Agrarian rebellion and defense of community: meaning and collective violence in late colonial and independence-era Mexico.

Riot at Atlacomulco

On the evening of 1 November 1810--All Saints Day--a riotous crowd in the village of Atlacomulco, in the Toluca area about sixty miles to the northwest of Mexico City, attacked the home of don Romualdo Magdaleno Diez, a local peninsular-born Spanish merchant and landowner.(1) Magdaleno Diez himself, along with his Spanish-born estate administrator, was killed by the mob in the action of that evening, and his son and son-in-law executed the following day in the town square and cemetery. The riot was fuelled at least in part by widely current rumors that an army of gachupines (European-born Spaniards) was advancing on the town to slaughter its non-European inhabitants, and that the baker in Magdaleno Diez's employ had at his master's command poisoned the bread he was making that evening.(2)

According to a number of witnesses (including don Romualdo's wife and adult daughters, left virtually destitute in the aftermath of the attack) the ethnically mixed crowd of local Indian peasants and mestizo townsmen had advanced on the Magdaleno Diez home from the village plaza at about 8 p.m. that evening, throwing stones when in sight of the house ". . . with the greatest fury, and to such an extreme that [the stones] appeared [to fall] like hail." Despite entreaties to reason by the family and servants, the rioters quickly smashed down the doors with axes and entered the courtyard, where they encountered don Romualdo holding a rosary and a prayer-book. The unfortunate man was seized immediately by a number of hands in the crowd, and dispatched with a lance-thrust which drenched his now-hysterical youngest daughter in her father's blood. As don Romualdo slumped to the ground mortally wounded, members of the crowd attacked him with stones and clubs. His eldest daughter

. . . saw her father fall to the ground, and so many [men] throw themselves on him that she could distinguish none of them; but she did see that they gave him so many wounds, and so many blows with sticks and stones, leaving him covered with stones, that they left him in a wretched condition, almost unrecognizable (casi sin figura corporal).

His son Jose Antonio, seeing he could do nothing to aid his father, ran from the house toward the home of the village priest, seeking sanctuary while brandishing a passport or safe-conduct from Father Miguel Hidalgo (the nominal leader of the anti-Spanish rebellion which had just six weeks before engulfed central Mexico).(3) His flight availed him nothing, however, since a number of the pursuing rioters caught up with him near the plaza and wounded him gravely even while he clutched the knees of the local vicar, imploring his protection. The next day Jose Antonio and his Spanish-born brother-in-law were dragged from the town jail where they had spent the night (the son by this time nearly dead from his untreated wounds) and executed by a large crowd of Indian villagers from the neighboring hamlet of San Juan de los Jarros.

The fearful violence directed against Romualdo Magdaleno Diez and his household may have been spontaneous in the sense that it was unexpected, but it certainly did not spring out of a social vacuum. For more than three decades before 1810 the relationship of Magdaleno Diez with local villagers had been one of almost unrelieved antagonism, chiefly over the issue of land ownership. Arriving in the district in the early 1770s or so, don Romualdo had purchased his first hacienda by 1776, and was subsequently to buy other property. He certainly appears to have been one of the most aggressive and grasping of local hacendados (estate owners), enclosing and engrossing land, manipulating local politics and justice to favor his own economic interests, and even turning to extra-judicial violence when formal institutional means failed or moved too slowly to suit him.(4)

Yet in these practices and in his habitual conflict with local Indian peasants and other landowners he was by no means alone. There had been a long history of struggles over land and water in the area, involving villagers of Atlacomulco, Jarros, and other hamlets, pitted against local caciques (Indian nobles) and non-Indian landholders. Accompanying the generalized competition for land and water resources in the area were serious indications of peasant land hunger, outright invasions of hacienda lands by Indian villagers, fairly frequent incidents of violence, and abusive labor practices by estate owners. These were the avatars of processes virtually universal in late colonial Mexico, comprising the recovery of indigenous population and resultant land pressure; the growing commercialization of large-scale agriculture; the increasing competition between Indian villagers and others over land resources; and the developing social differentiation within indigenous communities.(5) This generalized situation in the eighteenth century was compounded and facilitated in the Mexico City area, where Atlacomulco was roughly located, by the growth of the urban market and the consequent spread of irrigated wheat culture. Locally, the agrarian equation shifted between 1650 and 1750 from a situation in which land had been plentiful and labor scarce, to one in which land was scarce and labor plentiful, creating conditions under which a large part of the farming population enjoyed access neither to adequate real wages nor sufficient subsistence holdings for farming.

In a sense, then, Romualdo Magdaleno Diez may have served as a sort of lightning rod for peasant discontent--a proxy for local white power-holders as a group, and to some degree a surrogate victim for them. But he was hardly a faceless victim or a sociological abstraction to the people who killed him. Indeed, victims and killers knew one another, as the testimony in the case makes abundantly clear, and possibly dealt with each other on a day-to-day basis. Under such circumstances it must be supposed that personal animosities and vendettas of a highly personalized and possibly long-standing nature, and rivalries political and economic, as opposed to simply blind rage and/or ideological considerations, aimed the assassins at their victims and lent strength to their mortal blows.(6) Nonetheless, Magdaleno Diez was definitely a scapegoat--the proximate object for the acting out of intense social discontent which might more reasonably have been expected to be (and in some other cases was) directed against white society and the colonial regime as a whole. The social displacement implied by this process was a complex one much in evidence during the late colonial period and the era of civil struggle which brought it to a close.(7)

The Analytical Issues

On the whole, local grievances were probably much more important than ideological differences in defining where actors stood in relation to the September 1810 rebellion in general and incidents like the one at Atlacomulco in particular. Adding to the social volatility of the situation in Atlacomulco was the decline in power, wealth, and influence of the local cacique group after about 1700, and most notably after 1750, which produced within the diminutive society of local Indian householders a legitimacy vacuum ultimately compounded by the larger political crisis of the early nineteenth century. At the same time, the growing economic hegemony of non-Indian landowners was not matched by a parallel reinforcement of the structures of influence and legitimacy weakened by the very process of its creation and the cession of local dominance by the indigenous elite. Overall, the wider rebellion initiated by Miguel Hidalgo and subsequently taken up by other leaders seems to have provided an organizing principle--a pretext, a framework--upon which existing patterns of enmity, rivalry, and faction could be hung. These occurrences seem to offer a miniaturized version of events on a "national" level, at least in part, in which a middling sector of rural non-Indians (abetted by socially marginal elements) in some cases initiated a rebellion against the colonial regime and in some cases joined one already in progress, and in which Indian rural people participated massively for reasons growing more out of local conditions than out of engagement with their ostensible leaders' ideological concerns.

