Chapter 8

Conflict in the Sierra Gorda – Querétaro, Guanajuato, San Luis Potosí

The Sierra Gorda formed part of the broader Sierra Madre Oriental range, which spanned the eastern hinterland of the Gulf Coast from the Texas border to the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. This section of the range fell between southern San Luis Potosí and the eastern edge of Querétaro. The northern edge of the Sierra Gorda looked across the rich hacienda lands of the Río Verde district, dominated throughout the nineteenth century by the Verástegui family. On the western side of the Sierra were the fertile cereal lands of the Bajío and the mining districts of Guanajuato. The Sierra Gorda, furthermore, overlooked the principal commercial route from the north into the Valley of Mexico. In the strictly geographical sense, the Sierra Gorda was not remote. The problem had always been the resistance of the inhabitants of this mountainous zone, principally the indigenous groups, Pames and Jonaces, who lived in small, scattered settlements, to subjection to Spanish-colonial authority. They formed part of the broader Chichimeca zone stretching from the present-day State of Durango to Querétaro. They had been hunters and gatherers, warlike nomads never subdued by the Aztecs. Spanish power had not been effective in the Sierra Gorda until the military intervention of the 1740s. That explained its delayed Christianisation. Franciscan evangelisation in the eighteenth century led to the foundation (or reconstitution) of a chain of missions from Jalpan, the main town, to Tilaco, as centres of conversion. The friars brought with them the Virgin of the Pueblito, a popular Marian cult that developed during the seventeenth century in the village of San Francisco Galileo near Querétaro and spread this devotion through the Sierra. Stark terrain and the sporadic militancy of its inhabitants gave the Sierra Gorda a reputation for inaccessibility.¹

Spanish advance northward from the Valley of Mexico in the decades following the fall of Tenochtitlán brought their Indian allies, the Otomí, with them. The first pueblos of the present-day States of Querétaro and Guanajuato were originally Otomí foundations between the 1520s and the 1540s, including what would become the Hispanic city of Santiago Querétaro in 1531. These foundations also included San Juan del Río, Apaseo, Tolimán, Tilaco, San Miguel de Allende and San Luis de la Paz (both in the State of Guanajuato), and Xilitla (San Luis Potosí). The long and bitter war between the Spanish and the Chichimecas from the 1550s to 1590 delayed expansion but finally opened the way from the central zone to the mining districts of San Luis Potosí and Zacatecas. The Pames and Jonaces were put under severe pressure by these advances by the Spanish and their Otomí associates. The Pames moved into the mountain valleys with land and water, such as the Jalpan zone, whereas the Jonaces, more warlike, sought refuge in the remoter parts of the mountains. From there, they opposed all Hispanic advances, including the Franciscan Missions.²

The gradual opening of mineral deposits in the Sierra Gorda from the first quarter of the eighteenth century, stimulated migration into the area from the Querétaro plateau in search of land for small properties. Many such migrants were likely to have been Otomí. It was they, for instance, who predominated in the town of Cadereyta, founded in 1640 and located at the south-western entrance to the Sierra. San Luis de la Paz, which had a heavy Otomí population, originally migrants from the more southerly Tepotzotlán zone, formed the key position between the Bajío and the Sierra Gorda, to the east, and northward to the main mining areas of San Luis Potosí and Zacatecas. The main route from Mexico City and Querétaro passed through San Miguel el Grande, Dolores and San Luis de la Paz. Many of San Luis’s Indians worked as free men on the private estates associated with the mining sector or in the mines.³

The Spanish expedition of the 1740s brought the Sierra Gorda under a semblance of political control from the centre. It was accompanied by a fresh burst of evangelisation. The leader of the expedition, Colonel José de Escandón, founded the Provincial Dragoon Regiment of the Sierra Gorda in 1743, for the purpose of holding down the mountainous zone and its peripheries. In 1748, the viceregal government established the presidios of Peñamiller (Santa María Peña Millera) as a base for the subjugation of the Jonaces, and San Joseph Vizarrón for the protection of Cadereyta. The greater part of the Pames were concentrated around the Missions, but the Jonaces still resisted settlement there or in pueblos until broken by 1751, when they fled into the mountains, presenting little further danger. As a result, the transit route across the Sierra into San Luis Potosí and the Huasteca was safely opened to commerce. Escandón was rewarded by the Spanish Crown with the title ‘Conde de la Sierra Gorda’. The Dragoons thereafter found little to occupy them until the outbreak of the Insurrection of 1810 in the Bajío, which soon spread to the adjacent regions.⁴

The apparent pacification of the Sierra Gorda opened the way for further Otomí settlement. In 1789, such migrants were described as having come to work in the mines and haciendas. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, several haciendas, a few of them large in extent, controlled land and resources in the Sierra and adjacent valleys. The ‘Hacienda de San Pablo’, for example, covered 35,355 hectares, specialising in the rearing of cattle and goats but leaving its arable lands to sharecroppers. In view of the generally stark terrain, most haciendas combined grazing with arable, but few were profitable unless they had fertile lands in the valleys. Some haciendas, such as the ‘Hacienda de Salitre’ complex, had their core outside the Sierra Gorda in San Luis de la Paz, a town that acted as the commercial pole of attraction for the Sierra. On the other side of the mountains, the district of Tolimán, still predominantly indigenous in composition by the mid-nineteenth century, had three haciendas within its territory. The inhabitants of the head-town struggled with the ‘Hacienda Panales’, producer of maize and sugar, for the control of land. The Otomí and Nahua settlers from the central valleys found themselves on several occasions in opposition to the encroaching private estates. By 1806–8, there were violent conflicts between them.⁵

At the Guanajuato edge of the Sierra, the village of San Bautista Xichú and the Hispanic Mining District (Mineral) of Xichú formed two distinct parts of a salient within the district of San Luis de la Paz. Conflict between these two settlements continued from the later eighteenth into the nineteenth century. Xichú had experienced two decades of shortages. Tensions with nearby estates in eastern Guanajuato over cattle grazing by the Indians on what they perceived to be open lands, gathering rights in woodlands and mountain slopes, and estate fencing poisoned social and ethnic relations on the eve of the Insurrection of 1810.

