Chapter 7

Social and Ethnic Tensions in their Local Contexts

Nineteenth-century grievances increasingly focused on tax innovations, most spectacularly in response to the centralist regime’s introduction of the capitation tax in 1842. Military recruitment and land or labour disputes further aggravated social tensions. Ethnic factors usually added a further complication. Collaboration between villages and with non-peasant groups connected issues at times to national political life.¹ National-level crises provided openings for aggrieved communities to assert their influence or enforce what they considered to be their rights. This proved to be the case, most of all, when national-level crises immobilised government at the local levels. For Mexico, the years from 1844 to 1849 turned out to be ones of virtually perpetual turmoil.²

Unrest persisted across national territory during the 1830s and 1840s and into the early 1850s. The depth and breadth of turmoil were striking. Notwithstanding the absence of national leadership and lack of coordination, these movements, hypothetically taken together, represented the most far-reaching popular mobilisation since the Insurgency of the 1810s. The varying attempts by central governments, whether federal or centralist, to grapple with problems such as raising the levels of taxation to a sufficient level to sustain the state contributed to this unrest.³ Hostile response to the capitation tax from the villages and small towns indicated the degree of discontent.⁴

Rural groups were neither passive nor dependent on outside incitement. Villagers often initiated action, when no other recourse seemed available, and they did so with specific aims in view. The composition of such revolts revealed a range of socio-ethnic and occupational adherents. Outright and armed opposition testified to awareness of wider issues, which government decisions generated.

In some instances, a statement of aims might appear a rare rather than a normal practice. The Sierra Gorda rebellion and the long and bitter disputes in the southern Isthmus of Tehuantepec, both in 1848–52, provided examples of this. Manuel Verástegui’s approaches to a section of the Sierra Gorda rebels in 1850–1, formed part of his family’s struggle against the controlling faction in the city of San Luis Potosí and General Ignacio Martínez de Pinillos’ appropriation of the Isthmus rebellion against the Juárez administration in Oaxaca City lent weight to the Jalisco movement for levering Santa Anna back into power in 1852–3.

Localised conflicts broke out in specific sub-regions: the Gulf zones of northern and southern Veracruz, namely Papantla and Acayucan; the Huasteca of eastern San Luis Potosí and north Veracruz; the Sierra Gorda of Querétaro; the Tlapa zone of southeastern Puebla; and the Mixteca of western Oaxaca. Elite divisions enabled such movements to gain momentum, especially when local protest coincided with national-level distractions. On occasions, local chieftains or caciques, their eyes on the opening for exploiting government weakness, sought to take advantage of popular mobilisation, in order to strengthen their own position in relation to the official power.⁵ Michael Ducey has referred to the Mexican Republic as a ‘nation of villages’.⁶ In researching Mexican social and political history from a local and State-level perspective rather than from those of the capital city or State and department capitals, this is certainly what it looks like. Therefore, it is to the villages and small towns that we must repair in Part Two, if we are to attempt an understanding of reactions and responses among the rural and small-town majority of the population.

Opposition movements frequently developed of their own accord, without prior initiation or stimulation from the outside, and before governments were able to understand what was going on, still less respond. Yet, peasant communities did not act in isolation from broader society. Mariano Olarte, insurgent leader in northern Veracruz in the 1810s and leader of the rebellion of 1836–8 among the Totonacas of the Papantla area, for example, included support for federalism and opposition to agiotistas, with local community interests.⁷ The basic problem in Independent Mexico was not that ordinary people did not know what the State was, or even that one existed at all. On the contrary, they spent a good deal of effort in opposing its measures, notably recruitment and taxation. They formed, after all, the majorities in the Republic at this time, and for the Republic to survive and function, their interests had always to be taken into consideration by whoever aspired to govern this society, and their responses had to be considered, if ever policy was to be implemented. This meant that at all levels society and politics, sooner or later, operated by negotiation rather than as a naked conflict between ‘elites’ and ‘masses’.

