The Legal Revolution in Town Politics: Oaxaca and Yucatán, 1812-1825
2003; Duke University Press; Volume: 83; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1215/00182168-83-2-255
ISSN1527-1900
Autores Tópico(s)Politics and Society in Latin America
ResumoIn May of 1813 the newly elected mayor of the central Yucatecan town of Nohcacab wrote an angry and frustrated letter to the Diputación Provincial, the council created the year before to administer regional affairs. Ceferino Domínguez wrote to report on a sudden burst of disorder among the indigenous population. Three leagues from the village center, a group of Maya were living in a small settlement known as San José Chac. From that base, Domínguez reported, 10 or 12 “Yndios revoltosos” were traveling the countryside, disturbing the peace along the way. Prompted by these troublemakers, all of the Maya in the settlement were now living “as if independent from justice,” never coming to town to hear mass, confess, or pay their church fees. Things were not much better in the town itself, he explained, where the town’s highest indigenous official was constantly drunk and mistreated the Indians under his charge. Yet despite his behavior, and despite the new authority represented by Domínguez, this cacique still commanded respect and obedience among the indígenas. Every day, Domínguez wrote, one could see “mobs of Indians that this cacique calls to the town hall without a known reason.” The mayor was quite certain about the source of all this disorder. It began, he said, with the decree of the Spanish Cortes issued on November 9, 1812, which had declared Indians free of the tax and service burdens of the colonial era and proclaimed their equality with Spaniards. Since this decree, Domínguez opined, all Indians were living “without God, without Law, without Religion.”1What this local nonindigenous leader saw as the disintegration of social order was, in fact, evidence of an important transformation in the relationship between indigenous people and the state. The transformation began with the French occupation of Spain in 1808 and the liberal Spanish constitutional experiment of 1812–14 and continued with independence and the Mexican constitution of 1824. The Spanish constitution introduced major institutional changes in Mexico, including universal male suffrage, popular elections, and the elimination of legal distinctions between different groups of citizens. By formally ending the three-hundred-year-old legal and political distinction between indigenous peoples and Spaniards, the constitutional system altered the social and institutional worlds in which rural Mexicans lived. Once differentiated subjects of an absolutist regime, indigenous villagers would first become equal members of a constitutional monarchy and then citizens of a liberal republic with the right to vote and participate in local government and beyond. But at the same time, the new laws abolished any distinctively indigenous local authority and introduced new kinds of relationships with nonindigenous people who were also gaining new rights. For Mexico’s rural townspeople, both indigenous and nonindigenous, liberal reform thus provided new opportunities for self-government and autonomy while curtailing certain privileges, a situation that made for a new and often conflictual relationship both with other villagers and with the state.This article will address the early development of those relationships in two heavily indigenous Mexican states, Oaxaca and Yucatán. In both places, the transition to liberalism caused initial disruption in indigenous towns and prompted a reconfiguration of the relationship between state and subjects/citizens. Recent studies have shown that the years between 1808 and 1821 constituted a crucial moment in the development of local politics in Mexico’s regions. It was a time in which many peasants and villagers, through their participation in insurgent movements, transformed their understanding of politics and of their place within it.2 These studies also suggest the importance of the 1812 constitution in implementing real change in political relationships in the countryside, both among villagers and between villagers and the state.3 Finally, this new work clearly shows that this experience was not uniform across Mexico; in particular, the relationship between indigenous and nonindigenous people varied significantly depending on local circumstances. In short, there was no one way in which the transition to liberalism affected the place of indígenas in the new Mexican polity. By juxtaposing the histories of Yucatán and Oaxaca, this article will shed light on the axes of such variation and thus expand our understanding of liberalism as an ideology in action.At the same time, the article will juxtapose the experience of indigenous people with that of local political elites. I will demonstrate how both groups responded to one another as they reacted to institutional change. The combination of their responses resulted in local versions of the new liberal system. Indigenous people actively engaged the new institutions, attempting to use them to retain or even expand their own autonomy. Their actions, however, were both shaped and observed by governing elites, for whom liberalism both offered opportunities and presented challenges. Liberalism was an aspirational ideology; in theory, a liberal government sought not just to govern but also to transform society. But local conditions, especially the relationship between the indigenous and nonindigenous populations, affected not only the elites’ ability but also their desire to effect such a transformation. Even where liberalism had already made significant inroads, the brief but remarkable experience of Spanish constitutional rule would teach local administrators much about how liberal institutions would affect the realization of their goals. Between 1812 and 1825 regional and local administrators observed and noted which aspects of liberal policy triggered dissension and