Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Firewater, Desire, and the Militiamen’s Christmas Eve in San Geroónimo, Baja Verapaz, 1892

2004; Duke University Press; Volume: 84; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-84-2-239

1527-1900

Lowell Gudmundson,

Colonialism, slavery, and trade

San Gerónimo’s far-flung children—both those still living in the village or surrounding settlements and those who have migrated to the capital of Guatemala City—take great pride in the unrivaled reputation of their communal celebrations. Celebrations for San Gerónimo’s patron saint, for Christmas Eve, for New Year’s Eve, and for Easter Sunday are all marked by elaborate observances complete with costly fireworks. The village, renowned for its production of sugar and high quality moonshine and liquors, is also famed for the music and dancing that accompanies these festivities, both secular and religious, into the wee hours of the morning. Many Chomeños have credited these traditions to San Gerónimo’s unique heritage, having been home to thousands of African slaves and their descendants since the early seventeenth century. The massive Dominican-owned sugar plantation that once dominated the geographic and social landscape underwrote a major part of the extraordinary power of that religious order in colonial Guatemala and Chiapas.1Although all-night dancing and drinking accompanied most major celebrations, not all celebrations turned out according to script. Perhaps the most spectacular of such deviations occurred on Christmas Eve, 1892.2 Some time around midnight that evening, an alarm sounded in response to what appeared to be an arson attack in the La Joya section of the cane fields. Owners and trusted employees ran from the midnight mass to put out the flames and then returned to the service.Later that night, however, a vicious attack against two young revelers turned San Gerónimo’s centuries-old social order upside down, according to the alleged victims. Under cover of darkness, the hacienda’s youthful third-generation English owner, 23-year-old Enrique Douglas Harris, and a 19-year-old visiting English friend, Dudley Gosling, were beaten senseless and left unconscious in the middle of the street.3 They claimed to have been seeking harmless conversation with the daughters of Srta. Jesús Santos, described as a 30-year-old single mother. However, the young hacendado and his friend reported that when they called upon Santos at her home, they were set upon by a group of local men enrolled in the newly uniformed and armed militia unit, allegedly under the leadership of a 19-year-old from Antigua, Ricardo Rodríguez.Few witnesses disputed that the confrontation actually took place. Harris’s visiting friend received, by all accounts, a deep wound to his forehead—a dis-figuring and permanent memento of his adventure in the “wild tropics.” The details of the case, however, were the subject of widespread and overt dispute, as were the alleged participants’ intentions and motives and the propriety of their behavior, given the time and place. Nearly 150 pages of sworn testimony were collected in documenting this most unruly and historic of Christmas Eves in San Gerónimo.Were the events of this evening—alternately hilarious and pathetic, profane and sacred, drunken and deadly serious—a bizarre example of social inversion in a place where the centuries-old social hierarchy was tempered by rum-shop conviviality, workplace feats of strength or violence, and ritual acts of sacred brotherhood? Was this another typical Christmas Eve midnight mass competing with all-night drinking and dancing? Or were these bloody events signals of a more sustained threat against the old social order?Before we can make any sense of this particularly raucous Christmas Eve celebration, we need to place the protagonists into the broader context of San Gerónimo’s history.4 The lives of these revelers come into sharper focus when we consider several related themes drawn from disparate sources: the role of slavery in a distant colonial past, nineteenth-century struggles over San Gerónimo’s municipal status (first with the Dominican authorities and then with their English successors), and contemporary relations of labor, power, and gender. Tapping written memoirs and contemporary oral accounts, I explore local beliefs about the trajectory and meaning of the community’s history, readily expressed by Chomeños raised in the first half of the twentieth century. This raises questions concerning who has authority to interpret and give meaning to events, and it reveals the impact of later events and distant contexts on memory and meaning themselves. Many themes and beliefs emerged in the course of my numerous conversations with half a dozen elders and their younger family members. These were echoed in the life’s-work manuscript of San Gerónimo’s deceased nativeson intellectual, Víctor Flores Lucas, which was no doubt both a reflection of, and a “validating” source for, these beliefs among living