Part 1

In this discussion We’ll look at the end of the colonial era with Mexico’s Wars for Independence, and a few of the ideologies underpinning the new social order.

Task: Read these excerpts from

the Constitution of 1812, promulgated by the Cortes de Cádiz

. (ATTACHED BELOW) In your post, consider how this document embodies liberal ideals. How was this different from the colonial monarchy? 

part 2

Also respond to classmates responses below:

Classmate response 1 

This excerpt represents liberal ideas because it advocates for heightened autonomy from the Crown and outlines individual rights including fair representation of the people in government and freedom for Spaniards to express political beliefs. As discussed in the lecture, the Constitution of 1812 represented Hispanic liberalism because it consisted of concepts such as popular sovereignty, representative government, and the division of powers. To add, the system of government outlined in the document differentiated from the colonial monarchy because it served to limit the power of the King throughout the Spanish mainland and colonies. For instance, the document checked the King’s power because it prevented his ability to dissolve the Cortes or conduct foreign policy without the Cortes’ consent. Overall, the Constitution of 1812 embodied liberal ideas because it both specified personal liberties for those defined as Spanish citizens and held the King at a standard such that he was not above the law.

Classmate response 2

The document expresses liberal ideas because it shows the hispanic liberalism ideals that were discussed in the lecture. It gives independence to the nation and also transforms it into a popular sovereignty while keeping the religious monarchy.  The monarchy and the system of rulers follows the ideas of centralist liberalism which called for autonomy while still having a strong central power. It also follows the ideas of nativism with the new “American” identity as it recognizes citizenship to all those born on the land which differs from the sistema de castas. The new constitution ensured prevention methods to oppression as seen with the elections of deputies to the cortes, these representatives were picked by the people of the area and there was one for “every seventy thousand souls of populations”, emphasizing how people had more say in the new government. All of these aspects differ from the colonial monarchy because the power is not all in the hands of the Spanish who used their previous power to their advantage while denying the indigenous people of their rights and abusing them for labor without anyone checking their power.

YOU MUST USE THE ATTACHED FILES FOR THIS ASSIGNMENT. 

A Nation of Villages
Riot and Rebellion in the Mexican

Huasteca, 1750-1850

Michael T. Ducey

The University of Arizona Press

Tucson

The University of Arizona Press
© 2004 The Arizona Board of Regents

All rights reserved
“ This book is printed on acid-free, archival-quality paper.

Manufactured in the United States of America

09 08 07 06 05 04 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Duccy, Michael Thomas, 1960-

A nation of villages : riot and rebellion in the Mexican Huasteca, 1750-1850 /
Michael T. Duccy.

p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-8165-2383-5 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Peasant uprisings—Mexico—Huasteca Region. 2. Indians of Mexico—

Huasteca Region- Government relations— History— 18th century. 3. Indians of Mexico—
Huasteca Region—Government relations— History— 19th century,

i. Title.
h n i 20.h 8d 83 2004

972′.440049742—dc22
2004004667

Chapter 4

The Illusions of Municipalities

The Politics of Rebellion in Independent Mexico

In 1829 Mexico suffered one of the many foreign invasions that threatened
the nation during the turbulent nineteenth century. Some four thousand
Spanish soldiers under Col. Isidro Barradas, promising to liberate Mexico
from postcolonial anarchy, invaded Tampico. They failed miserably, but
throughout the country the return of Spanish soldiers to Mexican soil caused
alarm. T he minister of external and internal affairs, José Maria Bocanegra,
expressed concern about a pamphlet circulating in the State of Mexico call
ing on the Indians to support the invasion. In a letter to the state legislature,
he worried that the republic had placed additional burdens on the natives
without granting corresponding advantages. “[Njow that they are equal to
all citizens they arc obligated to serve in the military.” 1 T he state Congress
replied somewhat sheepishly that it “had not been able to do all that it had
desired for Indians” owing to the “partisan spirit” that had frustrated the
efforts of the legislature. It then passed a resolution calling for “a just and
egalitarian distribution of land, and what is more, enlightenment for all of
the inhabitants of the state . . . and complete equality before the law, exiling
forever the hateful caste distinctions, that are the principal pillars of this
terrible anarchy.”2

The seditious pamphlets, evidently circulated by a parish priest and a
hacienda administrator fromTlanepantla, did not produce a groundswell of
support in the communities.3 The 1829 invasion did not provoke any pro-
Spanish popular uprisings; to the contrary, it galvanized popular opinion
against Spaniards.4 However, the hurried response of the local legislators
and the fear Bocanegra expressed reflected growing concerns about the im
pact of republican rule on Mexico‘s indigenous population and perhaps a

sense of guilt about the failed promises of the constitutional order. The di
lemma faced by the state Congress mirrors the questions historians have
posed about the new nation. Were the indigenous villagers victimized by the
constitutional rule? Did the disappearance of the paternalist institutions harm
the pueblos and create widespread discontent?

Independence required the creation of a new republican order to replace
the colonial system of corporate identities and racial domination. The cre
ation of a new, liberal order based on individual citizenship was a contested
process in which competing political actors sought to preserve colonial privi
leges even as they used the new constitutional system to their advantage.5
The indigenous communities, the majority of the population at indepen
dence, posed a challenge to the new society of citizens. T he Constitution of
Cádiz and the War of Independence destabilized the old order in rural Mexico
as villagers aggressively sought to claim citizenship in the republic. At the
same time indigenous peasants clung to their identities as “sons of the pueb
los.” T he negotiated settlement that led Olarte and his followers to join the
constitutional order left political power on the local level up for grabs.6

Docs the end of colonial paternalism explain the explosion of regional
rebellions after independence? Historians have often suggested that with the
abolition of colonial institutions, such as the república and the Indian Court,
peasant communities lost the ability to protect their interests. When pueblos
de indios ceased to pay tribute, the government lost its incentive to protect
them, and land-hungry hacendados expanded their holdings at the villagers’
expense. Historians have tended to agree with Bocanegra, concluding that
the new constitutional order worked against the interests of indigenous vil*»
lagers.7 When the municipalities replaced the república de indios, villagers
faced the loss of the ethnically separate local governments that had once
overseen their daily lives. In this chapter I will discuss the fallout from the
constitutional transformation following the establishment of the Mexican
republic.

Indigenous villagers never simply rejected the new state project; rather,
they adopted sophisticated strategies to incorporate the new political reali
ties into their traditional practices. Popular critiques of the new order did
not use the language of colonialism; instead, they used the logic of the liberal
order to challenge the new state. In 1829, Spain’s would-be liberators found
little resonance in rural Mexico because the loyalty of the villagers to the old
order had always been tempered with a hardheaded understanding of the
costs and benefits of the colonial rule. The fact that Mexican liberal politicians

The Illusions of Municipalities / 95

believed Indians would respond to Barradas’s invasion tells us more about
the gap between the rural majority and the rulers than it does about pueblo
attitudes.8

The ambiguities of independence threw the traditional system of subor
dination into question, allowing villagers to seek out new alliances and new
claims to political participation. Indigenous village politics ultimately be
came coupled to the militarized political movements, known as pronun
ciamientos, that frequently destabilized national government. The dizzying
series of barracks uprisings and politicians in uniform have often led to the
conclusion that political life was a question of ambitious military men exert
ing control by virtue of armed might. However, pronunciamientos were not
merely military coups made in the barracks, they were political movements
that incorporated civilian society.9 T he events of the early 1830s reveal the
local roots of political disorder, as the popular rebellions in Papantla (1836-
38) and the caste war (1846-49) illustrate how villagers used the techniques
of pronunciamiento to push their own agendas.

During the nineteenth century the Constitution of Cádiz and later the
Federal Constitution of 1824 replaced the semiautonomous indigenous
repúblicas with ethnically neutral municipal governments. The Constitu
tion of Cádiz encouraged the establishment of town councils in towns with
more than one thousand inhabitants, and in practice the councils sprang up
whereever repúblicas had existed previously.10 The first constitutional pe
riod in Mexico saw the rapid proliferation of local governments, even in the
sujeto communities ofYahualica and Huejutla.11 The colonial order had strictly
limited political rights in the repúblicas such as voting and holding office to
the “sons of the town,” but the new order extended citizenship to all resi
dents. This meant that non-Indian residents could vote, but it also extended
the vote to indigenous villagers who had not been among the privileged few
with “voice and vote” in the traditional governments. The constitution sought
to banish the traditional political identity used by villagers, sons of the town,
and replace it with the enlightened role of citizen.

The creation of the federal republic in 1824 left the states to decide their
internal political structure, including suffrage and the population require
ments for town councils. Three states, Veracruz, Puebla and the State of
Mexico, controlled parts of the Huasteca, and in each of these entities local
legislatures drew back from the expansive rights granted under the Cádiz
Constitution. Veracruz permitted town councils only in pueblos with more
than two thousand residents, Puebla set the limit at three thousand, while

A Nation of Villages / 96

the State of Mexico raised the requirement to four thousand “souls.” 12 The
elimination of the traditional conduits of indigenous political representa
tion, the repúblicas, and the reduction of town councils in the posdndepcndencc
period raise the issue of how Totonacs and Nahuas reacted to what appears
to have been a system designed to exclude them.

T he letter of the law left no role for the old repúblicas ruled by the sons of
the town and their traditional elders, but in practice they continued to func
tion on the submunicipal level, serving an administrative function that the
new governments found indispensable. The initial objective of integrating
the old colonial identities into a single political organism did not become
reality in the villages. Municipalities failed to eliminate repúblicas in part
because they found them to be necessary intermediaries between themselves
and the indigenous population. Traditional forms of government were aban
doned in the town halls of the head towns, only to re-emerge in the outlying
villages and hamlets. The new order superimposed the head-town-versus-
subject-village split on the new dichotomies of town council versus república
de indios and non-Indian versus Indian. T he control of local government
became a critical issue that involved questions of race, particularly in the
larger municipalities where non-Indians dominated the towns. These divi
sions, with their origins in the colonial order, became the basis of rural poli
tics during the turbulent decades of the early nineteenth century. Villagers
continued to support unofficial repúblicas de indios, and they challenged
town councils that sought to intervene in the administration of indigenous
resources. To use a term that Guy Thomson coined: Indian actors adopted
political “bilingualism,” seeking to be both citizens and sons of the town,
manipulating national political discourse to preserve local identities and com
munity resources.13 In a society where political power was not equally dis
tributed, indigenous villagers used the new liberal ideology of the dominant
groups to stake out new political spaces for themselves.

Repúblicas in the Mexican Republic

Although the new order formally “extinguished” the colonial repúblicas de
indios, state constitutions and regulations left day-to-day questions of gov
ernance undecided. The issue of who was to control the land and labor re
sources of the repúblicas was left to locals to resolve. As the paternalist pro
tections of the colonial state faded away, local resources did not immediately
fall into the hands of the non-Indian elite. The first decade of independent

T he Illusions o f Municipalities / 97

rule was a period of experimentation during which villagers sought to use
the new order to defend their interests.

The results of the long insurrection of 1810-21 were ambiguous: the war
created a tradition of lower-class dissidence, but it also provided Creole land-
owners and merchants with powerful new tools. The local elite inherited a
military tradition, and their claim to manage local affairs was not disputed
by the national state. During the war, insurgents had exploited the tensions
between Spanish administrators and the repúblicas de indios as well as
conflicts within the Indian communities themselves to recruit followers. In
dependence and the new political order that accompanied it failed to resolve
the discontent within the communities and raised new political hazards for
the indigenous communities. The change from colonial repúblicas de indios
to municipalities had several implications. The constitutional arrangement
addressed some of the dissatisfaction within Indian communities by increas
ing the autonomy of local government and removing the hated Crown officials
who intervened in república affairs. But the new municipal councils chal
lenged the local traditions of political access permitting non-Indians to in
tervene in communal affairs. These contradictions had their origins in the
coalition that brought old insurgents and Creole royalists together in the
Plan de Iguala. In rural Mexico, the Plan preserved the potentially demo
cratic elements of the new town councils, but it also assured that the local-
elite-turncd-militia-officers would remain powerful.14

Alicia Hernández Chavez has documented the rapid creation of munici
palities in 1813-14 and 1820-21, and Antonio Escobar Ohmstcde has out
lined this process in the Huasteca.1′ Their work illustrates the divergent in
terpretations concerning the changes in local politics. Whereas Hernández
suggests that the councils offered an opportunity for greater political par
ticipation in the new constitutional framework, Escobar stresses the con
struction of a new system meant to dominate the rural population of Mexico.

The new order did not guarantee the easy access of villagers to town offices.
The larger municipalities with significant numbers of non-Indian residents
tended to come under the domination of mestizo and Creole merchants and
landowners, whereas the smaller towns with more homogeneously indigenous
populations tended to elect Indians to municipal posts. In some cases, such
as the Andrades in Huejutla or the Núñez family in Ozuluama, Creole fami
lies came to control local offices for decades at a time. Domination, however,
was not complete, and the privileged non-Indians failed to establish the level
of unquestioned legitimacy enjoyed by the colonial state. Participation in

A Nation of Villages / 98

municipal elections and the right of smaller towns to have independent coun
cils became contested issues in local politics in the decade of the 1820s. The
openness of the new politics of the 1820s declined throughout the decade,
and the protest politics of the 1830s and 1840s reflected the efforts of com
munities to protect what they had won.

To defend their interests, indigenous villagers retained colonial Indian
institutions on an informal basis. Repúblicas de indios continued in practice
to regulate communal life for much of the peasantry. The Indians’ tenacious
attachment to local political traditions created a dual system of authority
where the ancient repúblicas de indios survived at the submunicipal level
and the representatives of the indigenous villagers still presented themselves
as the spokesmen of the 1’común de indígenas. ’’The colonial titles of gobern
ador, gobernador pasado, viejos, pasados, and principales appear on the peti
tions of nineteenth-century villagers, indicating the survival of the tradition
of indigenous government where the elders made decisions even when they
held no official posts.16Rather than simplifying political territory, daily prac
tice laid the new constitutional system over the ancient repúblicas.1*

Indian villagers especially in the sujeto communities, organized as the
común de indígenas, hired lawyers, and initiated lawsuits.18 Petitions from
the Huasteca Hidalguense reveal that the repúblicas de indios now controlled
the indigenous hamlets in the hinterland of each municipality. Often the
leaders of the indigenous repúblicas held low-level posts within the munici
palities as justices of the peace and subregidores. In 1840, the “justices of the
peace, elders, and other natives of the five towns of Huazalingo” initiated a
complaint against their municipal government.19 Other signatories of the
documents included Don Martin Leonardo, past Indian governor, and Don
Diego Martin, justice of the peace of Santo Tomás, the current alderman,
and the “elders of the town of Chiatipan.”20The actors presented themselves
both as officials holding constitutional posts and as representatives of the
“extinguished” república. The repúblicas had always served as the point of
contact between the indigenous world and the “superior government” ; now,
the elders held the posts that served as the nexus between the hamlets and
municipal governments. The shift to a constitutional order merely pushed
the repúblicas out of the head towns and into the sujetos.

One should not confuse this conservatism with a general rejection of change
or an ignorance of the transformed political order.21 The villagers quickly
grasped the utility of constitutional rights in their struggle against the old
colonial taxes. In spite of the new liberal order, local officials sought to retain

The Illusions of Municipalities / 99

the colonial labor draft.22 In the early 1820s, landlords and officials found
that, at first, they could not bend the new municipalities to their will largely
because villagers used the new constitution to resist their efforts to re-create
colonial taxes. These developments point to the emergence of local politi
cians who informed the Indians of their rights. In the decades following the
war villagers struggled to eliminate the colonial obligations, such as unpaid
forced labor (personal service) and local taxes levied only on Indians.

The sujeto towns of Huazalingo submitted a complaint to the provincial
legislature against the alcalde, Ignacio Alarcon, for “failing our sage and adored
constitution.” The villages of Chiatipan, Santo Tomás, San Juan, San Pedro,
and San Agustín pointed out that “article 338 of our wise constitution” pro
hibited the “old contribution,” but Alarcon had continued to collect it and
whipped villagers who refused to pay. T he villagers protested Alarcon’s de
mand of “services without paying even a half real, treating us like slaves,
[and] punishing us with the lash.”23 The rhetoric of resistance to slavery re
calls Olarte’s insurgent language and reveals how widespread the republican
critique of colonial racial categories had become. Indigenous peasants seized
on the promises of the constitution to protest traditional labor demands. In
the Yucatán, for example, Terry Rugeley has noted that villagers immedi
ately began to use their constitutional rights to refuse “Indian” burdens such
as clerical taxes.24 The town councils sought to use the faculties of the old
república system, and in these cases villagers used their new rights to reject
colonial subjugation.

In the states of Veracruz and Mexico six or eight years elapsed between
the establishment of the town governments and the promulgation of regula
tions spelling out how they were to function. Hernández Chávez has noted
that the state constitutions failed to define the municipality’s role, allowing
for “usos y costumbres” to thrive.25 This situation permitted the old repúblicas
staffed by village elders to exercise authority and economic power, at the
same time that the town councils were formally in charge. It also left an
opening for municipalities to claim república practices, such as labor service,
for themselves.

An unambiguous case of the survival of the repúblicas appeared in 1839,
when the residents of the sujetos of Yahualica presented a petition against
the local municipal half-real tax. The signatories included “the justices of
the peace of the visitas [sujetos] and hamlets in Yahualica’s jurisdiction, the
governor of Indians of the same in their own name and in the name of the
commons.” The authors invoked the institutional memory of the indigenous

A Nation of Villages / 100

community when they recalled how the tax originated. “In 1823 the town
council assembled the Indian commons to present a tax project that would
form the municipal fund . . . said tax would have no other use but to pay the
secretary of said council, cover the expenses of the secretariat, and pay the
school teachers. They cheerfully resolved to accept said tax.”26The munici
pality had treated the indigenous community as a separate corporate body
that needed to be consulted before they adopted the tax. The villagers pointed
out that the town council had failed to fulfill its obligation to the visitas since
it had never paid their schoolteachers. They threatened to cease providing
the tax unless the town supported the teachers, insisting that any revenue
left after covering the teachers’ salaries be used to support the reconstruc
tion of their church.27 The “indigenous residents” observed that, while in
the 1820s local governments had sought their consent, by the late 1830s the
councils ignored them.

The story of the 1823 meeting also reveals how indigenous citizens of the
1830s remembered the creation of municipalities. Municipalities needed the
consent of traditional bodies to take over the role of taxman, as if the ex
república was the sovereign constituting body and not an abstract body of
citizens. T he petition artfully manipulated ideas about tradition to claim that
only the Indian community could approve the half-real tax, and therefore,
the commune had the power to revoke it.

In neighboring Huazalingo, a similar protest against payment of the half-
real municipal tax occurred within months of the Yahualica petition.28 Criti
cizing the distribution of resources, the Indians complained that although
they paid the tax, they did not receive the services they expected. Only teach
ers in the head town received salaries from the tax funds while the remote
schools remained vacant.29Town officials required that sujeto village Indians
serve as unpaid mail couriers and imposed fines on Indian children who could
not attend school. The villagers even charged that during the cholera epi
demic the council provided medicine to the head town but denied aid to the
sujetos. “The municipality treats the outlying villages as if we were brutes or
savage Africans without humanity.” 30 In subsequent petitions the villagers
accused the non-Indian officials of “using municipal funds to capitalize their
commerce and lend to other white residents.”31 The prefect in Metztitlán
attributed the political ferment to local non-Indian politicians who were
fishing in troubled waters: Captain José Antonio Lara, a local landlord, and
the parish priest ofYahualica, Don José Rosalino del Rosal.32These cases dem
onstrate several elements repeated on a grander scale during the political

The Illusions of Municipalities / 101

disorders of the 1830s and 1840s. In all of these tax conflicts, the divisions
that emerged were both ethnic and territorial. The petitioners originated
from the municipal hinterlands and challenged the distribution of power
between their largely Indian hamlets and the more mestizo head towns.

These cases also suggest that the decade of the 1820s witnessed an open
ing of the political system during which local communities explored the new
system of constitutional rights, ethnic equality, and town councils. The num
ber of petitions and conflicts over tax burdens and resource distribution in
the 1830s suggests growing disillusionment with the ethnically neutral mu
nicipality. During the 1830s indigenous villagers entrenched themselves in
traditional forms of government in the visita hamlets as they lost influence
in the town councils. In the process, villagers living in the hamlets had more
control and contact with the repúblicas than in colonial times. In other words,
the repúblicas of the national period were not merely the old colonial insti
tutions. They were more sujeto oriented and probably more indigenous than
had been their predecessors.

Communal Resources

Land tenure was one aspect of indigenous life that demonstrates the compli
cated relationship between the republican order and the colonial past. In the
G ulf lowlands Indians continued to control land and even expand the amount
they had at their disposal. Furthermore, control over land continued to be
governed by indigenous traditions. In spite of laws passed by the state legis
latures in Veracruz and the State of Mexico, land continued to be held and
administered by the “común de indígenas.” Village land use offers a con
crete example of how local traditions transformed the liberal impulse of the
new republican state.

Beginning with the ideologues of the Mexican Revolution, historians have
assumed that peasant access to land declined after independence. The two
systematic studies of nineteenth-century revolts by Leticia Reina and Jean
Meyer attributed much of the conflict to land disputes and to the abolition
of paternalist forms of government.33 John Tutino’s work was one of the first
to break with this interpretation when he pointed out that both peasant vil
lagers and small-scale tenants on private lands increased their landholdings
after independence. He labels the years prior to 1850 a period of “agrarian
decompression.”34 The agrarian history of the Huasteca tends to confirm
Tutino’s findings. The cases described below demonstrate that communities

A Nation of Villages / 102

successfully expanded their holdings by purchase, judicial initiatives, and
sometimes by outright invasions. At the same time the private estates of the
region continued to languish, with little investment and marginal connec
tions to national and international markets.35 The large-scale peasant rebel
lions reflected the weakness of the landowning class, not its aggressiveness.

The liberal project sought to simplify land tenure, replacing the particular
arrangements of large communal holdings with individually owned private
plots. But the uniform territorial division for rural Mexico that lawmakers
envisioned did not emerge until the late nineteenth century. Throughout the
early republican period village practices based on colonial law regulated the
lives of communal farmers. Even as state legislatures promulgated new poli
cies along liberal lines, villagers, assisted by the new municipalities, main
tained and increased the agricultural space governed by the old communal
rules.

A review of village titles in the State ofVeracruz reveals that communities
continued to hold their land well into the Porfiriato and that in many cases
during the early nineteenth century, peasant communities bought land. In
1826 the ex-marquesa of Uluapan sold the hacienda of Buenavista to the
indigenous villagers of Temapache, who had previously exploited the same
lands as tenants. According to the bill o f sale, the marquesa sold the 15,380
hectares estate for 3,120 silver pesos. The Indians raised the money with a
collection of 20 pesos from each of 187 community members.36 Ixcatepec
also assured its access to land by means of the purchase of an 18,695-hectare
estate for the price of 7,500 pesos in 1867.37 In theTotonac town of Coxquihui,
the villagers bought the large fertile lands of Comalteco with a payment of
1,200 pesos worth of zarzaparrilla (sarsaparilla) collected by the entire com
munity in i835.38In this last case, the records specify the role of the tradi
tional república in mobilizing the community to collect the payment and
carry out the purchase.

Reports from the early nineteenth century indicate the private owners of
large estates had great difficulty making their properties productive. Gen
eral Guadalupe Victoria, the insurgent and first president of the Federal
Republic of Mexico, demonstrated the problems confronting would-be land
monopolists. Victoria must have recognized the potential land bargains to be
had in Veracruz when he served as an insurgent leader in the region and
began to buy up properties during his term in office.30 He purchased the
huge estates of El Jobo in Tlapacoyan, Asunción and Santiago de la Peña in
Tuxpan, and Piedra Grande in Misantla, among other properties.40 The

The Illusions of Municipalities / 103

amount of land concentrated in these estates is astounding: the Tuxpan es
tates consisted of approximately 84,000 hectares and the titles for Piedra
Grande estimated its size at 31,500 hectares. Yet in spite of his considerable
political and military connections, he was never able to transform them into
successful agricultural enterprises, and after his death his heirs sold the ha
ciendas, often at lower prices than what Victoria had paid.41 Victoria faced the
same problems as all local hacendados: he had plenty of land but not enough
labor, and his estates were under-capitalized, far from potential markets, and
bereft of the infrastructure to take advantage of any potential demand for
their products. As Emilio Kouri has noted, the size of estates in northern
Veracruz was not a sign of their economic power but a reflection of the back
wardness of the local economy.42

The fate of one of the Victoria properties revealed the ambiguities of
postindependence roles of town councils and community landholding. Victoria
paid three thousand pesos in 1827 to the de Acosta family for Piedra Grande,
an estate that bordered the communal lands of Misantla. T he seven heirs of
the family owned the property collectively, and six of them sold their shares
to Victoria while the last, Joaquin Mariano de Acosta, retained his part.43 In
1845 the executor of Victoria’s estate, Francisco de Paula, tried to sell the
property to one of the descendents of the de Acostas, Gabriel de Acosta (for
a thousand pesos less than the original purchase price). However, the town
council prevented the sale because it “prejudiced the residents of this mu
nicipality,” and offered to buy the land for the same price. Gabriel de Acosta
deferred to “the interest of the common good,” and conceded the sale to the
town. His willingness may reflect the fact that residents of the town had
already invaded the land: enforcing his possession would have been costly if
not impossible.44 Townspeople had long established vainillares on the prop
erty, and the members of the council sought to protect the producers be
cause of the important role they played in the town’s economy.45

The Misantla case also points to the apparently widespread practice of
squatting on private land. These invasions appear to have been unopposed
by the landlords, and they appear in the documentary record only when there
arc attempts to enforce property rights, often decades after the invasion oc
curred. Indian villagers invaded lands of the hacienda of Jamaya in the mu
nicipality of El Espinal in 1841, and the owners’ effort to dislodge them
lasted for more than forty years.44’ Since land was plentiful and labor was
scarce, landowners may have tolerated squatters to attract potential labor
ers.47 In this context, landowners reached a modus vivendi with villagers that

A Nation of Villages / 104

stressed good relations with peasants rather than a strict adherence to prop
erty laws. These events suggest that even men of modest means had oppor
tunities to win new access to land during the years of the early republic. In
short, the political effervescence of the period was not the result of an agrar
ian crisis.

