The Caste War of Yucatán began in 1848 and lasted over fifty years. Terry Rugeley argues that this insurgent movement and the toll it took on southern Mexico cannot be understood as a local dispute that got out of hand, nor as a messianic cult that ended in a holy war. The key, according to Rugeley, is to be found in the decades surrounding Mexican independence from Spain, a time when the colonial system broke down and with it the fabric of alliances between peasants and church, state and commercial elite. When the Mayan elite turned away from colonial institutions and allied themselves with rural peasants, the Caste War began.
Rugeley’s economic and peasant perspective contrasts to that of scholars who take indigenous and even essentialist perspectives on Yucatán and the Caste War. The Speaking Cross, an apocalyptic world view, preconquest social structures, and the imagery of milpa and machete that loom so large in Reed’s The Caste War of Yucatan (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1964) and Sullivan’s Unfinished Conversations: Mayas and Foreigners between Two Wars (N.Y.: Alfred Knopf, 1989), are only minor features in Rugeley’s analysis. He is quick to reject essentialist tendencies of history and social science: “These tendencies have heightened under the rage for ethnic study prevailing in late-twentieth-century intellectual circles” (p. xiii). Instead, he portrays Yucatán in the early nineteenth century as a mix of European creoles, Mayan elite, clergy, and Mayan peasants, all working within one social and economic system. The Mayan peasants are not docile or passive; Rugeley shows them to be bold and active participants in conflicts and demands for justice. The increasing tax burdens, the loss of clear civil authority, and pressures on land all result in a peasant, not an indigenous, uprising.
The book is full of absorbing cases taken from the archives. There are remarkable accounts of land disputes, tragedies among priests, and excesses of the local Mayan elite that Rugeley uncovered by virtue of his thorough archival research. Rugeley’s sometimes ironic commentary offers a rich counterpoint to early-nineteenth-century voices. For example, when a church collapsed in 1835, Rugeley points out the difference between the cura’s, expectations and the Mayan peasant response: “Even though the authorities had offered to furnish [the cura Antonio] Mais with the requisite materials, and even though he ‘did not doubt of the cooperation of my parishioners, who hear me with love,’ the problem was getting those loving parishioners within earshot” (p. 153).
This is a book that stands well within the literature on the history of rebellions in Mexico, especially as seen within the debate between materialist, economic explanations on the one hand, and cultural, essentialist explanations on the other. The anthropologist in me wishes there were Mayan archives to match the thickness of archives written in Spanish. Maybe then ethnicity would loom as a larger part of the origins of the Caste War. Even so, Rugeley has explored the archives well and presented a persuasive and engaging account of a time in Yucatán’s history that had been largely overlooked.