The Sierra became the base of entrenched Insurgent activity between 1811 and 1816, sometimes linked to the Huichapan rebels led by the Villagrán father and son, who disrupted transit between the Bajío and the central valleys. Insurgent bands continued to operate from Jalpan into 1818, threatening the private estates and the towns in the Guanajuato Bajío. The politicisation of Indian colonists and migrants once more threatened to transform the Sierra Gorda into an unruly area, dangerously exposing transit north to south. The collapse of central government between 1820 and 1824 provided an opening for them to push forward their grievances.⁶

During the period between 1750 and 1810, a core of Spanish investors, largely from the province of Santander, moved into the Sierra Gorda and its surrounding areas, attracted by the prospect of mine exploitation and landed property. Interrelated and intermarrying, they founded Mexican families and took up residence in Querétaro – then ‘New Spain’s leading industrial city’ – in townhouses among the existing elite of hacienda owners and textile-workshop operators. A number of them had come with Escandón, who owned an obraje for producing woollens in the city with 200 labourers. The latter’s son-in-law and heir, Captain Juan Antonio del Castillo y Llata (1744–1817), also from Santander, became the most important of these montañeses. He owned several haciendas and heavily invested in silver mining in and around the Sierra. By 1769, he appears as an investor in the San Francisco Xichú mine, and, in 1784, in the same district’s Soledad mine. By 1778, he had formed an investment company in the San Miguel Río Blanco mine in the Cadereyta district with the operator José Vicente Rodríguez. He purchased the San Joaquín mine in the San Antonio del Doctor zone also in Cadereyta, served on the Sierra Gorda Mining Board, and was an officer in the militia in 1779. Castillo’s cousin, Manuel de la Llata Sáenz, arriving from Santander, married the Cadereyta-born daughter of Militia Captain Francisco Barbero y Valdés, a fellow mine investor and the richest man in that town. Llata Sáenz became a Militia Captain in 1798. Castillo moved into the house bought by his wife for 6,000 pesos in the centre of Querétaro in 1781. Two years later, we find him investing in mines in Valle del Maíz, in San Luis Potosí. In 1791, he held the post of senior city councillor (‘alcalde más antiguo’) of Querétaro, where, from 1793, he invested in the ‘Hacienda de Las Carretas’ and associated textile workshop (obraje) beyond the city limits, which his nephew, Lieutenant-Colonel Manuel Samaniego del Castillo, administered from 1801. Castillo also operated a shop in the mining zone of El Pinal in Cadereyta, owned the ‘Hacienda de Villela’ in San Juan del Río and two haciendas in the fertile San Luis Potosí district of Río Verde. The mining recession of the 1800s and the fighting in the 1810s seriously affected these mining and rural interests, due to the shortage of raw material, capital and circulating medium, the interruption of commercial networks, and insurgent depredations. By the 1830s, Querétaro’s textile industry lay in ruins.⁷

In the period between the First Federal Republic and the Revolution of Ayutla, the Sierra Gorda remained beyond the effective control of the government in Mexico City. Under federalism, the zone fell within the jurisdiction of the three States, Querétaro, Guanajuato and San Luis Potosí, but not one of their governments had effective control of this region.

The Rebellion of 1840 was ostensibly opposed to the centralist regime, but, more locally, its cause was resentment at the central government’s restoration of the colonial-era State monopoly of tobacco cultivation and sale. This measure, intended to raise national revenue, nullified the federal regime’s grant, in 1830, of the right to plant, as a means of reviving the local economy. The highlanders of Jalpan and Tolimán had already been taking advantage of the liberalisation to improve their material condition. The discontent resembled that in the Papantla district of northern Veracruz over the same issue. The Jalpan and Tolimán zones were key Otomí areas. These movements coincided with the uprising of General José Urrea in 1839–40 in Tampico, in concert with Gómez Farías, for the restoration of federalism, though they were not part of it. The Prefect of Jalpan, Teniente Coronel Cristóbal Mejía, the local strongman, was in contact with Urrea, but it is uncertain whether he was involved in the federalist rebellion. The highland cultivators appealed to him to persuade the government to rescind the prohibitions. The discontent from below placed him in the difficult position of either opposing the rebellion in the villages or putting himself at the head of it and using it as a further lever in the federalist cause. He opted for the latter. This ‘joint rebellion’ began in Pinal de Amoles on 17 July, with 400 men under the command of D. Cristóbal’s young son, Tomás Mejía. The rebels took control of Tolimán, and by September threatened government control of Jalpan, Peñamiller and Cadereyta. Arista, Governor of Tamaulipas at that time, warned the central government of the danger that such rebellions could spread into the Huasteca. The death of D. Cristóbal and Urrea’s defeat, however, undermined the cohesion of the rebellion. The Bustamante government was able to raise 600 men as a task force to intimidate the Sierra Gorda rebels. Under the command of the able and politically astute Julián Juvera, this force managed to recover control of Pinal de Amoles. The opening of negotiations with the dissidents followed, leading to an amnesty offered by Juvera in March 1841, designed to end the conflict for the time being. Juvera terminated the official seizure of the cultivators’ tobacco crop. Hostility to direct taxation, however, continued to simmer below the surface throughout the area. Tomás Mejía virtually became Juvera’s protégé.⁸

