranchos belonging to gente de razón—increased from six to twenty. It was this increase in two- to three-hundred-hectare ranchos, unprecedently large for the Sierra, that concerned Francisco Agustín and his followers and drove them finally to rebellion. A further possible explanation of the marked, secular decrease in the number of smallholdings (rancherías) recorded in the censuses—from more than 1000 in 1861, to 846 in 1869, to 653 in 1870, and to 595 in 1871—is that farmers were consolidating scattered holdings into single, territorially more compact properties to facilitate adjudication.

What forewarning was there of the rebellion that broke out in Cuetzalán in January 1868? Francisco Agustín first surfaces in the documentation in November 1861 as one of two Indian aldermen elected to an ayuntamiento constitucional staffed largely by whites.³⁵ At this moment—the end of the Three Years War—ethnic relations in Cuetzalán were reported to be harmonious.³⁶ However, during the first three years of the intervention the political order of the municipality deteriorated. This was manifested, at first, in the refusal of the barrio San Andrés Tzicuilan, in June 1862, to provide food supplies for the Army of the East.³⁷ Later in the year, the same barrio denounced two gente de razón (Manuel Flores and Octaviano Pérez) to the jefe político for building walls around the cattle pasture they rented from Tzicuilan, land “reaching the very edge of the village, even damaging the trees which we use for thatching our houses.”³⁸ The following April, Tzicuilan’s two alcaldes and fourteen pasados complained to the military commander of the district, José María Maldonado, that the crops of the barrio (they mentioned plantain, sugar, and chile—further evidence that Indians were specializing in relatively high-value goods for the market) were repeatedly being damaged by cattle belonging to Flores, Pérez, and Jesús Bazán, vecinos of Cuetzalán. They expected no redress of grievances from Cuetzalán, where the council was controlled by these men, and regretted that the damage had prevented the barrio from helping Maldonado with the war effort. They appealed to Maldonado’s well-known Liberal sentiments in a petition that would appear to betray some knowledge of the Communist Manifesto:

Perhaps to their surprise, the Tzicuiltecos immediately received a positive response. Maldonado ordered Flores, Pérez, and Bazán to the jefatura where they were instructed to submit to the findings of a survey commission. He then informed the alcalde of Tzicuilan that all the cattle would be removed from the village, adding that the villagers could sow wherever they chose and collect any roaming cattle to compensate for their losses. For the time being, the conflict between Tzicuilan and the Cuetzalán cattle owners appears to have been resolved. A contract was drawn up between Pérez and Flores and the barrio of Tzicuilan by which they would rent this land for a period of five years; peace would last for the duration of this contract.⁴⁰

Francisco Agustín and the Onset of the Comunero Movement

A movement of the Indian vecinos of Cuetzalán and its neighboring barrio of San Andrés Tzicuilan began at 11:30 a.m. on January 21, 1868.⁴¹ Ignacio Arrieta, justice of the peace of Cuetzalán, reported that a gathering of Indians led by Francisco Agustín, accompanied by

Another report on the event noted that “among the Indians was an armed man, a stranger, whom they obeyed.”⁴³ Other gente de razón from Cuetzalán were also barred from planting maize on the commons. Later in the day, Arrieta was informed that twenty to twenty-five Indians from the barrio of Tzicuilan and from Cuetzalán, armed with shotguns and rifles, were marching to the barrio of Yancuitlalpan to join Pala Agustín. The rebellion had begun.

Since the resolution of the initial conflict at San Andrés Tzicuilan in 1863, two conditions had changed. First, many Indian Cuetzaltecos had served in the patriotic forces against the French and Austrian attempts to subdue the Sierra. With peace, these men often kept their arms and, more importantly, their ties with their superior officers who were using the network of the National Guard to organize the Liberal party machine in the Sierra. The second important change was the decree of August 1867 that had instructed councils to apply the Ley Lerdo of June 25, 1856: to sell off all municipal and corporate property that was not of direct public utility, and to distribute village common land to individuals already in possession of it.

Accompanying Arrieta’s report to the jefe político was a letter he had received from Pala Agustín.

Here, then, was the initial statement of aims and allegiances of a rebel who, with his successor, would feature prominently in Cuetzalán’s public life until well into this century. The seventy pesos that Francisco Agustín asked the alcalde to pass on to Méndez and Lucas either was from the rebajado tax (payable in lieu of military service) contributed by barrios of Cuetzalán loyal to Méndez or, more likely, represented the value of land titles denounced by Indians on the commons they were now occupying by force. In August 1867, General Méndez, then acting state governor, had established a commission to supervise the adjudication of Cuetzalán’s commons, under the presidency of Juan Francisco Lucas. The letter demonstrates that in this part of the Sierra, four months after Méndez had handed over his command of the state to Rafael García, he was still considered the legitimate governor by Indians who had fought alongside him against the French.⁴⁴

Thus, from the beginning of the movement, Pala Agustín envisaged a clear, contractual association between support for the Montaña party and local demands over land. Cuetzalán’s justice of the peace recognized the seriousness of the threat. Considering the lives of the gente de razón of the cabecera to be at risk, he urgently requested an armed force “to save the situation, to restore order and our lost tranquility. ”⁴⁵ The authorities in the jefatura greeted the news of the disturbances with greater restraint. Rather than further provoke the Indians by sending a military force, the jefe político dispatched a three-man commission to meet directly with Francisco Agustín. On January 22 the commission met the Cuetzalteco leader, who confirmed that the rebels sought only to repossess their commons. A further meeting was arranged for the following day. The gente de razón of Cuetzalán were not satisfied, however, and requested a force of at least fifty men from the jefatura, fearing that the local force would be unable to defend itself were the rebels to return fully armed. This, indeed, is what occurred.

On the night of January 23 nearly two hundred men, some of them armed, assembled at the house of the “regidor pasado No. 6,” Pedro Esteban (elected alderman alongside Francisco Agustín in November 1861), “a place where past gatherings had taken place.” Zacapoastla at last complied with Cuetzalán’s call for help. Nahua troops from Xochiapulco (a Liberal military colony close to Zacapoastla), commanded by Col. Luis Antonio Díaz, arrived in the cabecera at noon on January 24. Still the gatherings of armed men continued, broadening in scope to include a commercial boycott of the gente de razón:

From this position of strength, the rebels were prepared to negotiate. On January 28, 1868, a meeting was arranged in Cuetzalán, attended by “the Indians of Cuetzalán and San Andrés Tzicuilan,” the president of the ayuntamiento, the síndico procurador of the municipality, Col. Luis Antonio Díaz, commander of the troops from Xochiapulco, representing General Lucas, and a commission composed of four “ciudadanos de razón.” The presidente municipal proposed that the gente de razón who had acquired land arbitrarily (without formal rental agreements) should be instructed to return it to the Indians forthwith. The representatives of the Indians were not content with this, “desiring a general expropriation of all the land belonging to gente de razón, even the orchards and insignificant plots which they possess in the cabecera of Cuetzalán.” As a result of this impasse, two commissions were established, one of Indians, the other of gente de razón. Their brief was to investigate all the antecedents of the recent events and to report their findings within a month to the state government, which would resolve which report “was the most opportune and just.” In the meantime, the gente de razón were obliged to live with this uneasy and increasingly unstable truce.

Almost three weeks passed before an extraordinary session of the ayuntamiento was convened to consider rumors of an imminent uprising of the Indians against the “white race.” The councilmen feared that Francisco Agustín, emboldened by the recent receipt of more arms and ammunition, was now ready to proceed with a general expulsion of the gente de razón from the municipality in anticipation of the completion of the work of the commissions. The uprising was rumored to be timed for the night of February 17.⁴⁷

That uprising did not take place—indeed the rumor of an imminent “guerra de castas” may have been contrived by Arrieta to encourage action by the jefatura. But pressure from Francisco Agustín and his followers upon the gente de razón continued to mount throughout February. Rebel forces increased to an estimated four hundred armed men, two hundred from the barrio of Tzicuilan and two hundred from the cabecera, and the commercial boycott continued as did the destruction of coffee orchards and cattle pens and the pulling down of orchard walls. Many gente de razón chose to abandon their houses and seek sanctuary in Zacapoastla.⁴⁸

At the end of February, the state government responded belatedly to the events in Cuetzalán:

The governor ordered the Nahua cacique, Gen. Juan Francisco Lucas, to lead one hundred armed men to Cuetzalán to suppress the movement and arrest its leaders.⁴⁹ By now, however, the commissions had submitted their reports and the district authorities were already acting to defuse the problem. On February 28, 1868, the three principal leaders of the district, Remigio Varela (jefe político), General Lucas (acknowledged leader of the Indian population of the central and southern Sierra), and Juan Francisco Molina (colonel of Zacapoastla’s batallion of National Guard) met in the council building of Cuetzalán to proclaim that:

1. The urban and rural property of the municipality should remain in the hands of those in possession of it on December 31, 1867.

2. In a census to be drawn up later in the year, it would be decided definitively which land was to be left as ejido and montaña for general use and which was to be divided up for cultivation, with the remaining vacant land to be adjudicated to any bidder, when appropriate.

