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This is to certify that the

thesis entitled
'The Juchitecan Seed of Revolt':
The Mobilization of Place-Specific Identity and

the Creation of a Tradition of Violence in Juchitan, Oaxaca,

presented by 1834—1912
Colby Nolan Ristow

has been accepted towards fulfillment
of the requirements for

Master of Arts degree in History

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1“ Wu

 

 

 

 

‘THE JUCHITECAN SEED OF REVOLT’:
THE MOBILIZATION OF PLACE-SPECIFIC IDENTITY
AND THE CREATION OF A TRADITION OF VIOLENCE
IN JUCHITAN, OAXACA, 1334 -1912

By
Colby Nolan Ristow

A THESIS
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulﬁllment of the requirements
for the degree of
MASTER OF ARTS
DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY

1998

 

 

 

ABSTRACT
‘THE JUCHITECAN SEED OF REVOLT’:

THE MOBILIZATION OF PLACE-SPECIFIC IDENTITY AND THE CREATION OF A
TRADITION OF VIOLENCE IN JUCHITAN, OAXACA, 1834-1912
By
Colby Nolan Ristow

The persistence of the village of Juchitan in the Mexican state of Oaxaca from the
pre-Columbian era to the eve of the Mexican Revolution fostered the development of a
uniﬁed community marked by overlapping collective identities. The lack of cross-cutting,
or competing identities produced a village populace with the constant potential to mobilize
collective violence. Due to relative isolation during the colonial period, Juchiteco social
relations became almost exclusively internal, while social contact outside of the village was
either conﬂictual, or with outsiders who did not share similar patterns of social relations
with others. As a result, the most important means of collective social identity became
place-speciﬁc to Juchitan.

Following Independence, the J uchitecos mobilized collective violence in order to
defend community interests fundamentally connected to the Juchiteco identity, and
offended by state-sponsored modernization programs. The result was two decades of
alternating J uchiteco rebellion and state—sponsored repression that produced a salient
conﬂict between the Juchitecos and the state government, based on the negotiation of
boundaries through the mobilization of violence. This period yielded a tradition of violence
that informed all future relations between the state government and the J uchitecos. While
mobilizing violence against the state became easy in Juchitan, the narrow and radical
demands Of the Juchitecos severely limited both the size and the scope of popular
mobilization. Ultimately, owing to centuries of historical continuity, collective violence in

Juchitan was place-speciﬁc and anti—state, and therefore inherently parochial.

 

 

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For my mom and dad

 

 

 

 

 

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This thesis will not fundamentally change the way we think about history, nor will
it even be the ﬁnal word on violence in Juchitan. However, over the course researching
and writing this humble piece, I have received invaluable assistance from many people.

For all their help, I would like to thank: Maria Eu Mudrovicic in the Department Of
Romance and Classical Languages, Scott Whiteford and staff at the Center for Latin
American and Caribbean Studies, and all of the faculty, staff, and students in the
Department Of History. Because of these people, my time at Michigan State University has
been very satisfying.

In regards to this project, I feel that particular history faculty members are deserving
of special thanks. Dagmar Herzog challenged me to think hard about everything, which
allowed me to study history in ways previously unknown to me. Her and Steve Averill
both encouraged me to think theoretically, and thus opened up an entire world of historical
literature. Peter Beattie gave me unconditional support and generosity, even when I did not
deserve it, and served as a continuous reminder that talking about history can actually be
fun. Last, but not least, I give special thanks to my advisor, David Walker. Without him,
not only would this project never have started, but I would not even be in graduate school.
His conﬁdence, support, and honest advice extend back to my undergraduate days, and

have been invaluable. TO him I owe my academic life.

 

 

 

 

 

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION AND THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK

CHAPTER ONE: COLONIAL PERIOD
Autonomy and Solidarity-Making

CHAPTER TWO: EARLY NATIONAL PERIOD
Rebellion and Repression

CHAPTER THREE: THE PORFIRIATO
Hegemony Without Consent

CHAPTER FOUR: THE MEXICAN REVOLUTION IN JUCHIT AN
The Chegomista Rebellion

CONCLUSIONS
BIBLIOGRAPHY

22

31

48

59

86
91

 

INTRODUCTION AND THEORETICAL FRAME WORK

While traveling through southern Mexico in 1946, anthropologist Miguel
Corvarrubias passed through Juchitan, "a sprawling town Of over 20,000 pure or nearly
pure Zapotec Indian inhabitants," located on the Isthmus Of Tehuantepec in the southeast
corner of the state Of Oaxaca. Corvarrubias found the inhabitants noteworthy in two
respects: their intense place-speciﬁc identity, and their reputation for violence. The
Mexican traveler noted that these villagers identiﬁed themselves not by ethnic or national
afﬁliation, but by their speciﬁc geographic place. He Observed that "Juchitecos never call
themselves mexicanos or even oaxaquefios; they are ﬁrst and always juchitecos."
Moreover, the Juchitecos were "renowned as the most ferocious, untamable ﬁghters in
Mexico when it comes to the defense Of their own rights against petty tyrants. They are
proud Of their unbroken record of loyalty to the causes Of democracy, equality, and justice
throughout the turbulent history Of Mexico." Corvarrubias understood that the Juchitecos'
distinct local identity and reputation for violence, "the Juchitecan seed of revolt" as he
called it, was not spontaneous, but grounded in historical experience. This thesis is an
attempt to understand this "seed of revolt." The analysis in this thesis will focus on the role
Of this place-speciﬁc identity in the mobilization of collective violence. More speciﬁcally,
this thesis will examine how consistent mobilization Of collective violence in Juchitan
created a tradition of violence between the state and the Juchitecos; a tradition that
signiﬁcantly impacted Juchitan's popular entrance into the Mexican Revolution.‘

The predominance Of the subsistence-based village in the Oaxacan countryside

persisted from the pre-Columbian era to the eve Of the Mexican Revolution. In Juchitan,

 

1 Miguel Corvarrubias, Mexico South: The Isthmus of Tehuantepec (New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1946), 157-60.

 

rather than discourage insurrection, village continuity fostered the development of a local

populace uniﬁed by shared class and ethnic identities, and thus consistently capable Of
mobilizing collective violence in defense of shared interests. This ability to mobilize based
on collective identity combined with a legacy of village-state violence, cultivated over a
period of decades, to initiate, facilitate, and ultimately limit the impact of the Juchitecos'
participation in the Revolution. Following Mexico's independence from Spain, the
Juchitecos violently negotiated the political, economic, and social boundaries between
themselves and outsiders. Particularly, the Juchitecos mobilized their collective identities to
defend the autonomy they had experienced throughout the colonial era, and the state
government initiated and supported programs to integrate Juchitén into a new "modern"
state. A period of alternating rebellion and repression resulted which intensiﬁed the
boundaries between the Juchitecos and the Oaxacan state government. The political
objectives that undergirded both Juchiteco rebellion and state-sponsored repression
reﬂected the importance of this conﬂict, which played a signiﬁcant role in the formation and
process Of the Chegomista Rebellion of 191 1-1912.

Collective violence was a constant possibility in Juchitan, but manifested itself in
congruence with overt conﬂict and breakdowns in the state's repressive capacity. The
decline of Oaxaca's Porﬁrian political apparatus during the initial phase Of the Mexican
Revolution allowed the Juchitecos to renegotiate fundamental political boundaries.
Meanwhile, the conﬂict between the state government of Oaxaca and the "revolutionary"
federal government permitted a local conﬂict over the position ijefe politico to escalate
into open rebellion against the state. As a result, the Chegomista Rebellion is best
understood as a continuation of a long history of anti-state community mobilization in
Juchitan.

The existence in J uchitan of a place-speciﬁc collective identity facilitated popular
participation in the Revolution, but also limited its size and impact. The Juchitecos' ability

to mobilize as Juchitecos gave unity and resilience to the Chegomista Rebellion. In

 

 

 

 

 

addition, their history of relatively successful defense Of local interests through anti-state

violence gave the rebels a heightened willingness to mobilize violence in defense of their
interests. However, the narrowness of Juchiteco interests severely inhibited the scale Of
the mobilization. Participation in collective violence based on identity depended on the
resolution of a speciﬁc conﬂict or grievance, making it impossible for the chegomistas to
integrate surrounding villages with different grievances. Moreover, the Juchitecos' lack of
amiable social relations with nearby villages circumscribed active participation in the
Chegomista Rebellion to Juchitan. The visibility Of the state government as the antagonist
in all local conﬂicts further reinforced the narrowness of Juchiteco interests. By providing
the rebels with a common enemy, the years Of continuous conﬂict between the Juchitecos
and the state government also provided the Chegomistas with the common goal of self-
deterrnination separate from the state government's inﬂuence. Ultimately, the Chegomista
Rebellion was inherently parochial, and its inability to garner active support from
surrounding populations rendered it unable to greatly effect the Revolution on a national

scale.

Theoretical Framework:

In order to understand the mobilization of collective violence, scholars are required
to balance numerous, Often-competing factors. Over the past decades theorists have
debated the importance of long—term processes, which imply long-standing structural
relations, and short-term changes or events; they have disagreed about the respective
inﬂuences Of popular discontent, opportunities for rebellion, and insurrectionary potential
in the formation Of collective violence. Individually, no single theorist can be said to have
"ﬁgured out" how collective violence is mobilized. However, taken as a whole, the ﬁeld of
social protest theory has Offered tremendous insight into why groups Of people become

violent, and when. By reviewing and combining the theories of various scholars, this

 

essay will attempt to ﬁnd an acceptable paradigm by which to make sense of the ntunerous

instances of collective violence in Juchitan between 1834 and 1912.

Likewise, attempting to understand the history Of collective violence in Juchitan
requires a sensitivity to the diverse factors involved in mobilizing groups of people. In
Juchitan, the balance between long- and short-term, and between discontent, opportunity,
and insurrectionary potential must be viewed within the context of village-state relations
and, moreover, centered on the role Of identity. The mutually antagonistic long-term
processes of local solidarity-making and "modern" state-building created in Juchitan a
political environment capable of fueling nearly a century of reciprocal violence between the
Juchitecos and the state government. However, changes in the Mexican state's ability to
govern its citizens played a role in when these instances Of violence appeared. Most
importantly, the mobilization of place-speciﬁc identity, the key to understanding collective
violence in Juchitan, was directly related to short-term changes, events, or conﬂicts,
generally involving local grievances. The repetitive mobilization of place-speciﬁc identity
in relation to grievances created signiﬁcant conﬂictual relations between the village of
Juchitan and the state government of Oaxaca. An examination of this "conflict-making"
process will take us a long way toward understanding the "Juchitecan seed of revolt," the
tradition Of violence in J uchitan, and its inﬂuence on the Mexican Revolution.

The solidarity-making process, as deﬁned by Timothy Wickham-Crowley, is a
process which leads "to enhanced abilities Of people to act collectively" through group
solidarity.2 Individual participation in collective action, especially violence, depends
foremost on the solidarity of the group to which the individual belongs. The particular
collectivity must be uniﬁed enough for the individual to believe that the action itself has a

chance of success, and that he will beneﬁt from its results.3 Thus, participation in

 

2 Timothy P. Wickham-Crowley, "Structural Theories of Revolution," in John Foran, ed.
Theorizing Revolutions (London, New York: Routledge, 1997), 39.

3 Roger V. Gould, Insurgent Identities: Class, Community, and Protest in Paris from 1848 to
the Commune (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 1995), 13-14.

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collective action depends on the individual '8 perception of the group's solidarity. This
perception is based on information gained through social interaction. In other words, the
individual understands the solidarity of the group in which he is a member only by socially
interacting with other members. Consequently, perceived solidarity is the most
fundamental prerequisite for the mobilization of collective violence. In Juchitan, solidarity
and the process of solidarity-making cannot be examined independent from the collective
identities of the people. The key to Juchiteco solidarity, in terms of enhancing the "abilities
Of people to act collectively," was the strength of their collective identities.

Like solidarity, the study Of collective identities must proceed from the basic
assumption that all identities are grounded in concrete social relationships. Since
relationships themselves are very diverse, it must also be understood that all individuals
have multiple ways Of identifying themselves. Craig Calhoun suggests that multiple claims
to identity are unavoidable, that "social life calls forth or demands identity claims and
provides Opportunities for their assertion."4 While individuals identify themselves in a
variety of ways, the strength of collective identities is determined by social networks. In
his study of "insurgent identities" in France, Roger Gould hypothesizes that collective
identities are plausible as a mobilizing instrument only to the degree in which they identify
sets Of people with: similar patterns Of social relations with Others, and a sufﬁcient level Of
internal social contact to ensure mutual awareness Of this similarity.5 These two factors
provide the limits Of identity mobilization. Collective identity as a mobilizing instrument is
perceived, like solidarity. However, unlike solidarity, perceptions Of collective identity are
made by those inside the group by juxtaposing themselves with those outside the group.

 

4 Craig Calhoun, "Social Theory and the Politics Of Identity," in Calhoun, ed. Social Theory and
the Politics of Identity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994),

5 Gould, 20.

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The strength of collective identity is further enhanced by a sense of structural

equivalence within a given society. A collective sense of shared identity is heightened
when members of the group are tied in equivalent ways to equivalent Others. Essentially, if
members of a group enjoy a sense of equality within the existing social structure, the sense
of belonging increases. However, although internal relations are important, the key to
understanding a group's potential for mobilizing collective identities is understanding how
members Of a collectivity conceive their relationship to outside society.6

Proceeding from the assumption that social actors have some conception of their
position in society, we can propose that these actors identify themselves in alliance with a
variety of social categories, based on the social relations in which they are involved.
Moreover, they will partition others into social categories as well, based on ideas of class,
ethnicity, or nationality, to name a few. This "conceptual mapping" of society is based on
a diversity of social relations and, according to Gould, "only rarely will diverse types Of
relations line up so perfectly that the same collective actors will emerge regardless of the
type of relation considered; on the other hand," he goes on to note, "when this does occur,
the absence of cross-cutting identities should lead one to expect very high levels of
mobilization indeed."7 This rare circumstance characterized Juchitan.

The formation of a powerful local identity in Juchitan produced a population
capable of high levels of mobilization, based on all the previously—mentioned factors.
During the colonial period Juchitan experienced more-or-less complete autonomy. As
subsistence-surplus farmers, or commoners, social contact for the Juchitecos was almost
completely internal, and they experienced a large degree of structural equivalence.
Moreover, Juchiteco social contact with those outside of the village was either conﬂictual,

or with outsiders who did not share similar patterns of social relations with others. As a

 

6 Ibid., 16-17.

7 Ibid., 17.

 

 

 

I'CSult, two important means of individual and eSpecially collective identiﬁcation were

geographically based: class and ethnicity. Due to a lack of amiable intervillage interaction,
there was no broad idea of a peasant class on the Isthmus. Class was geographically based
in peripheral villages, including Juchitan. Concurrently, isolation combined with Spanish
displacement of Zapotec elites eliminated the social forms which gave unity to the Zapotecs.
There was no idea Of a Zapotec ethnicity on the Isthmus, for ideas Of ethnicity, too, became
place-speciﬁc.

As a result, a very strong local identity was in place by the end of the colonial
period, owing to few cross-cutting identities and lirrrited, but relatively equal social
relations. The character of social relations in Juchitan produced a local population with a
high potential for insurrection. However, this high insurrectionary potential can not alone
account for the turbulent history of J uchitan. For that other variables need to be examined.

Economically, the process of "modern" state-building is a combination of two
interrelated processes: the exploitation of labor, related to the distribution of property, and
the commercialization of economic activity.8 Although the process of state-building is
loaded with political and cultural imperatives, scholars have generally theorized about it in
sociO-economic terms, particularly in regards to the encroachment of capitalism. As such,
the role of capitalism in agrarian insurrection has deep roots in social protest theory. More
speciﬁcally, the role of incipient capitalism in state-building has often been cited as a source
of discontent essential to the development of agrarian insurgency. However, theorists have
differed greatly in their explanations and uses Of agrarian discontent as a causal factor for
insurrection in general.

The proposition that agrarian discontent results from the introduction of capitalist
relations to previously "protected" economies is generally accepted by social protest

theorists. The impact of discontent on the formation of popular insurrection is the subject

 

8 Wickham-Crowley, 39.

 

 

 

Of much debate. Theorists differ greatly in the aniount of importance they place on rural

grievances. John Tutino, for example, argues that agrarian grievances are the most
important factor in studying rural rebellion. He contends that grievances, in fact, make the
rural poor "choose to become rebels."9 On the other hand, Theda Skocpol argues that
exploitation and grievances are inherent in rural class relations. She contends that relations
"by which an unpaid-for part of the product is extracted from the direct producers by a
class of non-producers" have historically been present in all rural settings; and that
"peasants always have grounds for rebellion." According to Skocpol, peasant grievances
are a "constant feature of the peasant condition," not an "explanatory variable."1 0

In accordance with Skocpol‘s hypothesis this study will challenge "the in-built
assumption that intensiﬁed grievances transmute readily into insurrection."ll That
being said, the examination of grievances and discontent cannot simply be ignored. In fact,
the study of agrarian discontent is necessary to establish a point of departure from which to
analyze rebellion. If Leon Trotsky was correct in saying that "the mere existence of
privations is not enough to cause an insurrection; [for] if it were, the masses would always
be in revolt," then the historian is still obligated to demonstrate that these privations did, in
fact, exist.12 Not only because speciﬁc grievances greatly effect the form of a given
insurrection, but also because grievances are a necessary precondition for agrarian
insurrection. The effect of particular grievances on the formation of collective violence will
be addressed further below, while a review of discontent as a precondition will follow

immediately.

 

9 John Tutino, From Insurrection to Revolution in Mexico: Social Bases of Agrarian Violence,
1750-1940 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986). 32.

'0 Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1979), 115.

' ‘ Wickham-Crowley, 48.

‘2 Trotsky quoted in Michael S. Kimmel, Revolution: A Sociological Interpretation
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), 91.

 

 

 

In terms of establishing a basic level of discontent, a number of scholars have
pointed at the dual processes of labor exploitation and economic commercialization.
However, theories tend to differ in explaining exactly how these processes produced
discontent. The central difference is located in the emphasis on long-standing relations in
human behavior or shorter-term changes. An attempt to balance the two is present in most
theories, although in distinct forms. A review of the various ideas about the connection
between capitalism and agrarian discontent will aid us in understanding these processes as
they appear in Oaxacan history.

In Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century, Eric Wolf explains that "North Atlantic
capitalism," by its very nature, produced rural dissatisfaction. This social organization "in
which labor is sold, land is rented, and capital is freely invested" led to commodiﬁcation of
labor, land, and wealth.13 Commodiﬁcation, then, effectively turned people into economic
actors; return maximizers and expense rninimizers. Economics took precedence over
social obligations and social costs. Wolf contends that capitalism required that land, labor,
and wealth be commodities, and therefore that traditional social and cultural institutions be
liquidated. As a result, "existence and its problems became subsidiary to marketing
behavior."14 The effect of this on rural cultivators was alienation: from the process of
production, from the product, from themselves, and from their fellow man. Wolf insists
that these were not philosophical concepts, but material tendencies.

The effects of commodiﬁcation, according to Wolf, did not end with human labor and
alienation. The commodiﬁcation of land presented another real problem. Peasants used
land resources to underwrite their minimal livelihood, and the transformation of land into a
commodity threatened the peasants' resources, and thereby their subsistence base. With

land as a commodity to be bought, sold, and rented, capitalists menaced peasants' access to

 

'3 Eric Wolf, Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century (New York: Harper and Row, 1969).
277-78.

'4 Ibid, 279.

 

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communal land, barred peasants claims to unClaimed land, and seized land outright. The

peasant land base receded as a result.

Capitalism also strained the peasant's link to the outside world, according to Wolf. The
increased commercialization of agricultural produce and the capitalization Of rent created
dislocation and tension between peasant and landlord. Capitalist relations put the landlord
in a bind: he could continue to fulﬁll preexisting social obligations and be responsive to the
peasantry, or fulﬁll economic interests and maximize proﬁts. They generally chose to
respond to the prompting of the market, and the peasantry became socially dislocated.

In The Moral Economy of the Peasant, James Scott cites the encroachment of capitalism
as a major contributor to agrarian discontent, but he stresses short-term grievances. Rather
than a process of alienation or commodiﬁcation, Scott emphasizes the scope and
suddenness of peasant grievances. More speciﬁcally, the scope and suddenness of a shock
to subsistence arrangements is the key to agrarian discontent. A shock of substantial scope
effects a larger body of people, and a sudden shock is more difﬁcult to adapt to routinely
and incrementally. Joel Migdal supports this emphasis in Peasants, Politics, and
Revolution. For Migdal and Scott, the key to rural unrest is not economic depression, but
rather economic crisis. Migdal claims that economic crisis creates a sudden disruption in
peasant social exchange, forcing the customarily inward-oriented peasantry to go outside
the community in search of new types of exchange. The peasantry is thus forced into a
vulnerable position.15

James Scott further claims that a sudden and substantial shock to subsistence
arrangements is more likely in areas that are most vulnerable. Areas with the sharpest
ﬂuctuations in income tend to suffer more frequent and dangerous subsistence crises, and

are therefore "brittle and explosive."16 Some areas are simply subject to natural yield

 

'5 Joel Migdal, Peasants, Politics, and Revolution: Pressures Toward Political and Social
Change in the Third World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974).