Juvera, in effect, was the key figure in the Sierra during the Santa Anna years of 1841–4. After the removal of Bustamante and the return of Santa Anna to power, Juvera was made Governor of the Department of Querétaro, holding office from 20 April 1842 until 15 May 1844. It was he who convened the departmental elections to the Constituent Congress in June 1842, which Santa Anna dissolved in December.⁹

Revival of the Guanajuato mining sector during the 1840s accompanied the discovery of large deposits of gold, silver, jade and marble in the Sierra, which stimulated migration and put pressure on unoccupied lands, from which existing peasant cultivators and gatherers derived their subsistence. Since few of the new rancheros had commercial skills, sales of newly bankrupted properties facilitated accumulation of landownership into fewer hands. Dispossession provoked unrest combined with village struggles for land, water, grazing and collecting rights at a time of governmental weakness. The Federal Government, reconvening in Querétaro on 14 September 1847, also found itself powerless in the Sierra Gorda.¹⁰

San Juan Bautista Xichú protested in 1844 against military recruitment and direct taxation imposed by the centralist regime. This conflict had scarcely died down, when conflict over land titles led to violence in March 1846 in several Huasteca pueblos on the other side of the Sierra in the humid zone leading to the Gulf coast. When the centralist system was replaced by the re-establishment of federalism in August 1846, the capitation tax continued in force, despite repeated protest and violence in the villages.

Xichú once again became a centre of unrest over the same issues as before, in August 1847. Some 500 rebels were said to have been involved. Government forces, in disarray following defeat by the US army and the occupation of the capital city, could still not bring the situation under control by October. In that month, the Governor of Querétaro was writing to his counterpart in Guanajuato, concerning ‘los revolucionarios de Xichú’, and that, at the request of the federal government (then located in Querétaro), 300 men had left the city to deal with these ‘sublevados’.¹¹

Xichú may have been the spark that after November ignited much of the Sierra Gorda. Army deserters arrived in the village. Among them was Eleuterio Quiroz, who appears to have originated, sometime in the 1820s, from the Real de Xichú (the mining zone). He had been a muleteer, thereby gaining knowledge of wide areas of the country and subsequently a hacienda worker on estates in San Luis Potosí before the outbreak of war, or, according to other accounts, he may have sprung from a family of bandits. Recruited into the army, he deserted after the Battle of Buenavista (Angostura) on 23 February 1847, when Santa Anna withdrew southward through San Luis Potosí with subsequent heavy loss of life. Quiroz has been portrayed in some historical literature as champion of peasant cultivators threatened by the haciendas. However, much about him remains obscure. From Xichú, he repaired to the security of the mountains, but we still do not know when, why or with whom. The rebellion became confused for a time with the attempts in June 1848 by some dissident military and political figures to continue the fighting against US occupation forces despite the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo the previous February. Former President Paredes, for instance, declared against the treaty. Paredes branded the Herrera administration as traitorous for signing away national territory, accusing it of handing over Mexico to the United States. Herrera vigorously rejected the slur.¹² In this, however, Paredes received the support of Quiroz. The latter’s association with the ultra-conservative (if not, monarchist) Paredes has regrettably occasioned little comment in the literature.¹³

The Governor of Querétaro described the Sierra Gorda rebels as ‘indios’, and, early in November 1847, reported a band of some 300 of them in Arroyo Seco, on the border with San Luis Potosí. The rapidity with which the rebellion spread from Xichú in eastern Guanajuato to the southern reaches of San Luis Potosí was striking. This suggests the generalised nature of grievances and the incapacity of government forces to stop the spread. The sub-prefect said that the rebels had entered Arroyo Seco on 8 November. The Squadron Commander in Lagunillas sent an envoy to treat with Quiroz, for the purpose of finding out what his intentions were. He was told that they included the abolition of monopolies, alcabalas and contributions. Sightings of rebel bands differed from sixty men with five or six rifles, and the rest with lances and machetes, to 160 men, of whom forty were armed infantrymen with rifles, several cavalrymen with shotguns, pistols and machetes, plus twenty deserters from the government army. The force was expected to hurry back to Xichú and counteract the anticipated government offensive supposedly coordinated by the State Governors of San Luis Potosí, Guanajuato and Querétaro. The sub-prefect advised that the National Guard should remain in Lagunillas for the purpose of blocking any invasion of San Luis. Since bands of ‘indios bárbaros’ from the north were perilously close to the State capital, he did not expect any relief from there.¹⁴

The Governor of San Luis Potosí warned that the National Guard in the Río Verde district, not far from Arroyo Seco, had still not been organised and that the town and the rich haciendas in that area remained defenceless. ‘Bandits’ were reported on 12 November to be a short distance from the ‘Hacienda de Bocas’. The inexperienced guardsmen on the estate were warned by the State government not to sally forth in search of them.¹⁵

Even though the peace treaty with the United States had still not been signed, the federal government, resident in Querétaro during the US occupation of the capital city, understood the urgency of dealing with the simmering rebellion nearby. Interim President Manuel de la Peña y Peña summoned former President Bustamante, veteran of the Counterinsurgency of the 1810s, from retirement on 24 September 1847 to assume command of an army of operations, to be known as the ‘División Bustamante’. Bustamante feared that a long campaign would be needed to root out the Xichú rebels. The obstacle to dealing a decisive blow continued to be the rebels’ propensity to avoid open combat by scurrying back into the hills as a refuge after an ambush. This situation dictated the urgency of combined operations by the three state governors, national forces and the National Guard units. Peña feared the spread of the rebellion into the State of San Luis Potosí.¹⁶

