Rebellion Now and Forever: Mayas, Hispanics, and Caste War Violence in Yucatán, 1800–1880 (review)

To a certain extent, the complexity of nineteenth-century Mexico’s political instability has served as a deterrent to scholarship. The dearth of documentation has made the topic even more forbidding. But in the recent past, historians have begun to address Mexico’s nineteenth-century chaos, partly through the discovery of archival material at the state level allowing for a regional approach to the topic.

Rugeley’s book is the latest entry into the field. It is based on prodigious research in the archives of Yucatan as well as in Mexico City and Belize, and it is supplemented by material from the British Foreign Office records available in the Bancroft Library. Even with a regional focus, the topic is huge in scope; as Rugeley shows, the massive violence of the middle of the century—the famous Caste War of Yucatan—grew out of the political problems that emerged as the colonial regime began to collapse. The study ends with the onset of the Porfirian regime, the era of generalized political stability growing out of, rather than breaking with, the past.

In each of the chronologically organized chapters the author discusses politics, politicians, political participation, political programs and ideology, state power and finances, land policy, clergymen and the Church, the militarization of society, and the social and economic impact of disorder and eventually of massive violence. One of the major concerns of the book is to show how a society responded to what the Rugeley calls “la Violencia,” the term used in Colombia to refer to the breakdown of political order after 1948 and the subsequent outbreak of conflict. Rugeley periodically refers to this phenomenon as well as to numerous other instances of it in places like Bosnia and Rwanda, hoping that the book will shed some light on adaptation to the politics of mass murder. However, Rugeley does not carry out any systematic comparison of the cases, which are mentioned in passing, and does not employ methodological approaches derived from the social sciences. As a result, he manages to convey little about such adaptation. In this sense, the book does not succeed as an interdisciplinary analysis.

But it succeeds admirably as a historical monograph. Rugeley provides a wealth of detail about all of the above-mentioned themes, in a compelling and interesting way. His approach encompasses people of all social classes, and his many examples, far from being tedious, are wellchosen for what they are supposed to illustrate. He also manages to demonstrate the importance of micro-regions, especially eastern Yucatan, in regional politics.

The book’s shortcomings are minor: its failure to explain the separation of Campeche from Yucatan, an index that is much too brief for scholarly purposes, and the use of slang or idiom (for instance, “perks”) that not all readers will understand. How is one to explain to a non- American the meaning of a sentence that, when referring to directives on land policy, reads “These words put milk of magnesia in administrative stomachs” (212)?

Despite these quibbles, this first-rate book helps to explain Yucatan’s instability and massive violence without becoming one more narrative of gore. It thereby contributes significantly to the ongoing reassessment of nineteenth-century Mexican politics and society.