For God and Revolution: Priest, Peasant, and Agrarian Socialism in the Mexican Huasteca

For God and Revolution

FOR GOD AND REVOLUTION

Priest, Peasant, and

Agrarian Socialism

in the Mexican Huasteca

MARK SAAD SAKA

© 2013 by the University of New Mexico Press

All rights reserved. Published 2013

Printed in the United States of America

18   17   16   15   14   13          1   2   3   4   5   6

The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

Saka, Mark Saad, 1962–

For God and revolution : priest, peasant, and agrarian socialism in the Mexican

Huasteca / Mark Saad Saka.

      pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8263-5338-2 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8263-5339-9 (electronic) 1. Agriculture—Economic aspects—Mexico—Huasteca Region. 2. Peasant uprisings —Mexico—Huasteca Region. 3. Land tenure—Mexico—Huasteca Region. 4. Sociology, Rural—Religious aspects—Catholic Church. 5. Socialism—Mexico—Huasteca Region. 6. Huasteca Region (Mexico)—History. I. Title.

HD1795.H83S35 2013

338.10972’109034—dc23

                                                         2013000926

Dedicated to Rosa Lilia

Contents

Maps

Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction

CHAPTER 1

The Cultural Geography of the Huasteca Potosina

CHAPTER 2

From Pueblo to Nation: The Huasteca Potosina, 1810–1848

CHAPTER 3

Peasant Nationalism and Agrarian War, 1848–1856

CHAPTER 4

War, Foreign Invasion, and Revolution, 1856–1876

Chapter 5

The Liberal Assault, 1856–1884

CHAPTER 6

The Capitalization of the Countryside, 1856–1884

CHAPTER 7

Toward a Mexican Theology of Liberation: Padre Mauricio Zavala

CHAPTER 8

Death to All Those Who Wear Pants!:

The Huastecan Peasant War, 1879–1884

Conclusion

Notes

Glossary

Bibliography

Index

Maps

Map 1 The Huasteca in relation to Mesoamerican regions

Map 2 The Huastecan language in relation to the languages of Mesoamerica

Map 3 The Huasteca Potosina in the colonial era

Map 4 El partido de Tamazunchale

Map 5 El partido de Ciudad del Maíz

Map 6 El partido de Tanchanhuitz

Map 7 Railroads in nineteenth-century San Luis Potosí

Preface

IN THE SUMMER OF 1879 THE PEASANTS OF THE HUASTECA POTOSINA, a region associated with the Sierra Madre Oriental of northeastern Mexico, openly rebelled against the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz and state elites in San Luis Potosí. They tore down fences, invaded haciendas, seized lands that they felt were rightfully theirs, and established their own local governments. In the years that followed, the violence spread throughout the region and culminated in the occupation by rebel forces of such notable cities of regional importance as Tamazunchale and Ciudad del Maíz.

The origins of the Huastecan revolution lay in two sets of causes: long- and short-term forces, both material and moral. The long-term and material bases of the revolution derived from the inequalities between the indigenous people and the Spaniards established during the conquest of the region in the sixteenth century. The short-term material origins resided in the privatization of Huastecan agriculture and lands that began in the 1850s, which deprived the rural lower classes and villagers of their land, leaving them desperate.

The moral basis of the revolution rested on the synthesis of a subaltern nationalist ideology that derived from participation of the Huastecan peasantry in two patriotic wars and a radical anarchist and socialist consciousness that demanded an egalitarian political system and economy. The agraristas, those who advocated radical social doctrines, included village clergy that provided local leadership and anarchists from Mexico City who, in the case of the Huasteca, introduced subversive ideas into the area, hoping to form political alliances. The agraristas and their allies sought to preserve the peasantry and their community holdings.

Padre Mauricio Zavala, a local parish priest, emerged as a key figure in articulating the moral economy of the Huastecan peasantry. Zavala, a socialist, organized the construction of schools, delivered revolutionary sermons, and fought for the redress of indigenous rights in the courts. He taught a form of ethnic populism that elevated the status of the indigenous people to that of Europeanized Mexicans. Zavala synthesized Christian humanism and anarcho-agrarian thought in support of the social, political, and economic rights of the indigenous peasantry of Mexico. In doing so, Zavala attempted to forge a more humane moral and material order in the hope of raising the dignity and aspirations of indigenous Mexicans.

Based on previously untapped sources, this work presents a new social and cultural history of a significant portion of the Mexican countryside in the nineteenth century. The story of the Huastecan uprisings offers a new perspective on the origins of Mexican nationalism and incorporates the peasantry into the national historical process.

Acknowledgments

MANY INDIVIDUALS AND INSTITUTIONS HAVE CONTRIBUTED TO THIS study, first and foremost my wife, Rosa Lilia, whose patience and support made this book possible.

