Village, Nation, and Constitution: Insurgent Politics in Papantla, Veracruz, 1810–1821

Figure 1.

Papantla and surrounding areas.

From June 1812 to December 1820, the Papantla region in northern Veracruz was a crucible of guerrilla warfare. Papantla, the seat of a subdelegación and the center of a prosperous vanilla trade, had a tradition of political unrest. Riots rent the community in 1735, 1762, 1764, 1767, and 1787, earning the villagers a well-deserved reputation as a troublesome people. ¹ Although the mostly Totonac-speaking inhabitants of the region did not immediately respond to Hidalgo’s call to arms, once the town rebelled in 1812 it did not easily return to order. During the greater part of the war of independence, insurgents dominated the coastal region between the ports of Tuxpan and Veracruz. And although by 1818 the royalist army had gradually reconquered all the towns in the area, the rural hinterland remained in rebel hands. Indigenous insurgents from Papantla withdrew to the rough terrain to the south and established a fortified mountain refuge at Coyusquihui, where for the rest of the war they resisted the royalist military.

Then in December 1820, when Colonel José Barradas, the royalist commander in charge of the campaign against the insurgent redoubt, reported that his garrisons were deserting and his offensive flagging, the rebels accepted terms of surrender. Barradas celebrated this act as signifying a return of the indigenous population to their proper position of subservience. ²

Subsequent events demonstrated that Colonel Barradas was overly optimistic in assuming that the old order had been restored, for during the war an important transformation had occurred in the way in which indigenous villagers viewed their relation to the state. Correspondence between the rebels and government negotiators provide a unique glimpse into how the former viewed the political objectives of the war they had fought. In his account of the event, the leading insurgent commander, Mariano Olarte, described the surrender as an act that indicated the rebels’ acceptance of the new constitution, not their willingness to return to the old order. ³ Olarte’s letters raise questions about precisely what the rebels expected from the new constitutional regime and how, after years of bitter guerrilla warfare, they conceived of political power.

Although there is an extensive body of work dealing with the political objectives of the creole advocates of independence, these studies often exclude rural insurgents from the discussion. ⁴ 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 empire, or on more immediate causes such as food shortages. ⁵ The literature tends to skirt the issue of the impact of these tensions on the political aspirations of the independence movement, as if to substitute “cause for reason” when describing peasant motives. ⁶ Jaime E. Rodríguez 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.” ⁷

This essay explores how elite concerns filtered into the camps of indigenous insurgents, who then gave new meanings to issues of constitutionalism and independence. James Scott reminds us that popular beliefs are in constant dialogue with the official ideologies of the powerful. ⁸ Scott’s insights help explain how, as the rebellion progressed, local insurgents reacted to the changing 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 gachupín officials and merchants as it linked village politics to a wider vision of politics. Villagers claimed new identities as citizens, casting off the sociopolitical category of indio and claiming new rights for local rule. Village rebels appealed to the concept of patria and named their troops “nacionales” to distinguish themselves from the royalist militias they fought. ⁹ Constitutionalism and a protonationalist 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 opportunities 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. ¹⁰ The villages experienced the war not as a war between Indians and Spaniards, but as a civil war within the pueblos that divided them along the same hierarchical lines that had evolved during the colonial period. ¹¹ One indication of these internal divisions appeared in 1813, when the royalists reoccupied Papantla after 18 months of insurgent rule. The república de indios literally split in two, as large numbers of villagers took refuge in the hills, while loyalist Indians enlisted in government militias. Antonio Pérez Ticante, a gobernador pasado of Papantla, became commander of the Indian militia company. On at least one occasion, Totonac insurgents under Olarte burned one of the barrios of the cabecera, evidently in reprisal for royalist assaults against the rebel settlements. ¹² 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.

The attitude of the rural insurgents at the end of the war reveals an attempt to shift the balance of power in favor of the communities by having its members affirm their new status as citizens and assert their rights to autonomous town governments (ayuntamientos). ¹³ Socioeconomic issues found an avenue for political expression through the rebel critique of state-pueblo relations. The new constitutional debates that permeated local politics opened up novel vistas to villagers who had become discontent with pueblo government. ¹⁴ The new ayuntamientos, 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.