3. The cattle ranches and arable land reclaimed and occupied by the Indians since December 1867 were to be vacated. Later, this land could be claimed by those who had occupied it before that date, but, at present, the former occupants (Octaviano Pérez and the Flores brothers) had no legal title to it.

4. The distribution of the municipality’s commons would follow the rules laid down in the Ley Lerdo.

5. Land would be priced at an annual rate of disamortization of 6 percent of its estimated market value.

6. Land within the cabecera would be distributed among its vecinos regardless of race.

7. The municipal council would pay the cost of the commission which would assess the value of the land and carry out the distribution.⁵⁰

On receiving the news of the accord, the governor expressed delight that order had been restored and a “caste war” averted. But Rafael García’s relief about the apparent resolution of this interethnic dispute contrasted with the despair he must have felt in the face of the breakdown of political order throughout much of the rest of the state. From early March the tensions of the municipality of Cuetzalán became ever more closely bound up with intensifying conflicts in the wider district of Zacapoastla and beyond.

From Rebellion to Insurrection

The implementation of the accord of February 28 began immediately, and throughout March, April, and May denuncias from those in possession of common land continued to be filed and escrituras of ownership issued. Soon, however, two major obstacles became apparent. The first was the fiscal penury of the municipality of Cuetzalán, charged with paying for the commission as well as the haberes of the Xochiapulco forces billeted in Cuetzalán to keep the peace. Arrieta claimed in mid-March that only twenty pesos remained in the coffers.⁵¹ Funds simply did not exist to cover the cost of full adjudication at this stage because the authorities, for fear of further provoking the Indians, were unwilling to risk passing this on to those entitled to denounce property. The fee charged for surveying and adjudicating property and the price of the property itself soon became matters of great dispute, adding to Indian grievances.

More ominously, it was becoming apparent that the followers of Francisco Agustín were not cooperating with the adjudication and remained opposed to a fundamental principle of the desamortización: that anyone in active possession of land could denounce and gain title to it. While the barrios of Yancuitlalpan and Tzinacapan were proceeding energetically in the matter, no denuncias had yet been received from Indians in Cuetzalán or Tzicuilan. Moreover, although Tzicuilan had begun compensating Flores and Pérez for the damage caused to their corrals earlier in the year, by late March their compensation was not complete.⁵² From mid-March, Indians once again took direct action against the properties of the municipality’s gente de razón.

Why resume direct action when a peaceful process of land subdivision, in which the Indians were likely to be the principal beneficiaries, was already under way? Francisco Agustín’s return to the use of force has at least two explanations. The first lies in the more favorable political climate created by General Méndez’s mounting military challenge to Rafael García, Puebla’s governor, imposed by President Benito Juárez the previous September. During March and April, following the disqualification of Méndez from the elections for governorship, several districts disavowed García as governor.⁵³ Francisco Agustín perhaps calculated that these circumstances substantially improved the prospect for Indians’ regaining complete control over the land of Cuetzalán, rather than sharing it with gente de razón. A successful Sierra rebellion would bring Francisco Agustín’s patron Méndez to power in the state. Cuetzalán would then surely belong to its Liberal and patriotic National Guard commander, “Capitán Ciudadano Francisco Agustín Dieguillo,” who had served Méndez since 1862.

A second explanation lies in the state order of March 11 that the leaders of the movement be brought to justice. Since the movement appeared to obey a collective leadership of pasados as well as current officeholders and informal military cabecillas such as Francisco Agustín, this was a tall order. “Arrest the leaders” could involve arresting almost the entire adult male population of a community. The detention and exile of Indian leaders, many in their seventies and eighties and some even in their hundreds, had a great impact on communities in which pasados traditionally exercised considerable authority, leaving villages effectively leaderless and, arguably, prolonging the conflict. Why the state government persisted in its determination to arrest, imprison, or exile Cuetzalán’s Indian leaders is hard to understand, particularly given the more pressing problems faced by Governor García. This imprudent measure, at a time when effort might more profitably have been directed at securing the cooperation of the authorities of the rebel barrios, may perhaps be explained by differences in perception of Francisco Agustín’s movement.

In Cuetzalán, the movement was understood simply as a struggle over the possession of common land on the point of being denounced and privatized through the disamortization laws. The struggle had obvious racial overtones, but the gente de razón of Cuetzalán appear to have been fairly confident about their ability to ride out the crisis, providing they received the financial and military backing of the jefatura. In the district capital of Zacapoastla, accustomed for centuries to administering Indians in its subject municipalities and barrios, the problem was never (officially at least) perceived as an impending “guerra de castas,” but more as a “problema de indios” that threatened to further diminish the control of the jefatura over its subject municipalities. Hence, the authorities in the district capital were more concerned that an armed Indian population in Cuetzalán, in league with the National Guard of Xochiapulco, might tip the balance of power in the district further in Xochiapulco’s favor and against Zacapoastla (the rivalry between Liberal Xochiapulco and Conservative Zacapoastla had its roots in the Reform Wars and even earlier). In the state capital, however, the Cuetzalán movement appears to have caused much greater anxiety, raising the specter of a caste war of the kind that had split Yucatecan society apart and was now raging in Chiapas. Moreover, a rebellion in Cuetzalán, it was feared, might be the spark that would ignite the entire Sierra against the state government.

Thus Francisco Agustín’s resumption of direct action was not only a creative response to a political opportunity offered by Méndez’s bid for power, but also a defensive response to an unjustified persecution of revered village elders. From mid-March to June, armed Indians in Cuetzalán were involved in the destruction of coffee orchards, the removal of walks, and direct attacks on the houses of gente de razón, actions that interrupted the work of the adjudication commission in Tzicuilan and the cabecera, where the violence was concentrated. Denuncias continued to be filed from the more peace-abiding barrios of Yancuitlalpan, Xocoyolo, and Tzinacapan.⁵⁴ On several occasions, Francisco Agustín was ordered arrested and brought to Zacapoastla.⁵⁵ But he escaped capture, continuing to lead the campaign of intimidation throughout July and prompting the ayuntamiento of Cuetzalán to beg for appropriate military backing.⁵⁶ The pleas were of little avail, for by now the entire Sierra was in rebellion.

The opening of hostilities between Méndez’s Sierra cacicazgo and the state government radically changed the field of power within which Pala Agustín was operating. Juan Francisco Lucas, the peacemaker, now became General Lucas, rebel commander of the Línea del Norte, confronting not only the forces of the state but also the federal Second Division under Juárez’s best commander, General Ignacio Alatorre. Francisco Agustín’s well-disciplined, albeit poorly armed force of Indians, already opposed to the state government, was too valuable a resource for Lucas to ignore, however committed he might have been to the resolution of the differences between Cuetzalán’s Indians and the gente de razón.⁵⁷ In exchange for arms, Francisco Agustín organized supplies and provided men for Lucas.⁵⁸

In response to Francisco Agustín’s growing military assertiveness and the sense of encirclement created by the knowledge of his ties with Xochiapulco—which had been a focus of Indian rebelliousness since the Liberal revolution in 1854—the military commander of Cuetzalán urgently requested ammunition for the fifty-one men he had under arms, as well as reenforcements.⁵⁹ Apart from his alliance with Xochiapulco, Francisco Agustín also joined forces with rebels from the neighboring district of Tlatlauqui, where Indian villages were taking arms against forced recruitment by the federal army.⁶⁰

The potential for alliances across district boundaries was greatly facilitated by the political geography of the Sierra. Each district (running east-west: Tezuitlán, Tlatlauqui, Zacapoastla, Tetela, Zacatlán) formed a north-south strip commencing with the district capital situated at high altitude in the tierra fría, stretching north like parallel ribbons, then dropping through the precipitous slopes of the tierra cálida to the lowlands of the tierra caliente. While logical for administering the Sierra in peacetime, these political divisions, reflecting colonial cabecera-sujeto relationships as well as the vertical integration of ecological zones, were a liability during wars and rebellions. Each horizontal strip of the Sierra could form the basis of a line of defense. Such lines were established in the summer of 1868 and again in the following year, as Méndez and Lucas attempted to integrate the resistance of the tierra cálida by linking rebel villages in the districts of Tetela, Zacapoastla, and Tlatlauqui against the occupation of the district capitals of the tierra fría by the federal army. Francisco Agustín’s cacicazgo in Cuetzalán was an important link in this chain.

At this stage, however, Francisco Agustín’s alliance with Xochiapulco incurred more risks than benefits. On August 11, the alcalde of Cuetzalán, expecting an uprising, took advantage of a successful federal offensive upon Huahuaxtla and Xochiapulco, Lucas’s rebel headquarters, to arrest seven Indian leaders (five from Cuetzalán and two from Tzicuilan) and dispatch them to Zacapoastla.⁶¹ Awaiting reenforcements from Xochiapulco that were now unlikely to arrive since Lucas was making peace with Alatorre, Francisco Agustín withdrew his forces to a defensible position close to Cuetzalán.⁶² In spite of the arrest of their leaders, the movement among Cuetzalán’s Indians continued with an estimated ninety men at arms in mid-August, reenforced recently by sixteen soldiers from Xocoyolo who had fled forced recruitment. At this point, the rebel strategy appears to have been to avoid direct conflict with the militia of the gente de razón but to maintain pressure with night raids, roadblocks, and occasional daring musters in the main square of Cuetzalán itself. Such tactics were intended to sap the whites’ will to resist and to encourage them to choose an easier life in Zacapoastla or elsewhere. On August 16, the rebels tried unsuccessfully to persuade the wives of the National Guard company of the cabecera to disarm their husbands (perhaps taking advantage of the fact that many gente de razón had Indian wives).⁶³ Two days later rebels from Tzicuilan and Cuetzalán were reported to have united with Indians from the barrio of Tzinacantepec (Tlatlauqui), reaching the suburbs of Yancuitlalpan. That night, Jesús Bazán, Cuetzalán’s militia commander, captured seven more rebel leaders.

