The Machete and the Cross: Campesino Rebellion in Yucatan (review)

The Machete and the Cross: Campesino Rebellion in Yucatán. By Don E. Dumond. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997. xvii + 571 pp., preface, maps, notes, bibliography, index. $57.50 cloth.)

Much has been written about the Caste War of Yucatán, and much has been written about it in Don E. Dumond’s monograph. With the exception of the sections examining rebel relations with officials in British Honduras, however, there is little in this study that advances the understanding of this famous rebellion.

Dumond’s book is a narration of selected political and military events of the Caste War. Large portions of this 428-page account are based on older but standard sources. The newest treatments of the Caste War are either not consulted or consulted briefly. Anthropologists will be disappointed by the virtual absence of discussion of rebel social organization and cultural practices. Almost nothing is said about the nature and workings of the famous Speaking Cross movement.

Dumond’s few interpretive points are largely unrelated to his narration. The exception to this is his assertion that rebel dealings with officials and residents of British Honduras were crucial to the movement’s survival. Here the author brings impressive evidence to the study, evidence drawn from the colonial archives of British Honduras. Dumond discusses British visits to the rebel stronghold at Noh Cah Santa Cruz. He outlines trade relations between British merchants and the rebels, as well as rebel attacks against opponents. Yet this information is used only to narrate events, rather than to analyze the workings of rebel society and the cult of the Speaking Cross.

To explain the outbreak of the rebellion, Dumond briefly discusses Indian peasant mobilizations by Mexican politicians after independence. In Yucatán the granting of full citizenship was followed by the arming of Indians to fight in myriad civil wars on the peninsula. Promises made during these mobilizations were then broken. “Just as Indians had begun to see themselves as partners like everyone else in Yucatán’s irregular political movements,” Dumond writes, “they were disenfranchised, jailed, and tortured” (139) in the aftermath of what he calls the “banditry” of the January 1847 attack on Valladolid. This violent dashing of rising expectations led to the Caste War.

One wishes Dumond had followed the recent trend in the literature toward analyzing indigenous rebellions after independence in terms of nation building, identity formation, and citizenship. As suggested by Florencia Mallon’s work on Peru and Mexico (and most recently by Mark Thurner’s work on Peru), one wonders if the rebels were asserting their own definitions of citizenship after independence. Indeed, what are readers to make of the fact that rebel leaders sought to become part of British Honduras, and that when this was rejected they claimed to prefer independence and rejected British suggestions that they return to the Mexican fold?

Because this book is so long, and because so much of the narrative repeats information included in previous studies, one wishes the author had decided to write on only the rebels’ relations with British Honduras. The result would have been a two-hundred-page treatment of a novel topic. One suspects that readers of this monograph will turn it into just such a study, by beginning their reading in the middle of the book. There they can discover interesting archival sources and new information that will help shape future studies of the Caste War.

Todd A. Diacon
University of Tennessee

...