Apparently, however, reactions to the new system of local politics varied widely. Traditionally, historians have interpreted the ayuntamiento as a victory for local non-Indian elites, who used this new institution in their attempts to control local resources. ¹⁵ But the role of the new ayuntamientos was much more complicated. In the Yucatán, for example, villagers seized on the recently introduced ayuntamientos to challenge heavy taxes and renegotiate political arrangements between villagers, indigenous elites, and priests. ¹⁶ Local government 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 resistance 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 section, I describe the organization of the local insurgency, paying particular attention to the regional space in which the insurrection thrived and to situating changes in the rebels’ political identities in this space. I then discuss the political situation created by the readoption of the Constitution of 1820 in the context of a country exhausted by years of warfare. In the last two sections, I explore the meaning of nación and constitución to rural people by focusing on the evolution of political identities within the insurgent camp.

How the War Was Fought: The Regional Context

During the colonial era, Papantla, located on the Gulf of Mexico in northern Veracruz, was the seat of a subdelegación and the center of a prosperous trade in vanilla, maize, wax, and, to a lesser extent, sugar. Papantla was an Indian pueblo with a well-established non-Indian presence. By the late colonial period, prosperous local merchants had built up a fleet of 15 ships dedicated to the coastal trade that connected the town to the port of Veracruz; at the same time, an active network of overland trade over rough mule tracks linked the coast to the sierra de Puebla and beyond. 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 protection. ¹⁷ Given 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. ¹⁸

Indigenous villagers joined the insurgency in 1812 and quickly overwhelmed 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 villagers to remove the subdelegados and expel the gachupines. Some rebels made their appeals more effective by suggesting that the rebellion enjoyed the sanction of the captive king, Fernando VII. ¹⁹ Rebel action directly attacked local officialdom, targeting the traditional objects of village unrest: the subdelegados and royal tobacco monopoly officials. In Papantla the insurgent villagers also singled out the commercial elite for abuse. This no doubt reflected resentment toward merchants and officials who promoted a system of repartimiento de mercancías to control the profitable vanilla trade. ²⁰ Insurgents also effectively subverted the local militias by offering soldiers better pay. ²¹ And 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. ²² 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 of Tuxpan and Veracruz. The rebellion in Papantla followed this same pattern whereby rank-and-file militiamen joined indigenous villagers in overthrowing the subdelegado and imprisoning local militia officers.

Papantla became the regional insurgent command center. The influential leaders from the sierra José Francisco Osorno and Ignacio López Rayón commissioned a priest, José Antonio Lozano, to administer the region for the insurgent cause, and bestowed upon him the title of “coronel y comandante de armas nacionales.” ²³ Throughout the insurrection rebels from the sierra and the coast worked in close cooperation. Papantecos moved from the coastal regions to inland rebel strongholds such as Tlaxcalantongo, Apapantilla, Pahuatlán, 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. ²⁴

While 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 commander 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. ²⁵ In the Papantla region, the Olarte 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. ²⁶ Serafín Olarte and his son Mariano became the leading insurgents 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 reoccupied 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.

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 Llorente described this curious geography of rebel communities, reporting that he had garrisons located in Tuxpan, Tamiahua, Temapache, Tihuatlán, 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. ²⁷ Rebels established communities in Tlacolula, Cimarrona, and Palo Blanco, near the towns of Temapache and Tihuatlán. Likewise, they occupied the lands of the haciendas 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 sujetos 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 indigenous 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 insurgents and added to the difficulties of the royalist army. ²⁸ 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 landscape 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. ²⁹ Not only did peasants rebuild their huts (jacales), they also assembled large community structures (galeras); and in Palo Blanco rebels even built their own church. ³⁰ Unfortunately, little information about how these communities governed themselves has survived. The royalist military reports, which emphasize the armed activities of rebel leaders, give some indication that the refugees recreated their own repúblicas de indios. For example, one captured Totonac, Salvador Méndez, described himself as an official of the “república de indios rebeldes.” ³¹ 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. Rebels used the small port of Boquilla de Piedra to trade with the outside world, and commercial ties 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 independent of the traditional villages, which remained in the hands of royalist garrisons.

