Forced Marches: Soldiers and Military Caciques in Modern Mexico

Redrafting History: The Challenges of Scholarship on the Mexican Military Experience

1 Redrafting History The Challenges of Scholarship on the Mexican Military Experience Terry Rugeley and Ben Fallaw At times historical change takes place as slowly and imperceptibly as the growth of an olive tree. But at other times it lurches forward through what might be called a forced march, when people suddenly find themselves dragged out of cozy domesticity and plunged into conflicts not of their choosing. In the case of Mexico, anyone wanting to understand this land of diverse peoples and their complex past can find few better instances of such marches than the story of its militias and militaries. The topic is confusing and often uncomfortable. Anyone familiar with Mexico knows the historical centrality of such themes as arms, coercion, recruitment, and collective violence. Indeed, when this land began its life as a nation, the military was one of the few cohesive institutions besides the Catholic Church, and yet that cohesion failed to translate into political unity. For the past eighty years, Mexico has been one of the least militarized of Latin American societies in institutional terms, even though the country continues to register high levels of guerrillas, paramilitaries, and criminal assaults. Armed force created the colony of New Spain, and still another surge of armed conflict tore that colony from the mother country three centuries later, but other themes have drawn more attention (ethnohistory, religion, politics, economic imperialism, and popular cultures come to mind). When scholars have explored the role of arms here, it has often been through the prism of the national leadership of generals such as Antonio López de Santa Anna or Álvaro Obregón. We know considerably less about the men who followed them, or of the women they left behind, or of the nature of life in the barracks, or of what 2 • Rugeley and Fallaw perceptions and skills former soldiers took with them when returning to civilian life. For all intents and purposes, those who shouldered arms remain names on a roster, buried in an archive or else subordinated to some far different story. This volume attempts to fill a long-standing void in our understanding of Mexican history by addressing the multifaceted role of militias and armies as social institutions. For over two hundred years, men stationed with rifles in hand provided the means for maintaining law and order, but they also constituted a breeding ground for rowdiness and discontent. For generations of Mexicans, and especially following the twin mobilization peaks of 1810–1821 and 1910–1920, service at arms was a shared experience, much in the way that compulsory enlistment during World War II provided a bond for men from the United States. But what did it mean to wear a uniform or fasten a bayonet? Was service simply a matter of fighting, or more an unending exile from home and family? Did conscription mean freedom from routine, or fear and hardship? Arms may have represented different things to Spanish landowners and to Indian and ethnically mixed guerrillas, but whatever the final answers to these questions, understanding the history of forging state and society in Mexico requires coming to terms with that country’s two centuries of forced marches. A Nation’s History in Military Perspective The importance that the military assumed following 1821 might well have surprised an observer from the early centuries of colonial Mexico—three centuries of Pax Hispánica, in Friedrich Katz’s words.1 Although battles— the fire and sword of so many romantic narratives—certainly mattered in the conquests, even more critical were subtle processes such as the cooptation of native elites and the diversion of seignorial and tributary patterns away from Indian nobility and into the hands of powerful Spaniards and their preferred institutions.2 Much of the subsequent colonial order depended on letting the Indians be Indians. Franciscan, Dominican, and Augustinian friars did most of the work of bringing native peoples into the Spanish system of governance, wherein Hapsburg’s global monarchy ruled indirectly though intermediaries.3 For two centuries after the conquest, New Spain gradually gelled into a new society. Spaniards, of course, dominated the social and political order. But while Indian peoples occupied inferior roles, they still enjoyed key rights such as access to legal defense, freedom from slavery and the Redrafting History • 3 Inquisition, and the indivisible community land grant known as the ejido. Creoles, or the American-born heirs of Spaniards, multiplied in number and...