'6 James Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast
Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), 196.

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ﬂuctuations. The climate just produces massive ﬂuctuations in crop yields, making the

zone precarious. A massive ﬂuctuation in annual yields coupled with a low annual income
can create a serious subsistence crisis. These areas are often found in peripheral regions --
they are peripheral precisely because they are precarious. Other vulnerable areas according
to Scott are zones subject to world market ﬂuctuations. Here, market penetration creates a
"shock ﬁeld": a highly commercialized area in which income is a function of the market.
These zones are generally very fertile and productive, therefore, large extractions are
assessed by landlords. These extractions are not usually overly harsh, but when the market
ﬂuctuates, the extraction remains the same. This is the key to discontent in these areas.
When the market ﬂuctuates both the landlord and the peasant are squeezed, so the peasantry
is hurt by the landlord and the market, simultaneously. Beyond this, these highly
commercialized areas are stripped of their traditional community ties, and left with no
retreat from the pressure of the market. The ﬁnal zones of particular susceptibility are those
whose incomes rely on a single crop. A monocrop area has its own shock ﬁeld, dependent
on one product. A price slump on the solitary crop can produce a sector-wide subsistence
crisis. For those who live in any of these areas, a sudden and substantial shock can cause
more misery than economic depression.

Wolf, Scott, and Migdal agree that economic discontent resulting from the spread of
capitalism created intense grievances in the countryside. They do not agree on the type of
grievances it created. Wolf claims that capitalism created alienation while Scott and Migdal
claim that sudden disruptions, or shocks, created real threats to subsistence capabilities.
This disagreement over long-term and short-term economic stress is recognized by John
Coatsworth. He offers that the two sides are compatible: "emphasis on short-term

economic trends does not necessarily reduce the importance of long-term trends." 1 7 He

 

‘7 John Coatsworth. "Patterns of Rural Rebellion in Latin America: Mexico in Comparative
Perspective" in Friedrich Katz, ed. Riot, Rebellion, and Revolution: Rural Social Conﬂict in Mexico
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 48.

11

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

uses eighteenth century Mexico to hypothesize that long-term trends combined with

ﬂuctuations to transform grievances into acute grievances.

This essay will examine both long—term trends and short-term changes inherent in
the introduction of capitalism. Moreover, by combining ideas about the nature of the
capitalist process with ideas about solidarity-making, the social bases of collective violence
in Juchitan become evident. The two processes provided the basis for fundamental and
powerful conﬂict between a locality with a very high insurrectionary potential and a state
government distinctly antagonistic to local interests. However, to understand the formation
of speciﬁc instances of collective violence, we need to go beyond these social bases and
examine two other important variables: (1) political opportunities for rebellion resulting
from the central state's inability to control its citizens; and (2) the manner in which a uniﬁed
agrarian community relates to speciﬁc changes, conﬂicts, or grievances, and translates that
relationship into collective violence.

For agrarian insurrection to occur, the rural populace must have an .opportunity to
transform their grievances into some form Of collective violence. This opportunity for
rebellion depends on the central state's ability to exercise control over its people. This
connection between state control and opportunity requires that three types of state-centered
analysis be considered, as proposed by Jeff Goodwin: the state-capacity, political-
opportunity, and state-constructionist approaches. ' 8 All three of these approaches are tied
together by what Michael Mann has termed the "infrastructural power" of the state.19 In
other words, the state's "ﬁscal resources, military power, and organizational reach into
civil society."20 The ability of a rural populace to rebel is directly related to the penen‘ation

of the state's "infrastructural power" in a given location.

 

'3 Various approaches introduced in Jeff Goodwin, "State-Centered Approaches to Social
Revolutions: Strengths and Limitations of a Theoretical Tradition," in Foran, Theorizing Revolutions, 12-
14.

'9 Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power, Volume Two: The Rise of Classes and Nation-
States, 1760-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

12

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

State-centered approaches that focus on infrastructural power are interrelated and

essentially stem from the analysis of the capacity of the state. This analysis, according to
Goodwin, "emphasizes the actual material and organizational capacity (or lack thereof) of
state ofﬁcials to implement successfully their political agenda."21 The ability of the state to
implement its agenda is directly related to the state's ability to extend infrastructural power
over its domain. Where infrastructural power is weak, the ability of the people to
transmute grievances into collective violence is enhanced. In weaker areas the rural
populace is able to negotiate more favorable political conditions from the state, often by
mobilizing collective violence.

This was the casein Mexico following Independence, when the central state's
ability to govern its people was crippled by a continuous lack of ﬁscal resources, diverted
military power, and failure to inﬂuence peripheral civil society. In the absence of
infrastructural control, the nation's peripheries underwent a period of extensive violence.
In Juchitan this condition was exaggerated. Throughout the early national period the
Juchitecos mobilized and negotiated favorable conditions in the district of Juchitén,
although at the expense of repeated violent repression from the state. However, with the
Porﬁriato the state's governing capabilities changed dramatically.

The Porﬁriato marked a major departure from Mexico's national beginnings by
replenishing ﬁscal resources, consolidating military power, and establishing transportation
and communications infrastructure. For thirty years the central government maintained
stability and control over the nation's rural populace. If the people's ability to rebel
depended on the weakness Of the state, how do we explain the Mexican Revolution, which
brought down Mexico's most capable, centralized regime? Understanding the Revolution
requires a different approach, although one that does not part with the examination of the

state's governing capacity. The political-opportunity perspective is applicable to societies

 

2° Goodwin, 13.

2‘ Ibid., 12-13.

 

 

 

 

 

in which political hegemony has been consolidated. According to this approach the

Opening of a political opportunity is necessary for an insurrection to occur.22 Many
theorists have written about agrarian insurrection using this perspective.

James Scott examines the Opportunity for rebellion in terms of "relationships of
force in the countryside."23 He argues that repressive force is the most important deterrent
to agrarian insurrection. From here, it is only logical that opportunity would be the key to
rebellion. An opportunity, for instance, like a lull in repressive strength: "A change of
regimes, the weakness of the state that may follow a military defeat, a regional success by
an opposition party, are all signs that the balance of forces may have changed and are often

the motivating events for peasant rebellions."24

Theda Skocpol makes a similar argument.
She claims that an agrarian order is immune to agrarian revolts if landlords directly control
administrative and military sanctioning machineries at local levels. She continues by stating
that the most vulnerable societies have high peasant autonomy, solidarity, and high levels
of state repression. To understand what makes peasants rebel, we must go beyond peasant
society: "widespread and irreversible" revolts resulted from the breakdown of the state's
monopoly of repressive capacity.25 Therefore, the argument follows, these societies with
high autonomy, solidarity, and state repression are vulnerable because of political
instability. When the state hits political crisis, rebellious peasants will seize the opportunity
and rebel.

The Chegomista Rebellion ﬁts into this political-opportunity paradigm. Political
conﬂicts following the fall of Porﬁrio Diaz resulted in government paralysis and military
diversions which gave the Chegomistas the necessary space to ﬂourish in the Isthmus

countryside for several months. This political space was exactly what was missing during

 

22 Ibid., 13.
23 Scott, 227.
2‘ Ibid, 229.

25 Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions, 117.

14

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

the Porﬁriato. Although the people of Juchitén. and doubtless other regions of Mexico,

considered their situation intolerable during the Porﬁriato, the government repressed or
disassembled major rebellions before they crystallized. Although this conclusion
underscores the importance Of political opportunities, it also points to the necessity of a
third state-centered approach. To understand the groundswell of popular rebellion released
by the Mexican Revolution it is necessary to examine the state's ability to construct popular
support.

The state-constructionist perspective, called by Skocpol the "Tocquevillian"
approach,26 "emphasizes how states shape the very identities, social ties, ideas, and even
emotions of actors in civil society;" or perhaps more importantly, "how the actions of
foreign or domestic states help to make cognitively plausible and morally justiﬁable certain
sorts of collective grievances."27 This focus necessarily connects to ideas about
hegemony. Hegemony, according to Raymond Williams, is a form of practical
consciousness that concerns "a whole body of practices and expectations, over the whole
of our living: our senses and assignments of energy, our shaping perceptions of our selves
and our world."28 This practical consciousness gains predominance by what Gramsci
called consent. Joseph Femia has interpreted consent as a "psychological state, involving
some kind of acceptance - not necessarily explicit - of the socio—political order or of certain
vital aspects of that order."29 Consent, or acceptance of the socio—political order, is

dependent on the concept of "legitimacy;" the belief that conforming to the existing order is

 

2° Theda Skocpol, "Bringing the State Back In: Strategies of Analysis in Current Research," In
Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschrneyer, and Theda Skocpol, eds. Bringing the State Back In (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1985), 21.

27 Goodwin, 13-14.

23 Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 110.

29 Joseph V. Femia, Gramsci’s Political Thought: Hegemony, Consciousness, and the
Revolutionary Process (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981).

 

 

15

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

justiﬁed and proper. The state's role in constI'UCting consent is through the construction

and extension of civil society.

While the Diaz regime brought stability to Mexico through the extension of
infrastructural power, its failure to inﬂuence important aspects of civil society limited its
ability to control the Mexican people. In Juchitan the Porfu'ian government imposed jefes
politicos on the local populace and extended a railroad through the district, but failed to
construct a sense of legitimacy. On the eve of the Revolution almost no Juchitecos attended
public schools, very few were literate, and about half spoke Spanish. Juchitan had existed
almost completely ﬁee of outside inﬂuence. As a result, the Juchitecos reacted to political
and economic impositions from the outside with a feeling of "moral outrage."30 The
Juchitecos viewed the state and central govemments' attempts to integrate them into
Mexican society as unjust, deﬁned by Barrington Moore as "a situation they need not,
cannot, and ought not endure."31 By failing to extend key aspects of civil society into
J uchitan, public education most importantly, the state failed to make this sense of injustice
either cognitively plausible or morally justiﬁable. Therefore, when political opportunity
presented itself, the J uchitecos pushed their local interests with a torrent of popular
mobilization.

Understanding how moments of collective violence developed in J uchitan depends
on understanding how place-speciﬁc identity is actually mobilized. Central to this topic is
understanding the relationship between grievance and identity. People typically juggle
multiple identities, each with a corresponding set of interests. Short-term changes, events,
or conﬂicts, generally related to grievances, do not change these identities, but rather cause
individuals to privilege one identity over another. More speciﬁcally, short—term grievances

compromise the speciﬁc interests of particular groups, forcing the group to reorder its

 

3° Idea of "moral outrage" as a source of discontent presented in Scott.

3' Barrington Moore, Jr., Injustice: The Social Bases of Obedience and Revolt (New York: ME.
Sharpe. 1978), 462.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

COIlective identity to defend the effected interests. Thus, by offending the interests of a

group of people, these critical events rearrange the priority given to social identiﬁcations
that already matter to people in varying degrees. Depending on how these short-term
grievances call forth collective identities, they can set the stage for mobilization.3 2

In Juchitan the modernization schemes of the state government of Oaxaca, although
relatively impotent, created real grievances for the rural populace. Attempts to expropriate
land and salt resources from the villages of the Isthmus created conﬂict between "exploiter"
(entrepreneurs sponsored by the state government) and "exploited" (indigenous villagers of
the Isthmus), to which the Juchitecos related as "exploited." However, the violent reaction
of the J uchitecos could not integrate with other "exploited" villagers because no social
relationship existed between Juchitan and the majority of its neighbors. Moreover, the
relations which did exist between J uchitén and other villages were generally conﬂictual.
Thus, the reaction to land and salt expropriation in Juchitan was necessarily local, but also
very powerful. Juchitan was a highly homogenous society and was able to mobilize almost
unanimously based on identity. The strength of the J uchitecos repeated mobilizations
stemmed from the lack of cross-cutting identities: to mobilize based on class meant to
mobilize as J uchitecos, and to mobilize based on ethnicity also meant to mobilize as
Juchitecos. As a result, the Juchitecos shared similar relations to what they were ﬁghting
for. The participants in these instances of violence saw themselves as part of a collectivity
large enough and uniﬁed enough to be successful, and homogenous enough to believe that
what was good for one was good for all.

'The repetitive mobilization of collective violence in Juchitén reinforced the collective
idea of a Juchiteco identity and created a signiﬁcant conﬂict between Juchitan and the state
government of Oaxaca. Essentially, continuous mobilization enhanced the perception of

the Juchiteco participants that they were part of a uniﬁed collectivity. Broadly, the

 

’2 Gould, Chapter One, especially 13-23.

17

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

commitment to collective violence begins with the individual 's commitment to a collective

identity. Thus, once actual mobilization begins the group commitment to a particular
identity, and its corresponding interests, is cemented. As mobilization continues, as it did
in Juchitén, the group's commitment to an identity becomes more plausible and signiﬁcant
for members of the group.33

The conﬂict between Juchitan and the Oaxacan government grew from this
commitment to a collective identity. The act of committing to a collective identity inherently
constructs boundaries between those deﬁned within the group and those deﬁned outside the
group. Moreover, people tend to view the world, including themselves, in terms of
collective actors, based on a variety of social categories. This conceptual mapping of the
world into groups of collective actors carries with it built-in expectations about how
members of a particular group are supposed to act. As such, the members of various
groups draw boundaries between themselves and outsiders. When identity—based violence
begins between two groups, the boundaries between the two becomes more salient and
results in an important and intense conﬂict. The creation and solidiﬁcation of shared ideas
within one group about the other is central to understanding the mobilization of identity
because these ideas make the groups of collective actors on both sides appear to be
homologous. As a result, the mobilization of collective violence in this type of conﬂict
situation is intrinsically a mobilization both for the interests which correspond to the
mobilizing identity, and against the interests of those deﬁned as opposition. The type of
conﬂict, based on collective identities, was very prevalent between the Juchitecos and the
state govemment.“

On the eve of the Mexican Revolution the J uchitecos and the state government of

Oaxaca were the inheritors of a legacy cultivated by decades of nearly continuous violence

 

33 Ibid.

34 Ibid.

18

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

il
l
I

l‘ ‘ l
i Q l
I ‘ i ‘. '
I
I“ 9 I‘
. I . '
. O- L

 

in Juchitan. The period of rebellion and repreSSiOn resulted in an intense conﬂict between
the Juchitecos and the state government, and a tradition of violence that transformed the
face of the Mexican Revolution as it appeared on the Isthmus of Tehuantepec.

The Chegomista Rebellion cannot be understood separately from previous
mobilizations of violence in Juchitan. What had occurred in previous decades was not
forgotten and effected the behavior of both the Chegomistas and the state government
during the rebellion. Owing to the large degree of continuity both in Juchitan and in state
politics, each side had an idea, grounded in historical experience, of what was expected of
themselves, and what to expect from each other. These expectations were most apparent in
the images of the J uchitecos. While the J uchitecos believed themselves to be heirs to a
legacy of rebellion in the face of tyranny, the state government saw the Juchitecos as
savages, or indios barbaros. Both of these images had their roots in the period of violence
following Independence, and this fundamental conﬂict, although reinforced by real political
and economic concerns, provided the baseline for the military conﬂict which took place in
19 1 1- 19 12.

The mobilizations of collective violence during the nineteenth century also effected
the actual direction and process of the Chegonrista Rebellion. On the most basic level, like
all previous Juchiteco insurrections, the Chegomista Rebellion was separatist in nature.
The Chegomistas were not revolutionary in the sense that they did not seek to
fundamentally change the existing power structure. Rather, the Chegomistas, like all
previous Juchiteco rebels, wanted to remove themselves from the power structure, and
more speciﬁcally from the state of Oaxaca. This separatist tendency was the result of the

Juchiteco conﬂict with Oaxaca's state government; Juchiteco rebellions did not demand

 

separation from the republic, but rather separation from Oaxaca.
The state government's dependence on violent repression as the primary means by

which to control the Juchitecos, in large part, created a tradition of violence in Juchitan.

 

Continuous repression at the hands of the state government increased the Juchitecos

 

19

 

 

 

 

willingness to use violence against the state. According to Jeff Goodwin, "state violence

against mobilized groups and oppositional ﬁgures is likely to reinforce the plausibility,
justiﬁability, and (hence) diffusion of the idea that the state needs to be violently
'smashed!"35 Throughout the nineteenth century and the ﬁrst decade of the twentieth, the
government's control of Juchitan depended very heavily on military power and repression.
As a result, when the opportunity presented itself with the Mexican Revolution, the

J uchitecos attempted to violently sever their ties with the state of Oaxaca. Furthermore, the
state's dependence on repression to control a highly uniﬁed community like Juchitan
created a situation, according to Roger Gould, in which mobilization is typically "marked
by an especially virulent sort of hatred."36 This hatred of the state government and its
instruments manifested itself through acts of extreme violence on the part of the Juchitecos.
However, it would be an error to understand the tradition of violence as simply a facilitator
of J uchiteco mobilization.

The state government of Oaxaca also participated in the construction of this tradition
of violence, and saw violence as the best way to deal with such an unruly set as the
Juchitecos. In fact, both the Juchitecos and the state utilized violence as a negotiating tool.
Throughout the nineteenth century the J uchitecos mobilized collective violence to negotiate
relatively favorable conditions in their village, such as de facto political autonomy and
access to expropriated land and salt resources. On the other hand, the state government
used violence to negotiate an end to such instances of Juchiteco rebelliousness, and met
with more-or—less success. Predictably, the end result was that, in 1911, non-violent

negotiation between the state government and the Chegomistas was impossible.

 

3’ Goodwin, l9; Wickham-Crowley adds, "where the state is unable to control and administer
such a region effectively, but is none the less able to terrorize populations therein, such regions are likely
to harbor 'persistent insurgencies!" 54.

3‘ Gould, 17.

20

 

    
    

'4:
A

U
A.”

The theoretical concepts presented in the preceding Introduction had a tremendous impact
on Juchiteco society and its interaction with the surrounding world. However, these
processes, constructions, conﬂicts, and events did not simply "happen" spontaneously, nor
did they occur independently. In reality, the processes, constructions, conﬂicts, and events
that shaped Juchiteco history and its relation with Oaxaca occurred and proceeded over
time, elaborately interwoven. Having separated many of these concepts in the introduction
for explanatory purposes, the analysis that follows will attempt to examine the interrelated
concepts of community solidarity, nation-building, incipient capitalism, place-speciﬁc
identity, and the mobilization of collective violence as they existed in reality -- as a complex
network.

The preceding Introduction was an explanation and an inventory of various,
important theoretical concepts given in an attempt to construct a useful framework by which
we can better understand the robust history of collective violence in Juchitén. The

following chapters are a test of the utility of that framework.

21

 

CHAPTER ONE

COLONIAL PERIOD: Autonomy and Solidarity-Making

The nature of the agricultural economy on the Isthmus limited the effect of Spanish
colonialism on land and labor relations. However, the limited Spanish presence did
signiﬁcantly transform indigenous social relations. Owing both to the form of the
preexisting Zapotec social structure and the effects of Spanish colonization, social relations
as well as class and ethnic identity became localized in the peripheral villages during the
colonial period.

Juchitan, a peripheral village, experienced more-or-less complete autonomy during
the colonial period, which resulted in social isolation. Social contact between Juchitecos
and outsiders was either conﬂictual, as with the majority of the surrounding villages, or
with outsiders who did not share similar patterns of social relations with others, such as the
Zapotec "nobles" of Tehuantepec or the Spaniards. Consequently, amicable social relations
in Juchitan were almost exclusively internal. The Spanish seizure of power from the
Zapotec elite further enhanced the internal solidarity of the Isthmus villages. By reducing
the power of the nobles, the Spaniards inadvertently localized both class and ethnic
identity. By depending on the Spanish to maintain their social status, the Zapotec elite of
Tehuantepec alienated the indigenous working classes located in the peripheral villages.
Furthermore, the Spanish displacement of elite power eliminated the social forms that gave
unity to the Zapotec ethnicity. Ultimately, notions of collective identity became centered in
the separate peripheral villages. Juchitan, in particular, emerged as a population center with
a strong local identity, based on limited external social relations and a lack of cross-cutting
identities. Prior to Independence the Juchitecos developed as a group of villagers with a

high potential for insurrection.

22

 

In the colonial period, the Spanish crown's protCCtion of Indian lands and the ﬂuctuating
nature of the Isthmus' agricultural economy conspired to inhibit the development of
haciendas and plantations. As a result, Spanish landholdings and presence in Oaxaca, and
particularly on the Isthmus, waxed and waned with agroeconomic ﬂuctuations, preventing
any sustained threats to protected Indian land. Eventually, Spanish colonizers in the region
opted to exploit the indigenous population indirectly.