upheaval, which could be peacefully integrated into a social order that would favor the continued ascendance of the nonindigenous elite, and which could be utilized to maintain or deepen that elite’s control. The observations of these administrators would prove crucial after independence, when local elites codified new structures of citizenship in the state constitutions of 1825. In Mexico, liberal citizenship—initially defined by laws written in Spain—was then reinvented on the ground as local people, from villagers to legislators, sought to accommodate and take advantage of new institutions.For indigenous villagers in 1812, the most transformative institutions were those involving town government. Inside of indigenous villages, the Spanish colonial state had long relied on locally elected indigenous councils known as repúblicas, bodies that gave indígenas a measure of autonomy while providing the state with the means to implement policies and exert control.4 But the extinction of these indigenous bodies as such was a foregone conclusion in the Spanish liberal context, which assumed that indígenas had no distinctive legal personality. New policies instituted in 1812 replaced the repúblicas with constitutional ayuntamientos, municipal councils elected not by the indigenous communities but by the population of the towns as a whole.5 In Oaxaca and Yucatán, the change promised to be particularly momentous, both for indigenous communities and for provincial governments. For the villagers, the ayuntamientos represented a new way of designating authority within villages, because they raised the possibility of sharing power with—or losing power to—local non-indígenas. Local governments, on the other hand, faced the question of whether changes in administrative practices would allow the state to retain its access to the products, labor, and taxes that it had long extracted from the villages using colonial institutions.By 1825, the successes and pitfalls of the new system were apparent to both indígenas and the political elite. The latter would have the opportunity to refine that system when they began the task of building new state structures after independence. The 1825 constitutions of both Oaxaca and Yucatán would reiterate and codify the innovations in municipal government, but they did so in ways that reflected the experience that began in 1812, an experience created by both indigenous and nonindigenous new citizens. Taken together, the events and immediate consequences of these years in Oaxaca and Yucatán constituted a process of transition in which, through practical experience and legislation, broad new institutions were adapted to fit particular local circumstances.Recently, Antonio Annino has argued that the establishment of ayuntamientos in small villages opened a breach in the colonial system of social and political control, providing an opportunity for communities to deepen their autonomy from the central state. Citing the large numbers of ayuntamientos established, especially in highly indigenous areas, Annino asserts that the villagers’ interpretation of the role of the new councils led to “the disintegration of the viceregal political space” and a shift of the locus of power from the cities to the countryside.6 As Annino suggests, the key to regional differentiation in the establishment of ayuntamientos lay in their relationship with their predecessors, the repúblicas—a relationship that varied widely over the territory of New Spain. While the ayuntamientos and repúblicas were ideologically at variance, they could potentially serve a similar purpose, especially where most towns were indigenous. Either council could provide the government with a tool for mediation between the indigenous population and the state. Such mediation was vital. In both Oaxaca and Yucatán, almost the entire nonindigenous economy revolved around the capacity of non-indígenas to exploit successfully the capacity of the indigenous population. Depending on who controlled it, the ayuntamiento could either provide a tool to enhance that capacity or, as suggested by Annino, to potentially undermine it.In some ways, Oaxaca and Yucatán confronted these changes from similar starting points. Both provinces had large indigenous majorities—88 percent in Oaxaca and 70 in Yucatán.7 Thus, their governments shared the difficulties of having populations to which the state had limited direct access and the challenge of incorporating those previously differentiated populations into one unified polity. But both the nature of those populations, and the states’ relative desire to improve access to them, differed greatly. By the end of the eighteenth century, the economies of the two regions had developed in very different ways, and the relationship between indigenous and nonindigenous residents reflected those divergent paths. Oaxaca more closely resembled Annino’s model, as villagers elected ayuntamientos in indigenous towns where few if any non-indigenous individuals resided. Here, the introduction of ayuntamientos, while disruptive within and among villages, was nevertheless an affirmation of indigenous autonomy. Because they were not interested in altering a successful system of exploitation, most non-indígenas had little motivation to reverse this situation, and few stepped in to try to extend their control. In Yucatán, by contrast, shifts in the economy had led to the settlement of nonindigenous producers in and around indigenous villages. Here, conflict after 1812 stemmed from the granting of political rights to the newcomers; these individuals quickly moved to take advantage of new institutions and just as quickly displaced indigenous authorities.The constitutions that each state passed after independence would reflect these differences. The Mexican constitution of 1824 did not dictate the structures of town government. Thus, the new states faced the task of determining what kind of town governments they wished to have. Both constitutional congresses, which convened in 1823 and issued