Land use during the fifty years after independence provides evidence about
the relations between new republican forms of governance and the weight of
custom. T he republican states granted municipalities power over the admin
istration of communal lands, but town officers proved unable or unwilling to
alter traditional land use. Central to understanding how nineteenth-century
villagers actually used the land is the fact that there were different kinds of
lands destined for different uses.48 The fondo legal consisted of the original
“six hundred yards square” that served as the town site where villagers had
their home sites. Most of the land held by communities in the Huasteca
belonged to two categories: the propios and the tierras de repartimiento. The
propios were properties held by the community and rented out as a source of
revenue. Most peasant agriculture took place on the tierras de repartimiento.
As the name implied, the villages divided these lands into individual plots
assigned to specific families. Peasants had a strong sense of ownership over
their specific plots, passing them from father to son. When the government
finally enforced the division of these lands into individual plots in the 1880s
and 1890s, peasant farmers complained that the boundaries drawn by the
surveyors did not conform to traditional usage.49

The manner in which the villages and municipalities administered differ
ent categories of land is very revealing. Although both the State of Mexico
and Veracruz passed legislation granting municipalities control of commu
nal lands and abolishing the existence of the traditional república de indios,
control of property did not simply fall into the hands of the town councils.50
The new municipalities inherited the fondo legal and propios, absorbing the
rental revenue into their budgets. Following colonial precedents, the mu
nicipalities rented out the land to members of the local elite and to individu
als with influence in local government. Documents from the Huejutla’s ju
dicial archive yield several examples where the Andrades and Larios families
rented estates for long periods at low rates.sl Thus, local elites already en
joyed large portions of the “communal” lands, but this was not a new devel
opment in the nineteenth century.

In contrast, the tierras de repartimiento remained outside of the adminis
tration of the local councils. While the law gave municipalities formal control

T he Illusions of Municipalities / 105

over the repartimiento lands, in practice the peasant traditions regulated ac
cess. Local government attempts to administer repartimiento land produced
revealing results. When the national government adopted a land tax to pay
for the Texas war, municipalities had to assess the value of all rural proper
ties (both private and communal) within their jurisdictions and collect a tax
of three one-thousandths of the land’s value. Metztitlán tried to carry out a
survey of who used the community land and failed completely. T he prefect,
José M. de Ahedos, discovered that the municipality had no census of those
using the property, and when he tried to interview the Indian farmers they
simply denied possession of the land in order to avoid the tax.52

A dispute in one of the hamlets of Metztitlán, Tcmazola, demonstrates
the conflicts between the town council and Indians over the rights to admin
ister communal property. T he hamlet residents charged that the municipal
ity had rented out part of their lands, “contrary to the laws that protect the
rights of property that regulate communal lands.”53 The petitioners asserted
that the council did not have any authority over repartimiento lands. The
hamlet residents used the argument that communal land was owned by specific
people in the commons, not the municipal government. The council and the
district prefect did not dispute this logic; rather, they argued that the land in
dispute had not been part of the traditional communal lands. The prefect
insisted the parcel in dispute was unoccupied “vacant” land while the town
officers replied that the petitioners had only recently started exploiting the
land and were not the hereditary occupants of TemazoIa.54The case revolved
around whether the petitioners were comuneros and whether the land was
repartimiento. No one suggested that the council had the right to dispose of
the land because it was communal. Both local government and popular prac
tice considered traditional usage of land “hereditary” in ways usually associ
ated with private property.

The administration of land demonstrates that indigenous communities
clung to traditional practices independent of the new municipalities. At the
same time peasant land use vigorously expanded at the expense of private
estates, often with the assistance of local town councils. Republican institu
tions did not upset traditional patterns of land use, and in some spectacular
cases the town councils acted to extend the amount of land at the disposal of
peasants. Within the tierras de repartimiento villagers managed their own
affairs, and administrators encountered only frustration when they attempted
to intervene.

A Nation of Villages / 106

The Structure of Discontent: Head Towns and Hamlets

The conflicts over the imposition of tax burdens, labor drafts and the distri
bution of the benefits government services followed deep divisions in rural
society. There were new stresses as well since state governments had left the
prefects’ powers over the local municipalities ill-defined, resulting in fre
quent tensions between prefects and the municipalities.55 In 1835, the estab
lishment of a centralist republic created deeper divisions when it raised the
minimum number of inhabitants required for a town to have an independent
municipality. This action abolished dozens of town councils and eliminated
one of the political benefits resulting from the institution of constitutional
rule.

Challenges to the old colonial head towns sometimes accompanied the
establishment of the municipalities. In 1822, the town of Huazalingo experi
enced several disorders when a sujeto town, San Francisco, refused to recog
nize the municipal government because of a new tax levied to fund salaries
for the new municipal officers. T he council wrote the provincial legislature
requesting guidance on whether the “six towns where there is only a regidor
should recognize this municipality or govern themselves.” In a fine example
of the ambiguities of the constitutional transition the legislature approved
the taxes imposed by the town but postponed any decision on the relation
between the new town council and the hamlets pending the state’s constitu
tional convention.5f>During the decade of the twenties municipalities sought
to define their powers over the indigenous populations of the subject towns,
while the villagers disputed the privileges claimed by district and head town
officials.

Political divisions at the district level help explain how villagers mobi
lized. In Huazalingo, villagers complained about the treatment they received
at the hands of the district officials in Yahualica and requested a change of
jurisdiction to Huejutla, pointing out that former town was farther away and
much less prosperous than HuejutIa.S7The district seat officials dismissed
their pleas, charging that Francisco Ugalde, a landowner and justice of the
peace in Huazalingo, had manipulated the Indians into initiating the petition
because he wanted to increase the influence of Huejutla for his own reasons.
The Ugalde family was related by marriage to the influential Andrade clan
of Huejutla. Using the oft-repeated refrain, Yahualica dismissed the peti
tion, stating that “the Indians are just machines mobilized by any upstart’s
desire.” In spite of this view of Indians as mere political cattle led from one

T he Illusions o f Municipalities / 107

I

Í 7»

cause to the next, when Yahualica officials assembled them the villagers re
fused to withdraw their petition. In a second petition, Huazalingo persisted
in its request and added complaints that the town council was abusing the
people promoting the change.5H

If the number of petitions and complaints to the state governments is any
indication, the decades of the 1830s and 1840s saw heightened tensions be
tween head town and hinterland. Indian hamlets of Huejutla— Vinasco,
Xuchil, Tetlama, and Santa Cruz— petitioned the state government for tax
relief on the grounds that they did not receive any benefits from the munici
pal taxes they paid in 1843. They asserted that town officials diverted funds
for their own use and did not send teachers to their communities.59The town
council responded by presenting the state government with accounts of its
expenditures indicating that while funds were not used for personal gain,
they were spent to serve the municipal seat, principally on cabecera schools
and on paving streets.60 That the municipality found funds for paving stones
but not for hiring teachers in the hamlets reveals much about the council’s
priorities. The town authorities dismissed the complaints as signs of Indian
backwardness. Although the subprefect sought to make the dissidents look
like country bumpkins, describing them as “enemies of the comfort and
beautification of the town,”6′ in fact, the dissidents were careful to couch
their criticisms in modern liberal terms. The discourse of the peasants was
not reactionary; rather, they claimed to be actively pursuing the liberal goal
of education.

Subprefect Viniegra saw the petitions merely as the result of the machi
nations of a justice of the peace, Antonio Núñez, rather than as the legiti
mate expressions of the rural inhabitants.62Judge Núñez reportedly used the
threat of a possible rebellion to give emphasis to his complaints/’3 Viniegra
reminded his superiors that the insubordination was not only a local affair
since the tax protest affected all revenue collection and that income from the
national “direct contribution” declined along with the municipal taxes.

Another traditional burden that the head towns continued to impose was
personal labor service, a tax levied exclusively on Indian villagers.64 The
municipalities of the thirties and forties used this prerogative, formerly be
longing to the colonial repúblicas, to augment municipal budgets. In Huejutla,
for example, the council rebuilt the parish church in 1843 at almost no ex
pense because “the Indians of the town seat did the work for free.”65 The
labor draft was also an indication of how the non-Indian-dominated coun
cils sought to keep certain elements of the old colonial order intact for their

A Nation of Villages / 108

own benefit. The flurry of official complaints in the early twenties bemoan
ing the end of personal service gave way to Indian villagers protesting
colonialism’s return in the thirties. Differences in taxes and labor demands
based on ethnicity were extremely contentious and continued to be one of
the issues that mobilized villagers.^Thc early nineteenth century did not see
rural discontent over a precocious liberalism alienating village land; rather,
the protest language of the villagers stressed a persistence of colonialism.

Efforts to limit the power and independence of local government accom
panied the attempt to establish centralist rule. In 1835, the centralists re
placed elected state governments with “departments” ruled by governors
appointed from Mexico City. Centralist policy raised the minimum popula
tion required for the formation of municipalities, thereby reducing the num
ber of local elected councils. Effectively, the new administration eliminated
all councils save those in the district seats where the prefects resided. The
leading conservative intellectual and advocate of centralism, Lucas Alamán,
charged that demagogues easily exploited municipalities to gain support of
the common people/’7 Centralists hoped that by eliminating town councils
they could limit the ability of radicals to organize the lower classes. Central
ists believed that the municipalities were too “popular” in nature, noting
that the social origins of the council members made them untrustworthy.
Complaints about the “popular” characteristics of local officials were often a
coded way of speaking about ethnicity. Fears about illiterate alcaldes holding
the reins of judicial authority disturbed urban elites. Conservatives sought
to restore ethnic boundaries that characterized colonial government, where
Indian society would be semiautonomous but clearly subordinate to non-
Indian administrators.

The Politics of Pronunciamientos:
National Plans and Local Actors

During the late 1820s and early 1830s armed movements organized around a
political “plan” or pronunciamiento became the most common method for
changing presidents, ministers, or policies. Although the traditional histori
ography has tended to see these events as barrack politicians competing for
control of the national treasury, there is an emerging consensus that pronun
ciamientos reflected more than unbridled personal ambition. They involved
a political process that incorporated municipalities as actors and often began
with civilian leadership/’* Others stress that the participants in the chaotic

The Illusions of Municipalities / 109

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politics of the period had serious objectives when they promoted these plans.6<>
Movement organizers sent their “plans” to municipal councils throughout
the republic, seeking support from “public opinion.” In these communiques,
the leaders asked local politicians to “second” their political principles. This
process made municipal intervention in national politics one of the salient
characteristics of nineteenth-century Mexico. Pronunciamientos invited
municipalities to speak for the nation.

In exchange for support, leaders of pronunciamientos often sought to
address the immediate concerns of villages. In a letter written to explain
Mexico’s complicated politics of disorder to the commander of the French
invaders of the 1860s, Marshall Francois Bazaine, one observer noted that
rebel leaders were always able “to encourage the illusions and simplicity of
one or another municipality promising unrealizable rewards.”70 In the 1832
pronunciamiento, the movement’s leaders offered to fulfill one of the aspira
tions of Pueblo Viejo’s merchants and open the port to international trade.
Small-town Mexico became a source of support for these movements as poli
ticians offered to address local demands with projects such as establishing
new political jurisdictions (new municipalities, prefectures, or judgeships),
tax relief, and, in the case of this region, the creation of a new state of the
Huasteca. National leaders also sought to appeal to regional sentiment by
supporting statehood for the Huasteca. Local politicians sometimes used
national plans to attach statehood proposals. Movements for statehood were
frequent, occurring in 1832,1837,1838,1852,2nd 1853, but they all failed.71

During the second decade of independent rule, Mexico entered a politi
cal crisis that resulted in the abandonment of its first federal constitution
and the creation of a centralist republic, that subsequently collapsed as war
with the United States approached in 1846. In the twenty-five years that
followed independence only one head of state finished his term in office
(Guadalupe Victoria), and pronunciamientos even marred the end of his presi
dency when radical politicians successfully challenged the 1828 electoral re
sults.72 Political mobilizations outside of constitutional channels became the
method of effecting change in the new republic. In this final section I con
sider how local political actors mobilized followers around national political
plans and local incentives to better understand how politics changed at the
regional level during this era of upheavals.

Beginning in the late 1820s the ideological lines between radical federal
ists and conservative centralists emerged and became the dividing lines asso
ciated with local politics as well. To summarize national events quickly, in

A Nation of Villages / 110

1828 the hero of the insurgency, General Vicente Guerrero, carried out a
successful uprising to ensure that he was elected to the presidency. Guerrero’s
term was interrupted in 1830 by General Anastasio Bustamante’s conserva
tive pronunciamiento.

Whereas Guerrero had been the champion of the radical federalists with
strong ties to the humble segment of the population, the Bustamante gov
ernment was markedly conservative in tone and presented itself as the voice
of moderation against the mob. The tone of the new administration was also
reflected in new electoral regulations that restricted suffrage.73 In the name
of the restoration of order, the new administration began to remove state
governors, effectively undermining the federalist pact. After two years of
conservative administration, General Antonio López de Santa Anna, in asso
ciation with prominent federalists such as Valentín Gómez Farias, organized
the “Plan ofVeracruz” and successfully overthrew Bustamante’s administra
tion. Once in office Santa Anna gradually moved to a centralist position,
culminating in the suspension of the federal constitution in 1835.

The rapid succession of presidents in uniform and the ability of charac
ters such as Santa Anna to switch sides from radical federalist to conserva
tive centralist gave the impression that Mexican politics were personalist
and driven by the ambition of military warlords. Although Mexicans resorted
to violence and the military participated, all of the leaders acted in the name
of republican institutions. The generals did not rule as military dictators,
using the army in lieu of congresses and town councils. Generals were poli
ticians, and civilians plotted coups along with them. Ideological issues were
at stake, and the pronunciamientos forced Mexican politicians to choose be
tween centralism and federalism. The coups and counterrebellions also served
to define how the constitutional question related to issues that were not at
first directly tied to the problem, such as voting rights, mass politics, and
even anticlericalism. Finally, the divisions evident in the national events soon
became burned into the political realities of small-town Mexico, including
the Huasteca.

T he pronuniciamientos in the Huasteca became more violent and local
society became polarized over national political questions during these years.
In the events of 1828 and 1830 the towns of the region merely “seconded”
the revolts in favor of Guerrero and Bustamante. This situation changed dra
matically in 1832 when the “plan” against Bustamante’s administration turned
into a genuine civil war. The port region of Pueblo Viejo and Tampico played
an important role in the national movement, especially after General Esteban

The Illusions of Municipalities / h i

Moctezuma, an officer with federalist connections and a member of a
landowning family from the Huasteca Potosina, joined the fray. One of the
critical issues that General Moctezuma resurrected to win local support was
the creation of a Huastccan state, which would also have increased autonomy
as a “free and sovereign” participant in a federalist system.74 Evidently, the
call for statehood appealed to the prefect of Huejutla, Ignacio Martinez, who
had previously proclaimed his loyalty to Bustamante. He joined the rebel
lion on 16 April 1832 and began to solicit other towns in the district. The
quickest to “second” Huejutla were not Huejutla district towns but the in
digenous towns of Tamazunchale, Xilitla, and Chalpulhuacán. All of these
communities lay outside of Huejutla’s jurisdiction and joined over the oppo
sition of their own prefects. Chalpulhuacán revolted only after its prefect,
who resided in the mestizo town of Jacala, declared his loyalty to Bustamante.
The bustamantista subprefect of Jacala wrote the state capital begging for
assistance to put down the revolt since the Chalpulhuacán Indians were
“people without civilization or politics” and would destroy Jacala if they
were not stopped.75 These events suggest that the villagers made an alliance
with Huejutla against their immediate superiors for reasons of local geography.

Town councils and prefects promoted the rebellions, raising the men and
propagating the rebel message throughout the region. Several interesting
geographic patterns emerged during these events that were to remain con
stants throughout the 1830s. Huejutla and Yahualica tended to line up be
hind the federalist movements while Metztitlán and Zacualtipán tended to
remain loyal to Bustamante and the centralist politicians. During the subse
quent revolts in the 1830s the story repeated itself; a political line divided
the eastern region federalists from the west, with its centralist ties. Not sur
prisingly, tensions between head town and subject towns also appeared in
the rebellions, with subject towns often dissenting from the political alle
giances of their head towns.

Personalities increasingly became attached to specific ideological positions.
Towns challenged prefects with the aim of placing their own favored sons in
the post. Huejutla administrators such as Cristóbal Andrade and Ignacio
M artinez became the local advocates of popular federalism while José
Gregorio Morales and José Licona of Zacualtipán became the representa
tives of the centralists. Personal ambition motivated many of the partici
pants in these events. Morales challenged the federalist administrators of
Zacualtipán in 1832, probably because he coveted the post of subprefect. By
confronting the local federalists, he became closely tied to the centralist cause.

A Nation of Villages / 112

The tradition of “turncoats” that is often ascribed to local politicians is not
confirmed by these events. Officials had a hard time remaining neutral. The
dilemmas faced by a local opportunist may be observed in the career of Félix
Arenas, the subprefect of Zacualtipán in 1832. Arenas tried to play both sides
in 1832, pledging his support to the government even as he maintained cor
respondence with the federalist Ignacio Martinez.76 Arenas’s loyalty was
largely determined by whoever had the most troops in the area. Distrusting
his duplicity, the local bustamantistas ousted him, and during subsequent
years Arenas was wholly in the federalist camp, later serving that party as a
Huejutla prefect. In 1834, local federalists (including Arenas) also remained
loyal to their faction even after their national allies in government had col
lapsed. Furthermore, there was no “live and let live” attitude toward the
defeated party. Subsequent to each pronunciamiento the victors often initi
ated legal proceedings against their opponents to punish abuses they com
mitted during the disorders.77 Choosing sides became imperative during these
events, and the side one chose had serious consequences.

After the victorious pronunciamiento of 1832 a federalist government led
by Santa Anna and Gómez Farias took office. Under the influence of Gómez
Farias the administration undertook ambitious reforms to limit the power of
the church and the army in Mexican society. The reforms provoked vehe
ment opposition, and even before they were implemented Generals Gabriel
Duran and Mariano Arista organized unsuccessful rebellions against them.
They had better luck in 1834 when they issued the “Plan of Cuernavaca.”
From the start the movement enjoyed the tacit support of Santa Anna, and
there was little doubt of its success. To use a modern term for the event, it
was an “auto-golpea political-military movement organized by the chief
executive to get rid of a congress that was not to his liking. By this method
Santa Anna aligned himself with the more conservative elements of Mexican
society and repudiated the anticlerical and antimilitary reforms that had be
gun in 1833.78

While on the national level the Cuernavaca Plan was a dispute between
the executive and the radical congress, it had a state and municipal dimen
sion. In the State of Mexico, Santa Anna encouraged the garrison of Toluca
(the state capital) to overthrow the governor and close the state legislature
because of its sympathies for the federal congress.79 The new state govern
ment supported the Cuernavaca Plan and even sent Arenas, then serving as
prefect of Huejutla, directions to “second the said plan in all of your district.”80
Santa Anna expected that once the political change had been imposed on

The Illusions of Municipalities / 113

the capital and the national congress, the small-town politicians would fol
low suit. The Huasteca events demonstrated that in spite of the strong man’s
control of the army, local politicians did not simply fall into line behind him.
The assault on the federal system provoked bitter ideological conflicts in
rural Mexico. Local administrators refused to follow orders and endorse the
plan of Cuernavaca, creating a miniature civil war in the Huejutla and
Metztitlán districts. It was a repeat of the 1832 war, with Huejutla holding
out for federalism and Metztitlán-Zacualtipán supporting Santa Anna.

Local political actors adopted the ideological positions of the national
movements as they pushed for control of local administrative offices. This
was a prominent feature of the 1833 and 1834 movements in which local
centralists linked their movement with Catholic religious orthodoxy. M o
rales and Licona joined with parish priests in Huazalingo and Zacualtipán
(Rafael Martínez de Aragón and José Ordaz) to carry out a cultural counter
revolution, ordering that municipal councils begin each meeting with a mass
and that the schools teach the Catholic catechism in each town they occu
pied.’1 It was a kind of armed propaganda for the conservative cause, forcing
town councils to pledge their loyalty to the Catholic Church. Prefect Arenas
responded to their clerical fervor by stating that the State of Mexico had
never attacked the church. It seems that the anticlerical policies (or at least
the anticlerical reputation) of Gómez Farias generated resentment in some
of the small towns. However, it is interesting to note that some of the munici
pal declarations of support for the plan of Cuernavaca specified that they
were in favor of annulling only the religious reforms and not changing the
form of government.82 Even the councils that supported the plan did not
adhere to the anti federalist tone of the movement and modified the language
of their declarations to clarify that “public opinion” remained loyal to the
federal system. The church became a major issue in politics as federalists
increasingly saw priests as agents of centralism. Arenas, for example, ordered
the arrest of several parish priests in an attempt to stem the tide of the
Cuernavaca Plan.

The conflicts were not only ideological, since they soon became entangled
in the Huasteca’s political geography. As in the events of 1832, towns lined
up supporting either Huejutla in the east or Metztitlán in the west as the seat
of the district prefect. Huejutla tried to suppress the subprefecture of
Metztitlán under the federalists, and after the triumph of the Cuernavaca
Plan the conservative government rewarded its supporters by raising the sta
tus of the subprefect of Metztitlán to prefect (while Huejutla was demoted

A Nation o f Villages / 114

to a subprefecture).81 Even the local parish priests divided along geographi
cal lines, with the priests of Zacualtipán, Xochiacoatlán, and Huazalingo
denouncing the parish priest of Huejutla as an “enemy of order” (i.c., as a
supporter of the Gómez Farias government). Huejutla residents succeeded
in getting the bishop of Mexico to arrest Martínez de Aragón and Jose Ordaz
in September 1834 on charges of abuses that stemmed from their participa
tion in the pronunciamiento.84

Control of town councils became the objective of the successive plans.
Leaders of the movements overturned the councils, as in 1834 when Mo
rales and Licona reinstalled the municipal officers from the 1832 Bustamante
period.83 As Morales’s armed followers marched through the Huasteca vil
lages, he convened community meetings to “second” their movement. The
latter case also points to the limits of interpreting the popular will on the
basis of municipal declarations since witnesses later denounced the coerced
nature of the “votes” that Morales sponsored.86 Arenas, Morales’s federalist
opponent, ordered the arrest of the councils of Yahualica and Xochiatipán
when they joined the Cuernavaca Plan in 1834. Sometimes towns vacillated
according to which way the wind was blowing or which armed mob was clos
est. Such seems to have been the attitude of Molango during 1832 when the
town switched sides in response to the arrival of competing armed factions.87
Thus, the political turmoil of the period was not an abstraction to Huastecan
villagers: pronunciamiento had become the means of rearranging regional
political relations.

Pedro Carrion, the prefect who came to power as a result of the plan of
Cuernavaca, dismissed popular participation in the conflicts. He believed
that the people adhered only “to the personages and not the causes.”88This
common description of nineteenth-century politics obscures the issues of
power that were often described in personalist terms. T he question of where
a prefecture or a municipality has its seat may seem an insignificant issue to
modern observers, but local governments controlled key economic resources
at the center of peasant life. Access to courts, assuring a favorable hearing in
civil disputes, and guaranteeing that a friendly patron continued guiding the
interests of one’s home town seem to have come into villagers’ calculations
during the upheavals of the thirties. Competing factions made frequent prom
ises in an effort to build coalitions strong enough to overcome their oppo
nents. Pronunciamientos were by no means mass movements, but they in
troduced villagers to the process of armed politics and also elevated the role
of local government in the political voice of the nation.

The Illusions of Municipalities / 115

The national politics of violence became part of the political memory of
the towns. Villagers remembered the political affiliations of the local leader
ship and used that knowledge to their advantage. In 1838, when villagers in
Ilmatlán became embroiled in a dispute over taxes with the alcalde of
Chicontepec, Juan Maria Meriotegui, they sought to win the sympathy of
the conservative governor by accusing Meriotegui of having been a radical
federalist for his role in the 1832 revolt against the Bustamante government.89
Villagers learned the value of political allegiances and that political leverage
could be won by participating in national politics.

Pronunciamientos sought the support of municipal governments because
they gave them political legitimacy. Town councils became the unofficial or
gans of “public opinion” from the earliest days of the War of Independence.
Hispanic legal tradition saw town councils as the original organs of popular
sovereignty, so it was quite natural for politicians to appeal to the councils
when they sought to rewrite the social contract. Timothy Anna has noted
that the Federal Republic constructed its sovereignty as a series of concen
tric circles with the pueblos at the center.90 When town councils spoke in
“the name of the patria”91 during a pronunciamiento, it was not hyperbole.
The councils claimed the constitutive role that existed in Hispanic law and
Mexican political practice. During the 1830s the popularization of “public
opinion” occurred. Indigenous villagers found that they, too, could express
their desires in the context of national political movements by influencing
municipal institutions they knew intimately. The fact that pronunciamientos
relied on town councils to propagate their movements also explains why poli
ticians concerned about social disorder sought to limit the number of mu
nicipalities. By supporting revolts, town councils assumed powers similar to
those of a constituent assembly: they claimed the right to construct the state,
not just administer its dictates.

Pronunciamientos gave peasants and rancheros ample evidence of inter
nal elite discord. Contending groups of merchants and landowners struggled
for control of political offices. As regional political actors formed alliances,
national political divisions came to have concrete and personal meanings in
the countryside. On one level, elite conflict had its origins in the fragmented
nature of the colonial elite. Stevens suggests that royal policy “promoted
and controlled social discord to maintain royal power,” which in turn im
peded the formation of a united ruling class.92 But in more immediate terms
divisions also thrived in the lowlands because the elite was economically weak
and geographically diffuse. The limitations of the men at the pinnacle of

A Nation of Villages / 116

lowland society were exacerbated because they did not defer to any one eco
nomic “center.” Men of means lived on their estates or in the small towns of
the region (none of which exceeded ten thousand inhabitants), and as a re
sult few saw any reason to cede authority to a regional center.93 Unlike the
wealthy elite that dominated the sugar estates of Morelos, landowners in the
Huasteca were slow to form a united front to press their own interests.