Following the "conquest" of Mexico the Spanish crown granted conquistador
Heman COItés personal sovereignty over the Marquesado del Valle de Oaxaca, which also

encompassed the southern Isthmus of Tehuantepec. The region offered commercial

 

opportunities in ship-building, gold mining, and especially livestock raising. For a brief
period following conquest the Isthmus played an important role in the Spanish imperial
project, based predominantly on its livestock production. During this period Cortés
extracted tribute from the Isthmus Zapotecs both in goods and labor. However, the intense
interaction of the period induced demographic disaster for the Zapotecs due to foreign
disease, and a subsequent retrogression of the Spanish presence on the Isthmus.
Following its initial successes the Isthmus became a marginal zone in New Spain and the
Marquesado del Valle shrunk on the Isthmus.37
Late in the sixteenth century the Isthmus became the target of renewed Spanish

interest in the region, in the wake of Cortés' death. The Cortes family recovered its
Isthmus estates, which now became the Haciendas Marquesanas, and Spaniards ﬂooded
into the region to develop the land of the consistently dying peasantry. This "ranching
boom" really brought the Tehuantepec region under the control of the Spaniards. Between
1590 and 1599, the crown granted 122 parcels of land to enterprising Spaniards, who used

the ﬂat, dry lands of the Isthmus to graze livestock. By 1620, one hundred wealthy

 

37 John Tutino, "Ethnic Resistance: Juchitén in Mexican History," in Howard Campbell, Leigh
Binford, Miguel Bartolomé, and Alicia Barabas, eds., Zapotec Struggles: Histories, Politics, and
Representations from Juchitdn, Oaxaca (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993), 45—47;
Howard Campbell, Zapotec Renaissance: Ethnic Politics and Cultural Revivalism in Southern Mexico
(Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1994), 11-13.

23

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Spanish families lived in Tehuantepec, the regional head town. However, beginning in the
1630s, the commercial development of the Isthmus declined steadily. The decline of the
silver economy in northern New Spain resulted in a decline of livestock production which
effected southern livestock producers most adversely.38

The limited Spanish economic development on the Isthmus did not destroy the
Zapotec lifestyle to any great extent. Throughout the colonial period indigenous
communities were by far the largest landholders in Oaxaca, as well as the Isthmus. 'The
Spanish crown granted indigenous communities legal title to their original lands and

allowed them to receive additional land. The Isthmus Zapotecs consistently used colonial

 

courts to defend their land and labor rights, and as a result, the minimal permanent labor
required by hacendados generally came from African slaves. Moreover, the boom and bust
nature of the region's agricultural economy limited commercial development and restricted
the Spanish presence on the Isthmus, allowing Zapotec villagers relative autonomy.
Ultimately, large estates proved to be too risky; hacendados bought, sold, and even
mortgaged their holdings on a regular basis.39

During this period the merchant classes of Oaxaca discovered that exporting the
products of Indian villagers was more proﬁtable and more secure than owning land and
directly exploiting Indian labor. By the eighteenth century, Antequera (later the capital city
of Oaxaca) became a major center of colonial commerce and was the third largest city in
New Spain. This mercantile method of exploitation extorted the products of Indian labor
rather than removing the Indians from the land. As a result, the displacement of Indian

communities conﬂicted with the ﬁnancial interests of the Oaxacan elite.40

 

3“ Tutino, "Ethnic Resistance," 47-49; Campbell, 13-14.

39 William B. Taylor, Landlord and Peasant in Colonial Oaxaca (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1972). Tutino, 49.

‘0 Brian Hamnett, Politics and Trade in Southern Mexico, 1750—1821 (London: Cambridge
University Press, 1971).

24

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Midway through the eighteenth century a "boom" in the international dye market

renewed proﬁtability and interest in the Isthmus. Motivated by the resurrection of the silver
economy in the north and the expansion of the textile market in Europe, dye production
brought to the Isthmus a period of sustained economic development. The production of
cochineal and indigo for export spread from the Oaxacan highlands to the Isthmus, but
owing to the nature of the two crops, did not threaten the land base of the Isthmus
Zapotecs. Instead the Zapotecs of the region used this commercial development to
supplement their subsistence-oriented activities. Not an estate crop, the village women
collected the insects used to produce cochineal dye in addition to familial chores, for
supplemental income. Indigo, on the other hand, was a grass-like estate crop that required
intense seasonal labor. The indigenous population provided the seasonal labor, but only as
a supplement to their subsistence base. Estate owners drew a small required permanent
labor force from the region's small mulatto population. Moreover, the commercial
development of indigo on the Isthmus required no land expropriation because old cattle
estates provided the necessary land."1

The indigenous village as the predominant landholding unit was the colonial
heritage of the Isthmus section of Oaxaca. Spanish colonial policies and the ﬂuctuating
economy kept conﬂicts over land to a minimum, and guaranteed an autonomous existence
for the majority of the Zapotec population.

Before Mexico's independence from Spain, J uchiteco identity developed over a
period of centuries, producing a community which distinguished itself through conﬂict and
the rejection of Spanish inﬂuence, and compromised various collective identities and their
corresponding interests. By the end of the Spanish colonial project the Juchitecos had
established ideas of who "we" were as Juchitecos, and who "they" were as outsiders,

usually Spaniards and later Tehuanos.

 

“ Tutino, "Ethnic Resistance," 51-52.

25

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The ﬁrst establishment of a Zapotec presence on the Isthmus foreshadowed the

conﬂictive identity that would develop there over time. In the mid-fourteenth century a
group of Zapotecs migrated from the highland Valley of Oaxaca and established a colony
on the Isthmus, conquering the land of local ethnic groups. Conﬂict motivated and resulted
from this movement. Pressure from encroaching Mixtecs and divisions within Zapotec
society impelled the migration, and the migration itself created friction with Huaves and
Zoques of the Isthmus. A distinct Isthmus Zapotec identity began with the conquest of the
Isthmus. The only tie that remained between the Isthmus and Highland Zapotecs was a
tribute payment from the Isthmus center of Guiengola to the highland elite in Zaachila, and
the fall of Zaachila to the Mixtecs in the ﬁfteenth century completed Isthmus Zapotec
distinctiveness.4 2

Intense class stratiﬁcation characterized pre-Columbian Zapotec society which was
organized geographically into head towns and tributary villages, based on status. Nobles,
who drew their power from control of the spirits, lived in head towns and commoners,
who generally worked the land, resided in the tributary villages. In Zapotec society nobles
lived pampered lifestyles, subsidized by tribute extractions from commoners. On the
Isthmus, Guiengola was the head town and accommodated the nobles, and Juchitan was
one of several peripheral tributary villages. The establishment of Spanish colonialism
aggravated the uneven relations between the head town and its tributary villages, and
between noble and commoner."3

The Isthmus Zapotecs had little contact with the intruding Spaniards until the end of
the sixteenth century, when the small "ranching boom" increased the Spanish presence on
the Isthmus and severed formal ties between the Zapotec tributary villages and the head

town, now called Tehuantepec. The elimination of formal ties resulted from the inﬂux of

 

‘2 Campbell, 6; Tutino, "Ethnic Resistance," 43-44.

‘3 Campbell, 7-8; Tutino, "Ethnic Resistance," 43.

26

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Wealthy Spanish families into Tehuantepec; a tOtal of one hundred families by 1620. The

incursion of Spaniards resulted in the imposition of a Spanish cabildo govemment, and the
expulsion of the indigenous elite in favor of the Spanish. With the new cabildo
government, tributary villages elected their own ofﬁcials, rather than having them imposed
from Tehuantepec. Moreover, with increasing Spanish control of Tehuantepec, Isthmus
Zapotec commoners no longer formally depended on the indigenous elite: Dominican friars
took over religious ceremony, undercutting elite power at its source; Spanish government
took positions from indigenous elite and eliminated hereditary control; and the new
imperial cash economy replaced relations between elite and commoner. The peripheral
villagers simply no longer needed the nobles of Tehuantepec.“4

The dissolution of the Zapotec elites' formal authority should not imply that no ties
existed between elite and commoner. 'The persistence of clandestine Zapotec religious
ceremonies, as evidenced by cases of idolatry, implies that pre—Columbian power relations
persisted, although not allowed within the imposed social structure. That notwithstanding,
during this period of heavy Spanish contact in Tehuantepec, cultural relations between
Isthmus Zapotec elite and commoner also began to strain. The elite became dependent on
the Spanish as the only means by which they could maintain their power: they participated
in the imposed style of local government, associated with Spanish authorities, and engaged
in commercial entrepreneurial activity. As a result of constant contact and dependence, the
nobles of Tehuantepec began to conform to Spanish culture, adopting Spanish clothes,
customs, and language. This cultural assimilation increased the tension between
Tehuantepec and the peripheral villages, such as Juchitan, which had very little contact with
the Spanish.45

 

4‘ Campbell, 13- 15.

‘5 Ibid., 16-19, 23-24.

27

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

After 1660 a series of general Indian revOits swept across the Isthmus and
elucidated the complete separation between Isthmus Zapotec elite and commoner. While
the peripheral villages took part in these rebellions, the Tehuanos assisted the Spanish in
stamping them out. Never before had the elite connection to the Spanish been so obvious.
After 1660 Isthmus Zapotec ideas of who "we" are shifted to the peripheral villages, based
on a rejection of the Tehuano elite. Ideas about identity shifted to the peripheral villages
and became deﬁned both geographically and by social class. Inhabitants of the peripheral
villages now identiﬁed themselves as commoners and the elite as "Ladinos," part of
Spanish society.46

Like notions of class identiﬁcation, ethnic identity also shifted to the peripheral
villages over the course of Spanish colonization. In the colonial period "afﬁliation with an
Indian community," according to Joseph Whitecotton, "became much more important for
the local Indian peasant." This signaled the end of Zapotecness as a deﬁning characteristic:
"Although the Spanish designation zapotecos may have entered their vocabulary, Zapotec
ethnicity, on a larger level, was of little consequence, as there were few, if any, social
forms that gave it unity."47 Essentially, what had been a larger ethnic identity yielded to a
place-speciﬁc identity, grounded in distinct villages.

Due to the peculiar combination of the preexisting Zapotec social structure and the
limited Spanish inﬂuence, the nature of social relations on the Isthmus during the colonial
period would not permit collective identities to extend beyond a local level. While
peripheral villagers, for the most part, shared similar patterns of social relations to others,
as subsistence-based rural cultivators they did not share a sufﬁcient level of intervillage

social contact to ensure a mutual awareness of this similarity. Thus, there was no broad

 

‘6 Ibid., 2024.

‘7 Joseph Whitecotton, The Zapotecs: Princes, Priests, and Peasants (Norman: University of
Oklahoma Press, 1984), 219; Philip Dennis, Intervillage Conﬂict in Oaxaca (New Brunswick, N .J.:
Rutgers University Press, 1987), 21-22.

28

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

idea of "the indigenous villager" on the Isthmus. In fact, external social contact for
peripheral villagers was limited primarily to Spaniards and Tehuanos, two groups with
whom they did not share similar patterns of social relations with others. As the products of
various social forces, collective identities on the Isthmus became place-speciﬁc.

By 1750 the separation between elite and commoner became geographically
polarized between Tehuantepec and J uchitan, where the peripheral villagers began to
conglomerate, free from Spanish inﬂuence. The traditional elite had proven that they
would not protect their cultural, political, or economic integrity from Spanish intrusions,
and Juchitan, unlike Tehuantepec, existed in isolation from all Spanish institutions and
structures except the hacienda, with which relations were conﬂictual. Juchitan maintained
its autonomy and a degree of combativeness against the Spaniards. Therefore, the
formation of an indigenous population center in J uchitan was a rejection of the Tehuano
elite and Spanish society.48

By the end of the colonial period, social differentiation existed in Juchitan because
Zapotec society inherently was highly stratiﬁed. Furthermore, the rejection of the Tehuano
elite was not a rejection of social inequality, but rather a rejection of Spanish social
inﬂuence. However, the intense differentiation that existed between peripheral villages and
Tehuantepec simply could not be replicated in Juchitan because elite status depended on
participation in Spanish institutions. As a result of this relative lack of social stratiﬁcation,
the Juchitecos experienced a high level of structural equivalence. Juchitecos generally
shared equivalent ties to each other, and to outside society. Furthermore, as a
conglomeration of Zapotec commoners, the J uchitecos were a relatively homogenous
group. Colonial J uchitan generally displayed a very high degree of community solidarity.

By Independence the Juchitecos had established a distinct local identity through

conﬂict, and founded on equal internal relations and shared collective identities. The lack

 

‘8 Campbell, 3233.

29

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

.'-’ /

/‘I

n,

 

of cross-cutting identities resulted in a community With a strong sense of shared local
interests. When Juchitecos thought of themselves in terms of class or ethnicity, they
thought of themselves as Juchitecos. As a result, the Juchitecos generally shared the same
collective interests. In practical terms this defense of local interests manifested itself in a
fusion of place-speciﬁc economic and political concerns. Isthmus Zapotec commoners
withdrew support from Tehuantepec because of the elites' failure to protect common
interests; they sought leadership that would answer to common needs, like subsistence.
So in order to obtain political power in Juchitan, potential leaders had to protect the
subsistence interests of the villagers. In turn, to protect their subsistence interests, the
villagers demanded authentic J uchiteco political leadership, which would necessarily
guarantee both village autonomy and the political power of their leaders. These shared
identities and interests ultimately transmuted into a staunch defense of Juchiteco
independence. In the nineteenth century, Juchiteco defense of their independence would
bring them into constant conﬂict with the state government, and eventually produce a

tradition of violence.

30

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER TWO

 

EARLY NATIONAL PERIOD: Rebellion and Repression

With Independence from Spain, the new powerholders in Mexico replaced the
crown's protective policies with liberal economic programs in an attempt to eradicate the
vestiges of the colonial economic system. The modernization programs proposed by liberal
leaders attacked communal ownership of land and important salt ﬂats on the Isthmus.
However, the state's lack of infrastructural power rendered these economic programs
nearly impossible to enforce. The state consistently suffered from a severe shortage of
ﬁscal resources, and the chronic instability that resulted only further exacerbated the
problem. The constant money shortages also retarded the state's efforts to extend its
organizational reach into the peripheries. Furthermore, Mexico's internal instability
coupled with military conﬂict with the United States diverted the federal government's
military power. Ultimately, during this period the Mexican state proved to be incapable of
effectively governing its people, and unable to carry through with its proposed economic
programs.

Throughout the nineteenth century, taking advantage of a weak and unstable central
government, the J uchitecos remained in a nearly continuous state of mobilization against
the state government of Oaxaca. The modernizing programs of the state government,
particularly attempts to expropriate communal salt ﬂats, created real grievances that were

shared evenly by the Juchitecos. The power of the Juchiteco mobilizations stemmed from

 

the lack of cross-cutting identities. The Juchitecos mobilized so powerfully against
government attempts to seize salt resources because they shared similar relations to what
they were ﬁghting for. Consequently, the repeated mobilizations against the state

government were understood to be beneﬁcial for the entire village.

31

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Juchiteco collective violence was also a form of negotiation with the state
government. The Juchitecos mobilized violently to assure themselves access to valuable
resources, which necessarily entailed local political autonomy. They fought to maintain
political control of their village in order to maintain access to the land and salt resources that
govemment-backed entrepreneurs wanted to separate them from. Failure to respect the
economic interests or the political autonomy of the Juchitecos resulted in a local revolt.
These were generally short revolts in which the J uchitecos expelled local political leaders.
However, rather than addressing the grievances of the local population, the state
government responded to this form of negotiation with violent repression. The Juchitecos
ultimately negotiated de facto access to land and salt, but at the expense of repeated
repression at the hands of the state government.

The intense violence that characterized relations between Juchitan and the Oaxacan

 

state resulted from a fundamental conﬂict, based on the image of the J uchiteco. The liberal
government of Oaxaca saw the Indian as an obstacle to modernization, and thus sought to
integrate indigenous villages into a new "modern" state. However, based on collective
identities, the Juchitecos organized a strong defense against the state's encroachment. As a
result, the Oaxacan public and state government ofﬁcials began to imagine the Juchitecos as
indios barbaros. As such the J uchitecos became a special problem for the state
government: they were not only a threat to the future modernity of the state, they were a
threat to public safety and order. Consequently, as Juchiteco recalcitrance continued, state-

sponsored repression escalated and J uchiteco defense of local interests transformed into

 

separatism. The legacy of this period of alternating rebellion and repression endured until

the eve of the Mexican Revolution.

Political and economic instability followed shortly after Independence, when political
leaders tried to impose modernizing programs on a rural populace capable of responding

with tremendous force. Separation from the Spanish crown opened large cracks in the

 

32

 

 

 

 

political order, and the Wars for Independence ﬁlled those cracks with regional military
leaders. At the same time, new centralized economic programs began to disenfranchise the
nation's indigenous populations. Political and economic instability ensued when regional
ex-military leaders mobilized these disenfranchised populations to support their bids for
political power.49
In Juchitan ex-soldier José Gregorio Melendez became the leader of local
mobilization. Melendez fought in the liberation army of Jose Maria Morelos during the
Wars for Independence. His service under Mariano Matamoros gave him military training
and the opportunity to learn the political terrain of the Isthmus. Most importantly,
however, the wars dispersed arms throughout the region. The leadership of Che Gorio
Melendre, as he was known in Juchitan, combined with an armed village population to
create a rural sector capable of mobilizing a tremendous amount of force.5 °
Economically, the Federal Constitution of 1824 did not propose any programs that
disenfranchised the indigenous populace, but various state constitutions, on the other hand,
attacked communal rights to land and resources. Oaxaca's constitution called for a general
privatization of communal resources, and more speciﬁcally conceded a monopoly of the
salt ﬂats in Tehuantepec district (which at the time included the village of Juchitan) "to an
individual who would be able to exploit the salt more 'economically' than the Indians."51
In 1834 the state government of Oaxaca put their words into action and granted a monopoly
of the Tehuantepec salt ﬂats to Francisco Javier Echevarrr’a.5 2

As a communal resource "from time irnmemorial," salt occupied a particularly

important position in Juchiteco society. Beyond its use in religious ceremony, salt played a

 

‘9 Leticia Reina and Fransisco Abardfa, "Cien aﬁos de rebellOn," in Maria de los Angeles Romero
ed., Lecturas histéricas del estado de Oaxaca, Vol. 3: Siglo XIX (Mexico City: INAH, 1990), 460.

5° Ibid.
5' Quoted in Ibid., 457.

’2 Ibid., 457, 460.

33

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

key role in everyday life as a preservative for meat and ﬁsh. As a result, the Juchitecos
shared similar relations to the salt ﬂats. More importantly, the state expropriation of the salt
ﬂats forced the Juchitecos to reorder their collective identities to defend the interests
effected by the state's action. Where Juchiteco identity may have been more-or-less
signiﬁcant before, the expropriation of the salt ﬂats forced the Juchitecos to give priority to
their local identity in order to defend local property. Essentially this critical event,
instigated by the state government, set the stage for group mobilization.

In 1834 the Juchitecos launched twenty years of nearly continuous combat against
the state government. Although locally-based, the original mobilization of collective
violence in Juchitan was a distinct part of a more widespread indigenous reaction to
imposed liberal programs from the state of Guerrero to the Isthmus. The movement

formed around Juan Alvarez's Plan de Texca and threatened to become a massive Indian

 

uprising. Remembering the violent rabble of Indians mobilized by Father Hidalgo during
the Wars for Independence, authorities mobilized quickly and suppressed the rebellion,
capturing Melendez in the process.5 3

Following Independence land and labor relations also changed on the Isthmus. A
major decline in the international dye market and the disorder created by the wars for
Independence carried serious consequences for the Haciendas Marquesanas. The increased
production of cochineal in Guatemala and indigo in India created a glut in the dye market,
driving down international prices and forcing the collapse of the Isthmus' export

economy.54 Moreover, by the 18308 the indigenous population of the Isthmus began

 

claiming legal ownership of the hacienda lands they had previously used for squatting. As
a result, Lucas Alaman, who managed the Haciendas Marquesanas for the Duke of

Terranova y Monteleone, began to actively seek out potential buyers to whom he could sell

 

53 Ibid., 460-61.

5" Tutino, "Ethnic Resistance," 53.

 

34

 

 

 

 

”I
.j.‘

A.”

 

the property. In 1836 Alaman found his men in two Europeans: Frenchman Juan Jose

Guergué, and Milano Esteban Maqueo.5 5

As wealthy immigrants completely unfamiliar with their new setting, the new
owners responded solely to market imperatives, creating continuous conﬂict with
surrounding villages, and especially with Juchitan. Immediately after assuming
ownership, Guergué and Maqueo attempted to eject several J uchitecos from a parcel of land
used for grazing. The dispute escalated and eventually ended up in court where the owners
unsuccessfully attacked the validity of the Juchitecos' land title from 1710. The Juchitecos
maintained access to the land and continued to use it for grazing, but the conﬂict with the
immigrant hacendados continued. For years following the case both sides stole each
other's sheep when found unattended.5 6

With their land and access to resources constantly being menaced by state-
supported entrepreneurs, peace did not last long in Juchitan. In 1842 the Juchitecos
rejected local authorities for selling land against the will of the people. State ofﬁcials
combated Juchiteco recalcitrance with a combination of persuasion and aggression.
However, the Juchitecos refused to compromise and the state could not muster enough
force to suppress the movement, leaving Juchitan in a state of rebellion for several years.
During this period the Juchitecos assumed autonomy and continued to illegally exploit the
salt ﬂats and utilize hacienda land.5 7

By 1847 neither the federal nor the state government had the ability to maintain
order. The United States intervention as part of the U.S.-Mexican War dispersed the
military strength of the federal government, while the power struggle between valley and

Tehuano elite paralyzed the repressive forces of Oaxaca. Under the smoke screen of

 

5’ Reina and Abardl’a, 461-62.