Chomeños.5Historians who work with oral histories often use their informants’ memories of events or experiences as “evidence.” Historical memory, on the other hand, has less to do with events and evidence than with retrospective understandings of the past heavily influenced by subsequent experiences. Here I will explore memory in terms of its powerful assertions of appropriate meaning for history and its processes or events. Its value lies almost entirely in what its own patterns and concerns may suggest. Although its implausibility may disqualify it from use in any simple, empirically corroborative sense, this same implausibility may actually be its greatest utility, suggesting implicit understandings about how the past must have been in order for the present and future to “turn out well.”6 After considering the historical context and some of today’s beliefs about the turn of the century, I turn to the legal documentation of the Christmas Eve incident, plumbing the sworn testimony and convoluted resolutions not only for the facts of the case but also (and more importantly) for their many possible meanings for San Gerónimo’s residents as they confronted new challenges and possibilities during changing times.Why are the transformations of this period important today? Three issues that emerge from my analysis are relevant to the larger comparative and historiographic endeavor. First, the accused militiamen were at the service of, and legitimated by, the liberal state that triumphed in 1871. While studies of popular liberalism have advanced considerably in Mexico, in Guatemala and Central America such studies are still limited to the most singular of cases. While Central America’s liberal militias are known for their role in the dispossession and suppression of indigenous communities, they may also have played a part in other sociopolitical transformations of the time—and in directions not anticipated by a literature that is, due to more recent events, overwhelmingly critical of the military.7 A second theme of interest is the role of African-descended populations in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century state formation, as well as their own ethnic self-consciousness, then and now. Once again, compared to a rapidly growing literature on Mexico, Central America remains largely trapped within a homogenizing indigenous/mestizo/ladino framework both created by local political actors over the past century and imported from Mexico after the revolution.8Finally, poststructural and postmodern styles of narration and interpretation have profoundly influenced academic writing in recent years, and no less so in Latin American history. A close reading of this incident as social text clearly motivates my analysis, and the use of Flores Lucas’s unpublished text and local oral traditions could be seen, on one level, as an altogether laudable rescue of subaltern voices that have largely been ignored by the dominant national historiography. Nevertheless, the actions of those Christmas Eve revelers stubbornly resist simple answers to questions of meaning, causation, and the consciousness of historical actors.A central goal of this study is to problematize the authorial assignment of meaning (or lack thereof) to historical events and the logics or intentions of their protagonists. My reading of a singular moment in San Gerónimo’s history spares no effort to empathize with local subaltern actors, perhaps at some risk of romanticization. However, I argue that an emphasis on empathy or post-modern reflexivity when dealing with a past whose own future may not be the one the author or readers have in mind risks seriously misleading. For example, when Antonio Pérez, one of Serge Gruzinski’s “Man-Gods” of the (colonial) Mexican highlands, bit off the finger of his priestly accuser, the author with-holds until the end of the story the fact that the priest was an Indian just like his assailant. Here the startling irony works to reinforce two main lines of argumentation: (1) the reader’s sympathy for Antonio as persecuted underdog; and (2) the radical hopelessness of his cause, in this world at least, given that fellow Indians, well positioned in the Spanish social hierarchy, would be the ones to silence him.9 However, as we will see later, shock and irony appear badly out of place when they contradict not only the flow of preceding arguments but also the most basic of historical facts hidden until the (anti-) climactic finish. There, what is to be gained in the search for the cultural logic of subalterns (for a deeply self-absorbed and rarely subaltern readership, one might add) does a disservice not only to such readers but also to the complex history, agency, and consciousness of those studied.Both historians and locals have long thought that San Gerónimo’s history of colonialera slavery was unusual for Guatemala and Central America. The eight-hundred-page, encyclopedic typescript by Flores Lucas, “Un vistazo a las Verapaces,” in its overwhelming profusion of isolated