Government forces made many largely unsuccessful interventions in the Sierra Gorda over the twenty-year period from 1847 to 1867. Bustamante was joined by Vicente Filisola, fellow iturbidista of the early 1820s. Filisola complained that the proper task of the army was to deal with external threats, not matters of internal security. In any case, he added, no men were available.¹⁷

Popular reaction to land encroachments, taxation and parish fees, however, also provoked renewed rebellion in the Huasteca.¹⁸ That area quickly became a subject of alarm in the State of San Luis. The state secretary advised the Sub-Prefect of Tancanhuitz, on 9 December, that the governor was aware that the rebels intended to penetrate the districts of Xilitla and Tamazunchale in his department, and that US occupation forces in Tampico might move inland for the purpose of opening passage for their trade and contraband. The secretary feared the influence of the rebellion in the village of Ozuluama in the State of Veracruz. The State government authorised him to stamp out contraband, using either resistance guerrillas or the National Guard.¹⁹ The spread of unrest alarmed head-town municipalities, dominated as they probably were by local proprietors, their agents and men of note. The municipality of Tancanhuitz, for example, succumbed to a ‘movement of the indigenous population’ of the town.²⁰

The war minister hoped to hold the rebels back at the defensive lines of Santa María del Río, the strategically situated town on the main route southwards from San Luis Potosí into Guanajuato and Querétaro, and at the line from San Bártolo and San Luis de la Paz to San José in Río Verde. It was unclear, however, that such lines existed in any military sense. Some members of the town council of Lagunillas had already fled, fearing persecution by ‘such ferocious enemies’ who were already in the town. The state governor had wanted a meeting of the council to discuss the issue of defence, but none was possible until the ‘bandits’ had left.²¹ The municipal council of La Palma, wary of the continuing situation on the State border, held an extraordinary session to request a military presence in the town.²²

The municipal President of Alaquines warned the Governor of San Luis that a vanguard of ‘the most atrocious and immoral of revolutions’, promoted by ‘the bandits of the sierra’, had appeared at the confines of the town and occupied the ‘Hacienda de la Estancita’, in the district of Nuevo Gamotes. The President wrote that local families depended for their subsistence on farming and that some local citizens (his term) had organised as ‘Celadores Rurales’ (‘Rural Guards’). He gives no explanation of what these were or who formed them, but it is likely that they were a voluntary association of lightly armed property owners with mounts and were closely associated with the town council. The sense of alarm can be clearly seen by his warning that, ‘because three-quarters of the population are composed of Indians’, recruitment by the rebels might be easier than in Lagunillas or Nuevo Gamotes, where, by implication, the majority were not ‘Indians’. Local unemployment and underemployment led to the kind of idleness and vagrancy that, the President concluded, could easily be subsumed into the ‘thieving and unbridled misconduct, which is the system practised by what calls itself the Army of the Sierra Gorda’.²³

The concern in Guanajuato was no less than that in San Luis Potosí. The exposed salient of San Luis de la Paz continued to be the main problem there. This district was under the jurisdiction of Manuel Ignacio Caballero, jefe político of San Miguel de Allende. He received news at the end of December 1847 that the Xichú rebels, their number rising to more than 1,000 by early February, had arrived in the district of Casas Viejas, where many refugees from the Xichú area had sought refuge. He feared an assault on this defenceless town. In early March, the district administrator in San Luis de la Paz warned that the main rebel force, fresh from its attack on Río Verde, was only a short distance away. If no assistance came, the authorities would have to abandon the town to save their lives. By the end of that month, the situation had become desperate. Rebels had already appeared in the outskirts. In the event of a popular uprising, the town would be defenceless. The rebel attack on the ‘Hacienda de la Noria’, located in the Casas Viejas municipality, however, failed to seize the owner, whom they had hoped to ransom. Other bands had invaded the ‘Hacienda de la Sauceda’ and would do so again on 30 May, seizing horses, armaments, tools and 400 pesos in cash, killing a farmworker and wounding three others. The jefe político advised hacienda owners to arm their properties and cooperate among themselves, blaming them, in June, for not having done so. Accordingly, he welcomed the federal government’s Organic Law for the National Guard, which the district administrator in San Luis de la Paz published on 21 October, but to no effect.²⁴

Tomás Mejía

In the Sierra Gorda, Tomás Mejía, who had returned to his home base from military action in the north-east, also tried to organise from Jalpan resistance to the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. He sought to exploit peasant unrest in the Sierra Gorda and turn it against the government, which had signed the treaty. Mejía’s objective was to keep federal and state forces out of the Sierra Gorda, as he rebuilt his position there. Mejía was born in 1820 at the Franciscan Mission of Bucareli in the Pinal de Amoles District. When his father, Don Cristóbal, died in December 1840, he was left exposed through complicity in the rebellion of that year. Juvera decided that a military career outside the Sierra Gorda would be best suited for him. Induction took place in November 1841, and from 1842 until 1844, Mejía fought against the ‘indios bárbaros’ along the norther frontier. From there, he was caught up in the war with the United States in 1846–7, distinguishing himself in the Battle for Monterrey in September 1846 and at Buenavista in February 1847, where Juvera, a veteran of the Alamo in 1836, also fought.²⁵

