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The Life and Deaths of Felipa Poot: Women, Fiction, and Cardenismo in Postrevolutionary Mexico

2002; Duke University Press; Volume: 82; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-82-4-645

1527-1900

Ben Fallaw,

Political and Social Dynamics in Chile and Latin America

On the night of 28 March 1936, gunmen linked to a cacique killed a young peasant leader in the village of Kinchil in western Yucatán. Such incidents proved far from rare in rural Mexico of the 1920s and 1930s, as factional disputes over land or local power often played out violently. What is exceptional about the murder in Kinchil is that the murdered community leader was a woman, Felipa Poot.Poot’s life and death inspired a series of writers, journalists, and amateur historians. For example, in 1938, Poot appeared in a short story penned by Martín Luis Guzmán.1 Yucatecan intellectuals later cast her as the victim of reactionary landlords who sought to halt agrarian reform and thus legitimize the postrevolutionary regime. In 1986 journalist Jesús Solís Alpuche published a series of articles based on oral history for the pro-government Mérida newspaper Diario del Sureste. Several subsequent intellectuals focused on the circumstances surrounding Poot’s life and death, but failed to separate her from revolutionary mythology.2This article reconstructs the events leading to Felipa Poot’s rise as a popular leader and, eventually, her death. By disentangling her life and death from semifictional accounts, I show how popular, leftist Cardenista mobilizations in Kinchil challenged limits on women’s political participation. My analysis of how and why Poot’s life and death became partially fictionalized, and how the transformation of Poot from a historical footnote into the subject of local revolutionary legend sheds light on the ideology of postrevolutionary Mexico.3 Finally, I will argue that the process of decontextualization and mythification of Poot’s life and death in later narratives yields important insights into both the nature of the postrevolutionary state in Mexico and the status of women.4In many ways, Felipa Poot represented the average Mexican of her day: young, female, and poor. She had acquired the ability to speak and write some Spanish despite her limited educational opportunities; however, the language of home and community remained Yucatec Maya.5 She became a mother at age 14 or 15, in either 1924 or 1925.6 Marriage and motherhood marked her transition into the adult world.7 At that time, Kinchil was a small town that gradually decreased in size: about a tenth of its population of 2,200 in 1930 would leave over the next decade.8Like other rural communities in southern Mexico, Kinchil was divided along lines of gender, ethnicity, and class that separated the Maya-speaking campesinos from the more Hispanicized wealthy and priviledged vecinos. For the most part, members of the campesino strata were poor, denied educational opportunities, and marked by prevailing attitudes as inferior due to their use of the Maya language, dress, and their occupations that typically required manual labor. Vecinos, on the other hand, owned almost all the handful of stores and more numerous ranches in Kinchil. They had more (but not a lot of) formal education, were generally lighter-complexioned, spoke Spanish, and dressed in the prevailing fashions of Western city folk.9Kinchil’s narrow world seemed superficially traditional (if not colonial). Although ideas of masculinity and femininity varied among poorer indigenous people and the wealthier mestizos, men from both groups viewed control of their unmarried daughters and their wives as necessary to define their own roles.10 Strictly gendered, Kinchil’s public space was considered to be a male preserve.11 For the most part, colonial (if not pre-Columbian) norms had long assigned different tasks to men and women.12 Women hauled water and tended the home and garden. Men scraped out a living working as cowboys on the numerous small cattle ranches around Kinchil, hunted, and farmed small fields of corn. The economic mainstay of many male Kinchileños had once been day labor on nearby large henequen haciendas, but their decline across western Yucatán curtailed this option during the revolutionary era.We should be careful in assuming that dominant cultural ideals and legally enshrined notions such as the patriarchal family pervaded society. Recent research by Christopher Gill suggests that women often escaped the yoke of male-controlled households as widows, unwed mothers, as well as long- and short-term mistresses.13 The church, a conservative influence on society since colonial times, was apparently not that powerful in Kinchil in this period.14 North American social scientists, such as Robert Redfield who studied rural pueblos similar to Kinchil in the 1930s, would classify it as a “folk society” in transition, losing its customary social and cultural patterns, becoming more individualistic, secular, and