Yucatan, Mexico, Caste War Period

In the mid-nineteenth century Maya refugees fleeing the violence of the Caste War of Yucatan (1857-1901) briefly reoccupied the ancient ruins of Tikal. Unlike the numerous Yucatec refugee communities established to the east in British Honduras, those who settled at Tikal combined with Lacandon Maya, and later Ladinos from Lake Petén Itza to form a multiethnic village in the sparsely occupied Petén jungle of northern Guatemala. This chapter discusses the analysis of the mass-produced consumer goods found at the Tikal village. The historic inhabitants of Tikal were well connected to exchange networks of the societies encircling the Petén, reaching the world through the global markets emanating from nearby British Honduras. This small village was poised to renegotiate social and economic relationships with peripheral societies from deep within the frontier zone, and may be demonstrating consumer behavior observed in refugee populations in the modern era.

This thesis presents the results and interpretations of preliminary investigations at two archaeological sites in northwestern Belize: Qualm Hill camp, which was the seasonal headquarters of British Honduras Company in the mid-1800s; and Kaxil Uinic village, a San Pedro Maya settlement established by Caste War refugees sometime after 1868. Although these sites may be considered two entirely separate entities with distinct histories, inhabitants, and archaeological assemblages, an exploration of the larger historical context surrounding both sites highlights their intricate relationship within a broader historical framework of the British colonization of Belize. Conflicts between the San Pedro Maya and British timber firms arose as a result of the two groups‘ differing uses of the Belizean landscape, as the former saw the land‘s agricultural potential, while the latter valued the region‘s mahogany reserves. Yet both the Maya and the largely Creole labor force employed by logging companies were prohibited from owning land by colonial legislation, becoming dependent upon British corporations for access to resources and jobs. As virtually all knowledge of this time period reflects a politically and socially biased colonial perspective of events and circumstances, this thesis, presented from an archaeological standpoint, challenges the notion that these groups were "incorporated" into the colonial super structure. By better interpreting the nature of the varied social, political, and economic interactions that occurred between these disenfranchised groups based on more contextualized archaeological and archival interpretations, it becomes evident that the loggers and the Maya, though marginalized by the colonial system, actively negotiated their identities to navigate the cultural landscape of British Honduras, sometimes in manners inconsistent with the defacto protocol dictated by the larger social groups of the "colonizers" and the "colonized."

During Yucatán’s Caste War, described in the nineteenth century as the Mayan rebel uprising against criollo (European-identified) hegemony, more than half the Yucatán Peninsula’s population either perished or fled, fearing for their lives. As one of the most violent indigenous uprisings in the Americas, it was also one
of the longest: the Caste Wars tormented the Mexican Southeast for over 50 years. While historical scholarship has examined the Caste War at length, the study of the peninsula’s literary production has yet to be considered for the contribution it makes to fully understanding the sociohistorical context of the war. In this article,
I examine the pirate novels of two of Yucatán’s most prolific nineteenth-century letrados—Eligio Ancona and Justo Sierra O’Reilly—as they delve into the anxieties that the Caste War provoked in the elite population. Through analysis
of the well-established genre of the pirate novel, I demonstrate the way literature served as a space to test new configurations of racial discourses that emerged from the criollo construction of a race war. When paired with historical monographs by the same authors, it becomes evident that the pirate took on new meaning
in the context of the Caste War, allowing criollo intellectuals to substitute their increasingly threatened mastery of the land (under attack by rural uprisings) for an imagined mastery of the sea.

The Caste Wars of the Yucatán tore apart the peninsula between 1847 and 1901. While the violence was not constant throughout the more than five decades between the start and conclusion of the war itself, the threat of rebel hostilities was ever present. Scholars have debated the origins of the war for many decades, with most recent academic treatments focusing on heavy tax burdens, poor working conditions for Yucatán’s peasantry, and the loss of land that occurred during the second half of the century. Tensions between political leaders exacerbated relations with the Mayas in particular and the peasantry more generally. The emergence of the breakaway state of Chan Santa Cruz, in the southeastern part of Yucatán, allowed rebel forces to coalesce between 1850 and the early 1870s. Here, a “Speaking Cross” oracle gave direction to the rebellious Mayas, who crushed their enemies and exacted revenge against those who would not support their cause. The emergence of Porfirio Díaz as President of Mexico in 1876 led to a gradual “reconquest” of the areas held by the cruzob, or “people of the Cross.” By 1901, the Mexican military ended the Caste Wars, though violent episodes still marred Yucatán until the early 1930s.

A través del estudio del pueblo k´iche´ de Santa Catarina Ixtahuacán [Sololá, Guatemala] se estudia el desarrollo de la territorialidad maya durante los primeros años del republicanismo en Guatemala. El enfoque de dicho parte desde la teoría de estudios posgramscianos, los estudios subalternos y poscoloniales.

En todo caso, lo que me interesa es comprender el desarrollo histórica de la sociedad "xancatal", o sea de Santa Catarina, en los años finales del dominio colonial hasta la instauración del neocolonialismo en Guatemala de la mano de la construcción del Estado Finquero.