The alliance between Indian rebels from Cuetzalán and Tlatlauqui coincided with the rapid collapse in the fortunes of the principal Sierra rebel force fighting the Second Division. On August 21 General Lucas surrendered, his thousand or so soldiers handing in their arms.⁶⁴ This submission might have been expected to persuade the Cuetzalán movement to lay down its arms, but Francisco Agustín’s rebellion continued for another month. Indeed, Alatorre had been so occupied with the broader strategy of containing and defeating the Sierra rebellion that he had failed even to notice the disturbances in Cuetzalán. On August 25, eight months after Francisco Agustín’s original rebellion, he informed the minister of war that “the first signs of disturbances among the indigenous class” in Cuetzalán had been observed.⁶⁵

The Indian movement in Cuetzalán continued for two reasons. First, anxiety over the subdivision of the municipality’s land was still not resolved. Second, General Méndez saw in Pala Agustín a means for keeping alive his own bid for power. Three days after Lucas’s surrender, two hundred Indian rebels from Tzicuilan and Tzinacantepec were reported to have assembled at Zacatipan, near Cuetzalán, where they were joined by forty-five men from Xochiapulco under one of Lucas’s captains. They were reported to be well armed and were raising funds by taxing “rancheros” in the districts of Zacapoastla and Tlatlauqui. The entire force was now commanded by Juan Ignacio Guerrero, a commander whom Méndez had used for organizing patriotic forces against the Austrians in the tierra caliente in 1866-67.⁶⁶ The object was to make contact with Col. Andrés Mirón, a Mendecista commander in Tlatlauqui, who would bring rifles and ammunition from Tezuitlán to be paid for from funds gathered at Zacatipan.⁶⁷

Whether the Cuetzalán authorities, in requesting two hundred well-equipped reenforcements, were exaggerating the extent of the threat in order to command the military support they had so far failed to receive, or the movement was genuinely assuming a regional dimension, is uncertain. Force, however, would not be necessary at this stage of the movement, as the chance for a peaceful solution had unexpectedly presented itself.⁶⁸ Late in August, Juan Francisco Molina, the military commander of the district, received two letters from Juan Ignacio Guerrero expressing willingness to return the arms leased from Tezuitlán and proposing a meeting. He insisted, however, that no Cuetzalán gente de razón be present. Guerrero explained that the Indian leaders of Cuetzalán and Tzicuilan were willing peacefully to air their grievances against the “Señores de Cuetzalán,” but that at present they were unwilling to hand over their arms in the face of continual attacks by the gente de razón and the arrest and exile of their leaders. He added that Francisco Agustín had asked to send two letters, one to Juan Francisco Lucas and the other to Molina, requesting that the seven prisoners held in Zacapoastla be released to ease the suffering of their families. Guerrero concluded that he would ensure that the Indians would be present in San Andrés Tzicuilan for the elections to be held on Sunday.⁶⁹ It seems likely that, following instructions from General Méndez, Guerrero had decided to scale down his support for rebel activities in Cuetzalán in readiness for participation in the electoral struggle. Such switches from rebellion to legal electioneering were characteristic of the politics of this period.

Unfortunately, no record has been found of any meeting at this point between Francisco Agustín and the district authorities. However, shortly before he left Zacapoastla for his headquarters at Jalapa, General Alaton e reported to the minister of war that the disturbances in Cuetzalán were over and that the Indians had once more submitted to the government. He added that they had not handed over their arms to the district authorities because they were borrowed from Tezuitlán, to which they were now being returned. He concluded emphatically that:

Here, surely, was the perfect moment for reconciliation. The Montaña rebels had made peace and returned to the electoral path. The grievances of the Cuetzalteco rebels had shifted perceptibly from concern about the division of common lands to anger about the detention and exile of their leaders. Yet in spite of Alatorre’s sympathetic interpretation of the Cuetzalán movement, in which he saw a response to repression rather than a deliberate attack upon the gente de razón, the federal general was still not prepared to order the release of the rebel leaders. On the contrary, writing to Ignacio Mejía, the minister of war, in mid-September, Alatorre recommended that the prisoners be sent to the military commander of Veracruz, then to the state of Yucatan to serve out their sentences.⁷¹

The Exile of Cuetzalán’s Leaders, Desamortización, and the Resumption of Conflict

When Mejía learned of the advanced age of most of the imprisoned Indian leaders—seven arriving in Veracruz in late September counted 593 years between them; the youngest was 64 and the oldest 104—he remarked that they could hardly pose a significant threat to the public order and immediately suspended the order that they be sent to Yucatan.⁷² Even Rafael García agreed that many were too old to be sent to Yucatan. He believed that military service was an inappropriate punishment for the prisoners, who would only desert and return to Cuetzalán to cause more trouble. He suggested instead that all be sent “to a place where they could no longer challenge the public order with such impunity,” without suggesting where this place might be.⁷³ Unhappily, the prisoners were already on their way to Yucatan by the time Mejía’s order suspending their sentence reached Veracruz.

During the subsequent five months, an energetic legal campaign was waged by lawyers hired by a commission of Cuetzalán Indian vecinos to secure the release of the prisoners. Although an order from Benito Juárez eventually released the prisoners and permitted them to return to Cuetzalán, very few returned.⁷⁴ Several died in custody, some were released from the Puebla penitentiary but detained in Zacapoastla jail, others were released and promptly rearrested. Several factors blocked the return of the jefes indios of Cuetzalán and San Andrés Tzicuilan to their homes: the increasingly precarious political position of Governor García, who eventually resigned in April 1869; the Puebla cuartelazo organized by Gen. Miguel Negrete in February 1869 during which the prisoners from the penitentiary were released (among them four Cuetzaltecos who, on their return to Cuetzalán, were promptly rearrested on grounds of rebellion against the state government); the pushing through of the desamortización in Cuetzalán and the fear that the return of the pasados might disrupt this; and the continuing disorders organized by Francisco Agustín himself.⁷⁵

With the principal community leaders out of the way, the commission charged with supervising the subdivision of common lands in the rebel barrio Tzicuilan forged ahead, urged on by the state government, and declared its work complete on October 24, 1868.⁷⁶ Attention then turned to the cabecera, where on November 9 a Junta Calificadora was established for the valuation and distribution of the commons under three gente de razón.⁷⁷ Keen to take advantage of the uncharacteristic calm in the southern Sierra, the state government then instructed that the desamortización be immediately carried out throughout the entire district.⁷⁸ Under these circumstances, the reluctance to allow the return of the Cuetzalán rebels becomes more comprehensible. But while the exile of Cuetzalán and Tzicuilan’s pasados from the district may have been effective in pacifying these communities in the short term (the imprisoned elders were undoubtedly opposed to the desamortización since it removed one of their principal prerogatives, the control of access to common land), in the longer term the absence of important Indian community leaders could only exacerbate the municipality’s problems.

The violent events occurring in the barrio of Tzicuilan in late November 1868, with the burning of the properties of gente de razón and the pulling down of recently rebuilt walls to the cattle pens, had left the municipality of Cuetzalán in a state of apprehension and uncertainty about how to proceed with the desamortización, just at the time that the state was urging haste.⁷⁹ To resolve the problem once and for all, the alcaldes of Tzicuilan convoked a “Junta General del Pueblo de San Andrés Tzicuilan del Municipio de Cuetzalán” on January 30, 1869, inviting the damaged parties (“citizens Octaviano Pérez, Manuel and Miguel Flores”) and calling for the old relations of fraternity and friendship to be reestablished.

A Tzicuilan pasado, Juan Francisco Jiménez (aged sixty-eight and recently released from jail in Puebla), spoke on behalf of the whole village. He admitted that most of the community had participated in these actions, but he believed that they were understandable if not justifiable, given the exceptional circumstances under which the village had been living and the degree of external meddling.

Outsiders, in combination with poor old Juan Bautista (who had died in exile in Yucatan, aged eighty), were therefore to blame. The villagers then promised never again to damage the plantations and cattle pens of the gente de razón, in exchange for an exemption from having to pay compensation to Pérez and the Flores brothers. Reluctantly the latter concurred. The Cuetzalán authorities applauded and seconded the agreement reached between Tzicuilan’s Indians and gente de razón,⁸⁰ Surely now, the grounds for violent conflict were removed?