worldly through contact with a capitalist economy and urban social ways.15 Indeed, Kinchil had already changed due to the expansion of the urban center of Mérida, whose population had mushroomed in the 30 years before the Revolution. Mérida’s railroads and tramways brought in fruits, vegetables, firewood, charcoal, and cheap unskilled labor from its hinterland.16 Although more research is needed to determine the extent to which the new labor market and petty commerce was “feminizing” the economy, anecdotal evidence suggests that many Mayan women from peasant families took advantage of the growing cash economy and modern transportation to market their produce, fruits, and eggs in burgeoning urban centers; some even migrated to work as domestic servants.17 In Kinchil, the gathering of leña (brush and wood) for kindling and charcoal represented the most important economic alternative to henequen, and apparently escaped masculine monopolization.18 Yet many women in Yucatán probably worked mainly to supplement family incomes still anchored by male wage-earners.19 But beneath the seemingly ageless, traditional patina of provincial communities such as Kinchil, economic, social, and cultural forces eroded gender, class, and ethnic structures.The Mexican Revolution ended the political and, to a lesser extent, social dominance of the great landowners in Yucatán by outlawing debt peonage and corporal punishment on the henequen estates and breaking their monopoly on political and legal institutions. As in the rest of Mexico, the revolutionary process tested and, at times, broke social boundaries, as women took on new roles and occasionally joined their men in battle.20 In Hunucmá, not far from Kinchil, Captain María Dolores Chuil de Chuc served as an officer in her husband’s rebel band.21 Revolutionary Governors Salvador Alvarado (1915–17) and Felipe Carrillo Puerto (1922–24) hoped to give women a new stake in Mexico’s economy and political system. Briefly elected to the state congress in 1923 and organized into female chapters of the Socialist Party of the Southeast (PSS), women appeared poised to enter public life—albeit under state tutelage. Although these promising political reforms were later rolled back, older men conceded privilege to younger males and—to a lesser degree, and less obviously—women during the years of upheavals. The Mexican Revolution and other changes such as the “feminization” of the economy weakened, but did not destroy, the traditional rural order.If the Mexican Revolution opened up some opportunities for women and subaltern groups in general, the changes it wrought did not always benefit those at the bottom of the society. In Yucatán, the revolutionary process began with scattered popular mobilization under petty caciques loosely linked to elite cliques who were maneuvering for state power. In the late 1910s, bands of rebels escaped elite supervision and operated in the department of Hunucmá, which included Kinchil.22 While other revolutionary caciques with a modicum of popular support took power in many locales in rural Yucatán in the late teens and 1920s, in Kinchil, a clique of vecino merchants and ranchers, headed by brothers Anacleto and Juan de Mata Solís, seized economic and political power abandoned by the old Porfirian plantocracy. The Solíses allied with the revolutionaries because of Anacleto’s childhood friendship with Edesio Carrillo Puerto, the brother of the great socialist leader Felipe Carrillo Puerto.23 In the chaotic teens and early 1920s, the Solíses and their cohorts consolidated their hold over Kinchil by offering a brand of rude, Hobbesian security to its inhabitants. They raised a group of vigilantes known as the chopos to combat roving gangs that raided around Kinchil. Accompanying the hard-pressed state police, they reportedly used the Ley Fugo to kill all suspected bandits.24The fierce reputation of the chopos—along with their long history of political violence, murder, and rustling—gained Kinchil the dubious honor of being considered the most “criminal,” “violent,” and “feared” locale in all of Yucatán.25 Terror tactics protected the Solíses’ henequen-producing operation that masqueraded as a peasant cooperative under the name Agro-Industrial Company of Kinchil (Negociación Industrial Agrícola Henequenera de Kinchil, or NIAHK).26 Anacleto’s political and economic clout earned him the sobriquet of chan gobernador (chan signifies “little” in Maya) of the western half of the state.27The Solíses’ hold over Kinchil must be attributed to more than just the crude tactics of caciquismo such as violence and electoral fraud. Anacleto Solís used his skill as a cultural broker between the Spanish-speaking and Maya-speaking worlds, his knowledge of the henequen labor system, and a keen understanding of changes in the Yucatecan economy and politics to expand his wealth and power in the 1930s. Although the Solíses were portrayed as a relic of the Porfirian oligarchy in Guzmán’s semimythic account of Poot’s death, the Solís brothers