José Martí, the United States, and Race by Fountain Anne;

Author:Fountain, Anne;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University Press of Florida
Published: 2017-09-14T16:00:00+00:00

Government Policies and American Indians

While in Mexico, Martí had regarded as progress the liberal and modernizing agenda promoted by President Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada, who led Mexico from 1872 to 1876, just before Porfirio Díaz came to power. As authors Robert L. Huish and W. George Lovell note, Martí approved of the Mexican president’s aim to reduce Indian dependency and to integrate Indians more fully into national life. The Cuban also supported the more aggressive approach that had developed in Guatemala. There Martí embraced the Barrios government’s progressive reforms that sharply curtailed the role of the church and advanced commercial agriculture, especially coffee, in which the authoritarian President Barrios had a vested interest. But for Guatemala’s Mayan Indians who had preserved a cultural legacy in their communities, the liberal plans meant an intrusion on their traditions and land as well as a return to labor servitude, something Martí did not appear to comprehend or appreciate (28–34). Furthermore, as Huish and Lovell explain: “Barrios’s promotion of coffee … was disastrous for the well-being of Maya communities, as it unleashed an assault on Indian lands by opening up communal holdings for private purchase. Many Indians, accustomed to living in the bracing climate of the highlands, fell ill, or died, from working in the more tropical and humid zones of the Pacific piedmont, where Guatemala’s coffee plantations were concentrated” (34). Martí wanted Indians to advance but was seemingly unaware of the cultural encroachment and physical displacement that advancement on national terms would bring, especially in Guatemala. He understood the land—his depictions of Guatemalan geography are lavish—but failed to adequately understand her people, a charge he later leveled at American writer Charles Dudley Warner in regard to Mexico (see chapter 8).

Years later, in the United States, in numerous commentaries but especially in chronicles written in 1885, 1886, and 1887, Martí described a similar set of circumstances: the desire of Native Americans to maintain cultural autonomy and identity versus the so-called civilizing strategies that were put forth and implemented by outside forces. As Native Americans were pushed off their land in the expanding United States, many reformers, in the name of progress, advocated changes that completely disrupted Indian traditions and ways of living. One change was the foundation of Indian schools where indigenous language was replaced with English and another was the allotment to Indians of plots of land for farming or grazing. Writing in 1882, Martí approvingly offered the example of a general who dealt with the Cheyenne by selling their war ponies and bringing them workhorses and draft animals for plowing and seeding. According to his chronicle, if the Cheyenne kept their ponies, they would be tempted to return to life on the plains even when hunting barely afforded survival. But, the narrative continued, once they saw the use of the wheel and had raised a crop of corn, they settled down successfully as farmers and tradesmen (9: 297–98).

In this article Martí described the shift to agriculture by people accustomed to the freedom of the Great Plains as a positive move, a way forward.

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