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63 Chapter 5 the liberal assault, 1856–1884 . /In the early 1870s the evening bell pierced the humid sky in the Ciudad del Maíz, as it had since the first Castilian inhabitants built the Spanish city in the days of the conquistadors. Every night, in memory of the city’s dead, the pueblo marked a moment of collective silence as the local church rang the community’s bell. To U.S. observers such as Cora Townsend, who was from a banking family in New Orleans, the Huasteca constituted an untouched “Eden,” a land of “glorious rivers, wandering streams, and never ending cascades.” She describes the “aboriginals” as indifferent and undisturbed by the outside world, living in a pristine natural state. “The quiet farms and little Indian villages rest undisturbed by the turmoil and dissensions that wrack the outer world. They know them not. To the newspaper they are indifferent, and the telegraph is no more to them than it was to our first parents in Eden.”1 However, this idyllic vision of a Huastecan Eden masked the brutal reality of an immiserated peasantry locked into a deteriorating landed and labor regime. Thepuebloshadexpandedboththeeconomicandpoliticalrightsofpeasants during the era of agrarian decompression and the federalist struggles of the 1820s and 1830s, and the seeds for a future resurgence of the larger landed estates and an offensive waged by a centralizing state were also sown in those years. During the early national period, the secularization of Church properties laid the basis for the growth of larger estates that would by midcentury threaten peasant landholdings. In the eighteenth century the Augustinian and Franciscan orders maintained seventeen missions in the Huasteca and controlled over four hundred thousand acres. Twenty thousand Huastecos lived on twenty-five Church-owned haciendas and eighty-five ranchos. The Huastecan creoles eagerly sought the secularization of these Church lands in 64 Chapter 5 the expectation of expanding their private holdings. In 1828 Mexican Liberal president Vicente Guerrero passed the Bienes de manos muertes, the first in a series of laws aimed at dispossessing the Church of its lands. In 1832 Liberal president Valentín Gómez Farías carried out the edict. The privatization of Church land allowed the creoles to begin expanding their lands at the expense of the Huastecan peasantry.2 Once such creole landowner was José Pablo Jongitud, who became a leading military strongman in Tanchanhuitz and Tamazunchale. By the 1830s Jongitud and his allies had eliminated the mission properties in Tanchanhuitz. In 1834 the Cofradía del Santísmo Sacramento de Tampamolón lost its communal lands because they lay within the boundaries of the missions. By 1850 the Jongitud clan controlled the haciendas of Cheneco and Chalco, totaling almost 825,000 acres.3 In the 1840s new elite families appeared. In 1844 José Domingo Rascón purchased the Hacienda San Ignacio del Buey. When Rascón’s son, José Manuel,inheritedthepropertyheintroducedthefirstmodernsugarmilltothe Huasteca. Manuel promoted road development throughout the area and was instrumental in campaigning for the building of the San Luis Potosí–Tampico Railroad. Rascón controlled a number of haciendas and ranches in the region under the rubric of the Rascón Hacienda. By 1879 he owned 1.4 million acres that reached across eastern San Luis Potosí and the state of Tamaulipas. Other creoles complemented the Rascóns, and together they attempted to wield arbitrary rule over the Huasteca. The Castellanos family dominated the Ciudad Valles political economy. Between 1848 and 1871 the Santos family of Tampamolón extended their cattle ranches by tens of thousands of acres, enveloping the pueblos. In the 1860s they further extended their power by participating in the civil war against the French. Using the Huastecan serranos as an operational base, they augmented their power by commanding the state militia.4 The only political units that remained independent were the pueblos, with their native languages, culture, and communal experience. By the middle of the 1850s a new and dynamic social class, the rancheros , emerged in and around Tamazunchale. Rancheros represented a politically significant portion of the agrarian population. Working medium-sized plots, these farmers developed a complex social structure.5 A few of the more prosperous ones sublet lands to smaller holders and even hired field hands. They lived alongside one other, ate the same food, dressed alike, and most were hardly distinguishable from one another. Employing relatives or neighbors, the rancheros of the Huasteca maintained close paternalistic [52.15.59.163] Project MUSE (2024-04-26 03:37 GMT...

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