Villagers defined their political identities (insurgent or royalist) in terms of their relation to local elites and the seats of colonial administration. At the center of rural insurgency were the questions of internal divisions within the pueblos as well as their relation 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 commerce. While late colonial riots often had multiple causes, in northern Veracruz and the Huasteca conflicts over pueblo elections often accompanied complaints against repartimientos de mercancías and administrative abuses. ³² During the war itself, royalist military commanders took control of town governments, which they used both to recruit companies of “patriot militia” and to collect taxes that would sustain their military operations. Rebels sought to renegotiate the relation between the colonial repúblicas de indios and the representatives of the state. Although these rebels viewed the insurgent cause through the lens of the municipal “patria chica,” this does not mean that they were without any sense of national identity. ³³ Nationalism had many meanings in 1821, meanings that were rooted in the soil of localized village identities and the very local conflicts of the previous 11 years of war. ³⁴

The last years of insurgency provide some unusually good documentation that describes the transformation of political identities in Coyusquihui, the refuge of a large contingent of indigenous rebels from Papantla. ³⁵ In the following section, I explore how recalcitrant villagers reacted to the Spanish constitution 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 readopted in 1820 played in Olarte’s surrender.

The Negotiated Settlement and the Constitution

The government of Viceroy Juan Ruiz de 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 José Francisco Osorno negotiated an amnesty for himself and many of his principal officers. The relative success of the royalist army under Apodaca was in large measure due to an amnesty 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 a surrender.

On May 9, 1820, Colonel Carlos María Llorente wrote Viceroy Apodaca that pamphlets from Havana had arrived with news that the Spanish Constitution had been readopted. Llorente revealed his antipathy to the change, remarking, “Your Excellency already knows the kind of venom that such publications contain . . . news is already spreading to the interior.” ³⁶ Perhaps Llorente sensed the challenge to his own authority that a return to the constitutional order entailed. Without a doubt the reestablished constitution 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. ³⁷ 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 replacement, Colonel José Barradas, arrived, he found that the garrisons surrounding Coyusquihui were dangerously undermanned. Desperate for reinforcements, on October 7, 1820, Barradas reported that one-third of his soldiers were ill and that he would soon have to abandon the forts surrounding Coyusquihui. He concluded by stating his regret at sending such a bleak report. ³⁸

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 Rincón’s departure and dispatched José María 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 readoption 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 of for so long.” ³⁹ Even so, Barradas’s envoy did not receive a positive reception. Upon his arrival, the sergeant was accused by insurgent captain Pedro Ferral “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.” ⁴⁰ 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 Rincón’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.” ⁴¹ One reason rebels such as Ibáñez 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. Rincón’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 vowed to kill anyone he encountered who accepted the government amnesty. ⁴²

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. ⁴³ Prudencio Ibáñez soon responded that he and several other gente de razón among the rebels were willing to accept the amnesty but had held back “out of compassion for the Indians, whom they do not wish to leave.” ⁴⁴ Ibáñez reported that the exhausted rebels were waiting for a general meeting that Olarte planned to call. However, on November 11, Pedro Ferral and a group of non-Indians appeared in Nautla and accepted the terms of amnesty, while reporting that Olarte and about two hundred rebels were crossing the Espinal River in order to continue the struggle alongside rebels in the nearby camp of Palo Gordo. Worried that he would not favorably conclude 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. ⁴⁵

In December 1820 Olarte’s forces finally reached an accord with the royalist officers when the rebel commander led 468 armed rebels, organized in seven military companies, to accept the amnesty. In a letter published in the Gazeta de México, 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). ⁴⁶ Olarte thus adopted the language of the Gazeta, where reports always described rebels as deluded or misled. Yet Olarte’s repentant declaration, created for the military as part of its propaganda 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 November 17, 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. The 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 control, 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 shifted away from the principal towns that had traditionally administered large hinterlands. Unlike those who had participated in earlier colonial rebellions, the rebels of 1820 demanded constitutional guarantees that would ensure that the transformation (mutación) of the government would be permanent.