Brigadier General Juvera, Military Commander in Querétaro from August 1848, once more played a decisive role in Mejía’s life. He pressed upon War Minister Arista the necessity of winning over Captain Mejía to the government side and handing over to him responsibility for the pacification of the Sierra Gorda. Bustamante, conscious of the perilous situation there, regarded Mejía as the key to the situation in the Sierra Gorda because of the respect that he commanded there as a proven cavalry officer. Bustamante urged the government to persuade Mejía to abandon the rebellion and help bring Quiroz to heel. In return, the government should guarantee Mejía’s rank and send him reinforcements from Jalpan. The situation across this edge of the Mexican central zone, however, remained unstable. During the summer, Indian communities of Zimapan and Jacala in the adjacent State of Hidalgo had rebelled. Up to 800 rebels were said to be threatening the important town of Huejutla and could soon penetrate as far south as Tula. This would then pose a threat to communications between Mexico City and the mining areas around Pachuca.²⁶

Unable to contemplate direct military confrontation, the national government on 20 July 1848 empowered its commanders to offer amnesty to the rebels. Quiroz rejected the amnesty on 23 September. The Governor of San Luis Potosí saw the rejection as contempt for the authorities and urged that the rebels be pursued implacably, once the rainy season had finished, from all three sides – Santa María del Río (San Luis Potosí), San Luis de la Paz (Guanajuato) and San Pedro Tolimán (Querétaro). He thought such a generalised pacification would need only twenty days to achieve. The governor warned of the imminent threat to the estates of Río Verde but lamented that an empty State Treasury meant that the National Guard could not be sufficiently prepared. The previous June, a band of 800 rebels had invaded Lagunillas and other positions. At the end of September, the governor was at the ‘Hacienda de San José Tapanaco’ but with only 115 men, two-thirds of whom had come down with sickness.²⁷

In the meantime, overtures to Mejía in late September and into October 1848, through the medium of Juvera from August 1848, sought to bring him over to the government side in return for a free hand in the Sierra. The amnesty policy, however, accompanied further government attempts to improve its military position. Arista advised Governor Amador to refrain from precipitate actions during the clandestine talks with Mejía.²⁸

Anastasio Bustamante’s General Plan

From his base in San Miguel on 1 February 1849, Bustamante sent an order to the Governors of San Luis Potosi, Guanajuato and Querétaro and to Colonel Valentín Cruz, operating from Río Verde, outlining the methods to be employed in putting down the rebellion. These proved to be the methods he had learned during the Counterinsurgency. They were also designed to ensure the long-term obedience of the highland inhabitants. Troops scouring the Sierra were instructed to gather all families and individuals found within the territory of the State of San Luis Potosí and dispatch them under guard – with no exceptions – to the towns of Río Verde or Santa María del Río. All their places of habitation were to be destroyed beforehand. The State government was to cover the cost of feeding them on the journey.²⁹ Until effective forces could patrol the Sierra and until the San Luis government could find the funds, this strategy remained on paper.

Shortly afterwards, a rebel force, said to consist of 500 men appeared on the ‘Hacienda de Villela’, to the east of Santa María del Río, and then attacked Tierranueva, recruiting supporters, and then passing to the ‘Hacienda de la Labor del Río’, closer still to the town. The rebel chieftain, Juan Ramírez, occupied Santa María del Río on 31 March 1849. Ramírez and his band later appeared on the ‘Hacienda de Atotonilco’, further to the east of the town, passing thence to the ‘Hacienda de Canoas’, leaving another leader, Trinidad Villanueva, at Cañada Grande with seventy men. The informant, however, speculated as to whether Villanueva planned to rejoin Ramírez, with the intention of both proceeding to join Quiroz on the ‘Hacienda del Jabalí’ in Río Verde.³⁰

The Verástegui Family of Río Verde

The focus of the rebellion moved to south-eastern San Luis Potosí, where Quiroz’s band sacked and occupied Río Verde and took up position on the ‘Hacienda del Jabalí’ beneath the northern edge of the Sierra. Combined with the loss of Santa María del Río, these actions brought the Sierra Gorda rebellion down to the plateau, and it entered its most serious phase. In Río Verde, the principal landowners were the Verástegui family. Their main property, the ‘Hacienda de San Diego’, originally established in 1613, was owned by the second Paulo Verástegui. It lay in the fertile Río Verde Basin and produced sugar for the north-eastern market. The first Paulo Verástegui, a Spanish army captain, had married the estate owner’s widow in 1815. Iturbide promoted him colonel in September 1822. When he died, in 1835, his property was valued at 275,000 pesos. The ‘Hacienda de San Diego’ covered 27,857 hectares. In 1798, the estate had been valued at 46,378 pesos. The increase in value could be attributed to the work done to improve the property through irrigation canals, milling machinery for sugar-cane products, and buildings. This heavy investment incurred debts of 85,158 pesos, most of which the second Verástegui managed to pay off.³¹

This powerful family had business contacts in Tampico and regular dealings with smallholders in the Huasteca, who were expanding production in competition with local community producers. Verástegui, residing most of the year in the city of San Luis, was primarily a landowner rather than a merchant. The rebels burned down the Verástegui’s hacienda residence, seized livestock and maize stocks from ‘San Diego’, and opened the dams with the intention of ruining crops. The total cost of damages amounted to nearly 13,000 pesos.³²

