Secession as an International Phenomenon: From America?s Civil War to Contemporary Separatist Movements

“The Brief, Glorious History of the Yucatecan Republic: Secession and Violence in Southeast Mexico, 1836–1848”

TERRY RUGELEY The Brief, Glorious History of the Yucatecan Republic Secession and Violence in Southeast Mexico, 1836–1848 Political secession is the scourge of postcolonial states, and although in this hemisphere it is most often associated with the ill-fated Confederate States of America, secession was endemic to nineteenth-century Latin America as well. Indeed, had nations adhered to the layout of late Bourbon and early national redistricting, continental Latin America might have coalesced into only six political entities: Chile, Peru, Brazil (with Uruguay), Mexico (including the five Central American states), New Granada (encompassing Venezuela, Colombia , and Ecuador), and Río de la Plata (with Argentina, Paraguay, and Bolivia). Instead, by 1840 the original groupings had splintered into sixteen, after which there were numerous attempts at secession that ultimately ended in failure and reunification. This chapter explores one of the most important cases—the rise of the Yucatecan Republic and its descent into ethnic revolt and civil war—in an effort to shed light on the dynamics that tore apart so much of the Americas. In 1836, Yucatecans, infuriated by Mexican attempts to curtail regional autonomy and impose greater metropolitan rule, launched a four-year revolt that led to the formation of a new political entity. Yucatecans initially won the battle and maintained an intermittent independence until 1848. But the price was high. Their separation led not to prosperity and national health but rather to decades of entrenched violence. How did this dream go awry, and why did a people seemingly intent on creating their own nation succumb to civil wars, ethnic and otherwise? This chapter proposes there are links between the separatist move- History of the Yucatecan Republic [215] ment in Yucatán and the later peasant uprisings and military revolts there and concludes by exploring how Mexican secession differed from its counterpart in the nineteenth-century United States. YUCATECAN SECESSION AND THE FAILED RECONQUEST The Yucatán Peninsula is an enormous limestone shelf jutting out from Mexico ’s extreme southeast into the Caribbean. Prior to 1858 it constituted one of the Mexican republic’s largest provinces (this term being preferred over “state”), second only to the thinly populated Chihuahua in sheer geographical expanse. Given that Yucatán boasted five hundred thousand inhabitants in a nation of some nine million, it might have formed a significant political force, but the vast majority of its inhabitants were Maya-speaking peasants with no access to power and with little reason to rejoice in the glories of the Mexican nation. Most Mayas still lived by independent subsistence farming in the 1840s, but an increasing number were becoming permanent servants on Hispanic-owned commercial properties known as haciendas. Several features separated Mexico from its southeastern province. For one, the province was geographically isolated; until the 1970s both Yucatán and Tabasco remained accessible only by boat. Even marine access was poor, for the shallow coasts forced vessels to weigh anchor farther out; smaller vessels of limited draft had to be used to transport both goods and people to the shore. Differing patterns of conquest and colonization also distinguished Mexico from the Yucatán. The decentralized, almost anarchic, conditions of late fifteenth-century Maya society retarded Spanish conquest until 1546, by which time central New Spain had already assumed a certain coherence and had established stable Hispanic institutions. The peninsula’s overall poverty retarded commercial development and confined Spaniards to a handful of European-style cities until the early 1700s. Maya, not Spanish or Nahuatl, reigned as the language of the countryside. Yucatán lacked many of the accouterments of Mexico City, and as sugar and cattle production grew in commercial importance, Yucatecan entrepreneurs began to resent metropolitan attempts to restrict their trade options. These matters came to a head after Mexico won its independence in 1821. The new Mexican statesmen tried to eradicate former dependency on Spain, and in so doing restricted trade with Spain’s Cuban colony, thereby severing Yucatecans from their principal market. Yucatecan Hispanics lived in a cultural atmosphere that antebellum south- [216] Terry Rugeley ern planters would in some ways have found made to order. Elites prized gentility , knowledge of classical literature, and honorific militia commands for prominent landowners. In their youth, Hispanic women lived “the most hothouse existence that Europeans could imagine,” but they married young, bore many children, managed enormous households of extended family and servants, and found refuge from the patriarchal order in the...