Elusive Unity: Factionalism and the Limits of Identity Politics in Yucatán, Mexico

3. “Back Then, There Was No Order”: The Early Twentieth Century in Collective Memory

51 3 “Back Then, There Was No Order” The Early Twentieth Century in Collective Memory The agrarian reform, a process that played a central role in the ideology of post-Revolutionary Mexico, was experienced in rural Oriente as an often incongruous mix of unity and discord. That is, the same juridical frameworks that promoted unity through the shared investment in ejido lands also enabled dissident factions to strike out and solicit their own autonomous grants. This ambivalence permeated local ways of making sense of the class-based identities that played a prominent role in post-Revolutionary Mexican politics. If the Revolution had “redeemed” rural agriculturalists from the “slavery” of the ancien régime and distributed land to those who would foment it through hard work and solidarity, why did these same agriculturalists fight so much among themselves? These tensions between the heroic narratives of official history and the unruly realpolitik of rural Oriente are DOI: 10.5876/9781607322399:c03 “back then, there was no order” 52 evident in the oral accounts in which members of these communities reflect on their ancestors’ experience of the 1920s and 1930s. In this chapter, I will focus on stories that are told about two very different phenomena: paramilitary violence and the distribution of ejido lands. I approach these stories as an expression of a living collective memory. That is, my own analysis will be consistent with a longer anthropological tradition that critiqued an earlier paradigm of oral history studies that sought to distill concrete historical events from the more “mythical” narrative contexts in which they were presented. In critiquing this paradigm, authors articulated a vision of “collective memory” as an active process through which societies transform disparate events from their past into narratives that have some ideological coherence within their quotidian experience.1 In my own work, such an emphasis is useful in making sense of the inconsistencies that occur between oral accounts that I recorded in the 1990s and 2000s and documentary sources written almost a century earlier. As I will argue, these inconsistencies give important insight into the political imaginings that allowed local people to reconcile their own experience with the mythical canons of Revolutionary nationalism.2 As elements of a vernacular culture that has been transmitted through the generations, these political imaginings are currently coming into play in the politics of ethnic identity. Anothersenseinwhichmyanalysisinthischapterisconsistentwiththetraditionof anthropological history is in my focus on the often complicated relationship between documentary and oral history sources. Consistencies and inconsistencies between documentary sources and oral history can demonstrate what kinds of events had a lasting resonance within local conceptions of politics and social justice. For example, my investigation of paramilitary violence began with a series of brief oral narratives of a dramatic battle in 1921 that I refer to as the Burning of Yaxcabá. I was later able to document this battle in the archives, but many important details have virtually faded from living memory. In contrast, narratives about the foundations of the ejido have a far more prominent place in the oral history of these communities. I will focus on one long account of the foundation of a specific ejido, a virtuoso telling of a kind of story that I have heard repeated in at least half a dozen communities. The different imprint that the Burning of Yaxcabá and the formation of ejidos has left in the collective memory of these communities reflects important differences in the kind of historical events that could be made consistent with post-Revolutionary political ideals and those that proved impossible to reconcile with the idea of heroic collective struggle. Despite these differences, some common themes in both sets of narratives provide important insight into the experiences and ideals of politics in rural Oriente. Stories about the violence of the early 1920s and about the foundation of ejidos both invoke a vision of justice in which “redemption” and the righting of wrongs tend to arrive “back then, there was no order” 53 from without. The motivations and ethics of local leaders are almost always suspect, and coalitions based on a shared identity or political affiliation tend to be quite fragile . But formal legal principles and ideals that can be brought to bear on local injustice exist in bureaucratic and political institutions that are distant from the “folk state” of rural Oriente. Thus one of the central dramas of these stories involves the arrival of different figures and the performance...