In the Name of the Pueblo: Place, Community and the Politics of History in Yucatán by Paul K. Eiss (review)

Why are some communities or regions rebellious? Why do certain places repeatedly resist authority? What factors contribute to such a spirited collective resistance? Paul Eiss, trained in both anthropology and history, unravels why peasants in Hunucmá, a small, sparsely populated district in western Yucatán, have continually defied local landowners and authorities, often at considerable cost.

This work is a beautifully crafted and painstakingly researched micro-history that mines a rich vein of documentary and material sources, including theatrical performances, deer hunts, engravings on shotguns, religious celebrations, local histories and a treasure trove of petitions, land claims, and judicial records. Eiss documents how campesinos fought tenaciously to hold on to communal lands and to secure access to salt pools, forests, stands of dyewoods, and hunting grounds in this district, which is located just off the Camino Real section that joins the peninsula's two largest cities, Mérida and Campeche. Typically, scholars speak of the breakup of ejidos, communal lands located just outside a pueblo's core, but Hunucmá's villagers took a more expansive view of their patrimony. Given the impoverished state of the soil in northwestern Yucatán, access to nearby woodlands and salt flats were critical to their survival.

Eiss tells a tale of dispossession that will be familiar to students of Latin American peasant communities. Landlords fought villagers tooth and nail and by the second half of the nineteenth century had not only secured much of the district's communal lands, but its labor force as well, as henequen monoculture transformed the regional economy and more than half of the district's formerly autonomous villagers found themselves living as indebted workers on haciendas. While the loss of communal lands occurred throughout much of northwestern Yucatán and resistance against hacendados was not uncommon, few districts so bitterly contested these changes.

As far as authorities were concerned Hunucmá was a scourge that had to be isolated, and they treated it with fearsome repression lest it infect its neighbors. In the aftermath of the devastating nineteenth-century Caste War, politicians and hacendados were the ones who racialized Hunucmá's "other," unwittingly forging bonds between mestizo artisans, shopkeepers and smallholders, and Maya campesinos. When the Mexican Revolution erupted in 1911, it was not surprising that Hunucmenses found common cause with rebels, and when the Revolution triumphed they demanded that the new regime return their lands.

If the loss of ejidal lands was the norm in the peninsula, not the exception, why did violence continually wrack Hunucmá? Eiss asks us to think more broadly about what it was that underscored such a culture of resistance. Over time, what "el pueblo" meant to residents was contentious and contingent, and was shaped by both internal and external forces. To Eiss, the pueblo is much more than a place, it is a collective entity "that has belongings, something that possesses and is possessed." For much of their history, Hunucmenses fought doggedly to repossess what had been taken from them and in that relentless struggle they came "to recognize themselves as el pueblo through the recognition of a shared history" (p. 273). Not surprisingly, landholders and authorities resisted indigenous and mestizo claims, ridiculing their maps in court and passing legislation that circumscribed peasant autonomy.

The author labels the three parts of his study "Dispossession," "Repossession," and "Recognition." Much of the Revolution's first decades were characterized by the state's tepid paternalistic half measures and a rearguard action fought by intransigent landlords to hold on to their lands. It was not until President Lázaro Cárdenas came to Yucatán in 1937 that Hunucmá's lands were wrested from private estates. As the number of Hunucmá's residents employed by the Federal Ejidal Bank to cultivate henequen fiber soared from 45,000 in 1955 to...