Lower socio-ethnic groups, however, did not control the administrative paperwork that interpreted these disputes, placing the issues before government and military agencies for resolution. The surviving documentation rarely conveys directly and impartially the perspective of the disputants. Even so, some communities did manage to employ legal representatives to argue on their behalf. Few local authorities were strong enough to ignore complaints, and usually preferred negotiation to outright confrontation. The historical literature reveals a series of nuanced views on the issue of the incapacity and limitations of the still recently established republican state. It has been argued, that, after Independence, this state became more closely identified with rural landowners, specifically the hacendados, than it had been during the colonial era. Whether this was so, association or identification with hacendados did not necessarily make the Mexican state more effective. Elite divisions and government financial difficulties remained overriding obstacles. Peasants were able to take advantage of such weaknesses, seize the political initiative and press home their demands.⁸

Indigenous communities took their stand on customs and rights believed to date from time immemorial. This led to perennial disputes among villages, as well as between villages and private landowners. Searches in local archives for land titles were often a consequence of such conflicts. In the case of the fertile valleys and slopes of the Sierra Gorda, conflicts over planting, grazing, collecting wood and wild fruits between haciendas recovering from the impact of insurgency and the needs of colonists of Otomí origin moving into unclaimed, unoccupied or disputed areas inflamed social relations by the 1840s. Several of those private properties were owned by or linked to powerful and wealthy figures in the surrounding States of Querétaro, Guanajuato and San Luis Potosí, who held positions in local administration or the militias. These conflicts were not generally between Indian villages and estates, but between rival contenders for the same resources, which might be divided by income and status though not necessarily by ethnicity. Most of the historical documents, written by the antagonists of lower social group protest, disdainfully describe the peasant farmers as ‘indios’. The situation of these farmers, however, was different from the long-standing communities with their own internal hierarchies and identities.

The situation in the southern Isthmus contrasted strikingly with this. Zapotec communities, their origins in the pre-Columbian era, were defending their space from intruders in the form of the cattle-estate operators of the haciendas marquesanas possessed by the heirs of the conqueror, Cortés, or newly appointed private proprietors of the salt deposits, which had traditionally been open for these communities’ exploitation. Unlike the centre-northern estates, these haciendas had been left in a poor condition when sold in 1839 to new owners for the relatively low price of 50,000 pesos. The sale to two Oaxaca-based businessmen, however, meant the irksome process of defining the legal extent of ownership. Since the object of the sale was to contribute to the economic revival of the sub-region, as viewed from the perspective of the central valley-based State administration, legal definition became crucial. This, when combined with the privatisation of the salt deposits, appeared to the communities to be an assault on their material interests. We should bear in mind the long experience of the Zapotec communities as traders linked to a chain of local markets. These were not families of colonists uprooted from original communities in search of new land but settled villagers with strong political organisation and their own religious traditions, disposed to defend themselves from outside threat, from whichever direction or from whatever authority it came. This did not mean, however, that division did not exist within such villages over which course of action to take and to what degree.⁹

In most instances of rural unrest, armed intervention by State governors was not intended to lead to prolonged conflict or outright repression. Neither lay at that time in the capacity of government. Such actions were, instead, intended to overawe and intimidate, thereby forcing a compromise. This usually entailed offers of amnesty, in an attempt to separate farmers from their leaders, thereby neutralising the latter, or inducing leaders to change sides and work for the government, usually by recognising and ratifying their current status. In other words, the appearance of force was designed to encourage negotiation, from which both sides were intended to benefit.

In the State of Oaxaca, no government of unchallenged legitimacy existed between the departure of Antonio de León in September 1844 and the election of Juárez for a four-year term in August 1848. This proved to be the time for the genesis of the crisis in the Isthmus, with which Juárez, the serrano Zapotec, had to deal, and which would dominate Isthmian political life from 1847 until 1852. Juárez, interim State governor from November 1847, feared that the unruly situation in the southern Isthmus might encourage a direct intervention by US forces, with the intention of annexing the territory, as a necessary zone of transit between the Atlantic and Pacific seaboards of the post-war United States. Juárez governed the State of Oaxaca not as a representative of the Indian majority of the population, still less as the particular champion of Zapotec communities, or, even less, as champion of a hypothetical Indian race. He was – and saw himself as – a professionally trained lawyer and Liberal politician. Neither Juárez nor Mejía in the Sierra Gorda functioned uniquely or even primarily within Indian society.