The failure of the local elite to create a state to represent their region is
perplexing, raising questions about how the inhabitants thought about poli
tics and identity. While it was easy to mobilize around municipal politics and
even district-level political ties, Huasteca-wide movements were rare. It is
revealing that perhaps the only regionwide movement to emerge during the
early republic was the “caste war” that spread across the state boundaries of
Veracruz, Puebla, Mexico, and San Luis Potosí. Even here, as we shall sec,
the movement followed different rhythms in different parts of the Huasteca.
The landlords and merchants failed to sustain a statehood movement, and
no populist caudillo emerged to lead one from below. The creation of the
State of Guerrero, described by Peter Guardino, demonstrates that a popu
list alternative of state formation was not impossible.94 Nor can we say that a
Huastccan caudillo (of any political persuasion) emerged to impose his will
over the entire region. Thus, while different groups pushed for the forma
tion of a new state or lobbied for increased commercial opportunities, intraelitc
competition caused the projects to fail. In spite of their close kinship ties and
economic similarities, the great landlords failed to coalesce around a com
mon project or even agree to a common caudillo.95

One element that may have inhibited caudillo development was the ab
sence of a preexisting provincial government. As Charles Walker has pointed
out, the conservative caudillo Agustín Gamarra of Cuzco relied not only on
the historic memory of Cuzco’s regional status, but also skillfully used the
preexisting machinery of the state to solidify his authority and promote a
regional project.% Another model of caudillo creation, in which a politician
cultivates a following among the masses, also failed to materialize.

Conclusions

The War of Independence ended in a stalemate that granted concessions to
the insurgents but left the power of the local royalists intact. The constitu
tionalism that the Huastecos embraced did not usher in an era of direct popu
lar rule. Furthermore, as Guardino has argued, the emergence of centralism

The Illusions of Municipalities / 117

saw a systematic effort to limit the effects of a broad franchise and the prolif
eration of town councils.97 Members of the colonial merchant and landown
ing class generally controlled the most important offices, especially those of
prefect (or jefe politico).

In spite of the vitality of the local ruling class, the new order cannot be
dismissed as merely neocolonial domination. Villagers survived and success
fully frustrated the centralist project utilizing the new tools of republican
citizenship and the traditional mechanisms of peasant resistance. These may
be observed in the villagers’ ability to retain informal communal organiza
tions in the shadow of the new constitutional order, what Hernández Chávez
called the persistence of “usos y costumbres.” The repúblicas de indios did
not disappear; rather, they moved to the hinterlands of the municipalities
where peasant agricultural production followed customary patterns. “Ex
república” officials acted as spokesmen to defend the interest of the village.
It was true, as the minister of relations Bocanegra noted in 1829, that indig
enous villagers did not reap many benefits from the end of colonial rule. But
Bocanegra was not aware that the villagers were capable of defending them
selves from the worst effects of the end of colonial paternalism.

Although indigenous actors were bolstered by village traditions, they did
not turn their back on the hard-won gains of the insurgency. The political
opening under constitutional rule promised villagers new opportunities for
political expression, and they infused their protests with the language of
citizenship. The indigenous people who signed the complaints using titles of
principal or elder (viejos) framed their critique in terms of their rights as
citizens to consent to taxation. This is a process that becomes even more
evident in the regionwidc popular uprisings of the 1830s and 1840s.

Perhaps one of the most critical shifts from the colonial period was the
ease with which all political actors used violence after 1810. The shift in
village politics was not just about discourse, it was also about the ability to
resort to force. Rioters of the eighteenth century sought ways to downplay
their acts of violent defiance. Such subterfuge was no longer necessary after
independence.

Independence created a new environment in which regional and village
political disputes became resolutely tied to national politics. The dizzying
history of pronunciamiento and counter-pronunciamiento demonstrates that
elite political divisions penetrated the fabric of local society. Factionalism
offered new avenues for political influence even when centralists sought to
close off formal channels for voicing popular opinion. The militarized politics

A Nation of Villages / 118

of the pronunciamiento gave villagers opportunities to wield informal
influence as the divisions within the regional elite created a situation where
politicians sought out supporters in the hinterland hamlets. The failure of
the would-be ruling elite to agree about power sharing or even about the
creation of a state of the Huasteca points to a severe limitation to neocolonial
domination. There was no shortage of potential patrons for political dissi
dents in the villages of the Huasteca. Factionalism made the use of violence
and new political discourse a natural addition to the political repertoire of
village rebels. In the next two chapters I will explore the effort to create
regionwide political movements from below and will show how Huasteca
peasants used the lessons of the disorderly events of the 1830s to their own
advantage.

The Illusions of Municipalities / 119

107- Archer, “ Where Did All the Royalists Go?” describes the crisis within the
counterinsurgent army at the end of the War of Independence.

108. See Lucas Atamán, H isto ria d e M é jic o : D es J e ios prim eros m o v im ien to s que p re p a ra ro n
su independencia en e l a ño de 1 8 0 8 h a sta la época presente (Mexico City: n.p., 1849-53; reprint,
Mexico City: Libros del Bachiller Sansón Carrasco, 1985), 5: chapters 5, 6. Often the divi
sions between insurgents were as deep as the differences between insurgents and loyalists;
such was the case in a running feud between Victoria and Mier y Tcrán.

109. AGN-OG, vol. 767, fols. 422-23, dated 17 March 1821. Llórente wrote that Iturbidc
“has tried to envelop these vast provinces in the most horrible anarchy, just when they began
to enjoy the benefits of peace and tranquility.”

110. AGN-IG, vol. 148, dated 15 May 1821.
i n . AGN-OG, vol. 767, fol. 500.
112. Ibid., vol. 767, fol. 470.
113. Ibid.
114. Ibid., fol. 475.
115. AGN-OG, vol. 767, fol. 498.
116. Ibid., fols. 476-8.
117. Ibid., fol. 500.
118. AGN-GSS caja (henceforth cited as c.) 11, exp. 12, fols. 2, 11-1 iv.
119. Meade, H u a ste c a v e ra c ru z a n a , 2:38.
120. Jorge Flores D., L a revo lu ció n de O la rte en P a p a n tla (i8j 6-i8j 8) (Mexico City:

Imprenta Mundial, 1938), 13-14.
121. Sec AGN-GSS, c. 11, exp. 12, fol. 11 for a lengthy description of the conspiracy to

rebel in favor of independence in 1821. On the Chontla revolt, sec Zózimo Pérez Castañeda
and Angel Daqui, M o n o g ra jia d e la C iu d a d de T u x p a n (Jalapa: Talleres Gráficos del Gobierno
del Estado, 1955), 32.

122. AGN-G, c. 11, cxp. 12, passim. Llórente was not completely resigned to accept inde
pendence and in 1821 attempted to use his authority to punish the officers who had conspired
to join the independence movement (Agustín Iturbide, P lausibles noticias [Puebla: Imprenta
de Ejercito Imperial Mexicano, 1821J). On the petition of Tuxpan to disband its militia, sec
AGN-G, c, 1, cxp. 12, fol. 13V.

123. See Carmagnani, E l regreso de los dioses, 171, 181, 185-87; and García Martínez, L o s
pueblos de la sierra, 189,201-4,antl passim.

124. Declaration of Mariano Olarte, 1 March 1819, Campo Nacional de Coyusquihui,
AGN-OG, vol. 490, fol. 202; sec also “Declaración de los capitanes del campo de Coyusquihui,”
22 February 1819, AGN-OG, vol. 323, fol. 308

125. Anna, M e x ic a n E m p ire o f Iturbtde, 20-24; antl Archer, “Insurrection-Rcaction-Rcvo-
lution-Fragmcntation,” 96-98.

Chapter 4

1. BCEM, 1829/330/54/2, Bocancgra to governor of the state of Mexico, 28 August 1829.
The comment also reflects the fear that military service might provoke discontent.

2. Resolution of the permanent commission of the state Congress of the Estado de Mexico,

Notes to Pages 90-94 / 201

8 September 1829, BCEM, 1829/330/54/8-8r. The resolution ordered primary schools to
be established in every municipality, without providing specific funds to support the schools,
a classic solution oiTcrcd by liberals and radicals to the “Indian problem” during the period.

3. The commander of the civic militia of Huejutla reported that his militiamen willingly
marched against the Spaniards in Tampico without a single desertion (Jose Maria Arenas, 4
November 1829, BCEM, 1829/355/55/5-6).

4. Significantly the Jefe Politico Antonio Casados reported that the civic militia of the
pueblos of the district of Panuco immediately mobilized and repulsed the Spaniards’ attempt
to move inland (8 August 1829, AGN-G, leg. 99, exp. 1, fol. 1).

5. This is also the problem at the center of Mark Thumcr’s study of Andean societies in
nineteenth-century Peru, F ro m T w o R epublics to O ne D iv id e d : C o n tra d ictio n s o f P o stcolonial
N a tio n m a k m g in A n d e a n P eru (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 16-17 and passim.

6. In many ways Iturbidc’s independence movement reproduced on a eolonywide scale
the ambiguities of the armed truce that ended the war. Iturbidc made concessions not only to
insurgents but also to those attached to the liberal Constitution of Cádiz (Anna, Forging M exico ,
68-82; Ortiz Escamilla, G u e rra y gobierno, 147, 151, 154).

7. Examples of this formulation may be found in Von Mentz, Pueblos de indios, 56; Manuel
Ferrer Muñoz, “Pueblos indígenas en Mexico en cl siglo XIX: La igualdad jurídica, ¿Eficaz
sustituto del tutclajc tradicional?” in L o s pueblos indios y e l p a rtta g u a s de la independencia de
A léxico, ed. Manuel Ferrer Muñoz (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México,
1999), 101-2; or Rina Ortiz Peralta, “Inexistentes por decreto: Disposiciones legislativas sobre
los pueblos de indios en el siglo XIX. El caso de Hidalgo,” in Indio, nación y c o m u n id a d en el
M é x ic o d e l siglo X I X , Antonio Escobar Ohmstede, ed. (Mexico City: C.I.E.S.A.S, 1994), 160-
68.

8. Scott, D o m in a tio n a n d Resistance, 90-96. Scott also points out that the subaltern classes
often had a better understanding of the ruling ideology than the dominant class had of popu
lar ideologies.

9. An example of the reevaluation of pronunciamientos may be found in Josefina Zoraida
Vázquez, “Political Plans and Collaboration between Civilians and the Military, 1821-1846,”
B u lle tin o f L a t i n A m e r ic a n R esearch 15:1 (1996): 19-38. Sec Annino, “Cádiz y la revolución
territorial,” 178, where he points out that the new town councils made military caudillos
possible.

10. Annino, “Cádiz y la revolución territorial,” 209-to. Article 3 to of the Spanish Consti
tution established councils in towns with a population of one thousand “souls” or more.

11. AGN-A, vol. 183, exp. 41. The subdelégate Femando de la Vega supported the cre
ation of town councils in sujeto communities in the district, hoping to use them as an admin
istrative tool; see “acta de elección Maquixtcpetla, 17 de septiembre de 1813.”

12. “Decreto número 43 de 17 de marzo de 1825 Creación de Ayuntamientos,” in C L D V ;
Article 159 of the constitución política del Estado de México (1827), in C onstituciones d e l
E s ta d o de M é x i c o 1 8 2 7 , 1 8 6 1 , 1 8 7 0 , 1 9 1 7 , ed. Mario Colin (Mexico City: Biblioteca
Enciclopédica del Estado de México, 1974), 42.

13. Guy P. C. Thomson, “Pueblos de Indios and Pueblos de Ciudadanos. Constitutional
Bilingualism in 19th Century Mexico.” Paper presented to the Workshop on Political Culture
and Ideology in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Mexico, St. Anthony’s College, Oxford,

N o t e s to P a g e s 9 4 – 9 7 / 2 0 2

2 May 1997, 12. Scott also describes the “duality” of popular political identities in D o m in a
tio n a n d Resistance, 109. Annino’s description of nineteenth-century syncretism is also appro
priate.

14. On the plan de Iguala and the role of municipalities, see Anna, F orging M e xico , 81-83,
88-8g.

15. See Hernández Chávez, L a tra d ició n republicana, 33-38; Antonio Escobar Ohmstedc,
“La conformación y las luchas por el poder en las Huastecas, 1821-53,” S ecu e n cia 36 (nueva
época) (1996), 11-14; aRd by same author, “Del gobierno indígena al Ayuntamiento
constitucional en las Huastecas hidalgucnsc y vcracruzana, 1780-1853,” M S / E M 12:1 (win
ter 1996): 13-17. Annino describes these divergent points of view as a conflict between “pes
simist” and “optimist” visions of the postindepcndcncc landscape (Antonio Annino, “Nuevas
perspectivas para una vieja pregunta,” in E l p rim e r liberalism o m exicano, 1 8 0 8 1855, Maricel
Fonseca, coordinadora (México City: INAH, 1995] 46-51).

16. See, for example, the petition signed by “los jueces de paz de las visitas y rancherías de
la comprensión de esta cabecera, el gobernador de indígenas de la misma por si y a nombre del
común,” Huazalingo, 20 February 1839, BCEM, 1842/103/118/4.

17. Rugeley, Y u c a ta n ’s M a y a P ea sa n try, 94-95, finds similar processes in the Yucatán.
18. AJH, 1836 “Petition of Juan Argúmedo en representación del común de naturales de

Santa Ursula Huitzilingo [sic].” Individuals with the titles of gobernador, pasados, or
principales often signed these documents. The “jueces de paz, viejos y demás prinicpalcs. . . ”
initiated a petition from the sujetos of Huazalingo in 1840; see petition 30 April 1840, BCEM,
1842/91/118/ 1 -5 V , 6-8v, io -itv .

19. Petition of “los jueces de paz y viejos con los demás naturales de . . . Huazalingo,” 4
April 1840, BCEM, 1842/91/118/6. Thomson also finds that sujeto communities retained
the political apparatus of Indian control in the mountains of Puebla (Guy P. C. Thomson,
“Agrarian Conflict in the Municipality of Cuetzalán [Sierra de Puebla]: The Rise and Fall of
‘Pala’ Agustín Dicguillo, 1861-1894,” H A H R 71, no. 2 [May 1991]: 216-17).

20. Petition of “los jueces de paz y viejos con los demás naturales,” Huazalingo,” 30 April
1840, BCEM, 1842/103/118/fol. 6v. For more examples of colonial titles surviving after
independence, sec, “Poder del común de indígenas de San Felipe,” 20 May 1835, AJH, 1835;
and “Poder que otorgan los indígenas y el juez sclador de San Miguel, Antonio de San Juan . . .
a favor de Don José Maria Avila,” 30 September 1853, AJH, 1853, fols. 15-16.

21. Powell, for example, once suggested that as late as 1856 Indian villagers were not aware
of the fact that Mexico had become independent (T. G. Powell, “Los liberales, cl campesinado
indígena y los problemas agrarios durante la Reforma,” H isto ria M e x ic a n a 24, no. i (1972]:
658)!

22. Guy P. C. Thomson and David G. LaFrancc, P a trio tism , P olitics, a n d P o p u la r L ib e ra l
ism in N in e te e n th – C e n tu r y M e x ic o : J u a n F rancisco L u c a s a n d th e P uebla S ie r r a (Wilmington,
Del.: Scholarly Resources Inc., 1999), 11-13, describes the continued use of labor drafts in
the early republican period, Rugeley, Y u c a ta n ‘s M a y a P e a sa n try , 68.

23. Petition against the alcalde primero of Huazalingo, 7 November 1820, BCEM, 1820/
60/2/7. The constitutional article 338 specified that the legislative branch must approve all
contributions. The petitioners thus argued that “customary” taxes were not legitimate be
cause they had not been approved. Gómez Escalante suspended Alarcon from his post after

N o t e s t o P a g e s 9 8 – 1 0 0 / 2 0 3

the provincial legislature investigated. The signatories included the regidores of San Juan,
Tlamamala, Santo Tomás, and San Pedro Huazalingo.

24. Rugeley, Y u c a ta n ‘s M a y a P ea sa n try, 47-48.
25. Hernández Chavez, L a tra d ició n republicana, 38; also seen in Rugeley, Y u c a ta n ‘s M a y a

P ea sa n try, 39.
26. Petition “Los jueces de paz de visitas,” Yahualica, 20 February 1839, BCEM, 1842/

103/118/4. The tax was similar to the real de comunidad of the colonial period, a half-real
head tax.

27. The indigenous leaders used the recent order by the state Junta de Instrucción Pública
that schools be established “wherever they are judged necessary” (BCEM, 1842/103/1 tSA^v).

28. The villagers described themselves as “indigenous justices of the peace and other
principales.” They also protested the fines and imprisonment suffered by villagers who had
failed to pay the tax (“Petition to the Junta departamental from los jueces de paz indígenas y
demás principales de los pueblos de Husalingo [sic] sujetos a .. .Yahualica,” n.d.Thc prefect’s
note in margin is dated 3 May 1840, BCEM 1842/91/118/1).

29. Petition to the Junta departamental from “los jueces de paz indígenas y demás principales
de los pueblos de Huazalingo sujetos a . . . Yahualica,” n.d. BCEM, 1842/91/118/3.

30. The term used—“Negros bozales”— was a colonial term used to refer to non-Chris
tian slaves recently brought from Africa. Again the petitioners use the language of slavery to
indict the republican regime (See petition BCEM, 1842/91/118/3). Allegedly, the secretary
of the council also slighted the indígenas because he “refused to give paper to Indians to write
our children while he gives it to the gente de razón.”

31. From the same petition cited above, BCEM, 1842/91/118/7v.
32. Prefect ofMetztitlán, Manuel Maria Carmona, 20 January 1841, AHEM, 075.1/149/

17/fol. 20. Although an earlier report called the petition “justified,” Carmona described del
Rosal as “the only mover behind the continuous complaints of the natives of Huazalingo” (8
January 1841, fol. 17V).

33. Meyer, P roblem as campesinos, 29-33; Reina, R ebeliones, 16.
34. Tutino, F ro m In su rre ctio n to R e v o lu tio n , 229-38. Although this term is appropriate for

the more densely populated Huasteca Hidalgucnsc, in Papantla, as Kouri points out, there
had been no “compression” in the eighteenth century. Even in the densely populated regions,
Escobar found that the pueblos were very effective in defending their territory (“Los pueblos
indios,” 58-59).

35. Kouri, B usiness o f th e L a n d , 121-24, 132-33, and passim.
36. “Venta de la Hacienda de Buena Vista, November 7,1826 a los ciudadanos dcTemapache

(esto es a los que se titulaban naturales de dicho pueblo),” Tcmapache, ACAM, cxp. 341, fols.
49 5<>–

37. “Informe del registro de Propiedad sobre el predeio ‘El Nopal,’” ACAM, cxp. 1235;
and “Informe correspondiente al poblado de Poza Azul, Ixcatepcc,” 30 July 1932, ACAM,
1188-A.

38. Andres Vega, 14 December 1879, alcalde de Coxquihui to Jefe político de Papantla,
AGEV, Gobernación, “Comaltcco,” fol. 50.

39. AGEV, ACAM, vol. 50, fol. 21, “Misantla”; and vol. 619, “Tuxpan.”
40. Victoria’s heirs later sold the huge estates to the municipality of Tuxpan (Compra de

Notes to Pages 100-103 /204

las haciendas Asunción y Santiago de la Pena,” Tuxpan, ACAM, cxp. 619; Filiberta Gómez,
T u x p a ti: C o m e tid o y P oder en e l S ig lo X I X (Jalapa: IVEC, 1999], 36-41, 79-96).

41. In this respect Victoria’s experience followed that of another insurgent-turned-presi-
dent, Vicente Guerrero, who also sought to transform his political fortune into an economic
one. Significantly, whereas Victoria invested in the underdeveloped lowlands, Guerrero grew
frustrated with his land investments in the heavily populated and commercialized area of
Chaleo in the Valley of Mexico (John Tutino, “Haciendas and Social Relations in Mexico: The
Chaleo Region in the Era of Independence,” H A H R , 55, no. 3 [1975]: 512-13).

42. Kouri, “Business of the Land,” 111-14.
43. Escritura de Venta de los terrenos de Piedra Grande otorgada por los Señores Acosta a

favor del General D. Guadalupe Victoria. ♦. Santa María Asunción Misantla, 19 May 1827, in
AGEV, Comisión Local Agraria, Expediente Misantla, No. 50, fol. 55. Victoria’s intermedi
ary for the sale was none other than Lt. Col. Miguel Mendez, Misantla’s old insurgent leader.
Typical of the lowland latifundia, the owners declared that they did not know the amount of
the land but that the borders were known.

44. Minutes of the Cabildo extraordinario, Misantla, 1 April 1845, AGEV, Comisión Lo
cal Agraria, Expediente Misantla, No. 50, fol. 20.

45. It is unclear from the documents who the “invaders” were or if members of the coun
cil had also participated in using Piedra Grande. In their justification the council members
mentioned that a substantial number of misantccos grew vanilla on the land (Ibid., fol. 22).

46. ACAM, exp. 42. Even more surprising is that during the porfiriato the owners finally
settled with the “invaders,” granting them clear possession of a large portion of the land in
dispute.

47. Sec Kouri’s description of the haciendas in the Papantla district, “Business of the
Land,” 131-34 and passim. Villagers were not always successful. In Chiconamcl indigenous
villagers lost a lawsuit against the owners of hacienda of Chintepcc after a long court case in
1835 (AJH, Año 1835, “Sobre Pagos de Renta,” 8 January 1835).

48. Powell, “Los liberales, el campesinado,” 655-56, gives a concise description of these
land categories. E jidos, or common pastures for grazing, do not seem to have been important
in the Huasteca.

49. For an example of such complaints sec. Petition “indígenas y vecinos dc las
congregaciones del municipio de Papantla” to Gov. Teodoro Dehesa, Papantla, 13 July 1895,
AGEV, Gobernación y Justicia, Tierras, Caja General 2414, Exp. titled “Comisión Ing. división
de terrenos 1895-1905.”

50. Orden del 21 dc Agosto dc 1824, en CLDV, 1:104; and decreto número 37 de 2 dc
diciembre dc 1826, CLDV, 1:444-49

51. Sec the rental contracts from 1835-36; the properties rented for ten to twenty pesos a
year. For more examples from other towns sec the rent contracts for Yahualica, AJH, legajo
1852 fol. 1; Pahuatlán, AJH, Arrendamiento de los terrenos de común de Pahuatlán a favor dc
Ramón Reyes, Año 1835 fols. 8-9; “Arbitros del muncipio dc Zacualtipán,” BCEM, 1842/
386/123/t-42;Von Mcntz, Pueblos de indios, 66.

5 2 . Prefect José M. dc Ahedos, Mcztitlán, Oct. 21, 1 8 3 7 , BCEM 1 8 4 2 / 9 3 / 1 1 8 / 3 , 3V, 9 .
Another problem for tax collectors was that even the larger landholders divided them into
multiple small plots scattered throughout the property.

Notes to Pages 104-106 / 205

53- BCEM, 1842/97/118/5.
54. The municipality stated that five of the sixteen petitioners were not residents of

Tcmazola, and that one of them was a schoolboy (Ibid., tov).
55. Sec Ramona Falcon’s exploration of this issue in “Force and the Search for Consent:

The Role of the Jefaturas Políticas of Coahuila in National State Formation,” in E v e r y d a y
F orm s o f S t a t e F o rm a tio n : R e v o lu tio n a n d th e N e g o tia tio n o f R u le in M o d e r n M e xico , cd.
Daniel Nugent and Gilbert Joseph (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1994), 119. In
the State of Mexico the prefects had the legal authority to intervene in municipal land and tax
affairs (Ortiz Peralta, “Inexistentes,” 164). The legal codes in Veracruz gave these officers
broad powers of “supervision” over local government (sec “Ley para la organización, policía
y gobierno interior del estado,” in CLDV, 1:281-85).

56. “Consulta del Ayuntamiento de Huazalingo a la diputación,” BCEM, 1822/66/8/2.
The 1822 events in San Francisco, a center of dissidcncc in the eighteenth century, had their
origin in 1819, when San Franciscanos participated in a tumult against the head town.

57. Letter ofTrinidad Rodriguez to the subprefect of Hucjutla,2t February i838,Yahualica,
BCEM, 1838/74/89/1-23.

58. Petition “Los jueces de paz y viejos con los demás naturales de los cinco pueblos de
Huazalingo . . . , ” 30 April 1840, BCEM, 1842/91/118/fols. 6-6v.

59. Agustín Viniegra, subprefect of Hucjutla, 7 November 1843, BCEM, 1843/255/128/
f-5-

60. “Aviso ai público,” 5 July 1843, BCEM, r843/191/127/f. 17-18V.
61. Agustín Viniegra, Subprefect of Hucjutla, iojuly 1843, BCEM, 1843/191/ 127/3V.
62. Ibid., fol. 6.
63. Francisco Sánchez, Hucjutla, 6 July 1843, BCEM, 1843/191/127/19. The first jus

tice of the peace of Hucjutla denied that “public tranquillity had been disturbed . . . in spite
of the efTorts of said gentlemen.” Agustín Viniegra wrote that Judge Núñez “is himself the
one who is disrupting the peace with his advice to the residents of Santa Cruz, Nexpan,
Tetlama andVinazco that they not pay the municipal tax” (Viniegra Subprefect of Hucjutla,
to July 1843, BCEM, 1843/191/127/2V). Viniegra claimed to have seen letters the judge had
sent to the other visita towns asking for support in the lawsuit.

64. Schrycr, E th n ic ity a n d Class, 85-86. Note the extensive use of labor demands during
the nineteenth century. Thomson and LaFrancc, P a tr io tism , P o litics a n d P o p u la r L ib era lism ,
12-13, also notes that demands against labor service mobilized Indian militants in the 1850s
and 1860s.

65. Francisco Sánchez, Huejutla, 6 July 1843, BCEM, 1843/191/127/18V.
66. Thomson and LaFrance, P a trio tism , P olitics a n d P o p u la r L ib era lism , 229; when the

radical liberal Nahua leader in Puebla, Juan Francisco Lucas, served as jefe politico, the non-
Indian residents of Zautla protested bitterly because he made them pay a tax previously levied
only on Indians.

67. Ibid. Thomson and LaFrancc describe the conservative project created by Alamán to
eliminate the destabilizing force of municipal politics. See also Guardino, P easants, Politics,
152-53, 160-61, and passim.

68. Barbara Tenenbaum, ‘“They WentThataway’: The Evolution of the Pronunciamiento,
1821-1856,” in P a tte r n s o f C o n ten tio n in M e x ic a n H is to r y , cd. Jaime Rodriguez O. (Scholarly

Notes to Pages 106-109 / 206

Resources Inc, Wilmington: 1992), 194; Vázquez, “Political Plans and Collaboration,” 19-
38; Anna, Forging M e xico , 248; Annino, “Cádiz y la revolución,” 178. See also Guardino, who
in P easants, P olitics, 159, comments on the peasant use of pronunciamientos. Di Telia, in
N a t io n a l P o p u la r P olitics, has systematically described the role of “popular mobilizes,” 73-
104, 116-20, 206-12.