56 Manuel Esparza, "Las tierras de los hijos de los pueblos: El distrito de Juchitan en el siglo
XIX," in Lecturas histéricas del estado de Oaxaca, Vol. 3: Siglo XIX, 427-29; Reina and Abardia, 462.

 

’7 Ibid., 462-63; Tutino, "Ethnic Resistance," 56.

 

35

 

 

 

 

 

disorder, Gregorio Melendez assumed a position as a sort of defacto governor of the

Isthmus. Benito Juarez became the governor of Oaxaca later in the year and immediately

attempted to reintegrate and pacify the Isthmus by naming Melendez head of the region's

national guard. Rather than an attempt at reform, Juarez simply wanted to demobilize

Juchiteco forces by coopting their leader. The plan backﬁred, and rather than pacify the

Juchitecos, the move precipitated "a wave of violence" in which J uchitecos assaulted the

salt ﬂats, stole sheep from haciendas, sacked the local jail, and ultimately reiterated their

demand for local autonomy. After the initial uprising, Melendez publicly called for istmeno

separation from the state of Oaxaca.5 8

The J uchitecos continued to live in relative autonomy, outside of state control, but

when they rejected local ofﬁcials again in 1849 and 1850, increasingly harsh repression

followed. In May of 1850 the Juchitecos expelled the local alcalde for not obeying popular

volition, and replaced him with Simén LOpez, a former rebel leader. Tehuano ofﬁcials

found this political move unacceptable and requested that the federal government intervene. 5
Intense violent conﬂict ensued and came to a head on July 19, on the outskirts of Juchitan.
A two-hour battle between Juchiteco rebels and the federal army resulted in the deaths of
seventy J uchitecos. After the battle federal soldiers pillaged Juchitan, leaving one—third of
the village in shambles.59

Two national events inﬂuenced the state's decision to increase repression in

Juchitan: the end of the U.S.-Mexican War, and the Caste War of Yucatan. The end of the
war simply freed up federal resources and allowed the state to utilize a previously-
unattainable amount of repressive force. Meanwhile, the massive number of Mexicans
killed by Maya rebels during the Caste War of Yucatan roused the Oaxacan government's

fear of its huge Indian population.60 The Juchitecos seemed to display the same hatred of

 

5“ Reina and Abardfa, 463—64; Tutino, "Ethnic Resistance," 56-57.
’9 Reina and Abardfa, 465-67; Tutino, "Ethnic Resistance," 57-58.

6° For details on the Caste War of Yucatan, see Nelson Reed, The Caste War of Yucatan

36

 

 

 

 

l
o I

A.”

 

ontsiders as the Mayas of Yucatan, and thus terriﬁed Oaxacan ofﬁcials and landowners.

The carnage inﬂicted by federal soldiers on July 19, 1850 was both a catharsis and a
preventative measure against a possible caste war in Oaxaca.61

In the face of intensifying repression, the indigenous groups of the Isthmus became
more uniﬁed, and the rebels of Juchitan became more radical. The state-sponsored
repression, which included sweeps through the Isthmus countryside, antagonized
indigenous villagers and consequently made Meléndez impossible to capture. The entire
region, at least passively, supported Meléndez, and from one of his rural sanctuaries
Melendez announced a more radical Plan de 28 de Octubre. The plan articulated the
J uchiteco commitment to the defense of their cultural, political, and economic autonomy: it
denounced the state and federal government, and pronounced Meléndez's opposition to
soon-to-be president, General Mariano Arista.62

Owing to a more conciliatory attitude from the central government, in the months
that followed his announcement, Meléndez's stance changed dramatically. Mariano Arista
gave Meléndez an offer he could not refuse. On January 10, 1851 Melendez announced a
new plan in which he recognized government authorities, supported Arista as the new
president, and sought peace and harmony with Tehuantepec, which the J uchitecos had
sacked in the violence of the previous year. In exchange the govemment separated the new
federal Department of Tehuantepec from the state of Oaxaca, and granted amnesty to all
rebels. Through direct violent action against the state government, the Juchitecos ofﬁcially
won their independence from Oaxaca. Ironically, Gregorio Melendez died on April 20,
1853, just one month before the Isthmus of Tehuantepec ofﬁcially became a federal

territory.63

 

(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1964); and Terry Rugeley, Yucatan '3 Maya Peasantry and the Origins
of the Caste War (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996).

6' Reina and Abardia, 468.
62 Ibid., 468-69.

63 Ibid., 469-70.

37

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Melendez Rebellions established two important precedents for future incidents

of collective violence in J uchitan. First, this marked the ﬁrst instance in which the federal
government intervened to bring order to Juchitan. The federal government, contrary to the
state, took a more conciliatory approach to the J uchitecos, making compromise possible,
and undercutting the sovereignty of the state government. This interference became a
pattern, but not without creating friction with the state. Second, the period of rebellion
crystallized a real and signiﬁcant conﬂict between the Juchitecos and the state government.
The Melendez Rebellions were a defense of the Juchitecos' local identity and their
corresponding political and economic interests. Speciﬁcally, the J uchitecos mobilized as
J uchitecos in order to negotiate political autonomy and continued access to community
property. This mobilization clearly antagonized the state government, creating a
fundamental conﬂict of interests. However, once the violence began, the conﬂict gained a
heightened signiﬁcance. These rebellions, which began as a defense of local interests,
became separatist and anti-state rebellions whose battle cry was "Death to the state of
Oaxaca and long live Juchitan."64 Seeing Tehuantepec as a tool of the state, which was the
popular image of Tehuanos in Juchitan, the Juchitecos raided the village twice, burning
barrios and killing many Tehuanos.65

More importantly, the period of continuous violence produced an image of the
Juchiteco in the public and ofﬁcial conscience as barbaric and rebellious, and thus an
obstacle to modernity and a threat to public order. The progressive, liberal idea of the
Indian as barbaric or backward was not new, but the Meléndez rebellions created an image
of the Juchitecos as particularly violent barbarians. The image that emerged portrayed the

Juchitecos as both an obstacle to progress, and a constant threat to public safety.

 

"‘ Victor de la Cruz, La Rebelién de Che Gorio Melendre (Juchitan: H. Ayuntamiento Popular de
Juchitan, 1983) cited in Campbell, 42.

"5 Campbell. 42.

38

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

,l

a.
0‘ '

A.“

 

The account of German traveler G. F. Von Tempsky's visit to Oaxaca toward the
end of the rebellions reﬂected popular opinions of the J uchitecos that existed in Oaxaca and
demonstrated liberal notions of Indians, in general. Von Tempsky visited Gregorio
Meléndez in his camp, but he noted a great deal about the Juchitecos before even arriving in
Juchitan. The German did not go into Juchitan uninformed about the nature of the people
who lived there. Their reputation preceded them:

[Juchitan's] inhabitants have the reputation of being a very unruly set,

turbulent politicians and revolutionists they have been in Oaxaca often,

as well as in Tehuantepec, enforcing their opinions at the point of a bayonet

this village was, besides, reputed for its hostility against white strangers,

or strangers of any kind, and we had been warned not to enter its conﬁnes
as the people would, at the least, steal our horses.66

Von Tempsky did not, however, learn everything he knew about Indians from Mexicans.
As a progressive drinker, he instinctively knew some things about the nature of the Indian:

There is nothing like showing oneself fearless in the intercourse with

Indians, shake them vigorously by the hand, look boldly into their eye, and

you have them as servants, who would have been your masters had your

footsteps been wavering, your hand timid, and your eye winking in

approaching them. They are, in that respect, like the wild beasts of their

forest. Turn your eye from the tiger, attempt a retrograde movement, and

he ﬂies at your throat; but fasten your eye upon him, he will quail, and not

dare injure you“;7
This account characterizes well how progressive notions of the Indian blended with the
image of violence that deﬁned Juchitan. The Indian himself was primitive and prone to
violence, and the Juchiteco, as proven by past actions, was an ampliﬁed, exaggerated
Indian. 'The Juchiteco characterized the savagery and violence inherent in all Indians.
Gregorio Meléndez himself was a man deﬁned by "an inextinguishable hatred of Mexicans
in general." Ultimately, in the public mind, the Juchitecos were barbarians, naturally

disposed to violence and aggressive toward outsiders. The immigrant owners of the

Haciendas Marquesanas complained that the expansion of their estate had been cut short

 

‘6 "A German Traveler's Observations in J uchitan," in Zapotec Struggles, 119.

67 Ibid., 120.

39

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

"by the insatiable greed of a barbarous village without a title except their brute force."68

The public viewed the J uchitecos proclivity toward violence as a constant threat to public
safety, and as a result, they became a major target of public ofﬁcials.

The ofﬁcial verbal assault against the Juchitecos heightened in accordance with the
increased military assault. In 1849 when the Juchitecos ejected a local ofﬁcial, Tehuano
ofﬁcials appealed to the federal government to intervene and restore order to J uchitan. To
support their appeal, the ofﬁcials compiled a list of Juchiteco transgressions. The list of
indiscretions reﬂects the balanced assault on the Juchiteco as a particularly disorderly
Indian: committing outrages against authorities, remaining in a hostile state toward
constitutional authorities, promoting public meetings with a beating drum, and being given
to all sorts of excesses.69 The list worked as intended and federal forces intervened.
Ofﬁcials saw Juchiteco recalcitrance and Indianness as interrelated and both were
unacceptable in a modern nation.

With this as the predominant vision of the Juchitecos, it made sense that the "Father
of Modern Mexico," Benito J uarez, was the most important, and most powerful political
enemy of the Juchitecos. The Juchitecos represented a threat to all that Juarez stood for
politically. In a speech delivered on July 2, 1850, Juarez addressed Juchiteco malfeasance
and even foreshadowed the brutal repression that followed two weeks later. J uarez, a
politician, was not alone in his beliefs of the depraved, violent nature of the Juchitecos, and
in his speech he clearly appealed to public sentiments on the subject (italics added):

It would take a great deal of time to describe to you the state of immorality

and disorder in which the residents of Juchitan have lived since very ancient

times. You know well their great excesses. You are not unaware of their

depredations under the colonial regime You know that during the

centralized government they mocked the armed forces that the central power

sent to repress their crimes, defeating and causing damage to it, making fun
of its leaders, and scoming local authorities. You have been witnesses to

 

‘8 Quoted in Esparza, 427.

69 Reina and Abardfa, 466.

40

 

 

 

these scenes of blood and horror. You know all this, which is another
reason why I omit a history of the events that have passed before your eyes
I will remind you of the past so that you will know better the unruly

character of these rascals.70

Juarez felt that the presence of the Juchitecos in Oaxaca did more than threaten the safety of
the state's citizens. Their behavior threatened Oaxaca's ability to become a modern state:
peace has been secured, in general, in the state. Only the town of Juchitan
has scandalously altered the tranquillity enjoyed by the District of
Tehuantepec. This was done neither to carry out a political plan, nor to
propose any useful reforms, nor to complain about its current government,

nor to change administrative personnel It was done to evade obedience to
all authority and the healthy burden of the law, and to rob with impunity and

engage without obstacles in excesses that morality condemns.71

This conception of the Juchitecos portrayed them as a threat to the state in many
ways, and led Juarez to conclude that the village needed to be suppressed. In the same
speech Juarez announced that he was preparing to "organize and maintain public forces and
prepare the elements of war, so that when peace is threatened or interrupted, the instigators
can be repressed and punished as rapidly and efﬁciently as the security of the Oaxaquefros
and the dignity of the Government demand."72 Two weeks later Juchitan smoldered.

The pattern of rebellion and repression in J uchitan ultimately produced a tradition of
violence between the village and the state government. Based on past experiences, the
Juchitecos understood that they could mobilize collective violence in order to negotiate
better political and econorrric conditions. Also based on experience, the state understood
the Juchitecos to be both savage and rebellious. As a result, the state saw violent
repression as the only way to control such an "unruly set." Ultimately, non-violent

negotiation became impossible in Juchitan without federal intervention.

 

7° " The Juchitecos as Seen by Benito Juarez: Excerpts from a Speech, July 2, 1850," in Zapotec
Struggles, 123-24.

7‘ Ibid., 123.

72 Ibid.

41

 

 

’IV ..

   
 
      

'
.0
a

3‘ p.

Following the Meléndez Rebellions, Benito Juarez wanted to modernize Oaxaca in
classic liberal fashion after he became the state's governor. Juarez planned to extend the
state's transportation infrastructure in order to, among other things, open the peripheries to
new markets and develop all uncultivated land (terrenos baldias). The ﬁrst step toward
accomplishing this goal was to account for and regulate all land and land transactions in the
state. Juarez sent local government representatives into the ﬁeld to inventory the amount of
terrenos baldias that existed in the state, so the government could then adrrrinister the land
as public domain. The state instituted a modernization program that revolved around the
state government, but local ofﬁcials throughout the state resisted the scheme as an
encroachment on their autonomy. Municipal governments simply did not do the mandated
work. By the end of the decade, Juarez‘s plan had failed due to local noncompliance. In
1862 state ofﬁcials complained that they still had not received ﬁeld reports from 1849.7 3

Following the wars of La Reforrna in the late 18508, liberal leadership once again
ascended to the top of the state government, and with renewed vigor, attacked communal
property with renewed vigor. In the chaos of the violent conﬂict between liberals and
conservatives, and during a brief conservative reign, villagers throughout Oaxaca seized the
opportunity to expand their land base by moving onto private property. When liberals
resumed power in 1861, Governor Ramon Cajiga denounced this affront to private
property, carried out by "revolutionaries usurpers, or pernicious vagabonds," as an evil
that "personiﬁed sedition and signiﬁed the dissolution of society."74 Meanwhile Cajiga
reinstituted the act of 20 Octubre 1859, which transformed cofradz’a land and livestock into
private property; an act "dictated for the beneﬁt of all types of honorable poor."75

 

73 Esparza, 392-95.
7‘ Quoted in ibid., 395.

75 Quoted in ibid., 395-96.

42

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Despite the passionate pleas of liberal ideologues, the laws of La Reforrna which

called for the expropriation of communal landholding could not be enforced because the
state did not have the infrastructural power to divest villages of their land. The wars of La
Reforma, the French Intervention, and the political factionalism that followed kept the state
government in desperate need of funds, and incapable of modernizing. Recognizing its
failure, the state government warned its constituents: "The state will not rise nor will it be
sufﬁciently wealthy if its vast territory remains as it is now, uncultivated, and we will not
stop regretting this mistake if the lands that the villagers possess are not reduced to private
property. "7 6
Through the periods of La Reforma and the French Intervention, from 1855 to
1867, constant warfare between liberals and conservatives kept the entire nation in a state
of chaos, and opened the door to violent conﬂict between Juchitan and Tehuantepec.
During the wars of La Reforrna Benito Juarez became the president of the Republic and
immediately rolled back the gains of the Meléndez Rebellions. The Benemérito denounced
the decree that created the Department of Tehuantepec, and Juchitan rejoined the state of
Oaxaca as Tehuantepec's subject, exacerbating an already problematic situation."7
In the period that followed the reintegration of the Isthmus into Oaxaca, tensions
mounted between the two villages. Under the guise of larger political concern the two
villages simply acted on an escalating feud in the absence of a capable repressive state.78
The state, recognizing that the French were a more serious threat, offered the Juchitecos

incentives to support the liberal cause against the French. In 1864 Juarez offered to return

 

7“ Quoted in ibid., 396.
77 Reina and Abardfa, 470.

78 During this period the Juchitecos began wearing green and the Tehuanos red, the colors
associated with liberal and conservative causes, respectively. According to Philip Dennis, Intervillage
Conﬂict in Oaxaca, this is a common indication of feuding villages in Oaxaca. See page 20.

43

 

 

Various salt ﬂats to Juchitan, including those controlled by the Echevarrr’a family, in

exchange for armed support in the battle against the French.79

Although it is probable that the J uchitecos did have some sense that they would be
ﬁghting to protect national sovereignty, it is more likely that the J uchitecos understood their
negotiating power as ﬁghters. The state, and most certainly Benito Juarez, understood that
while the J uchitecos were indios barbaros, they made better allies than enemies. Although
the restitution of the salt ﬂats did not take place, the state did successfully use it to gain
support from the Juchitecos.

Meanwhile, the Tehuano military declared in favor of the French and immediately
marched into San Blas, historically a Juchiteco ally, and sacked the entire barrio. A
guerrilla war ensued which pitted J uchiteco and blaseiio guerrillas against French
reinforcements of the Tehuano military. The violent warfare culminated on September 5,
1866 when a small Juchiteco army routed a French battalion of 2500 soldiers. This victory
reinforced the tradition of violence in Juchitan. Afterward 5 de septiembre becarrre a
holiday in J uchitan and marked the pinnacle of Juchiteco rebelliousness. The event became
central in the Juchitecos' construction of a rebellious identity.80

Just six years after the legendary 5 de septiembre battle the Juchiteco rivalry with
the Dr’az family began. Félix Diaz, like his brother Porﬁrio, was a liberal general in the war
against the French and afterward a politician. Chato, as Félix was known, shared his
brother's interest in bringing stability to Mexico via a strong central state. He became
governor of Oaxaca following the expulsion of the French and in 1872 he looked to
centralize authority in the state by imposing a hand—picked jefe politico in Juchitan. The
Juchitecos reacted immediately to the infringement on their autonomy by throwing out the

imposed jefe politico and nanring their own. Albino Jiménez, better known by his Zapotec

 

7’ Reina and Abardfa, 47071.

8° Campbell, 49-51.

44

 

 

 

name, Binu Gada (Nine Lives), had led the Juchitecos against the French and now became

the new jefe politico of Juchitz’m.81

Mexico, however, was no longer engaged in a civil war and Governor Diaz would
not tolerate Juchiteco assertions of self-determination, much less the rumors of Binu
Gada's planned secession. Demonstrating his dedication to peace and order, Chato arrived
in J uchitan personally with a federal battalion and routed Binu Gada's men. Afterward
federal forces killed all the prisoners, burned down houses, looted the local treasury, and
stole the statue of San Vicente, the village's patron saint, which they dragged out of town
tied to a horse. After vehement protest from the J uchitecos the military sent San Vicente
back to Juchitan with his feet cut off. The idea of village autonomy represented a threat to
the state in and of itself, but the Juchitecos' reputation fostered a reciprocal aggressive and
violent attitude from the state. The state not only felt obligated to suppress the J uchitecos,
they wanted to suppress them in order to teach the stubborn Indians a lesson. This act of
brutality also represented the violent hatred that had developed between Juchitan and the
state govemments 2

Despite the brutal repression, when the next political conﬂict created disorder in the
state, violence broke out on the Isthmus. Porﬁrio Diaz's announcement of the Plan de la
Noria precipitated political chaos as factions battled one another. On the Isthmus armed
supporters pushed Dr’az's bid for presidency, but lost to forces led by Binu Gada. The
movement behind the plan failed and the results were similar throughout Oaxaca, forcing
Félix Diaz to ﬂee the state. The Juchitecos captured Dfaz as he attempted to leave the state
through the Isthmus, beginning a sequence that became part of Juchiteco folklore. The

Juchitecos cut the skin off the bottoms of Diaz's feet, forced him to walk on hot sand, then

 

8' Ibid., 54—55; Corvarrubias, 229.

‘2 Campbell, 54-55; Cibeles Henestrosa de Webster, Juchitdn: Un pueblo singular (Mexico:
Editorial Alcaravan, 1985), 71; Reina and Abardfa, 471.

45

 

 

 

castrated and shot him. They then sent Chato's bOdy to Pochutla draped over a horse with
his own testicles placed in his mouth. The moment became a centerpiece in the resistant
imagery that surrounded the J uchitecos, and the boundaries between J uchitan and the state
continued to solidify.83

A short time later the Juchitecos took up arms once again, but this time in support
of Porﬁrio Diaz's Plan de Tuxtepec. Diaz succeeded in his second bid for presidency, but

Binu Gada died in the ﬁghting. Ironically, Nine Lives died helping to install what would

become Mexico's most centralized regime.84

The period of continuous collective violence following Independence was an
assertion, in absence of the crown, of Juchiteco political and economic autonomy, and as
such, was a function of their local identity. The constant violence against outsiders also
altered their identity by solidifying an image of themselves as rebels. Where their identities
as Juchitecos gave them solidarity and made collective action easier, their identity as rebels
made collective violence easier. Ultimately, the Juchitecos themselves mobilized the image
of the Juchiteco rebel, which they had constructed as part of a "village-speciﬁc history"
essential to local thinking and local identity.85

Juchitan existed, throughout history, almost completely free of outside inﬂuence,
especially in civil society. By 1910, less than ten percent of the population was literate,
less than ﬁve percent attended public schools, and a majority probably did not speak
Spanish.“5 In Juchitan, then, there was no colonial or national history, only a local

conscience. History, for the Juchitecos, was a collection of local memories; "memories of

 

33 Henestrosa de Webster, 71; Campbell 55.
84 Campbell, 55-56.

85 Dennis, 20.

86 Paul Garner, La Revolucién en la provincia: Soberam’a estatal y caudillismo en las montaiias de
Oaxaca, 1910-1920 (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Economica, 1988), 27, 29.