The perspective held by Juárez in Oaxaca, and by Liberals generally in Mexico at that time, helps to explain his conduct with reference to the southern Isthmus in 1847–52. In the first place, he did not come from that region but from a distinct Zapotec zone in the northern sierra, which was integrated into the mining economy, the colonial-era dye and textile trades, and the transit route across to Veracruz. Second, he did not share the Isthmian communities’ view that, when private property rights or government policies conflicted with their interests, the law need not be observed. Third, he sought to establish the superiority of State-appointed authorities and elected assemblies over local chieftains exploiting community grievances. Juárez quickly realised that such chieftains had their own agendas, very different from his own.¹⁰

The range of these movements spanned several provinces with different historical and geographical circumstances. In only one province, Yucatán, did internal factional struggles lead, first, to secession from the Mexican Republic, and second, to a large-scale popular uprising that dragged on for the ensuing half-century. In the first instance, Yucatán demonstrated the interrelation of national and provincial events; in the second, it showed how the dangers of unbridled factionalism in both Mexico City and the rival Yucatecan cities of Mérida and Campeche provided the springboard for insurrection by disadvantaged Maya villagers against the dominant planter, ruling group. This latter soon acquired the negative description, the ‘Caste War’.¹¹

The Tlapa-Chilapa Conflicts and the Role of Juan Álvarez

Resistance in the (then) southern Puebla districts, such as Tlapa, and in the Mixteca Baja of Oaxaca, repeatedly shook local government to the extent that those holding power in the localities portrayed this as ‘caste war’, a description that failed to convey the broader social basis of opposition. This deliberate slur indicated the level of fright that outright opposition instilled in them. Traditional community grievances, such as diversion of water supply, prohibition of wood-cutting and land encroachments by private proprietors subsisted alongside newer fiscal issues. The combination of resentment at new tax burdens, when combined with traditional grievances, proved to be particularly inflammatory and ‘led to peasant mobilization remarkable for its size, staying power and effect on national politics’.¹²

The Tlapa and Chilapa districts were predominantly mixed race, with a large representation of pardos (mixed Indian and Black). By the 1840s, seven private estates, their products geared towards the markets of Mexico City and Puebla, controlled much of the land in Tlapa. Peasants raised the question of the validity of land titles. Water-usage and wood-collecting rights were also at issue. Álvarez had tried in vain to mediate.¹³ Conflict began in Chilapa in mid-April 1842 and continued for most of the decade. The former insurgent, Carlos María de Bustamante, found space for the rebellion there in his comments on the Santa Anna regime of 1841–4. The cause of the struggle between the local ‘Indians’ and the hacendados seemed to have originated over the possession of cotton, produced for use in the new cotton-spinning and weaving factories of the city of Puebla. Bustamante’s view is remarkably revealing concerning:

the first reports of the rising of the Indians of those parts, motivated by their oppression by the ‘whites’, who had usurped their lands and reduced them to misery … Incensed against the ‘whites’, the Indians, finding no justice in the local court, marched, armed, in the direction of the houses and a nearby hacienda. They presented themselves aligned in military fashion as though ready to confront government forces.

Bustamante recalled the militancy of Chilapa and other towns and villages of the area during the Insurgency led by Morelos in 1811–13. Government forces – some 500 men – dispersed them and the situation simmered down after talks between the two sides, although the disputes still continued. Bustamante notes that Álvarez had sought to protect the Chilapa rebels by persuading Lic. Ignacio Rayón to leave Mexico City for Chilapa in order to provide them with legal support in the Chilapa district court.¹⁴

In Tlapa, the popular movement attempted to define its objective, revealing thereby its character. Miguel Casarrubias, a mestizo ranch owner became the rebel leader. Originating from near the village of Olinalá in the Chilapa district, he appealed for support among what he called the ‘pueblos del Sur’ on 22 September 1844, blaming the centralist regime for the misery inflicted on them. This represented a second stage of the district uprisings, extending to the Oaxaca Mixteca. The general context was stagnation of trade and the absence of circulating medium. In such a context, the government had imposed the capitation tax on the whole population. Arms would be laid down only when the oppressive tax measures had been rescinded. Casarrubias wanted government guarantee of all properties, untrammelled access of traders across the region, and the removal of impediments to trade.¹⁵