69. Fowler, M e x ic o in th e A g e o f Proposals, 2 -4; and Stevens, O rigins o f In s ta b ility , 28-29.
70. Letter from Constantini to Bazainc, in D o c u m e n to s p a r a la h istoria de M é x ic o : L a

intervención fra n c esa en M é x ic o según e l archivo del M a risc a l B a za tn e, cd. Genaro García (Mexico
City: Librería de la Viuda de Ch. Bouret, 1906), 18:112. When theTampico garrison revolted
in 1832, for example, it used printing presses to produce multiple copies of the town’s politi
cal program and then sent them out to neighboring communities. Sec AHEM, 048.4/117/
12/11, 12,13, 69; for a response to one of these invitations to revolt, sec Ayuntamiento de
Tulancingo, 24 April 1832, AHEM, 09i,6/i83/3/27V.

71. Declaration of town council of Hucjutla, iojuly 1823, AGN-H, vol. 578B, exp. 13, fol.
249; Andrade, isM ay 1826, BCEM, 1826/215/30/1. The efforts often failed owing to divi
sions within the regional political elite. Antonio Escobar Ohmstede, “Las Huastecas para los
huastecos. Los intentos para conformar un estado huasteco durante la primera mitad del siglo
XIX,” Vetas 2, no. 4 (enero-abril 2000): 131-33, discusses several of the statehood efforts.

72. For a succinct discussion of the dizzying number of pronunciamientos of the period,
see Fowler, M e x ic o in th e A g e o f P roposals, 17-32.

73. Anna, Forging M exico, 230-31; Costcloe, C e n tra l Republic, 38-39. On suffrage sec Ricard
Warren, V a g ra n ts a n d C itize n s: P olitics a n d the M a sses in M e x ic o C i ty f r o m C o lo n y to R epublic
(Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources Inc., 2001) 102-3.

74. Trcns, H isto ria de V eracruz, 5:130. See AHEM, 48.4/117/12/49 for report on ad
vances of rebellion in Veracruz.

75. Simultaneously, there were supporting declarations from Xilitla and Tamazunchalc
Indian towns in San Luis Potosí that bordered Hucjutla (Mariano Reyna,Tula, 26 April 1832,
AHEM, 091.6/183/3/39,40-41).

76. According to Licona, then the alcalde primero of Zacualtipán, “his intention was to
win regardless of the revolution’s outcome.” The state government distrusted Arenas enough to
order his replacement with José Ruis Trejo (23 May 1832, Toluca, AHEM, 091.6/183/3/151).

77. Losers could also use lawsuits, as seen in the complaints filed by the federalist leaders
of Hucjutla against the centralist priest of Huazalingo, Martínez de Aragón.

78. Michael P. Costcloe, L a P rim era R ep ú b lica F ed era l de M é x ic o ( 1 8 2 4 – 1 8 3 5 ) (Mexico
City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1975), 428-33; Anna, F orging M e xico , 259.

79. On the events in Toluca, Charles F. McCunc Jr., E l E stado d e M é x ic o y la fe d e ra c ió n
m exica n a , 1823 3 5 (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1978), 176-77.

80. Unsigned draft oflcttcr to prefect of Huejutla, 7 June 1834, AHEM, 091.2/178/7/172.
81. Trinidad Ballato, juez de paz de Huautla, informe dc 22 February 1838. On the events

associated with the plan dc Cuernavaca of 1834, see AHEM, 091.2/178/4/5-162, which con
tains extensive reports from the different municipalities of the region. Sec also BCEM, 1842/
83/118, fol. 5. The parish vicar of Huazalingo, Martínez de Aragón, became one of the cen
tral leaders of the conservative movements; federalists later accused him of looting Huautla
during the 1834 events.

Notes to Pages 1 1 0-114/ 207

8z. See, for example, the declaration ofMolango, iQjune 1834, AHEM, 091.6/178/4/37.
83. On the elimination of Mctztitlán’s subprefecture, see AHEM, 091.2/178/4/1-2,5-6.

On the switch to Mctztitlan, see the order of J. M. Coral, Toluca, 10 September 1834, BCEM,
1834/206/79/1. The order cryptically mentioned that the motive for the change was the
“delicate situation” concerning “public tranquility.” Naturally, the Hucjutlcños did not ac
cept the change without a fight. On 1 April 1835 the town council granted a power of attorney
to Francisco González to “promote the return of the district capital to Hucjutla” (AJH, libro
de 1835).

84. The provisorato metropolitano ordered the arrest and transfer to Mexico City of
Martinez de Aragón and Ordaz on 9 August (Félix Osorcs, AHEM, 091.2/178/4/133). This
in spite of letters from the new prefect, Pedro Carrion, documenting the good behavior of
Jose Ordaz (Carrion to the secretario de relaciones del estado de México, Zacualtipán, 30
August 1834, fols. 143-44). Carrión delayed the arrests until Toluca sent a letter supporting
their detention in Scptcmbcr(f. 149 and fols. 151-52). See also the arrest order (Viniergra, 14
September 1834 *n AJH, libro de 1834); it accused Martinez de Aragón of “leading an armed
movement” and also of unspecified “excesses” against his parishioners.

85. Arenas, 13 June 1834, AHEM, 091.2/178/4/11. Locals were following precedents set
at the national level. Warren, V agrants a n d C itiz e n s , 114-15, describes how Gómez Farias in
1833 purged the Mexico City town council and summoned the 1829 council members to
replace those elected under Bustamcntc.

86. Trinidad Ballato, juez de paz de Huautla, to prefect of Hucjutla, 22 Feb. 1838, de
scribes abuses committed by Morales when he occupied Huautla in 1834, especially the arbi
trary arrest of the town council and the looting of the local treasury (BCEM, 1842/83/118/
4-6; Arenas, 3 July 1834, AHEM, 091.2/178/4/14-15).

8 7 . AHEM, 9 1 . 6 / 1 8 3 / 1 8 4 V – 5 subprefect of Mctztitlan, Borromco to governor, 2 4 May
1 8 3 2 . Informe al congreso del estado d e México, 19 April 1 8 3 2 , AHEM, fol. 1 8 7 .

88. Carrión to secretary of relations, 23 August 1834, AHEM, 091.2/178/141-42.
89. “Varios indígenas de la feligresía de Santiago Ilmatlán,” 8 May 1837, AJP, legajo de

1 8 3 7 –

90. For a discussion of the role ayuntamientos in Mexican political thought see, Villoro, E l
proceso ideológico; Anna, Forging M e xico , 212.

91. “Oficio dirijido por cl Ylustrc Ayuntamiento de esta ciudad al Sr. D. Esteban
Moctezuma.” G a c eta de Tam pteo, 17 March 1832, BCEM, 1832/76/68/3.

92. Stevens, O rigins o f In s ta b ility , 115.
93. Lomnitz Adler, E x its f r o m th e L a b y r in th , gives an excellent description of what he calls

the “ranchero culture” of Huastccan landlords.
94. Guardino, P easants, P olitics, chapter 5, on the formation of Guerrero.
95. Ironically, the Huasteca today is often associated with caudillos in the popular press

largely because during the postrevolutionary period two charismatic (albeit disreputable)
caudillos, Saturnino Ccdillo and Gonzalo N. Santos, lorded over a generous portion of the
Huasteca. See Dudley Ankerson, A g r a r ia n IVarlord: S a tu r n in o C edillo a n d th e M e x ic a n R e v o
lu tio n in S a n L u is P o to sí (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1984); Gonzalo N.
Santos, M e m o ria s (Mexico City: Grijalbo, 1986); Lomnitz Adler, E x its f r o m th e L a b y rin th ,
187-201.

N o t e s to P a g e s 1 1 4 – 1 1 7 / 2 0 8

96. Charles F. Walker, S m o ld e n n g A sh e s: C u zc o a n d th e C re a tio n o f R ep u b lica n P eru, i y 8 o –
¡ 8 4 0 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999), 130-45.

97. Guardino, P easants, Politics, 98-102.

Chapter 5

1. Anna, F orging M e xico , 240. Warren, V agrants a n d C itize n s, 100-105, describes the elec
tion reforms adopted for the federal district and the territories. New state laws increased the
property requirements to vote, severely restricting the suffrage (“Decreto 163,” 4 May 1830,
CLDEV, 2: 188-201).

2. Michael Costcloc argues that the “hombres de bien,” members of the comfortable classes
concerned about social order and the “excesses” of popular politics, were the driving force
behind the rise of centralist politics ( C e n tr a l R e p u b lic ). Warren adds to Costeloc’s argument,
pointing out how fears of a crime wave and the popular classes contributed to the decline of
federalism (Warren, V a g ra n ts a n d C itize n s, gr, 105, 128).

3. Guardino, P easants, P olitics, 139-46. For a brief overview of centralist objectives and
ideology, see Reynaldo Sordo Ccdcño, “El pensamiento conservador del Partido Centralista
en los años treinta del siglo XIX mexicano,” ¡n E l conservadurism o m exica n o en el siglo X I X
( 1810-1910,1, cd. Humberto Morales and William Fowler (Puebla: Benemérita Universidad
Autónoma de Puebla, University of St. Andrews, and Secretaría de Cultura Gobierno del
Estado de Puebla, 1999), 135-68; Costcloc, C e n tr a l R epublic, 38-45,103.

4. Flores, R e v o lu c ió n de O la rte. This work remains the fountainhead of much of what is
written about the events owing to the extensive collection of documents Fiores included from
national archives. Leticia Rcina’s work (R ebeliones, 325-40) is largely derived from Flores’s
account. Trcns also added some critical information in his treatment of the rebellion. H isto ria
d e V eracruz, 4:79-140.

5. Elio Masferrcr, “Los factores étnicos de la rebelión totonaca de Olarte en Papantla,”
C uicuilco, no. 14-15 (julio-diciembre 1984): 24-31.

6. Antonio Escobar Ohmstcde, “El movimiento olartista, origen y desarrollo, 1836-1838.
Una revisión histórica,” in Procesos rurales e h istoria r e g io n a l ( S ie r r a y costa to to n a co s de
V era cru z) , cd. Victoria Chcnaut (Mexico City: C.I.E.S.A.S., 1996), 51-74; sec especially 66.

7. Victoria Chcnaut, A q u e llo s que v u e la n : L o s totonacos en e l siglo X I X (Mexico City:
CIESAS, 1995), 99-106.

8. “Proclamation Gen. José Antonio Mexia [sic], to the besieged forces in Bexar,” Brazoria,
15 December 1835; and “Proclamation The citizen Jose Antonio Mexia, brigadier General of
the Army of the Federal Republic to his fellow countrymen,” Tampico, 15 November 1835;
and J. A. Mejia to Hon. James A. Robinson 15 December 1835; these documents may be
found in George Fisher, M e m o ria ls o f G eorge Fisher, la te secreta ry to th e exp e d itio n o f G en.

J o s e A n to n io M e x ia , a g a in st Tam pico, in N o v em b er, ¡ 8 j s – P re se n te d to th e F o u rth a n d F ifth

congress o f the R ep u b lic o f T exa s, p r a y in g f o r r e l ie f in f a v o r o f th e m em bers o f s a id e xp e d itio n

(Houston: Printed at the Telegraph office, 1840), 64-65, 60-61, 68. Translations by Fisher.
Mejia had been sent to Texas in 1832 after the fall of the Bustamante government; while there
he established friendly tics to Esteban Austin, as he was then known, who impressed him as a
sincere federalist and not a secessionist. In December of 1835, when Mejia arrived in Texas

Notes to Pages 117-122/ 209

A Nation of Villages
Riot and Rebellion in the Mexican

Huasteca, 1750-1850

Michael T. Ducey

The University of Arizona Press

Tucson

The University of Arizona Press
© 2004 The Arizona Board of Regents

All rights reserved
“ This book is printed on acid-free, archival-quality paper.

Manufactured in the United States of America

09 08 07 06 05 04 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Duccy, Michael Thomas, 1960-

A nation of villages : riot and rebellion in the Mexican Huasteca, 1750-1850 /
Michael T. Duccy.

p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-8165-2383-5 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Peasant uprisings—Mexico—Huasteca Region. 2. Indians of Mexico—

Huasteca Region- Government relations— History— 18th century. 3. Indians of Mexico—
Huasteca Region—Government relations— History— 19th century,

i. Title.
h n i 20.h 8d 83 2004

972′.440049742—dc22
2004004667

Chapter 3

‘Following the Law of Our Lady de Guadalupe’

Insurrection in the T ierra C a lie n te , 1810-21

T he War of Independence in Mexico proved to be a pivotal event in the
histories of many rural pueblos. It is at this moment that large numbers of
villagers mobilized to support the insurrection, linking numerous commu
nities that had never before cooperated to achieve common political objec
tives. The causes of discontent that motivated these insurgents were similar
to those described in the previous chapter. Concerns about local power struc
tures and systems of ethnic domination reappeared in the acts and words of
these rebels, but the villagers presented their dissent in new, challenging
ways. In this chapter I demonstrate that the insurgents of 1810-21 went be
yond the village riots of the previous fifty years to create a new way of mak
ing politics. A new language of nationalism and citizenship became the norm
over the decade of armed rebellion against the colonial order. I trace here the
transition from colonial riot to national rebellion in the mentalité of the vil
lagers of tierra caliente by describing their motives during the revolt and
how they perceived their role in politics as the decade-long war evolved.

Although there is an extensive body of work dealing with the political
objectives of the Creole advocates of independence, these studies often ex
clude rural insurgents from the discussion. In exploring the reasons for the
outbreak of insurgency, recent work has focused on long-term social and
economic tensions that developed in the twilight years of the Spanish Em
pire, or on more immediate causes such as food shortages.1 The literature
tends to skirt the issue of the impact of these tensions on the political aspira
tions of the independence movement, as if to substitute “cause for reason”
when describing peasant motives.2 Jaime E. Rodriguez summarized much of the
recent research when he proposed that during the war, “two broad movements

emerged: an urban upper-class demand for home rule and a rural revolt
against exploitation.”3

Peter Guardino and Virginia Guedea have demonstrated important links
between elite and popular political thought during the insurrection.4 These
authors point out that the insurgents framed their initial discussions of po
litical legitimacy in terms of Spanish legal traditions of the pueblo. Guardino
in particular points out how insurgents adopted the constitutional concepts
in response to the viceregal government’s counterinsurgency state. Guedea’s
works have the virtue of demonstrating the mechanisms that connected the
urban autonomists to the rural insurgents.5 Rodriguez’s recent work has also
noted the shift within Spanish American thought as a result of the constitu
tional crisis of 1808 and the subsequent wars for independence.6 These au
thors describe how the political thought of both urban intellectuals and rural
insurgents evolved during the war to a point where they abandoned the tra
ditional Hispanic legal precepts of the monarchy and embraced constitu
tional concepts of sovereignty. The relationship between elite and plebe is
not uncontrovcrsial. Recently Eric Van Young, in his monumental work, has
offered an in-depth review of popular political culture, finding a wide breach
between the two. Pointing to such features as the widespread belief in the
good king (naive monarchism) and the localism of village action. Van Young
sees continuities in peasant action and ideology before and after 1810.7

I explore in this chapter how elite concerns filtered into the camps of
indigenous insurgents, who then gave new meanings to issues of constitu
tionalism and independence. The war changed local political actors, forcing
them to confront ideological challenges as they sought to build a state from
the village up. James Scott reminds us that popular beliefs are in constant
dialogue with the official ideologies of the powerful.11 Scott’s insights help
explain how, as the rebellion progressed, local insurgents reacted to the chang
ing political scene by adopting new political objectives and identities. While
these objectives had a provincial bent, they did not simply revolve around
the issues of village land and local pride. Rather, they set out to redefine the
political ties between the patrias chicas of the rebels and the larger state. The
insurgency built on the traditional hostility toward Spanish officials and
merchants as it linked village concerns to a wider vision of politics. Villagers
claimed new identities as citizens, casting off the sociopolitical category of
indio and demanding new rights for local rule. Rural rebels appealed to the
concept of patria and named their troops “nationals” to distinguish them
selves from the royalist militias they fought.9 Constitutionalist and proto-

Thc Law of Our Lady de Guadalupe / 61

nationalist rhetoric entered into village discourse and helped sustain the
guerrilla war through the long years of royalist ascendancy.

For the villagers of northern Veracruz, the insurgency offered them op
portunities to favorably resolve issues of political power in two critical areas:
within the pueblos themselves (between cabecera and sujeto), and between
the pueblos and the state. The villages experienced the war not as a war be
tween Indians and Spaniards, but as a civil war within the pueblos that di
vided them along the same hierarchical lines that had evolved during the
colonial period. As we shall see, the royalists mobilized Indian villagers to
fight indigenous insurgents from their own pueblos while those same rebels
often took reprisals against their fellow villagers who refused to join them. A
second line of political tension ran between the village and the Bourbon state,
which in its efforts to increase revenues and streamline administration had
raised taxes and increasingly intervened in community affairs. These ten
sions, seen clearly in the events described earlier, now gave momentum to
the long guerrilla war.

The attitude of the rural insurgents at the end of the war reveals an at
tempt to shift the balance of power in favor of the communities by having
their members affirm their new status as citizens and assert their rights to
autonomous town governments (ayuntamientos) . 1(1 Socioeconomic issues
found an avenue for political expression through the rebel critique of state-
pueblo relations. The new constitutional debates that percolated into local
politics opened up novel vistas to villagers who had become discontent with
pueblo government.11 The new town councils, therefore, were at the center
of the events of 1820-21. The transformation of repúblicas de indios into
constitutionally based forms of local rule offered villagers opportunities to
address the disputes over power that had affected relations both between
Crown officials and subjects and within the pueblos themselves. Local gov
ernment was in flux as a result of both the war and constitutional change, a
situation that created unusual opportunities for subalterns to claim political
rights.

The rebel worldview is evident in how insurgents organized their resis
tance to the state. Another useful benchmark of rebel attitudes is the rhetoric
they employed to respond to late-colonial political change, particularly the
reintroduction of the Constitution of Cádiz in 1820. In the following sec
tion, I describe the organization of the local insurgency, paying particular
attention to the regional space in which the insurrection thrived and to situ
ating changes in the rebels’ political identities in this space. I then discuss

A Nation of Villages / 62

the political situation created by the readoption of the constitution in the
context of a country exhausted by years of warfare. In the last two sections, I
explore the meaning of nation and constitution to rural people by focusing
on the evolution of political identities within the insurgent camp.

How the War Was Fought: The Regional Context

On 15 September 1810 Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, the parish priest of
Dolores, Guanajuato, called on his parishioners to join him in an insurrec
tion against the government in Mexico City. Hidalgo and his fellow con
spirators never expected the outpouring of popular support that their call to
arms garnered. The size and spread of the insurrection alarmed the colonial
establishment, and local royal officials diligently sought public professions
of loyalty from the towns they administered. T he region’s subdclegates as
sured Mexico City that their districts were quiet. Jose María Bausa, subdel
egate of Papantla, sent a petition signed by the prominent non-Indian resi
dents pledging their loyalty while Indians in Tamazunchale likewise insisted
on their submission to authority.12 Royalist officials were confident as they
mustered the militias to meet the threat of the insurgency. In a departure
from colonial policy, local officials, at the urging of Mexico City, created new
militias composed of Indian villagers to supplement the pardo (non-white,
non-Indian people) militia units.

News of the insurgency spread very quickly to the towns of the lowlands,
as the insurrection spread beyond the Bajío and throughout the altiplano. As
described earlier the littoral lowlands of the G ulf region were intimately con
nected to the altiplano through trade routes in the Sierra Madre Oriental.
T h e principal routes of trade ran from Papantla and Tuxpan through
Huachinango, Zacatlán, and Tezuitlán, while alcaldía mayor of Panuco was
intimately tied to Chicontepec and Hucjutla. From Chicontepec trade routes
ran through Tianguistengo, Molango, and Mctztitlán. This network of east-
west trade routes dominated the geographic logic of the region, as merchants
in the late-colonial period looked toward Tulancingo and Mexico City for
credit and political direction.13 On the basis of these traditional contacts, it is
not surprising that during the insurgency the coastal rebels maintained close
ties to representatives of the insurgent government in Zacatlán de las
Manzanas.14

Subdclegates and militia officers viewed the spread of the insurrection as
they would the progress of an epidemic. The rebellion traveled along the

The Law of Our Lady dc Guadalupe / 63

routes of commerce originating in the altiplano and moved toward the coast.
This phenomenon was evident to local administrators, who viewed every
small merchant coming from the west as a potential agent of rebellion. At
one point the royalist commander of Huejutla, Alejandro Alvarez de Güitián,
sought to control the movement of small-scale merchants because of their
role in propagating the insurrection. “Food merchants, known by the name
o f ‘Molangueros’ who go from town to town with their goods, will not in any
case be permitted to enter the towns, because they have been everywhere the
principal agents of the rebellion.” 15 Significantly, Molango, the town from
which the term “Molangueros” originated, was famous both for its muleteer
merchant activity and as a center of insurgent sympathy in 1811. These
Molangueros typically purchased the surpluses of Indian farmers and mes
tizo ranchers and sold them in local markets; naturally, they were ideally
poised to carry news and subversion to the countryside. They were also of
ten victims of the commercial restrictions described in the previous chapter
and as such would no doubt have looked with sympathy on the prospect of
political change. Alvarez was right to recognize the danger that these small
time merchants carried with their mule trains, but at the same time his pro
hibition was futile since they were the lifeblood of the economy.

Local officials began to report the presence of insurgent emissaries in the
region, and rumors of the rebellion’s progress had a destabilizing effect on
the towns. The first disquieting news arrived in the form of a rowdy mulatto
cowboy from Huejutla, Nasario Manzano, who declared that “the insurgents
had a closed carriage holding three disguised personages . . . that these indi
viduals paid a peso a day to each soldier.” 16 A Spanish merchant, Diego
Santander, testified that Manzano had said that the king was in the carriage.
Even though the prisoner was drunk when he made his subversive outbursts
and he had no formal ties to the rebels, local officials treated Manzano harshly,
sending him to the capital where he won release only after suffering an inca
pacitating accident during his two and a half years forced labor.

The closer the insurgency came to the district, the more worried local
officials became; during Manzano’s trial, Santander testified that “the town
is in considerable conflict because of the insurrection so close to the jurisdic
tion.” 17 Even though the insurrection did not yet have any organized pres
ence, there was a marked decline in the deference shown to local Spaniards.
In Chicontcpcc a Castilian-born merchant complained that since February
1811 he had “not had a single day of peace” because of the constant insults
he received.18 Merely the news of the insurrection destabilized long-held

A Nation of Villages / 64

patterns of domination and changed the ability of local Spaniards to com
mand respect. Rebellion spread like a “contagion,” as Ranajit Guha points
out, because colonial domination provided a universal organizing principle
for the rebels. A common enemy enabled villagers to rise above traditional
peasant localism.19

T he overreaction of the royalists in the Manzano case also reflected the
power of the insurgent idea; unlike earlier colonial riots, the insurgency of
fered an alternative political legitimacy. The disappearance of the king from
Spain and the coup organized by the Spaniards in Mexico City in 1808 cre
ated uncertainty throughout the political system. Manzano’s drunken out
bursts inspired fear in the local Spanish officials and merchants precisely
because similar declarations characterized the Hidalgo insurrection to the
east. T he fact that Manzano had come from Valles, where the insurgency had
recently taken hold, did not help his case. T he fate of Manzano and the at
tempt to prohibit trade demonstrate the official view that insurrection was a
kind of contagion that could be controlled by quarantine measures.20

In spite of the quarantine the insurgency spread. TheTotonac Sierra town
of Pahuatlán joined the insurgency, while in the Huasteca rebels seized the
regional market town ofTianguistengo in May of 1811. Rebels were encir
cling Hucjutla; the district of Valles, including the nearby town of Tama-
zunchalc, revolted; and to the east Molango and Metztitlán were firmly in
rebel hands, while in the south dissidents occupied towns in the Sierra de
Puebla. The same rebels challenged Mexico City’s grip on the area around
Huejutla. De la Vega reported that the European residents of Huejutla had
begun to flee the town with their goods as news of rebel advances spread.21
Insurgent forces in these towns made a conscious effort to persuade nearby
Indian communities and mestizo rancheros to join the rebellion, singling
out officials of the Indian repúblicas and members of the local militias for
inducements to revolt, including commissions as “American officers.” In the
following paragraphs I use the events in Chicontepec to demonstrate why
the “contagion of insurrection” was so effective.

Once established in Tianguistengo the insurgent leader José Manuel
Cisneros sent letters to the Indian governor, Diego Hernández urging him
to arrest the subdelegate, Juan González de Burgos, embargo his goods, and
send him to the rebel camp. Cisneros charged that González acted “contrary
to the Nation and Fatherland.” The insurgent commander also commissioned
Hernández as a “captain of the Royal Orders of the American Nation.”22
Cisneros recruited several Creole farmers from Chicontepec—José and

The Law of Our Lady de Guadalupe / 65

Lorenzo Espinoza, their mother Ana Villegas, and Lorenzo’s father-in-law
Vicente Ortega, a small “molangero” merchant— to help him to convince
Hernández and the Indian república to join the insurrection. The Espinozas
and Ortega had ties to both Tianguistengo, where they were born, and
Chicontepec, where they were “vecinos.” Subdelégate González and his lieu
tenant, José Ignacio Cantos, fled at the first sign of trouble.

Cisneros made several concrete proposals to the Indians, offering to rid
the town of the unpopular subdelegate and end royalist military service. One
of the Indians involved in the rebellion had originally fled Chicontepec to
avoid enlistment by the subdelegate. Lorenzo Espinoza promised “the gov
ernor that he would never leave his post and that the [officers of the] república
would always hold their jobs.” By removing the subdelégate and promising
the Indian leaders that they would continue in their offices, the insurgents
offered greater autonomy to the Indian elders controlling the Indian pueblo
than they had under the trends described earlier. The rebels offered to virtu
ally eliminate the system of colonial subjugation by cutting the political and
fiscal bonds between the state and the village community, leaving the local
Indian leaders to determine the form of the new state. The insurgents and
the Indians of Chicontepec set out to decapitate local officialdom. Signifi
cantly, the villagers sought to arrest the officials involved in regulating and
taxing trade: the tobacco-monopoly administrator and the alcabala collector.
According to the testimony of the república officers, Espinoza and the In
dian governor Hernández discussed confiscating the goods of the tobacco-
monopoly administrator, the postal agent, and the priest because of their
opposition to the rebellion. Insurgents promised to divide land confiscated
from these officials “among the sons of the town.” The insurgents thus of
fered concrete collective and individual benefits to Indian leaders and villag
ers willing to take the risk of opposing local Spanish government. While the
letters introduced new identities of the “American nation” to Chicontepec,
local politics continued to be at the center of political activity. The insur
gents promised a reorganization of local power, deposing the royal represen
tatives who traditionally intervened in village institutions.