Por aparte, la intención de este trabajo, es hacer una recopilación de todas la fuentes que disponía en el momento de realizar la investigación para devolvérsela a la gente que le pertenece. Esto es, las personas que hoy en día viven en Santa Catarina Ixtahuacán y Nahualá.

HLVS

PhD proposal for the Laboratoire d'Anthropologie Sociale (LAS) in Paris in 2009. In enrolled as a graduate student there in January 2010.

My original PhD project described here was an ethnographic research in which video would be used as a primary tool to analyze what the members of some Macehual Maya families of Quintana Roo, Mexico (i.e. descendants of those who fought the Caste War of Yucatan) make out of their local history and religious and ideological heritage, putting particular emphasis on how this perception shapes their identity (both individual and communal) and their relation with the surrounding landscape.

This article deals with an issue of the court-martial functioning in Mexican state of Yucatán in the middle of the 19th century. The political violence, a very characteristic of the epoch, in Yucatán scaled up with a start of the ethno-social conflict between the government and predominantly Indian population of southeastern part of the state – the Caste War (1847–1901). For the juridical practices the constant political conflicts, domination of the Army and military men in public life meant broad simplification of judicial procedures, often executed by officer corps. One special place for the middle of the 19th century was the fortress of Bacalar, which controlled the border with British dominions in Belize. It was one of the crucial points for importation of contraband into Yucatán peninsula, and if before 1847 it had been mostly civil goods, with the start of the Caste War, Belizean entrepreneurs actively participated in supply of rebels with armament and munitions. They were contrabandists of such kind who were captured on September 13 of 1849 in the border outpost in Chaac upon the Río Hondo.They left behind themselves the “Four Sisters” boat case – the document that shed light not only on the details of simplified court procedures in the 19th century Mexico but also on various details of wartime daily life in that remote fortress.

Link to a 26-minute documentary film entitled The War of the Princes of Rain ("La guerra de los príncipes de la lluvia", in Spanish) researched, directed and co-produced by Bernardo Pérez-Soler:

https://vimeo.com/119632830
(Please request password by writing an e-mail to bperezsoler@gmail.com)

The old Macehual Maya experts in the art of recalling events long gone-by from the state of Quintana Roo, Mexico, still evoke vividly and in great detail the final stages of the so-called “Caste War” of Yucatan, even though they did not witness them or ever read anything about them—actually, they never learned how to read.

The vividness of this evocation has to do with the fact that the remembrance of the Caste War is thoroughly intertwined with both Maya religion and agriculture, and, more generally, with how the people who still speak the Yucatec Maya language spend their everyday lives.

This film is about the old stories on the war three of these men recount, and about the main activities those who share (or, in one case, oppose) their beliefs engage in.

Albeit in its present form it is a fully completed short-film, I have recorded enough material to enlarge it into a feature-length film. I, however, did not get enough funding to edit and post-produce such longer version.

En junio de 1848 el presbítero yucateco Domingo Campos fue enviado a su tierra natal con los donativos recaudados en México y Puebla para socorrer a los refugiados de la guerra desatada en Yucatán. Fruto de este viaje escribió un opúsculo en el que dejó un testimonio de la dramática situación que atravesaba la Península, afirmando que era "la guerra más bárbara e inicua que los indios sublevados sostienen contras las otras razas, envolviéndolas en la más espantosa miseria" 1. La Guerra de Castas yucateca (1847-1901) ha sido tratada bajo distintas perspectivas por la historiografía que, desde finales de siglo XX, conoce un sorprendente interés por este conflicto. Atrás quedaba el libro de Nelson Reed The Caste War of Yucatan, publicado en 1964 como la pieza inaugural de los estudios sobre este turbulenta, larga y reticular etapa de la historia del sureste mexicano. El interés por la Guerra cuenta en su haber con una bibliografía relevante, que fue recogida por Leopoldo Peniche en 1997, con trabajos panorámicos como los de Marie Lapointe, Los mayas rebeldes de Yucatán (1997), Terry Rugeley, Yucatán's Maya Peasantry and the Origins of the Caste War (1996), o Don Dumond, The Machete and the Cross: Campesino Rebellion in Yucatan (1997). A estos habría que añadir estudios más específicos que son una buena muestra de la atracción que suscita el tema, como el de Genaro Pool sobre la historia oral de la guerra según los descendientes mayas (1997); el de Rocío Cortés sobre el periodismo yucateco durante la Guerra (2013), o el estudio de los antecedentes bélicos y la importancia del liderazgo de Santiago Imán y los huites del Oriente de Arturo Taracena (2013); Gabriel Aarón Macías Zapata profundizó en la importancia

Archaeological sites in the Yucatán Peninsula are among the leading attractions for a thriving tourism industry and have helped to significantly boost the local economy since the 1970s. While the success of tourism has provided many economic benefits for the millions of people who live in the region, it has also created a slew of undesirable consequences. Among the most publicized negative impacts have been major spikes in crime and pollution, but tourism has also influenced the way local culture and heritage are economically and socially valued. This is especially true for the large population of Maya living in the modern states of Campeche, Quintana Roo and Yucatán in the Yucatán Peninsula, who have been compelled to reconceptualize their heritage as a commodity to meet the demands of the hordes of tourists that travel to the region every year.