46

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

/
l

(.

 

old struggles rooted in centuries of injustice."87 The key to understanding the
dissatisfaction of the Juchitecos lies in understanding their local history, and the sense of
injustice it highlighted.

The Juchiteco identity began as a rejection of outsiders, developed locally in
isolation from outside inﬂuence, and ultimately yielded a local culture that perceived outside
impositions as inherently unjust. The Juchitecos did not have what Barrington Moore calls
a "sense of inevitability." Owing to their independent development, the Juchitecos viewed
the state's attempts to integrate them into society through land privatization and social
control as "a situation they need not, cannot, and ought not endure,"88 and their local
history emphasized this. The memories of Meléndez, of Juarez, of Binu Gada, were
loaded with victories over outsiders and struggles against injustice. This local conscience
"convinced them of their rebelliousness in the face of oppression." This gave local political
leaders a "spirit of rebelliousness" to appeal to "when conﬂicts ﬁnally did sharpen."89
This, then, was the legacy of village continuity in Juchitan: the J uchitecos were rebels,
unafraid to use violence to protect their independent lifestyle from the impositions of
outsiders.

This legacy of mobilizing violence in Juchitan also created a tradition of violence
between the Juchitecos and the state government. While the Juchitecos were consistently
able to mobilize collective violence against the state, the state was consistently able to
violently repress the Juchitecos. As a result, non—violent negotiation between the
Juchitecos and the state government was no longer possible without interference from the

federal government.

 

37 de la Cruz, quoted in Adriana Lopez Monjardin, "Juchitan: Histories of Discord," in Zapotec
Struggles, 67.

as Moore, 462.

‘9 Lopez Monjardin. 67.

47

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER THREE

THE PORFIRIATO: Hegemony Without Consent

General Porﬁrio Diaz seized the Mexican presidency in 1876 and ruled the country
with a centralized state for over thirty years. The Diaz regime brought economic growth to
Mexico by luring foreign investment with guarantees of "peace, order, and progress." It
was in this period, particularly, that Ramon Rur’z claims Oaxaca was "bypassed by the tides
of modemization."9° However, stories of Oaxaca's "backwardness" and lack of economic
growth during the Porﬁriato are greatly exaggerated. During the Porﬁriato various sections
of Oaxaca, including the Isthmus, experienced dynamic growth in commercial agriculture,
owing to the extension of railroads into the region. On the other hand, despite intense
econonric growth, the indigenous village continued to predorrrinate in the Oaxacan
countryside. The newly-formed district of Juchitan reﬂected a unique pattern of
development: while major econorrric growth characterized the district, the municipio of
Juchitan maintained its land base.

The Porﬁrian state represented a unique relationship between Juchitan and the
government in that it both antagonized Juchiteco interests and monopolized repressive
capacity. Whereas the interests of the Spanish crown, generally, were not especially
opposed to the interests of Indian villagers, the Porﬁrian government sought to "bring
civilization" to the Isthmus region by stimulating economic growth. More importantly, for
the ﬁrst time since Mexico became an independent nation, local-level adrrrinistrative and
military sanctioning machineries answered to the central government, producing a high

level of state repressive capabilities. Using a combination of effective military aggression

 

9° Ramon Eduardo Ruiz, The Great Rebellion: Mexico, 1905-1924 (New York: Norton, 1980),
23; For a sinrilar view of Oaxaca during the Porﬁriato and the Revolution, see Ronald Waterbury, "Non-
Revolutionary Peasants: Oaxaca Compared to Morelos in the Mexican Revolution," Comparative Studies
in Society and History 17:4 (1975).

48

 

 

 

 

and strategic exile and imprisonment, the Dial regime suppressed opposition before the

popular sectors could be mobilized in mass to seriously challenge the state's authority.

Porﬁrio Diaz continued to see J uchitan as a special problem, and thus utilized all methods at
his disposal to maintain order on the Isthmus. However, although the Diaz regime brought
unprecedented infrastructural power to Mexico, the state did little to construct consent from

its citizens. For the J uchitecos, the Porﬁriato represented three decades of injustice.

In areas of rigid social and political hierarchy, according to John Coatsworth, an
improvement in the proﬁtability of agricultural enterprise generally resulted in a regressive
movement in the distribution of property. Such was the case in Porfuian Mexico. By
sharply reducing transportation costs and connecting previously isolated areas with distant
markets, railroads, the key tenant to Porﬁrian economic development, removed previous
obstacles to owning land in Mexico and made land owning more proﬁtable than ever
before. As a result, railroads introduced to Mexico "an era of land grabbing."91 Oaxaca
experienced a dramatic reversion of land tenure with the introduction of multiple railroads.
Due to its geographic location, which made it ideal for a trans-Isthmanian railroad, the
district of Juchitan experienced acutely the effects of the railroad.

During Diaz's ﬁrst presidency, Oaxaca's liberal government, led by Matias
Romero, actively worked to attract American investment. The government wanted to
develop mining interests by connecting the central valley to Mexico City and commercial
agriculture interests by constructing a trans—Isthmanian railroad. Government ofﬁcials
considered the extension of a good infrastructure central to modern development. Railroad
construction in Oaxaca began with the formation of The Mexican Southern Railroad
Company on March 24, 1881. Although the company went broke shortly thereafter, other

programs followed and by the end of the Porﬁriato three lines connected Oaxaca to Mexico

 

9‘ John Coatsworth, "Railroads, Landholding, and Agrarian Protest in the Early Porﬁriato,"
Hispanic American Historic Review 54: 1,4-48

49

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

City and to two ports, one on the Paciﬁc Ocean, and one on the Atlantic. Whereas in the

central rrrining zone, the railroad ampliﬁed traditional patronage relations without greatly
effecting land tenure, in many other zones in the state the railroad produced a reversion in
land tenure.9 2

From the beginning of the Porfrriato to the eve of the Revolution Oaxaca achieved
"progress" through the concentration of land and foreign investment. The Diaz
administration reinvigorated the process of land appropriation. In 1874, 123 haciendas
existed in Oaxacan territory, and by 1910 the number had jumped to 450.93 Not
incidentally, this regressive movement of landed property coincided with a major inﬂux of
foreign investment. Between 1900 and 1910 the state's foreign population increased from
844 to 2,026 people; although not a major part of the population, it was a 133 percent
increase. Moreover, by 1910 Americans had invested more capital in Oaxaca than all but
four Mexican states.94 Land concentration and foreign investment were not evenly
distributed throughout the state, however, and the district of Juchitan, in particular, became
an export agriculture enclave.

Due to easy access to both the F errocarril Panamericano and the F errocam'l del
Istmo, agricultural enterprises in the district of Juchitan diversified and expanded during the
Porﬁriato, partly due to foreign investment. The region had the third largest variety of
cultivated crops in the state, which included sugar cane, coffee, tobacco, rubber, cotton,
anil, and a variety of fruits. The district of Juchitan also had the state's largest haciendas to

carry out this diverse regional production for export. The average Oaxacan estate covered

 

92 Francie Chassen and Hector Martinez, "El desarrollo econ6mico de Oaxaca a ﬁnales del
Porﬁriato," in Maria de los Angeles Romero ed., Lecturas historicas del estado de Oaxaca, Vol. 4: 1877-
1930 (Mexico: INAH, 1990), 55-57; Paul Gamer, "Federalism and Caudillismo in the Mexican
Revolution: The Genesis of the Oaxacan Sovereignty Movement (1915-1920)," Journal of Latin American
Studies 17:1 (1985), 120-21.

93 Carlos Sénchez Silva, "Estructura de las propriedades agrarias de Oaxaca a ﬁnes del Porﬁriato,"
in Lecturas historicas del estado de Oaxaca, Vol. 4: 1877-1930, 122.

9" Chassen and Martinez, 50; Sénchez Silva, 115-16.

50

 

 

 

 

less than 5,000 hectares, but four haciendas of over 40,000 hectares existed in the district

of Juchitan, led by the Hacienda Santo Domingo in Ixtaltepec which covered 77,000
hectares. Also, the United States-owned Tehuantepec Mutual Planters Company actively
exported a great deal of produce to the United States. Their exports included sugar,
bananas, and with 570 hectares under cultivation, they owned the largest orange groves in
Mexico.95 In terms of foreign investment, the Tehuantepec Planters Company was by no
means alone on the Isthmus. Various foreign agricultural enterprises obtained land on the
Isthmus, such as Illinois Coffee and Rubber, Mexican Land and Coffee, the Mexican
Tropical Planters, the Isthmus Plantation Association, the Brown State Company, Rock
Island Tropical Plantation, and United States Mexico Sugar, among others.96

The district of Juchitan was by no means economically "backward," but owing to
its massive surface area and low population density, Juchitan was economically dynamic
without displacing a large amount of the rural poor. The majority of the land appropriated
by entrepreneurs was terreno baldia rather than communal land. Although this method
barred village access to previously accessible land, it did not require displacement. The
village of J uchitan was the second largest settlement in Oaxaca with 13,891 people, but
encompassing 11,133 square kilometers, the district of Juchitan was also the largest in the
state. Overall, the district contained a very sparse 5.8 people per square kilometer.97 As a
result, while estate agriculture expanded, villages generally remained intact, a conclusion
which is borne out by looking at agricultural labor relations. In 1907, 12,818 joumaleros
worked in the district of Juchitan, the second most in the state. However, these joumaleros

maintained their village land base, worked seasonally, and had a great deal of leverage in

 

95 Chassen and Martinez, 66.
9° Esparza, 404-05; Campbell, 58.

97 Paul Garner, La Revolucio’n, 28.

51

 

 

 

AU

    

labor negotiations; the average wage in Juchitén was 75 centavos per day, which was 25

centavos more than any other district.98

More particularly, large landholdings threatened the municipio of J uchitan much
less than any other area in the district. In 1889 General Francisco Leon, former jefe
politico of Juchitan, ﬁled a complaint to Governor Gregorio Chavez about land tenure in
the municipio of Juchitan. Leon complained that a scant three villages -- Espinal, Union
Hidalgo, and the cabecera, Juchitan -- controlled 35 square leagues inside municipio
boundaries. He claimed that the villagers did not cultivate a majority of this land, and it
should therefore be pronounced public domain. "To preserve peace and order in the
district" Governor Chavez ignored Leon's complaint. Only after threatening to break the
peace himself did Leon get his day in court with the Juchitecos. In court, jefe politico
Manuel Muiroz Gomez made the startling confession that in J uchitan "everything has been
conserved under the same conditions as before the law [of La Reforma]."99 Never in the
municipio of Juchitan had there been a single adjudication to communal land in accordance
with the laws of La Reforma. Mufroz Gomez defended his by pointing out that the
communal land of the municipio was not ejidal, but rather terreno de comun repartimiento,
and thus protected from the law. The J uchitecos won the case. 1 0°

In several cases following the turn of the century, however, the federal government
stepped in and alienated land in the municipio of Juchitan, citing the new Ley de Tierras of
1894. Most notably, during the construction of the trans-Isthmanian railroad, which ended
in 1907, the federal government gave a concession of 13,000 square meters to the railroad

company to build a train station in Juchitan, and 15,000 square meters in Union Hidalgo.

 

9“ Chassen and Martinez, 67.
99 Quoted in Esparza, 431-32.

‘00 Ibid., 429-32; A study of communal landholdings in the central valley of Oaxaca found
similar results there; see Charles Berry, The Reform in Oaxaca, 1856- 76: A Microhistory of the Liberal
Revolution (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1981).

 

 

52

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For the most part the village of Juchitan avoided the land problems that plagued other areas
in the state, and especially on the Isthmus. Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to conclude
that the Juchitecos lacked grievances in relation to land tenure.101

The Porﬁrian program of modernization through econonric development and
political centralization was directly opposed to Juchiteco autonomy on the Isthmus.
Nonetheless, the Porﬁriato marked thirty years of peace in Juchitan, which endured while
the state hand-picked jefes politicos, brought in a foreign-owned railroad, and installed a
military barracks inside the village. The Diaz regime, to some degree, integrated Juchitan
into the state without violent resistance.

The Porﬁrian peace did not begin immediately after Diaz became president of the
Republic. During the early years of his regime, while he attempted to consolidate power
over the nation's peripheries, ample opportunity existed for the rural populace to protest
against the new government by show of force. In the years that followed the initiation of
the Porﬁriato, disorder ruled throughout much of Mexico, and particularly on the Isthmus
in the state of Oaxaca.

Part of Porﬁrio Diaz's economic strategy was to "bring civilization" to the Mexican
peripheries, and as such was a sort of ideologically justiﬁed assault on Indianness. The
notion that by integrating peripheries into the market and extending national infrastructure,
Indians would become civilized economic actors provided the foundation for this program.
With 97 percent of its population classiﬁed as Indian, the government saw the Isthmus as a
region in desperate need of civilization.102

The Porﬁrian regime attempted to civilize the Isthmus through European
colonization and the introduction of the railroad. In May 1879 two colonizing schemes

were in place on the Isthmus. Between Tehuantepec and J alapa the government conceded

 

10‘ Esparza, 432-34.

‘02 Garner, La Revolucio’n, 27.

53

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

10,000 hectares of land to Gonzalo Ramos to promote the immigration of colonists. The
government also had a plan to place two hundred families from the Canary Islands in the
district of Juchitan by granting each farrrily ﬁfty hectares, equipment and animals, and
exemptions from military service and taxes. Moreover, on May 31, 1879 the government
publicly announced its intention to build the Ferrocarril del Istrno de Tehuantepec, which
would attract foreign investors. Clearly the federal government and local authorities
wanted to civilize the Isthmus by diminishing the Indian element. This became a real
source of popular dissatisfaction among the rural population.1 03

Diaz's attempts to consolidate political power during his ﬁrst presidential term also

generated discontent on the nation's peripheries. Diaz's strategy of political centralization

 

focused on controlling states and villages by imposing or coopting ofﬁcials who would
collaborate unconditionally with the executive government. As a result, his ﬁrst term was
extremely turbulent, as it consisted of the replacement of public ofﬁcials on a state and local
level. Diaz viewed the imposition of jefes politicos as another means by which to integrate
the peripheries. Essentially, jefes politicos served as "the direct and effective link" that
Diaz sustained with distant villages and districts. Consequently, the rejection of a jefe
politico was a rejection of Diaz and the central government.104

Diaz's continuing interest in his home state exaggerated the effect of these
impositions at a time when his term as president was conring to a chaotic end. Diaz, who
campaigned on the slogan "Effective Suffrage. No Reelection," vacated the presidency
when his ﬁrst term ended in 1880. This resulted in a national conﬂict over succession.
The intense conﬂict and disorder over presidential succession hit Oaxaca as well, opening

the door for the discontented agrarian sector to openly protestlos

 

'03 Maria Eugenia Terrones Lopez, "Istrnefros y subversion en el Poﬁriato: 1879-1881," in
Lecturas histtiricas del estado de Oaxaca, Vol. 4: 1877-1930, 156-57, 162.

'°‘ Ibid., 140, 14s.

'05 Ibid., 137-50.

54

 

 

 

 

Between 1879 and 1881 the Juchitecos railed against attempts to impose political

and economic "rationalism" on the Isthmus. The Juchitecos plotted and threatened to rebel
against the despoliation of communal lands and salt ﬂats, expelled an imposed jefe politico,
declared the community independent, and engaged in bandin throughout the Isthmus.
However, Porfrrio Diaz returned to Oaxaca following his resignation to put an end to
Juchiteco rebelliousness.106

Porﬁrio Diaz returned in 1881 to run for the position of governor of Oaxaca. His
gubernatorial campaign for "peace, order, and progress" became a statewide consolidation
of his power, and really transformed into a campaign of co-optation, with Diaz creating
clients throughout the state. On June 26 Diaz became governor with 133,552 votes,
compared to 397 for the runner-up. The consolidation of Diaz's power in the state spelled
doom for J uchiteco rebels who now faced intense repression. By the end of the year,
attempting to bring Juchitan under state control, federal forces crushed the "bandits" on the
Isthmus and burned down several villages.107

The following year, under the leadership of Ignacio Nicolas (known by his Zapotec
name, Mexu Chele), the Juchitecos took up arms in open rebellion against the state. The
revolt itself was quite familiar: the rebels killed the jefe politico and took de facto control of
Juchitan, demanded the restoration of lands supposedly usurped by Esteban Maqueo, and
called for independence from Oaxaca. Beyond that, the rebels directly protested
development, particularly the proposed trans—Isthmanian railway. The state reacted to the
rebellion severely, reﬂecting the President's personal feelings toward Juchitan and his
dedication to civilizing the Indians of the Isthmus. Diaz himself led a rrrilitary battalion
from Oaxaca City in a thirty-day siege of Juchitan, after which "the nrale population was

reduced to a small proportion!”8 The Diaz government exiled a majority of the surviving

 

'06 Ibid., 159-66; Campbell, 55-56.
‘07 Terrones L6pez, 144-49.

‘08 Lewis Haskell, Salina Cruz, 8 Nov. 1911, State Department: Records relating to the internal

55

 

 

 

 

males to the work camps of Quintana R00 and the Valle Nacional, and sent the women to

San Miguel Chimalapa.l 09

Following the severe repression, a kind of peace settled over the Isthmus.
Although Mexu Chele escaped, this was the last instance of Juchiteco collective violence
until the Revolution. The J uchiteco reputation persisted through the peace and Diaz, who
returned to the presidency in 1884, took care to transform nearby San Geronimo Ixtepec
into "one of the biggest garrison towns in Mexico."1 1°

The establishment of peace in Juchitan did not necessarily dissolve the Juchitecos
sense of injustice, nor did it veil them in "the illusion of inevitability" in regards to their
condition. However, the Diaz regime's strategic exile and imprisonment of potential
dissident leaders undermined collective action before the populace could get involved. The
examples of two very important dissidents, José F. Gomez and Adolfo Gurrién, illuminate
how these tactics functioned.

José Gomez was "a squat, fat mestizo"l ” born in 1858 to relatively wealthy
Juchiteco parents. After ﬁnishing primary school in Juchitan, Gomez transferred to the
Instituto de Ciencias y Artes del Estado in Oaxaca City, where he studied law and
distinguished himself "by his love of istmeiios."l ‘2 He made his way through law school
defending the cases of Juchitecos in the state capital. G6mez received his degree in 1887

and afterward received his ﬁrst post in Tlacolula, Oaxaca.l ' 3

 

affairs of Mexico, 1910-29 (hereafter SD) 812.00/2498.
‘09 Campbell, 55-56.

”0 Alan Knight, The Mexican Revolution, Vol I: Poﬁrians, Liberals, and Peasants (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1986), 374.

”1 Ibid., 375.

“2 Victor de la Cruz, "Che Gomez y la rebelion de Juchitén: 1911," in Lecturas histén'cas del
estado de Oaxaca, Vol. 4: 1877-1930, 248.

”3 Ibid., 249.

56

 

 

Throughout his career José Gomez harbored political aspirations, and in 1893 he
ran for municipal president of Juchitan. Although details about his life before the
Revolution are not completely clear, it appears that Gomez won the election based on a
campaign promise to return the salt ﬂats to the people of Juchitan. The regional newspaper
accused Gomez of going too far, and labeled him a socialist; a label that stuck. Within the
year, Gomez left his position in Juchitan for reasons unknown. Also, a key member of
Porﬁrio Diaz's cabinet, the "diamond" of the cientt’ﬁco party, Rosendo Pineda, was a
fellow Juchiteco who had attended school with José Gomez. Pineda knew well Gomez's
socialist political ideals and made sure that Gomez never again would return to J uchitan in
any political capacity. For the remainder of his career before the Revolution Gomez
received posts throughout the country, but always far from the Isthmus. In 1904 he
became the principle stamp tax collector in La Paz, Baja Califonria, as far from Juchitan as
possible. He remained there until the eve of the Revolution.1 '4

Adolfo Gurrion, a rural cultivator from Juchitan, also expressed discontent with the
regime and consequently spent a great deal of time incarcerated and exiled. After a long
education in agriculture in Mexico City, Gurrion returned to Juchitan and was disgusted by
the fraudulent reelection of local and state ofﬁcials. In 1902 he publicly opposed the third
reelection of General Martin Gonzalez as governor, and received his ﬁrst jail sentence for
his efforts. Later, the govemment-chosen jefe politico of Juchitan, Manuel Bejerano, on
the orders of pon‘irista Governor Emilio Pirnentel, had Gurrion arrested in 1905 for being a
correspondent for the radical magonista periodical Regeneracio’n. Once liberated, Gurrion
published his own journal La Semecracia, in which he criticized the corruption and
authoritarianism of local porﬁrista functionaries. One such functionary, Municipal
President Fernando de Gyvés, warned Porﬁrio Diaz that Gurrion, by diffusing "his

machiavellian principles among the people," was " giving a bellicose character to the

 

'1‘ Ibid., 249-53; Henestrosa de Webster, 74.

