In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

1 1 The Death of Pablo Chan About two hours after sunrise on January 6, 1890, José Ceh, a thirty-seven-year-old widower and father of two, was in transit from one morning task to another. Accompanying him was Juan Tun, a slightly younger man with a surname meaning “stone” in his native Maya tongue. The two had started work in the fields around 5:00 a.m. by the light of the full moon. It was the feast of the Epiphany, the day commemorating the adoration of the Christ child by the Three Magi, and both men were anticipating the customary celebration later in the day. They would gather with friends and family, presenting small gifts to their children just as the Wise Men had done for the divine infant according to Christian scripture. They would also divide the rosca de reyes, a ring-shaped sweet bread similar to the king cake served customarily in New Orleans during Mardi Gras. Their families anxiously awaited the bread’s cutting to see who would have the good fortune of finding one of the trinkets tucked inside. As it would turn out, the two men would have no good fortune this morning. Both José and Juan lived and labored on a vast 35,000-acre plantation in Yucatán, the pie-shaped Mexican state in the peninsula of the same name. Known as Hacienda Tabi, the landholding stretched across a valley between two ranges of low limestone hills in a region known by the Maya term puuc. About one-third of the property was planted with sugarcane, which was used to make rum in the plantation’s distillery. Another one-third was forest land, conserved for building materials and firewood to power the sugar mill. The remainder of the estate comprised cornfields and cattle grazing lands, as well as orchards and plots for the cultivation of tobacco and henequen, an agave plant used to make cordage. At the heart of the plantation stood a magnificent two-story, 22,000-squarefoot stone house. The estate and house, which locals today call the palacio, were the property of María Jesus Machado, the widow of Felipe Peón, a powerful man who had died some fourteen years before.1 Felipe was a member Chapter 1 2 of an illustrious creole family that traced its lineage to some of Yucatán’s earliest Spanish colonists. He had owned more than a dozen haciendas in the countryside, though his immediate family had lived in either Mérida, the colonial capital of Yucatán, or Ticul, a small center of municipal government in the Puuc region. Given the widow’s advancing age, the administration and eventual ownership of the hacienda fell to her son, Carlos, who would become governor of Yucatán in just four short years. Of all Felipe Peón’s haciendas, Tabi was the crowning jewel. From the palacio, one looked across the great yard at a church that would eventually be reconstructed as a scaled-down version of a colonial Franciscan monastery. On one side of it was a sugar mill boasting three chimney stacks. On the other were some arcaded stables. This structural nucleus had been built in part with stones stripped from ancient ruins nearby, and many finely carved pieces appeared in the building exteriors. A six-foot-high stone wall surrounded the precinct, and an aristocratic arched gate on the wall’s north side served as the formal entrance. Just beyond the gate was a small village where José and Juan made their homes. Some five hundred people—men, women, and children—lived there. Most were local peasants who had moved, or whose parents had moved, to the village in the last two generations. They were generally acknowledged to be the descendants of aboriginal inhabitants who had transformed the area with urban centers some ten centuries before. Nearly all still spoke the regional dialect of Maya, and only a few had acquired the language of the conquistadors . Many had become indebted to the estate upon arriving. Finding it increasingly difficult to repay the debts, or perhaps having no desire to repay them, they were, according to longstanding custom and recent state legislation , bound to the property for life. There, starting as early as age ten, they labored as field hands, house servants, or mill workers throughout the year. January was a busy time for sugar processing, but it was also the harvest season for tobacco. José and Juan had...

Share