The fact that popular collective action in the countryside of New Spain (as Mexico was then called) was overwhelmingly local in origin and localocentric in worldview does not prevent our generalizing about it, of course. Popular and elite rebels had in mind very different and mutually incomprehensible social and political agendas when they took up arms against the Spanish colonial regime between 1810 and 1821. Peasant villagers, in particular, fought in defense of embattled communities which they conceived as antecedent to, and in some sense existing outside of, the colonial state. The creole directorate of the loose independence movement, on the other hand, struggled toward a proto-nationalist vision of an autonomous nation-state in which active political citizenship would be limited to a white native elite and a penumbra of ethnically mixed secondary players. That strong ethnic and class divisions, always present but now politically salient in new ways, emerged within Mexico during the period of the independence struggle accounts in large measure for the fears of caste war expressed by many creole insurgents and social observers, and for the socially conservative auspices under which independence finally arrived in the early 1820s. Beyond issues of political horizon, state, or citizenship, popular rural rebellion also comprised elements of cultural resistance--linguistic survival, religious cult, local status and power arrangements, gender relations, issues of self and group identity, and worldview in general--which lent the three-way struggle among peasant villages, creole insurgent directorate, and colonial state a certain sharpness and violence it would otherwise have lacked had not that cultural resistance been conflated with the defense of community.

The Atlacomulco disturbance, and dozens of similar ones that erupted in 1810 and after, raise a number of interesting issues about culture and society in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Mexico. One of these, and the principal question to which I want to devote the remainder of this essay, is the following: to what degree can economic grievances of the sort outlined for Atlacomulco and the hamlet of Jarros in the late colonial period credibly account by themselves for violent collective behavior of this intensity, and its absorption, frequently, into the insurgency against Spain? There is a substantial doubt, in other words, as to whether and how our rural rioters framed their decisions to act with reference to explicitly economic goals. A simplified model of such collective behavior, with land hunger as its engine or motive force, should enable us to predict that peasant villagers in such situations would overturn the existing structures of colonial oppression in terms immediate to their own experience, by expropriating land and destroying its owners and their capital. The focused violence and destruction are present in the Atlacomulco incident and many others of the time, but not the expropriation, and even less any systematic expression of an agrarian program on the part of popular rebels. A subsidiary theme, therefore, consists in the question of why there is so little evidence of a widespread agrarian ideology during this period, or even of expropriation by poor rural people of the property of the rich. Admittedly these are somewhat different issues, and each will receive at least abbreviated treatment in passing.

The absence of land, for the most part, as a major issue in policy formulations, public pronouncements, and ideological elaborations in the rebellion in New Spain as a whole (always excepting the somewhat murky case of lose Maria Morelos, another country curate who inherited the mantle of Hidalgo's leadership after the latter's death in 1811, and who espoused some agrarian reform) does not of course mean that it was not an issue in bringing peasants to arms.(8) Nor should the absence of such a coherent, generalizing ideology of agrarianism, either from above or from below, surprise us; indeed, its existence would have seemed peculiarly anachronistic given the time and place. And even had such a program been elaborated and seriously promoted by the insurgent leadership, its wide diffusion among country people, and their adherence to it, would have been blocked by such factors as the constricted channels of communication between elite insurgent directorate and common masses (linguistic differences, an overwhelmingly illiterate population), and the still strongly patriarchal and paternalistic flavor of social relationships prevailing between the laboring and owning classes in many parts of the Mexican countryside.

Nonetheless, in the case of Atlacomulco conflict over land between rioter-rebels and their victims, in one form or another, seems to be the main element in the etiology of local political violence. Partly, of course, this may be the result of the differential survival of documentation, granting that the possibility that the sheer frequency of land conflicts and the obviousness of their paper trail may distort our view of what actually motivated collective violence on the part of peasants. Where we can trace local economic relationships from the eighteenth century into the insurgency era, certainly, agrarian conflict is often in play. And where insurgency-era documentation itself is thickest, there is abundant evidence, as we shall see, of ad hoc popular agrarianism--acts of vengeance against landlords, destruction of property, looting, and so forth--generally, however, stopping short of even short-term land expropriation.(9)

What other possible candidates exist as motives for localized popular action?--tribute and tax collections? relationships to the Church? the mercantile network? separatist political inclinations? None of these seems as credible an explanation for collective action as the land question, because they would probably have affected people in a less uniform manner; because except in the case of the Church they would probably have lacked the symbolic power necessary to send villagers across the affective threshold into collective action; and because there is no concrete evidence that they were at issue in Atlacomulco or most other cases of village uprising. What occurred, in fact, was that the land question was transmuted into other issues capable of mobilizing rural people to violent collective action under, or alongside, the banner of political protest, though the alchemy of the process is not entirely clear. It is not necessary to accept a knee-jerk hypothesis concerning the relationship between agrarian conditions and violent protest, nor does it seem possible to do so in this case. But the land question as a motivation for rebellion can be preserved if we begin to think in terms of intervening variables instead of the simpler formulation. What is novel in my own interpretation of popular action in the period is not emphasis on agrarian grievance, certainly, since in recent scholarly work this has come to occupy an ever more important place. Rather, I am concerned to explore the nature of popular agrarianism, its limits, and more importantly its relationship to an even deeper level of struggle in the countryside--the struggle over the continued political viability of peasant communities and their existence as substantially autonomous reproducers of local ethnic culture.