facts, descriptions, autobiographic vignettes, and haunting comments on the fratricidal politics he experienced firsthand in a military/police career, also reflects this keen sense of both pride and insularity.In the colonial period, hundreds of black slaves worked alongside Indian laborers coerced through repartimientos. Many contemporary accounts suggest that slaves perhaps fared better than their formally free Indian neighbors. Dominican friars in both San Gerónimo and in neighboring Salamá worked tirelessly to emphasize a “place” for both groups via religious symbolism. For example, they went to the rather considerable bother and expense of installing in San Gerónimo an original retablo of the Virgin of Guadalupe painted by the famous Mexican artist Cristobál Villalpando (1649–1714), while in Salamá’s church they very pointedly included an image of the black San Martín de Porras alongside a smaller, locally made version of the Virgin of Guadalupe.10Few in Central America today realize that sugar production in colonial Guatemala took place not just on rustic farms using animal-driven, wooden mills but also on plantations. The largest of these, under both clerical and private ownership, had outputs and workforces roughly comparable to their Caribbean counterparts.11 By all accounts, during the colonial era and the first decades of independence, the largest and most technically sophisticated of these plantations was San Gerónimo. Its irrigation and waterworks alone were unparalleled achievements for that time and place, and all of this was accomplished with a handful of Dominican priests and the occasional overseer present at any point in time. Slaves comprised the majority of the colonial militia and had so much bargaining power that Dominican authorities would later claim that the hacienda’s slaves themselves sought out positions of servitude on the plantation. Friar Miguel José de Aycinena asserted that only troublemakers were sold away, as a form of punishment, and even then, slaves born in San Gerónimo and sold to distant owners would run away and return home regardless of distance or difficulties.12According to Flores Lucas, the military commander of Salamá took it upon himself to announce liberation to San Gerónimo’s residents in 1823, fully a year prior to official emancipation.13 Whatever the truth of this claim, there was an even earlier form of grudging freedom for the slaves of San Gerónimo. In 1810, the procurador general y síndico (the general counsel and an elected representative) of the capital, Francisco Arrivillaga, represented the slaves in an extraordinary confrontation with their Dominican owners. As defender of the slaves, among his many offices, Arrivillaga obliged Dominican authorities in the capital city’s Convento Viejo to sign an agreement by which their slaves would henceforth be paid scaled wages (with separate rates for masters, arti-sans, and laborers) and allowed to rent plots for cultivation. They would also be allowed to work away from the hacienda on days when there was no work to be done there, and they were even permitted to take along their blacksmithing and construction tools, so long as they provided their own charcoal.14This extraordinary level of local autonomy was perhaps difficult for foreign traveler Jacobo Haefkens to comprehend when he visited San Gerónimo in 1829. In a somewhat dismissive tone, he claimed that nothing had changed with abolition and that the former slaves all seemed to want to stay and work on the hacienda.15 Howsoever power relations, and social calculations based on them, may have changed after abolition in 1824, the slave quarters of Barrio Abajo (just across the street from the church, the municipal building, and the entrance to the hacienda itself) continued to be the residence for San Gerónimo’s laboring classes.Chomeños today, whether born and raised in the village or in the capital, typically express deeply held beliefs about this past that recognize and rework that contradictory history in myriad ways. A hymn specially commissioned by the Guatemala City–based neighborhood association for its 50th anniversary celebration in 1999 pointedly asserts the brotherhood of Indians and blacks (see figure 3). Its inspirational lyrics, penned by—who else?—Víctor Flores Lucas, likewise grace the entry to the local museum, the Museo del Trapiche. This is testimony to a historical memory that is one part fact, one part aspiration, and yet another part deeply purposeful confusion. “The residents were Indians . . . and blacks their allies . . . turned into slaves . . . of a mistreated lineage. . .. A race that’s not pure . . . nor a shadow its figure . . . together in brotherhood . . . with the Indian and the African. . .. Gone is that past . . . we’re free and no longer slaves . . . we’re children, brothers and sisters . . . of this beautiful Guatemala.”16 And yet, one of the grossest insults hurled against a mixed-race woman, as reported in criminal cases from the nineteenth century, was to call her a samba, or