Malcontents, Rebels, and Pronunciados: The Politics of Insurrection in Nineteenth-Century Mexico

1. The Compass Points of Unrest: Pronunciamientos from Within,Without, Above, and Below in Southeast Mexico, 1821–1876

terry rugeley One. The Compass Points of Unrest: Pronunciamientos from Within, Without, Above, and Below in Southeast Mexico, 1821–1876 F or southeast Mexico the nineteenth century managed to be the worst of times without simultaneously being the best of times. Political instability remained endemic and blood flowed like water. And one signpost of the chaos was the abundance of pronunciamientos, acts in which one or more individuals (most often military officers) issued a formal declaration of revolt against the standing order. The idea baffles and perhaps even angers those raised in a time when stable institutions, established processes, and written legal codes guide the course of life. How then to make sense of an age in which private individuals posted their own signposts to the political future? Both the problem of violence and the reason for pronouncements are clear enough.The independence wars had inflicted terrible damage on the new nation and retarded its economic development , particularly in the critical silver-mining industry, until the century’s end. At most levels Mexicans had little experience with self-government, and despite idealist expressions of rights, nation, and liberty, early Mexican society still carried deeply ingrained colonial attitudes that separated people through a racially based caste system. Moreover, little agreement existed on a basic political direction . Some statesmen preferred a federalist arrangement in which most power devolved to the provinces, while others championed 2 Rugeley conservative centralism, a kind of Spain without the Spaniards: regal, mercantilist, and above all Catholic. Finally, the rapid and unconsolidated expansion of New Spain’s northern frontier in the eighteenth century saddled Mexico with a vast but thinly populated territory that invited Anglo filibustering. Mexico could counter this pernicious force only by crippling and profoundly unpopular conscriptions in the deep south. The sons of New Spain thus inherited a poor, inexperienced, and internally divided society that could only defend one region by convulsing another. Faced with anarchic conditions and lacking a clear political future , people had to find their own way. Mexico’s political actors— mostly of the elite sort, but as this essay shows, with significant participation and initiative from below—invoked private statements of purpose and plans to launch their movements. Political initiatives devolved to relatively small networks of friends, family , and clients, as opposed to representative bodies, a fact that reflected the terrible weakness of Mexican institutions. But in the southeast (as, doubtless, elsewhere) pronouncements varied greatly according to individuals, needs, and circumstances. The southeast—in this case Yucatán, Campeche, Tabasco, and the territory that would eventually become Quintana Roo—was no exception. Here, the years 1829–78 offer an encyclopedia of violence . It began with the rows that frequently followed ayuntamiento elections in the 1820s. Unaccustomed to the give and take of the electoral process, small-town patriarchs simply could not accept that a rival should take their place on the town council simply because more people had checked that rival’s name on a piece of paper. Then came the federalist-centralist wars of the 1830s, culminating in Santiago Imán’s successful separation from Mexico . A failed campaign of reconquest in 1842–43 simply stoked the Compass Points of Unrest 3 fires; and when the United States invaded Mexico three years later , the crisis reignited smoldering enmities over regional power. These increasingly nasty tussles antagonized the Maya peasants, one (relatively limited) segment of whom responded with an uprising known as the Caste War. Counterinsurgency naturally followed . But just as something resembling peace returned, political violence erupted all over again with Yucatán’s version of the Reform War: coup after coup, selected assassinations, barracks uprisings lubricated through bribes, deposed governors bayoneted in the stomach, and a revived campaign of raids on the part of Maya rebels. The coming of the French-sponsored Empire might have extinguished some of this mayhem, but imperialists made the fatal mistake of shouldering the Caste War, and their attempts at remilitarizing the society provoked grassroots resistance. When the Empire fell, unrepentant conservatives and internecine Liberal rivalries kept the waters stirred until the successful Tuxtepec revolt succeeded in imposing a reluctant peace. The Caste War ground on long after the rebels had ceased to represent any sort of threat, while Yucatán and Campeche themselves remained planter-class police states into the twentieth century.1 The other southeastern province, seldom-studied Tabasco, had its own history of instability. Smaller populations, a geography intersected...