Subdelegates, never popular in the best of times, now faced extremely
dangerous conditions. González de Burgos discovered the planned insur
rection before the village insurgents could call out their followers, and he
made preparations to leave. When the Indian leaders tried to convince him
to stay, telling him that he “was their father and that they loved [him] very
much,” it merely confirmed their subversive intentions in the mind of

A Nation of Villages / 66

González. “I knew the governor and republican request that I stay had a
malicious intent, for never have they made such a request of any subdel
égate.” Gonzalez’s telling comment reveals the hatred that characterized re
lations between Indians and Spanish officials. When the Indians declared
their love for him, González, his lieutenant Cantos, and the tobacco-monopoly
administrator beat a hasty retreat from the town. Subdelegate González got
off easy: in Valles the insurgents assassinated the subdelegate and hung his
corpse at the crossroads.25

The Chicontepec revolt represented the persistence of colonial political
culture in the insurrection. Events in the town appear very similar to those
described by Eric Van Young in his meticulous discussion of the insurrection
in towns such as Atlamulco, where insurrection proceeded as village riot.24
The insurgent governor used the institutions of the república de indios to
mobilize supporters, sending letters to the principales and lesser officials
(Chinampixqui) in the sujeto towns to bring their people to the cabecera on
the day of the planned insurrection. Rebel objectives resembled the aims of
local riots and rebellions in colonial Papantla and Yahualica in that they con
sisted of expelling Spanish officials and tax collectors in the name of the
king. T he Tianguistengo insurgents played on the villagers’ rebel tradition
since the order to arrest González de Burgos claimed to have royal origin.

As in the colonial rebellions, the Indians seemed reluctant to use violence
against the authorities in spite of their overwhelming numbers. The Indians
and their non-Indian allies were armed with bows and arrows, machetes, and
clubs, but there is no evidence that they used force against the local notables
who refused to join the rebellion. The principal activity of the Indians was to
frighten off the subdelegate and his lieutenant and to prepare to greet the
arrival of the Tianguistengo rebels “with súchiles [lit., flowers, but here per
haps bouquets] of flowers.” Ana Villegas, who served as an emissary between
Chicontepec and Tianguistengo, was angry with Governor Diego Hernández
when he told her that the subdelegate had fled. Believing that Hernández
could have prevented his escape, she scolded him, “Well, now you arc in a
bad spot, who knows how it will go for you.” Perhaps Villegas was aware that
the rules of the game had changed and that the Mexico City government
would no longer be as conciliatory as it had been when confronted by previ
ous isolated colonial riots.

T he denouement of the movement in Chicontepec was similar to events
in earlier riots. The parish priest and two local landowners, José Francisco
del Valle and José Antonio Cuervo, organized thirty “patriots” and arrested

The Law of Our Lady de Guadalupe / 67

the leadership of the Indian community and Lorenzo Espinoza when they
were meeting in the town hall. Del Valle later stated that the thousand or
more Indians who were “in rebellion did not resist”25 and that the principal
weapon used against the rebels was persuasion rather than force. Cuervo, it
should be noted, had a tradition of hiding Indian tributaries from tax collec
tors in exchange for working on his estate.26

But there were important differences between this uprising and the colo
nial movements because it challenged the tradition of declaring loyalty to
the state. In 1810-11, two groups claimed to act in the name of the king, one
loyal to the government in Mexico City, and one insurgent. The insurgents
created their own hierarchy of officials and titles, sending out orders in the
name of the king. Unlike earlier riots, this insurgency offered an alternative
order with its own claims of legitimacy. Espinoza produced his letters of
commission, written in Metztitlán, “in the name of Our Lady of Guadalupe
and Femando VII.”27The makeshift documentation did not meet the elegant
standards of papers produced in Mexico City, and when the Chicontepec
conspirators showed their orders to del Valle, he dismissed them as being
written “by some muleteer.” More significantly he questioned the right of
local market towns to usurp the authority of the viceregal capital: “Why do
the people of Metztitlán and Tianguistengo order you about?” The reader is
struck by the fact that the insurgents evidently accepted the “royal” orders
and expected members of the local elite to embrace them as well. While de la
Vega could blame the rebel success on the Indians’ ignorance and naivcté, it
is more likely that the villagers (some of whom were not Indians) accepted
the letters as authentic because they confirmed what they already believed,
namely, that Femando VII hated González dc Burgos and loved his subjects.

The harsh punishments meted out in the aftermath of this brief revolt
served notice to the Indian population that the Mexico City government
would no longer tolerate riots. The non-Indian “residents” who organized
the local counterrevolution initially arrested only Espinoza and three mem
bers of the Indian government. But when loyalist troops arrived, twenty-
eight more Indians were arrested, along with twelve non-Indians.2*The gov
ernment executed Ana Villegas (a Creole) in July and the other prisoners
disappeared into the prisons of wartime New Spain, where several died. On
27 June 1817 the viceroy ordered the release of the remaining prisoners,
except for the governor Diego Hernández and Lorenzo Espinoza.29 The in
surrection made it dangerous to complain since abusive officials responded
to complaints with charges that the protesters were crypto-insurgents. Such

A Nation of Villages / 68

was the case in Huautla, where villagers claimed the parish priest stifled
objections to his demands for labor by accusing villagers of being subversives.30

T he insurrection in Chicontepec demonstrated the weakness of the colo
nial regime. Once the insurrection challenged the legitimacy of the state,
dissident locals could turn to the alternative state to redress their complaints.
In large part, Spain had succeeded in channeling social discontent into the
courts because there was no viable alternative. The Nahuas of Chicontepec
quickly realized the opportunity that the arrival of rebel government in the
area represented. At least to the local villagers the crudely written invitations
were enough to undermine the insecure legitimacy of colonial officialdom.
T he failure of the insurgents in Chicontepec was a temporary setback; rebels
remained in control of Tianguistengo and Metztitlán, broadcasting their
subversive message with effect. In the next year the insurgents extended their
influence into Huayacocotla, and Chicontepec soon followed the lead of their
neighbors in July 1812.31

Besides appealing to the Indian republics, the insurgents found local mi
litias to be fertile grounds for recruitment. The loyalty of the militia was the
key criterion for the successful defense of the region from insurgents. In the
first months of the war, the loyalist government repelled Ignacio Rayon’s
attempt to establish headquarters in Pahuatlán with troops recruited in
Papantla. But ultimately the loyalty of the local militia was not secure. The
insurgents succeeded in winning over the local militia by recruiting the non
commissioned officers. The local rebellions also reflected an important so
cial cleavage. As noted earlier, the leading merchants and government offi
cials (the subdelegate, royal tax collectors, and tobacco-monopoly police) had
pledged their loyalty to the Crown in early 1811. They were also the leaders
of the military expedition against the insurgents in Pahuatlán. These indi
viduals did not change their affiliation. Rather, the insurrection recruited
the leaders of Indian communities and the sergeants of the militia compa
nies. In general the militia companies of the coast, composed of “pardos,”
that is, non-white, non-Indian people (except for the officers), proved to be a
key source of rebel recruits in Nautla, Misantla, and Papantla. In the case of
Nautla, the entire militia joined in the insurrection. When the loyalist army
finally reconquered the town, the loyalist commander felt that there were no
members of the old militia loyal enough to be trusted with command posi
tions.32!^ . Col. Carlos María Llórente, royalist commander of theTuxpan-
Papantla region after 1814, also justified his lack of success in pacifying the
region by pointing to the fact that the rebels were experienced militia soldiers,

T he Law o f Our Lady dc Guadalupe / 69

unlike the rebels of the early stages of the war in the central plateau.33 The
colonial militia was in many ways organized along the principles that domi
nated Bourbon society. T he officers were drawn from the local elite (land
lords, merchants, and officials), and the soldiers were pardos and mestizo
farmers, fishermen, laborers, and, as the war progressed, Indian villagers.
The split that occurred in the militia thus mirrored the split within colonial
society.

The war itself quickly heightened the tensions within the militias. As they
demonstrated in the colonial rebellions, the pardo militiamen were never
fond of serving under arms for long periods, and with the outbreak of the
war the government began to create Indian militias. In the case of the tierra
caliente, Indian military service was very problematic. The subdelegate of
Hucjutla and Yahualica, de la Vega, was uncertain of the loyalty of the region’s
Indians and raised objections to the formation of Indian militia because any
demand for militia service not based in “custom would breed disloyalty in
the Indian community.”34 De la Vega words were prophetic: the militia raised
from the Indian population of Papantla revolted in 1812 under the leader
ship of Serafín Olarte and later served as the backbone of the insurgency
during the long war.35

In the early stages of the war, reports mentioned the high wages the insur
gents offered. Nasario Manzano, the unlucky cowboy caught mouthing off
about the king’s presence among the rebels, had also declared that the rebels
paid a peso a day to all recruits. What must have been even more alarming to
the local magistrates is that Manzano testified that he heard the story of high
pay from royalist militiamen who came to visit him in jail in Valles. Antonio
Cortes, a Hucjutla militia lieutenant, received a letter from theTianguistengo
insurgent, Cisneros, in January of 1811, promising him “a commission as
captain with a good salary and four reales daily for each soldier.”36 For mili
tiamen, an offer of double the standard wage must have been very enticing.
Hugh Hamill has observed that the royalists took these salary offers seri
ously enough to address them in their anti-insurgent propaganda.3 The
thought of a peso a day fired the imagination of the lower class as much as the
rumors of the king’s presence.

The success of the insurgents in subverting most of the coastal region is
noteworthy. It came at a time when loyalist forces were stretched to the limit.
Insurgent activity simultaneously overran the nearby provinces of Nuevo
Santander to the north and much of the Sierra de Puebla to the west. Insur
gents from along the coast were in close communication with those of the

A Nation of Villages / 70

Sierra de Puebla. By 1812 rebels controlled the entire coast except forTuxpan
and Tampico. During 1811, insurgent forces approached Altamira on the
outskirts of Tampico.38 Loyalists reported that in Altamira the few soldiers
“of this province are scandalously deserting daily and what is worse they
take their arms with them.”39The desperate situation led the loyalists to aban
don Altamira and the entire north bank of the Panuco River, moving the
garrison to Pueblo Viejo.-*0 The coastal towns of Pueblo Viejo and Tuxpan
became loyalist redoubts as exiles from insurgent-controlled territories made
their way to the ports.41 The urgent pleas of the port garrisons led the gover
nor ofVeracruz to dispatch troops to Tampico to forestall the fall of the port
to rebel armies. But even in this loyalist refuge along the coast, the loyalist
commander found that one of his sergeants “has been surprised in corre
spondence with the enemy. He is one of those seducing the troops and Euro
pean residents of that town [Altamira].”42 Indeed the frequent defections of
militia units largely triggered the crisis in Santander.

In several towns the insurgents failed to prosper. This is especially true of
Huejutla, where the militia commanders rebuffed the early attempts to re
cruit them. Likewise, the rebels never occupied the head towns ofYahualica
and Huazalingo, although these cabeceras did suffer rebel invasions and a
clear challenge from the traditionally dissident sujeto villages.

While the loyalist reinforcements from Veracruz under General Arren-
dondo successfully campaigned against the northern rebels, rebellions
throughout the Huasteca created a new series of pressures on the loyalist
redoubt in Tuxpan. In June 1812 the loyalist commander Domingo Comuñez
reported that the insurgents controlled the entire region. Only the port of
Tuxpan remained. Comuñez stated that rebels were laying siege to the port.
The attack lasted eight days and three thousand rebels were said to have
participated.43

During the following year, insurgent control of coastal Huasteca was al
most complete. Tuxpan successfully survived the siege but the rebels cowed
the loyalist commander into remaining behind entrenched positions in the
port. At the same time the Sierra was largely in the hands of insurgents.
Chicontepec rebelled in June 1812, and the Indians of Huayacocotla affili
ated themselves with the insurgents after insurgents from Molango recruited
the Huayacocotla governor.44The same rebels challenged Mexico City’s grip
on the area around Huejutla. De la Vega reported that the European resi
dents of Huejutla had begun to flee the town with their goods as news of
rebel advances spread.45

T he Law of Our Lady de Guadalupe / 71

The insurgency of 1811 and 1812 was not a spontaneous outburst of anger.
There was a slow process of recruiting support from communities beyond
the field of action of the first insurgents. The insurgents built upon the ten
sions within the villages created by the late-colonial regime. Villages divided
internally, often continuing the factional lines of the earlier riots. The insur
gents offered Indians new powers to control their repúblicas and remove the
subdelegates from their posts. Furthermore, they created new opportunities
to sectors of local society (mulatto and mestizo ranchers and laborers) who
had access to neither the Indian repúblicas nor the offices of Spanish gov
ernment. I will now consider what the insurrection offered to its new re
cruits and who the new followers were.

Indigenous villagers joined the insurgency in 1812 and quickly over
whelmed the royalist militia that had taken refuge in the principal towns.
The insurrection spread along trade routes coming into the Papantla region
through the Huasteca and the Sierra de Puebla. In the coastal lowlands, two
important social groups found the insurgency particularly appealing: Indian
villagers and pardo militiamen. Rebel emissaries arrived and incited villag
ers to remove the subdelegates and expel the gachupines, as Spaniards were
disrespectfully called. Some rebels made their appeals more effective by sug
gesting that the rebellion enjoyed the sanction of the captive king, Fernando
VII.46

Rebel action directly attacked local officialdom, targeting the traditional
objects of village unrest: the subdelegates and royal tobacco-monopoly offi
cials. In Papantla the insurgent villagers also singled out the commercial elite
for abuse. This no doubt reflected resentment toward merchants and offi
cials who promoted a system of repartimiento de mercancías to control the
profitable vanilla trade. We have already seen how the insurgents effectively
subverted the local militias by offering soldiers better pay.47 In chapter 2 we
saw how the coastal militias were reluctant enforcers of colonial order, espe
cially when the government called on them to serve any lengthy amount of
time. Insurgents exploited resentments over racial hierarchies practiced in
the coastal militia units. They promised pardo militiamen that they would
be promoted to officer rank, positions that they were denied in the royalist
army, where the government generally reserved command positions for
whites.4* The impact of insurgent subversion was impressive. By June 1812,
with the notable exception of the officers, almost the entire coastal militia
had defected, and the royalists had lost control of all the coastal pueblos
between the ports ofTuxpan and Veracruz. The rebellion in Papantla followed

A Nation of Villages / 72

this same pattern whereby rank-and-file militiamen joined indigenous vil
lagers in overthrowing the subdelegate and imprisoning local militia officers.

Papantla became the regional insurgent command center. The influential
leaders from the sierra, José Francisco Osorno and Ignacio Lopez Rayon,
commissioned a priest, José Antonio Lozano, to administer the region for
the insurgent cause, and bestowed upon him the title of “Colonel and Com
mander of National Forces.” Throughout the insurrection rebels from the
sierra and the coast worked in close cooperation. According to Llórente,
Osorno called on lowland rebels for reinforcements whenever royalist incur
sions threatened his sierra strongholds. He described the rebels in Papantla
as “followers of Osorno.”49 Papantecos moved from the coastal regions to
inland rebel strongholds such asTlaxcalantongo, Apapantilla, Pahuatlan, and
Huachinango, obtaining weapons and soldiers from the serranos who, in turn,
gained access to the outside world through the modest ports of Tecolutla,
Nautla, and Boquilla de Piedra.so

Although the coastal rebels had close ties to the sierra insurgents, there
was no closely articulated hierarchical organization between the two groups.
Local rebels fought in small bands that coalesced around allegiance to their
own pueblo leaders. A case from Misantla offers a fine illustration of the
military autonomy of these groups. When Guadalupe Victoria, the rebel com
mander who time and again ambushed royalists and merchants traveling along
the camino real to Veracruz, ordered Misantla insurgents to send him their
cannon, they refused, asserting that they had bought it themselves and that
it was very much theirs.51 In the Papantla region, the Olartc family became
the dominant leaders, mainly on the basis of their long-established role in
indigenous cabildos and their ability to muster large numbers of Indians to
fight for them.52 Serafín Olarte and his son Mariano became the leading in
surgents by virtue of their ability to forge a coalition among the region’s
diverse rebel bands, who joined together to sustain Olarte’s redoubt in
Coyusquihui.

In September 1813 royalist forces staged a minor rally when they reoccu
pied Papantla. But government troops made real progress only after 1817,
with the decline of the insurgency in the Sierra de Puebla, a decline that
forced the insurgents to abandon all of the principal towns of northern
Veracruz. However, rather than suppressing the insurrection, as the military
hoped it would, the royalist reconquest of the towns simply displaced the
rebellion, turning it into a guerrilla war between towns occupied by royalist
garrisons and hinterlands infested with intransigent rebels.

The Law of Our Lady de Guadalupe / 73

Events between 1813 and 1820 demonstrated the royalists’ inability to
defeat the insurgent challenge. As the royalist armies reoccupied the region,
the towns split and rebel combatants fled into the hills with their families.
These rebel households became the nuclei of new communities that formed
in opposition to the royalist-controlled cabeceras. The pattern became so
common that each royalist town seemed to be shadowed by a corresponding
insurgent camp (cantón). In 1816, Colonel Carlos María Llórente described
this curious geography of rebel communities. He had garrisons located in
Tuxpan,Tamiahua,Temapache,Tihuatlan, Papantla, El Espinal, and Nautla,
while in the rough terrain of the sierra his opponents had created a line of
camps facing each of the royalist-controlled towns.53 Rebels established com
munities in Tlacolula, Cimarrona, and Palo Blanco, near the towns of
Temapache andTihuatlán. Likewise, they occupied the lands of the hacien
das of San Diego and San Antonio and the hill of Coyusquihui, all close to
Papantla, and surrounded El Espinal with insurgent camps at Mesa Grande,
Palo Gordo, and Tenampulco (the latter now in the State of Puebla). The
division between cabecera and hinterland during the war exacerbated one of
the sources of tension that had existed within colonial pueblos. The political
logic of the Indian repúblicas made the hamlets perennial foci of dissidence,
particularly in regard to the distribution of tax and labor burdens. The sujeto
communities and outlying settlements in the hinterlands of indigenous towns
proved too dispersed for the military to garrison. Traditionally, the colonial
state had placed few of its representatives in sujetos, relying instead on in
digenous intermediaries to administer rural hinterlands. In the conditions
of civil war, the rough terrain and, in the coastal region, the dense forests
that surrounded these communities offered a ready-made refuge for the insur
gents and added to the difficulties of the royalist army. Although close to
Papantla as the crow flies, Coyusquihui was separated from the town by
streams impassable in the rainy season and by dense forests and a hilly land
scape that throughout the year made military operations almost impossible
to coordinate.

Although royalist commanders used military terminology to describe these
rebel settlements, calling them “cantones,” in reality they were much more
than that. The rebels recreated their villages, bringing their families with
them as they fled the loyalist occupation.54 Not only did peasants rebuild
their huts, they also raised large community structures (galeras); and in Palo
Blanco rebels even built their own church. Rebels near Coahuitlán, in the
Sierra de Papantla region, built “a large house with the accouterments of a

A Nation of Villages / 74

church; although it lacked a saint’s image, it was well protected from ani
mals, and the facade was decorated with flowers and a star and there were
many burials.” 55 During insurgency, rebels created these militarized villages
throughout much of Mexico. In the Huasteca there were rebel redoubts at
Venasco, Siete Palmas, Cimarrones, and Xihuico, to name but a few. Unfor
tunately, little information about how these communities governed them
selves has survived. The royalist military reports, which emphasize the armed
activities of rebel leaders, give some indication that the refugees re-created
their own repúblicas de indios. For example, one captured Totonac, Salvador
M endez, described him self as an official of the “república de indios
rebeldes.” *’ As they had done before the insurgency, the rebels sustained
themselves and their communities by growing and selling a wide variety of
commercial crops, including sugarcane, tobacco, and vanilla. Llórente de
scribed the agricultural base of the revolt in a letter to the viceroy: “In the
rugged mountains, Excellent Sir, these perverse wild animals live in the most
horrendous vice. In the remotest hills they build their grass huts, and grow
their fields of corn, beans, rice, and other grains that this fertile land pro
duces, [and which] easily provides their livelihood.”57 Rebels used the small
port of Boquilla de Piedra to trade with the outside world, and commercial
tics between rebels and nominally royalist estate owners provided the means
by which insurgents were able to acquire goods that they could not produce
locally. Insurgents thus fashioned a social and economic identity indepen
dent of the traditional villages, which remained in the hands of royalist gar
risons.

Villagers defined their political identities (insurgent or royalist) in terms
of their relation to members of the local elite and the seats of colonial admin
istration. At the center of rural insurgency were the questions of internal
divisions within the pueblos as well as the subordination of the pueblos to
the state. The war translated into a conflict for control of the pueblos and an
attack on outside administrators who dominated local resources and com
merce. As we have seen, late-colonial riots in northern Veracruz and the
Huasteca displayed conflicts over pueblo elections often accompanied by
complaints against administrative abuses. During the war itself, royalist mili
tary commanders took control of town governments, which they used both
to recruit companies of “patriot militia” and to collect taxes that would sus
tain their military operations. Rebels sought to renegotiate the relation be
tween the colonial repúblicas de indios and the representatives of the state.
Although these rebels viewed the insurgent cause through the lens of the

The Law of Our Lady dc Guadalupe / 75

if

I

municipal “patria chica,” this docs not mean that they were without any
sense of national identity. Nationalism had many meanings in 1821, mean
ings that were rooted in the soil of localized village identities and the very
local conflicts of the previous eleven years of war.5f*

The Loyalist Movement

So far I have concentrated on the composition of insurgent groups, but my
comments would be incomplete without a discussion of who the royalists
were and how the royalist forces evolved during the long years of bloodshed.
The insurgents directed their rage at members of the local elite as much as at
government officials. Insurgents raided the possessions of the Vidal family in
Papantla, while in Tantoyuca, insurgents sacked two properties belonging to
Carlos María Llórente.59 Landlords and merchants did not confront the in
surrection with their arms crossed; rather, they formed the leadership of
the counterrevolution, using the war to find new ways to assert their tradi
tional power. These individuals had powerful incentives to carry the war to
its ultimate extreme.

T he leadership of the forces loyal to the viceregal government evolved
into an independent force in local politics. As Juan Ortiz Escamilla has dem
onstrated, Viceroy Calleja adopted a dangerous strategy to confront what
seemed to be an unstoppable wave of insurgency: he delegated authority to
local notables who organized militia companies under their command/10The
creation of numerous locally recruited militia units represented a massive
change in Mexican society. In the eighteenth century militia units had ex
isted along the coast, but as seen in the events in Papantla, they were not
very effective, and participants resented any attempt to make militia service
long term. During the years of insurgency, local society became militarized
to an unusual degree. Militia soldiers and officers served for long periods,
and for the first time local landowners and merchants saw military careers as
promising, if not essential to their strategies for success. Furthermore, mili
tary authorities began to supplant civil officials as the army began to assume
control of fiscal resources to pay for the war. Conflicts emerged between
local commanders and subdelegates which generally ended with the army
taking the advantage.

In some cases the new military officers found a direct connection between
their fortunes and their service. Probably the best example of this is the some
time commander of the Papantla garrison, Juan Baptista Vidal, who used his

A Nation of Villages / 76

militia units to escort his goods rather than participate in military campaigns.
Alvarez de Güitián, the active commander of Huejutla, also could not resist
using the control of revenues that his post gave him to accumulate a fortune.
A review of the books revealed at least thirty thousand pesos missing. Villag
ers in Chontla accused Carlos María Llórente of using his military authority
to seize communal lands. Thus, military careers offered prominent local fami
lies opportunities to recoup their losses incurred during the insurrection.
Naturally, this benefit only accrued to those fortunate enough to occupy posts
as commanders.

When questions of economic interest arose, the drive for control by mili
tary commanders undermined the pacification effort. A good example of
this occurred in Tantoyuca in 1816 where a group of owners commissioned
José Antonio Díaz de la Concha, a priest recently appointed administrator of
the hacienda de las Flores, to negotiate a settlement with the local insurgents
led by Félix Mesa. Many of Mesa’s men were former estate employees. Among
the generous terms offered by the owners was freedom for the slaves and an
increase in wages for laborers. Diaz de la Concha offered Félix Mesa the
position of hacienda administrator/’1 Not only do the records of the negotia
tions indicate that slaves were an important part of the local movement, the
terms also indicate that local landlords had become desperate enough to make
ample concessions to return their lands to production. T he owners recog
nized that there was no going back to the old order. However, the peace plan
did not prosper. According to Diaz de la Concha, the loyalist captain, Andrés
Jáuregui, deliberately derailed peace negotiations by initiating an offensive
while he was treating with Mesa. Jáuregui, he argued, feared losing his mili
tary fiefdom if the rebels took an amnesty. One suspects that peace was not
always in the best interest of local commanders.

Calleja’s strategy was very successful in mobilizing provincial elites against
the insurrection, but it also armed and organized them into an effective po
litical force that proved to be politically independent in 1821. The leaders of
the “patriot militias” went on to play a central role in the creation of the
independent state. The arrival of independence did not destroy their politi
cal influence.

The Negotiated Settlement and the Constitution

The last years of insurgency provide some unusually good documentation
that describes the transformation of political identities in Coyusquihui, the

The Law of Our Lady de Guadalupe / 77

refuge of a large contingent of indigenous rebels from Papantla.62 In this
section, I explore how recalcitrant villagers reacted to the Spanish constitu
tion promulgated in 1820. The jockeying for power between government
and rebels reveals how rural insurgents perceived their struggle and how
these perceptions had changed since 1810. Concomitantly, this power struggle
provides insights into rebel aspirations and demonstrates the pivotal role
that the constitution rcadopted in 1820 played in Olarte’s surrender. Finally,
this struggle serves to demonstrate how the popular concepts of power had
changed by the end of this ferocious insurrection.

The government of Viceroy Juan Ruiz dc Apodaca pursued an effective
policy of negotiating with local insurgents and granting liberal terms of
amnesty. This policy played a key role in pacifying the Sierra de Puebla,
where in 1817 the local insurgent leader Jose Francisco Osorno negotiated
an amnesty for himself and many of his principal officers. The relative suc
cess of the royalist army under Apodaca was in large measure due to an am
nesty policy that sanctioned the military and political authority of repentant
guerrillas. The settlement negotiated in Coyusquihui followed this pattern.
But with the changes that accompanied the promulgation of the Spanish
Constitution in 1820, Olarte’s capitulation was much less than surrender.