had humble origins and were relative newcomers to substantial wealth and political influence. Instead of restoring the prerevolutionary “era of slavery” based on debt peonage and large-scale exploitation of henequen, the Solíses used local power as well as connections in the state capital to profit from the state-managed henequen industry and the partially regulated ranching economy. Anacleto and Juan de Mata Solís were not Porfirian aristocrats but petty state capitalists and upwardly mobile mestizo vecinos, strikingly similar to the rancheros of central Mexico such as Figueroa of Guerrero, who used alliances with national revolutionary figures to maintain their hold over petty cacicazgos and expand their own economic horizons.28 Unfortunately for the Solíses, President Lázaro Cárdenas’s ambitious reforms, aimed at liquidating regional political machines and uplifting marginalized groups, threatened their fiefdom. National changes reached Kinchil in mid-February 1935, when a young schoolteacher named Bartolomé Cervera Alcocer arrived to open a federal school.Before his Kinchil assignment, Cervera had already taught in the federal system for three years. He served as an assistant teacher in nearby Ucú, where he had helped found a model rural school.29 In keeping with the doctrine of socialist education of the Secretary of Public Education (SEP), Cervera not only taught the children basic skills (in Spanish, not Maya) and the national anthem but also offered night classes for adults, vaccinated residents, organized civic festivals, and taught sports to children and adults alike.30 Mary Kay Vaughan has argued that this sort of cultural outreach by federal teachers helped forge the enduring hegemony of the postrevolutionary state.31Federal education played a special role both geographically and socially in Yucatán in the 1930s. Since the federalization of education in Yucatán began in 1929, the SEP targeted poorer and more remote areas.32 Its focus on smaller and generally more indigenous communities reflected not only its modernizing impulse, but the fact that the state schools had generally shunned the children of campesinos.33 In 1933, a couple of years before Cervera arrived, some of Kinchil’s parents complained that the teachers of the state schools ignored their jobs.34Since the Mexican Revolution, education had mainly opened up opportunities for the middle strata of rural society—those who already had a familiarity with Spanish and hailed from relatively better off families, in other words, the vecinos. Educational inequalities had serious political ramifications. Most peasants believed that elections and offices were for literate people and those who had excellent communication skills. In the words of an old campesino in the eastern Yucatecan town of Espita, leaders “had to have a good head on their shoulders . . . to know how to defend their rights.”35 Before Cervera opened his federal school, literacy, social skills in dealings with city folk, and the ability to speak Spanish as well as Maya were talents relatively scarce among the campesinos, politically neutralizing them.Federal education also challenged gender inequality in Kinchil. Given the historically lower literacy rates for women and the patriarchal nature of rural society, the emergence of female leaders like Poot in Kinchil suggests that schooling for women brought about by Cervera’s federal school supplied a key factor in the revolutionary mobilization in Kinchil.36 Mary Kay Vaughan argues that literate women were better equipped to challenge the status quo.37Understanding why and how Cervera’s federal school challenged class and ethnic stratification in Kinchil requires taking into account not only federal education in the 1930s but also the larger goals of the Cardenista project and the strong influence of the Communist Party of Mexico (PCM).38 The Cardenista educational doctrine (socialist education) encouraged federal teachers to set up community organizations to run schools, adult education and public health programs, material improvements (irrigation, roads), and to spread ideas of recreation and consumption that the SEP deemed modern. At the same time, school-based communal organizations led by federal teachers also acted as cradles of unionism and land reform. By giving federal teachers the power to enforce federal labor codes, as well as to petition for land grants through federal agencies, Cárdenas deployed federal teachers as a rural vanguard, mobilizing and incorporating peasants and peons into the national party-state.39Cervera arrived in Kinchil not only as the point man of the Cardenista national state but also as a covert representative of the PCM.40 As Cardenismo supported class-based mobilizations and (to a lesser extent) ethnic and gender equality, the PCM wanted to use it to move Mexico into the camp of antifascist nations and, in the long run, create the conditions for a proletarian revolution.41 Because the Cardenista state rebuffed the PCM in its attempts to openly