The Prefect and Military Commander of Tlapa, Lieutenant-Colonel José María Muñoz (whom we shall shortly encounter again in the Isthmus conflicts), would accept none of these ‘pretexts’ for rebellion, as he believed them to be. Muñoz, writing on 20 and 31 October, brushed aside the idea that the capitation tax alone was its cause. In his view, there would have been an uprising, regardless of the tax. This was because the real intention of the rebels was the restoration of the federal system, as part of a wider plot to bring down Santa Anna, and that local villagers had been manipulated by the leaders. Behind it all were none other than Álvarez and his associate, Comonfort, in sinister alliance with those whom Muñoz described as ‘wicked yorkinos’, that is, radical Liberals and freemasons. The rebel bands consisted not only of Indians but ‘gente de razón’, that is, men of mixed-race or creole descent. Among the rebels were mounted ranch owners, some 1,000 in number and armed with rifles – supplied, he affirmed, by Álvarez, reinforced from coastal districts and by 1,500 men from Chilapa. His own forces had been trapped in the town of Tlapa on 29 October and it had taken a seven-hour combat to beat the rebels back from the outskirts. His situation, he said, was critical, especially since reinforcements promised from Puebla had never arrived, but instead had been subverted by the yorkinos, one of whom was their Commander of Operations, Col. J. M. Pavón. Muñoz wrote to León, at that time Governor and Military Commander of the Department of Oaxaca, that his force was in danger, cut off, hungry and depleted by desertions. Rebel forces were making for Iguala, which they hoped to seize, and had extended control of the villages. By the end of October, his situation had become ‘critical’, and early in November, he faced a force of 3,000 men. A military action, however, appeared to have dispersed them on 7 November, since he reported that villages were already requesting amnesty.¹⁶

We are dealing not with inward-looking villagers, closed to outside influences and rejecting collaboration beyond their own ethnic groups. Awareness of wider political issues and their implications for the rural population accounted for broader alignments, which made extended mobilisation possible. Muñoz’s characterisation of the Tlapa movement suggests a powerful linkage between local situations and nation-level political issues, which was not always evident in other disputes between villagers and district authorities – civil, military or ecclesiastical. Anxious to identify a federalist intent, he may well have understated the impact of the capitation tax on the villages. Guardino argues that the transformation of the national political system from federalism to centralism in 1835–6 disenfranchised large sections of the population by restricting the franchise and reducing the number of municipal councils. The Chilapa-Tlapa movements and their ancillaries across the Oaxaca border originated in the villages, where local leaders now and then emerged, as primary evidence shows. They were not stimulated from outside, despite the interrelationship between local and national politics and the role of Álvarez as potential mediator between the ‘rebels’ and the official power. Armed opposition in this area, which had formed part of the base area of Morelos’ insurgency of 1811–13, resembled the so-called ‘War of the South’ in 1830–2, following Guerrero’s expulsion from the presidency by conservative forces.¹⁷

León, for his part, was concerned that the unrest in Tlapa should not spill over the department border into Oaxaca, already experiencing tensions in the Mixteca villages. About the same time, León was receiving news that a segment of the town of Putla appeared to have risen in sympathy with the Tlapa rebels. Even more serious, he learned of Paredes’ movement in Guadalajara for the overthrow of Santa Anna, for whom León continued to declare his support.¹⁸

Imposition of the capitation tax was certainly a major issue at the time. León, furthermore, was correct to fear its impact in Oaxaca. Chilapa had risen against the tax in 1842–3, finding allies among the villages. The opposition to payment spread to Tlapa and the Taxco area and down into the Tierra Caliente, killing tax collectors. Existing land disputes in the Chilapa zone exacerbated tensions. Rancheros and villagers collaborated against the Santa Anna regime’s attempt to enforce collection of the tax during 1844. Opposition in Tlapa, Chilapa and across the Mixteca provided the context of the revolt by Casarrubias. He was able to rally the support of mestizo town-dwellers, who also opposed the capitation tax. After his death, leaders of the movement rallied in late November 1844 behind the opposition to Santa Anna and the Plan of Jalisco for his removal.¹⁹