The desamortización resumed throughout the municipality, and, with the return from exile of some of the pasados, Cuetzalán seemed to be returning to normal.⁸¹ However, this mood of reconciliation was disturbed by the cuartelazo in Puebla on February 3 and the movement of the rebel leader, Gen. Miguel Negrete, to the Sierra, occupying Tezuitlán between February 8 and 25.⁸² Governor García promptly ordered the rearrest of the four Cuetzalán leaders who had recently returned. In early March, in spite of Negrete’s flight across state borders in Guerrero, García overruled the instructions from the minister of war that the remaining prisoners, now detained in Zacapoastla, be released.⁸³ In this last act before resigning from the governorship, García effectively destroyed any basis for reconciliation in Cuetzalán.

The partition and privatization of Cuetzalán’s commons continued throughout March, April, and May with more than two hundred denuncias of land around the cabecera, to which escrituras were then granted by the jefatura. Many of these initial denuncias came from non-Indian claimants. Indians still held back from taking the leap into private ownership. Most claims were for small parcels, ranging from a few cuartillos de sembradura to one or two almudes (between 2½ and 14 hectares). Although claims for larger parcels were exceptional, they predictably caused the greatest dissension. The original claim of Manuel Flores in Tzicuilan was of 8 fanegas (160 hectares), which he had recently augmented by a further 6 almudes (42 hectares).⁸⁴ Octaviano Pérez’s rancho, adjoining that of Manuel Flores, covered a similar area.⁸⁵ Manuel’s brother, Miguel, also successfully denounced land in Tzicuilan covering 6½ fanegas (130 hectares).⁸⁶ Although these ranchos were small by the standards of the altiplano, they were gigantic compared to the average Indian ranchería.

The presence of three gente de razón owning just three Tzicuilan ranchos might, at first glance, appear a fairly innocuous intrusion in an otherwise entirely Indian municipality. Yet when the area covered by these ranchos is taken in account, amounting to almost five hundred hectares located in the center of the community and dedicated to cattle raising rather than agriculture, the scale of the intrusion and its perceived threat to Indian agriculture can be better appreciated. Another example of adjudication to gente de razón of extensive landed property was the grant of title to Francisco Luque, prominent aguardiente distiller from Zacapoastla, for 8 fanegas (160 hectares) of land, 6 of woodland and 2 of cleared land, at La Caída de Ocoteno for eighteen pesos the fanega, in spite of the claim of the alcalde of Cuetzalán that this land was of public utility (ejido) and therefore, in his view, exempt from privatization.⁸⁷ The Flores family was also acquiring an important stake in aguardiente distilling, a rapidly growing industry in this period, with Cuetzalán becoming the center of production in the district.

A picture emerges of a small but energetic bourgeoisie of white entrepreneurs with interests spanning cattle fattening and dealing, aguardiente production, and investment in the new magic cash crop, coffee.⁸⁸ It was entirely appropriate, therefore, that Manuel Flores should purchase (for the impressive sum of two thousand pesos) the substantial house on the corner of the plaza of Cuetzalán that had belonged to the priest José de Jesús Castrillo.⁸⁹ In spite of some generous adjudications to non-Indians, at this early stage of the privatization of Cuetzalán commons the authorities nevertheless adopted a cautious approach. Anxious not to provoke the Indians back into rebellion, the alcalde of Cuetzalán argued, for example, that woodland throughout the municipality should not be included in the adjudications. The jefe político insisted, however, “that all [woodland] must be adjudicated except the ejido,” a relatively small area of woodland covering the hill above the cabecera and used as a source of house thatch.⁹⁰ The problems accompanying common land adjudication in Cuetzalán arose as much from the state’s determination to apply the law inflexibly as from the cupidity of local gente de razón.

It was this inflexibility and the unwillingness to allow greater local discretion in exempting land of public utility from adjudication that so concerned the Indian population. Exempting Cuetzalán’s woodland from adjudication might have quelled local anxieties, for Indians would have kept the reserve that they knew they would one day need. Instead, the whole question of who would one day lay claim to the uncultivated and wooded part of the municipality, which comprised most of its land area, remained open and uncertain, and Cuetzalán’s Indians remained preoccupied by a legal process that appeared both irrational (it tied a person to a plot nature would soon require him to leave fallow, if it were ever to regain its fertility) and threatening (it granted gente de razón permanent rights to land to which before they had enjoyed only customary access). Earlier in the century, Cuetzalán had prided itself on remaining a wholly Indian municipality in which gente de razón were grudgingly welcome to conduct their business.⁹¹ Now they were gaining legitimate and permanent access to some of the best lands of the municipality. To village leaders, several of whom had recently returned after months of imprisonment, the political implications were deeply worrying.

By mid-May 1869, rumors were once more circulating about the revival of the movement against the gente de razón of Cuetzalán.⁹² To preempt the recurrence of further disorders, Ignacio Romero Vargas, the new and more conciliatory state governor, ordered an inquiry into causes of the conflict. More wide-ranging than the previous commissions and juntas, it involved a hearing in the district capital from the alcaldes of each of Cuetzalán’s five villages, along with any vecino who chose to accompany them, before Juan Francisco Molina, the jefe político, and José María Castro, the district judge. The first hearing, attended by the ayuntamiento and fifty-one “vecinos de razón” from Cuetzalán and Tzicuilan, took place in Zacapoastla on June 3. Significantly, no Indians were present, suggesting either that they were deliberately excluded or that the hearing was being boycotted by Francisco Agustín.

Predictably, given the absence of spokesmen for the Indians, Cuetzalán’s responses to Molina’s interrogation were anodyne. In the view of the gente de razón, the Indians had no cause for alarm and certainly no excuse for rebellion. Everyone was now in proud possession of at least one land title. Only very moderate charges were being made for the costs of surveying and adjudication. Moreover, other reform laws, such as the abolition of compulsory ecclesiastical fees and personal services, were being faithfully respected. Indeed, the Indians were now even better off than the gente de razón with respect to contributions and duties owed to church and state—“less was asked of the Indian population than of the gente de razón, and they often received much more consideration than the latter.”⁹³ Similarly contented reports came from the alcaldes of Tzinacapán, Yaneuitlalpan, and Xocoyolo.⁹⁴

Officially at least, the desamortización problem in Cuetzalán, as well as grievances concerning fees and services, seemed to have been resolved. However, no attempt was made to sound out grass-roots opinion from the Indians themselves, who still showed abundant and worrying signs of dissatisfaction. In mid-June 1869, the incumbent juez de paz de indígenas of Cuetzalán and his four predecessors travelled to Zacapoastla to impress upon the jefe político the extent of Indian dissatisfaction.⁹⁵ From their representation, it is clear that the source of Indian grievance no longer lay in the adjudication per se, but in how it was being carried out. The specific objection was to the 2 percent adjudication fee (2 percent of the value of the plot being denounced). The Indians preferred the original payment of a flat rate of two reales for each almud adjudicated.⁹⁶ What might seem a trivial matter provided the catalyst for the recrudescence of the movement of Cuetzalán’s Indians against the gente de razón.

In early August, public order in Cuetzalán suddenly deteriorated, with reports of clandestine meetings and the destruction of coffee orchards organized by Francisco Agustín in Cuetzalán, Tzieuilan, and, for the first time, in Tzinacapán, where a thousand-tree coffee plantation belonging to Filomeno García was razed. Francisco Agustín was rallying support on the basis of the unpopularity of the 2 percent adjudication fee.⁹⁷ The Cuetzalán authorities, no longer awaiting instructions or reenforcements, immediately dispatched a force to break up meetings of Indians in the three barrios and arrested four of the leaders.⁹⁸ The Cuetzalán defense force was too small and ill-equipped, however, to achieve more than a temporary dispersal of the rebels, who immediately regrouped. Alcalde José María Mora suspected that Francisco Agustín’s strategy was to stage conspicuous shows of force, then to appeal for mediation directly to the jefe político over the heads of the Cuetzalán authorities.⁹⁹

By mid-August, the movement was again assuming regional dimensions. On August 14, Mora reported that Francisco Agustín had gone to Xochiapulco, intending to return that evening with a sufficient number of armed men to be able to issue a pronunciamiento. His purpose, Mora believed, was “to realize his designs against the gente de razón of this place and to interrupt the elections due to be held tomorrow.” Evidently, the disturbances among the Indians of Cuetzalán remained closely enmeshed with the political aspirations of Méndez and the Montaña, presently contesting the election for state governorship resulting from Rafael García’s resignation. Once again, Juan Ignacio Guerrero had set up camp across the district boundary in Tlatlauqui from where he was training and arming Indians from Tzicuilan and Cuetzalán. It was rumored that a coup was planned for the early morning of August 15.¹⁰⁰

Again, the rumored Indian uprising did not occur. Perhaps Mora had exaggerated the threat in order to prompt the sending of reenforcements from Zacapoastla, judged necessary for ensuring order (i.e., the election of Ignacio Romero Vargas, the official candidate) on election day. In this he succeeded. Reenforcements arrived late on August 15: a handful of soldiers accompanied by mule packs carrying ninety-one rifles, of which forty-one were unserviceable and six useless.¹⁰¹ With these arms, Ignacio Arrieta set about organizing a National Guard unit from among the gente de razón to provide security for the cabecera. Ironically, it was a section of this guard that would rebel against the district administration on November 19, 1869, marching in company with the Indian forces of Francisco Agustín upon the district capital.