57

 

   
  
 

'\
I
f

1

l“
l
1.

1
‘.

F
'

 

ZapOtec race."115 Shortly thereafter, Diaz ordered Gurrion arrested once again and
conﬁscated the printing press used to publish La Semecracia. This time Gurrion's release
depended on his acceptance of a government post in Tepic and later in Baja California,
where he remained until after the ﬁrst phase of the Revolution.116

During the Porﬁriato, relationships of force in rural Oaxaca clearly favored the
government, and strategic repression by the Diaz regime deterred agrarian insurrection in
Juchitan. However, the infrastructural power exercised by the Porﬁrian government
depended on replenished ﬁscal resources and consolidated military power rather than the
construction of meaningful aspects of civil society. As a result, when the armed phase of
the Revolution altered the balance of power in the Oaxacan countryside, the Juchitecos

seized the opportunity to reassert local interests through collective violence.

 

 

”5 Fernando de Gyvés to Porﬁrio Diaz, Mexico, 1 Nov. 1905, Archivo de Adolfo C. Gurrion
(hereafter AACG), (Mexico: INAH, 1988), 23-24.

“6 Hector L. Zarauz Lopez, "Introduccion," AACG, 7-14.

58

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER FOUR

THE MEXICAN REVOLUTION IN JUCHITAN: The Chegomista Rebellion

On the eve of the Madero Revolt in 1910, the Juchitecos were the inheritors of two
important historical legacies that would shape their participation in the Mexican Revolution.
The legacy of village continuity facilitated and limited popular mobilization during the early
phase of the Revolution. The endurance of J uchitan as a relatively autonomous village
fostered the development of a local populace uniﬁed by shared class and ethnic identities,
and capable of mobilizing collective violence in defense of shared interests. However, the
consolidation of a place-speciﬁc identity based on shared notions of class and ethnicity
limited the ability of the Juchitecos to mobilize support from surrounding villages. The
Juchitecos mobilized around collective identities, called forth by the state's violation of
shared local interests. The mobilization of collective violence based on local interests and
local identity was inherently parochial. As a result, village continuity limited the size and
scope of Juchiteco protest.

The Juchiteco legacy of violent conﬂict with the state government of Oaxaca also
had an ambivalent effect on popular participation in the Revolution. Decades of violent
conﬂict with the state government of Oaxaca in the nineteenth century facilitated collective
violence by giving both the Juchitecos and the state a historical tradition to call upon. The
Juchitecos could appeal not only to a history of successful rebellions that had won them
political independence and access to resources in the face of the state's "petty tyrants," but
they could also recall their own brutal repression at the hands of the Oaxacan state. To
mobilize as a Juchiteco was inherently to mobilize against the state government. However,
this conﬂict also limited the size and scope of Juchiteco collective violence. The visibility
of the state as a corrrrnon enemy and the history of conﬂict between the two resulted in a

separatist tendency in all Juchiteco movements. Surrounding villages did not share

59

 

 

 

Juchitan's conﬂict with the state government and thus did not duplicate the Juchitecos'

demand for independence from the state of Oaxaca.

The tradition of violence in Juchitan also effected the state government's reactions
to J uchiteco insurrection. The Oaxacan government, due to extraordinary continuity in
state politics, continued to see the Juchitecos as barbarous rebels who represented a threat
to order and progress. In large part due to this traditional image of the Juchitecos, the state
government had historically depended on violent repression as the primary means by which
to control the Juchitecos. Continuous state-sponsored repression, in turn, justiﬁed the
Juchitecos utilization of violence against the state. Ultimately, peaceful negotiations
between the Juchitecos and the state government became impossible without federal
intervention. The Chegonrista Rebellion conformed to this pattern: neither the Juchitecos
nor the state government were willing to negotiate peacefully until the arrival of a federal
peace commission.

The federal intervention in Juchitan during the Revolution also had an ambivalent
effect on the direction of the Chegomista Rebellion. While the presence of the federal
government in J uchitan made non-violent negotiation possible, it also created the
opportunity for sustained Juchiteco rebellion. The Oaxacan government saw federal
intervention as a violation of state sovereignty, which resulted in a conﬂict that paralyzed
the state's repressive apparatus. As a result, the Chegorrristas persisted in a state of
rebellion for several months following the initial revolt. Surviving the assassination of
their leader, the Chegorrristas were, at the end of 1911, the largest armed rebellion in

Mexico behind Zapatismo.

Stemming from a presidential succession crisis and Porﬁrio Diaz's interview with James
Creelrnan in which he invited political opposition, liberal landowner Francisco Madero and
the Anti-Reelectionist Party became a real threat to Diaz's power in 1910. As a result, Diaz

outlawed party meetings and jailed Madero shortly before the presidential election.

60

 

 

 

 

Announced in late September, Porﬁrio Diaz won the election in a landslide. Released, but

defeated by electoral fraud, Madero crossed the border into the United States and
announced the Plan de San Luis Potosz’. The plan denounced Diaz and named Madero
provisional president. While the Plan de San Luis only vaguely addressed social
questions, it explicitly called for an armed uprising at precisely 6 pm. on November 20,
1910. Madero's shift from ofﬁcial to violent opposition shifted the thrust of the Revolution
from town to country, where the rural population used the opportunity to bring down
existing local power structures. On May 10, 1911 maderista forces led by Pascual Orozco
and Francisco Villa, took Ciudad Juarez in northern Mexico. Two weeks later Porﬁrio
Diaz resigned as President of the Republic.117

In Oaxaca various villages supported the Revolution by expelling state ofﬁcials in
short, powerful revolts. Villagers took control of the western half of the state through
these "jaqueries," making the state ungovemable. On May 2 porﬁrista governor Enrilio
Pirnentel resigned from his post hoping to stem the tide of rebellion. Attempting to appease
the popular sector without fully relinquishing his regime, Porﬁrio Diaz named his nephew,
Félix Diaz (son of Chato), as interim governor. The move failed to slow the popular
revolution in Oaxaca. In June, with rebel forces moving in on the capital and his uncle out
as president, Felix Diaz resigned from his post. Within a week the state legislature elected
recognized anti-reelectionist Heliodoro Diaz Quintas as the new interim governor and
scheduled regular elections for July 30.1 18

The campaign for state governor was a contest between two familiar names from
the nineteenth century. Felix Diaz represented the state's old guard and hoped to win the

election on the basis of his name and his connections. Benito Juarez Maza, son of the

 

”7 Freidrich Katz, The Secret War in Mexico: Europe, the United States, and the Mexican
Revolution (Chicago, 1981), 32-35; David Brading, "Introduction," in Brading, ed., Peasantand Caudillo
in the Mexican Revolution (Cambridge, 1980), 7; Knight, 77.

”8 Fransisco José Ruiz Cervantes, La Revolucion en Oaxaca: El movimiento de la Soberant’a,
1915-1920 (Mexico, 1986), 137-41; Garner, [a Revolucion, 52-67.

61

 

 

 

 

Benemérito, was an anti-cicntiﬁco who hoped to Win the election based on support from all

opponents of the regime. For the anti-reelectionists, who had very little support in Oaxaca,
Juarez Maza seemed to be the better choice. For Francisco Madero, however, the election
in Oaxaca presented a particular problem: he disapproved of Diaz because of who he
represented, he disliked Juarez Maza personally, and there was no viable anti-reelectionist
alternative. Madero supported Juarez Maza throughout the campaign, but also entertained
thoughts of a federal intervention in Oaxaca following the election. Juarez Maza won the
election easily and took possession of the state's executive power on September 23, but
with only suspicious approval from Madero.l ‘9

During his exile from Juchitan, José Gomez became a supporter of Francisco
Madero and the anti-reelectionist cause. In the period leading up to the Madero Revolt,
Gomez began corresponding with the brothers Enrilio and Francisco Vézquez Gomez.
Through them, Madero asked Gomez to return to J uchitan to assemble support for the
struggle against Diaz. Gomez obliged and returned to Juchitan for the ﬁrst time in several
years.120

"Che" Gomez, as he was known in Juchitan, arrived in Juchitan in 1910, and
immediately gained popular support. However, despite popular support for the
revolutionary cause, Juchitan remained peaceful throughout the Madero Revolt because of
its geographic isolation. The only connection between Juchitan and the state and national
capitals ran through San Geronimo Ixtepec, where the federal army reviewed all
correspondence. As a result, the federal forces used censorship to effectively cut Juchitén

off from the Revolution.1 2'

 

”9 Peter V.N. Henderson, F élix Diaz, the Porﬂn'ans, and the Mexican Revolution (Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 1981), 31-39; Ruiz Cervantes, 137-41.

'20 Henestrosa de Webster, 74—75.

m Macario Matus Gutierrez, "La Revolucion en Juchitan, Oaxaca," in Mi pueblo durante la
revolucién, Vol. 2 (Mexico: INAH, 1985), 77-78.

62

 

 

 

 

Although the Juchitecos did not participate in the armed revolution, they did not

simply support the status quo. Juchitan held municipal elections in December 1910, and
even with the porﬁrista apparatus crumbling, the cientiﬁco party of Juchitan rigged the
election. The econorrric growth of the Porﬁriato created a conservative class in J uchitan
that supported the cientiﬁcos. The north side of the village became identiﬁed as porﬁristas,
and enjoyed government support in the form of the 25th Battalion, stationed in the local
Carlos Pacheco barracks. These members of the "red party," often associated with
Tehuantepec, according to one Juchiteco, "made the rules."122 However, the presence of
Che Gomez combined with the deterioration of the regime to erode the red party's power
base in Juchitan. With the balance of power thrown off by revolutionary activity in
northern Mexico and the overwhehning support of the "unruly" Juchitecos behind Che
Gomez, the people ordered a new election. Capturing ninety percent of the popular vote,
Gomez took ofﬁce as the municipal president on the ﬁrst of May. Without bloodshed, by
the time the Madero Revolt had ended, the Juchitecos had reasserted their claim to
autonomy with a popular election.12 3

The leadership of Che Gomez resulted from his understanding of the national
political situation and his appeal to popular sentiments. Essentially, Gomez arrived in
Juchitan as an outside agitator, and one with a reputation as a socialist. His ability to
immediately gain popular support in Juchitan was not the result of his personal ties nor his
charismatic leadership, but rather his perception. Gomez understood that the state's
monopoly of the tools of repression had been broken, and that the balance of forces in the
countryside was shifting. When the Juchitecos recognized that the era of repression and
exile had ended, they believed that they could successfully reassert their local interests, just

as they had done throughout history. In Sidney Tarrow's terms, by understanding the

 

122 Ibid., 92.

‘23 Henestrosa de Webster, 75; de la Cruz, 256.

63

 

 

 

 

 

pOIitical environment, Che Gomez provided "incentiVes for people to undertake collective
action by affecting the expectations for success or failure."124 The impositions of the
Porﬁrian government had never been acceptable, so when the Juchitecos learned that the
state's repressive capacity had diminished, they rejected these impositions, ﬁrst with the
vote and later with violence.
Che Gomez also appealed to local interests to obtain support from the Juchitecos.
During the Porﬁriato, Gomez gained popularity as a lawyer by defending the rights of
Juchitecos, and later won a municipal election by proposing to return alienated salt ﬂats to
Juchitan.125 Although the details of Gomez's campaign for Municipal President in 1911
are not clear, it is clear that the Juchitecos believed that Gomez represented local interests.
The Juchitecos supported Gomez with the idea that he would defend their land and restore
their salt resources.126
Representative of many lower level elites in Porﬁrian Mexico, Che Gomez was
unhappy with the halted social mobility he experienced at his position in La Paz. Clearly
dissatisﬁed with his job, Gomez repeatedly petitioned the federal government for
reassignment, only to be repeatedly rebuffed by Ministerio de Hacienda, J 056 Ives
Limantour. Limantour, in fact, refused "to enter discussions of any nature" with
Gomez.127 As a result, Gomez supported Francisco Madero and the Anti-Reelectionist
Party in 1910. Gomez's appeals to popular sentiments in Juchitan were an attempt by
Gomez to secure himself a piece of the Revolution. It is likely that Gomez believed, as did

many, that Madero's revolution would allow a redistribution of land.

 

'24 Sidney Tarrow, Power in Movement: Social Movements, Collective Action and Politics

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 85.
”5 de la Cruz, 249.
‘26 Matus,

'27 de la Cruz, 255.

64

 

 

o - . t‘ _
, “£4339,” r:

'1'-.-‘

 

 

 

 

The torrent of popular support for the Madero Revolt produced various, often

competing visions of the Mexican Revolution. In the summer of 1911, the antagonistic
ideals of the Juchitecos, the state government, and the federal government converged in
Juchitan. Through their election of Che Gomez the Juchitecos ofﬁcially supported an ideal
of economic and political autonomy: the recuperation of the salt ﬂats expropriated by the
liberal government, the restitution of communal lands, and the restoration of municipal
autonomy through local control of the jefaturas politicos. The latter issue remained
unresolved, even after municipal elections, as porﬁrista Carlos Rodriguez stayed in ofﬁce
as jefe politico, and could be removed legally only by the state government. Resolution of
this particular issue resulted in escalating tensions that reached a national level in 1911.

The state government's reaction to the formation of the Chegonrista movement
displayed a similar correlation of economic interests and political principle. The state could
not allow the Juchitecos to control the position of jefe politico because the Juchitecos would
elect somebody who would accommodate local interests. In the case of Che Gomez this
included the protection of land and the requisition of salt ﬂats. Considering the heavy
foreign investment on the Isthmus, the state government could not allow Juchiteco self-
deterrrrination. Politically, to acquiesce to the demands of a group with a reputation as
rebels, who had mobilized against the government numerous times in the past, would have
encouraged further disorder at a time when the state desperately wanted to maintain peace.
Instead, the state attempted to suppress and subjugate the Chegorrristas in order to set an
example for potential rebels elsewhere, and for potential Juchiteco rebels of the future.

Although neither could permit J uchitan to exist outside of government authority, the
"revolutionary" visions of Madero and the Oaxacan government conﬂicted greatly. In the
aftermath of the Revolution, Madero sought moderate reform centered around the federal
government, while Oaxacan politicians looked to centralize the state government and protect

the tradition of state sovereignty. The formation of the Chegorrrista movement in the face

65

 

 

 

 

 

Of these competing views brought the conﬂict to a head after a summer of actions,

counteractions, and escalating tensions.128

As the dust settled and the new "revolutionary" regime began to stabilize, the state
government looked to continue past methods of control by imposing a jefe politico in
Juchitan. Hearing rumors of the state's plan to impose either Francisco Leon, Che
Gomez's "irreconcilable enemy," or Martin Melendez, a elite, the Juchitecos came together
to defend their autonomy. On June 20 the people of J uchitan, not including Che Gomez,
sent a telegram to interim governor Diaz Quintas expressing their desires and issuing an
ultimatum to the state:

The people of Juchitan know perfectly the characters alluded to, and are

indignant against the proceeding, if the Government wishes to honor the

promise of placing authorities according to the will of the people, it would

do well to name impartial people who will consult public opinion the

truth is found in the people. We beg you to ﬁnd an effective way of

avoiding unrest. False information could cause unfortunate

consequences.‘ 29

This telegram marked the beginning of the Chegomista movement; a movement of the
people of Juchitan which basically gave the government an ultimatum: respect the will of
the people, or the people will rebel. The following day Che Gomez outlined the Juchiteco
vision of the Mexican Revolution to Governor Diaz Quintas, and also solidiﬁed his position
as its leader:

I will consider just any movement within the revolutionary movement which
restores the sovereignty of the people. I consider appropriate the
opportunity for creating a strong government supported by sovereign
people, if the present government intends to maintain past impositions, then
there will deﬁnitely be serious difﬁculties it would be best for you to
respect the people's movement within the system, given the present
circumstances to go against the well—directed will of the people today is the
equivalent of considering the revolution unﬁnished.l 3 °

 

'28 de la Cruz, 257-58.

'29 The people of Juchitan to Gobemador del Estado, Oaxaca, 20 June 1911, Documentos del
archivo José F. Gomez (hereafter DAJFG), (Juchitan: H. Ayuntamiento Popular de Juchitan, 1988), 7.

13° José F. Gomez to Heliodoro Diaz Quintas, Oaxaca, 21 June 1911, DAJFG, 8-9.

66

 

 

 

 

 

The sovereignty of the village, for the Juchitecos. was the only way to ensure the

protection of their way of life.

Following the initial protests of the chegorrristas, Diaz Quintas responded to Gomez
by ordering him to obey his immediate superior, the jefe politico Carlos Rodriguez. The
Juchitecos reacted by fornring a "preventative" police force, armed mostly with machetes.
Gomez, a lawyer, defended the action by pointing out that such a police force was the
province of the popularly-elected ayuntamiento, and could not be obstructed by the state or
federal government, according to the Constitution. Moreover, in direct response to the
governor, Che Gomez issued a threat aimed to force the state's hand, writing that "if
tolerance of the Jefe continues, for my own good I will take the consequential steps to give
you the head of the serpent There is no compronrise: either you support me or the jefe
politico and his followers. I hope for an immediate solution To be or not to be."131
Gomez left no room for negotiation or compromise, and neither would the state
government. With the escalation of tensions, the state set into motion a plan to repress the
J uchitecos.l 3 2

Tire state government never intended to bargain with the chegonristas. As soon as
tensions mounted Diaz Quintas turned to Francisco Leon to bring an end to troubles in
Juchitan, and immediately named him jefe politico. Leon had long been disliked in
Juchitan stemming from his harassment of village lands and his role in the brutal repression
of Juchiteco rebels in 1881. Gomez, whose family feuded with Leon's, referred to
Francisco as the "Coronel of one hundred battles and a virgin sword."133 News of his

imposition reached Juchitan almost immediately and resulted in a massive demonstration

 

”1 Gomez to Diaz Quintas, Oaxaca, 26 June 1911, DAJFG, 15-17.
”2 de la Cruz, 258-59.

”3 Gomez to Diaz Quintas, Oaxaca, 22 June 1911, DAJFG, 10.

67

 

 

 

 

 

that drew the attention of the federal government, and opened a second level of conﬂict,
between the state and the federal government.1 34

The federal government heard of the escalating conﬂict in Juchitan, and against the
will of the state government, got involved in the affair. The federal government, as it did
during the Melendez Rebellions, took a much more conciliatory stance toward the
Juchitecos, and in late June interim president Francisco Leon de la Barra invited Che
Gomez to the capital to hear his side of the story. Subsequently, Gomez applied to the state
for money to travel to Mexico City. Resenting the federal interference, Diaz Quintas denied
Gomez's request for 500 pesos. A few days later a military detachment arrived in Oaxaca
under General Gabriel Gavira to investigate the conﬂict. The state government saw this as
a direct violation of their autonomy and did all that it could to obstruct the investigation.
Ultimately, Gavira suggested to the governor that, in the name of peace and order, he
accept the resignation of Carlos Rodriguez as jefe politico and replace him with Che Gomez
or leave the position vacant. The state ignored the general's suggestion and looked to solve
its own problems in a distinctly less conciliatory fashion.133

Following the federal intervention the state went ahead with its plan to "restore
peace" in Juchitan by sending "Pancho" Leon, "not as jefe politico but as a private citizen."
The governor sent Leon to Juchitan with the recommendation and the power to use the
force of the federal military zone, and publicly announced his expected arrival in Juchitan
for July 10.136 On the morning of the tenth a group of Juchitecos invaded the local jefatura
politica and stole all existing arms. Then, anticipating Leon's arrival, "ninety percent of the
population, crowded together" at the train station "with the intention of lynching the

intruder."1 37 Having been informed of the Juchitecos' plan in San Geronimo Ixtepec,

 

'33 de la Cruz, 259-60.
”5 Ibid., 260-61.
136

Carlos Marin to José P. del Pino, Ixtaltepec, 22 June 1911, DAJFG, 11-12.

'37 Matus, 87.

68

 

 

 

 

Leon did not arrive on the train, and the crowd diSpersed. Although no shots were ﬁred,

this marked the initial armed conﬂict between the two sides. When questioned about the
incident by federal authorities, Diaz Quintas denied that anything had happened.1 3 8

The next couple of months were quite peaceful as the Juchitecos and the state
reached an uncomfortable stalemate, and the presence of the federal army, led by maderista
generals, balanced the state politically. On September 23, however, Benito Juarez Maza
took his place as the governor of Oaxaca and dramatically changed the complexion of the
entire conﬂict. Juarez Maza inherited his father's desire for a strong central government,
his intolerance of disorder, and undoubtedly his hatred of Juchitecos. While campaigning
for governor Juarez Maza promised that the ﬁrst action he would take would be to abolish
the jefaturas politicas so that "all villages will have direct communication with the capital."
He also promised that he would immediately punish Che Gomez for instigating the
disorder.1 39 The political platform of Benito Juarez Maza, like that of his father, directly
opposed Juchiteco notions of autonomy and the sovereign village.