John Mason Hart, Tom O’Brien, and Susan Kellogg at the University of Houston proved invaluable as I completed this book. A number of individuals encouraged me throughout the process; I would especially like to thank to Pauline Warren. In addition, a number of individuals read and commented on earlier drafts of this work, including Terry Rugeley, Douglas Richmond, Paul Hart, Norman Caulfield, and Arnoldo de León. In San Luis Potosí, assistance from Rafael Montejano y Aguiñaga, María Isabel Monroy de Martí, and others proved invaluable, and without the professionalism of the staff of the Archivo histórico de San Luis Potosí, this book would not have been possible. Support for this research came from the Fulbright-Hayes Foundation. At Sul Ross State University I would like to thank Jim Case, Jay Downing, Filemón Zamora, Matthew Marsh, Susan Spring, Ryan Buck, and Miguel Ortíz. Finally, I owe this book to my parents, Hamid and Kathleen, who taught me when I was very young to appreciate the histories and dignity of all people.

Introduction

With this edict, we proclaim the just cause of the socialist struggle of the masses that are living in poverty; as close neighbors in the small communities of the Sierra you represent the children of the Mexican nation; and thus you understand the evil hacendados who say that they own all of our land. We must remain firm in the face of their actions and take up arms in order to defend our rights. If we do not, then we will continue to suffer from their abuses.

—Council of Socialist Sharecroppers

We have peace because of the imposition of thirty-two thousand bayonets, we have peace because the reformists have become the aristocracy, we have peace because it is natural that a nation born in monarchy is cursed with dictatorship!

—Padre Mauricio Zavala

DURING THE LATE 1870S AND EARLY 1880S A WAVE OF PEASANT UNREST swept the mountainous Huasteca region of northeastern Mexico.¹ The Huastecan uprising represents the apogee of agrarian unrest that erupted in the 1840s and swept northeastern Mexico until the 1880s. The Huastecan peasantry that waged these struggles demanded political autonomy for their pueblos, the protection of their churches, and the restoration of the land, water, and foraging rights that were a part of their heritage. In short, the Huastecan struggle presented some of the principal issues at stake in the revolution of 1910 and the Cristero War that followed it.

Heightened labor abuses and a loss of pueblo lands, which was the ground of deeply held community values, provided the immediate basis for the upheaval. While the origins of the dissatisfactions expressed by the revolutionaries can be found in the effects of the sixteenth-century Spanish conquest of Mexico on indigenous peoples, they worsened during the course of the nineteenth century. By the 1870s, during the attempt to modernize the economy of San Luis Potosí, the state elites had privatized community landholdings and were eagerly building roads, railroads, and telegraph lines throughout the state, including in the previously remote Huasteca. The construction of the roads and railroads from across the area to the port of Tampico, undertaken to provide access to the global economy, encouraged elite and foreign landowners to purchase farmland, ranchland, and timberland that were part of the pueblos. These changes, in turn, challenged the communal way of life of the Huastecan peasantry, which relied on village autonomy and locally controlled production. They also violated a sense of radical national consciousness that had developed in the region beginning with the armed struggles accompanying the independence war against Spain (1810–1821) and then during armed guerrilla wars against United States and French invaders between the 1840s and 1860s. Those struggles entailed far-ranging guerrilla campaigns and had given the previously parochial Huastecan veterans a new sense of empowerment. When they returned from the wars, a newly enhanced sense of citizenship enabled them to become involved in local issues. At the same time, the sense of self they had acquired combined with more traditional beliefs, including religious and agrarian ideology.

During the 1870s anarchist ideas that emanated from Mexico City and were carried into the Huasteca by revolutionary agitators further radicalized the indigenous peasantry and small landholders, who grafted peasant-class consciousness onto a preexisting subaltern nationalism. Socialist parish priests further raised and radicalized their political consciousness and then led them into a revolution against the national government.

The origins of the Huastecan revolution were also rooted in longer-term problems, especially the caste divisions that resulted from the invasion of the Huasteca by the Spaniards in the sixteenth century. The privatization of peasant properties from the 1830s to the 1870s deepened these already existing inequalities. The short-term causes of the revolts followed the imposition of Liberal Party rule on the national government in Mexico City and the state government in San Luis Potosí. Under the Liberal governorships of Mariano Escobedo (1870–1872) and Carlos Díez Gutiérrez (1876–1896), the elites of San Luis Potosí began their effort to transform the economic and commercial structure of the Huasteca Potosina. The previously isolated mountain region, held in stasis for centuries, suddenly became a part of the effort to develop agrarian capitalism.

During the colonial era, the defeated Huastecos had been reorganized by the conquerors, placed under the authority of the church, received pueblo land grants, and gradually developed new pueblo identities. By the late eighteenth century, however, a landowning class made up of creoles and mestizos emerged in Huasteca among a still large Indian majority. The unequal competition between the growing native rural population and the emergent private estate owners established the social inequalities that contributed to the wave of peasant unrest between 1848 and 1884.

