For God and Revolution: Priest, Peasant, and Agrarian Socialism in the Mexican Huasteca

7: Toward a Mexican Theology of Liberation: Padre Mauricio Zavala

103 Chapter 7 toward a Mexican theology of liberation Padre Mauricio Zavala . In 1878, when I did not have the eight pesos needed to send my son to school, Padre Zavala pulled four pesos out of his pocket and told me to forget the rest. He did this for many campesino families and we all respected him for it. —Jesús Moctezuma Bolano, San Nicolás de los Montes I joined the movement when Padre Zavala said that the hacienda lands belonged to us who worked it and that we should not have to pay rent on our own properties. —Germán Segundo, Ciudad del Maíz Property is Patriotism and the only way to build true patriotism is to place the nation into the arms of socialism! —Padre Mauricio Zavala /Into this arena of impending class war stepped a socialist agitatorfromoneofMexico ’soldestandmostestablishedinstitutions,theCatholic Church.1 Between 1867 and 1884 Padre Mauricio Zavala openly challenged the attempts of landed creoles and state authorities of San Luis Potosí to expand private land tenure at the expense of the peasantry. He articulated a theology of ethnic self-determination for his indigenous parishioners and 104 Chapter 7 joined the secular ideologies of socialism and anarchism with Christian humanism to synthesize a new political consciousness among the pueblo citizenries. Specifically, he advocated government aid for the pueblos, their autonomy, local control over hospitals and schools, and self-management of the land. He also recruited lawyers to defend the indigenous pueblos in the state courts. Later, when corruption, as he saw it, caused these efforts to fail, Zavala urged the Huastecos to “take up arms and seize the land that rightfully belonged to them.” In the summer of 1882 Padre Zavala led campesinos of the Huasteca in an attack on the Ciudad del Maíz. They seized the city and then spread out, occupying nearby haciendas. The rebels demanded a restoration of the communal lands that had been recently usurped from their pueblos and proclaimed “agrarian socialism” for the entire nation. They carried red and black flags that read “Agrarian Law and Municipal Government” and that had a red star over the proclamation. In conjunction with their uprising, Zavala drafted a series of revolutionary plans that proposed restructuring rural Mexican society into a more egalitarian economic, political, and cultural order. These plans included “The Plan of Zavala,” “The Proposed Electoral Law,” “Political Reform,” “The Agrarian Law of Zavala,” and “Tamazunchale: Municipio Libre.” The term “municipio libre” reflected the pre-Columbian notion of self-governing and economically viable pueblos. In addition to drafting these revolutionary plans, Zavala later published three books while living in Merida. Padre Zavala was born in the city of San Luis Potosí in 1832, the son of Guatemalan immigrants. He entered the priesthood and served at the parish level from July 1867 until August 1873 in the working-class barrio of San Sebastían, on the outskirts of San Luis Potosí. Then, in 1873, the Church fatefully posted Zavala to Ciudad del Maíz.2 Over the course of seven years Zavala succeeded in politicizing his parishioners, most of whom worked in miserable conditions of virtual servitude under the domination of their landowners and managers.3 Zavala’s communalist political philosophy in support of the rural workers and indigenous people stood in stark contrast to the positions of both the Liberal and Conservative parties. He criticized the individualistic philosophy of liberalism as expressed by Juarismo and denounced the dispossession of Church property because, in addition to eliminating the Church’s income and ability to provide health, education and welfare, it also removed collective access to much of the land utilized by the indigenous people, who often 105 Toward a Mexican Theology of Liberation used such property for common pastures and firewood collection. Zavala questioned the logic of a foreign social and economic system that benefited only a fraction of the population and wondered how it could be called “Mexican.” He declared that the “dispossession of the indigenous pueblos forced the majority of true Mexicans into a life of misery and proletarianized and crucified them on the cross of free wage labor.”4 For Zavala, in losing their communities and pueblo landholdings and being unable to cultivate land for the common good any longer, the indigenous and rural workers were being dehumanized. Acknowledging that free wage labor existed before Juárez, Zavala believed that in its previously limited form it had...