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.” ⁴⁷ The 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 countryside, but it also gave recognition to the new political actors who emerged from the long insurgency. The treatment of Moreno and his followers indicates that the peace accords allowed political autonomy with teeth. The rebels kept their arms, and their own insurgent officers commanded the new militias. For example, on November 30, 1820, several rebel leaders wrote Olarte that they accepted the constitution and that they “have kept their arms in hand to defend their rights.” ⁴⁸ 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 commission as a cavalry captain. ⁴⁹ 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 promulgation 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. ⁵⁰ Most immediately, the rebels implemented the terms of the new constitution when they established an ayuntamiento named Santiago Coyusquihui. The former rebels had a strong appreciation of the prerogatives won under the negotiated settlement and the constitution. When Juan Vidal, the new commander of Papantla, arrested some of Olarte’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.” ⁵¹ Olarte thus interpreted the truce as a recognition of local autonomy from colonial authorities. And he set out to create a new pueblo using the political rights granted to ayuntamientos 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 Fernando VII. ⁵² 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 maliciously frustrated by the gachupines. ⁵³ Though monarchism was the language 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.

Even during the early stages of rebellion, popular beliefs about the monarchy played a role in creating a new nationalist idiom. For example, an insurgent letter sent to Huejutla on January 16, 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.” ⁵⁴ Captured rebels declared that they followed “the law of Our Lady of Guadalupe.” ⁵⁵ In Zacualtipan, a sierra community located far to the west of Papantla, 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.” ⁵⁶ 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 subdelegado and other gachupín officials. Insurgency became one way of protecting the community against the subdelegado and his local merchant allies. At the local level, anti-gachupín sentiment had a very concrete meaning. 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 gachupines, 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. ⁵⁷ Anti-gachupín sentiment and an identification with the Virgin of Guadalupe were evident in local indigenous rhetoric. Village rebels immediately identified the royalist government as the protector of the gachupines. In essence, for them the vaunted paternalism of the colonial regime fell far short of popular expectations.

Anti-gachupín 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 account. 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 survival depended on the goodwill of the villagers. Insurgent villages could, and often did, refuse Lozano’s attempts to command village militias or tax their community members. ⁵⁸ Lacking the powers of royalist officers and subdelegados, Lozano adopted a language of persuasion to get what he needed, circulating letters to the indigenous town governments in favor of the insurgency. 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 royalist 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.” ⁵⁹

The insurgents attempted to create a new political order in the towns they controlled. In 1813 they held elections in Papantla and the surrounding towns to choose electors for the provincial delegation to the insurgent congress in Chilpancingo. ⁶⁰ The local rebel leaders, although threatened by a royalist counteroffensive, paused to carry out the elections. ⁶¹ Apart from the traditional voting for officials in the repúblicas de indios, these were the first 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 September 1813, when the royalist army reoccupied Papantla and rebel resistance was increasingly reduced to the activities of a loose confederation of insurgent villages and camps. Even then, however, continued ties to the colonywide insurgency meant that “peasant localism” did not simply dominate the insurgent struggle. For example, the Supremo Congreso Nacional Americano maintained a presence in the region through the person of José Joaquín Aguilar, the intendant of Veracruz, who established his headquarters in the Papantla region in 1814. Besides his military activities, Aguilar dedicated considerable energy to antigovernment propaganda. Between 1813 and 1816, he wrote and circulated tracts that ridiculed the practices of the old regime. Aguilar engaged in a give-and-take with the royalist Gazeta de México. He wrote circulars denouncing the Gazeta’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 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. ⁶² 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. ⁶³ Aguilar used the language of the widely circulated Gazeta de México to mock the regime in Mexico City. He adopted the rhetoric of the Gazeta 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. ⁶⁴ Insurgents 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 ciudadano in the colonies. ⁶⁵

The influence of Lozano and Aguilar is apparent in the proclamations of Mariano Olarte, written in the rustic Spanish of a village-educated insurgent. In his own proclamations, Olarte adopted the terminology and mimicked the mocking tone of Aguilar’s dispatches. Even before 1820, Olarte’s discourse 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.” ⁶⁶ 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, oydores, and subservient ministers 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. ⁶⁷