The Arriaga Rebellion and the Dangers of Alliances

The rebellion that broke out in Cuetzalán on November 19, 1869, under the leadership of Francisco Javier Arriaga, colonel of the Zacapoastla National Guard, was the first occasion in which a large faction of Cuetzalán’s gente de razón, in alliance with Indians, took an aggressive political initiative beyond municipal boundaries.¹⁰² Until then, only the Indians, with their leader “Pala Agustín,” had become involved in wider armed conflict. Cuetzalán’s gente de razón had been too few and too preoccupied with maintaining their fragile hold over this largely Indian municipality to risk military adventures beyond its boundaries. Within two weeks, what had started as a series of cabecera revolts (in Xochitlán, Cuetzalán, and Nauzontla) arising out of local issues of patronage and electoral fraud had grown into a regional insurrection embroiling the entire central Sierra, commanded by Gen. Juan Francisco Lucas and directed against the state and federal governments. As was the case for the rebellion the previous year, the fundamental cause of the insurrection, which lasted from November 19, 1869, to June 2, 1870, was the accumulation of local and regional grievances resulting from the power arrangement imposed by Juárez upon the state of Puebla after the French intervention. But why choose remote, traditionally Conservative, Cuetzalán for launching a Montaña rebellion? And what common interests brought Cuetzalán’s Indians and gente de razón together in an armed challenge to district, state, and federal authorities?

Scrutiny of the list of Col. Francisco Arriaga’s fellow conspirators, who met in Cuetzalán on the eve of the rebellion, reveals certain common characteristics. Several conspirators—notably Arriaga and his brothers Mariano and Miguel, also Zacapoastla National Guard officers—had ties forged during the patriotic struggles with Méndez and the Montaña. Others had received recent setbacks in their attempts to denounce common land (three rebels actually possessed houses and orchards on Cuetzalán’s ejido, which had recently been exempted from adjudication). Several conspirators had held local civil or military positions but were temporarily without office, forming part of the losing faction in the latest elections for the post of jefe político, the fount of district patronage. Out of office during this crucial year in which the desamortización was being hurried through, they were less able to ensure a personally favorable outcome in this massive process of transfer of ownership. Thus, electoral disappointment among Méndez supporters provided the spark for rebellion. The tinder, however, was anxiety about the outcome of the desamortización.

Although no Indians attended the original conspiratorial meeting, Arriaga had already made contact with Francisco Agustín, using the good offices of Octaviano Carpintero, the only non-Indian to have rebelled with him in January 1868 and recently returned from exile. Francisco Agustín and his followers were already partially mobilized since the disorders accompanying elections for the governorship in August. Moreover, they had recently received additional armaments from Xochiapulco. Their principal reason for joining the rebellion was to secure the removal of the 2 percent commission charged on adjudication as well as, no doubt, to limit the encroachment by gente de razón upon Cuetzalán’s lands.¹⁰³ As the most disciplined military force in the municipality, Francisco Agustín and his following swiftly recovered the dominant position they had enjoyed in Cuetzalán early in 1868, encircling the cabecera and collecting contributions.

Soon, however, local concerns had to give way to the broader insurrectionary strategy. Francisco Agustín was ordered to move his forces away from Cuetzalán toward Tlatlauqui to prevent the enemy crossing the bridge at Macuilquila, Tlatlauqui’s principal route of communication with its tierra caliente.¹⁰⁴ Soon after he had positioned his men at Cuichapan, on the Ocoteno ridge, Francisco Agustín’s forces were engaged, defeated, and dispersed by a force captained by José María Calderón, who had recently reorganized the Cuetzalán National Guard.¹⁰⁵ Far from the formidable and well-armed force that the Cuetzalán authorities had always described in reports to higher authorities, Francisco Agustín’s rebels proved to be pathetically poorly equipped. Only thirty of the one hundred rebels possessed firearms; the rest carried only garrotes and machetes. Before the battle, the jefe político had ignored Francisco Agustín’s request for peace, a request that illustrates the gulf between the localized concerns of the Indian leader and the more abstract and universal appeals of leaders such as General Méndez and Colonel Arriaga.

3 Diciembre 1869, Cuichapan, Gefe Politico,

In spite of Francisco Agustín’s defeat on December 5, Cuetzalán was reported still surrounded by more than one hundred Indian infantry on the following day.¹⁰⁷ Calderón failed to appreciate the rebels’ peaceful intention, directed at recovering their dead from the cabecera. A deputation sent from Tzicuilan to collect the corpses was shot at; as a result, one Tzicuilteco had to have an arm amputated, because his colleagues would not allow him to be taken to the jefatura to be operated on.¹⁰⁸ Further evidence that the rebels desired to avoid further armed confrontation came on the following day when the alcalde of Tzicuilan returned to the cabecera three rifles that Francisco Agustín’s men had handed in.¹⁰⁹ Nevertheless, the alcalde, Ramón Vázquez, rounded up anyone suspected of having links with Francisco Agustín.¹¹⁰ Incensed by this injustice, the rebels continued to encircle the cabecera, whose small defense force sporadically engaged and dispersed them but did not pursue or defeat them.¹¹¹ Without external support, unlikely at this moment given the Second Division’s involvement in the southern Sierra, the prospect of an end to this stalemate seemed dim.

The Cuetzalán “problema de indios” thus continued, by now quite separate from the military events occurring in the southern part of the district; but after the defeat of December 5, 1869, Francisco Agustín’s movement failed to recover its momentum.

The Completion of the Adjudication and Further Disorders

The district remained in rebellion for a further six months. Throughout this period General Lucas, the rebel leader, succeeded in retaining the initiative, effectively controlling the southern Sierra beyond the district capitals. Exasperated by the failure to suppress the revolt, the state government faced additional embarrassment when the Cuetzalán problem was taken up by the national press. The cruel exile of Cuetzalán’s pasados and the corruption and injustice accompanying the distribution of common lands made good copy in the antigovernment, generally Porfirista Monitor Republicano.¹¹² However embarrassing these revelations, the practice of exiling Indian leaders continued; twenty more “indígenas de la Sierra” were dispatched to Yucatan for penal service in late January.¹¹³

What part Francisco Agustín played in the insurrection after his defeat in December is unclear. He was included among eighty-one officers of the Sierra National Guard granted amnesty in June 1870.¹¹⁴ The March 1870 arrest of José María Castañeda, suspected of being a “capitán de indios de San Andrés Tzicuilan,” suggests that the Indian rebels of Tzicuilan, allied to a section of the gente de razón, contributed actively to the revolt.¹¹⁵ Many of those who did not appear to have abandoned the municipality to escape the burdens of military recruitment and the continual demands for food supplies for both rebel and government forces.¹¹⁶

With the amnesty in June, the adjudication of Cuetzalán’s commons, which the rebellion had effectively brought to a halt, could resume. By late July, although the adjudication of common land was almost completed in the barrios of Xocoyolo, Yancuitlalpan, and Tzinacapan, 158 denuncias were still unprocessed in the trouble spot of Tzicuilan and 158 in the cabecera. The delay was over a revised valuation ordered in November 1869 but still not carried out in August 1870.¹¹⁷ Moreover, the question of fees charged by adjudicators was still unresolved.¹¹⁸ In spite of these difficulties, it seems the principal work of adjudication had been completed by the summer of 1871. Cuetzalán was now a municipality of private property holders, moored in a sea of still unoccupied and undenounced tierrabaldía. The original source of discontent—anxiety about further non-Indian encroachment on this vacant and until recently communal land-remained.

Cuetzalán remained divided. In August, the alcalde was informed that the Tzicuiltecos had resumed their reunions and, armed with sixty rifles, were intending “to rebel again against the gente de razón.” This report was confirmed by Vicente Filomeno Lara, who was attempting to replant the coffee orchard in Tzinacapán destroyed by rebels the previous August.¹¹⁹ This movement came to nothing. Its objective appears to have been to intimidate outsiders during the completion of land adjudication in the barrio. During Porfirio Díaz’s revolt of La Noria, between November 1871 and June 1872, a general insurrection commanded by Generals Juan N. Méndez, Juan Crisóstomo Bonilla, and Hermenguildo Carrillo once more gripped the Puebla Sierra. The Méndez/Lucas/Arriaga/Francisco Agustín coalition reemerged and, throughout the rebellion, Cuetzalán provided large amounts of cash, rebajado taxes, and food supplies for the rebels. “Capitán Ciudadano Francisco Agustín, Jefe de Brigada del Ejército Restaurador,” resumed an active role in recruiting men not only from Cuetzalán but also from the tierra caliente of the neighboring district of Tetela, where his soldiers earned a reputation for drunkenness and disorder.¹²⁰ Reports came in May 1872 of Cuetzalán families settling on the fertile lands of Tetela’s municipality of Jonotla to escape Francisco Agustín’s exactions.¹²¹ As a consequence of his activity during the revolt of La Noria, Francisco Agustín consolidated his political position in Cuetzalán, occupying the civilian post of secretary of the Juzgado de Cuetzalán in 1872, a prudent move since the federal amnesty, following the cessation of hostilities in July 1872, had stripped the rebels of their ranks and demobilized their companies.¹²² Besides, the secretaryship would have involved Francisco Agustín closely in the adjudication of land.