Here the idea of a "compromise of community" as a motivation for peasant insurrection may be helpful, especially where the class position, and the ethnic and cultural identity of the peasantry were highly congruent. The historical resilience of the peasant community in Mexico suggests that the maintenance of village identity and autonomy are key factors in understanding the history of rural society there.(10) This resilience, when expressed in political terms, as during the wars of independence, could sometimes take on a flavor at once zenophobic and reactionary vis a vis the encroachment of outsiders, including the state. Nor was the overt expression of such sentiments unknown during the initial phases of the independence movement; the incidents at Atlacomulco should be seen in this light. It has even been suggested by a number of anthropologists and other scholars that the communal Indian village (and communal peasant villages in general) breeds a particular peasant cognitive formation which tends to see the social world--relationships within communities, as well as between them and outsiders--in very definite terms, with the village at its center and with the universe as a kind of zero-sum game. The struggle to preserve village identity intact may then be seen as subsuming the land question, inasmuch as the land question was inextricably related to a coherent cosmology which had the communal village as its central entity. The most extreme formulation of this view would completely invert the materialist causal arrow by positing that during "normal" times land conflict was a pretext or collectively unconscious representation of a deeper social and cultural conflict, although it might have real enough practical aspects in itself.(11) In this scenario, the generalized conditions of social and political upheaval initiated by the insurrection of 1810, and concretized here in the case of the Atlacomulco incident, would have created an open space or breach, as it were, to play out a much larger social drama in which agrarian grievances rarely took center stage.

We have, then, a series of agrarian or agrarian-inspired uprisings, often conflated with a diffuse movement of "national" liberation and a state of internal war, with a rough and ready (though truncated) agrarian ideology and praxis, but also embodying a more broadly cultural conflict fueled by the pressures of change in rural society and transmuted into a rebellion in defense of community. It is essential to remember, however, that the long-term evolution of agrarian structures in colonial Mexico--of the social chafing attendant upon the development of regional commercial economies, land grabbing, and peasant defense of community--did not occur in a social or economic vacuum. Broad cycles in colonial economy and demography tended to deepen over several generations the spreading shadow of impoverishment for major sectors of the rural population. Furthermore, this tendency was compounded by shorter-term, conjunctural factors which positively influenced the propensity of rural people to engage in collective action with the advent of the political crisis of 1808-1810. The metaphor here would be the generation by the erosion of popular living standards of a sort of political hyperesthesia which in itself might not spur collective violence, but which in combination with sharpening cultural and political conflict might produce that very effect. Without some understanding of this economic background, therefore, agrarian conflict and a peasant posture in defense of community are not readily comprehensible. Here we turn, therefore, to look very briefly at the conditions of life for rural working people in late colonial New Spain, and at agrarian structures in general; then to an analysis of what one could call popular agrarianism in practice; and finally to village rebellions as texts, to see what they tell us about the thinking and aspirations of rural people.

The General Economic Context of Rural Violence

As the study of colonial Mexican rural history, and of economic history more generally, has advanced over the last several decades, historians have built up and begun to dissolve again a number of conventional wisdoms. One of these is that the eighteenth century was a time of substantially uninterrupted economic expansion and prosperity, a silver century if not a golden one.(12) More recently, however, our view of the half-century or so leading up to the outbreak of the independence movement in 1810 has begun to take on a darker shading, so that I could not unreasonably characterize the eighteenth century in a recent essay of my own as a century of chiaroscuro--of starkly contrasting light and dark.(13) Indicators of economic movement and general welfare once thought to be unequivocally positive for the eighteenth century are now proving to be less so, or even negative in sign.(14) Most basically, the impressive demographic increase of the early decades of the century began to slacken or stutter after about 1770, in some regions earlier, in some later. Despite important differences of scholarly opinion as to the causes for this sapping of demographic vitality, it seems likely to have stemmed at least in part from an increasingly unfavorable man/land ratio in the years after mid-century or so. This Malthusian situation was aggravated or compounded by recurrent subsistence crises linked to meteorological cycles, stagnant agricultural productivity, and a markedly uneven distribution of income and wealth in the late colony.

Furthermore, the most important sectors of the Mexican economy--mining, commerce, and agriculture--all offer a mixed picture during the last decades of the colony. The production of silver, for so long the bellwether of the colonial enterprise, echoed the overall movement of population, experiencing its longest period of sustained growth during the first quarter of the century.(15) It would also appear that even signs of subsequent absolute growth in production levels masked a real economic slippage and structural problems of a serious long-term nature. And the Mexican economy, of course, did not stand still around the mining sector. Although the value of Mexican exports during the entire colonial period and well after it was overwhelmingly comprised of silver bullion and coin, the relative share of mining output in the colonial gross domestic product fell towards the end of the eighteenth century to something like four or five percent of the total.(16) Fiscal revenues and commerce, two thermometer-like indicators of the general state of the economy, tended in the late eighteenth century to travel the same bumpy, curvy trajectory.(17) If the situation of the mining sector has been somewhat controversial, that of agriculture is necessarily even foggier, but on the whole it seems likely that although agricultural production grew perceptibly during the eighteenth century in many parts of New Spain, there was little in the way of productivity gain or technological improvement. It is true that selected parts of the country, most notably the Guadalajara and Bajio regions, were characterized by an agricultural dynamism unknown elsewhere, though the reasons for this are not as yet entirely clear.(18) But in general terms, judging by the incomplete and equivocal figures we presently possess, population growth, aggravated by urbanization (i.e., the agglomeration of larger non-farming populations), was running ahead of agricultural production at the end of the eighteenth century.(19)

The evidence for a fall in real wages and incomes for rural working people over the course of the last colonial century is virtually incontrovertible. Estimates of per capita income at the close of the colonial period tend to support this view. Even allowing for the fact that silver output, which drives most estimates of gross domestic product, fluctuated considerably, it seems fairly clear that per capita income in New Spain at best remained stable or declined slightly during the last six decades of the colonial period, and at worst declined sharply during the last two decades or so.(20) If one takes into account qualitative evidence indicating that the distribution of wealth within the colony tended to become ever more skewed in the late eighteenth century, the conclusion is nearly inescapable that substantial popular impoverishment, if not immiseration, must have been the inevitable result. The movements of prices and wages certainly point in the direction of a loss of effective purchasing power, with consumer prices in Mexico rising substantially from at least the last quarter of the eighteenth century and into the first decades of the nineteenth.(21) As nearly as we can determine in the absence of reliable wage series, nominal cash wages for the most common types of unskilled and semi-skilled work, both rural and urban, remained pretty much at a dead level during the eighteenth century. The combination of rising prices and stagnant nominal wages, therefore, produced a drop in real wages during the latter half of the eighteenth century of something like 25 percent, and a concomitant fall in the living standard for most working people in Mexico. While this would certainly have reduced the real incomes of urban working people, most fully exposed to market forces because of the cash wage nexus, it also severely affected a large proportion of the country population, most especially rural wage laborers and peasants whose landholdings were not adequate to support their family subsistence and other needs. At a guess, something like half the Mexican labor force earned most, or a substantial part, of its livelihood in cash, and would therefore have seen its economic position perceptibly eroded in the late colonial decades. Compounding this secular trend there occurred a series of harvest failures and sharp price rises in articles of basic popular consumption after 1800, producing the same effects--popular immiseration, unemployment, business collapse, cityward migrations, and so forth--characteristic of most ancien regime economies in the grip of crises de subsistences.