Governor Juarez Maza, as he pronrised, took immediate action in the matter by
narrring Enrique Leon jefe politico of Juchitan. When confronted with a petition from
Juchitecos seeking to avoid unrest, Juarez Maza's answer was, in the opinion of the
Juchitecos, "categorical, brutal, excessively dictatorial, [and] capricious: 'I am completely
unable to acquiesce to your demands; the jefe politico is named and has to begin his
duties.” When they then turned to congress they found Diaz Quintas as "slippery" as
Juarez Maza, but decidedly more "diabolicalz" "The petition of the people of Juchitan was
not taken into consideration. The petitioners are formed by reckless mobs instigated by

bandits and if they want blood they will get blood!"140 This direct violation of the public

 

 

”8 de la Cruz, 260-62; Matus, 87.
”9 Marin to del Pino, 22 June 1911,DAJFG, 11-12.

”‘3 Various juchitecos in Mexico City to Presidente de la Republica, Mexico, 8 Nov. 1911,
AACG, 58.

69

 

 

 

 

 

Will made it clear that the new governor planned to forcibly subjugate the Juchitecos. One

chegorrrista recalled that "just the name 'Leon' provoked the repudiation of the Juchiteco
people;" 1 4' a fact that could not have been lost on Juarez Maza.

The escalating confrontation over who appointed the jefe politico of J uchitan was a
conﬂict between two contradictory ideals: state sovereignty and village autonomy. A
compromise between J uchitan and the state on control of that ofﬁce would necessarily
compromise the ideals of both sides. Consequently, this emerging conﬂict, which made
Oaxaca "the most problematic area in Mexico" according to the British consul,l "3 had to
have a winner and a loser. A state-imposed jefe politico in Juchitan would breach local
autonomy, while a popularly-elected jefe politico would circumvent the state's sovereignty
over the people of Oaxaca. This situation was far from new in Juchitan and the actions of
both sides were informed by past experiences. As a result, each side matched the

aggressive and recalcitrant attitude of the other, making certain a violent conclusion.

The Chegomista Rebellion:

By late October J uarez Maza made the ﬁnal decision to send Enrique Leon to
Juchitan to take his post as jefe politico, and thus bring the conﬂict to a head. Essentially
Leon was an instrument with which to force the Juchitecos' hand and to give the state a
viable excuse to subjugate Juchitan. As municipal president, the jefatura politica was the
charge of Che Gomez, and consequently it was his duty to turn the ofﬁce over to Leon.
Receiving news of Leon's anticipated arrival in Juchitan, on the ﬁrst of November Gomez
telegrarmned both Leon and Diaz Quintas, warning them that to turn over the position

would be an "inexcusable mistake" that would result in " grave consequences that would

 

 

”1 Matus, 91.

”3 Garner, La Revolucion.

70

 

 

 

 

 

hurt the entire country."143 Fully aware of the consequences, Diaz Quintas ordered Leon
to continue.'“

The following day Enrique Leon arrived in J uchitén with 250 federal
reinforcements from San Geronimo to join the 25th Battalion, stationed in the local
barracks. About ﬁve hundred in number, the federal forces found themselves surrounded
by about three thousand Juchitecos almost immediately upon entering the village. From his
refuge in the barracks, Leon demanded that Gomez turn over the jefatura and dissolve his
massive group of followers.145 Gomez rebuffed his demands on both accounts, claiming
(probably accurately) that he was not capable of dispersing the crowd, and thus to hand
over the jefatura would result in violence.1 ‘6 Shortly thereafter, open hostilities began.

Although the actual commencement of open ﬁre is unclear, it is certain that for the
next three days federal forces and the chegorrristas fought continuously, with the army
conﬁned in the barracks and the Juchitecos surrounding them. Chegonrista forces
constantly besieged the barracks, but being armed with machetes, sticks, slingshots,
spears, and antiquated "wait a minute" riﬂes, they could not overwhehn federal forces. On
the third day of ﬁghting a federal contingent of about ﬁfty cavalrymen attempted to
penetrate Juchitan and give ammunition to the soldiers conﬁned to the barracks. As the
cavalry entered the village from the north, the chegomistas slaughtered them in the barrio of
Cheguigo, killing almost the entire unit and supplying themselves with arms, ammunition,
and horses. Convinced that they could not subdue Juchitan with riﬂes, the next day the
federal army sent in from Orizaba a large unit of reinforcements with heavy artillery. The

cannons of the artillery created a "thunder that nobody had ever heard," and forced the

 

”3 Gomez to Enrique Leon, Juchitén, 1 Nov. 1911, DAJFG, 17-18.
”4 Diaz Quintas to Leon, Juchitan, 1 Nov. 1911, DAJFG, 18-19.
”5 Leon to Gomez, Juchitén, 2 Nov. 1911, DAJFG, 19.

"6 Gomez to Leon, Juchitan, 2 Nov. 1911, DAJFG, 20.

71

 

 

 

 

 

 

chegorrristas from Juchitan. One participant in the battle made the symbolic analogy that the
cannon was "unknown to [the Juchitecos] until now as the horse was unknown to the
valiant soldiers of Moctezuma when the army of Heman Cortés appeared, for they
imagined that the horse and rider were one; [the chegomistas] evacuated the village and left
for the mountains."147 By the end of November 5, the federal forces took control of the
village, and began burning the dead bodies and the houses of the "hostile natives with a
view to furnish a warning and as a punishment." All tolled, several hundred died in the
ﬁghting, including a Spaniard and the district judge in the local hotel, and the local
battalion's paymaster and medic, whom the rebels tortured "horribly."148

While more federal reinforcements arrived to fortify the village, the chegonristas,
now about ﬁve thousand strong, took up positions in the countryside and remained in "a
state of armed hostility."149 Meanwhile the dispute between the federal and state
government resurfaced. Governor Juarez Maza wanted to use the massive force
accumulated in Juchitan to thoroughly subjugate the battered chegomistas. Madero, on the
other hand, hoped to negotiate and establish relations between the rebels and the central
government. The conﬂict paralyzed federal forces in J uchitan and drove an even deeper
wedge between Oaxaca and the national government. The indecision caused by this
conﬂict gave the chegorrristas the necessary breathing room to take control of the
countryside. The new jefe politico complained of rebels roving around Juchitan "in search

of plunder, taking shots, and without being pursued by the federales, perhaps due to lack

 

”7 Matus, 81, 90.

”3 Haskell, Sarina Cruz, 6, 8, 11 Nov. 1911, so 812.00/2497, 2498, 2528; Henry Lane
Wilson, Mexico City, 20 Feb. 1912, 812.00/2889; Pablo Pineda to Leon, Juchitan, 24 Nov. 1911,
DAJFG, 39-40; Leon to Diaz Quintas, 5 Nov. 1911, DAJFG, 21-22; Augustin A. Valdes to Leon,
Juchitan, 25 Nov. 1911, DAJFG, 44; Alfonso Fransisco Ramirez, Historia de la Revolucion Mexicana en
Oaxaca (Mexico: Talleres Graﬁcos de la Nacion, 1970), 38-40; Knight, 373-78.

 

”9 Haskell, Salina Cruz, 11 Nov. 1911, SD 812.00/2528.

72

 

 

 

 

 

 

of instructions."1 3° Government paralysis gave the chegonristas relative freedom in the

countryside.1 3 1

Che Gomez established his main barracks within the jurisdiction of Juchitén at a
point called Guela Befre, where the rebellion began to conform to the traditions established
by a century of violent conﬂict. From his barracks Gomez blamed the rebellion on the
government for not respecting popular consent in the election of local ofﬁcials, expressed
fears of isthmeﬁo villagers losing their lands to Americans, and ultimately, following in the
footsteps of Meléndez, Binu Gada, and Mexu Chele, he addressed the vital need for the
Isthmus to secede from Oaxaca and form its own entity. At Guela Ber'ie Che Gomez
formulated the slogan of the chegomistas: "erile we depend on Oaxaca, we are lost."1 5 3

Following the initial revolt the J uchitecos demonstrated an understanding of their
position in history. They called upon the traditions of place-speciﬁc identity and collective
violence to explain their participation in the rebellion. For the Juchitecos, the imposition of
outside authorities was an affront to their collective, local identity. Consequently, the
Chegorrristas basically asked that Juchitén be governed by Juchitecos, free of outside
inﬂuence: "the government wanted an outsider to occupy the position of jefe politico and
'Ché Gomez' asked that it be one of our people, so that would be of our blood."1 3 3 The
Juchiteco identity signiﬁed more to the people of Juchitan than a shared geographic
location; it was a shared class and ethnicity. As a result, the Juchiteco identity took on
heightened signiﬁcance as shared blood, ancestry, and race.

Calling upon their local history, the Juchitecos also understood themselves to be

inheritors of a tradition of violence. To be of the Juchiteco "race" was to be heir to a legacy

 

‘30 Leon to Diaz Quintas, 5 Nov. 1911, DAJFG, 21-22.

'3' Wilson, Mexico City, 20 Feb. 1912, SD 812.00/2889; Leon Porsch, Tapachula, 5 Mar.
1912, SD 812.00/3446.

”2 Ramirez, 3940.

‘33 Matus, 85.

73

 

 

 

and of valiant warriors, who fought for independence and democracy. Tire chegorrristas

saw themselves as an extension of that tradition, as evidenced by a petition presented to
President Madero in the wake of the revolt. This petition demonstrates where J uchitecos
conceived themselves in a long history of collective violence:
A virile people, that, on many occasions during the French Intervention
demonstrated itself to be a digniﬁed descendant of our heroic ancestors; a
people harassed for thirty years, humiliated by the brutal hand of local
authorities, has entered into an armed conﬂict on the impulse of a just
ambition and a just right, that is the village of Juchitan The people did
not want to accept the imposition, and now do not want to depend on the
government of Oaxaca to resist imposition, they confront danger with
indifference; to obtain their independence, they will spum their lives we
do not want more blood, because we want to preserve our race; because we
do not want by the whims or ambitions of certain individuals, to be an
externrinated race that, in dangerous times for the nation, could lend a brave
contingent of the bold valor of its sons We want, since we live in full
democracy, the petition of the people to be agreed to; their just ambitions to
be agreed to, for the voice of the people to be heard.154

The chegomistas were ﬁrst and foremost Juchitecos, and as such, in the eyes of the rebels,
a "break with tradition" such as the imposition attempted by Juarez Maza had to be met with
violence.

The distinct identity of the chegonristas produced nearly unanimous participation
from the people of Juchitén, but limited the scope of the rebellion. Once forced into the
countryside, the J uchitecos could not rally additional support for the rebellion.
Immediately following the initial revolt, the United States consul at Salina Cruz noted that
"one thing that will militate against a spread of this disorder is the fact that the tribes of
Indians are not altogether in sympathy with each other."155 In fact, while in the
countryside the chegorrristas attempted to forcibly recruit supporters for the rebellion, but
met with a great deal of resistance. Neighboring villages hated and feared the Juchitecos
more than they feared the state, and turned to the government for support against the

recruitment tactics of the chegorrristas. Speciﬁcally, they appealed to the state for protection

 

13" Juchitecos to Presidente de la Republica, Mexico, 8 Nov. 1911, AACG, 58-60.

'33 Haskell, Salina Cruz, 8 Nov. 1911, SD 812.00/2498.

74

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

and arms in order to assist in persecuting the rebCIS. In at least one village, Rincon
Antonio, the conﬂict resulted in casualties.‘ 3"

As the Juchitecos threatened to separate from Oaxaca, the dispute between Oaxaca
and the federal government escalated over how to reestablish control on the Isthmus. In
mid-November General Gabriel Gavira arrived in J uchitarr, commissioned by the federal
government to negotiate peace with the chegomistas. As negotiations between Gomez and
Gavira began, Oaxaca threatened to secede from the Republic because of the direct violation
of the state's sovereignty. General Gavira, under direct orders of President Madero,
offered the rebels amnesty and the right to be consulted in the choice of a jefe politico. He
even went as far as to blame the conﬂict on the authoritarianism of Juarez Maza. As a sort
of compromise, Madero proposed that General Candido Aguilar occupy the position of jefe
politico on an interim basis and with the approval of the people of J uchitan. The federal
government, in effect, underrrrined the sovereignty of the state, and as a result peace

seemed eminent.l 3 7
Meanwhile, Governor Juarez Maza moved to obstruct the negotiations of the federal
government in order to protect the sovereignty of the state. Juarez Maza told Enrique Leon
that Gavira had no power over affairs of the state, and commanded Leon not to turn over
the jefatura unless ordered to do so by the state government. In addition, while the federal
government negotiated, the state purged Juchitan of its ofﬁcials and named cientiﬁco Pablo

Pineda, brother of Rosendo Pineda, as municipal president in place of Che Gomez. In the

 

name of state sovereignty, Juarez Maza did all that he could to obstruct federal

negotiations.‘ 3 3

 

”6 Diaz Quintas to Leon, San Geronimo, 13, 16 Nov. 1911, DAJFG, 24-26; Leon to Benito
Juérez, Oaxaca, 17 Nov. 1911, DAJFG, 27.

'37 Juarez to Leon, Juchitan, 17, 18 Nov. 1911; Leon to Juarez, Oaxaca, 18 Nov. 1911, DAJFG,
26, 28-29: Haskell, Salina Cruz, 20 Nov. 1911, SD 812.00/2572; Wilson, Mexico City, 20 Feb. 1912,
SD 812.00/2889; de la Cruz, 262.

'53 Juarez to Leon, Juchitén, 18,20, 23,24 Nov. 1911, DAJFG, 27-28, 33, 36, 38.

75

 

 

At the same time, clandestinely, Juarez Maza himself entered negotiations with Che
Gomez. In a letter delivered to Gomez at Guela Beﬁe by Braulio Toledo, Juarez Maza
proposed to pardon Gomez and his followers if he agreed to join J uarez Maza in supporting
the presidential coup of Bernardo Reyes. Like his father, Juarez Maza understood that,
though dangerous, the Juchitecos made better allies in war than enemies. Their support
during the French Intervention had been invaluable. Che Gomez, on the other hand, like
his predecessors, knew better than to trust the government of Oaxaca. The state
government rolled back the reforms promised the J uchitecos for their support against the
French. Moreover the precedent did exist for a successful treaty with the federal
government, which also had offered amnesty to the rebels. Che Gomez refused Juarez
Maza's offer and prepared to leave for Mexico City to negotiate personally with President
Madero. Guaranteed a safe passage to the capital by the president, Gomez took Juarez
Maza's letter with him.1 3 9

The governor set into motion a plan to assassinate Che Gomez in order to elirrrinate
proof of the conspiracy. Juarez Maza expliciﬂy ordered all authorities along the route to the
capital to apprehend Gomez, under the pretense of bringing him to justice in the military
courts of San Geronimo Ixtepec. Gomez, who traveled with a entourage for his protection,
feared having to travel through the Isthmus villages. On December 4, in the village of
Rincon Antonio, which had previously petitioned the state for arms to help persecute the
chegomistas, the municipal president and a group of "thugs" arrested Gomez and his
escort.160 The following day, claiming to be taking the prisoners to San Geronimo to be
judged, the group of men took the J uchitecos to the nearby Ranchen’a de Barranco’n and

killed them. Displaying their feelings toward the rebel leader, the assassins, led by Tomas

 

‘39 Causa contra Tomas Carballo (a) Matanche (Juchitén: H. Ayuntamiento Popular de Juchitén,
1983), 15; de la Cruz.

“3° Diaz Quintas to Leon, Juchitan; Leon to Presidente Municipal, San Geronimo; Leon to
Presidente Municipal, Petapa; Leon to Presidente Municipal, Matias Romero; Leon to Josué A. Esteva,
Matias Romero; Esteva to Leon; Catarino Abad to Leon; Venturo Cano to Leon, 4 Dec. 1911, DAJFG,
55-61.

76

 

 

 

 

 

Carballo (known as "Matanche"), left 52 holes in the body of Che Gomez. Beyond
covering up his conspiracy, undoubtedly Juarez Maza had Gomez assassinated to protect
the state's sovereignty, and to warn potential rebels that disorder would not be tolerated.l 6'

Juérez Maza's application of the Ley F uga changed the complexion of the entire
situation. The death of Che Gomez diffused the state's conﬂict with the central government
by removing the source of the problem. The state ofﬁcially claimed that Gomez "was
assassinated by the relations of the people whom he had injured" at Rincon Antonio shortly
before the incident.1 ‘33 Knowing the reputation of the J uchitecos, Madero apparently
believed this version and simply offered Gomez's widow 150,000 pesos in compensation.
The death of Che Gomez also transformed the rebellion itself. The chegorrristas had been
close to accepting government offers of amnesty before the assassination, and now, with
their leader dead, the Juchitecos began to ﬂood back into Juchitén.l "3 The jefe politico
reported on January 12 that 2,671 rebels had presented themselves and returned to their
homes, turning in about one hundred riﬂes.1 6" The state congress roundly applauded
Governor Juérez Maza for crushing the rebels and maintaining the sovereignty of the state.

However, motivated by the state's aggression toward them, roughly half of the
chegorrrista forces remained in the interior mountains and the marshes of the Isthmus.
Although not in a fanriliar manner, the rebellion continued, and at the end of the ﬁrst full

year of the Revolution the chegorrristas were the second largest armed rebellion in Mexico.

 

'6' Ramirez, 108; Knight, 377; Causa contra Tomas Carballo, 15.

'32 Wilson, Mexico City, 20 Feb. 1912, SD 812.00/2889.

‘33 Leon to Diaz Quintas, Salina Cruz, 8, 9 Dec. 1911; Leon to Diaz Quintas, Tuxtepec, 11 Dec.
1911; Leon to Benito Juarez, Tehuacan, Puebla, 13 Dec. 1911; Benito Juarez to Leon, Juchitan, 15 Dec.
1911; Leon to Benito Juarez, Oaxaca, 16 Dec. 1911; Leon to Diaz Quintas, Oaxaca, 17, 18, 21 Dec.
1911; Diaz Quintas to Leon, 22 Dec. 1911; Leon to Diaz Quintas, Oaxaca, 5 Jan. 1912, DAJFG, 68, 71,
73, 76-80, 85.

1“ Leon to Diaz Quintas, Oaxaca, 12 Jan. 1912, DAJFG, 86.

77

 

 

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The death of Che Gomez did not bring on a concerted Juchiteco insurrection, but rather led

to a period of sporadic, small-scale activity under seenringly disjointed leadership.l ‘33

In March 1912, with the Orizquista Rebellion intensifying in northern Mexico and
diverting federal military attention away from the Isthmus, the chegonristas came down
from the mountains for the ﬁrst time since the assassination of their leader. From March to
July about two thousand chegomistas took active control of the country between Juchitén
and Reforma, a village to the south in the state of Chiapas. The reappearance of the
chegonristas in mass resulted from the dispersal of federal forces on the Isthmus and an
illicit arms trade with Guatemala. The shipment of arms to southern Mexico from
Guatemala took place through the "estero system." The paciﬁc coast of between Guatemala
and Oaxaca was full of esteros (lagoons) which rendered "patrol of the coast practically an
impossibility." It was " generally understood" that before the November revolt, the
Juchitecos "had received consignments by way of the 'esteros'"l 6'3 In the last week of
February, seven thousand riﬂes landed near Pijijipam, a station in Chiapas on the Pan-
American Railroad. Clearly this was not an exclusive trade between Juchitan and
Guatemala, but within a week the chegorrristas reemerged with arms.1 67

On the ﬁrst of March, the same day that Pascual Orozco initiated his rebel
movement in Chihuahua, about two thousand chegomistas burned down six bridges on the
Pan-American Railroad, and cut telegraph lines to the region, effectively severing all
communications below J uchitan. For the next four months the chegorrristas protected their

zone outside of government control by burning bridges frequently and harassing the

 

“33 Eusebio Ramirez, Niltepec, to Leon, Juchitan, 8 Dec. 1911; Presidente Municipal, Rincon
Antonio, to Leon, 8 Dec. 1911; Leon to Diaz Quintas, Salina Cruz, 10 Dec. 1911; Leon to Presidente
Municipal, Union Hidalgo, 11 Dec. 1911; Leon to Diaz Quintas, Tuxtepec, 11 Dec. 1911; Ventura J.
Cano, Rincon Antonio, to Leon, 12 Dec. 1911; Presidente Municipal, Estacion Reforma, to Leon, 20
Dec. 1911; Diaz Quintas to Leon, 25 Dec. 1911; Leon to Diaz Quintas, Oaxaca, 29 Dec. 1911; Diaz
Quintas to Leon, 3, 6 Jan. 1912, DAJFG, 69-70, 72-74, 79-81, 83, 85; Campbell, 62.