On balance, however, by the mid-1870s, it is doubtful whether Francisco Agustín and his Indian followers considered that they had significantly benefited from their participation, as clients of Méndez, Lucas, and Arriaga, in the wider insurrectionary struggles of the state and nation. Indeed, the last years of the Restored Republic were not happy ones for the Indians of the district of Zacapoastla. While the rebelliousness of the Arriaga brothers paid dividends in a federal deputyship (representing Zacapoastla) for Francisco and the jefatura política of San Juan de los Llanos for Miguel, this period was remembered by Francisco Agustín and his fellow soldiers from Cuetzalán with bitterness and dismay. From their twin citadels, the Arriaga brothers proposed to carry out an ambitious project to link the cereal-producing highlands by road and canal through the district of Zacapoastla (passing close to Cuetzalán) and joining the Cempoala river system through the lowlands of Veracruz to the Gulf coast. This goal necessitated a massive mobilization of Indian labor. A personal contribution” was introduced for mobilizing labor, which villages were forced to provide in relays, for the construction and maintenance of roads. This unconstitutional arrangement was rendered doubly oppressive by the practices of payment in alcohol and imprisonment of Indians until they had paid the “personal contribution.”¹²³

In the face of these oppressive conditions introduced by the very people to whom Francisco Agustín had rendered fiscal and military tribute, it is hardly surprising that he decided to retain his ties with his former soldiers, advising them to hold onto their arms. In November 1872, some months after the end of the revolt, armed men were still active in San Andrés Tzicuilan gathering weapons, probably on Francisco Agustín’s instructions.¹²⁴ His decision ultimately paid off when the revolution of Tuxtepec broke out in February 1876. In August, Francisco Agustín occupied Zacapoastla with a force of twenty men, under the command of “Licenciado-veterinario” José Rafael Tarbe, reportedly the only remaining men at arms in the entire district of Zacapoastla, the National Guard of the district having been dissolved in 1874.¹²⁵ After Díaz’s victory in November, Tarbe was rewarded with the jefatura política of Zacapoastla and, for a time, became a willing mouthpiece for the Indian soldiers of the district, seeking recognition and reward for their sacrifices through the enforcement of the liberal constitutional guarantees that the revolution of Tuxtepec had promised to restore.

Following Porfirio Díaz’s victory at Tecoac in November 1876 and the fall of the Lerdo government, General Méndez and the Montaña at last attained their objective of taking power at the state level. General Bonilla, fellow Tetelense and close companion of Méndez, assumed the governorship. For a short time, Méndez occupied the interim presidency of the republic before accepting a position from Díaz in the Senate. Here was Francisco Agustín s opportunity to seek official redress from the patron he had served so loyally since the early 1860s. He presented two petitions signed by his soldiers to Méndez in Mexico City early in 1877. In the first, he reminded Méndez of the promise he had made in Xochiapulco at the beginning of the revolution: land in Cuetzalán that had been illegally denounced and claimed by outsiders should be returned to the communities. He called for the reestablishment of a commission to review the entire process of land adjudication in the municipality since the original decree of August 1867. And he urged that the subdivision of the ejido of Cuetzalán, which the Indians needed for the grazing of their livestock and for materials for their houses, should cease immediately. Finally, he asked that the full complement of one hundred national guardsmen under his command be retained, emphasizing the sacrifices of his men during successive campaigns in defense of the principles of the constitution:

The second petition, signed by Francisco Agustín and fifty of his soldiers (all Indians, judging from the absence of surnames), contained a more general plea for an end to the abuses committed upon the Indian population of Cuetzalán, again alluding to “our fundamental pact, for which we have shed blood on the battlefield.” They complained of the reintroduction by the district and municipal authorities of compulsory labor services, arbitrary imprisonment, and payment in kind rather than in cash; of the compulsory services exacted by the parish priests, who obliged Indians to work unpaid as sacristans and bellringers and widows and their children to render domestic services in their households; and of the “scandalous abuses” committed by the adjudicators of common land, who charged extortionate amounts for processing denuncias of plots often valued at less than five pesos (when the law forbade any charge for the adjudication of land worth less than two hundred pesos). The petition concluded with an appeal to Méndezs known concern for the welfare of the Indian, “trusting in the protection which you have always shown toward the indigenous class.”¹²⁷

It would be four years before Méndez was in a position, as state governor, to redress these grievances. Yet, however well intentioned, the Tetela caudillo had only a limited capacity to influence events in remote Sierra municipalities such as Cuetzalán that had for so long given him their support. All he could do was to help ease his friends (who would not necessarily be sympathetic to Francisco Agustín’s cause) into positions of authority.

If the prospect of continued patronage from Méndez was uncertain, the local political scene in Cuetzalán was hardly more promising. In the face of the bullish behavior of Francisco Agustín and his Indian soldiers during the Tuxtepec revolt, and realizing perhaps that their own divisions left them additionally vulnerable, the gente de razón met in the municipal schoolroom on March 1, 1877, to discuss ways of resolving their differences.¹²⁸ From this meeting there issued a lengthy proclamation in which Cuetzalán’s gente de razón vowed to abolish the distinction that for over a decade had divided them into two factions—“los del barrio de arriba” and “los del barrio de abajo”—promising to work together “for fraternity, harmony, and progress.”

Precisely what this distinction between the two non-Indian barrios within the municipality signified was not spelled out. Earlier, it was argued that Cuetzalán’s gente de razón were divided between the maizefarming, early migrants, who had settled farther up the hill and aspired to rent but not to buy land from the Indian communities, and those later migrants, settling farther down the hill, who developed cattle pastures and coffee plantations in the center of Cuetzalán’s Indian barrios and had recently denounced and gained title to this land through the Ley Lerdo. The desamortización had brought these differences into the open. Since the decree of August 1867 instructing municipalities to privatize their lands, the most conspicuous division in Cuetzalán was between Indians and gente de razón. Yet, throughout this period, factionalism and violence were also rife among the latter.¹²⁹ Not only did an important faction strike an alliance with Pala Agustín’s rebels during the revolt of November 1869, but in June 1870, during the height of the adjudication, two factions of gente de razón were reportedly on the point of war.¹³⁰

Whatever had divided them in the past, on March 1, 1877, forty-one gente de razón, bearing such familiar names as Calderón, Mora, Lara, Bazán, Urcid, Huidobro, Pérez, Flores, Arrieta, and Vázquez, vowed never again to allow differences of interest or of party to divide the village and promised, instead, to work together for Cuetzalán’s peaceful progress.¹³¹ The positivist language of this proclamation, the emphasis on overcoming political divisions in the pursuit of harmony and order, could not contrast more strongly with the language of the two petitions presented by Francisco Agustín to General Méndez on behalf of Cuetzalán’s Indians. The petitions were informed by ideas of social contract and popular sovereignty. The pedantic and opaque proclamation from Cuetzalán’s gente de razón announced the passing of politics and anticipated the age of positivism.

Later in 1877, the alcalde and ayuntamiento of Cuetzalán submitted a further petition requesting a fundo legal for the village.¹³² This intriguing document points at the crux of the impasse in the relations between Cuetzalán’s Indians and gente de razón during the period covered in this study. The alcalde began by praising the principles of the desamortización, describing how its application in the formerly underpopulated municipality had laid the basis for Cuetzalán’s moral and material aggrandizement. The Indians pattern of land use characterized by shifting cultivation was now replaced by a system of fixed holdings, each yielding a small interest (6 percent) for the benefit of the municipality. As a consequence both Indians and gente de razón now owned the land they worked and knew exactly who owned what. Although much land was still vacant and available for adjudication, access to it was barred by Indian intransigence.

The alcalde went on to reflect how the Indians remained fundamentally opposed to the adjudication, chiefly because it obliged them to remain in a determined location. The Indians therefore continued to make every effort to prevent further adjudication in favor of the “white race,” basing their claims on su derecho en el dominio quo existió del imperio azteca.” Acknowledging this fundamental disagreement, the alcalde suggested means for overcoming the bottleneck Indian hostility was causing to further immigration and settlement by the “white race.” He claimed that during the adjudication of common lands, ejidos had been granted to the five Indian villages in the municipality but that the authorities had omitted to grant Cuetzalán (cabecera), where most genre de razón resided, a “fundo legal.”¹³³ Once granted this territorial basis, the municipal authorities would be able to entice immigrants to settle on house plots (solares) upon the fundo legal, provided free of charge. These immigrants would then be able to denounce and farm the vacant land of the municipality. The alcalde suggested as the best location for the fundo legal an area of vacant ejido to the northeast of the cabecera, of three to four fane gas de sembradura, sixty to eighty hectares. He then proposed an ingenious way to go about this.