Agrarian Unrest, Village Rebellion, Ideology, Culture

The signs of mounting agrarian conflict, fuelled and aggravated by a widespread drop in popular living standards, may be seen in virtually every corner of the central part of the country. Even with the slackening of momentum in population growth, the upward drift continued and the demographic pressure accumulated in the dynamic early decades of the century subjected the structure of landholding to new stresses by its end. Waves of land conflict and rural criminality rose to a crescendo at the close of the colonial period. In central Mexico, as in other developed areas of the country, the incidence of land suits involving all types of landholders--Indian villages, haciendas, other private owners--about tripled from the middle of the eighteenth century until its end, so that the colonial courts were virtually flooded with new and continuing litigation by the early nineteenth century.(22) As to criminality in general and rural brigandage in particular, most contemporaries and modern scholars would agree that they were notably on the upswing in the eighteenth century.(23) The colonial countryside was "innundated" and "infested" with brigands, many of whom entered the ranks of the insurgents after 1810. There was also a pretty clear upward trend in the incidence of rural collective violence---of village tumultos (riots)--during the late colonial decades. Of the 150 or so riots that occurred in central Mexico between 1700 and 1820, over a hundred took place after 1765 and nearly fifty in the period 1796-1810, though there is no particular periodicity observable and no clear relationship between rural riot and recurrent subsistence crisis.(24)

There is a quite marked continuity between the types of rural deviance and protest before 1810--primary among them the village riot and rural brigandage just mentioned--and those forms of popular violence and rebellion which came to be associated loosely with the cause of independence. It bears emphasizing that rural riots were perhaps the most visible sort of unambiguously popular violence during the earlier years of the insurgency.(25) As we shall see, the closely circumscribed mental horizons defining traditional village life conditioned the broader participation of country people--particularly indigenous peasants--in a striking manner. Moreover, it is in the form and objects of such outbreaks that agrarian rebellion reveals itself, albeit mostly in a very inchoate way. We now turn to some consideration of the agrarian elements in independence-era village uprisings, followed by a brief discussion of the cultural constraints which kept these movements localized and politically fragmented.

The three most common forms for the expression of agrarian unrest in rural disturbances both before and during the independence struggle were victimization of local non-indigenous landowners and their allies and representatives, invasion of haciendas by rioting villagers, and vaguely programmatic pronouncements about property rights and the redistribution of wealth.

An example of the first sort we have seen in the Atlacomulco case. In connection with the land question, this most often took the form of conflict with "outsiders," primarily, of course, an etic category reconstructed in the main from evidence concerning the victims of communitarian violence. These people tended to share certain characteristics. First, they were frequently non-village-born (and generally non-Indian) power-holders, or allies or creatures of such people.(26) Second, such structural "outsideness" was most often complemented by strong signs of "otherness," such as language and/or ethnic difference. Third, the upset or threat of upset linked to such people, and ostensibly at the root of popular violence, required some aspect of dynamism (a perceptible element of "more" or "recently") and/or of normative violation (to be "excessive" or "illegitimate") in order to create a level of stress or conflict sufficient for collective violence to arise in the absence of alternative resolution mechanisms. Where such individuals existed within or proximate to a village community, precipitating events could turn them from tolerated neighbors, functionally necessary mediators, or even symbiotic allies into noxious elements against which whole or part-communities might turn their destructive rage. Longstanding social or economic bonds (which in any case tended to have markedly exploitative aspects), or even personal familiarity on a day-to-day basis (as the Atlacomulco episode tragically demonstrates) were not enough to exempt such "outsiders" from collective attack.

This pattern was nearly universal in central Mexico and has been exhaustively documented as a result of the scholarly attention paid to it during the last twenty years or so. Although it had been present since the early post-conquest period--since the first Spaniard's cow nibbled the first Indian's corn patch--the incidence of such friction was apparently on the upswing during the late colonial decades.(27) We have many straightforward examples of village riots preceded by years and even decades of conflict with white landowners in the neighborhood. Such cases are straightforward in the sense that the observer can see fairly clear class, ethnic, and institutional dividing lines between rioters and outsiders, and it does not require much theoretical imagination to make some link between conflict and violence.

To cite but one additional example among many, there occurred a number of village riots in the Jilotepec area, to the northwest of Mexico City, beginning at least with the late eighteenth century and overlapping well into the independence period. It is also worth noting that this district and the zone adjacent to the east, and especially the town of Huichapan to the north, comprised a theater of endemic insurgent activity well into the middle of the decade of the 1810s. Recurrent land invasions and attacks by local indigenous peasants on landowners, government officials, and then later on royalist soldiers, punctuated the period from the 1780s on, and are to be understood as peasant responses to the expansion of haciendas onto community lands, the pushing aside of accepted tenantry arrangements, and highly abusive labor practices by local hacendados.(28) The underlying motive of the conflict in the area, and of the collective violence and insurgent activity which grew out of it, appears mainly to have been an intensifying use of local resources, both landed and human, accompanied by an increased competition between large-scale mixed farming estates and peasant producers. This, in turn, can be linked to the penetration during the middle and later decades of the eighteenth century of a commercial market into areas previously marginal to it. The Jilotepec area we may suppose to have been, like that of Atlacomulco to the southwest (and for roughly similar reasons--resource endowment, relatively sparse population, etc.) drawn fully into the deepening and ramifying late colonial market economy relatively late. The drive of large landowners in the area to abrogate customary tenantry arrangements of long standing, and to extract larger and more predictable money rents and labor inputs, and the efforts of Indian peasants to resist these demands, reflect market conditions favorable, grosso modo, to large-scale grain producers. This is an historical leitmotiv we can expect to encounter repeatedly in any analysis of the events of 1810 and the years on either side, with the bass playing the heavy repeated chords of agrarian discontent and the upper clef picking out the almost infinitely varied melody of local collective action.