San Luis Potosí’s eastern proprietors, under the leadership of the Verástegui, were playing a dangerous game during the 1840s. They resented domination of the State by the upland elite, and accordingly formed tactical alliances with hacienda lessees and non-elite groups to remove it from power. The restoration of federalism in August 1846 and military defeat in the following year altered the power structure in the state and enabled opposition Liberals to seize control of the State government. They subsequently divided over the acceptance of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. The Verástegui opposed the treaty. Manuel Verástegui, Sub-Prefect of Río Verde, wanted to harness the Sierra Gorda rebels into a broader movement to remove the pro-treaty State governor and restore his predecessor, who had been removed for opposition to it. At the same time, Verástegui sought to divert the rebels from further assaults on haciendas by negotiating the incorporation of Quiroz into the power structure. Taking advantage of the amnesty policy, Verástegui set himself up as the intermediary between Bustamante and Quiroz and managed to secure, on principle, government acquiescence to the latter’s elevation to the position of ‘Commandant of the Sierra Gorda’. In practice, nothing came of this. Nevertheless, it revealed the depth of Verástegui’s involvement in the process of neutralising the rebellion by diverting its purpose and, presumably, dividing its leadership.³³ In these years, the Verástegui emerged as crucial mediators in the political relationship between local communities and the State government, and between State and national governments, as they would be once again during the later 1850s and 1860s.

Another issue appeared, in the meantime, which would turn out to have considerable political significance. Felipe García, the leader of a rebellion in El Plantanar, in the mining area of Majada Grande, who had rejected government pardon, wrote to the Operations-Sector Commander, Col. Valentín Cruz, on 20 September 1848, telling him that the highlanders (‘serranos’) would only end their struggle when their ‘sovereign and free independence’ had been secured by the creation of a new department, that is, as a separate Department of the Mountains. They ‘do not want to be governed by any of the authorities of the Departments to which they have been provisionally subjected’. García told Cruz, though without elaboration, that the present movement followed its antecedent of 1840 – ‘that was the seed from which the present one germinated’, regardless of the repression at that time.³⁴ This was an extraordinary statement, which did not appear in Quiroz’s later statements of aims and has had no repercussion in the historical literature to date. We do not yet know who this obscure figure was, or what relation he might have had with Quiroz or Mejía, if any. The end result, as we shall see, was the creation of a separate political entity in the Sierra Gorda. This was done not by Liberal federalists but by the centralist dictatorship of Santa Anna in 1853.

The rebels under Quiroz issued their first declaration of aims in their ‘Social-Political Plan’ of 2 January 1849. This plan appealed to the revolutionary tradition of the leaders of the movement for Independence. It complained of present government abuses and also those by ‘los magnates de los pueblos’. Whether these were caciques, hacendados, local power brokers or officials, remains unclear. The plan upheld the exclusivity of the Catholic religion but called for a moderation of clerical fees in the villages, an issue which we also see outstanding in the case of the rebellious pueblos of Oaxaca. Other village grievances such as recruitment, tax collection and landowners’ levies for use of open pasture or the wild produce of the sierra reappeared. A local parish priest, however, identified a latent anti-clericalism, which seems to contradict the opening declaration in favour of upholding the Catholic establishment. In this priest’s view, the rebellion had wiped out his seventeen years’ work in the San Luis Potosí parish of La Palma. From the evidence of three other parishes, he saw only robbery, murder and hatred of the Church.³⁵

Following the seizure of Río Verde, Manuel Verástegui intervened to try to stem the destruction. The second statement of aims, on 13 March 1849, seemed more radical, although its initial concern was the internal politics of the state of San Luis Potosí. Once again, the rebels reaffirmed Catholic exclusivity, but called for a reform of the clergy’s moral conduct. An anti-clerical strain re-appeared, when the plan denounced the fees that gave the clergy ‘such a formidable power, prejudicial to public liberties’, as a result of the ‘ignorance of the masses’. That extraordinary statement – in the context of the Sierra Gorda, where there were neither prized parishes nor powerful clerics – begs the question. This and other views expressed in the plan suggest Verástegui’s authorship. Were the sections of the plan calling for reform of landowners’ abuses and for the foundation of new villages on hacienda land to be taken seriously? It may be that this clause should not be understood as a statement of peasant revolutionary goals but as an attempt by a member of a locally powerful landowning family to terrify political rivals by the prospect of widespread insurrection in the villages. The plan, incidentally, made no reference to defence of Indian community, language or ethnicity, indicating that these may not have been overriding issues, as they certainly were in the case of the southern Isthmus, as we shall see shortly. Landowners such as the Verástegui might feel momentarily alarmed by the presence of a rebel band in their head-town and on their property, but they evidently felt safe enough to play politics with agrarian issues. Fear of further attacks led to appeals by property owners for the nearby states of Jalisco, Zacatecas and Querétaro to dispatch what forces they could.³⁶

Fortunately, the San Luis Potosí State Archive contains a revealing letter of explanation written by Manuel Verástegui, outlining the origins and course of the rebellion and his relation to it. This was written on 1 April 1849 and addressed to the Commander of Relief Forces dispatched by the government from Tampico to recover lost territories in the State of San Luis Potosí. It is clear that Verástegui had reservations concerning the imminent arrival of this external force in his state, especially since its southerly route through Villa del Maíz would come perilously close to the territory that he said was under his control. He told Commander Díaz de la Vega that, with an escort of thirty armed men, personally loyal to him, he had ensured that this group of pueblos, east of Río Verde and containing a population of 80,000, would not fall into the hands of Quiroz and his men, who would seek to revolutionise them on the basis of the Plan of 12 March 1849, proclaimed in Río Verde. Verástegui then tells De la Vega that he himself was the author of this plan, which was meant as a proposal. He states that he has full confidence in the main leaders of the rebel force, whom he describes, referring in particular to Quiroz and Mejía, as ‘men of good disposition and character’. Clearly, Verástegui did not want De la Vega to upset the careful balance he had sought to establish between proprietors and rebel leaders in the southern zone of San Luis Potosí, situated just below the northern edge of the Sierra Gorda.³⁷