On 9 May 1820 Colonel Carlos María Llórente wrote Viceroy Apodaca
that pamphlets from Havana had arrived with news that the Spanish Consti
tution had been readopted. Llórente revealed his antipathy to the change,
remarking, “Your Excellency already knows the kind of venom that such
publications contain.. . . [N]ews is already spreading to the interior.”63 Per
haps Llórente sensed the challenge to his own authority that a return to the
constitutional order entailed. Without a doubt the reestablished constitu
tion posed merely one of the difficulties that the royalist military faced. In
the summer of 1820, a new commander, Colonel José Rincón, led the local
military in a successful but costly campaign against the insurgent redoubt in
Coyusquihui. His plan consisted of ringing rebel territory with garrisoned
forts and maintaining his troops in active campaigns throughout the rainy
season.64 In spite of its military success, the royalist offensive began to crumble
under the impact of disease and declining supplies of men and money. In
September, Colonel Rincón abruptly resigned his post. When his replace
ment, Colonel José Barradas, arrived, he found that the garrisons surround
ing Coyusquihui were dangerously undermanned. Desperate for reinforce
ments, on 7 October 1820 Barradas reported that one-third of his soldiers
were ill and that he would soon have to abandon the forts surrounding

A Nation of Villages / 78

Coyusquihui. He concluded by stating his regret at sending such a bleak
report.65

In this context of impending crisis, Barradas began negotiations with the
Coyusquihui rebels. The negotiated settlement that resulted from the new
commander’s initiative can help us understand how villagers perceived the
political changes associated with the new constitutional system. When
Barradas replaced Rincón in September 1820, his first action was aimed at
winning the trust of the insurgents. He sent letters to the rebels informing
them of Rincon’s departure and dispatched José Maria Aguilar, the parish
priest of Tlapacoyan who once had spent several months in Coyusquihui
as Olarte’s prisoner, to the insurgent camp to inform the rebels about the
rcadoption of the constitution and to baptize rebel children. He also sent an
offer of amnesty by way of a sergeant who had also been held captive in
Coyusquihui. More than simply offering amnesty, however, Barradas wrote
“of the transformation of the government . . . [and of the new] immortal
Constitution that makes men free and independent. Now,” he concluded,
“you have what you have fought for and dreamed o f for so long. ” 66 Even so,
Barradas’s envoy did not receive a positive reception. Upon his arrival, in
surgent captain Pedro Ferral accused the sergeant “of seducing the people
so that they would ask for amnesty.” Acting for Olarte, who was ill, Ferral
took the emissary to a ranking rebel chief, who was presented with a copy of
the constitution. “I explained at length,” reported the sergeant, “that the
war must end, not in threats that would give cause and motive for a new
outbreak of war . . . but with the Constitution.”67

The insurgents responded with caution, stating that they would consult
with Olarte before making a decision. Nevertheless, Prudencio Ibáñez, one
of the rebel officers, wrote that Rincon’s replacement with Colonel Barradas
was a positive sign, because of the “ punishing policy” that the former army
commander had pursued. He added that the change in officers had given the
insurgents “hope to enjoy the peace that some of us desire, according to what
the government of the Spanish monarchy’s Constitution has granted us.”f>fl
One reason rebels such as Ibanez were happy to see Rincón go was precisely
because his tactic of repeated campaigns and the permanent garrisoning of
troops in forest fortresses was having a tremendous impact on rebel troops.
Rincon’s scorched earth policy destroyed the provisioning system that had
fed the insurgent cantones. Such conditions had created dissension. One
captured rebel, Mariano González, testified through a translator that Olarte
was determined to fight on even if “all the milpas are destroyed” and that he

T he Law of Our Lady de Guadalupe / 79

vowed to kill anyone he encountered who accepted the government amnesty.69
In November, Barradas again sent Father Aguilar to negotiate with the rebel
camp and, as an act of good faith, he also released Francisco Ibáñez, the
brother of Olarte’s lieutenant. Prudencio Ibáñez soon responded that he and
several other gente de razón were willing to accept the amnesty but had held
back “out of compassion for the Indians, whom they do not wish to leave.”70
Ibáñez reported that the exhausted rebels were waiting for a general meeting
that Olartc planned to call. However, on 11 November Pedro Ferral and a
group of non-Indians appeared in Nautla and accepted the terms of am
nesty, while reporting that Olarte and about two hundred rebels were cross
ing the Espinal River in order to continue the struggle alongside rebels in
the nearby camp of Palo Gordo. Worried that he would not favorably con
clude negotiations before Olarte discovered the weakness of his garrisons,
Barradas made an attempt at psychological warfare. He released two amnestied
insurgents, who were instructed to go to the rebel camps and spread the
word that the royalists would soon attack Olarte.71

In December 1820 Olarte’s forces finally reached an accord with the roy
alist officers when the rebel commander led 468 armed rebels, organized in
seven military companies, to accept the amnesty. In a letter published in the
Gaceta de Mexico, the official organ of the government in Mexico City, Olarte
disavowed his previous actions and declared that he and his followers had
been “engañados” (deceived).72 Olarte thus adopted the language of the
Gaceta, where reports always described rebels as deluded or misled. Yet
Olarte’s repentant declaration, created for the military as part of its propa
ganda campaign, only temporarily obscured what his subsequent actions soon
revealed: the evolution of a new political text that was articulated by the
former rebels. This change from intransigence to negotiation was due to the
diplomacy of Father José María Aguilar and the very generous terms of the
amnesty. Aguilar and Barradas agreed that the rebels would be entitled to
establish new pueblos in the regions they had occupied during the war. On
17 November the commander of Papantla recognized the new municipality
of El Cepillo, founded by Pedro Ferral and his followers. This no doubt sent
a clear and reassuring message to the rebels still under arms in Coyusquihui,
who subsequently set up a new town council in their redoubt. T he fact that
they were allowed to do so amounted to a de facto recognition of formerly
autonomous rebel cantones as legitimate pueblos under ex-insurgent con
trol, with political rights protected under the terms of the constitution. With
the creation of these new municipal governments at the end of the war, power

A Nation of Villages / 80

shifted away from the principal towns that had traditionally administered
large hinterlands. Unlike those who had participated in earlier colonial re
bellions, the rebels of 1820 demanded constitutional guarantees that would
ensure that the transformation (mutación) of the government would be per
manent.

After Olarte’s surrender, the only remaining rebel band in the Papantla
region was that of José Santiago Moreno, located in Palo Gordo. Barradas
demanded that Moreno and his followers accept unconditional surrender,
but Viceroy Ruiz de Apodaca ordered Barradas to commission Moreno as a
lieutenant who would, along with his armed followers, be placed under Olarte’s
immediate command. Moreno’s rebels surrendered “with the condition that
they not put down their arms, which they would no longer use to pursue,
invade, or fight, but [only] for their defense.” The local royalist commanders
agreed that “in the name of the Nation . . . [the rebels be allowed] to keep
their arms for personal defense.”73T he question of against whom, precisely,
they needed to defend themselves, seems not to have been asked.

Ruiz de Apodaca’s policy of absorbing former rebels into the royalist army
was a double-edged sword. It allowed for the rapid pacification of the coun
tryside, but it also gave recognition to the new political actors who emerged
from the long insurgency. T he treatment of Moreno and his followers indi
cates that the peace accords allowed political autonomy with teeth. The rebels
kept their arms, and their own insurgent officers commanded the new mili
tias. For example, on 30 November 1820 several rebel leaders wrote Olarte
that they accepted the constitution and that they “have kept their arms in
hand to defend their rights.”74 This letter may well have influenced Olarte’s
decision to surrender, since soon afterward he declared his loyalty to the
constitution. Mexico City authorized Barradas to grant Olarte a commis
sion as a cavalry captain.75 As further proof of government goodwill. Barradas
sent ammunition to the newly commissioned “national” militia of El Cepillo
under Ferral’s command. The new militias adopted the terminology that
local insurgents had begun to use in 1813. But it was only after the promul
gation of the constitution in 1820 that the government troops dropped the
term realistas in favor of nacionales, implying that the militiamen were in the
service of the nation rather than the king. A change had clearly occurred in
how militiamen perceived their service.

In essence, Olarte had made his peace with the constitution before he
accepted the government that ruled in its name. Olarte’s letter accepting
amnesty, cited earlier, described his surrender as an act that embraced the

The Law of Our Lady de Guadalupe / 81

“party of the constitution,” not the government. Most immediately, the rebels
implemented the terms of the new constitution when they established a town
council for a new pueblo named Santiago Coyusquihui. The former rebels
had a strong appreciation of the prerogatives won under the negotiated settle
ment and the constitution. When Juan Vidal, the new commander of Papantla,
arrested some of Olartc’s followers in April 1821, Olarte protested to the
viceroy in terms that indicated his interpretation of the peace agreement.
Olarte stated that Barradas had told him that his followers in Papantla would
not be bothered for any reason, neither by the military chief Vidal, nor by
anyone else. Captain Olarte believed that his people had the right to put
their entire efforts into building their community wherever he and they found
it most convenient. “This,” continued Olarte, “is what I have been offered
on behalf of the Sovereign and the Nation.”76 Olarte thus interpreted the
truce as recognition of local autonomy from colonial authorities. And he set
out to create a new pueblo using the political rights granted to ayuntamien
tos by the constitution. In claiming that both the sovereign and the nation
had granted him these rights, he suggested that these rights originated from
a source beyond the personal will of the monarch.

Evolution of Insurgent Ideology

Eric Van Young’s work has shown that the insurgents originally espoused a
form of “naive monarchism,” believing that the insurgency was in defense
of the king and that it was supported by Femando VII.77 This perspective
also characterized revolt in the Huasteca region during 1811 and 1812, when
it aimed to restore the royal protector. The villagers saw the monarch as a
ruler who intervened in their favor and whose beneficent laws had been ma
liciously frustrated by the gachupines.78 Though monarchism was the lan
guage of power, it was not an idiom wielded exclusively by those in power.
The myth of a beneficent king became a powerful mobilizing tool for rebels.
This deeply rooted belief made it possible for the rebels to claim legitimacy
as they defied authority.

Nor were the subaltern classes the only ones who professed a faith in the
benevolent monarch who identified with their well-being. Creoles clung to
dreams of naive kingship and Femando VII even after the triumph of the
Plan de Iguala, a tendency that indicates that popular and elite conscious
ness were not completely alien to each other. Anna shows that the Plan de
Iguala succeeded because of the widely held hopes that a Bourbon would

A Nation of Villages / 82

accept a Mexican throne.79 It was this shared community of beliefs that made
the insurgency so powerful. Trusting the king was a universal trait, not merely
a plebeian one.

Even during the early stages of rebellion, popular beliefs about the mon
archy played a role in creating a new nationalist idiom. For example, an in
surgent letter sent to Huejutla on 16 January 1811 invited the local militia to
revolt “under the banner of Our Lady of Guadalupe and King Fernando VII
in favor of America, faith, and religion, but against the gachupines.”80 Cap
tured rebels declared that they followed “the law of O ur Lady of Gua
dalupe.”81 In Zacualtipán the Indian governor wrote to the insurgents asking
for protection, explaining that “the gachupines protect the gente de razón
but we have no other protection but Our Lady of Guadalupe.”82 In the world
of indigenous villagers, the absence of the monarch created a profound crisis
of state legitimacy because without the king there was no check on the power
of the subdelegate and other gachupín officials. Insurgency became one way
of protecting the community against the subdelegate and his local merchant
allies. At the local level, anti-gachupin sentiment had a very concrete mean
ing. In claiming to speak for the king, rebels implied that the monarch was
the source of their political legitimacy. But at the same time, insurgents
modified their royalism with an “American” identity. Even in the earliest
stages of the revolt, they identified the enemy as the colonial state and the
Spaniards, suggesting a new alternative order in the “American” party.

One remarkable aspect of the rebellion is that although the violence had
its roots in the local conflicts of village politics, insurgents used a protonational
language. As Alan Knight has pointed out, by 1810 key elements of “cultural
nationalism” had already filtered into popular consciousness.83 Anti-gachupin
sentiment and identification with the Virgin of Guadalupe were evident in
local indigenous rhetoric. Village rebels immediately identified the royalist
government as the protector of the Spaniards. In essence, for them the vaunted
paternalism of the colonial regime fell far short of popular expectations.

Anti-Spanish sentiment and royal paternalism may have dominated the
early declarations of village rebels, but their political outlook did not remain
static. Insurgent officials constantly sought to bolster the morale of their
followers with propaganda that took the changing political scene into ac
count. Debates surrounding the Spanish Constitution and the insurgent
charter of Apatzingán filtered into the rebel camps, especially during the
period of rebel administration under José Antonio Lozano. Although Lozano
held the impressive title of commander general, he was aware that his sur-

The Law of Our Lady de Guadalupe / 83

vival depended on the goodwill of the villagers. Insurgent villages could, and
often did, refuse Lozano’s attempts to command village militias or tax their
com m unity m em bers.114 Lacking the powers o f royalist officers and
subdelegates, Lozano adopted a language of persuasion to get what he needed,
circulating letters to the indigenous town governments in favor of the insur
gency. Reminding the villages of the services that he and the insurgents had
rendered the community, Lozano stressed the defense of the patria in very
local terms, equating it with the defense of the pueblos. Lozano played on
the very real fears of royalist revenge, warning of the consequences of a roy
alist restoration. “Since my arrival in this command,” he said to local rebels
in 1813, “I have not followed any other course but to defend the places where
you live and to avoid the ruin that would befall you if the enemy returned to
dominate you. [If that were to happen] incalculable evils would result.”’15

The insurgents attempted to create a new political order in the rebel towns.
In 1813 they held elections in Papantla and the surrounding towns to choose
electors for the provincial delegation to the insurgent congress in Chilpan-
cingo.w’ The local rebel leaders, although threatened by a royalist counter
offensive, paused to carry out the elections.87 Apart from the traditional voting
for officials in the repúblicas de indios, these were the first national elections
many pueblos participated in, and they indicate a new political practice in
rural Mexico.

The political structure that Lozano sought to create collapsed in Septem
ber 1813, when the royalist army reoccupied Papantla and rebel resistance
was increasingly reduced to the activities of a loose confederation of insur
gent villages and camps. Even then, however, continued tics to the colonywide
insurgency meant that “peasant localism” did not simply dominate the in
surgent struggle. For example, the Supremo Congreso Nacional Americano
maintained a presence in the region through the person of Jose Joaquin
Aguilar, the intendant ofVeracruz, who established his headquarters in the
Papantla region in 1814. Besides his military activities, Aguilar dedicated
considerable energy to antigovemment propaganda. Between 1813 and 1816,
he wrote and circulated tracts that ridiculed the practices of the old regime.
Aguilar engaged in give-and-take with the royalist Gaceta de México. He wrote
circulars denouncing the Gaceta’s war propaganda; debunking royalist claims
of military victories and defending the demands of “the Americans,” Aguilar’s
pronouncements challenged the legitimacy of the colonial state by referring
to Viceroy Félix Calleja as “the Tyrant called Viceroy of the kingdom,” who
taxed and conscripted villagers. He ridiculed the inability of the royalists to

A Nation of Villages / 84

defeat insurgent guerrillas and contrasted the “courage, enthusiasm, strength,
and resourcefulness of the Americans” with the royalist “wave of slaves”
that tried to subdue them.88 Aguilar’s public letters indicate the existence of
political debate within rural Mexico, a struggle for the minds of villagers.

The extent to which Aguilar’s letters were “consumed” by the public is
hard to gauge. Lacking printing presses, local insurgents could not publish
the letters. Instead they circulated through the loose chains of command
within the insurgent camp.89 Aguilar used the language of the widely circu
lated Gaceta de México to mock the regime in Mexico City. He adopted the
rhetoric of the Gaceta to describe “American” victories and to point out the
discrepancy between government reports and the ongoing war. Significantly,
royalist propaganda relied on the same ideas as those of the insurgents: patria,
religion, and even monarchy. The idea of the noble defense of patria runs
throughout royalist discourse.90Insurgents merely added that defense of the
patria meant fighting gachupines. The popular discourse absorbed elements
of elite thought but turned it to revolutionary purposes. The political changes
that took place in Spain before the return of Fernando VII also allowed an
easier diffusion of the new political identity of citizen in the colonies.91

The influence of Lozano and Aguilar is apparent in the proclamations of
Mariano Olarte, written in the rustic Spanish of a village-educated insur
gent. In his proclamations, Olarte adopted the terminology and mimicked
the mocking tone of Aguilar’s dispatches. Even before 1820, Olarte’s dis
course recognized villagers’ rights as citizens and supported their demands
for increased local autonomy. In an 1819 document, for example, he referred
to the lives of villagers under the viceroyalty as similar to those of “beasts of
burden” and “slaves.”92 He lauded the “nationals” (i.e., insurgents) because
they offered villagers control of local politics in opposition to the towns,
which were then under royalist military command. Olarte’s words indicate
that political autonomy was high on the list of rebel objectives: “We must no
longer allow ourselves to be ruled by Viceroys, judges, and subserv ient min
isters of the tyranny that has sucked the blood from our hearts; rather we
must govern ourselves so that we may see the subjects as brothers, not as
mules or animals, which up to now is how the previous government has viewed
us. Yes, my brothers, those who have offered you amnesty are the same ones
who would shackle you with the chains of slavery.”93 In his declaration Olarte
introduced the image of the beast of burden, a metaphor that worked on
different levels. From the perspective of indigenous villagers, Olarte’s com
ments reminded his readers (and listeners) that colonial officials and royalist

The Law of Our Lady dc Guadalupe / 85

military commanders continually imposed forced labor. His condemnation
of how Indians were treated as beasts of burden struck a responsive chord
among Indians who had been forced to give personal service to officers and
functionaries. Here the political demand for autonomy had clear economic
overtones for the Totonacs holding out with him in the hills. On a more
general level, Olarte was challenging the caste system and the unequal dis
tribution of burdens and privileges that permeated the entire colonial order.
The idea of brotherhood served as Olarte’s term for citizen and evoked a
claim of egalitarianism within the insurgent movement.

Olarte’s denunciation of slavery indicates that peasants perceived their
new political rights in terms of local systems of labor and exploitative taxation.
A new, aggressive definition of citizenship also appeared in the “pacified”
communities. After 1820 the constitutional regime provided the pueblos with
new means by which to oppose the actions of petty officials and military
commanders. In 1821 the subdelegate of Yahualica, José Gómez Escalante,
wrote an alarmed letter stating that the local Indians had become excessively
proud of their rights. “The vain Indians,” he said, “have with gusto begun to
call themselves citizens.” The immediate cause of Gomez’s protest was the
Indians’ refusal to provide the labor services that subdclegates had tradition
ally enjoyed.94 In spite of the new liberal order, local officials sought to retain
the colonial labor draft. Administrators like Gómez Escalante relied on such
coercive labor arrangements to prosper.95 It also points to the emergence of
local politicos who quickly informed the Indians of their rights.

T he declaration of Olarte also indicates how far the rhetoric of Spanish
constitutionalism had penetrated the ranks o f rural insurgents. Jaime
Rodriguez has demonstrated that the Cortes de Cádiz undermined the posi
tion of the royalist government. Indeed, Olarte’s declaration seems to mimic
the language of the Cortes that was published in the Gaceta de México: “From
this moment, American Spaniards, you see yourselves elevated to the dignity
of free men . . . your destinies no longer depend on Ministers, Viceroys, nor
Governors; they are in your hands.”96 After Fernando VII revoked the Con
stitution of 1812, insurgents found it even easier to wrap themselves in the
cloak of constitutionalism.

Insurgents who accepted government amnesties after the readoption of
the constitution in 1820 demonstrated considerable independence of thought
when interpreting the specifics of the new legal order. But even before De
cember 1820 they had obviously discussed the meaning of the constitution
with envoys who had been sent to rebel camps. Thus, when Olarte accepted

A Nation of Villages / 86

the amnesty, it became clear that his view of constitutional rights differed
from that of local royalist commanders. Only two weeks after Olarte’s sur
render, these differences gave Barradas cause for second thoughts about the
peace process. He complained that “seditious letters opposed to the healthy
morality of religion and society” were passing among the pacified insurgent
commanders.97 Barradas’s experience was not unique; other royalist military
commanders reported renewed agitation throughout New Spain. But for
Barradas, the priests negotiating the peace were to blame for the subversive
tone of the letters. And indeed, some local priests were extremely sympa
thetic to the insurgents’ interpretation of the new constitutional order. For
example, in a letter to José Moreno, Francisco Parroga, the parish priest of
Huehuetla, interpreted the constitution promulgated in 1820 asa product of
the constitution that Morelos and his followers had adopted in Apatzingán:

I have written you three letters that have gone without response in which
I inform you of the joy that came to our America when the Americans
promulgated the worthy constitution [of Apatzingán] in the year of [i]8i4.
When the government refused to accept this in order to keep us forever as
its slaves, all Americans took up arms until they saw that what they de
manded had been carried out. The happy day has arrived in which we
Americans can have a respite from so much misery, from the hunger and
lack of clothing we have suffered, we have emerged to see the establishment
of the Constitution to which we American priests have sworn loyalty.98

In the same letter, Parroga invited the “national troops” to swear loyalty to
the newly promulgated constitution, because if the “old bayonets . . . chal
lenge our liberty, together we are the national troops who are ready to re
sist.” Addressing those who had accepted amnesty, he added that “all the
pueblos will declare that you are not pardoned (indultados) but rather free
citizens, loyal to your homeland, who did not put down your arms until you
saw the Constitution of which we have dreamed established.”99

Barradas was correct to worry about the nature of the rebel correspon
dence. Essentially, the rebels were claiming the right to rebel if they felt that
the army violated the constitution. In January 1821 Barradas reported that
seditious proclamations were circulating in the newly pacified region. A group
calling themselves “ padres de la patria” issued a document that called for
independence on the grounds that the Spaniards dominated the courts and
the king was too far away to understand American needs. The letter carried a
municipal seal and apparently originated in Jalapa.100

The Law of Our Lady de Guadalupe / 87

Religious imagery, monarchism, and resentment of Spaniards do not pro
vide much evidence of a modern concept of the nation, but insurgent con
cepts evolved over the decade-long war. The war made Indian principales
and pardo militiamen commanders of the nation. These individuals were
subjected to the propaganda efforts of both the royalists and insurgent intel
lectuals like Aguilar. Individuals like Mariano Olarte could no longer rely on
their traditional status as members of principal families; he now spoke as a
colonel in the “national” army. Popular ideology changed as the insurgency
forced it to integrate new attitudes toward authority.

Pueblo and Nation

% The Mexican War of Independence was undoubtedly a regional affair, rooted,
as Brian Hamnett points out, in the social tensions of local societies.101 As we
have seen, even within a given locale the insurgency was a loose confedera
tion of rebel camps, each with its own leader who jealously guarded his au
tonomy of action. The violence of independence heightened the already
provincial orientation o f the colonial economy. No overarching economic
identity existed that would provide the impetus for a national state, and even
the colonial army became balkanized as the war progressed.102 If the factors
that historians have often designated as having promoted national unification
were absent, what did the nation mean in 1821?

Mexico’s new, independent reality was bom out of the decentralization of
power that occurred during the war. Revealing a central tenet of the insur
gency, Father Parroga’s letters quoted above used the term “pueblos” (towns)
interchangeably with “pueblo” (the people), as if the “national” audience
was a plurality of pueblos. Insurgents seemed to have imagined the nation as
a confederation of regions, a pluralist reality, just as they had organized the
insurgency itself. Indeed, the federal constitution adopted in 1824 was one
attempt to accommodate the new political realities produced by the war. The
new Constitution of 1824 conceived of the nation as a union of sovereign
provinces— in other words, as a collection of patrias.103

While many theorists of national identities assume that nationalism was
exceptionally thin in early-nineteenth-century Latin America, involving only
a fraction of the Creole population, the events surrounding Coyusquihui
suggest that alternative nationalisms developed on the peripheries of New
Spain.104 The negotiated settlement and the letters to and from local insurgents
supposed that sovereignty resided in an authority other than the monarch.

A Nation of Villages / 88

According to their interpretation of the constitution readopted in 1820, the
nation was composed of strong and autonomous municipalities, capable of
defying the power of the “old bayonets.” Indeed, the barrier between elite
and popular discourse was more porous than it now appears, and villagers
participated in the ideological creation of the nation along with the Creole
elite. The spread of the cult of the Virgin of Guadalupe into New Spain’s
hinterland is a case in point. The local patron saint of Mexico City became a
national symbol as Creole priests, trained in the Basilica of Guadalupe, pro
moted the cult in their Indian parishes. At the same time, muleteers spread
the practice of the cult along commercial routes.105 By 1810 the cult provided
a supravillage identity, enabling the insurgents to transcend the local patron
saints of individual villages. Benedict Anderson assigns a central role to the
Creole elite’s “bureaucratic career” pilgrimages in the creation of national
identities. William Taylor’s work resonates with Anderson’s idea of pilgrim
age and goes one step further by suggesting how Creole priests (and mule
teers) could promote a national cult of the Virgin in their remote parishes.
Thus, the Guadalupe symbol was far from traditional; it represented the
genesis of new practices in the villages. The fact that by 1810 indigenous
insurgents adopted the language of a national Virgin saint to justify their
actions indicates that they found no contradiction between the new nation
and their local patron saints.

Indian villagers were often less provincial than observers have supposed.
In their commercial transactions and efforts to pursue litigation in the cen
tral courts, Totonacs from the coast made frequent trips through the Sierra
de Puebla, an activity that gave them the elements to create a vision of na
tional space. Mexican insurgents adopted a nationalist discourse before the
emergence of national markets or a united national elite, a process that con
firms the emerging consensus among scholars that nations are not a natural
phenomenon but are ideologically constructed. Insurgents sought to create
a nation out of the localist impulses of the rebellion and the overarching
elements inherited from colonial society. The insurgents “imagined” a na
tion from below without the regions being subordinated to the national cen
ter. Although this regional vision of the state did not triumph, this does not
mean that it was not crucial in the formation of the nation during the nine
teenth century.106

The Law of Our Lady de Guadalupe / 89

The End of Colonial Rule

The army created to suppress the insurgency had grown to prodigious size,
but as we have seen by 1820 the royalist army was in trouble, not just in the
lowlands ofVeracruz but throughout the colony.107 Carlos M. Llórente, as we
have seen above, was not in the least bit happy about the reintroduction of
the Constitution of Cádiz, even believing that the first reports he received of
the political change were malicious rumors. His response to the rebellion of
Agustín Iturbide was likewise negative.