their final products in 1825, made important modifications to the colonial system, but they also modified the liberal reforms of 1812.8 They did so based in part on the experience of Spanish liberalism. Many other states underwent this process while trying to reestablish order in the wake of the Hidalgo and Morelos insurrections; however, the fighting had never arrived in the Yucatán peninsula, and in Oaxaca it was both limited in range and largely resolved by 1816. Instead, by 1823, the two provinces had experienced the full force of Spanish liberalism and its transformation of town administration. For the Oaxacan government, the experience had been relatively peaceful, and new institutions could be adopted with a few modifications tailored to the needs of the state; as of 1825 there was little call for the state to increase significantly its power in the countryside. Yucatecan legislators, on the other hand, wished to use the new institutions to further their vision for the economic development of the state, a vision that required reduced indigenous autonomy. At the same time, they recognized that in practice, indigenous Yucatecans were strikingly autonomous. They had defended that autonomy, sometimes violently, in the years since 1812, convincing the government that it lacked the power to destroy indigenous independence with one blow. In the end, the Yucatecan constitution reflected both of these competing factors. In short, in both states legislators carefully designed systems that they believed would protect the particular interests of the nonindigenous population and the state while maintaining the trappings of liberalism.The years between 1812 and 1825 represented a crucial moment in Mexican state formation, when indigenous and nonindigenous citizens negotiated the parameters of the new relationship between state and society. In many ways, the transition to a liberal form of administration was incomplete. The implementation of new institutions was often piecemeal and, without doubt, too rapid and chaotic to fundamentally change the way that the state and its new citizens understood each other. But that incompleteness was in some ways built into the new systems that they constructed, which retained what was useful from colonial arrangements while introducing potentially beneficial liberal ones. The Oaxacan and Yucatecan governments built those systems based on their knowledge of the effects of liberal reform on the indigenous population, a knowledge that came in large part from their observations of indigenous reactions between 1812 and 1821. Thus, these years witnessed a learning process in which both indígenas and non-indígenas took active part, one that they would build and expand upon in years to come as they collectively determined what, precisely, liberal citizenship would mean.At the turn of the nineteenth century, the Oaxacan countryside was a markedly indigenous place. The indigenous population, 88 percent of the total, controlled most of the region’s resources. And yet, the economic balance of power was complicated by the fact that non-indígenas reaped most of the profits from those same resources. Indigenous towns owned the majority of Oaxaca’s land, they collectively held considerable wealth in the coffers of their religious brotherhoods and community funds, and in many cases they controlled important sectors of the internal market. Production from village lands dwarfed non-indigenous agriculture as a commercial endeavor. And most importantly, Oaxaca’s principal exports—cotton weavings and cochineal—were produced directly in the villages. Meanwhile, the nonindigenous population (only 12 percent of the total) was concentrated in certain pockets, especially in the capital city of Antequera—the only region in Oaxaca where the indigenous population was in the minority.9 In 1777, in the Valley of Oaxaca, only 42 of 88 towns surveyed had any non-indígenas at all, and in the Sierra Zapoteca almost the entire non-indigenous population made its home in the cabecera of Villa Alta.10 And yet, this small nonindigenous minority was able to consolidate the resources of Oaxaca into wealth for itself. To do so, it had to be able to find ways to extract those resources from the indigenous population.11Not surprisingly, Oaxaca’s nonindigenous merchant community responded to the crisis of the Spanish monarchy by lobbying for better access to indigenous resources. In particular, they called for the return of the repartimiento, which had been abolished in 1786. This system, in which non-indígenas prepaid indigenous communities and individuals in order to induce them to produce the goods that merchants sold, had long served the nonindigenous elite well as a mechanism of indirect exploitation.12 It did not, however, imply extensive government control over the internal affairs of indigenous villages. Indeed, the stable relationship of the Spanish government in Oaxaca with the indigenous communities relied on the maintenance of extensive autonomy within the towns. Thus, as Oaxacan non-indígenas considered the possible effects of the municipal legislation of 1812, they envisioned a system of town administration as much like its colonial predecessor as possible.The new laws would not, however, go into effect immediately in 1812. The wars of independence arrived in Oaxaca that year in the form of José María Morelos, the rebel leader who triumphantly entered the city of Antequera in November. Most of the fighting in Oaxaca was contained in Oaxaca City and in the nearby Mixteca region, which constituted an important passage between the capital and the province of Puebla.13 But with that exception, the fighting itself never reached great proportions in the Oaxacan countryside. A rebel administration governed the province until 1814, when royalist forces entered the city, and the war was largely over two years later.14 Thus, rebel forces were in control throughout the first period of Spanish constitutionalism. But the rebel government did not have much chance