The allegation that Álvarez lay behind these movement foreshadowed the complex coalition, which ten years later, under the Plan of Ayutla of 1 March 1854, would eventually bring Santa Anna down permanently. Álvarez, at that time, dominated the Pacific coastal area from Zacatula to the south-east of Acapulco and inland to the Balsas River. As Military Commander in Chilpancingo, after the fall of Santa Anna in 1844, he was able, in the following year, to push out his traditional rival and predecessor in office, Nicolás Bravo, the centralist ally of Santa Anna. The Bravo family had controlled the Chilapa-Chilpancingo zone since before the Insurrection of 1810. Bravo bitterly opposed the rebels of 1844:

the burning and laying waste of the main southern villages, the consequence of the ignorance and stupidity of the Indians, obliged me to take up my sword once again in order to defend the property and lives of my fellow citizens. Hence, I present myself to my fellow citizens as the last of the original leaders of the movement for Independence and Liberty.

Bravo’s actions in November 1844 led the murder of Casarrubias. Those in the south, who remembered the ‘Rebellion of the South’ of 1830–1 and Bravo’s role in enabling the judicial murder of Guerrero, the heir of Morelos, could not fail to be appalled by his stance in 1844.²⁰ Significantly, Álvarez recommended the Herrera administration to appoint Comonfort to the Prefecture of Tlapa on 4 February 1845, on the grounds of his popularity there on a previous occasion and his success in keeping the peace. Álvarez clearly regarded Tlapa as a key appointment.²¹

In this mixed-race territory, Álvarez played the role of broker between local communities and the national government. Álvarez used the escalation of the local disturbances as a means of putting pressure on the Santa Anna regime in Mexico City. Bravo, who understood the implications of this, denounced him as a double-dealer, appealing for Álvarez’s removal from a position of command. Bravo warned of the prospect of ‘caste war’ in the south, although Álvarez, with his own band of armed followers, had no intention of allowing protest to degenerate into slaughter. His overriding objective continued to be restoration of the federal system and the creation of a new State designed to correspond to his own area of control. This aim would come to fruition on 17 October 1849, when the restored Federal Republic, during the second Presidency of Herrera, established the State of Guerrero, named after Álvarez’s Insurgency progenitor and martyr of Cuilapan of February 1831. Álvarez became the first governor. Its capital originally in Tixtla, the birthplace of Guerrero, the new state included Tlapa and Chilapa within its bounds and reached the Pacific coast. In accordance with the Federal Constitution of 1824, virtually universal male suffrage prevailed in the State, which also removed the literacy requirement for holding municipal office. Many of the centralist taxes imposed during the 1840s were removed and the capitation tax scaled down.²²

Much resistance to the capitation tax would come from the villages and small towns in 1842–52, whether under centralism or federalism. Cross-class alliances, albeit tactical and of extemporary duration, confronted urban elites, particularly those of the capital city. Such alliances now and then transcended particular local situations.²³ A major explanation for this interrelation lay in the specific role of Álvarez, well-known opponent of Santa Anna and centralism. He was also connected to leading politicians such as Gómez Farías and Mariano Riva Palacio, and a friend of President Herrera. With his eye also on the younger generation, Álvarez subsidised the education of the impoverished native son of Tixtla, Ignacio Altamirano, for his education at the Toluca Institute.²⁴

The Case of Yucatán

A different context applied in the case of Yucatán. Resentment at increased taxation and attempted recruitment during and in the aftermath of the Texas War of 1836 sparked a revolt in the peninsula in May 1839. The Mérida urban elite used regional government in the federal system to transfer resources previously controlled by Maya peasant communities to themselves. From the early 1840s, a large-scale transfer of the tierras baldías to private ownership took place. As much as 460,000 hectares changed hands.²⁵