In this letter, Verástegui describes himself as ‘a man of independent ideas’. He tells De la Vega that the present state governor and his ‘favourite’, José Antonio Barragán, loathe him and will discredit him. Inept and useless in government, they will portray him as a ‘dissident’, since, as personal enemies, they would like to have him shot and even fried in oil. He roundly condemns Barragán as ‘that well-known sans-culottes of the first order’. Yet, this condemnation as a French Revolutionary street-rioter comes from the same man, who admits to authorship of the March plan. Earlier in the letter, furthermore, Verástegui praises the Spanish royal government’s energetic counter-revolutionary response to the Mexican Insurgency of 1810–21, contrasting it with the inability of the government of his own time to deal effectively with the current wave of rebellions across the country. The letter opens with the statement that he defended the town of Río Verde with volunteers against the rebel assault on 9 March 1849. Thereafter, his main effort had been to negotiate with Quiroz to prevent further ‘banditry’ and bring to an end a ‘war’ that would be as interminable as the Insurgency of the 1810s.³⁸

Reference to this earlier Insurgency shows again how that unanticipated shock still lived in the memory of property owners of the countryside. Verástegui’s stress throughout on the incapacity of the government of his time revealed a fear of escalation and intensification of revolt. He saw the root of the problem in continued lack of funds and perennial factional strife. Such a situation meant that internal strife at every level facilitated the external enemy’s military success against the Mexican Republic. With rebellion out of control, proprietors were thrown back on their own devices. Verástegui’s solution was recognition of rural grievances and, on that basis, negotiation for a compromise and a laying down of arms. This, nevertheless, depended upon cooperation from both proprietors and government in a series of reforms designed to improve conditions on the land.

We do not know De la Vega’s response to Verástegui’s letter. We do not know whether he read and understood its contents or whether he was sympathetic to its intended message. Historians, however, coming across this long letter in a provincial archive will rejoice at the discovery of Verástegui’s analysis of the origins and nature of the Sierra Gorda rebellion. We can only hope that De la Vega had earlier shared such joy.

The long-term origin lay in the festering relationship between hacienda owners and their tenant farmers (‘arrendatarios’). Verástegui took up the latter’s complaint of excessive charges by the estate owners, which depressed the living standards of local tenant-farmers. Recourse to letting by the owners suggests that they themselves were absentee, living in comfortable town houses distant from the lands they owned. This is to say, that the owners lived in a different world to their tenants. The government’s impecunious condition, combined with the deepening crisis of relations with the United States from 1845 onwards and then by the outbreak of war accompanied by foreign invasion and military defeat, meant that repression of rural grievances became impossible. The short-term origin of the rebellion lay in the attempted arrest of army deserters, such as Quiroz and his associates, by the village magistrate of Xichú. Verástegui says that these deserters had no intention of returning to the army, because they believed their Supreme Commander, Santa Anna, to have betrayed the nation. The deserters managed to escape from the village, though not before releasing prisoners from jail, and made their way into the sierra. Quiroz then put himself at the head of the aggrieved tenants, and, in such a way, ‘a war began of the poor against the rich’. Their aim was ‘the search for a better way of life’. This was in October 1847. They wanted the removal of the levies and obligatory labour imposed on them and the usurious loans exacted for planting, all of which caused intense misery:

In such a way, this war became transformed into a war of proletarians, who, receiving no support from representative institutions and through legal channels, took the decision to use force. In effect, that numerous and unfortunate class has never had a homeland (patria). Homeland means social well-being (bienestar social). Hence, the proletarians had no homeland to defend, when the North Americans invaded – and they, accordingly, did not defend it.³⁹

These powerful words were not those of a revolutionary leader or rebel chieftain, but of an educated man and member of a leading, landowning family of the Mexican provinces. It is striking that he did not use the term ‘indios’ but preferred a pseudo-sociological term to describe the rebels. Perhaps their status as tenant farmers was the distinguishing attribute, since they were not members of a village community of identifiable ethnicity. Verástegui, in any case, had no intention of becoming a revolutionary leader, since he wished to stop the rebellion, not extend it.

At this crucial moment, as the rebels entered Río Verde, the State Congress granted the governor emergency powers, on 11 March 1849, which would last for four months. One of his first actions was to seize hold of Manuel Verástegui’s brother, José María, owner of the ‘Hacienda del Jabalí’, and incarcerate him incommunicado in the Carmen Convent in the State capital. This intemperate action aroused the wrath of D. José María’s formidable wife, Doña María Inés, who, on 21 March, demanded his instant release. She wrote to the State Congress, alleging that the governor had violated the Federal Constitution, exceeded the faculties granted him, and put forward no specific charge. Doña Inés described how the rebels had invaded their property on 9 March, pushed out Colonel Valentín Cruz, whose force was trying to defend the estate, and caused 16,000 pesos’ worth of damage. She and her husband had escaped on foot to the town of La Pastora, where they remained until the 14 March. After seeking refuge in the city of San Luis Potosí, her husband fell into the hands of the governor. Doña Inés insisted that her husband’s political view was no different from the governor’s. This was one way of saying that he should not be associated with his brother’s dalliance with the rebel leaders. The governor does not appear to have listened to her. In any case, D. José María managed to escape from captivity, although, to date, we do not have the details of how.⁴⁰

