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

1: The Cultural Geography of the Huasteca Potosina

1 Chapter 1 the Cultural Geography of the Huasteca Potosina . The Spanish Conquistadores did not have the right to appropriate through violence the nation’s territory that was already populated; and neither did they have the right to reduce the nation to slavery and servitude against human liberty. The usurpation of the Conquest and the division of our common lands has converted the nation into one of proletariats suffering under the tyrannical oppression of the haciendas. Without Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, and Land, prosperity is impossible. —Juan Santiago, cacique of Tamazunchale, San Luis Potosí, 1879 /The origins of the agrarian violence that engulfed the Huasteca Potosina during the nineteenth century lie in the exploitative political and economic order established during the three centuries of Spanish colonial rule.1 The Mexican Huasteca extends from the tropical lowlands of the Mexican Gulf Coast upland through the rugged Sierra Madre Oriental to the fertile valleys beyond. It encompasses portions of the states of San Luis Potosí, Veracruz, Querétaro, Hidalgo, and Tamaulipas. The western edge of the area, where the greatest number of people lived during the time of the rebellion, lies three thousand feet above sea level. The hot climate, ample rivers, and fertile soil of the region provide an ideal basis for agriculture. In the eighteenth century, the indigenous peasants and the creole elites lived in regional isolation, the former in their villages and the latter in the capital cities and country estates. Chapter 1 2 The society of the Huastecos was as complex as their landscape. Historically, the distribution of land in the Huasteca varied greatly from one region to another. Ethnic ratios varied as well, and San Luis Potosí retained a denser indigenous population than Veracruz, Querétaro, Hidalgo, or Tamaulipas. Large haciendas characterized the Potosina provinces of Valles, Tanchanhuitz, and Tamazunchale, where the nineteenth-century revolutions were most intense. The Huasteca is regarded as an ecological, sociocultural , and economic region. Ecologically, it is made up of three different zones: the high tropical mountain forests and canyons of the Sierra Madre Oriental, the low mountains characterized by a series of valleys, and the coastal plains of Veracruz. Socioculturally, the vast portion of the peasant population of the Huasteca is descended from various native Mexican groups, but the region is dominated socially and politically by rancheroowning creole families. Economically, the region is characterized by interdependency . Frans Schryer notes that, in economic terms, the different parts of the Huasteca have more in common with one another than they do with other regions of their respective states.2 In the 1870s, at the outbreak of the agrarian revolts, the Huasteca Potosina, that region of the Huasteca located in the state of San Luis Potosí, Map 1. The Huasteca in relation to Mesoamerican regions The Cultural Geography of the Huasteca Potosina 3 was divided into three partidos: Valles, Tanchanhuitz, and Tamazunchale. Eight municipios with 22,743 inhabitants constituted Tanchanhuitz, the largest of the three partidos, while Tamazunchale contained four municipios with 18,165 inhabitants.3 Tanchanhuitz and Tamazunchale belonged to the southern part of San Luis Potosí, which is marked by hot jungles and extends southward into the states of Veracruz and Hidalgo. The city of Valles, which is to the north and borders the Huasteca of Tamaulipas, had four municipios but only 10,590 inhabitants living in the Gulf Coast littoral.4 Valles is characterized by low and straight land that runs along the whole of the Gulf Coast. The Spaniards used the plains to raise livestock and sugarcane. In the areas of Tanchanhuitz and Huehutlán, cattle ranching and sugar thrived in the lower valleys, while corn was cultivated on the mountainsides. During the late nineteenth century in the southern municipio of Tamazunchale and Xilitla, the indigenous peasantry still had some land for sugarcane cultivation in the lower valleys, and they raised coffee trees on the mountainsides. The term “Cuextlan,” used by the Aztecs to name the region, means “land of abundant food.” It was later altered to “Huasteca” by the Spanish during the sixteenth century. The descendants of the earliest inhabitants of the region refer to themselves as Teenek and distinguish themselves from the more recent ethnic groups in the area, the Nahua and Otomí. The term Huasteca is applied, by outsiders, to all of the indigenous people of the region, but this is a misnomer; technically the term applies to the Teenek only. However, when collectively referring to...