This truce did not produce a lasting peace. The “consummation of inde
pendence” followed only a few months later. The proclamation of the Plan
de Iguala took place on 24 February 1821. This movement was based on an
alliance between the loyalist military commander, Agustín Iturbide, and in
surgents in southern Mexico led by Vicente Guerrero. The alliance proclaimed
a series of agreements calling for “unity, independence, and religion.” Es
sentially, Iturbide’s plan included a promise to uphold the Spanish Consti
tution, the position of the church, and independence.

Iturbide’s movement slowly spread through New Spain’s military, while
at the same time it began to attract insurgents. Amnestied insurgents, such
as Bravo and Mier y Terán, as well as insurgents who had continued the
struggle, like Guadalupe Victoria, joined the movement.108 On the local level,
Llórente got news of the rebellion in early March 1821, and like many loyal
ists, pledged his support to the government in Mexico City. Llórente prom
ised that his troops would fight any disruption of public order.100 In spite of
Iturbide and the military’s participation, local officials feared the rebel forces.
In Huejutla, José Cayetano Lubián wrote that “all those who rise up arc
barbarians without any system, or humanitarian ideas, everything comes down
to killing and stealing as we have witnessed in our sad experience.”noRegard
less of the leadership, locals still feared the social consequences of rebellion.

The main challenge to the precarious peace that had just been achieved in
the region did not come from the regular troops but from the pueblos.
Llórente especially doubted the loyalty of the towns with insurgent histories
such as Nautla and Papantla.m On 30 March the town of Misantla rebelled
in favor of Iturbide. T he constitutional town council led the revolt, and the
town’s military commander fled to Jalapa. Llórente wrote that he did not
know if he fled or left on orders “either because he believed his troops were
insufficient to contain the disorders. . . or because he had received orders [to
retreat].” 1 l2Llorente ordered the commander of Nautla, Salvador Garcia del

A Nation of Villages / go

Corral, to march immediately on Misantla. As Garcia approached, the popu
lation and the municipal officers fled to the hills, as in 1815 and 1817, when
loyalist forces had first attempted to occupy the insurgent town. Llórente
noted that many of the rebels were members of the militia companies he had
reestablished when the town was reconquered for the loyalist cause in i8 i7 .m
Garcia calmed the revolt “ with gentle and political measures.” He appointed
Miguel Méndez, a leading amnestied insurgent, as military commander of
the town because “he was well known to the pueblo.” He also issued a proc
lamation granting total amnesty and coaxed the municipal government back
to the town after four days.114

Garcia was able to reestablish peace in the town but it proved to be tempo
rary. When he returned to Nautla, the peace he established in Misantla was
immediately undermined when the nearby town of Naolinco revolted and
the military commander of the town defected on 24 April. Llórente reported
that Misantla and Boquilla de Piedra would soon follow “because of the opin
ion that the inhabitants hold in favor of the plans of this cabecilla [Iturbide].” 115
Unlike his response to the revolt of Misantla the previous month, Llórente
did not dispatch any troops to put down the revolt. This was due to the
increasingly precarious situation in which he found himself. Even in March
he had informed his superiors that desertions were increasing. By May he
doubted the loyalty of his own garrisons. His troops were without money,
and Llórente began to fear a conspiracy within their ranks.1,6

On 2 May Llórente reported that Zacapoaxtla, followed by Teziutlán, had
revolted and arrested Colonel Juan Arteaga. Llórente sent more men to hold
Papantla and Nautla, but pessimistically gave them orders to retreat if neces
sary.117 Llórente ordered the arrest of several long-standing loyalist officers
on charges of conspiring in favor of Iturbide. The officers were Lieutenant
Colonel Francisco Barrena, Captain Pedro Blasco, Lieutenant Juan D.
Cordero, and Sublieutenant Juan Vega, all from theTuxpan garrison. These
officers conspired with members of the municipal government to surprise
Llórente and take the port for the independence movement. The plan was
discovered, and the participants fled the town or were arrested.118Then the
amnestied rebels of Coyusquihui took up arms again and began to turn the
tables on Colonel Llorente’s weakened troops.1 i9 Olarte again led his follow
ers in an attack on Papantla, and this time he succeeded in taking it. In Au
gust Olarte’s forces occupied Tecolutla; and in October Olarte led a contin
gent o f troops in the siege of Veracruz.120 Llorente’s soldiers rebelled in
Chontla, and the commander was forced to flee to Tantoyuca. Tuxpan now

The Law of Our Lady de Guadalupe / 91

successfully revolted in favor of Iturbidc with the help of the militia offic
ers.121 One of the first acts of the independent municipal government was to
ask that the town’s militia battalion be disbanded. At the same time, the com
mander who had replaced Alvarez de Güitián in Huejutla joined the Itur-
bidistas as well. On 29 August 1821, finally bowing to the inevitable, Llórente
swore loyalty to the independentista cause inTuxpan.122The negotiated truce
ended only four months after it began. Finally, at the end of May or early
June, Llórente himself and the town council of Tuxpan declared in favor of
the plan of Iturbide.

Conclusions

Observers of rural Mexico agree that indigenous villages were fraught with
internal divisions. Studies of Totonac communities in the Sierra de Puebla
describe territorial animosities occasionally overlain with ethnic divisions as
well as other social tensions.123T he insurgency added new forms of political
protest to this inflammatory mix of social and political tensions. Indepen
dence offered villagers new opportunities to renegotiate power in Mexico’s
hinterlands.

The insurgency shared with the more modest riots of the late eighteenth
century common roots in the politics of rural villages. As in the colonial
period, there were factional splits within and between villages, fueling social
conflict. The insurgents challenged the ways in which rural communities
functioned, both internally and in their relations with “outsiders.” The con
stitution readopted in 1820 accommodated some of the changes in popular
politics that villagers had developed during the long period of guerrilla war
fare.

The insurgents’ attitude toward this constitution indicates that the inde
pendence movement had created a critical shift in ideas concerning govern
ment and political identities. Earlier colonial revolts were brief protest move
ments designed to redress specific abuses of local officials. But by the end of
the War of Independence, rather than frame their nonconformity in terms
of dissatisfaction with particular officials, villagers asserted their rights to
control local officials. This was a slow process, assisted by the lack of clear
legal authority during the Spanish king’s absence. While the rebels’ early
grievances recalled the “naive monarchism” of colonial riots, by 1820 Olarte
had come to question the foundation of Spanish rule. He described it as “three
hundred years ofTyranny,” language borrowed from Spanish declarations about

A Nation of Villages / 92

the Constitution of Cadiz rcadopted in 1820 that came to form part of the
liberal heritage of nineteenth-century Mexico.124 More than just the issue of
monarchy, Olarte repudiated the traditional status of Indians as subordinate
subjects in the colonial system. Villagers in northern Veracruz began to de
scribe themselves as citizens rather than as subjects; and a language that
stressed national service rather than royal service became the norm. The
activity of Olarte and the negotiated settlement that brought a truce to the
region indicate that Indians had developed a set of political objectives dur
ing the war, and they did not cease fighting until they had achieved some of
their aims.

The ten years of war created a profound disruption in the old order, thwart
ing efforts to return to the past. The war had so widely diffused political and
even military power that when the Plan de Iguala offered greater autonomy
to the provinces, the viceregal government quickly collapsed.125T he actions
of the villagers at the end of the war presage some of the conflicts of the new
nation. At the center of the negotiated settlement with the Coyusquihui war
riors was a promise of autonomy by way of the constitutional town council.
Such a promise left unresolved the issue of how the municipality would re
late to the nation and how the town council would encompass the former
functions of the república de indios. The constitution readopted in 1820,
along with subsequent events, left unanswered the questions of who would
rule in the hinterland and what the relation between a national state and the
patria chica would be.

The Law of Our Lady de Guadalupe / 93

130. Petition of Tomás de la Cruz, gobernador de Huautla, AGN-T, vol. 2832, cxp. 5, fol.
41. The governor complained of the influence of Nanahuaco and charged that the then sub-
delegate Rodriguez, the ally of the dissidents, made it impossible to receive justice (“no hace
justicia”).

131. Escobar, “La población,” 290, notes that non-Indian populations had become inte
grated into most Huasteca communities.

132. Antonio José Vélez to Virrey José de Iturrigaray, 15 February 1808, AGN-C, vol. 280,
cxp. 11, fols. 415-19.

133. The sujetos of Zacualpan andTistaca led the rebellion (AGN-C, vol. 314, exp. 5, fol.
217).

134. Patch, M a y a R e v o lt a n d R ev o lu tio n , 210-11, has recently pointed out that the Bourbons
broke the compact between the Crown and its Indian subjects and maintains that the disorders
in the Yucatán constituted more than a rebellion.

Chapter 3

1. John Tutino’s synthesis of the Bajío region in the years leading up to the war is one of
the finest examples of this scholarship; F ro m In su rre ctio n to R e v o lu tio n , 61-100. See also Eric
Van Young, “Moving toward Revolt: Agrarian Origins of the Hidalgo Rebellion in the
Guadalajara Region,” in Katz, R io t, R ebellion, a n d R e v o lu tio n ; Van Young, “Los ricos sc vuelven
más ricos y los pobres más pobres: salarios reales y estándares populares de vida a fines de la
colonia en México,” in L a crisis d e l orden co lo n ia l: E stru c tu ra a g ra ria y rebeliones populares de la
N u e v a E spaña, 1 7 5 0 -1 8 2 1 , trad. Adriana Sandoval (Mexico City: Alianza Editorial, 1992);
and Enrique Florescano, Precios d e l t n a i z y crisis agrícolas en M é xico , 1 7 0 8 -1 8 1 o, rev. cd. (Mexico
City: Ediciones Era, 1986), 89-91,100-2.

2. Ranajit Guha, “The Prose of Counter-Insurgency,” in S e le c te d S u b a lte r n S tu d ie s 4, cd.
Ranajit Guha and Gayarti Chakravorty Spivak (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 47.

3. Jaime E. Rodriguez O., “From Royal Subject to Republican Citizen: The Role of the
Autonomists in the Independence of Mexico,” in T h e Independence o f M e x ic o a n d th e Cre
a tio n o f th e N e w N a tio n , cd. Jaime E. Rodriguez O. (Los Angeles: UCLA Latin American
Center Publications, 1989), 20. Jaime E. Rodriguez O.’s recent, L a independencia de la A m e rica
española (Mexico City: El Colegio de Mexico and Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1996), dem
onstrates that he has modified his view of this division between elite and popular ideology.
See, for example, his discussion on Enlightenment ideas and the popular classes, 16,61. Brian
R. Hamnett, “Mexico’s Royalist Coalition: The Response of Revolution, 1808-1821,” J o u r
n a l o f L a t i n A m e ric a n S tu d ie s 12 (1981), also provides a fine survey of elite reactions to the
insurgency.

4. Guardino, P easants, Politics, 45, 49-69.
5. Virginia Guedca, L a insurgencia en e l D e p a rta m e n to d e l N o rte . L o s L la n o s de A p a n y la

S ie r r a d e P ueb la , 1 8 1 0 1 8 1 6 (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México,
Instituto Dr. José María Luis Mora, 1996), 133-37, 171. and E n busca de u n gobierno, 74-113,
256-61.

6. Rodríguez, L a independencia de la A m é ric a española, 123-26.
7. Eric Van Young, T h e O th e r R eb ellio n : P o p u la r Violence, Id e o lo g y a n d th e M e x ic a n S tru g g le

f o r Independence, 1 8 1 0 -1 8 2 1 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2oot), 471-75, 483-84,
517.

8. Scott, D o m in a tio n a n d Resistance, 18,49, 54, 134-35. Scott’s discussion of the subver
sive potential of the “good czar” myth is particularly useful (96-103).

9. For examples, sec “Proclamation of Coronel Felipe Lobato”; 26 August 1813, AGN-
OG, vol. 4, fol. 193. In the same document. Lobato referred to the royalists as “the emissaries
of Napoleon”; see also Antonio Lozano to Col. Francisco Antonio Pcrcdo, 26 August 1813,
AGN-OG, vol. 84, exp. 2, fol. 27. Guardino has noted how the insurgency used the French
threat as a mobilizing tool and how it had its origins in royalist rhetoric dating from the 1790s.
Gucdca has demonstrated that the insurgency made a serious effort to introduce a constitu
tional basis to rebel rule in the Sierra dc Puebla; sec her Insurgencia, 51-53, 67, 72-73, and
78-79.

10. Rodríguez, In d ep en d en cia de la A m e ric a española, 237-38, 243-44, demonstrates that
the political traditions of municipal rights were turned to new uses in ¡820. The rise of con
stitutional rule was also at the root of the royalist military crisis at the end of the war; sec
Christon I. Archer, “Where Did All the Royalists Go? New Light on the Military Collapse of
New Spain, 1810-1822,” in T h e A U x ic a n a n d M e x ic a n -A m e r ic a n E xp e rien c e in th e N in e te e n th
C e n tu ry , cd. Jaime E. Rodriguez o. (Tempe: Bilingual Press, 1989), 37-38.

11. See Hernández Chávcz, L a tra d ició n republicana, 26-27. She describes the rapid cre
ation of town councils in 1820 and notes some of the tensions existing within traditional
repúblicas de indios (39-42).

12. AGN-OG, Vol. 20, exp. 1, fol. sin número.
13. Materials from the late-colonial period offer descriptions of the sierra trade; sec, for

example, AGN-C, vol. 304, exp. 2, fol. 112. John Leiby, cd., R e p o rt to th e K in g : C o lo n el J u a n
C a m a r g o y C a v a lle ro ‘s H isto ric a l A c c o u n t o f N e w S p a in , 1 815 (New York: P. Lang, 1984), 65.

14. Ample evidence of correspondence between the leaders of the insurrection in the Si
erra dc Puebla, Ignacio Rayón and José Francisco Osorno, and the insurgents of Papantla may
be found in AGN-INF, vol. 84, exp. 2, fols. 1-43; and Virginia Guedea, cd., P ro n tu a rio de los
insurgentes (México City: Centro dc Estudios sobre la Universidad; Instituto Mora, 1995),
140,171-72» 299,306, 343.

15. Mcadc, L a H u a ste c a hidalguense, 170. Contagion was a universal metaphor for describ
ing the spread of peasant discontent; sec Guha, E le m e n ta r y A sp ects, 220,222, 225. The conta
gion description, Guha notes, also helps officials dismiss rebellion as irrational.

16. “Autos contra Nasario Manzano,” 10 December 1810, AGN-C, vol. 250, exp. 8, fols.
338,347V. See Eric Van Young, “Agustín Marroquin: The Sociopath as Rebel,” in T h e H u m a n
T r a d itio n in L a t i n A m e ric a , T h e N in e te e n th C e n tu r y , cd. Judith Ewell and William Bcczlcy
(Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources Inc, 1989), 17-38.

17. Testimony of Diego Santander, 13 April 1811, AGN-C, vol. 250, exp. 8, fol. 247V.
Manuel Zcnarro to Virrey, 29 September 1811, Chicontcpcc, AGN-OG, vol. 663, fol. sin
número, reported that someone had stolen the mail and wrote, “it makes me suspect there is
a hidden fire.”

18. Testimony of Romulado dc Rabago, 5 August 1811, Chicontcpcc, AGN-INF, vol. 17,
exp. io, fol. 265. Rabago complained that even the “vecinos” harassed him, knocking on his
door and windows in the middle of the night. By all accounts, Rabago was not a popular man.

Notes to Pages 61-64 / *93

19- Guha, E le m e n ta r y A spects, 225.
20. The subdelégate Fernando de la Vega described the rebellion as “the contagious venom

of insurrection” (Auto contra Narciso Manzano, 17 April i8t 1, fol. 345; on his later release,
see fol. 368). The subdelégate was also suspicious of Manzano because of his mobility; he had
been in Valles where the insurrection had arrived and was on his way to find employment on
the hacienda of Ignacio Pérez in Altamira. See also Taylor, D r in k in g , 120, on riot “epidemics”
in the colonial period.

21. Report of Fernando de la Vega, subdelégate of Hucjutla and Yahualica, 26 February
i8ti,A G N -H , vol. 104, exp. 6, fol. 12.

22. Information for the following paragraphs come from the judicial proceedings carried
out against the insurgent república and their non-Indian allies. This material is located in
AGN-INF, vol. 17, exp. 7,8 ,9 and 10. Gonzalez got wind of the correspondence when simi
lar letters sent to the Indian governor of Huayacocotla were intercepted. See also Isaac Velazquez
Morales, “La rebelión de 1811 en Chicon tepee, Veracruz,” in M e m o n a sobre e l p rim e r congreso
sobre la independencia, 1 8 1 0 -1 8 2 1 , cd. Abel Juárez Martínez (Jalapa: Universidad Veracruzana,
1986), 139-45.

23. Alejandro Alvarez de Güitián, Huehuctla, 13 March 1812, AGN- INF, vol. 14, cxp. 6,
fol. 190. On 9 January 1811 Rafael Garcia, a government soldier escorting the subdelégate,
turned him over to the insurgents, an action that earned him a commission as captain in the
insurgent army. When Ignacio Muñoz, the subdelégate of Mctztitlán, fled his post, he justi
fied it in part out of fear of the same fate (I. Munoz, 6 March 1811, AGN-H, vol. 104, cxp. 34,
vol. 147).

24. Van Young, T h e O th e r R ebellion, 351-57.
25. AGN-INF, vol. 17, cxp. 7, 143-143V; Ibid., 155-58%’. Likewise to the north in Valles,

the parish priest Pedro Villaverdc was able to calm an insurrection in March 1811, “after a
half hour of exhortations” (Genaro García, cd., D o cu m en to s p a ra la h istoria d e M é x ic o , vol. 9,
E id e r o de /M éxico y la independencia, docum entos d el arzobispado de M é x ic o [Mexico City: Librería
de la Viuda de Ch. Bourct, 1906], 103 4).

26. Antonio Escobar Ohmstede, “La insurgencia Huasteca: Origen y desarrollo,” in Tres
le v a n ta m ie n to s p o p u la res: Pugachov, T u p a c A m a r u , H id a lg o , cd. Jean Meyer (Mexico City:
Centre D ’Etudcs Mexicaines et Ccntramcricaines and Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las
Artes, 1992), 143- 44-

27. AGN,-INF, vol. 17, cxp. 8, fol. 187. Guha, E le m e n ta r y A spects, 54, notes how the act of
writing is a process of claiming power. Here, written orders invoking both the Virgin and the
captive king were ploys to claim legitimacy.

28. Meade, L a H u a ste c a v e ra c ru z a n a , 2:4; AGN-INF, vol. 17, exp. 10, fol. 253.
29. AGN-INF, vol. 17, Exp. i t , fols. 306-306V.
30. Escobar Ohmstede, “Insurgencia Huasteca,” 145.
31. Lt. Antonio Román de Odias Hucjutla, AGN-OG, vol. 64, fols. 69-70, describes the

insurgent takeover of Chicontcpcc. José Antonio Sevilla de Olmedo of Huayacocotla circu
lated a rebel proclamation 9 May 1812, AGN-INF, vol. 18 cxp. 22, fols. 26-40.

32. AGN-OG, vol. 830, fol. sin número.
33. AGN-OG, vol. 527, fol. 32. In Hucjutla an attempted revolt by a militia captain, Manuel

Carranza, and several followers was also aborted in 1812; see AGN-1G, vol. 149, fol. sin número.

N o t e s t o P a g e s 6 5 – 7 0 / 1 9 4

34- AGN-OG, vol. 21, exp. 19, fol. 183. De la Vega wrote that the Indians lacked the “noble
reflections that animate us to willingly sacrifice ourselves as an offering to our just cause.”
Militarizing the Indians would bring them “to the precipice of committing the crime of
infidelity” (184). The attempt to disband the com pañías d e p a trio ta s realistas was cut short by
Joaquin Arrendondo, commander of Nuevo Santander and the Huasteca. Arrendondo stated,
“if the Indians of that province [Hucjutla] have not revolted it is not from loyalty but from
fear that the king’s arms imposed and the lack of cabecillas.” AGN-OG, Vol. 20, exp. 5, fol. 23,
27 April 1811.

35. Llórente to Viceroy Ruiz dc Apodaca, 16 April 1819, AGN-OG, vol. 124, fol. 49.
36. AGN-IG, vol. 149, fol. sin número.
37. Hugh M. Hamill Jr., “Royalist Propaganda and ‘La Porción Humilde del Pueblo’ dur

ing Mexican Independence,” T h e A m e ric a s 36 (1980): 437-38.
38. Francisco Dc Paula dc Arrangoiz, M e x ic o desde 1 8 0 8 ha sta ¡ 8 6 7 . (Madrid: Imprenta de

A. Perez Bubrcll, 1872), 1:220; AGN-H, vol. 104, exp. 12, fol. 40.
39. AGN-H, vol. 104, exp. 12, fol. 40V.
40. AGN-H, vol. 104, exp. 15, fol. 66.
41. Ibid., fol. 106.
42. Ibid.
43. From 21 August to 30 August, AGN-OG, vol. 735.
44. AGN-OG, vol. 64.
45. AGN-H, vol. 104, exp. 6, fol. 12.
46. For a brief description of the outbreak of the rebellion that stresses the disloyalty of

the militia, see the petition of Papantla militia commander Juan Vidal dcVillamil to Calleja, 13
March 1814, AGN-OG, vol. 273, fols. 143-47. In response to the Hidalgo insurrection, the
government formed a company of Indian militia in Papantla. This militia revolted in 1812
under the leadership of Serafín Olartc; see Llórente to Viceroy Ruiz dc Apodaca, 16 Apr.
1819, AGN-OG, vol. 124, fol. 49.

47. For example, see Juan Antonio Sánchez to Antonio Cortes of Hucjutla, 16 January
1811, AGN-IG, vol. 149, fol. sin número.

48. In the 1780s, for example, the Papantla Creole Ignacio Patino refused to serve under a
pardo sergeant; AGN-IG, vol. 100a, fol. sin número. From 1812 to 1815, militia sergeant
Francisco Bermúdez served as one of the leading insurgent commanders in Papantla.

49. Llórente to the comandante general and intendente ofVcracruz, Brigadier Fernando
Millares y Mancebo, 11 January 1816, AGN-OG, vol. 525, fol. 1. Likewise, the rebels on the
coasts called on serranos when they were threatened by royalist attacks. Jose Antonio Lozano
was originally sent to Papantla to raise cavalry troops for Rayón; see Carlos Maria dc
Bustamante, C u a d ro histórico de la revolución m e xic a n a , 8 vols. (1846; facsimile, Mexico City:
Instituto Nacional dc Estudios Históricos dc la Revolución Mexicana, 1985), 3:481; Guedea,
Insurgencia, 61, 67, notes that Lozano was one of the principal organizers in Osorno’s camp.

50. In 1816 Llórente stated that through the ports that they held, rebels had received
“great and continuous quantities of arms and munitions” from overseas (AGN-OG, vol. 526,
fol. 165); see alsoTrens, H isto ria d e V eracruz, 3:284. For additional reports of arms ship
ments, see AGN-OG, vol. 525, fols. 162, 173, 198 (for 1815); vol. 927, fols. 121, 216 (for
1816).

Notes to Pages 70-73 / 195

5!. Arturo García López to Gen. Dávila, report, 2 June 1816, AGN-INF, vol. 38, cxp. 8,
fol. 152. Osomo had little control over the bands he nominally commanded in the Sierra de
Puebla; see Guedea, Insurgencia, 3 3 -3 4 . It is interesting to note the similarity in language
here between the views expressed by the misantccos and those expressed by Chaleo residents
described in Eric Van Young, “The Raw and the Cooked: Elite and Popular Ideology in Mexico,
1800-1821”; in T h e In d ia n C o m m u n ity o f C o lo n ia l M e x ic o : F ifte e n E ssays on L a n d Tenure,
C o rp o ra te O r g a n iz a tio n s, Ideo lo g y, a n d V illage P olitics, cd. Arij Ouwcnccl and Simon Miller
(Amsterdam: Centro de Estudios de Latinoamérica, 1990), 309.

52. See Lozano to Col. Serafín Olartc, 18 August 1813, AGN-INF, vol. 84, cxp. 2, fol. 20.
53. See Llórente to Calleja, 31 January i8i6,AGN-OG, vol. 525, fol. n;and Llórente to Viceroy

Ruiz de Apodaca, 19 September 1817, AGN-OG, vol. 526, fols. 259-60. For further dispatches
from Llórente on the geography of the rebellion, sec vol. 526, fol. 128; and vol. 527, fols. 138-46.

54. All family members, not just male adults, appear in the lists of rebels granted amnesty;
see “Lista de indultados,” AGN-OG, vol. 725, fols. 340-46. Loyalist officers also treated
women and children captured in insurgent territory as rebels, sending them to be held in
loyalist towns, often with the hope that by doing so, they would force rebel sons and husbands
to surrender; see Lt. Col. Manuel González de la Vega, report, 7 February 1814, AGN-OG,
vol. 697, fol. sin número.

55. Cap. Ignacio de Zuñiga to de la Concha, Coyutla, 20 January 1819, AGN-OG, vol.
124, fol. 75. On the Huasteca cantones see G aceta d e l G obierno de M e xico , 11 February 1813,
vol. 4, no. 359, p. 168; and AGN-OG, vol. 4, fols. 27-28.

56. “Declaración tomada al rebelde aprehendido Salvador Méndez,” 29 May 1820, AGN-
OG, vol. 890, fols. 210-13. 1° amnesty lists from the Huasteca, the rebels appear organized
into repúblicas de indios rebeldes, complete with gobernadores, alcaldes, and escribanos. Sec
Lt. Col. José Maria Lubian, “Lista que manifiesta los individuos de la comprensión de Palo
Blanco y Sombrerete que han impetrado la real gracia de Indulto desde 10 de diciembre de
1817,” 27 February 1818, AGN-OG, vol. 122, fols. 6-8.

57. Llórente to Calleja, 23 April and 17 July 1816, AGN-OG, vol. 525, fols. 97,116; Llórente
to Viceroy Ruiz de Apodaca, 23 June 1817, AGN-OG, vol. 526, fol. 125V.

58. C o m p a ñ ía s de p a trio ta s was one of the terms that royalists favored for their militia
units, another example of how the government introduced a new political language into rural
Mexico (Alan Knight, “Peasants into Patriots: Thoughts on the Making of the Mexican Na
tion,” M S / E M to [1994]: 146). P a m a s chicas were, in Knight’s view at least, potential build
ing blocks of the nation.