The land was planted with cuamaital (Spanish: anayo) trees, which the Indians used for thatching their houses. The ayuntamiento argued that this was a dangerous custom since the leaves, when dry, were both inflammable and concealed venomous reptiles. A prohibition on house thatches from these trees would therefore bring two benefits of great public utility. The Indians would have to stop using a hazardous roofing material and the land planted with cuamaital would be available for settlement. The alcalde anticipated opposition from the Indians, but he was prepared to risk this in pursuit of the greater good.¹³⁴ The self-confidence of Cuetzalán’s gente de razón is palpable. However, a decade would elapse before alcalde Jesús Flores was able to subdivide Cuetzalán’s ejido as a fundo legal for the encouragement of white settlement. While the Montaña still occupied the state governorship, Francisco Agustín and the Indians of Cuetzalán could expect a degree of official support sufficient to restrain the ambitions of the gente de razón.

In 1880, after contributing energetically to the electoral defeat of the followers of Carlos Pacheco in their challenge to Juan N. Méndez for the Puebla governorship, Francisco Agustín Dieguillo was rewarded with the Presidencia Municipal of Cuetzalán, a post he retained throughout Méndez’s term (1880-84).¹³⁵ This was the peak of Agustín’s formal political career and the last time during the Porfiriato that an Indian would govern Cuetzalán. Thereafter, the town effectively became a Flores fiefdom. Jesús Flores occupied the municipal presidency in 1887-91, 1891-99, and 1901-4.¹³⁶ He was related to Manuel Flores, whose occupation of the core of San Andrés Tzicuilan’s community lands in 1862, and later his denunciation of these lands as his own, had prompted the initial conflict between the Indians and the gente de razón of the municipality.

After the defeat of Miguel Méndez (Juan N. Méndez’s son) for the governorship in 1884, the Montaña’s hold over state politics rapidly receded, even within the Sierra. With Juan N. Méndez “promoted” to the Supreme Court of Military Justice (never to be allowed by Díaz to return to the Sierra), Francisco Agustín was left without a patron. During the late 1880s, the project for creating a fundo legal from Cuetzalán’s ejido was revived by alcalde Jesús Flores. Cuetzalán’s Indians possessed one remaining spokesman with some influence on higher levels of government. In 1887, Juan Francisco Lucas complained to the governor that the determination of Flores, backed by the jefe político, to divide up Cuetzalán’s ejido was meeting great opposition from the Indians, who were being persecuted and imprisoned for obstructing the creation of a fundo legal.¹³⁷ But even the patriarch of the Sierra,” in spite of his close relations with Díaz and his importance to the governor, Rosendo Márquez, could not influence matters in Cuetzalán now that “scientific peace” had superseded the “age of insurrection.” Order bred order. Francisco Agustín, once a respectable Liberal and patriotic National Guard commander, had become Francisco Agustín, the “bandit.”

Francisco Agustín did not disappear from the political scene but fell back on his old tactic of direct action. He was probably behind the opposition to the subdivision of Cuetzalán’s ejido in 1887. The last mention of the fading Indian cacique is in January 1894, when Jesús Flores wrote anxiously to the jefe político:

Flores succeeded in mustering support among the gente de razón, restoring order and arresting the two leaders and six other Indians, all of whom were sent to the jefatura for punishment. Investigation revealed that the motín had coincided with elections and was supported by political agents who were attempting to stir up a caste war “como lo ha pretendido siempre el citado Agustín Dieguillo. Because of the gravity of this crime Flores asked that the leaders be punished in such a way that “se ponga un total remedio á un mal de tanta trascendencia.”¹³⁸ What fate awaited Francisco Agustín at the hands of the courts in Puebla is not known.

During the late Porfiriato, Cuetzalán became one of the most prosperous municipalities in the state of Puebla on the strength of its prodigious coffee harvests and the hard labor of its Indian coffee farmers.¹³⁹ The immense Gothic parish church, the sanctuary to the Virgin of Guadalupe, the imposing town hall with its statuary of noble savages wearing improbable headresses, the numerous graceful merchants’ residences, and the Gothic coffee warehouses still bear witness to the town’s greatness. After two decades of persecution and prohibition of religious festivals, the church returned to Cuetzalán on an imposing scale during the Porfìriato, encouraging the syncretic cult of Quetzalcoatl and San Francisco, Cuetzalán’s patron saint, that coincided conveniently with the coffee harvest in early October. As residents of a successful coffee-producing municipality, gente de razón of Cuetzalán felt more in control of the place than had been the case during the middle decades of the century when their position seemed continually under challenge. They and the Indians were now engaged in a joint project from which both, for the time being, derived benefit. The cacicazgo created by “Pala Agustín” survived well into the twentieth century, until Francisco Agustín Dieguillo II died of gunshot wounds in San Andrés Tzicuilan in 1926. His heirs still aspire to a Cuetzalán controlled by Indians, an aspiration that must seem increasingly unrealizable.¹⁴⁰

Conclusion

What did Francisco Agustín achieve by taking direct action, on so many occasions, against the genre de razón and the municipal authorities of Cuetzalán? Did the pressure he exerted substantially affect the process of land adjudication beyond merely delaying its completion for a few years? As a result of that pressure, did Indians receive titles to a more favorable share of village commons than might otherwise have been the case? Did aggressive Indian resistance alter the way gente de razón evaluated the economic opportunities in Cuetzalán, affecting their decisions about economic specialization and land use? Unfortunately, none of these questions can be definitively answered from the available evidence. However, certain more general conclusions can be drawn about Cuetzalán’s troubled passage from communal to private land ownership.

Little is known about the effects of the application of the Ley Lerdo during the last third of the nineteenth century. In states such as Veracruz, Chiapas, Jalisco, and Yucatan, desamortización had already been applied to many rural communities even before the Reform period.¹⁴¹ In other areas, however, such as much of highland Oaxaca and the Huasteca Hidalguense and Potosina, its effects appear to have been minimal, even at the end of the century.¹⁴² More district and local-level studies that trace the relationship between law and reality are clearly needed. Cuetzalán provides an example of how liberal emphasis upon fixed, private property clashed with the existing mobile and temporary system of land use and possession characteristic of the tierra cálida. Had this part of the Sierra contained only a sprinkling of gente de razón, with no projects of agricultural transformation around new cash crops, the locals would perhaps have disregarded the implementation of the law or carried out a fictitious application while continuing their traditional farming practices. But, from the midnineteenth century, parts of the Sierra, and especially Cuetzalán, were being projected as the great hope for the Puebla economy, with the highlands still locked in agricultural and industrial depression.¹⁴³ The clash with Cuetzalán’s Indians—the laziest, the least intelligent, the most hostile to progress and the most averse to the white race”—therefore ensued.

In spite of Francisco Agustín’s failure to reverse the process of desamortización, or to block the legalization of a non-Indian presence on the lands of the municipality, it is evident that Cuetzalán by the early 1890s maintained approximately the same pattern of land use and crop specialization as had obtained before the desamortización. The project to introduce coffee specialization on the basis of medium-sized ranches owned by gente de razón and worked by migrant Indian peons (if it ever existed) was certainly abandoned following the violent destruction of several small coffee plantations by followers of Francisco Agustín between 1868 and 1870. Consequently, the route to coffee specialization followed in El Salvador and, to a lesser degree, in Guatemala from the 1860s, based upon medium-sized to large estates and the dispossession of Indian communities, was not followed.¹⁴⁴ Only after 1900 did coffee get a grip in Cuetzalán, and it proceeded on the basis of coffee production by Indian smallholders, with genre de razón confined to processing and marketing.¹⁴⁵ It is therefore fair to conclude that Indian opposition to early experiments by gente de razón with the crop, coupled with their determination to hold onto the land they already occupied and to prevent further settlement of vacant lands by outsiders, presented substantial obstacles to any early coffee specialization on the basis of a plantation system. And it is significant that where coffee production did get underway more rapidly in Mexico during the 1880s and 1890s—in Coatepec and Songolica (Veracruz) and Soconusco (Chiapas)—planters chose the relatively less populated lower slopes of the tierra cálida, bordering on the tierra caliente, where there was less resistance from Indian communities and where shortage of labor presented a more serious obstacle than access to land.¹⁴⁶ Catherine Young has studied a development pattern of coffee production closely resembling that of Cuetzalán—small proprietary coffee farms worked by Indians—in the Sierra Juárez (Oaxaca), following a similar periodization.¹⁴⁷

Cuetzalán during this period thus offers an example of how Indians conditioned the way agrarian capitalism was introduced into their midst through the twin processes of land privatization and introduction of cash crops.¹⁴⁸ Through sustained, and occasionally violent, pressure they succeeded, first, in slowing down the process of adjudication, second, in securing their share of the land being privatized, and third, in making it difficult for gente de razón to take up residence in Cuetzalán and thereby qualify for a share of the municipality’s vacant lands. As a consequence, in the longer term, Indians were able to control two important factors in the production of coffee—land and labor—until well into the second half of this century.

