The Other Rebellion: Popular Violence, Ideology, and the Mexican Struggle for Independence, 1810-1821 (review)

Being a participant in the wars of independence in Mexico between 1810 and 1821 was a highly personal endeavor. Peer pressure, love, kinship, and curiosity, all may have been the reasons, which might have pushed a rebel into the fray. And what was personal was local as well. Longstanding rivalries or short-term bitterness between individuals, families, groups, or villages caused people to join one side or the other in the conflict. Mexicans did not much care about the events in Europe or even Mexico City for that matter. There was not much ideology involved either. Newfangled ideas about liberty and equality took a back seat to effecting “some sort of standoff in a prolonged process of cultural resistance by rural communities.” (496) Country people struggled against internal and external change, not to win independence from Spain. Local leaders, such as indigenous notables or parish clergy, did not pull followers into rebellion. Insurgent leaders, known as cabecillas, more often than not acted as a result of popular energies, not at the forefront of them. Insurgency was not for the young, nor, for the most part, for city slickers or men with families (or for the faint-hearted). Indigenous people comprised the majority (fifty-five percent) of rural insurgents.

In the background — author Eric Van Young insists that they were important but not preeminent — of course, were greater forces, like the widespread “immiseration” of almost all working residents of all castes in the geographic region now known as Mexico in the eighteenth century, which brutal droughts exacerbated during the 1810s. In this schemata agrarian conflict between haciendas (large estates) and pueblos (mostly Indian villages) were a “subcase of tensions of a deeper and more general nature rooted in ethnocultural conflict between indigenous and nonindigenous people.” (To Professor Van Young this finding differentiates Mexico from other independence movements of the era and invalidates class-based theories of social upheaval so widely applied to the age of revolution.) Moreover, few areas went untouched by the violence throughout the era.

Van Young emphasizes continuities. In his words (paraphrasing Von Clausewitz) “popular insurrection was in many ways the pursuit of riot by other means. The energies, goals, and habitual forms of collective expression that infused localist uprisings from at least the middle of the eighteenth century carried into the insurrection of 1810–21....” (501) A crucial difference between the earlier upheavals and those of the independence era was the lack of agrarian motivations. Land had been at the center of previous conflicts. There were surprisingly few “ad hoc sorts of agrarian attacks” during 1810 to 1821. (502) No “widespread and systematic agrarian program developed.” Van Young, in what he describes as a speculative reading of the documents, posits that even in earlier tumultos (riots) ostensibly caused by conflicts over land (or taxes) the real issues derived from underlying ethnocultural tensions. Indigenous and other peasant communities were fighting for their very survival.

Most certainly, the rebellion of the 1810s was a rural phenomenon. Evidently, urban lower classes had no outstanding grievances against the royal administration, because it continued to deliver basic services. Although they were not long removed from their rural origins, urban subalterns had neither the agrarian motivation nor the cultural resistance to the threats to village life, which underlay political action in the countryside. City dwellers “lacked ready forms of association to conscientize and mobilize potentially rebellious popular groups.” (506)

Professor Van Young rebuts the old notion that priests led the rebellion against Spain. What he found is that lower secular clergy were not well regarded by the people in their parishes, for they oppressed them with their greed and meddled intrusively in local politics and cultural practices. They were outsiders who always wanted to move on to richer, more prestigious positions. They were concerned primarily with maintaining comfortable lifestyles, perhaps, even with becoming wealthy. Often the priests spoke little if any of the common native languages. Van Young documents several instances of protests by parishioners...