Then, the intrusion of large-scale investments of private capital in the 1870s, as Mexico sought to incorporate the Huasteca into the North Atlantic capitalist economy, dramatically shifted the balance of power against the campesinos. While the state elites inaugurated the construction of the roads, railroads, and telegraphic lines into the Huasteca from the port of Tampico, they also bought up peasant land holdings. The growth of export agriculture had provided incentives for the state’s landowning elites and foreigners to increase the magnitude of their holdings.

The development of nationalist, anarchist, and socialist ideologies among the Huastecan rebels evolved over the course of the nineteenth century. First, Huastecan peasants fought for national independence alongside the armies of Padre Hidalgo y Costilla. Second, in 1846, in an important step, they again heeded the call to arms and fought as guerrilla bands alongside the Mexican Army against the invading U.S. forces. The pueblo militias also helped to harass and attack the U.S. Army’s supply lines that stretched from Veracruz to Mexico City. Third, during the 1860s they enlisted in another patriotic resistance against French invaders. These experiences created an unprecedented awareness of national destiny among the Huastecan fighters.

After the U.S. invasion, Huastecan peasant guerrillas returned to their villages. Calling themselves citizens and armed with weapons and a nationalist identity, they occupied their ancestral lands and subdivided haciendas by force. In their proclamations, the peasants also delegitimized the Mexican government by declaring that the government opposed the general will of the people and asserting that it had failed to prosecute the patriotic war against the foreign invaders.

During the rebellions of the 1840s the campesinos demanded greater political participation, guarantees of citizens’ and pueblo rights, and the right of peasant women to fight in the militias of the locally controlled pueblos. The Huastecos also called for an end to private property. The Mexican state they envisioned would guarantee the right of native citizens to pursue economic self-sufficiency and political autonomy through common agricultural lands. The intervention of the Mexican Army and compromises between the national government and the rebels restored a semblance of stability.

Then, during the 1860s, the French invaded and occupied Mexico, an event that once again brought the Huastecan campesinos into a broader national struggle. The communities of the Huasteca formed much of the militias for Mexican president Benito Juárez’s army of the east that conducted an extensive guerrilla war against the French and Emperor Maximilian’s forces. The experience gained by the Huastecos during their service in the armed forces in conjunction with their exposure to the ideas of liberty, equality, and fraternity that Liberal army officers propagated among the troops in order to motivate and inspire them further enhanced their sense of nationalism.

Later, when Porfirio Díaz launched the 1876 Tuxtepec revolt against the beleaguered government of President Sebastían Lerdo de Tejada and proclaimed himself president of Mexico, he enjoyed wide support from peasants throughout the Huasteca. In the Huasteca Potosina, the campesinos believed Díaz would support their demands for the return of recently usurped ancestral village lands. Declaring themselves Porfiristas, the Huastecan campesinos considered themselves part of Díaz’s alliance. They supported him because he promised a new, free, and more democratic Mexico: In the struggle sustained from time immemorial by the people with the haciendas, I shall be on the side of the people once I obtain power. When Díaz broke that promise he set the stage for social violence.

Beginning in the 1870s, a wave of peasant unrest swept northeastern Mexico. Many of these uprisings were grounded in modern anarchist and socialist notions of class warfare and revolutionary agrarian syndicalism. These ideas reached the Huasteca Potosina through a number of different means, including pamphlets, books, and community organizers as well as through symbolic banners as red and black flags. Many of these ideas were disseminated to the Huastecan peasantry via the revolutionary sermons by a radicalized parish priest Padre Mauricio Zavala.

In the summer of 1879, the Huastecan peasants of San Luis Potosí rose in open and armed defiance against the new agrarian order imposed on them by the policies of Porfirio Díaz in Mexico City and state elites in San Luis Potosí. At Tamazunchale the Nahua and Otomí campesinos demanded the return of lands that had recently been usurped by commercially oriented agricultural estate owners. After years of increasing tensions, the peasants of the tropical highlands, under the leadership of Padre Mauricio Zavala and cacique Juan Santiago, tore down fences and invaded haciendas, seizing lands they felt were rightfully theirs. The rebellion quickly spread to nearby Tanchanhuitz, where Huastecan jornaleros marched through the streets, waving machetes and chanting death to all those who wear pants! The indigenous Huastecos distinguished themselves from the mestizos of the towns by castigating them for wearing Europeanized clothing. When negotiations between the peasants and government failed to bridge the seemingly unbreachable gulf between the native peasants and their creole overlords, the military intervened. A six-year bloodbath ensued, characterized by guerrilla ambushes and scorched-earth counterinsurgency efforts.