join it, the party operated in secret and worked through popular front organizations until the very end of the Cárdenas presidency.42 In Yucatán, the PCM dominated both federal and state schools. Moreover, through its labor, feminist, and youth fronts, the party built the strongest grassroots base of all Cardenista groups in Yucatán.43 The party’s influence over education and its important role in Kinchil can be attributed to Antonio Betancourt Pérez.When Betancourt Pérez took over the Directorate of Federal Education (DEF) of the SEP in the state in January 1935, he already codirected the PCM in Yucatán. He aimed not only to implant Cárdenas’s progressive and nationalist “socialist” education in federal schoolhouses but also to fuse it with communism.44 To that end, he replaced many federal teachers with young communists with little teaching experience. To win over skeptical veteran teachers and administrators, Betancourt personally directed in-service training featuring crash courses in marxism, which conflated Cardenismo with the idea of imminent class conflict. For good measure, he had the SEP in Yucatán publish and issue a Spanish translation of Bukharin’s The ABCs of Communism along with his own Economia marxista.45The introduction of communism into federal schools provoked strong resistance, especially in larger communities such as Kinchil that already had state schools. Nevertheless, from their schoolhouses on henequen haciendas, in isolated villages, and in small towns, Betancourt’s teacher-activists organized PCM cells, which in turn formed peon and peasant unions, affiliated with a statewide labor federation secretly linked to the party, the Independent Syndical Front (FSI).46 Under Cervera’s gifted direction, Kinchil’s federal school thrived, becoming a model of the Left-Cardenista strategy of popular mobilization as well as an effective educational institution, although many other teachers from Betancourt’s cadre floundered due to lack of training and a conservative backlash.47Because of the Cardenista/communist strategy of broadening political participation and challenging local políticos identified with the Callista regime, and because literate peasants could complain to outside authorities, the opening of the federal school posed a direct challenge to the hold of the Solíses over Kin-chil and the superiority of the vecinos over the campesinos. Other factors fueled conflict. The SEP charged communities with defraying the operating costs of federal schools by contributing land, buildings, and labor. Mayor Juan de Mata Solís responded to a plea for help from Cervera by saying, “I don’t want to have anything to do with the federal school, the only one I have to look after is the state school that is supported by the state government. Your school, on the other hand, is the responsibility of the federal government, and it is the only responsible party, because the peasants go there.”48It was soon apparent to the Solís gang that Cervera’s federal school disrupted the status quo in Kinchil. Culturally, Cervera worked to instill a new consciousness among the peasantry. Mary Kay Vaughan has shown that school festivals served a key purpose in Cardenista Mexico, spreading the values of a more inclusive, less patriarchal society. In the case of Yucatán, Betancourt Pérez infused the patriotic and vaguely class-conscious calendar of the SEP’s civic festivals with a frankly marxist notion of history, hoping to spread Cardenista values as well as the much more radical ideas of the PCM in communities like Kinchil.49As the vanguard of the Cardenista state, Cervera was charged with an important economic mission. The federal labor tribunal in Yucatán appointed him honorary (unpaid) labor inspector, giving him the power to enforce the federal labor code including the minimum wage, bypassing the state arbitration board on which Anacleto Solís himself sat. But because the Solíses had disguised their henequen operation as a cooperative, federal laws could not be invoked against it, much to the frustration of Cervera and the SEP.50Undaunted, Cervera set up a communal council made up of men who would be willing to cooperate not only in supporting the embattled federal school but also to organize a union and a charcoal-producing cooperative. Considering the PCM’s strategy of organizing small cells in peasant communities to serve as leaders of such groups, the community council probably doubled as the directorate of the PCM in Kinchil. Here, Cervera would be on dangerous ground, moving beyond the role of educator and community organizer sanctioned by the federal government into politics at a time when the Communist Party, though legal, was ostricized in most of Mexico and could not be openly backed by Cárdenas.Forced to confront the Solíses, Cervera built on preexisting grievances and couched them in the language of the Left and Cardenismo that challenged the Solíses by invoking the support of the federal state. For example, Venancio Tzuc and Tomás Quintal, two leaders of