But what has this study of an Indian village leader in midnineteenth-century Mexico revealed beyond matters of land ownership and land use? The actions of Francisco Agustín on the municipal level and the ties he established with district- and regional-level politicians and military men qualify him as one of those ubiquitous agents of the Mexican political system: the caciques. But what kind of a cacique? And what kind of a cacicazgo was Cuetzalán? Throughout his career as municipal officeholder—alderman (1861), secretary of the Juzgado (1871), municipal president (1880-84), arid captain of the National Guard (1862-84)—Francisco Agustín maintained close ties with Gen. Juan N. Méndez, leader of the Liberal party of the Sierra from 1854 until 1884. Méndez’s brand of liberalism was characterized by anticlericalism, sympathy for and desire to build support among the Indian population, priorities on education and establishing “civil society” in areas hitherto dominated by the Catholic church in league with a few Conservative families, and willingness to resort to force at election times through control of units of the National Guard. In the Puebla Sierra, this brand of liberalism was embraced and projected by a rising class of gente de razón, sons and grandsons of immigrants from the plateau or of European immigrants of more recent provenance, especially Italians. Their wealth was drawn, during this period, principally from commerce and aguardiente production, neither requiring any significant alteration to the established patterns of land use or land holding.¹⁴⁹

Francisco Agustín was useful to Méndez because of his ability to act decisively at election times not only in Nahua Cuetzalán but also in the neighboring Totonac municipalities of Nauzontla, Tuzamapa, and Jonotla, key areas for harvesting votes as also for the supply of military campaigns waged by Méndez in the southern Sierra and on the plateau in the pursuit of his political ambitions. What did Francisco Agustín and his followers gain from this arrangement? His sparse correspondence and his petitions in 1877 (once Méndez had reached the supreme position in the republic) suggest that certain Liberal reforms were particularly attractive to the Indians of Cuetzalán, above all, the abolition of compulsory and unremunerated personal services and the introduction of a democratic and locally controlled National Guard. Nevertheless, one obvious paradox concerns the central element of the Liberal program, and the most far-reaching in its effects, the Ley Lerdo. Francisco Agustín’s opposition to the fundamental premises of this law, as it was being applied in Cuetzalán, kept him a rebel from 1868 until his final arrest in 1894. And it was precisely on this central issue that Francisco Agustín’s Liberal patrons let him down, wedded as they were to the ideal of the economic development of the Sierra. It is clear that once Méndez had left the Puebla governorship in 1884, Francisco Agustín’s influence waned while Cuetzalán’s gente de razón assumed an ever-tighter control over municipal government. Through their protagonist, Jesús Flores, they established the fundo legal upon the former ejido, thereby furnishing the political and legal basis for the expansion of white society in what had been a largely Indian political world.

If the Liberal emphasis upon the inalienable rights of private property proved impossible for Francisco Agustín to defeat, the two “carrots” that had originally attracted him to the Liberal cause—the locally controlled National Guard and the abolition of compulsory labor services—also proved elusive. Throughout the 1880s, the National Guard was gradually demobilized throughout the republic. The fiscal immunities that had accompanied military service were also removed. Finally, in 1888, the National Guard was removed from the control of the states and their localities and demoted to an auxiliary status within the federal army. Compulsory labor services, for their part, steadily increased during the Porfiriato, both for the construction and upkeep of works of public utility such as roads, bridges, and town halls, and to keep pace with the ambitious program of church building brought on by the revival of the Catholic clergy. Finally, the Liberal promises of popular sovereignty, so attractive to Indians, also proved empty under the centralized and authoritarian administration of Gen. Mucio Martínez, Puebla’s Porfirian strongman. By the end of the nineteenth century Cuetzalán’s Indians found themselves more intensely governed by church and state (and by gente de razón) than had ever been the case during the colonial period.

The evidence in this study points toward two final conclusions. The first concerns the political consequences of the establishment of municipios constitucionales on the basis of formerly autonomous repúblicas de indios, a subject recently broached by Rodolfo Pastor.¹⁵⁰ The advance of constitutional liberalism during the nineteenth century tended to erode the status of cabildos/ayuntamientos as autonomous entities, relegating them to merely administrative agencies open to state or federal intervention. Their right to petition and their judicial functions were progressively curtailed, in contrast to the colonial practice under both Habsburg and Bourbon rule when the cabildo represented the bedrock of political order, providing the only institutional definition of the identity of the colonial subject, Indian or creole. The desamortización de bienes comunales further weakened the municipalities by forcing them to sell income-yielding propios. Finally, abolishing compulsory personal services on which municipal governments had depended for day-to-day administration weakened them still further. The consequence for Cuetzalán was that Indians and genre de razón were denied an effective political forum within which their mutual grievances might have been discussed and resolved. Instead, the municipal government served merely as a vehicle for the material ambitions of gente de razón, eager to increase their share of Cuetzalán’s commons, or as an electioneering agency, obeying the dictates of the incumbent district and state authorities. Under these circumstances, Francisco Agustín’s brief taste of formal power, with his elevation to the Presidencia Municipal in 1880, represented little more than a consolation prize in recognition of his years of military and political service to the Montaña party. It did not allow him to reverse any of the changes to which he had vehemently objected during the previous twenty years. For the gente de razón, in contrast, control of municipal government was the icing on the cake. It merely confirmed the economic dominance they achieved during the late Porfiriato around the commercialization of coffee.

If the decline of the municipality deprived Cuetzaltecos of a common forum for the resolution of conflict it also widened the gulf between the cabecera and its barrios sujetos. The constitutional reforms that gradually altered the nature of the cabildo/ayuntamiento principally affected local government in the former. The barrios, where most people lived, remained fairly immune to the changes. Beyond the routine imposition of jueces de paz and coinandantes militares by the presidente municipal of Cuetzalán, barrio-level government continued to avail itself of free and compulsory personal services (in the sense that all Indian males felt obliged, even if no longer legally bound, to occupy a range of cargos throughout their lives) and was bolstered by the active deliberation of the pasados. Local government in mid- to late nineteenth-century Cuetzalán thus existed in a state of severe disequilibrium. A demoralized, understaffed, and underfinanced municipio constitucional confronted strong barrio government by elders. This imbalance contributed to the political instability of the period by widening the gulf between the political worlds of the Indians in the barrios and of the gente de razón, whose local institutional point of reference was the municipio constitucional.¹⁵¹

Only during the late 1880s did Cuetzalán’s gente de razón, by establishing the fundo legal, succeed in creating an institutional and political space that was properly their own. Until then, the Indians of the two wealthiest barrios (Cuetzalán cabecera and San Andrés Tzicuilan) were able to act energetically and apparently unanimously, while the gente de razón were obliged to plead for help from the jefe político or the “arms of the Federation” whenever the going got rough, sheltering behind the myth of the imminence of a “guerra de castas.” Hence, just as the desamortización threatened to upset the economic equilibrium between Indians and gente de razón, so the constitutional reforms helped widen the political gulf between them by undermining Cuetzalán’s political autonomy vis-à-vis higher authorities as well as the authority of the cabecera over its sujetos. Thus, economic and constitutional liberalism combined to fracture the ties of reciprocity that existed between the gente de razón of Xocoyolo and the Indians of Cuetzalán at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Far from breaking down ethnic and social differences, liberal reforms served to increase the gap between Indians and non-Indians and to fragment their political world.

This leads to a final point, which concerns the more general character—the world view, or mentalité—of Francisco Agustín’s movement. Was Francisco Agustín set upon igniting a regional caste war? Did he see the movement that he captained for thirty years as a racial movement directed specifically at white settlers, those even now referred to in the Sierra as “gente de razón,” “gente de Castilla,” or, less politely, “coyotes”?¹⁵² Francisco Agustín undoubtedly possessed a vision of Cuetzalán free from gente de razón. But this view, I would argue, was a consequence of Cuetzalán’s peculiarly isolated history and the de facto autonomy that the municipality enjoyed throughout the colonial period. His movement stopped short of being a guerra de castas of the kind that gripped Yucatan throughout much of the second half of the nineteenth century and highland Chiapas between 1868 and 1870. No religious cult emerged. No revitalization movement is evident. No invocation can be found in any of Francisco Agustín’s admittedly sparse writings of any claims to legitimacy conferred by an ancient or pre-Hispaníc line of descent. It was Cuetzalán’s gente de razón who claimed that he had “tried to nullify the adjudications made in favor of the white race, founding their right in the dominion which existed from the Aztec empire.”¹⁵³ Francisco Agustín never made this claim.

Backed by octogenarian pasados, Francisco Agustín and his following sought merely to return Cuetzalán to the conditions that had obtained in their own lifetimes. The means adopted were not the creation of an Indian regional insurrection against the white race, but a series of pragmatic maneuvers—land occupations, destruction of walls and fences, a commercial boycott, the formation of a company of national guardsmen, the forging of ties with Méndez’s Montaña party, fighting for General Zaragoza at the battle of 5 de Mayo and for Porfirio Díaz at Tecoac—pursued by only two (admittedly the richest) of Cuetzalán’s five barrios. Francisco Agustín’s movement was hardly, therefore, a caste war. It was much more a comunero movement directed at protecting the comfortable swathe of territory that their Nahua forebears had carved out of Totonacpan against settlement by a wealthier and more ambitious group of gente de razón than the poor mestizo maize farmers who had settled the barrio of Xocoyolo during the great famine of 1786-87.

The research for this article was carried out during three visits to Mexico between 1984 and 1987, with the financial assistance of the ESRC, the Nuffield Foundation, and the Twenty-Seven Foundation.