to put its often radical ideas about social organization into effect. Under both the rebels and the royalists, the older colonial system of town government remained the norm. There is clear evidence that the repúblicas continued to be elected regularly throughout these years, but there is no record of any ayuntamientos elected in the villages.15 Thus, when the liberal Spanish government reissued the decree calling for ayuntamientos in 1820, the councils had to be elected from scratch, rather than reinstated as they were in some parts of Mexico. In 1820 and 1821, then, the government scrambled to oversee the election of new town councils all over the province.In his study of the process of “municipalization” in Oaxaca, Rodolfo Pastor has argued that the formation of ayuntamientos represented “the violent plundering of [indigenous] political prerogatives and the abolition of racial segregation,” resulting in a drastic loss of autonomy for indigenous pueblos and the ascendance of a mestizo elite.16 But my research suggests that the disruption caused by this initial phase of the transition to liberalism, while certainly significant both within the pueblos and without, did not fundamentally alter the way that the state related to the pueblos or the extent to which indígenas were able to govern themselves.17 For indígenas, the new laws called for a reconceptualization of local political power both within the villages and between them. The new institutions did not, however, fundamentally disrupt the notion that indígenas should govern themselves with a degree of autonomy from the regional government. For Oaxacan political elites, for whom this system had long worked in a relatively stable and productive fashion, there was little impetus for change. The elites were thus willing to negotiate solutions to any problems that did arise, particularly when they threatened the stability of the relationship between the government and the villages. Eventually, legislators would codify these negotiated solutions; the state constitution of 1825 reflected the experience of 1820–21 in very specific institutional ways.In October of 1820, authorities in the Department of Teposcolula began the process of ayuntamiento elections. Writing to the royalist teniente in the cabecera of Tlaxiaco, Manuel Megía sent along a copy of the chapter of the constitution that dealt with the proper form for the elections. He asked that the local priest be engaged to explain the rules to his parishioners, “in order that the people be instructed in the great purposes that our wise government proposes on establishing order and method in these elections.”18 In Oaxaca, the creation of ayuntamientos remained almost entirely under the control of Spanish officials such as Megía. The colonial state was involved in the process from start to finish, deciding which villages could have ayuntamientos, overseeing the elections, and helping villagers negotiate the change in the local administrative system. The state had long overseen the election and functioning of the repúb-licas; it would do the same for the ayuntamientos that replaced them.Behind this facade of smooth transition, however, the change from one form of administration to another was not entirely seamless. Government officials in fact observed a considerable amount of disruption and confusion. In particular, they found that it was impossible to maintain a one-to-one correspondence between repúblicas and ayuntamientos. According to the constitutional decrees, only pueblos that had at least one thousand residents had the privilege of electing town councils. But in Oaxaca, very few villages fulfilled this requirement. In Teposcolula, for instance, most of the towns could only claim several hundred community members. Although some of these towns did apply to elect their own ayuntamientos, the government stuck to a policy by which local authorities arranged for the aggregation of towns into electoral units that would then elect a single ayuntamiento. In March of 1821, for instance, the towns of San Vicente Ferrer, Santa María Nduayaco, Santo Domingo Ticú, and San José de Gracia, with a combined population of more than 1,010 people, agreed to join together to create one ayuntamiento after government officials rejected their requests to elect separate councils.19 In cases like this, the pueblos were to agree upon some method of power sharing. In one aggregation of three villages, for instance, leadership would rotate according to the following arrangement: “Each year … the job of Alcalde revolves, first on some individual of the Pueblo of San Juan: in the next year on one of San Pedro Mártir and in the third of San Andrés de la Laguna… . [T]he Regidor who results or síndico of their respective Pueblos, should oversee public order, and if there is no obedience, he should be aided according to the case that occurs, by the Alcalde or by the entire Ayuntamiento, and the annual election should be celebrated in the Pueblo of the Alcalde [whose term] has ended.”20 There was thus an assumption that villages would work together in some things but not in others; communities retained autonomy within their own villages under the authority of one of the councilmen unless there was some sort of trouble that required intervention from the alcalde.Many villagers, however, met this attempt to unite previously autonomous towns under a common government with some distrust. The mere fact of being subject to another village in some matters was not necessarily the problem; in most of Oaxaca, villages had long been arranged according to the cabecera/sujeto system, whereby several villages were subordinate in limited ways to a central town.21 Instead, the conflicts were often specific to the particular villages included in the aggregation. The town of San Antonio Monteverde, for example, had previously been subject to the cabecera of Chilapilla. Under the new system, however, its population was united with that of the town of San Marcos. In April of 1821, the regidor and