The first sort of expression of agrarian unrest obviously overlaps with the second, comprising invasions of neighboring privately held lands--haciendas, generally--by peasant villagers. During the insurgency, it was naturally to be expected that rural estates would become targets for local villagers, guerrilla bands, and even bandits. Since the rebellion itself was overwhelmingly rural, the countryside, dominated as it was in many areas of the country by large haciendas, formed the major theater for fighting and collective violence. Rural estates were also tempting targets because of their often strategic location, the considerable wealth concentrated on them, and their long histories of conflict with surrounding villages and small property owners. To the degree that local people participated in such actions, attacks against landed estates pretty clearly indicated one of the major components of popular thinking about the social constitution of the colony. Thus, attacks on haciendas became an almost formulaic element in insurgent military tactics in the Mexican countryside from the very beginning of the independence struggle. For example, when in August of 1811 a well-armed force of some sixty rebels briefly captured the town of San Juan Teotihuacan (familiar to modern tourists for its ancient monumental ruins), just to the northeast of Mexico City, their actions followed a familiar pattern. They went directly to the offices of the royal tobacco monopoly, the customs house, and the local magistrate, and to the homes of prominent Spanish householders, gathering as much cash and weaponry as they could. The judicial archive in the casas reales (government building) was burned, and they freed the single prisoner in the town jail. Their business in Teotihuacan finished, they thoroughly sacked a neighboring hacienda, though the property escaped the incineration that befell so many rural estates in similar circumstances.(29) Haciendas all over the country were regularly subject to extortion of money, had their livestock stolen, and were sacked and/or burned.(30)

More interesting for our present purposes are those instances of attacks on rural estates which can be linked unambiguously to local peasants, and which reflect programmatic elements of the popular insurgency within the context of local economic and social conditions. Though on occasion villagers remained indifferent to such depredations or even helped estate employees offer resistance to them, more often they demonstrated considerable willingness and even enthusiasm in joining in attacks on rural estates initiated and led by non-local rebels. Such was the case of the attack on the Hacienda Nuestra Senora de Guadalupe, near Pachuca, in September, 1811, in which twenty men from the nearby pueblo of Santa Monica helped a rebel force sack the estate and execute two European Spaniards found hiding in the casa grande (main house). When the village men returned to their pueblo early the next morning laden with items carried off from the hacienda, the Indian alcalde was awaiting them in the cemetery with fresh pulque (a mild intoxicant), which they all sat down and drank together, almost as though in acknowledgement of a planned task well accomplished.(31) To take another example, the passage of Hidalgo's insurgent army through the neighborhood of Toluca at the end of October 1810 seems to have spurred a wave of attacks around the Cuajimalpa area, in the mountains between the Toluca Valley and the Valley of Mexico. The haciendas Buenavista, Venta de Cuajimalpa, and Batan were almost picked clean by people from a half-dozen or more local villages, whose inhabitants came en masse, directed by their local Indian officials, to harvest the standing maize in the estates' fields and share out the livestock between themselves and the passing insurgent forces.(32)

Even more revealing is the fairly typical case of Juan Valerio, an Indian of about 40 years old from the barrio of Santa Maria in Malinalco, who had worked for a number of years as a laborer on the local Hacienda de Xalmolonga by the time of his capture as an insurgent on 25 August 1811. The previous day he had participated in an attack on the hacienda, where a number of witnesses had seen him putting the torch to estate buildings, and he had taken part in an earlier attack on the same estate led by the well known rebel chieftain Ruvalcaba on 1 November 1810. Valerio had received as part of the booty in the earlier incident a bull to divide up among his fellow laborers. Witnesses recounted his statement that ". . . a priest was coming from the interior (tierra adentro) who would fix everything, since the viceroy no longer existed, and this hacienda and all its lands would be divided among its laborers."(33)

Juan Valerio's ingenuous remark brings us to the third (and least well documented) type of expression of agrarian discontent--explicit, typically fragmentary programmatic statements regarding property rights and the redistribution of wealth in the countryside. An example is that of Albino Vicente, Indian gobernador of the pueblo of San Marcos, in the Tula district, arrested on 15 October 1810 on suspicion of insurgent sympathies. Among other crimes, Vicente was accused of having encouraged an Indian villager named Mariano Pascual, from a sujeto (subordinate hamlet) of San Marcos, to write a letter to the insurgent chief Ignacio Allende ". . . asking him to give them the lands usurped from his pueblo." The naive Pascual had gone to the local escribiente (scribe) in the main plaza of Tula and asked him how much such a letter would cost. Pascual's pueblo had long had a suit pending in Mexico City against the accused usurpers of its lands, the noble counts of Moctezuma and la Cortina, and he testified that the gobernador had told him Allende had restored lands to villagers wherever he went throughout the colony.(34) Evidence of a similar sort shows unmistakable elements of a rudimentary agrarian program at play in some village disturbances, and of tendencies toward levelling ideologies. A few days after the village uprising at Tamasunchale in February 1812, for example, a local rebel commander in the neighborhood wrote to the representative of the Indians of nearby Chapulhuacan pueblo, offering him a commission in the rebel army and inviting him ". . . to receive in the name of his constituents the lands to which they aspired."(35)

This and other evidence of an explicit popular agrarian ideology and of the aggression that could be unleashed against haciendas makes it all the more notable that in most cases of independence-era endogenous village uprising there should have been so little sign of any such ideology or action, and certainly little inclination on the part of creole leaders to rum it into a broader platform for popular political mobilization in the countryside. There is a difference, of course, between goals, or levels of goals, and the instrumentalities employed to realize them. In almost no recorded instance was the actual expropriation and redistribution of hacienda land undertaken by villagers. But a generalized tendency for villagers to initiate or join in the sack of nearby rural estates--a short-term solution to problems of wealth distribution, as well as an outlet for the acting out of aggressive impulses--would not necessarily be incompatible with a deeper aspiration to redress by more fundamental steps long-standing agrarian grievances. It is probably reasonable to assume, therefore, that peasant sentiments in favor of land expropriation were more widespread than the direct evidence indicates.