mixed Indian-African. This is hardly suggestive of entirely fraternal relationships between local Indians and blacks.17Yet another reconciliation of dominant social values with appropriate historical narratives of slavery can be seen in the widespread belief that Bartolomé de Las Casas actually brought the first seven hundred (families or individuals depending on the speaker) slaves from Jamaica to San Gerónimo. That Jamaica was home to virtually no slaves or Spaniards during Las Casas’s lifetime is less the issue here than the desire to envelop the history of slavery within the cloak of Lascasian reformism and humanitarianism, one of the few ways this can be done in a political culture as doggedly conservative as Guatemala’s today. Such a historical reconciliation offers the additional attraction of whitewashing the unpleasant and messy fact that all slaveholders in San Gerónimo were, in fact, Dominican friars like Las Casas himself and that all slaves were Dominican property for nearly three centuries.While reluctant to allow the history of slavery to taint the historical achievements and morality of either the community or the nation, Chomeños of all colors quite openly express their revulsion at the brutality of the institution, a condition all recognize to have been restricted to those of African descent. This condemnation is equally codified in certain historical beliefs or allusions. The expression of horror and revulsion at the practice of branding, for example, is notable in many conversations with older adult informants. Flores Lucas went to great lengths to describe and denounce the practice in his lengthy manuscript, including reproducing an image of what he claimed to be the official brand applied to all legally imported slaves, colloquially referred to as “La Casimba.”18 Just as with the anachronistic but powerful invocation of Las Casas before, the sense of moral indignation is heightened by asserting that branding continued long after abolition in 1824, that its living victims continued to exist into the early twentieth century, or that facial or forehead branding was also practiced. Once again, time ebbs and flows, but always around markers of historical significance not to be overly confused with any tight, professional, or academic chronology of events. Historical memory remains couched in moral judgment, and even the most objectionable material is framed in such a way so as to ratify a sense of shared humanity that connects the suffering of their ancestors with community membership today for all those who would claim a connection to San Gerónimo.San Gerónimo was something of an anomaly within the Guatemalan state, both colonial and national. It was a private plantation and not a pueblo (village), even though in virtually every respect the settlement itself functioned and was administered as if it were a pueblo after it was expropriated from the Dominicans by anticlerical liberals in 1829 and subsequently sold to English investors in 1835.19 San Gerónimo’s Dominican owners were notorious for their unrivaled power in Guatemala and Chiapas during the colony. Unlike sister Dominican properties in Amatitlán and Palencia (both near the capital), however, San Gerónimo was both remote and large enough to constitute an entirely Dominicanrun settlement, and this legacy would live on well after expropriation.Originally worked with repartimiento labor drawn from neighboring communities, from the mid–seventeenth century onward the Dominicans increasingly employed black slaves. In the last quarter of the seventeenth century they built a massive aqueduct to supply the water-driven cane press, and thereafter the plantation became by far the largest sugar producer in the realm, with a total population of approximately 705 Indians, 237 freedmen (livertos), and 557 slaves on the eve of independence in 1821.20The size and complexity of the San Gerónimo sugar plantation was breath-taking in the Central American context. The kilometer-long aqueduct was only the most visible part of the complex. Archbishop Pedro Cortés y Larraz marveled in 1770 that the entire drying area for the hundreds of sugar molds could be covered in the event of rain by one or two slaves using mechanical aids in a matter of four to six minutes.21 In colonial times, the Dominicans cultivated some 300 hectares of irrigated cane fields, and another 1,800–2,800 hectares of rainfed plots were available as needed. The entire valley, almost right down to the common lands of Salamá, were Dominican (and then English) property.22The sugar output from San Gerónimo was estimated by colonial authorities and later historians at 15,000 pounds per month or more. Documents seized or generated by liberal authorities with the expropriation of 1829 revealed an average production of some 75–100,000 pounds per year between 1809 and 1828. It appears that production then fell off dramatically, at least in the short run, after expropriation. However, it is entirely possible that production of liquor took up the