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 comments reminded his readers (and listeners) that colonial officials and royalist military commanders continually imposed forced labor. His condemnation of how Indians were treated as beasts of burden (jumentos) 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 distribution 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 subdelegado 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 Gómez’s protest was the Indians’ refusal to provide the labor services that subdelegados had traditionally enjoyed. ⁶⁸

The declaration of Olarte also indicates how far the rhetoric of Spanish constitutionalism had penetrated the ranks of rural insurgents. Jaime Rodríguez has demonstrated that the Cortes de Cádiz undermined the position of the royalist government. Indeed, Olarte’s declaration seems to mimic the language of the Cortes that was published in the Gazeta 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. ⁶⁹ After Fernando VII revoked the Constitution of 1812, insurgents found it even easier to wrap themselves in the cloak of Spanish 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 December 1820, they had obviously discussed the meaning of the constitution with envoys who had been sent to rebel camps. Thus when Olarte accepted the amnesty, it became clear that his view of constitutional rights differed from that of local royalist commanders. Only two weeks after Olarte’s surrender, 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. ⁷⁰ 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 sympathetic to the insurgents’ interpretation of the new constitutional order. For example, in a letter to José Moreno, Francisco Parroga, the párroco of Huehuetla, interpreted the constitution promulgated in 1820 as a 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 [1]814. 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 demanded had been carried out. The happy day has arrived in which we Americans can have a break 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. ⁷¹

In the same letter, Parroga invited the “national troops” to swear loyalty to the newly promulgated constitution, because if the “old bayonets . . . challenge our liberty, together we are the national troops who are ready to resist.” 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.” ⁷²

Barradas was correct to worry about the nature of the rebel correspondence. 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 Cortes and the king was too far away to understand American needs. The letter carried a municipal seal and apparently originated in Jalapa. ⁷³

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. ⁷⁴ As we have seen, even within a given locale the insurgency was a loose confederation of rebel camps, each with its own caudillo, who jealously guarded his autonomy of action. The violence of independence heightened the already provincial orientation of 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. ⁷⁵ 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 born out of the decentralization of power that occurred during the war. Revealing a central tenet of the insurgency, Father Parroga’s letters quoted above used the term pueblos interchangeably with nación, as if the “national” audience were a plurality of pueblos, revealing a central tenet of the insurgency. The rural insurgents approached the nation from a localized perspective. They promoted a vision of a decentralized nation where local traditions could survive in defiance of Mexico City. As Knight has noted, this formulation of identity had its advocates throughout the nineteenth century and can be summed up in Ignacio Ramírez’s phrase, “El municipio es la nación.” ⁷⁶ 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. ⁷⁷

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. ⁷⁸ The negotiated settlement and the letters to and from local insurgents supposed that sovereignty resided in an authority other than the monarch. 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, promoted the cult in their Indian parishes. At the same time, muleteers spread the practice of the cult along commercial routes. ⁷⁹ 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 pilgrimage and goes one step further by suggesting how creole priests (and muleteers) 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 central 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 national space. Mexican insurgents adopted a nationalist discourse before the emergence of national markets or a united national elite, a process that confirms the emerging consensus 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 nation from below without the regions being subordinated to the national center. 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 nineteenth century. ⁸⁰

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. ⁸¹ The insurgency added new forms of political protest to this inflammatory mix of social and political tensions. Independence 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 constitution readopted in 1820 accommodated some of the changes in popular politics that villagers had developed during the long period of guerrilla warfare.

The insurgents’ attitude toward this constitution indicates that the independence movement had created a critical shift in ideas concerning government and political identities. Earlier colonial revolts were brief protest movements 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, describing it as “three hundred years of Tyranny,” language borrowed from Spanish declarations about the Constitution of Cádiz readopted in 1820 that came to form part of the liberal heritage of nineteenth-century Mexico. ⁸² 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 describe themselves as citizens rather than 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 during 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, thwarting 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. ⁸³ The 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 warriors was a promise of autonomy by way of the constitutional ayuntamiento. Such a promise left unresolved the issue of how the municipio would relate to the nation and how the municipio 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.