The issues of land or the distribution of wealth actually came up as explicit programmatic elements relatively seldom during the insurgency, at least as compared with the Mexican Revolution of a century later or some other great modern peasant movements.(36) Certainly village riots and other violence related to land disputes between Indian villages, and between villages and neighboring non-Indian property owners, were common enough in most areas of the country up to 1810, but they do not figure as prominently thereafter. The reasons for this hiatus in explicitly agrarian violence--and it was simply an hiatus, since it appears to have picked up again after Mexico had gained its independence--are not entirely clear, but several may be suggested. On the one hand, it may be that the unsettled conditions which prevailed intermittently in many parts of the country during the period 1810-1821 worked against the normal functioning of the colonial justice and administrative systems to some degree, so that documentation on such incidents might not have been generated, or if produced might have been partially destroyed or lost. On the other hand, it may very well be the case that the substantial survival of the central government intact--its failure to collapse or implode over a period of months as the regime of Porfirio Diaz was to do in 1910-1911--and its ability to re-impose its political and military control over large areas of the colony, discouraged peasant groups in particular from undertaking land expropriations or other forms of long-term solution to the problem of agrarian pressure in the countryside. The most obvious sort of limit here would be that, while one could sack an estate in a matter of hours or even minutes, the equitable parcelling out of land to village insurgents or rioters might require weeks or even months, a leisurely framework not often available.

Third, to the degree that the elite creole directorate of the separatist movement in New Spain exercised any real influence at all over the popular insurgency at the village level, it did not particularly encourage a radical or far-reaching agrarian reform or other types of property redistribution, even as the sort of tactical measure in which Lincoln emancipated the slaves during the U.S. Civil War. The contrast with the ideology and actions of at least a segment of the Revolutionary leadership of 1910-1920--Zapata and other populist leaders, particularly--could not be clearer here, though it is true that men like the northern politicians Francisco Madero and Venustiano Carranza paralleled in their social conservatism figures of a century earlier, such as the elite creole officer Ignacio Allende.(37) Even in the revolutionary Mexico of 1910-20, however, after nearly a century of increasingly ideologically influenced agrarian disturbances, including the diffusion of liberal political doctrines, centralized efforts at some land reform, and anarchist agitation in the countryside; and even with the presence and substantial national diffusion of agrarian ideology of a vindicationist stamp (Zapatismo and other programs), agrarian action at the local level still bore the stamp of political-military necessity, on the one hand, or of longstanding vendetti or short-term looting on the other.(38) It would seem that some peasant attempts at the seizure and re-distribution of property did occur in 1810 and after, but it may be that they were not more widespread in the period, and have therefore left a limited documentary trail, because a genuinely popular agrarian ideology had not yet developed in the Mexican countryside, but only bits and pieces of one activated on an ad hoc basis if at all. In this sense the step from a profoundly localocentric, defensive, and reactive posture on the part of peasant villagers, from which they sought in the end to prevent further erosion of their economic position, to a broader, more systematically aggressive, proactive posture, from which they might actually expand the limits of village economy, was likely to be a short but difficult one.

This brings us around again to the question of culture and mentalite among the indigenous Mexican peasantry at the end of the colonial regime. Briefly put, the solipsism of village life--the intensely localocentric worldview, the xenophobic attitudes towards outsiders, and the conflation of economic, cultural, and personal identity in community membership--precluded the development of an agrarian ideology that might have helped local protest movements against the colonial regime coalesce into larger ones. Furthermore, at the top of the movement the creole and provincial directorate--always excepting the somewhat murky case of Father Morelos and one or two other people--was unlikely to embrace such doctrines, which they would have viewed as too radical.

Even had a coherent, generalizing, and widely diffused agrarian program existed in the ranks of the independence movement's creole directorate, the incommensurability of their political lexicon with that of the popular rural classes, and the cultural dead air between these groups, would have acted to dampen its broad appeal. The creole leadership and mass rural following of the insurgency were characterized by diametrically opposed worldviews and mentalities. These differences nourished entirely distinct views of citizenship, and therefore strongly conditioned the reach of ideological appeals. The conventional wisdom about the movement for Mexican independence is that the primary objective of both popular and elite rebels was national autonomy and the capture of state power. But whatever else they may be, states are also mental constructs, and one's perception of them is likely to change as one's structural perspective and conception of citizenship changes. For people even to conceive of the state, or of its active intervention in altering the social distribution of wealth or property relations, they are required to share a cognitive map which includes a view of a wider world beyond locality, and of the integuments which hold it together. For much of the population of late colonial Mexico such a vision did not--could not--exist, and to assume its presence is anachronistic. In fact, the common cultural and political ground shared by the representatives of the colonial regime with the creole leaders of the rebellion and their allies was much larger than any between the latter and their mass following. Within this framework it can be seen that the critique of the late Bourbon state fashioned by the creole directorate of the independence struggles, and the project for a national state experimented with in the decades following the break with Spain, were artifacts of elite, essentially urban culture linked to a European great tradition. The assumptions and preoccupations of that culture and the political projects that arose from it resonated only dully, if at all, with the popular culture of rural and predominantly Indian Mexico. In sum, what seems to have mattered most to the vast majority of rural people was not state, but community. An ideology of agrarianism embracing the country as a whole, or an identifiable regional space, or even the neighboring village, would not have made much sense to country people of the time.(39)

Decoding Collective Behavior

Finally we come to the question of what rural uprisings do show about the independence movement in particular and late colonial Mexican society in general. Here I would like to take up briefly in turn three aspects of the insurgency specifically with regard to village-based collective violence: language and otherness, the organization of collective violence, and patterns of popular participation.