From 1880 to 1882, the peasant forces grew in strength, and the movement spread northward within the Huasteca. By the spring of 1882 the campesinos around Ciudad del Maíz, most notably the pueblos of San Nicolás de los Montes and San José, had attacked landowners and estate managers, seized estates, and established de facto pueblo governments. Led by Padre Zavala, who had earned his prestige by heading up a campaign to build locally controlled schools and fighting in the courts for the legal redress of indigenous rights, the peasants demanded the restoration of communal lands that they claimed the great estate owners had usurped from the pueblos during the previous two decades.

Zavala openly advocated what outsiders referred to as anarchism. The form of rural anarchism, or anarcho-agrarianism, advocated by Zavala and other anarchist agraristas, demanded local autonomy from centralized government, seizure and redistribution of agricultural properties by the municipios libres, and cultural autonomy over the educational and religious traditions of indigenous communities. He and his allies proclaimed agrarian socialism in the name of the Mexican nation and created red and black flags that read Agrarian Law and Municipal Government with a red star adjoining the proclamation. Agrarian socialism, a variant of anarcho-agrarianism, advocated the equal distribution of landed resources among collectivized peasant villages and the democratic participation of the indigenous population in decisions about the types of crops to be cultivated. The Huastecan rebels proposed the restructuring of rural society into an egalitarian economic, political, and moral order that would give indigenous people control of property. They justified their rights as children of Mexico and as citizens. Owing to their open challenge to the elite Mexican and foreign estate owners, the peasant revolutionaries constituted an important force for agrarianism and peasant nationalism in nineteenth-century Mexico.

The presence of rural subaltern nationalism in the Huasteca parallels modern examples in China, India, Peru, and other regions of rural Mexico. Chalmers Johnson testifies to the role that peasant participation in national guerrilla wars played in the creation of modern revolutionary movements in Peasant Nationalism and Communist Power, his groundbreaking analysis of the importance of peasant nationalism in the Chinese peasantry’s resistance to the Japanese occupation of the 1930s and 1940s, which then became the basis for the Chinese Communist Party’s ascension to power in the late 1940s. For Johnson, Chinese communism originated during a war that energized a radical nationalist movement among the peasantry, the imposition of Marxist-Leninist ideology being adjunct to Chinese peasant nationalism. David Hardiman provides a subaltern perspective of the emergence of Indian nationalist consciousness in Peasant Nationalists of Gujarat by focusing on the peasantry of Gujarat, the epicenter of Mahat Gandhi’s Indian National Congress. The Gujarat peasantry forged a revolutionary nationalism and actively joined multiclass and multiethnic alliances and shaped a broader political base from which Gandhi’s anticolonial politics emerged. According to Hardiman, this peasant communal base proved crucial to the making of modern India.

In Peasant and Nation, Florencia Mallon uncovers the pivotal role that Peruvian peasants played in the formation of cross-class and cross-ethnic alliances that confronted the Chilean Army during the War of the Pacific (1879–1883) and, in so doing, forged a nationalist consciousness that urban middle class radicals later embraced. During the course of the war, a radicalized nationalism materialized among these peasant-soldiers, whose newly empowered sense of nationalist consciousness then spurred them on to seize lands that had historically belonged to their Indian communities. Mallon further enhances her treatment of the Andean peasantry’s radicalized nationalist consciousness and actions by providing a comparative treatment of the Mexican Indian guerrillas who, in the region of Cuautla, Puebla, participated in armed resistance against the U.S. invasion between 1846 and 1848. In the aftermath of the war, peasant guerrillas occupied local haciendas, as a sense of heightened empowerment manifested itself among the peasant guerrillas, who had internalized nationalist consciousness as a means of promoting an agrarian struggle against their class enemies.²

In Bitter Harvest, Paul Hart also underscores the nationalist discourse that the peasantry of Morelos articulated in Mexico’s wars against the U.S. invasion of 1846 and the French occupation of the 1860s. In the aftermath of the tumultuous wars of the nineteenth century, the rural working class of Morelos drew on modern social and political ideologies to construct a vision of a more humane and inclusive Mexican state. The formation of nationalist discourse among the peasantry of Morelos laid the groundwork for an empowered sense of class consciousness that manifested itself in the ideology of Zapatismo that characterized rural revolts during the Mexican Revolution (1910–1940).

In Peasants, Politics, and the Formation of Mexico’s National State, Peter Guardino provides a pathbreaking history of the peasantry of the state of Guerrero in southwestern Mexico and the impact they had on the formation of Mexico’s political culture during the first half of the nineteenth century. Guardino demonstrates how the peasantry and the rural population actively engaged in and forged various political alliances with elites at the regional and national levels and shaped the outcome of Mexico’s state-building process. For Guardino, the question was not whether there would be a Mexican state but what the