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  • The River People in Flood Time: The Civil Wars in Tabasco, Spoiler of Empires by Terry Rugeley
  • Andrew Konove
The River People in Flood Time: The Civil Wars in Tabasco, Spoiler of Empires, by Terry Rugeley. Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2014. 355 pp. $45.00 US (cloth).

Tabasco was never Mexico’s most hospitable region. Searing heat, infectious diseases, and unpredictable floodwaters were among the hazards facing inhabitants of this southeastern Mexican state. But the environment proved even more vexing for Tabasco’s would-be conquerors. In this lively history, Terry Rugeley argues that Tabasco’s formidable terrain and tenacious inhabitants managed to frustrate every invader’s attempt to tame the region between the end of Spanish rule and the Mexican Revolution. The desire for autonomy and “the need to expel some unwanted intruder,” more than liberalism, conservatism, or any of the ascendant ideologies of the era constituted the “defining dynamic” (4) of Tabascan history and culture during the era.

Through exhaustive research, Rugeley has stitched the fragments of Tabasco’s historical record — “virtually any paper that did not find its way out of Tabasco before the 1880s has been destroyed” (5) — into a comprehensive history of the region from the pre-Hispanic period to [End Page 200] the 1920s, with an emphasis on the tumultuous nineteenth century. The author’s sources range from official correspondence, archived in Mexico City, Mérida, New Orleans, and Washington, DC, to travelers’ accounts, short-lived regional newspapers, and novels — any written source, it seems, that offered a glimpse into this historical black box. If the book sometimes feels encyclopedic in its recounting of numerous foreign incursions and local power struggles, the level of detail seems justified, given how little we know about this vital region.

While the land often plays a leading role in the histories of other rural Mexican regions, water is the protagonist in Tabasco. Indeed, Tabasco occupies little more than one percent of Mexico’s national territory, but contains one-third of the country’s hydraulic resources. Much of the state is covered by a vast swamp lying between the Gulf of Mexico and the highlands of Chiapas, penetrable only by the region’s mighty rivers — the Usumacinta, the Grijalva, and the Tonalá — whose recurring floods and frequent course changes further limited the availability of arable land and made any human settlement precarious. These conditions had profound effects on Tabasco’s economic and political development during the colonial and early national periods. For one, they prevented the establishment of large agricultural estates; indeed, the majority of cacao production, Tabasco’s most significant export crop, lay in the hands of Indigenous and mixed-race smallholders at the end of the colonial era. With a smaller overall Indigenous population, more mestizaje, and little or no tradition of latifundio, Tabasco avoided slipping into the ethnic violence of neighbouring Yucatan’s Caste War in the mid-nineteenth century.

Throughout the era, Tabasco’s rivers lured would-be conquerors into the state’s interior, where they were inevitably trapped and ultimately expelled by locals. A number of foreign invaders, including US Commodore Matthew Perry (1847), succeeded in capturing the capital at Villahermosa, known as San Juan Bautista prior to the late nineteenth century. None of them, however, was able to firmly establish control over the territory after the Spanish, whose light touch was the only form of governance Tabascans would endure. The bulk of the monograph (chapters three to seven) is dedicated to these feats of resistance — against Mexican Centralists, the Cuban-born filibuster Francisco de Sentmanat, the US Navy, and the forces of the French Intervention. Those incursions alternatively triggered or became subsumed in local power struggles amongst Tabasco’s Hispanic elite (Tabasco’s Indigenous peoples, Rugeley writes, largely stayed on the sidelines while these conflicts played out). Although Tabascans generally favoured federalism over centralism, that preference stemmed less from their enthusiasm for liberalism than from the greater autonomy federalism afforded local elites. [End Page 201]

One of the book’s most significant contributions is its illumination of the circuits of commerce and warfare that criss-crossed the Gulf of Mexico in the nineteenth century. Tabasco was poorly connected to the rest...

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