Manuel Verástegui, Quiroz and Mejía

The State governments of Querétaro, Guanajuato and San Luis Potosí were left to deal with the situation as best they could. Rebel bands consistently pushed back their forces to great alarm. The División Bustamante’s lack of resources continually hindered each of its component sections. Government burning of homes pushed families into supporting rebellion, swelling its numbers and enabling it to go on the offensive. Verástegui argued that the government should respond positively to rebel aspirations and respect their dignity. It should take on board Quiroz, recognising him as Military Commander in Xichú, and giving Mejía the same rank in Jalpan. Grant of amnesty alone would not be sufficient to curb the rebellion, since the rebels had been winning virtually all engagements with official armed forces. The cause they stood for had to be addressed.⁴¹

Bereft of Federal Treasury funds and weak in manpower on the ground, the national government recommended the dispatch of friars into the Sierra Gorda with a view to evangelising the region once again. They would need the full support of the civil authorities.⁴²

In the meantime, the rebellion continued to spread northward, threatening the ‘Hacienda de Bocas’. A band under Desiderio Rodríguez ‘in league with the rebels of Río Verde,’ was preparing to rob the estate, under the pretext of declaring for the ‘Plan of the Sierra’.⁴³ Government response continued to be compromise. The objective was to wear down the rebellion through sporadic (but half-hearted) demonstrations of force combined with offers of amnesty. Juvera’s negotiations with Mejía, at the same time, were bearing fruit.⁴⁴

Finally, from April 1849, the three state governors of Querétaro, Guanajuato and San Luis Potosí opened a counter-offensive against the Sierra Gorda rebels and also sent a division into the Huasteca. Even so, the situation in these eastern districts continued to be menacing. The Sub-Prefect of Ciudad del Maiz had been warned that 150 serranos had been sent in his direction from Río Verde. He described the pueblos of his district to be in a sorry state and there seemed to be sympathy for the rebels in some quarters. The sub-prefect warned that if the rebels managed to stir them up it would be difficult to calm them down again, and the danger would spread across the Huasteca. Shortly afterwards, Sub-Prefect Castro reported that his counterpart in Tancanhuitz had informed him that the town of Xilitla had fallen to a rebel band of 250 men. He expected them to advance on Ciudad del Maiz and had called up the Department’s National Guard companies. He was later told that Villa de Valles was under threat from the serranos, whose total strength was around 500 men, and that Tancanhuitz had fallen on 23 May.⁴⁵

Mejía caught Quiroz in June 1849 in the Cerro del Doctor with some eighty followers.⁴⁶ After his capture, Quiroz offered an equivocal testimony on 30 October 1849, to the effect that he had signed Verástegui’s plan without knowing its contents, and that he had been unwilling to commit the forces under his command to Verástegui’s objective, which was seizure of the State capital. Quiroz admitted his earlier role in support of the Paredes anti-treaty rebellion. He then made two extraordinary statements, which we cannot at present verify. The first was that for the fourteen months of his rebellion at the head of 1,000 men, the sierra villages had not assisted him. Fear of violence and the fact that they did not know him – presumably since he might have come from Xichú and not the Sierra Gorda proper – had been their explanation for standing aloof. Quiroz’s second statement was that his fellow commanders had prevented him, under threat of death, from taking the offer of government amnesty. If that were true, we need to find further documentation, which might explain the role of these other chieftains.⁴⁷ We do not know, at this point, who rebel leaders, such as Ramírez, Villanueva, García or Rodríguez, mentioned in this chapter, were – their origins, activities and what happened to them. Could they be among those ‘fellow commanders’ referred to by Quiroz?

Since Quiroz represented an alternative pole of authority in the sierra, Mejía’s principal goal was to destroy him. This was no easy task, since Mejía needed to tack between differing sources of unrest. At the same time, he sought to keep State and national forces out of the sierra, which was also difficult, since peasant unrest led to demands for military intervention. Mejía had Quiroz, an army deserter, executed on 6 December. As yet, we have no explanation of why it took so long between capture and execution. The elimination of Quiroz demonstrated Mejía’s superior power in the sierra. Mejía, thereupon, became the focus of all negotiations in the Sierra Gorda with the government. He used the threat of further insurrection to deter outside powers from interference in his sphere of influence. President Herrera expressed gratitude to Mejía ‘for distinguished service … to the cause of civilisation and humanity’ in putting down the rebellion in the Sierra Gorda. Minister of War Arista similarly praised Captain Tomás Mejía’s loyalty, noting that he had been severely wounded in the conflict.⁴⁸

Verástegui’s subsequent relationship with Mejía became a matter of crucial importance for the balance of power in the sub-region. The former’s family were generally identified with the Liberal cause in the State of San Luis Potosí, whereas Mejía, defender of the Catholic religion and devotee of the Virgin of the Pueblito, became a paragon, first, of the Conservative cause in the Civil War of the Reform, when San Luis became a pivotal State in the struggle, and, finally, of the Imperial cause during the Second Empire. Through the Verástegui, President Juárez sought, in vain, to prevent Mejía’s adherence to the Imperial cause in 1863.⁴⁹

Mejía, at the earlier date, had cooperated with the army in the recapture of Río Verde from the rebels on 10 June 1849. Government forces were also operating in Tancanhuitz and the Huasteca against small rebel bands there and across the Tamaulipas border and southward to Huejutla. The aim was, at the same time, to keep open the commercial routes across Guanajuato and Querétaro.⁵⁰