slack, as it was of huge importance in colonial times and never well documented by Dominican, colonial, or national authorities.23 A long-time hacienda administrator, Dominican friar Sebastián García y Goyena, actually petitioned royal authorities in 1811 for permission to sell all sorts of flavored rums—aníseth, pineapple, orange, cinnamon, fig, mint, grape, and cane sugar— in the capital, but that would never be the key market for liquor production.24 North of San Gerónimo lay Cobán: Indian country. It was there (and to the east in Chiquimula) that Dominicans, Englishmen, and Chomeños alike sold, legally or not, their tasty rums. Finally, the hacienda’s herds would decline precipitously after the Dominicans’ expulsion, but prior to that time they were counted in the several thousands.25Although under Dominican rule the issue of secular authority surfaced indirectly time and again, there appears to have been no real diminution in regular clerical power. Archbishop Cortés y Larraz, in his famous visitas of the late 1760s, loudly lamented his inability to command any accounting from his nominal subordinates among the regular clergy, especially when it came to the Dominicans in San Gerónimo. After the Dominicans were expelled to Cuba on very short notice in 1829, these same issues of plantation or pueblo would resurface, albeit in new guises.As with nearly all instances of historical memory, individuals and institutions no longer active in a particular setting become prime candidates for mythologizing. In part as a statement of local pride and in part as an affirmation of piety, today’s commentators tend to idealize the role of the clerics, when they mention them at all.26 The local church is spoken of (understandably perhaps) as “the village’s” or “ours,” without any discussion of the uniquely Dominican contributions to its architecture or to the colonial art treasures it contains. Nevertheless, conflict over ownership of the church and its contents were at the heart of the nineteenth-century struggle to transform the plantation into a pueblo.This contemporary embrace of Dominican saintliness, which is wide but shallow, contains a certain irony. Contrary to liberal views that presented the Spanish colonial and clerical heritages as inherently retrograde, Chomeños idealize that past in contrast to their English successors, whose uniquely “civilizing” influence the liberals courted and eventually contracted. In this vein, in 1835 liberal rulers (Morazán and Gálvez) sold the expropriated plantation to Carlos Meany, an English merchant in Guatemala, and Marcial Bennett, the wealthiest proprietor of land, slaves, and lumber rights in British colonial Belize. Meany and Bennett had saved the liberal regime more than once, including supplying their forces with some one thousand rifles. Indeed, San Gerónimo became their property not for the 250,000 pesos specified in the contract, or the 111,000 pesos mentioned later, but to cancel the state’s debt of 5,000 pesos for those thousand rifles.27But San Gerónimo’s residents, far from finding civilization and progress at the hands of their new English employers, soon found them every bit as opposed to an independent village as the Dominicans had been. Worse yet, some came to believe they had been delivered into the hands of “savage Englishmen” who seemed intent on intimidating residents and monopolizing all income sources while systematically decapitalizing and mortgaging what, under the Dominicans, had been a far larger, more dynamic, and sophisticated enterprise.The property passed from the first generation of Meanys and Bennetts to their heirs by midcentury. While retaining their property rights, the Meanys took no active role in San Gerónimo over the nineteenth century, and its administration fell to the heirs of Thomas Bennett and his sons-in-law, John Owen and Henry Benjamin Wyatt. When Thomas Bennett Jr. died, his sisters Maria Owen (Bennett) and Elisabeth Wyatt (Bennett) apparently took his part, even though he had at least three “natural” children recognized in the area.28 When John and Maria Owen died, the property was left to the Harris clan (also referred to at times by the double surname Douglas Harris), lead by Henry Wyatt, the only heir to reside in San Gerónimo.29Key flash points for conflict between los ingleses and local residents will perhaps suggest why the English, as had the Dominicans, found it so difficult to recognize a pueblo where they only wanted to see their plantation (however backward or antirepublican that might seem). The new owners sought to deny residents the right to independently produce cane on plantation land (although they were willing to rent it out for small-scale grain production) or to produce moonshine for sale except insofar as the sugar used was purchased from the estate.30 While the first restriction was feasible, the second proved a neverending source of conflict. And as relations between the owners and local residents soured over the decades, residents and their allies would