59. Llórente, 21 March 1816, AGN-OG, vol. 67, fol. 354.
60. Ortiz Escamilla, G u e rra y gobierno, 80-87. On the militarization of Mexican society

during the war, see Christon I. Archer, “The Militarization of Mexican Politics: The Role of
the Army, 1815-1821,” in F iv e C en tu ries o f M e x ic a n H is to r y : P apers o f th e V I I I C onference
o f M e x ic a n a n d N o r th A m e ric a n H isto ria n s, S a n Diego, C a lifo rn ia , O ctober 1 8 -2 0 , /9 9 0 , cd.
Virginia Guedea and Jaime E. Rodriguez O. (Mexico City: Instituto de Investigaciones Dr.
José Maria Luis Mora; Irvine, Calif: University of California, Irvine, 1992), and by the same
author, “Politicization of the Army of New Spain during the War of Independence, 1810-
1821,” in T h e O rigins o f M e x ic a n N a t io n a l P olitics, 1 8 0 8 -1 8 4 7 , C(I* Jaime E. Rodriguez O.
(Wilmington, Del.: SR Books, 1997).

Notes to Pages 73-76 /196

61. AGN-1NF, vol. 57, exp. 1, fol.64.
62. The military reported that 2,051 men, women, and children from Coyusquihui sur

rendered in December 1820; see “Lista de los individuos presentados al señor D. José Barradas,”
20 December 1820, AGN-OG, vol. 725, fols. 340-48.

63. Llórente to Viceroy Ruiz de Apodaca, 9 May 1820, AGN-OG, vol. 767, fols. 326-28.
On 21 June 1820 Llórente published the constitution; sec AGN-OG, vol. 768, fol. 97. In
referring to the pamphlets from Havana, Llórente gives credence to the idea, as described by
Rodríguez, Ind ep en d en cia de la A m é ric a española, 121, that Havana played a role as a center for
the dissemination of subversive literature during the insurgent decades.

64. Christon I. Archer, “Insurrection-Rcaction-Revolution-Fragmcntation: Reconstruct
ing the Choreography of Meltdown in New Spain during the Independence Era,” M S / E M
to (1994): 80-82, gives a brief account that situates Coyusquihui in a wider military and
economic perspective. Before this change in tactics, rebels had been able to use the rainy
season to recuperate from royalist offensives; Rincon’s tenacity had a terrible effect on the
rebels. According to one of his followers, Olarte still believed that “although [Rincón] might
destroy all of the m ilp a s and bum all of the houses,” he would eventually leave, “at the latest
when the rains come” (“Declaración tomada al rebelde aprehendido Salvador Méndez,” 29
May 1820, AGN-OG, vol. 8go, fol. 21).

65. Barradas to Viceroy Ruiz de Apodaca, 7 Oct. 1820, AGN-OG, vol. 107, fol. 223. Llórente
showed little willingness to cooperate with Barradas; indeed, the two had been feuding since
1814, when they served together in the plains of Apan; see Guedea, Insurgencia, 1 18.

66. Barradas to the “rebels of Coyusquihui,” 30 September 1820, AGN-OG, vol. 107, fol.
235 (emphasis in original). This language recalls that of the royal proclamation of 23 July
1820, and it seems that Barradas was following a script provided by the liberal Spanish cortes;
sec Timothy E. Anna, T h e F a ll o f th e R o y a l G o v e r n m e n t in M e x ic o C i ty (Lincoln- University
of Nebraska Press, 1978), 197.

67. Barradas to Viceroy Ruiz dc Apodaca, 7 October 1820, AGN-OG, vol. 107, fol. 231.
68. Ibáñez to Aguilar, 4 October 1820, AGN-OG, vol. 117, fol. 240. Rincón had also sent

peace proposals to the rebels after the promulgation of the constitution. These met with little
success because the rebels “had an absolute aversion to him”; see Mariano de los Rios (one of
Olarte’s non-Indian officers) to Aguilar, 4 October 1820, AGN-OG, vol. 107, fol. 239; and
Rincón to Viceroy Ruiz de Apodaca, 11 September 1820, AGN-OG, vol. 890, fol. 260. Mendez
voiced the same opinion after his capture, AGN-OG, vol. 890, fol. 212.

69. “Declaración tomada al rebelde aprehendido Mariano González,” 29 May 1820, AGN-
OG, vol. 890, fol. 207. A certain Captain Blasco reported that the rebels had executed one of
their commanders, Lucas Ximenez, for advocating acceptance of amnesty and that Olarte
had disarmed another, Alberto Bermudez, on suspicion of wanting to obtain an indulto; see
Cap. Blasco to Llórente, 21 January v8, AGN-OG, vol. 767, fols. 142-43. The field diaries of
Col. Rincón contain monthly reports of m ilp a s cane fields, trapiches, houses, and granaries
that his troops had destroyed. For examples, see Rincón, “Diario dc operaciones,” 1 April, 30
April, and 1 July 1820, AGN-OG, vol. 890, fols. 175, 199-200,235.

70. Ibáñez to Fr. Aguilar, 17 October 1820; Fr. Aguilar to Barradas, 18 October 1820. See
also de los Rios to Aguilar, 17 October 1820, AGN-OG, vol. 107, fols. 262, 263, 267.

71. Barradas to Viceroy Ruiz dc Apodaca, 11 November 1820, AGN-OG, vol. 107, fols.

Notes to Pages 77-80 / 197

285-86; and testimony of Pablo Antonio Hernandez, 7 November 1820, AGN-OG, vol. 107,
fol. 287. The former rebels claimed that the Indians “disagreed with the [gente] de razón and
never wanted to accept the amnesty, and that they were going to cross the Espinal River with
their families to go to Palo Gordo and unite with the Morenos.”

72. Olartc to Barradas, 1 December 1820, AGN-OG, vol. 107, fol. 271.
73. José Francisco Gonzalez and Jose Ignacio Maria Partana to Barradas, 3 December

1820, AGN-OG, vol. 107, fol. 282.
74. González and Partana to Olartc, 30 November 1820, AGN-OG, vol. 107, fol. 275.
75. Viceroy Ruiz de Apodaca to Barradas, 11 December 1820, AGN-OG, vol. 107, fol. 270.
76. Olarte, 23 April 1821, AGN-OG, vol. 725, fol. 377. The situation suggests that Olartc

also claimed the right to be the political arbiter of his community with caudillo-likc powers.
77. Van Young, “Raw and the Cooked,” 299-301 and more extensively, T h e O th e r R eb e l

lion, 463-83.
78. Andean historians have been less reluctant to link indigenous and Creole ideologies;

for an interesting ease, see Alberto Flores Galindo, “In Search of an Inca,” in Resistance,
R ebellion, a n il Consciousness in th e A n d e a n P ea sa n t W orld, ¡ 8 th to 2 0 th C enturies, cd. Steve J.
Stem (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), 201, and passim.

79. Timothy E. Anna, T h e M e x ic a n E m p ire o f Itu rb id e (Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press, 1990), 11, 17, 24.

80. Juan Antonio Sanchez to Cap. Antonio Cortés, 11 January 1811, AGN-IG, vol. 149,
fol. sin número.

81. Testimony of Sebastian Antonio (Indian alcalde of Tlatclmaco near Zacualtipán), 10
January 1812, AGN-C, vol. 251, exp. 12, fol. 321.

82. Pérez (Indian governor of Papantla) to Juan Agustín González, 25 November 1811,
AGN-C, vol. 251, exp. 1, fol. 6. In a letter, the rebels claimed to have royal orders to arrest
anyone who defended the government “because what the government does favors the
gachupines” (J. M. Cisneros to Diego Hernández [Indian governor of Chicontepec], 27 May
1811, AGN-C, vol. 17, exp. 7, fol. 166).

83. Knight, “Peasants into Patriots,” 141.
84. Lozano to Juan Pérez, 16 August 1813; and Lozano to José Mariano Belendcs (priest

of Coxquihui) on “donation for the nation,” 19 August 1813, AGN-INF, vol. 84, exp. 2, fols.
22 and 23-24, respectively.

85. Lozano to “los señores gobernadores y alcaldes de Espinal, Zozocolco Coxquibui,
Chumatlán, Mctcatlán, Santo Domingo, Coahuitlán; Coyutla,” 2 August 1813, AGN-INF,
vol. 84, cxp. 2, fol. 9. See Lozano to Bernardo Angulo, 17 August 1813, AGN-INF, vol. 84,
exp. 2, fol. 23.

86. Virginia Guedea, “Las elecciones entre los insurgentes, 1811-1813,” in F iv e C enturies
o f M e x ic a n H is to r y : P apers o f th e E ig h th C onference o f A U x te a n a n d N o r th A m e ric a n H is to

rians, S a n Diego, C a lifo rn ia , 1 8 – 2 0 O ctober 1990, ed. Virginia Guedea and Jaime E. Rodriguez
O. (Mexico City: Instituto de Investigaciones Dr. Jose Maria Luis Mora; Irvine, Calif: Uni
versity of California, Irvine, 1992), 309-11, discusses the process of popular participation in
the insurgent elections. Gucdca’s work on Mexico City elections during the first constitu
tional period also reveals the importance of increasing popular participation in the political
life of the colony. A dramatic evolution of political identities occurred even within “royalist”

Notes to Pages 80-84 f 198

Mexico; see Virginia Guedca, “El pueblo de Mexico y la política capitolina, 1808-1812,”
M S / E A l 10 (1994): 60-61. Guedca, Insurgencta, 78-83,171-76, demonstrates that the sierra
insurgents made frequent efforts to create a new political order in their territories. One of the
characteristics of changes in political practice during the insurgency is that there were often
parallel developments within the two sides, with insurgents often borrowing from the prac
tices that came out of the Spanish Constitution; see also Rodriguez, Independencia de la A m e rica
española, 123.

87. Lozano to Nicolás Bravo, 16 August 1813; Lozano to Peredo, 16 August 1813; Lozano
to Calixto Garcia (priest of Papantla), 20 August 1813; and Lozano to Peredo, 3 1 August 1813,
on representatives elected from El Espinal; AGN-INF, vol. 84 exp. 2 fols. 21, 24, 25, 28,
respectively.

88. Letter of Jose Joaquin Aguilar, “cuartel general por la nación de la sierra y costa de
Barlovento,” 2 December 1816, AGN-OG, vol. 65, fols. 57-60. Aguilar’s surviving circulars
mirror the G a ceta in that they manifest an obsession with giving the insurgent military report
as a reply to the military reports printed so frequently in the official paper.

89. The rebel camps, although often independent of one another, seem to have established
a systematic mail service to keep in touch. A royalist emissary in the insurgent camp of Palo
Blanco reported that mail arrived daily with news of political events (José Ignacio Martinez to
Alvarez de Güitián, 20 March 1816, AGN-OG, vol. 65, fol. 110).

90. The royalists often used the term “patria” in their dispatches. See, for example, Ar
cher, “Militarization of Mexican Politics,” 285; also Llórente, 24 May 1820, AGN-OG, vol.
528, fol. 66.

91. Rafael Sagredo Baeza, “Actores políticos en los catecismos patriotas y republicanos
americanos, 1817-1827,” H isto ria M e x ic a n a 45 (1996): 507-8, notes that in 1814 the Crown
attempted to prohibit the circulation of Spanish “political catechisms” in the colonies.

92. Declaration of Mariano Olarte, 1 March 1819, Campo Nacional de Coyusquihui, AGN-
OG, vol. 490, fol. 202.

93. Ibid. The spelling and calligraphy of the Spanish original indicates that the author had
a modest village education, even though his political vision was clearly not restricted to the
village. “Ha no ai que dejarse Gobernar de Virreyes, oydorcs, y Ministriles de jentes de la
Tirania que nos an chupado esta Sangre del Corazón sino Gobernamos por nosotros mismos
para bcr en los Subditos unos crínanos no unos Jumentos o animales como nos a bisto asta
aqui el Anterior Gobierno, si Ermanos mios esos que os an ofresido el Yndulto Son los Mismos
que os an de echar las cadenas dcsclabitud.”

94. BCEM, año 1820/19/1/f. 2. Archer points out that the constitution made it increas
ingly difficult for local military men to raise the manpower and fiscal resources needed to
continue the war (Christon I. Archer, ‘“La Causa Buena’: The Counterinsurgency Army of
New Spain and the Ten Years’ War,” in Rodriguez Q , Independence o f M e xico , 106, and
Archer, “Where Did All the Royalists Go?” 31, 34, 38). Similar protests occurred in the
Yucatán, where the Mayas seized upon their newly won rights to refuse clerical demands for
taxes and labor during the first constitutional period of 1812 to 1814; see Rugelcy, Y u c a ta n ’s
M a y a P ea sa n try, 41-42.

95. Gómez Escalante later revealed that the Indians were willing to work, but only when
paid “triple the normal wage in this region” (BCEM 1820/19/1 /2v). Perhaps this also points

N o t e s to P a g e s 8 4 – 8 6 / ig g

to why the república survived: the local elite relied on them to mobilize labor for their benefit.
The diputación dismissed Gómez Escalante’s request to re-establish forced labor “que por
ningún pretexto obligue a los indios a trabajar contra su voluntad” (f. 3V.).

96. G aceta de M é xico , vol. 1, no. 56 (18 June 1810): 413, cited in Rodríguez, Independencia
de la A m é ric a española, 120. As mentioned above in the discussion of Aguilar, the insurgents
readily borrowed the constitutional rhetoric that appeared in the G aceta.

97. Barradas to Viceroy Ruiz dc Apodaca, 6 December 1820, AGN-OG, vol. 107, fols.
274-75. Rodriguez noted that the restoration of the constitution seemed to have created an
opening for the noninsurgent autonomists to agitate for deeper changes (In d ep en d en cia d e la
A m é ric a española, 243-44, 24&)- Parroga’s letters may well have fit into this tendency.

98. Parroga to Jose Santiago Moreno (insurgent leader of Palo Gordo), ioDcccmber 1820,
AGN-OG, vol. 107, fol. 277.

99. Ibid., fol. 278. The important distinction that Parroga made in this text is even more
striking when one considers that after the triumph of Iturbidc, Mexicans began to call Span
iards “capitulados, ” that is, people who surrendered and had no rights; see Anna, M e x ic a n
E m p ire o f Iturbtde, 33.

100. Barradas to Viceroy Ruiz dc Apodaca, 8 January 1821, AGN-OG, vol. 725, fol. 363.
101. Brain R. Hamnett, R o o ts o f In su rg en c y: M e x ic a n Regions, 1 7 5 0 -1 8 2 4 (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1986), 24, and passim.
102. The army failed to become an effective unifying force given that the counterinsurgency

effort tended to divide the army into smaller and smaller units with little supervision, while
regional commanders sought to create their own semiautonomous satrapies. See Archer, ‘“La
Causa Buena,”’ 101; Hamnett, R o o ts o f Insurgency, 178; and Hamnett “Royalist Counter
insurgency and the Continuity of Rebellion: Guanajuato and Michoacán, 1813-1820,” H A H R
62 (1982): 48.

103. Timothy E. Anna, “Inventing Mexico: Provincehood and Nationhood after Indepen
dence,” B u lle tin o f L a t i n A m e ric a n R esearch 15 (1996): 9.

104. Benedict Anderson, Im a g in e d C o m m u n ities: R e fe c tio n s on th e O rigin a n d S p r e a d o f
N a tio n a lism , rev. cd. (London: Verso, 1991), 48.

105. William B. Taylor, “The Virgin of Guadalupe in New Spain: An Inquiry into the
Social History of Marian Devotion,” A m e r ic a n E th n o lo g is t 14 (1987): l, 14, 16-19. Linda
Curcio-Nagy, “Native Icon to City Protectress to Royal Patroness: Ritual, Political Sym
bolism and the Virgin of Remedies,” in T h e C h u rch in C o lo n ia l L a t i n A m e r ic a , ed. John F
Schwallcr (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources Inc., 2000), 197-98, describes the ca
reer of the “ royalist Virgin.” In this case the royalist government seized upon Remedios as
a loyalist icon. The two cults share humble origins in the local religious practice of indig
enous communities around Mexico City, but only Guadalupe was projected as the patron
ess of the entire viceroyalty.

106. Mario Cerruti describes the consolidation of Latin American nations as a process of
linking “regional power bases together.” See Mario Cerruti, “Monterrey and Its Ambito Re
gional, 1850-1910: Historical Context and Methodological Recommendations,” in Van Young,
M e x i c o ’s Regions, 146. Sec also Mallon, P ea sa n t a n d N a t io n ; and Guy P. C. Thomson, “Agrar
ian Conflict in the Municipality of Cuctzalan (Sierra dc Puebla): The Rise and Fall o f ‘Pala’
Agustín Dicguillo, 1861-1894,” H A H R 71 (1991): 205-58.

N o t e s to P a g e s 8 6 – 8 9 / 2 0 0

107- Archer, “ Where Did All the Royalists Go?” describes the crisis within the
counterinsurgent army at the end of the War of Independence.

108. See Lucas Atamán, H isto ria d e M é jic o : D es J e ios prim eros m o v im ien to s que p re p a ra ro n
su independencia en e l a ño de 1 8 0 8 h a sta la época presente (Mexico City: n.p., 1849-53; reprint,
Mexico City: Libros del Bachiller Sansón Carrasco, 1985), 5: chapters 5, 6. Often the divi
sions between insurgents were as deep as the differences between insurgents and loyalists;
such was the case in a running feud between Victoria and Mier y Tcrán.

109. AGN-OG, vol. 767, fols. 422-23, dated 17 March 1821. Llórente wrote that Iturbidc
“has tried to envelop these vast provinces in the most horrible anarchy, just when they began
to enjoy the benefits of peace and tranquility.”

110. AGN-IG, vol. 148, dated 15 May 1821.
i n . AGN-OG, vol. 767, fol. 500.
112. Ibid., vol. 767, fol. 470.
113. Ibid.
114. Ibid., fol. 475.
115. AGN-OG, vol. 767, fol. 498.
116. Ibid., fols. 476-8.
117. Ibid., fol. 500.
118. AGN-GSS caja (henceforth cited as c.) 11, exp. 12, fols. 2, 11-1 iv.
119. Meade, H u a ste c a v e ra c ru z a n a , 2:38.
120. Jorge Flores D., L a revo lu ció n de O la rte en P a p a n tla (i8j 6-i8j 8) (Mexico City:

Imprenta Mundial, 1938), 13-14.
121. Sec AGN-GSS, c. 11, exp. 12, fol. 11 for a lengthy description of the conspiracy to

rebel in favor of independence in 1821. On the Chontla revolt, sec Zózimo Pérez Castañeda
and Angel Daqui, M o n o g ra jia d e la C iu d a d de T u x p a n (Jalapa: Talleres Gráficos del Gobierno
del Estado, 1955), 32.

122. AGN-G, c. 11, cxp. 12, passim. Llórente was not completely resigned to accept inde
pendence and in 1821 attempted to use his authority to punish the officers who had conspired
to join the independence movement (Agustín Iturbide, P lausibles noticias [Puebla: Imprenta
de Ejercito Imperial Mexicano, 1821J). On the petition of Tuxpan to disband its militia, sec
AGN-G, c, 1, cxp. 12, fol. 13V.

123. See Carmagnani, E l regreso de los dioses, 171, 181, 185-87; and García Martínez, L o s
pueblos de la sierra, 189,201-4,antl passim.

124. Declaration of Mariano Olarte, 1 March 1819, Campo Nacional de Coyusquihui,
AGN-OG, vol. 490, fol. 202; sec also “Declaración de los capitanes del campo de Coyusquihui,”
22 February 1819, AGN-OG, vol. 323, fol. 308

125. Anna, M e x ic a n E m p ire o f Iturbtde, 20-24; antl Archer, “Insurrection-Rcaction-Rcvo-
lution-Fragmcntation,” 96-98.

Chapter 4

1. BCEM, 1829/330/54/2, Bocancgra to governor of the state of Mexico, 28 August 1829.
The comment also reflects the fear that military service might provoke discontent.

2. Resolution of the permanent commission of the state Congress of the Estado de Mexico,

Notes to Pages 90-94 / 201

Cortés de Cádiz. (2003). The Political Constitution of the Spanish Monarchy: Promulgated in

Cádiz, the nineteenth day of March, 1812. Alicante: Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de
Cervantes.

1

The General and Extraordinary Cortes of the Spanish Nation, well convinced; after the most
minute examination and mature deliberation, that the ancient fundamental laws of this
Monarchy, aided by every precaution and authority, which can enable and insure their being
permanently established and thoroughly carried into effect, are perfectly calculated to fulfil the
grand object of promoting the glory, prosperity and welfare of the Spanish Nation; decree the
following Political Constitution for the well governing and right administration of the State.

Chapter I. Of the Spanish Nation and Spaniards
Article 1.- The Spanish nation is the re-union of all the Spaniards of both hemispheres.

Article 2.- The Spanish nation is free and independent, and neither is nor can be the property of
any family or person.

Article 3.- Sovereignty belongs to the nation, consequently it exclusively possesses the right of
establishing its fundamental laws.

Article 4.- The nation is obliged, by wise and just laws, to protect the liberty, property and all
other legitimate rights, of every individual which composes it.

Article 5.- Of those who are Spaniards, and lawfully considered as such:

1. All free-men, born and bred up in the Spanish dominions, and their sons;

2. Foreigners who may have obtained letters of naturalization from the Cortes;

3. Those who, without it, have resided ten years in any village in Spain, and acquired
thereby a right of vicinity;

4. The slaves who receive their freedom in the Spanish dominions.

[…]

Chapter II. Of the Spanish Territory, Religion,
Government and Rights of Citizenship
Article 12.- The religion of the Spanish nation is, and ever shall be, the Catholic Apostolic Roman
and only true faith; the State shall, by wise and just laws, protect it and prevent the exercise of any
other.

Article 13.- The object of Governments is the welfare of nations; as is the happiness of the
individuals who compose them, that of all political societies.

Article 14.- The Government of the Spanish nation is a moderate, hereditary monarchy.

Article 15.- The power of making laws is in the Cortes, with the King.

Article 16.- The power of executing, the laws is in the King.

[…]

Chapter III. Of the Cortes
Article 27.- The Cortes is the junction of all the deputies who represent the nation, named by the
citizens in the manner hereafter to be explained.

Article 28.- The basis of national representation is the same in both hemispheres.

Article 29.- This basis is, the people composed of those inhabitants who, by both lines, are natives
of the Spanish dominions; of those who have letters of citizenship from the Cortes; as also those
who are comprehended in Article 21.

Article 31.- For every seventy thousand souls of population, consisting of those expressed in
Article 29, shall be sent one deputy to the Cortes.

Article 34.- For the election of deputies to the Cortes, juntas shall be held in the parishes, cities
and provinces.

Article 35.- The parish electoral juntas shall be composed of all the citizens, residents within the
bounds of the respective parishes, among whom shall be included the secular clergy.

[…]

Chapter IV. Of the King
Article 168.- The Kinds person is sacred and inviolable; neither is he responsible for any thing.

Article 169.- The King shall be styled, his Catholic Majesty.

Article 170.- The exclusive power of enforcing and rendering the laws effective resides in the
King, whose authority extends to whatever may conduce to the interior good regulation, and
exterior security and defence of the State, consistently with the laws and the Constitution.

Article 171.- In addition to the prerogative of sanctioning and promulgating the laws, the King
possesses many other rights and powers; such as:

1. Publishing such decrees, directions and instructions, as may appear likely to contribute
to the due execution of the laws;

2. Taking care that justice may be promptly and effectually administered throughout the
kingdom;

3. To declare war and make and ratify peace; laying, afterwards, authentic documents of
the same before the Cortes;

4. To nominate, by and with the assistance of the council of State, all civil and criminal
magistrates;

5. To appoint all civil and military officers;

[…]

Article 172.- The restrictions upon the regal authority are as follows:

1. The King, under no pretext whatsoever, can prevent the meeting of the Cortes, at the
times or under the circumstances, directed by the Constitution; nor suspend nor dissolve
them; nor, in any way whatsoever, check nor embarass their deliberations. Those who
are guilty of advising him to, or assisting him in any of these acts, shall be punished as
traitors;

2. The King shall not leave the kingdom, without the consent of the Cortes; and, in case
of so doing, shall be considered to have abdicated the throne;

3. The King cannot renounce, yield, deliver up, or make over, to any other person, the
royal authority, or any of its prerogatives;

4. If, under any pretence whatsoever, he may wish to abdicate the throne in favour of the
lawful heir, he cannot do it without the consent of the Cortes; he cannot grant, yield up,
or exchange, any city, town, village, or part of the Spanish territory, however, small it
may be;

5. He cannot make any offensive or defensive alliance, or special treaty of alliance or
commerce, with any foreign power, without the consent of the Cortes;

[…]

Article 173.- On the King’s accession to the throne, or, if he should be under age, when his
Government begins, he shall make oath before the Cortes according to the following form: I,
N., by the grace of God and the Constitution of the Spanish Monarchy, King of all Spain, do
swear before God and the holy Evangelists, that I will defend and preserve the Catholic
Apostolic Roman Religion, without permitting the exercise of any other, throughout the
kingdom: that I will observe, and cause to be observed, the laws and political constitution of
the Spanish monarchy, doing and acting, in all things, only for their good and benefit; that I
will not make over, yield or dismember any part of the kingdom; that I will never exact
contributions, money or any other thing, without it shall have been decreed by the Cortes; that

I will respect private property and, above all, the civil liberty of the nation and rights of every
individual; and if, to what I have now sworn, or any part of it, I should be found to act contrary,
such act shall be null, void and not be obeyed. If thus I do, may God reward and protect me,
if not, may it be at my own peril.

Chapter IX. Of Public Education
Article 366.- Introductory schools shall be established in every town throughout the kingdom, in
which children shall be taught to read, write and cypher, the catechism of the Roman Catholic
Religion, and a brief exposition of natural and civil duties and obligations.

Article 367.- Measures shall also be immediately taken to found a competent number of
universities and other establishments, for the promotion of literature and the fine arts.

Article 368.- The plan of general instruction shall be the same, throughout the kingdom; the
Constitution of the monarchy shall be expounded in all the universities, and in the literary
establishments where divinity and politics are taught.

Article 369.- A committee shall be formed of persons of known judgment and learning, to which,
under the authority of the Government, shall be intrusted the direction and inspection of public
education.

Article 370.- The Cortes, by means of special decrees and plans, shall regulate the important object
of public education.

Article 371.- Every Spaniard possesses liberty to write, print and publish, his political ideas,
without any previous licence, permission or revision, under the restrictions and responsibility
established by law.