principales of San Antonio complained that under the new arrangement, “we have experienced a disturbance of government.” The present alcalde was from San Marcos, and “said Alcalde wants with too much authority to insult us and impose on us taxes … for anything [he wishes].” To solve this problem, the villagers wanted not to be released entirely from outside control, but rather to be returned to the authority of “our cabecera Chilapilla.”22Objections to aggregation were not always responses to abuse of authority, but rather reactions to the possibility of uniting with a pueblo perceived as an enemy. San Francisco Nuzaña, for example, did not wish to unite with the town of Magdalena because the two villages were involved in pending litigation, and “the sons of the one view with total rivalry the sons of the other.”23 In another case, representatives of six Mixteca pueblos explained their complaints in a letter to the local authorities. The combined populations of Santa Catarina Tlasila, San Bartolomé Satola, Santa Marta Yolotepeque, San Juan Talist-lahuaca, Santiago Camotlán, and Santiago Ystalhua amounted to an aggregation of only 719 villagers, making it “almost impossible to complete the number suggested by the wise constitution” in order to establish an ayuntamiento. Local authorities had proposed that they should add their population to that of other pueblos that were located at some distance from theirs. This measure they deemed entirely impracticable, both because of the difficulty of travel and because it would require them to “mix ourselves with others of diverse customs.” They thus requested permission to elect an ayuntamiento among themselves despite the shortfall in population, a privilege that the local Spanish official granted.The same official reacted similarly to a case involving the towns of San Martín Huamelupán, Santa Cruz Tayata, San Pedro Mártir Yucuxaco, and Santa María del Rosario. Here the pueblo representatives complained that they were all to be attached to the large town of Tlaxiaco, that this aggregation was made against their will, and that the great distance to the seat of the ayuntamiento would be prohibitive to good government.24 This role of mediator between villages was one that the Oaxacan colonial state knew well. But the difficulty of forcing new aggregations of villages to work together in an ayuntamiento was a new problem, and one that caused a good deal of disorder in town administration. In the end, the confusion over what to do about cases like these delayed the creation of many ayuntamientos indefinitely. The difficulty in arranging acceptable aggregations was taxing to the official in charge, who in March 1821 asked to be able to turn the job over to someone else, because to continue devoting his attention to it would mean the near abandonment of all his other duties.25But the delay was problematic in another sense as well. While provincial authorities deliberated on what to do (or perhaps simply failed to resolve the issue at all), towns were experiencing crises of authority. In many villages, the old repúblicas had remained in power pending the transition to the new system. But república offices were only supposed to be one-year posts; by March and April of 1821, many officials had been serving for upwards of 15 months. For these men the danger was not of losing power, but rather of keeping it. República posts could be expensive, as officials were expected to devote time and often money to village administration. The officials in the town of Yucunama, for example, foresaw disaster if they were not allowed to step down soon: “It is constant that the individuals that make up the body of the república in particular are significantly harmed, because in order to attend to our obligations, we forget our families, houses, duties, and what’s more our crops, which facilitate our annual sustenance, and it is clear that we perish from hunger for this cause, and we fear what will happen to us in this year if we remain in the cargo that we have suffered for fifteen months.”Not only were the officers of Yucunama in financial trouble—they were also losing control of the village, where “the vecinos no longer respect us, nor obey us. And aside from our being extremely sensitive to this scorn in particular … it all redounds on harm to peace and public tranquillity.”26 Indeed, all over the district of Teposcolula outgoing indigenous officials complained that they were unable to retain authority over their constituencies. Now that the regime transition had held up the process of the turnover, villages were experiencing a new kind of crisis, as the authority of local officials did not extend beyond their term of office. Thus, for many pueblos the creation of an ayuntamiento became imperative, not just because it was legally mandated, but because it meant the end of this interim during which there was no recognized authority in the village. The imperative held both for the outgoing officials, who were unable to maintain control over a recalcitrant populace, and for the rest of the townspeople, who were forced to endure the rule of officers they saw as illegitimate. Most pleas for intervention from the government came in the form of requests for a “change of staffs” (cambio de varas), the term for the ceremony in which the staff of office was passed from outgoing to incoming officers under the supervision of a Spanish official. Until this ceremony occurred, the old república was still in power. What most pueblos wanted from the government was official recognition of the council that they had elected or were to elect.In some cases, however, conflict over the new councils may have reflected the very real innovations that the ayuntamiento system introduced. The gobernador and república of San Pedro Tidáa, for instance, wrote that the lack of obedience on the part of their fellow villagers, prompted by the illegitimacy of the república after its term of duty had expired, was aggra
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