1“ Porsch, Tapachula, 23 Feb. 1912, SD 812.00/3050.

“37 Porsch, Tapachula, 23 Feb. 1912, SD 812.00/2860, 3050.

78

 

 

 

 

 

 

railroad almost daily. United States Ambassador Henry Lane Wilson lamented

"internrittent and dangerous outbreaks, the existence of large bands of brigands and a
general insecurity of life" on the Isthmus.l ‘38 The federal government sent troops, but they
could not subdue the Juchitecos, who utilized guerrilla tactics to keep federal forces at bay.
The United States consul at Salina Cruz observed that "the road is repaired, and then
promptly a band tears up some hundred yards or so and returns keeping the Federal
soldiers from approaching them on the railroad, or rather augmentation of the Federal force
against them by way of the railroad."169 In this manner the federal army and the
chegomistas reached a stalemate; federal reinforcements secured the village of J uchitérr and
the rebels controlled the countryside.I 70

In the absence of federal forces the chegorrristas menaced large landholdings of the
interior, and even burned and destroyed the town of Reforma. The presence of the
chegonristas, apparently led by Felipe Lopez, and instrumental ﬁgure in the November
revolt, scared interior land owners. Moreover, with zapatistas and orozquistas ﬁghting
against the government in Morelos and Chihuahua, respectively, Isthmus landowners
began to fear that the chegorrristas would attach themselves to a larger movement. An
American on the interior claimed that the Juchitecos had already declared for both Zapata
and Orozco. By May landowners, especially Americans, began to abandon the Isthmus in
mass.l 7‘

The beginning of planting season combined with waning revolutionary activity in
the north to bring the Chegonrista Rebellion to a close. In northern Mexico the federal

army, under Victoriano Huerta, routed orozquista rebels, and by June the rebellion ceased

 

'63 Wilson, Mexico City, 20 Mar. 1912, SD 812.00/3365.
“39 Haskell, Salina Cruz, 17 Apr. 1912, SD 812.00/3729.

‘7° Haskell, Salina Cruz, 4, 21 Man, 2 Apr., 2 May 1912, SD 812.00/3036, 3476, 3568, 3789;
Porsch, Tapachula, 4 Mar. 1912, SD 812.00/3015.

37' Haskell, Salina Cruz, 21 Mar.. 21 May 1912, SD 812.00/3476, 4093; Wilson, Mexico City,
6 May 1912, SD 812.00/3877.

79

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

to be a threat. The army's success in the north "directly and immediately" effected "the
attitude and bearing of the population on the Isthmus."172 The stability of the government
no longer seemed so uncertain. Perhaps more important "in causing the people to become
more paciﬁc" was "the necessity of getting crops planted and cultivated." In mid-July the
US. consul celebrated that "the indians of Juchitan have quieted down, raiding has
stopped, and the great majority of country people are devoting themselves to putting in their
crops. "‘7 3 Ultimately, the ability of the Juchitecos to maintain their land base undercut the
rebellion. When planting season came, the Juchitecos had ﬁelds to return to and plant.
The reestablishrnent of federal control in the north also signiﬁed that more military attention
would be sent south. Consequently, in July of 1912, the chegorrristas returned to Juchitén,
bringing the rebellion to a close.

Owing to the state government's diminished governing capacity, the Juchitecos
found their relations with the state much improved following the violent phase of the
rebellion. Guerrilla warfare in the Sierra Juérez threatened the capital and diverted the
state's military power, while the period of instability on the Isthmus had left the state nearly
broke. In August 1912, hacendado and poﬁrista Miguel Bolaﬁos Cacho became the new
governor following the mysterious death of Benito Juarez Maza in April.174 However, the
state government simply lacked the ability to effectively govern Juchitan and, consequently,
the Juchitecos experienced a large degree of freedom. As a sign of that political freedom,
Juchitan elected Adolfo Gurrion as district representative on September 13. Gurrion used
this freedom and his ofﬁce to attack the remaining pofrristas in the state legislature, and to
address the need of the Isthmus to separate from the state of Oaxaca. On the latter issue,

Gurrion warned congress that "the Isthmus has not waited nor will ever wait for anything"

 

'73 Haskell, Salina Cruz, 28 June 1912, SD 812.00/4411.
”3 Claude Guyaut, Salina Cruz, 19 July 1912, SD 812.00/4503.

'74 Ruiz Cervantes, 244, 246.

80

 

 

 

 

 

from the state government.1 7 3 In the unstable environment that followed the Chegomista
Rebellion these statements were accepted, but repression followed the next year when the
Porﬁrian Order once again came to power.

In February 1913 General Victoriano Huerta named himself President of Mexico
following the assassination of Francisco Madero and Pino Suarez. In Oaxaca, with active
support from Bolai‘ros Cacho and the old porﬁristas, Huerta began to tighten the screws on
political opponents. In Juchitan, the Huerta regime forcibly recruited Juchitecos into the
federal army. In the month of July alone, the government sent over ﬁve hundred
Juchitecos to ﬁght against rebels in the north. The Isthmus remained relatively quiet during
this period until July, when former jefe politico Alfonso Santibaﬁez rebelled in
Tehuantepec. Shortly thereafter, Adolfo Gurrion returned to Juchitan from Mexico City
with the intention of aligning Juchiteco forces with Venustiano Carranza, in opposition to
the Huerta regime. Accusing him of being involved in the uprising in Tehuantepec, local
ofﬁcials arrested Gurrion on August 17. Three days later, without a trial, local police killed
Adolfo Gurrion. As Porf‘nio Diaz had done so effectively in the past, Huerta was able to
dismantle Juchiteco rebellion before it started.

When civil war broke out in Mexico following the resignation of Huerta in July
1914, Juchiteco participation in the Revolution conformed to the traditions of separatism
and conﬂict with the state. The Constitutionalists, led by brothers Venustiano and Jesus
Carranza, appealed to these traditions to gain the political and military support of the
Juchitecos. This alliance between the Juchitecos and the Constitutionalists marked the
beginning of a shift in Juchiteco social protest from radical and violent to institutional.
Although this alliance signiﬁed a dramatic break from strictly local forms of collective

violence, it did not represent any break from the defense of local identity or local interests.

 

”3 Sesion de Colegio Electoral de la Camara de Diputados, 11 Oct. 1912, AACG, 78-79.

81

 

 

 

 

The Constitutionalists initially wanted to secure the Isthmus of Tehuantepec and its

railway in order to transfer troops and supplies between the Gulf and Paciﬁc zones of
operation. Led by Jesus Carranza, the Constitutionalists played on the relationship
between the Isthmus and the state of Oaxaca to gain acceptance on the Isthmus. With the
central valley already opposed to the presence of the Constitutionalists in Oaxaca, the
Juchitecos saw carrancismo as a means by which they could secure autonomy from the
government of Oaxaca. By conforming with the Juchitecos primary political objective,
national-level political ofﬁcials succeeded in gaining Juchiteco support where state-level
ofﬁcials had consistently failed.

Jesus Carranza found competing military forces in Juchitan and Tehuantepec when
he arrived on the Isthmus in August 1914. Hoping to reach some sort of comprorrrise by
playing the two off of each other, Carranza recognized both forces. Carranza extended the
Constitutionalist umbrella to cover both groups, accepted both into his army, and named
Alfonso Santibaﬁez, head of the Tehuano faction, as operations chief. However, this
strategy forced Carranza to juggle leaders to avoid civil war on the Isthmus. By the end of
the year, Carranza began to fear a Santibafrez coup on the Isthmus, and moved to replace
him with the stepson of Che Gomez, Mario Palacios. Santibaﬁez heard the news and
moved ﬁrst, capturing Carranza and his staff. The J uchitecos who were captured were
killed immediately, while Santibar'iez kept the First Chiefs brother as a hostage. When
Venustiano Carranza refused to negotiate, Santibaﬁez executed Jesus, and ﬂed to Oaxaca
City to join the state government's soberanista movement.l 7'3

The assassination of Jesus Carranza was another incident in a long history of the
state's violent repression of the J uchitecos. The incident further entrenched the tradition of
state-village conﬂict and the vision of the Tehuano as an instrument of state-sponsored

repression. For the Juchitecos, Jesus Carranza represented autonomy from the Oaxacan

 

'76 Jorge Fernando Iturribarria, Oaxaca en la Historia: de la e’poca precolombiana a los tiempos
actuales (Mexico: Editorial "Benito Juarez" de Oaxaca, 1955), 330-31.

82

 

 

state. Che Gomez's widow and daughter traveled With Carranza, and Mario Palacios

served on his staff. On the other hand, Santibaﬁez represented the state government, which
ultimately entailed repression. His staff included members of the Leon and Maqueo
families. Furthermore, Santibar'iez had connections with the Oaxacan Sovereignty
Movement, led by state ofﬁcials, before and after the assassination. According to many
sources, Santibai'rez assassinated Carranza on the orders of the soberarristas. Following the
assassination, he became a military leader for the Sovereignty Movement until felicistas
shot him to death in 1916.'77

Juchitan continued to be a bastion of support for the Constitutionalists, even after
the death of Jesus Carranza. For the remainder of the violent period of the Revolution,
Carranza called upon the Juchitecos for military support. Four battalions of Juchiteco
soldiers fought all over Mexico in support of Carranza, and later Alvaro Obregon.
Obregon once commented that there was not one cemetery in Mexico that was not ﬁlled
with the remains of at least one Juchiteco killed in the Revolution. It was Obregon's
friendship with Juchiteco General Heliodoro Charis that helped to bring the century of
rebellion to a close in Juchitan.178

Heliodoro Charis came to power in Juchitén following the Mexican Revolution and
brought, for the ﬁrst time, decades of political stability with the consent of a majority of the
population. Charis' ability to rule with consent resulted from his peculiar combination of
national and local political connections. On a national level Charis began as a political client
of Obregon. He exchanged loyalty to Obregon for military support in ending the violence
between Juchitan and Tehuantepec, and the ﬁnancial resources to establish an agricultural
colony on the Isthmus. Locally, the people of Juchitan respected Charis and his authority

because of his personal ties to the community, and especially because they saw him as a

 

'77 Ramirez, 211; Iturribarria, 330—31.

”3 Campbell, 76-78.

83

 

      

Q,
Ah

"real" Juchiteco. Charis lived in Juchitan all his life, he never attended public schools, he
was illiterate, he did not speak good Spanish, and he did not ﬁt in to so-called "civilized
society." As far as the Juchitecos were concerned, they were being led by someone of
shared "blood" and "ancestry." Eventually, Charis became a PRI politician, and thus
institutionalized the "Juchitecan seed of revolt." Howard Campbell summarizes Charis as a
cacique who "helped keep the Isthmus in check and amenable to national government
policy in return for federally funded development programs, public works, and a degree of
regional autonomy.“79 Ultimately, the strong Juchiteco identity and the tradition of
conﬂict with the state, which had combined to fuel a century of separatist rebellion, also
combined to transform the J uclritecos rebellious past into an "institutionalized

revolution." 1 3 °

The local and regional sense of what it meant to be a Juchiteco initiated, sustained,
and ultimately, limited popular mobilization on the Isthmus. Conceiving their position in
history as uncompromising defenders of their local integrity, the Juchitecos felt hunriliated
by the government's imposition of local authorities. Although their condition in regards to
land and labor were good compared to many Mexican regions, juxtaposed with a long
history of collective violence in defense of local autonomy, they viewed their position in
Mexico as "a situation they need not, cannot, and ought not endure."181 By shifting his
opposition from formal to violent, Francisco Madero "let the tiger out of the cage,"
unleashing a torrent of popular rebellion in the countryside that, ultimately, broke the
monopoly of repressive capacity held by the army, and opened the door for the Juchitecos

to take their place in history alongside their "heroic ancestors."

 

”9 Ibid., 81.
‘8° Campbell, 78-79.

'3' Moore, 462.

84

 

 

 

The conﬂict between the state and the federal government following the Madero

Revolt provided the opportunity for the chegomistas to persist in a state of armed rebellion
for several months. The state government, instructed by years of disorder in Juchitan,
carried a familiar, uncomprorrrising attitude toward the Juchitecos, while the federal
government, as it had historically, took a more conciliatory stance toward the rebels. This
dispute over how to bring order to J uchitan kept the government from taking decisive
action and created a sense of ambivalence among the chegorrrista rebels. The assassination
of Che Gomez made this ambivalence clear. With the chegorrristas on the verge of
accepting federal offers of arrmesty, the death of their leader simply expedited the process
of demobilization for about half of the rebels. However, for the other half the assassination
of Che Gomez underscored the state's wickedness and provided the impetus for remaining
armed and hostile toward the state.

As they had for centuries prior, the J uchitecos fought during the early phase of the
Mexican Revolution for cultural, political, and economic autonomy, which necessarily
lirrrited the rebellion in size and scope. Supported by illicit arms from Guatemala and
intense rebel activity in northern Mexico, the chegomistas maintained an existence beyond
the pale of government control, but found it impossible to integrate themselves into the
larger revolution. Its distinct identity as Juchiteco isolated the Chegomista Rebellion both
regionally and nationally. Juchiteco attempts to garner anything more than tacit support
from surrounding villages met with stiff resistance, and when planting season began and
the "revolutionary" government began to stabilize, the Juchitecos returned to their ﬁelds,

ending the violent phase of the Chegorrrista Rebellion.

85

 

 

CONCLUSIONS

The persistence of the village of Juchitan from the pre-Columbian era to the eve of
the Mexican Revolution produced a uniﬁed community marked by overlapping collective

identities. Centuries of continuity fostered a distinct community formation that diminished

 

horizontal cleavages within the village. Reduced social stratiﬁcation produced a community
in which the majority of the population shared similar social relations to each other, and to
outsiders. Moreover, the limited impact of Spanish colonialism displaced Zapotec elites,
elirrrinating the social forms which uniﬁed Zapotec ethnicity, and shifting ideas of ethnic
identity to speciﬁc villages. Ultimately, class and ethnic identity overlapped with local
identity resulting in a community capable of mobilizing a large percentage of its population
in defense of their collective identities.

The government's attempts to integrate Juchitan into a new "modern" state
following Independence represented a fundamental challenge to the collective J uchiteco
identity. Over a period of centuries, the Juchitecos had developed a distinct place-speciﬁc
identity based on social relations relatively free from outside inﬂuence. The state's
proposed modernization programs essentially required a realignment of village social
relations, and thus challenged the central feature of place-speciﬁc identity. More
speciﬁcally, Mexico's modernization plans violated speciﬁc local interests that were
inherently connected to the Juchiteco identity. All collective identities include a
corresponding set of interests, and therefore the violation of a speciﬁc interest is also a
violation of a speciﬁc identity. In a community with few cross cutting identities, such as
J uchitan, the violation of a speciﬁc identity resulted in a nearly unanimous local

mobilization in defense of the offended identity. However, because the J uchiteco identity

86

 

 

 

 

 

included an aggregation of collective identities, and even more local interests, the
mobilization of collective violence in Juchitan has been difﬁcult to classify.

In regards to the Mexican Revolution, Alan Knight divides popular mobilization
into two distinct categories, neither of which adequately embodies general J uchiteco
mobilization or the Chegonrista Rebellion, speciﬁcally. In his own terms, Knight
characterizes the Chegorrrista movement as a serrano rebellion, rather than an agrarian
rebellion. Serrano movements derived from peasantries free from landlord control, but
also unfamiliar with the hand of political authority. Consequently, the movements
themselves represented a backlash of autonomous communities against incursions of the
central government.

The difference between a serrano and an agrarian rebellion was that serranos reacted
against Porfrrio Diaz's program of political centralization, whereas agraristas reacted
against the expropriation of their land by large landowners. Essentially, the serrano
movement sought to protect its political autonomy while the agrarian movement sought to
protect its land base. The Chegonrista Rebellion was, indeed, a popular reaction against
"the brutal hand" of government imposition that resulted from Diaz's policy of
centralization. However, the nature of modernization and popular mobilization in Juchitén
both call into question the usefulness of Knight's typologies.182

The Diaz regime implemented a program of econorrric development and political
consolidation on the Isthmus that added direct conﬂict to an agrarian system already rife
with horizontal cleavages. Although the most powerful members of provincial society
lived in the state capital and exploited the rural populace indirectly, a dichotomy between
large landowners and rural cultivators both drawing their income from the land
characterized the organization of the Isthmus. The modernization programs proposed by

the Mexican government to privatize agricultural land attempted to lure capital into the

 

'82 Knight.

87

 

 

Countryside by increasing the proﬁtability of owning land. To extend landholdings on the

Isthmus, or in any society in which the elite derive their income from the land, the elite
needed the approval of political authorities. As a result, the political nature of land
ownership focused conﬂict on control and distribution of landed property, and battles for
land became battles to decide who got to make the rules. This formula worked inversely as
well: conﬂicts focused on who got to make the rules were, implicitly, battles over the
control and distribution of landed property. Essentially, then, conﬂicts in the export
agriculture sectors of rural Mexico were both agrarian and serrano.183

Mexican modernization programs attacked the local interests that corresponded with
the various collective identities embodied in the Juchiteco identity, and consequently the
Juchitecos countered government programs with community-based mobilizations of
collective violence. Juchiteco mobilizations reasserted the J uchitecos cultural, political, and
economic autonomy, and as such were attempts to reclaim the right to make the rules, and
control and disnibute land. The strength of J uchiteco collective violence stemmed from
centuries of village continuity which resulted in a uniﬁed, resilient community, willing to
use violence to defend itself. Mobilizations experienced minimal internal opposition,
proposed a bold challenges to the state's political ideology, and did not dissolve in the face
of adversity. Perhaps most importantly, however, on the eve of the Revolution the people
of Juchitan believed themselves to be heirs to a legacy of collective violence, and thus were
unafraid "to spum their lives" to "obtain their independence." Ultimately, the perseverance
of the village in Oaxaca did not necessarily inhibit participation in the Mexican Revolution.
In fact, continuity in Juchitan clearly facilitated local entrance into the revolutionary fray.l 3‘

By the same token, village continuity limited popular mobilization in Juchitan

owing to the narrow interest of the Juchitecos and the history of conﬂict with surrounding

 

”3 Jeffery Paige, Agrarian Revolution: Social Movements and Export Agriculture in the
Underdeveloped World (New York: Free Press, 1975): Chapter 2.

‘84 José Antonio Cheibub, "Mobilizing and Sustaining Collective Action in the Mexican
Revolution," Politics and Society 23:2 (1995).

88

 

 

villages and the state. On a broad level the Juchitecos fought for the sovereignty of the

people, but more speciﬁcally they fought for their own local independence. The Juchitecos
were socially dislocated from the remainder of the rural population, thus limiting the scope
of their mobilizations, even when their ideology seemed to transcend local boundaries.
Moreover, throughout history the J uchitecos accentuated their local distinctiveness by
cultivating conﬂictual relations with all outsiders. As a result, the Juchitecos could never
garner enough support to propel their rebellions beyond a regional level.

The creation of a tradition of violence between the Juchitecos and the Oaxacan state
helped to initiate, but ultimately limited collective violence in Juchitén. The mobilization of
anti-state violence solidiﬁed the Juchitecos' commitment to a local collective identity, and
thereby enhanced the people‘s ability to mobilize in defense of local interests. Moreover,
the success of collective violence in defending local interests and negotiating with the state
government increased the willingness of the J uchitecos to mobilize violence. On the other
hand, collective violence in Juchitan also reinforced the state's image of the Juchitecos as
unruly and barbarous Indians. As a result, this conﬂict facilitated the use of violence on
both sides, and precluded peaceful negotiation between the two. The end result was a
relationship deﬁned by decades of continuous violent rebellion and repression.

By giving the Juchitecos a common enemy, the conﬂict between J uchitan and the
state government limited popular mobilization in J uchitén by further narrowing J uchiteco
interests. All popular rebellions in Juchitan demanded independence from the state of
Oaxaca as a main objective. This limited the size of these rebellions because surrounding
villages did not share the Juchitecos' antipathy toward the state, and did not desire to be
independent. This conﬂict also limited the scope of J uchiteco rebellion. The Juchitecos
were not revolutionary in that rather than changing the existing power structure, the
Juchitecos sought to remove themselves from the power structure entirely. As a result,
once this basic demand was satisﬁed, once Juchitan was free from the inﬂuence of the state

government, popular mobilization waned.

89

 

Ultimately, whether mobilized from Within or looked at from the outside, the

Juchiteco identity shaped the period of violence from 1834 to 1912. The tradition of
violence that developed between the state government and the Juchitecos was based on a
conﬂict of interests, and necessarily a conﬂict of identities. This conﬂict dictated the
formation and direction of Juchiteco protest before, during, and after the Mexican
Revolution. Consequently, when Miguel Corvarrubias took special note of the Juchitecos
intense place-speciﬁc identity and their reputation for violence, he had identiﬁed the two

elements essential to "the Juchitecan seed of revolt."185

 

"5 Corvarrubias, 159.

90

 

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