Cervera’s community movement, had previously clashed with the Solíses after being fired from nearby haciendas.51 The school itself functioned as a secure meeting place, where peasants of both sexes gathered in the evenings to talk. In this rustic salón, peasants could speak freely without fear of retaliation from the Solíses. They discussed rudimentary marxism, and, according to Guzmán’s account, even read aloud the official national paper, El Nacional, to gain a larger perspective on Cardenismo.A host of factors lay behind the popular groundswell of leftist Cardenismo in Kinchil. The exact outlines of mobilization are not completely clear, but Cervera and his Kinchileño collaborators managed to overcome deep-seated habits of deference among most peasant men and women. Cervera explained local conflicts and framed popular demands against the Solíses in terms drawn from the abstract discourse of the PCM and Cardenismo. Moreover, he could use his connections with federal agencies to promise justice. The distribution of rifles from a friendly federal general that challenged the monopoly of the chopos on violence certainly helped, as a concrete indication that powerful outsiders could intervene on behalf of the campesinos.Only a few months after Cervera arrived in Kinchil, probably in May or June of 1935, he took the side of two peasants, Eleucio Dzib Pech and Liborio Poot, in a dispute against Mayor Juan de Mata Solís. Their complaints exemplified the economic exploitation and criminal abuses common in Kinchil during Solís’s rein. Dzib lost 50 mecates (2,000 square meters) of corn after cattle owned by Basilio Manzanero, a rancher and Juan de Mata Solís’s brother-in-law, invaded his field. The mayor jailed Liborio Poot on false charges because Poot resisted his overtures to his common-law wife. When the mayor threatened to have Cervera incarcerated for representing the men in state court, Cervera contacted the DEF for help and prepared for a head-on confrontation with the Solíses.52Anacleto Solís’s clout posed serious problems for the DEF, but the importance of Cervera and Kinchil’s school led the SEP district inspector to visit Kinchil on 2 October 1935 to gather enough evidence to have the mayor removed. After a village meeting, he lauded Cervera’s “control” and unification of the peasants via “an intensive social labor,” (including the electrification of Kinchil). He furthermore complained to higher-ups that Juan de Mata Solís threatened to kick Cervera out of Kinchil for not paying municipal taxes on his school—a serious challenge to federal authority. More important, some 400 peasants turned out to complain loudly about the Solís clan’s administration and to demand an investigation by the state governor. Juan de Mata Solís tried to defend himself by denouncing Cervera as the leader of a “political movement,” violating the SEP’s mandate of noninterference in local politics.53 Fortunately for the Solís clique, the DEF/SEP sent their complaints to Mérida at an inopportune moment. Since 30 September, a general strike had paralyzed Mérida, and on 10 October Governor César Alayola Barrera resigned. Because of the chaotic political atmosphere in Mérida and the showdown between Cárdenas and former national strongman Calles in Mexico City, the crisis in Kinchil languished on the back burner.In light of the dire situation faced by supporters of the federal school in Kinchil, Cervera and the DEF could not wait out the regional and national turmoil. On 3 November 1935, the DEF in Yucatán, Séptimo Pérez, arranged for a second public hearing in Kinchil to air complaints about the Solíses. This time, two honored guests bore witness: Captain Felipe Márquez, representative of the sympathetic federal military commander in the state, General Rafael Cházaro Pérez, and José M. Campos B., representative of the state executive committee of the ruling party, the National Revolutionary Party (PNR).54 Because the federal military zone commander ultimately was responsible for maintaining order in his region, and the PNR was, at least in theory, responsible for disciplining the governor to the dictates of the president, Cervera and the DEF hoped that the new interim governor, Fernando López Cárdenas, would have to investigate the charges against the Solíses once these officials heard the charges.Given the open and menacing resistance of the Solíses, Cervera’s effectiveness as a mediator between the Cardenista state and Kinchil’s peasants would rest on whether he could oust the Solíses from power. His task was two-fold: prevent the campesinos from launching a possibly violent confrontation; and persuade the governor and federal institutions to carry out an investigation in Kinchil. Consider an extract from Cervera’s speech to the assembly on 3 November:The stream of complaints presented by peasants against the Solíses and their collaborators on the night of 3 November painted a picture of tyranny that was excessive even by the rough-and-tumble standards of the rural Mexico in the 1930s. However, the