Language comprised one of the main mediums of "otherness" in the localized village disturbances that accounted for so much of popular violence during the insurgency struggle. Nothing else demonstrated so clearly the lack of unifying ideologies among the rebels, the gulf between indigenous people and outsiders, or, most importantly, the cultural markers bounding and reinforcing the communitarian spaces whose viability and defense constituted the main item on the agenda of popular collective action. The form that threats and verbal abuse, directed by Indians at non-Indians, could assume during village riots struck many non-indigenous victims and witnesses, and non-rioters in general, as very menacing. Although many non-Indians spoke Nahuatl or other indigenous languages, most probably did not, and the fact that much rebellious discourse was carried on in unknown speech associated with the mercurial, suggestible, violent brown masses of the countryside must have seemed to them particularly sinister. Accounts by such people of the chanting and shouting that went on in some riotous situations are, in fact, oddly chilling, especially when large groups of people were involved. Not surprisingly, rioting Indian crowds expressed themselves reflexively in Indian languages, even if large elements of them were bilingual. But the yelling and anarchy so often described, for example, by witnesses to late colonial land measurements where possession of village lands was at issue, became more alarming as it dropped in volume, since the menace of the protest (at least in the perception of non-Indians) was apparently inversely related to its loudness. In the Malinalco riot of 1803, for example, the alguacil mayor (constable) of the town found the Indian crowd in the patio of the casas reales very sinister, not least because to the pushing and shoving ". . . was added a murmuring or whispering among the Indians which only they understood, since it was in their language, and also because everyone talked at the same time."(40) In the uprising at Chicontepec in 1811, the teniente de justicia (deputy magistrate) noted that the crowd of Indians which came to arrest him in his house spoke exclusively their "Mexican language," and at one point began chanting "Grab him, grab him" ("Cojanlo, cojanlo").(41) During one phase of the 1810 Amecameca uprising, a crowd of local Indians were heard to chant "War, war with the gachupines" ("Guerra, guerra con los gachupines").(42)

Passing on to forms of collective violence, the organization of many village uprisings both before and after 1810 resembles nothing less than rural soviets, or perhaps free communes along Fourierist lines. These cases consisted of short-lived attempts by rural communities apparently to cut their political and other bonds with the outside world and govern themselves in utopian independence. Occasionally one sees in such episodes hints of attacks on local systems of privilege and property, such as occurred at Chicontepec in May 1811, where the admittedly scant evidence of an insurgent program points to the local landholding structure as the most specific item of grievance. The one concrete proposal talked of in the village, and in rather diffuse terms at that, was that ". . . the lands of private individuals be divided amongst all the sons of the village, and that [other] goods be set aside for the maintenance of the lords who were coming [presumably Ignacio Allende and his army]."(43) This local agrarianism was occasionally accompanied (as in the Chicontepec case) by actual or threatened violence directed against non-Indian racial groups, and a highly amplified, almost obsessive concern with local political legitimacy and authority. It is true that one sees this village utopianism prefigured in occasional incidents before 1810 or so, and also true that during the insurgency it was sometimes complicated by the presence of outside rebel influences. Nonetheless, as a manifestation of the localocentric identity and worldview of peasant communities it was more frequent, and achieved its most developed expression, during the insurgency period.

One fairly vivid example of the pueblo-as-soviet during the insurgency is that of the village of San Lorenzo Ixtacoyotla, near Metztitlan to the northeast of Mexico City, taken by force of royalist arms on 15 November 1811. Though the defenders of the town had virtually no firearms (only bows and arrows, clubs, and stones), they had held it as an avowedly insurgent commune for some two months. The major leadership seems to have come not from outsiders, but from the gobernador of the pueblo and the local insurgent cabecillas (leaders) Luis Vite (also an Indian) and Vicente Acosta. Local men were recruited to steal maize from the nearby Hacienda San Guillermo and other estates. Other villages in the area were known to the rebels as "cantons," though their action in concert was virtually non-existent. Local roads connecting the insurgent villages with other areas were cut, the rebels ". . . thinking with this that the pueblo would remain safe"--not only, one suspects, for tactical reasons, but to underline the autochthonous nature of the uprising.(44) Local men loyal to the insurrection for the most part wore a device with a representation of the Virgin of Guadalupe and a feather on it. Acosta enjoined the village rebels not to believe in (or acknowledge the authority of) King Ferdinand VII (". . . que no creyeran en el Rey"), and Vite convinced them that the royalist troops operating in the region ". . . came killing everyone because since they were gachupines they did not like the local men ("los hijos" [del pueblo]) because they are Indians." It was also widely believed by village insurgents in the area that the gachupines and other non-Indian locals were allied against the Indian villagers, ". . . and if the non-Indians help the gachupines, we have no other support than our Lady of Guadalupe." One captured rebel testified ingenuously that the insurgents would eventually triumph because they followed the commands ("la ley") of "Nuestra Senora de Guadalupe, la Americana." When questioned specifically what those commands consisted of, he said ". . . he doesn't know what the laws contain, but that they were promulgated by those iniquitous men who are persecuting the Europeans and embargoing [the property of] and arresting all the non-Indians of the town who are their allies."(45)

So we have here and in other cases what looks to be the embryonic stage of an insular village utopia, substantially cut off from other such communes, acting to expropriate property from non-Indians, and following at least to some degree an ideology of American religious legitimation, ethnic exclusion, and rejection of the colonial state from the top down. The creation of these village soviets--or even the tendency to move in that direction, short of actually instituting such a commune--was pregnant with significance concerning indigenous villagers' views on political authority and the colonial regime in general. One can reasonably infer from their actions in these situations--as in the "normal" village politics of the pre-insurgency period--the localocentric worldview and political ideology we have been describing. A diagnostic sign of this collective habit of mind is the preoccupation with political legitimacy that one sees in many rural disturbances during the era. The basic model in play here seems to have been one in which sovereignty (to some extent) and legitimacy (to a greater extent) were seen as immanent in the local indigenous polity, or at least could be disaggregated to several levels, the bottom-most of which was the communal landholding village. The model resonated strongly with the concept of the two republics much talked of in the sixteenth century, in which Spanish and Indian polities were seen in theory to be separate from each other politically, though they might touch at points for purposes of religious conversion and maintenance, and (uneven) economic exchange.(46) A hermetic sealing-off of indigenous from conqueror society was never envisioned in this doctrine, of course, except among its most extreme advocates, but in actuality a substantial village political autonomy was widely customary even by the close of the colonial period. The point is that this seems not to have been imposed from the top of the imperial structure down, but was rather accommodated to as it continued to well up from the smallest political cells in rural society.(47)

Finally, patterns of popular participation in the insurgency tend to reinforce the model of peasant collective action we have been exploring here. Throughout its life, but most especially in its early phases, the popular following of the insurgent cause was in the main identifiably Indian as opposed to mestizo.(48) This conclusion is based upon a computer-analyzed sample of nearly 1,300 individuals captured as insurgents between 1810 and 1815. Of those individuals (about 85 percent of the sample) whose ethnicity can be determined, some 55 percent were Indian, 25 percent Spanish (overwhelmingly creole, or New World-born), 15 percent mestizo, and 5 percent mulatto or black. This corresponds fairly closely to the generally accepted overall ethnic makeup of New Spain at the end of the colonial period, when the population was comprised of 60 percent Indians, 18 percent whites, and about 22 percent mixed-blood groups. Some well substantiated conclusions from the sample of captured insurgents extend to other variables, as well, including age, marital status, occupation, place of origin, and so forth. To summarize here, the modal rebel of the period turns out to have been a married Indian farmer or rural laborer--a peasant, it is fair to say--of about thirty years old (almost elderly by the standards of the time), probably the head of a nuclear family, and most likely captured within sixty miles or so of his home, a two- or three-day trip by foot.(49)

