Cárdenas and the Caste war that Wasn't: State power and Indigenismo in post-Revolutionary Yucatán*

The Caste War that devastated Yucatán in the middle of the nineteenth century cast a long shadow across ethnic relations and politics in the state decades after its effective end. During the Mexican Revolution and the subsequent period of national reconstruction, revolutionary politicians invoked the Caste War as a precursor to the Revolution and as justification for post-Revolutionary projects, in particular indigenismo. The state's indigenist policy advocated, in the words of Alan Knight, the "emancipation and integration of Mexico's exploited Indian groups."¹ To this end, it offered indigenous people education, legal support, even land; however, these "modernizing" policies also destroyed or appropriated much of their culture and subordinated them to the state.² The legacy of the Caste War shaped such indigenist projects in Yucatán from the Revolution to (at least) the 1930s, but its influence was strongest during Cardenas' visit to Yucatán in August of 1937. The president not only reinterpreted the Caste War to justify land reform and a broad indigenist project; he attempted to mobilize the Yucatecan peasantry along class and ethnic lines and threatened recalcitrant landlords with another caste war should they oppose him. Once armed, however, peasant soldiers turned their rifles not against the landowners but against each other. This essays explores how the Caste War's legacy shaped the development and deployment of indigenist projects in Yucatán from the Revolution to the late 1930s, focusing on Cárdenas' aborted mobilization. Along the way, it will consider the impact and efficacy of state-sponsored indigenismo. Above all, it seeks to understand why state efforts to champion the cause of the Maya failed to unify the rural poor of Yucatán under the banner of Cardenismo.

I. Yucatán from the Caste War to Cárdenas

In the last decades of the nineteenth century, Yucatán recovered from the ravages of the Caste War through a new boom in export agriculture. The invention of McCormick's mechanized harvester fueled global demand for Yucatecan-grown henequen fiber as a binder, which in turn transformed the state from an economic backwater into one of Mexico's most prosperous regions. The white planter class created henequen haciendas, and used debt peonage to coerce Maya laborers into their fields. Even after federal and state troops had driven most of the Caste War rebels into sparsely populated southern and eastern parts of the peninsula (what would become the federal territory of Quintana Roo), the specter of ethnic conflict still haunted the minds of landowners during the Porfiriato.

The growth of the henequen plantation economy spread debt servitude into the Yucatecan countryside. Coming on the heels of the destruction/of the Caste War, intensified capitalist penetration shattered peasant communities in northern, central, and western Yucatán. The splintering of social relationships previously centered on the village broke down collective identity. Consequently, when the Revolution began, the Maya-speaking rural poor in most of Yucatán lacked a shared, common sense of being "Maya," although the individual experience of racial inequality undoubtedly existed among peons and peasants toiling on henequen estates. Despite the breakdown of communally-based indigenous identities, the fact that capitalist production took place on rural henequen haciendas rather than in an urban environment largely preserved Maya language and other culture traits. Even as peons (rural estate workers) continued to speak Maya and celebrate folk religious festivals on the haciendas, estate owners would extend their control over them through practices traditionally a part of patron-client relationships such as loans (for sustenance as well as dowries) and god-parentage.³ This set Yucatán apart from most of the rest of southern and central Mexico, (like the Maya highlands of the nearby state of Chiapas) where strong communal structures survived.⁴

The henequen boom in Yucatán was but one regional example of the remarkable economic growth that took place across Mexico during the 34-year rule of Porfirio Díaz. Porfirian prosperity, which benefited mainly foreign investors and the domestic upper class...