increasingly view the Englishmen’s restrictive regulations and lack of cooperation with the locals as part of a strategy to purposefully run the estate into the ground and provoke confrontation, in hopes that the Guatemalan state would buy them out to quiet the situation.31The ingleses, like the Dominicans before them, saw to it that local alcaldes (“justices of the peace” who acted as local law enforcement officials) were favorably disposed to them; indeed, these offices were most often held by estate administrators, employees, or business associates. José Carter, the long-term estate administrator, was first elected alcalde primero in 1843 and served for many years in this dual role.32 While the relationship was not always so obvious thereafter, no one had any doubts that San Gerónimo’s alcaldes answered first to the governor or president who had appointed them, followed by the estate owner, and only in the last resort to any sense of local residents’ rights. San Gerónimo had been given municipal status by the central government in 1836, but it would not fully function as one for decades thereafter, owing to the fact that it had only one (English) property holder and hundreds of “landless” (part-time) employees—hardly the model republican municipality.There was also the somewhat embarrassing fact that some local residents believed the English owners had taken over church property as their personal residence, complete with its sacred objects.33 This led the authorities, in the 1830s, to take action against local women who had removed objects from the church “for safe keeping,” without the new owners’ permission.34 Shortly before the 1892 events, however, the parish priest had come to take the side of villagers and sued Enrique Harris for his unauthorized removal (“theft,” in less couched language) of sacred objects. Harris’s associate, Lorenzo Burne, proudly responded to the court’s questioning: of course he had taken the objects for safekeeping— which he had every right to do, since they were the property of the hacienda. The court swiftly reminded him that such a statement could be interpreted as an admission of his “contempt of court,” demonstrating just how completely the tables had turned over the preceding half century.35Although the ingleses failed to live up to their image as bearers of civilization and progress, they nevertheless transformed public displays of masculinity via a newly potent and individualized military culture. Renowned as rifle salesmen, the various English owners and employees were at once feared, resented, and admired for the superiority of their firearms over knife fighting as a display of manliness. It was precisely in this context that one local protester exclaimed, “[T]hese Englishmen are uncouth savages [unos salvajes y groseros].” This was an expression of both contempt and shock at the inversion of roles—after all, liberal authorities had always claimed the English would help civilize a violent local culture. These ingleses, however, not only used their rifles to intimidate (shooting wildly into the air to keep back alleged squatters whose fences or huts were being set afire) but they also pointedly carried revolvers in their belts as they walked around town.36 But the English would not long be the sole bearers of this manly mark of distinction. Remington rifles were on the way from the United States, and this time the Guatemalan government would neither buy them in Belize nor remain beholden to San Gerónimo’s owners for their acquisition.37The business of San Gerónimo had seemingly always been sugar. But this does not tell the whole story, since sugar can be produced in many different ways and is used in even more fashions once produced. The political elite that was created by the industry’s wealth and sought to control the region learned not only to focus on the few, most profitable of its many operations, but also on those individuals who actually carried out those same activities. The task was not made any easier by the fact that this was an exslave population little given to taking orders, to suffering insults in silence, or to backing down from a good fight. The resort to violence, both public and private, was never far beneath the surface in such a setting, but within powerfully gendered spaces.San Gerónimo’s various productive regimes clearly demarcated public and private spheres and coded certain activities by gender, but its particular gender division of labor might surprise outside observers today. Under slavery, women had worked in the cane fields in planting, weeding, and even cutting, just as they did elsewhere in the Caribbean. When wage labor replaced slavery, however, employers offered field jobs to men only. While the “rough and ready” physicality of male sociability engaged in backbreaking field and mill labor is unsurprising, women’s pointedly public involvement in distilling and marketing liquor was remarkable. Women’s activities may have been rigidly defined as domestic/private, but this definition belied the