For God and Revolution: Priest, Peasant, and Agrarian Socialism in the Mexican Huasteca

8: Death to All Those Who Wear Pants!: The Huastecan Peasant War, 1879–1884

123 Chapter 8 death to all those Who Wear Pants! the Huastecan Peasant War, 1879–1884 . To The Mexican People! Wake up sleeping people and claim your rights as sons and daughters of Mexico! Year after year the tyrannical landowners have smothered us with unjust taxes, they have increased our poverty and misery, they undervalue all of us just because we are poor. They believe that because they are hacendados, they are the owners of the universe. But they are not the owners of the universe. God is our creator and He gave us our lives that we may live in union together, enjoying all of His creation equally. —The Council of Socialist Sharecroppers /The Huastecan rebellions of the late 1870s differed from previous agrarian rebellions because of their coordination with national leadership originating from Mexico City and the provinces, their incorporation of anarchist and socialist ideas, and their coordinated military strategies under cacique Juan Santiago and Padre Mauricio Zavala.1 The 1879–1884 revolution was the outcome of both short- and long-term local conditions that had been building for years. But the unrest also formed part of a broader wave of agrarian violence that erupted across much of the Mexican countryside during the first years of the Porfiriato. In the late 1870s a wave of peasant unrest swept across the states of Querétaro, Hidalgo, Guanajuato, Chihuahua, Mexico, Michoacán, and Oaxaca.2 Anarchist and socialist revolutionaries from the Gran comité comunero and the Directorio socialista in Mexico City assisted the campesino leaders and coordinated regional support for rural defense. 124 Chapter 8 General Miguel Negrete, a former Mexican minister of war, directed one of the most intense agrarian upheavals of the later 1870s and contributed to the increasing political radicalism of the peasantry in the Huasteca. On June 1, 1879, Negrete led agrarian rebels in the Sierra Gorda of Querétaro against the Díaz government, proclaiming that the new administration had betrayed its promises made during the Tuxtepec rebellion. Negrete, a war hero during the struggle against the U.S. and French occupations, had long fought for working-class and peasant rights. In 1876 he supported Díaz’s Tuxtepec revolt, believing that it would improve the immiserated conditions of the rural proletariat. By 1879, however, Negrete realized that Díaz had betrayed the peasantry and working class.3 In July 1879 Salomon Morales, Diego Hernández, and Luis Luna, leaders from the Directorio socialista, joined Negrete and helped him write “The Socialist Plan of Sierra Gorda.” The Directorio socialista originated in Mexico City and represented a core cadre of urban working-class intellectuals and radicals who were attempting to organize and coordinate peasant rebellions throughout northeastern Mexico. They played an important role in the Huastecan uprisings and maintained close contact with Juan Santiago and Padre Mauricio Zavala. Juan Santiago emerged as a classic rural “organic intellectual” as conceptualized by Antonio Gramsci.4 He bridged the gap between the urban socialist parties and the rural working class. By providing indigenous intellectual leadership, he was able to legitimize socialist ideologies and make them compelling to the rural indigenous peasantry. The Directorio socialista advocated agrarian laws and the reformation of the electoral and political process in such a way as to secure the representation of the interests of the rural working class. The plan was influenced by previous agrarian struggles in Mexico, the ideas of individual liberty enshrined in the 1857 constitution, and the Paris Commune of 1871.5 Similar documents also emerged in the states of Hidalgo and Querétaro, as well as in the Huasteca Potosina.6 In July 1879 Juan Santiago and Mauricio Zavala joined the agrarian rebellions erupting as a seismic wave, and Zavala later incorporated parts of “The Socialist Plan of Sierra Gorda” within the broader revolutionary plans and ideas he articulated that gave expression to the social and cultural values of the Huastecan peasantry. The agrarian unrest that swept the Huasteca Potosina between 1879 and 1884 moved through four phases, beginning in Tamazunchale and ending in the Ciudad del Maíz. The opening guns sounded in July 1879 and kept sounding until a cease-fire was negotiated in the winter of 1880. The summer 125 Death to All Those Who Wear Pants! of 1880 marked a new and more radical departure. The appearance of Diego Hernández of the Directorio socialista transformed the peasant rebellion into a revolution. In their...