The ruling group, however, were divided over the question of outright independence from the Mexican Republic or a temporary secession until federalism should be restored. Fearing Mexican intervention in the peninsula, the Yucatecan separatists appealed to the fledgling Texas Republic for assistance. Three Texan ships arrived off the port of Sisal.²⁶

Distant and distinct from the central zones of Mexico, the province of Yucatán announced its separation from the Republic on 16 March 1841 and its intention to become a sovereign entity. This declaration formed a parallel to the secession of Texas as a Republic in 1836, both in opposition to the abolition of the Federal Constitution of 1824 and the imposition of a centralist system from Mexico City. Opposition to Santa Anna had led to the Yucatecan Zavala’s participation in the process of Texan Independence from Mexico in 1835–6. He became Vice President of the Texas Republic in March to October 1836. The movement for restoration of the federal system and the Yucatecan State Constitution of 1825 (abolished in 1835) began in Valladolid in February 1840. The renewed Constitution of 1841 was followed by an Act of Independence on 1 October.²⁷

Independence raised serious issues, not least of which would be relations with the Texas Republic on the northern shore of the Gulf of Mexico, with the United States (in New Orleans), and with the British in Belize. Deepening tension between the rival cities of Mérida and Campeche on the question of relations with Mexico City further muddied the waters. Santa Anna, returned to power in 1841, sent the veteran Yucatecan Insurgent leader, Quintana Roo, to negotiate the return of Yucatán to the Republic, but refused to acknowledge the settlement. Accordingly, Santa Anna – who was heavily criticised – took the decision in 1842 to ignore pressure for the recovery of Texas, and, instead, sent an army of 4,000 men from Veracruz to Campeche for the reconquest of Yucatán. This offensive collapsed, in part due to stiff resistance from Maya forces armed by the Mérida authorities. The Mexican troops, suffering from the climatic transition and disease in the peninsula, sailed back to Veracruz.²⁸ Following the collapse of Santa Anna’s regime, Yucatán reaffirmed its independence on 1 January 1846. In the meantime, however, a deeper crisis was emerging from the annexation of Texas by the United States on 29 December 1845, a matter which had already been under discussion since 1838 and had the support of pro-slavery Southern Democrats.

The outbreak of war between Mexico and the United States in the following spring raised the question of Yucatán’s neutrality in the conflict. Inside Mexico, the restoration of the federal system on 22 August 1846 removed the principal reason for Yucatán’s original secession. The Mérida elite’s decision to return to the Republic on 2 November, however, was opposed in Campeche. Polarisation between these two cities led to armed conflict, resulting in the fall of Mérida and the election of the Campeche leader, Santiago Méndez, as Governor of Yucatán. Méndez reaffirmed Yucatecan neutrality in the Mexican war with the United States.²⁹

Military reverse and US incursion into central Mexico from the port of Veracruz drew all Mexican government attention away from Yucatán. A US naval force, in any case, occupied the island of Carmen, off the western Yucatán coast, despite the independent republic’s neutral stance. Méndez despatched his son-in-law, Justo Sierra O’Reilly, to Washington to protest, but this only stimulated discussion there of the annexation of Yucatán, favoured in the US Senate by several Southern Democrats. The whole issue collapsed, however, and Sierra returned home despondent in the summer of 1848.³⁰

On 29 April 1848, President Polk instructed the US Congress to prepare measures designed to rescue Yucatán from British or Spanish rule, thereby bringing it directly under US protection. The Senate, however, let the matter lapse. US interest in Yucatán was clearly stifled by news of the large-scale Maya Indian insurrection in the peninsula, taking advantage of the political chaos produced by these divisions among the ruling ‘whites’. The rebellion, led by Jacinto Pat and Cecilio Chi, began on 30 July 1847, and, despite a truce in 1853, would not finally end until 1901. The desperate situation of the beleaguered ‘whites’ and fear of insurgent seizure of Mérida encouraged the unconditional return of Yucatán to the Mexican Republic on 14 August 1848.³¹

Economic issues and ensuing social conflict thereby became intermingled with ethnic and cultural factors. Maya-village resentment at the tax levels and the expansion of private estates exploded in 1847 into what has become known in the historiography as the ‘Caste War’:

By 1847, when the Caste War began, many indigenous Yucatecans were prepared to jettison their attachment to the Yucatecan state. What’s more, the indigenous elite, their privileges and resource base seriously eroded, were willing to provide the leadership necessary to do so. As the year progressed, all Yucatecans could see that Yucatán’s divided polity was coming apart.³²

Elite power in the 1840s and 1850s, however, was insufficiently great enough either to prevent popular insurrection or to defeat it when it occurred. That would explain the long duration of conflict in the Yucatán peninsula. Alamán compared all these rebellions combined to the Insurgency of the 1810s. His proposed solution lay in a reconstitution of the type of system that had sustained the Spanish colony for so long, perhaps with the addition of a Europeanstyle dynastic monarchy.³³

Juxtlahuaca and the Triques

The term ‘caste wars’ was employed to discredit protesters and undermine the moral value of opposition to outside impositions and encroachments. Suggesting gratuitous anti-white or anti-mixed-race violence, the term was used by those who, in the local context, sought to make gains at the expense of villagers, and by the agents of repression directed against them. The conflict between the Trique pueblos and the mestizo-controlled district head-town of Santiago Juxtlahuaca in western Oaxaca, between 1843 and 1847, illustrated the ethnic issues involved. The Triques lived in the Sierra de Chicahuaxtla, located between the towns of Putla, Tlaxiaco and Juxtlahuaca. A significant Hispanic and mixed-race population lived in this latter town and they had taken the best lands in valleys and irrigated areas.³⁴

Villagers in this Mixteca Baja zone, a sub-prefecture under the federal system, rose in protest at the exaction of parish dues. The protest began in the village of San Juan Copala, a place disdainfully described by the Porfirian-era Liberal, Manuel Martínez Gracida, as notorious for its disregard for law and order. At his time (1883), only 893 people lived there, although many others lived scattered through the mountains preferring this to living in formalised structures. He estimated the total Trique population to be 3,069 individuals. Martínez Gracida saw them as warlike, rejecting education and material progress, and in league with the ‘celebrated outlaws’, Domingo Arriaga and Domingo Santiago, who operated across the western border of Oaxaca. He, too, used the phrase ‘terrible caste war’ to describe the villagers’ actions.³⁵

The district administrator, Col. Mariano Guzmán, demanded on behalf of the local priest payment of the parish dues. The Triques’ response was to steal into the head-town in the night, free their imprisoned colleagues and kill Guzmán and his secretary. The priest escaped harm by hiding in a niche behind the image of the Virgin of Solitude. Three years of armed conflict followed throughout the district. Forces loyal to the State government managed to hold on to the head-town. The situation was made more difficult for the State government by a parallel rising in Huajuapan, further north in the Mixteca Baja, under the leadership of Feliciano Martín. From their mountain redoubts, the Triques held out until the death of their leader obliged submission in 1847. Only in the following year were government forces able to bring the area under control. The remaining leaders were rounded up and executed, their heads sent to the military commander in the adjacent Puebla district of Tlapa for display in the main square.³⁶

Juárez took a dim view of villagers’ resistance to formal education and official authority. He regarded Copala, for instance, as a place with ‘a constant inclination to withdraw itself from obedience to the public authorities’ and to committing ‘robberies’ and ‘murders’ in the nearby pueblos. He had reported to the Oaxaca State Congress in July 1848 that, despite rigorous measures, the Triques had still not been reduced to obedience, and that ‘they almost always made a laughing-stock of the forces sent against them, since they fled into the mountains and ranches, from which they then came down to menace those who had already made their peace with the authorities’. Juárez referred to the sub-prefect’s policy of leniency, although this seemed hardly compatible with earlier reference to rigorous measures.³⁷