This last point is of some particular interest to us, since it provides a picture of the physical mobility of people in times of acute social upheaval, and therefore some insight into the worldview of popular rebels and the sub-set of cultural ideas they shared amongst themselves. There are significant differentials amongst ethnic groups insofar as distance between home and place of capture is concerned. The clearest of these is between Indians and Spaniards (that is to say, whites), the former about four times more likely that the latter to be captured within a short distance (say, three hours or so by foot) of their homes. On the whole, these findings and results of other cross-tabulations among the variables suggest a sort of von Thunen's ring-like arrangement in the propensity of groups in the insurgent population to act in a spatial field centered on their home towns, villages, and hamlets. Indians, laborers and farmers, and married men tended generally to stay closest to home, while Spaniards, small merchants and muleteers, and single men wandered furthest afield. The most likely interpretation of this hinges on differences in mentality among the groups in question, the most important of these in the present context being a metaphorical political horizon defining the effective limits of people's action in collectivities. Indian peasants, who made up the largest group amongst the insurgents, were profoundly localocentric in their worldview, and their actions tended to be constrained by the political and affective campanilismo characteristic of their mentality. Spaniards, on the other hand, were much more likely to enjoy a higher degree of physical and social mobility, to have experienced something of a wider world, and therefore to be able to conceive of an abstract entity such as a nation in whose nominal interest they might take up arms. There would appear to be a spatial gradient, therefore, corresponding closely to an ethnic one which reflected not the importance of race per se in stimulating or damping collective action, but the largely unarticulated views of different groups as to what constituted the appropriate community of reference for such action.

In conclusion, if we analyze popular violence, thinking, and mentality it begins to become clear how agrarian discontent could have bred continuing political violence in the absence of an overarching ideology of agrarianism. A focus on the intervening variables between agrarian change and collective action--on the structure of rural communities, on Indian cultural identity, and on ethnic relations--indicates that agrarian discontent, while real enough in itself, was only one aspect of a broader, ongoing struggle of cultural resistance. The floodgate of opportunity provided by the Spanish imperial crisis allowed this struggle to overflow its normally restricted banks and betray its totalizing character. But if this is the case, what does it do to our understanding of the independence movement? The conclusion is inescapable that popular and elite rebels had substantially different and mutually incomprehensible agendas when they took up arms against the Spanish colonizers, and that the independence conflict was less a two-way struggle than a three-way conflict amongst the Mexican masses, the elite creole directorate of the insurgency, and the colonial regime.

Department of History LaJolla, CA 92093-0104

ENDNOTES

1. The brief account presented here is based on a detailed reconstruction of the occurrence in Chapter 3, "Anatomy of a Riot, 1:Atlacomulco, 1810," in my book-in-progress, "The Other Rebellion: Popular Violence and Ideology in Mexico, 1810-1816." The documentation on the Atlacomulco case, except where otherwise noted, is to be found in Archivo General de la Nacion, Mexico (hereafter, AGN), Criminal, vol. 229, no expediente no., fols. 263r-413v, 1810; vol. 231, exp. 1, fols. 1r-59r, 1811; vol. 238, exp. 1, fols. 1r-66v, 1811; and AGN, Infidencias, vol. 24, exp. 13, fols. 246r-254v, Fagoaga to Venegas, 1 July 1811.

2. Such rumors were common among rural people especially during the early years of the insurgency in Mexico, recalling to some extent in form and content the rapidly circulating, panic-inducing tales of marauding armies of sanguinary counter-revolutionary aristocrats traced by Georges Lefebvre in The Great Fear of 1789: Rural Panic in Revolutionary France (Princeton, 1973).

3. The rebellion had broken out on 16 September 1810 under Hidalgo's leadership, at the central Mexican town of Dolores, his own parish. At first autonomist in its aims, it quickly came to espouse a complete political rupture with Spain, though it embraced both monarchist and republican tendencies. After a series of initial military victories, Father Hidalgo and several of his lieutenants were captured and executed in mid-1811, the same fate that in 1815 befell Hidalgo's sometime seminary student and political successor Jose Maria Morelos, also a parish priest. Guerrilla warfare continued in many parts of the country until a conservative creole (Mexican-born white) military officer, Agustin de Iturbide, consummated the break with Spain in 1821, establishing a short-lived empire with himself on the throne. For a solid recent interpretive history of the Mexican independence movement, also embodying much new primary research, see Brian R. Hamnett, Roots of Insurgency: Mexican Regions, 1750-1824 (Cambridge, 1986); and specifically on the Hidalgo period (September, 1810-January, 1811), Hugh M. Hamill, Jr., The Hidalgo Revolt: Prelude to Mexican Independence (Gainesville, 1966).

4. For a detailed reconstruction of local agrarian conflicts between about 1775 and 1810, but also reaching back into the seventeenth century, see the discussion in my manuscript mentioned in note 1 above, and the sources from AGN, Tierras, cited there.

5. For a survey and some case studies of these phenomena, and their relationship to popular collective violence in general and the outbreak of the independence movement in particular, see the essays in Eric Van Young, La crisis del orden colonial: Estructura agraria y rebelion popular en la Nueva Espana, 1750-1821 (Mexico City, 1992).

6. For example, there is some evidence to indicate that one of the men prominently implicated in the murder of Magdaleno Diez himself, Jose Maria Reyes, was a somewhat less successful commercial competitor of the murdered man; and that old grudges relating specifically to local politics and law enforcement arrangements played their part in polarizing the community into factional struggles that entered heavily into the victimization of Magdaleno Diez.

7. I have elsewhere explained this dynamic as one in which violence directed by Indians and other popular groups against European Spaniards should be seen as a displacement of hostile affect away from whites as a whole (both creole and European) and toward European Spaniards in particular, following along the lines of scapegoating.