federal education system had to tread carefully when it came to local politics: the mayor, no matter how despotic, remained constitutionally protected from removal by the federal government and the SEP was expected to somehow carry out revolutionary socioeconomic reforms without intervening (openly, at least) in politics. Only the state congress, prompted by the governor, could replace an elected town council with an appointed municipal council.Aware of these obstacles, Cervera accused Anacleto Solís of exploiting the peasants via a fraudulent cooperative that mocked federal labor legislation. Moreover, by using the term slavery, Cervera not only suggested an outrageous abuse of poor peasants but also associated the Solíses with the prerevolutionary landowning oligarchy, who used debt peonage and corporal punishment to literally enslave henequen workers. Secondly, Cervera emphasized Mayor Juan de Mata Solís’s open contempt towards the federal government, claiming that Anacleto Solís heard of his attempts to improve the lives of peasants “according to the ideals of the president” and ordered his brother, Mayor Juan de Mata Solís, to put a stop to his activities. The mayor dutifully summoned him to his office and warned him—again, according to Cervera—that “The federal government controls your position, but as for here, if you do not see things my way, I will throw you in jail, because that’s what we do to revolutionaries. Here, you don’t come to me with laws or with [constitutional] articles, because all of this is a myth and if you keep up like this you’re going to have a hard time.”56 Nothing could be clearer than Juan de Mata Solís’s bold challenge to Cervera: his authority as cacique nullified Cardenismo. How, Cervera would obliquely ask, could the governor ignore such defiance?At the meeting, several peasants—both male and female—made devastating charges against the Solíses, laying out for the federal representatives a history of murder and mayhem in Kinchil. Family members demanded justice for a string of murders by the Solís clan and their retainers. Some complaints revealed a savage, if not sadistic streak, among the gang: a member of the Solís clique whipped 16-year-old Plácido Tzuc to death in front of town hall; local authorities stoned Martinza Dzul’s uncles to death. Individual speakers were interrupted by a Greek chorus of shouts welling up out of the crowd and faithfully transcribed the DEF reporter: “We’re tired of suffering, we do not want them to keep killing us like dogs in the street, without arresting the true criminals.”57 A similar sentiment was expressed by unidentified peasants who called for an end to the murders and robbery of the caciques, and lamented that “the complete abandonment in which we find ourselves.”58 Several demands from the crowd called on the visitors to make good on their pledges of help from Mexico City: “[I]f President Lázaro Cárdenas said he will defend us, we want justice, they are a bunch of assassins because they threaten us throughout our lives with death if we complain against them.”59Still other complaints seemed comparatively minor, but reinforced the federal teacher’s argument that the local authorities misruled Kinchil: rampant crime (one man’s house was robbed while he attended the meeting), failure to investigate labor claims of the workers, continual harassment of the federal school, and threats to have protesters, or even any children who went to the federal school, drafted into the federal army.60Significantly, agrarian reform was only mentioned twice, and never indicated an on-going attempt by Kinchil’s peasants to expropriate land from haciendas: some peasants chanted the slogan “Land and Liberty and Justice”; others charged that the Solíses attacked the Cardenista land reform when they said that the federal credit cooperatives organized by the Agrarian Bank were shams that would trap ejidatarios (recipients of land and credit in the federal land reform) in debt. There was neither a women’s organization at the dramatic assembly nor were women included in the community council of the school, the key leadership organization set up by Cervera that helped organize the meeting. Women did speak, but only to reclaim justice as mothers whose sons were murdered. Captain Marquéz was the only speaker to address the women of Kinchil and he spoke to them not about suffrage or their economic rights but on the importance of hygiene.61 In spite of the long litany of complaints and abuses against the Solíses, the governor again refused to take action on the petition, because the state congress and the leadership of the PSS balked.62This inaction almost cost Cervera his life. On the night of 17 December, Teófilo Solís, one of the Solíses most feared enforcers, and four henchmen shot up the schoolhouse where Cervera slept guarded by a bodyguard of loyal peasants. Two days later, Cervera filed formal charges, and authorities jailed four of the assailants. Authorities later released them, however, and failed to ser