Broader Tax Issues

Payment of parish dues also became an issue in the centrally located village of Tlalixtac in the vicinity of the state capital. Bishop Mantecón regarded refusal to pay as a serious matter, because it diminished diocesan revenues. He appealed to Governor Juárez for State support. The State Congress, however, learned that ‘los indígenas’ were still resisting payment, despite the State government’s Circular Order of 24 January 1849 requiring their alcaldes to do so. The bishop later heard from the parish priest of Zimatlán, another central valley town, of those parishioners’ equally ‘stubborn refusal’ to pay dues. Again, the civil authorities supported the bishop, who, nevertheless, continued to complain of the ‘malicious recalcitrance’ of the villagers.³⁸ During this first period in office, Juárez maintained that he had consistently sought to resolve the problem of parishioners’ resistance to payment of ecclesiastical dues by supporting the bishop. While he insisted, on the one hand, that parish priests should not burden their flock with excessive exactions, he upheld the principle, on the other hand, that payment was a legal obligation. He pointed out that the problem had long antecedents: parish revenues had been falling since 1770, despite population growth. Juárez wanted updated assessments from the ecclesiastical authorities as a basis for action.³⁹

On the Pacific coast, a different issue prevailed. Loss of the cotton crop in the later 1840s exacerbated villagers’ difficulties in finding funds for tax payments. Different social groups made representation to the State authorities concerning the dire economic conditions of their district and the social repercussions. In the Department (in the restored federal system) of Jamiltepec, day-labourers and subsistence-farmers, who composed the greater part of the population, had been reduced to penury. They said that there were very few ‘capitalistas’ in the area. The use of the term ‘capitalistas’ requires comment. They were, as in the Spanishcolonial era, merchant-financiers. A letter of appeal, representing respectable citizens (‘vecinos’), proprietors, municipal councillors and a few private individuals, urged the Oaxaca State Government in February 1848 to suspend collection of the capitation tax and the State’s emergency war tax of 27 December 1847. The war had drained the department of circulating medium. The appellants described themselves as confirmed supporters of the federal system. Continued low prices for agricultural produce, combined with population decline, had, they said, reduced ‘la clase proletaria’ to misery. This phrase, also used by Manuel Verástegui during the Sierra Gorda rebellion, as we shall see, might have had some common usage at the time, to denote the lower levels of rural society. Villagers in Jamiltepec could hardly afford parish dues and community upkeep.⁴⁰ This situation was made worse by a measles epidemic in the spring and summer, in an area with no medical practitioners, which took away a quarter of the population.⁴¹

The Sub-Prefect of Ixtlán, in the northern sierra mining district of Oaxaca, complained that ‘the usual moral turpitude of the village authorities’, especially in Ixtepejí and Capulalpan, meant that capitation payments were below par for January and February 1849, and requested Juárez to supply armed force to compel payment.⁴² The strategically situated Isthmus of Tehuantepec proved to be the most resistant area. The Sub-Prefect of Juchitán, accordingly, reported that hardly a quarter of the capitation tax had been collected by November 1849 and that arrears were already outstanding for 1847 and 1848. He appealed in vain for fifty militiamen to enforce payment. Marcos Pérez, like Juárez also of indigenous descent, reported in 1850 from Petapa, where he was sub-prefect, the area’s ‘supreme reluctance’ to pay the tax. The Sub-Prefect of Nochixtlán, in the Mixteca, told Juárez that his villages ‘only obey anything when there is force in sight’.⁴³

Fears of a repetition of previous conflicts haunted the Juxtlahuaca authorities in the 1850s. The federal authorities, which had retained the centralist regime’s capitation tax after 1846, feared the revenue consequences of resistance to payment of an assessment of 3,214 pesos for the district, especially in view of arrears from previous attempts at collection. The sub-prefect, who had taken office in December 1847, warned against excessive pressure on village councils, wary of inciting a recrudescence of the ‘caste war’ scenario of 1843–5. He had been in person to inspect the villages involved. The Town Council of Santiago Juxtlahuaca, on 7 January 1850, praised his efforts to secure collection of the capitation tax. The outbreak of cholera in the region in 1850–51, however, further disrupted tax collection. The official power simply had no funds to cover the cost of coercion.⁴⁴

Dramatic as those events were in Oaxaca districts, other parts of the country were experiencing popular movements as well. Between 1845 and 1849, communities in the Totonac areas of Papantla in northern Veracruz and across the Huasteca were defending their lands. The official power was only able to re-establish its authority after the end of the war with the United States.⁴⁵ We shall now turn to examine two of the most serious areas of conflict.