Indigenous Citizens by Karen D. Caplan

Author:Karen D. Caplan [Caplan, Karen D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Latin America, Mexico
ISBN: 9780804772914
Google: NzKnMiSEq00C
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2009-12-03T03:33:46+00:00

Oaxaca and Yucatán Compared, 1825–1847

Between 1825 and 1847, the states of Oaxaca and Yucatán put the governing systems devised after independence into practice. In the process, new institutions and structures acquired meaning for the two states’ citizens. In both places, the structures laid out in the first state constitutions allowed for the maintenance of a direct and unique relationship between the state and indigenous people. Through the constitutional repúblicas in Oaxaca and the repúblicas de indígenas in Yucatán, the state carried on a process of negotiation and legitimation directly with the indigenous population. Yet there were also significant differences between the two systems. In Oaxaca, because indígenas controlled local administration, negotiation between the state government and the indigenous towns was the central administrative activity of most Oaxacan officials. In Yucatán, by contrast, the state governed by maintaining relations with both indigenous and nonindigenous administrations within the same town. As the economic interests of nonindigenous rural residents in Yucatán became more and more pressing for the Yucatecan state, the potential for conflict developed. That conflict would begin to unfold in the late 1830s, when Mexico opted for a centralist administrative structure. It intensified through the 1840s and erupted into war in 1847.

The Yucatecan government’s pact with its indigenous population was in some ways not fundamentally different from that between the Oaxacan government and Oaxacan indígenas. Both governments drew on colonial notions of justice and obligation while adapting them to the liberal institutional context. In both states, the pact was deeply imbued with a sense of what was moral and just. But the different economic goals of the two nonindigenous populations meant that the two governments were not equally committed to upholding their side of the pact. Oaxaca’s nonindigenous elite did not have the impetus to challenge indigenous autonomy because it had no prospects for changing the structure of the economy. Into the 1840s and beyond, the elite continued to depend heavily on the taxation of indígenas and on the marketing of products from indigenous villages. Yucatán’s elite, on the other hand, was eager to make changes. It saw itself as poised to conquer new and broader markets, if only it could gain control over indigenous land and labor. So although representatives of the Yucatecan state knew it was necessary to maintain a pact with the indigenous population for the sake of social peace and a minimum level of governability, the economic aspirations of the nonindigenous population led them simultaneously to take actions that undermined it.

Oaxacan state officials and their indigenous constituents shared and consistently reinforced a language about poverty and state obligation that the Yucatecan government was increasingly rejecting. Oaxacan indígenas, in exchange for certain concessions, were willing to accede even to some of the state’s harshest demands, at least in principle. Yucatecan indígenas, by contrast, were increasingly unable to see the state as working in their interests at all. Even demands that had been acceptable in the past became unbearable as the 1840s wore on.

The differing experiences of the first twenty years after independence are also reflected in the use of the category of “indigenous.

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