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ChaPTeR 7 Revolution without Resonance? Mexico’s “Fiesta of Bullets” and Its Aftermath in Chiapas, 1910–1940 Stephen E. Lewis At first blush, a reassessment of the Mexican Revolution in the impoverished southern state of Chiapas would seem to be a dry, rather pointless exercise. After all, Chiapas has been geographically and politically marginal to Mexico for most of its existence. During the violent decade of 1910–1920, Chiapas was relatively calm for the first four years. When the revolution finally came to the state, it triggered very little of the popular mobilization experienced elsewhere in Mexico. When the fighting began to die down in 1920, the victors in Chiapas were not the colorful rebels celebrated in corridos and the mural art and film of the 1920s and 1930s but precisely those forces that resisted revolutionary reforms and reformers. Indeed, it was common throughout the twentieth century for historians, politicians, teachers, and others to remark—with some justification—that the revolution never arrived in Chiapas. However, if we consider the Mexican Revolution as a thirty-year process, with the decade of violent destruction followed by two critical decades of postrevolutionary reconstruction, Chiapas becomes the ideal laboratory for the study of revolutionary actors, institutions, and outcomes. For precisely the reasons mentioned earlier—the state’s geographic location, its marginalized, diverse, and impoverished population, its defiant and fiercely independent ruling class—Chiapas challenged revolutionary and postrevolutionary state and nation builders as much as any other Mexican state. This chapter explores four deceptively simple questions: Was there a revolution in Chiapas, a period of reforms, or neither? How did Mexico’s “fiesta of bullets” and its aftermath affect ordinary chiapanecos? How successful was the postrevolutionary state at forging more secular, sober, modern Mexican citizens? Finally, just how important is the Mexican Revolution to the history of modern Chiapas? 162 • stephen e. lewis imported Revolution, homegrown Reaction On paper, at least, Chiapas was ripe for revolutionary violence in 1910. During the course of the nineteenth century, most indigenous people in the state lost their ancestral land due to various liberal land grabs and led precarious, miserable lives. Porfirian governors created an elaborate tax code meant to drive indigenous workers into the wage economy. Debt-labor contractors representing lowland planters “hooked” other indigenous workers into seasonal contracts through a process known as enganche. Most major plantations and ranches in the state featured company stores called tiendas de raya, as well as private, subterranean jails, and the owners’ will was the law of the land.1 But the history of Chiapas suggests that misery and abject poverty do not necessarily a revolution make.2 In 1911, just as the violence began to spread elsewhere in Mexico, ladinos (non-Indians) in highland Chiapas turned to the highland Maya as part of their interminable rivalry with lowland ladinos. Many of the indigenous people mobilized for war, led by Jacinto Pérez, a Chamula also known as El Pajarito. Once El Pajarito’s movement got rolling, however, ladinos on both sides of the conflict (including the instigators) decided that mobilized Indians represented a greater threat than their ladino foes. The ladinos closed ranks and crushed El Pajarito’s forces with the help of the federal army. For the next three years, while much of Mexico tore itself to pieces, there was no popular mobilization in Chiapas because the state’s ladino ranchers and planters, whatever their differences, united in their fear that renewed violence would trigger a race war that might sweep them away.3 Chiapas remained calm until late 1914, when a Constitutionalist army led by Jesús Agustín Castro entered the state and imposed a series of reforms at gunpoint. Castro’s most significant reform was his October 1914 Workers’ Law (Ley de Obreros, also known as the Ley de Liberación de Mozos, or Peon Liberation Law). It represented the first federal attempt to regulate labor in Chiapas by ending debt peonage, enganche, and the tiendas de raya. The law also set minimum wages according to occupation and geographic location and created a corps of labor inspectors. It established rudimentary accident and disability insurance for workers, set a ten-hour day, and stipulated, vaguely, that rural proprietors establish schools for the children of their workers.4 Two months later, Castro passed an anticlerical law that prohibited confession, legalized divorce, closed convents, restricted the celebration of mass to once a week, and confiscated all church property.Afirm believer in central government, Castro intended to liberate the...

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