The Legal Revolution in Town Politics: Oaxaca and Yucatan, 1812-1825

In May of 1813 the newly elected mayor of the central Yucatecan town of Nohcacab wrote an angry and frustrated letter to the Diputación Provincial, the council created the year before to administer regional affairs. Ceferino Domínguez wrote to report on a sudden burst of disorder among the indigenous population. Three leagues from the village center, a group of Maya were living in a small settlement known as San José Chac. From that base, Domínguez reported, 10 or 12 "Yndios revoltosos" were traveling the countryside, disturbing the peace along the way. Prompted by these troublemakers, all of the Maya in the settlement were now living "as if independent from justice," never coming to town to hear mass, confess, or pay their church fees. Things were not much better in the town itself, he explained, where the town's highest indigenous official was constantly drunk and mistreated the Indians under his charge. Yet despite his behavior, and despite the new authority represented by Domínguez, this cacique still commanded respect and obedience among the indígenas. Every day, Domínguez wrote, one could see "mobs of Indians that this cacique calls to the town hall without a known reason." The mayor was quite certain about the source of all this disorder. It began, he said, with the decree of the Spanish Cortes issued on November 9, 1812, which had declared Indians free of the tax and service burdens of the colonial era and proclaimed their equality with Spaniards. Since this decree, Domínguez opined, all Indians were living "without God, without Law, without Religion." ¹

What this local nonindigenous leader saw as the disintegration of social order was, in fact, evidence of an important transformation in the relationship between indigenous people and the state. The transformation began with the French occupation of Spain in 1808 and the liberal Spanish constitutional experiment of 1812-14 and continued with independence and the Mexican constitution of 1824. The Spanish constitution introduced major institutional changes in Mexico, including universal male suffrage, popular elections, and the elimination of legal distinctions between different groups of citizens. By formally ending the three-hundred-year-old legal and political distinction between indigenous peoples and Spaniards, the constitutional system altered the social and institutional worlds in which rural Mexicans lived. Once differentiated subjects of an absolutist regime, indigenous villagers would first become equal members of a constitutional monarchy and then citizens of a liberal republic with the right to vote and participate in local government and beyond. But at the same time, the new laws abolished any distinctively indigenous local authority and introduced new kinds of relationships with nonindigenous people who were also gaining new rights. For Mexico's rural townspeople, both indigenous and nonindigenous, liberal reform thus provided new opportunities for self-government and autonomy while curtailing certain privileges, a situation that made for a new and often conflictual relationship both with other villagers and with the state.

This article will address the early development of those relationships in two heavily indigenous Mexican states, Oaxaca and Yucatán. In both places, the transition to liberalism caused initial disruption in indigenous towns and prompted a reconfiguration of the relationship between state and subjects/citizens. Recent studies have shown that the years between 1808 and 1821 constituted a crucial moment in the development of local politics in Mexico's regions. It was a time in which many peasants and villagers, through their participation in insurgent movements, transformed their understanding of politics and of their place within it. ² These studies also suggest the importance of the 1812 constitution in implementing real change in political relationships in the countryside, both among villagers and between villagers and the state. ³ Finally, this new work clearly shows that this experience was not uniform across Mexico; in particular, the relationship between indigenous and nonindigenous people varied significantly depending...