The Rebellion of Mita, Eastern Guatemala, in 1837
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University of Massachusetts Amherst ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst Doctoral Dissertations 1896 - February 2014 1-1-2000 The rebellion of Mita, eastern Guatemala, in 1837 Ann F. Jefferson University of Massachusetts Amherst Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_1 Recommended Citation Jefferson, Ann F., "The rebellion of Mita, eastern Guatemala, in 1837" (2000). Doctoral Dissertations 1896 - February 2014. 861. https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_1/861 This Open Access Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations 1896 - February 2014 by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. For more information, please contact [email protected]. THE REBELLION OF MITA EASTERN GUATEMALA IN 1837 A Dissertation Presented by ANN F. JEFFERSON Submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Massachusetts Amherst in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY September, 2000 History © Copyright by Ann Farquhar Jefferson 2000 All Rights Reserved THE REBELLION OF MITA EASTERN GUATEMALA IN 1837 A Dissertation Presented by ANN F JEFFERSON Approved as to style and content by: fine M. Rausch, Chair Lowell Gudmundson, Member Gerald McFarland, Member Oriol Pi-Sunyer, Outside Member Mary C Wilson, Department Head Department of History To the memory of Susan C. Schneider who started me down this sUppery slope and to my various families, of origin and of choice, who kept me on it ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am grateful to everyone who has contributed in whatever way to my survival during this lengthy and sometimes distressing project. Acknowledging them all individually, however, is simply impossible, so I will limit myself to the mention of those people and groups who made a very direct and specific contribution to this work. First and foremost, I thank my advisor Jane M. Rausch, who has followed every up and every down of this process over the past decade, and who never failed to place my work near the top of a crowded priority list. I am also very grateful to my other committee members, Gerald McFariand, Lowell Gudmundson, and Oriol Pi-Sunyer, who patiently waded through various drafts of this material while I was still battling basic problems of presentation. In addition, I wish to thank Carmen Diana Deere for her enthusiastic support over many years, although her work took her out of the country just as I entered the final phase. I also thank my colleagues Catherine Komisaruk and Rene Reeves for reading and commenting on parts of this work, as well as for many provocative discussions over several years. The fiinding that made this work possible came from the Fulbright Foundation; the University of Massachusetts History Department, Gordon-Bauer Grant; the Robert and Jeanne Potash research grant, two Foreign Language and Area Studies grants, and, far from least, Gana and Jim Dunlop. I am very fortunate to have received this assistance. I could not have done this work without the dedication and hard work of the staffs of the History Department at the University of Massachusetts, the Archivo General de Centroamerica, the Archivo Historico Arquidiocesano Francisco de Paula Garcia Pelaez, V the Family Center of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints in Guatemala City, the Archivo de Protocolos which at the time was located in the Corte Suprema de Justicia, the Hemeroteca Nacional, and the Centro de Investigaciones Regionales de Mesoamerica in Antigua, Guatemala. Many individuals in these offices and archives went out of their way to help me, and I am deeply appreciative. Although I cannot name everyone in Guatemala who helped me bring this work to conclusion, I wish to express my thanks to those individuals who made a direct, in many cases indispensable, contribution. In addition, some of them are among the many, many people of that country who befriended me, taught me their language, and helped me gain the fundamental survival skills in a situation in which I sometimes I felt~and behaved, I am sure-like a creature from another planet. The fact that I have come to love their country is in part a tribute to the efforts of Ervin Boteo Pineda, Anna Carla Ericastilla, Leticia Gonzalez S., Oralia de Leon, Ana Vela Castro, Beatriz Palomo de Lewin, J. Fernando Masariegos, Sonia Alvarez, Flory de Catalan, and Diana Sierra de Gamalero. I am also grateful for the assistance of Franz Binder. For letters written on my behalf, I thank Dr. Julio Pinto Soria and Dr. Gustavo Palma Murga. I have dedicated this work in part to my family, but I wish to acknowledge especially the love and support given me over the past year by my brother Peter Farquhar and my niece Elizabeth Lopez Farquhar. Without the home they provided I could not have finished. Ann Jefferson Fort Collins, Colorado vi ABSTRACT THE REBELLION OF MITA: EASTERN GUATEMALA IN 1837 SEPTEMBER, 2000 ANN F. JEFFERSON, B A., LAKE FOREST COLLEGE M.A., UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST Ph.D., UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST Directed by; Professor Jane M. Rausch This study is a social history of the rural mulattoes/ladinos of the District of Mita in eastern Guatemala who rebelled against the Liberal government headed by Mariano Galvez in Guatemala City in June of 1837. Known as the Carrera movement or the War of the Mountain, this popular uprising began with scattered revolts precipitated by an outbreak of cholera, but soon became a full-scale rebellion that articulated a set of demands and eventually spread across the state of Guatemala and beyond. While the importance of this rebellion in the political history of Central America is widely recognized, this is the first attempt to focus on the ethnicity and social position of the protagonists, to relate rural social structure and the patron-client system to the rebellion, and to link the everyday concerns of this rural population with their political actions. The methodology combines anthropological techniques with chronological history. The early chapters provide a structural analysis of the geography of the area, settlement patterns, households, the economy, and affective life to create a picture of a society that differed in important ways from that of the urban Liberals. The last chapter shows how liberal policies designed to create a new polity based on Enlightenment principles and a vii free-trade economy antagonized the local population and exacerbated long-standing differences between the urban power structure and rural groups. The Liberals' decision to end banditry on the Camino Real and the methods they pursued to accomplish this goal emerge as the definitive step in the polarization process. The rebels' first engagement with government troops took place in Santa Rosa and was led by local cattle ranchers Teodoro and Benito Mexia. This study finds that a peasant elite, typified by the "mulatto" Teodoro Mexia, played the critical role in catalyzing the rebellion by forging alienated sectors of the local population into a strong regional alliance and by drawing on their substantial resources to fund the war. viu PREFACE One of the roots of this study reaches back into the Vietnam era when one version of that war held that the peasants understood Httle of the political struggle occurring around or above them and desired nothing so much as to be left alone to eke out their meager sustenance This was not a new idea at the time, and it has been recycled since for use in Central America and areas of Africa in which peasants have been involved in civil wars. I have never cared much for the idea that people, peasants included, are not capable of evaluating their options and deciding what is in their best interests. We might not always follow our best long-term interests, especially if they conflict, as they often do, with what seem to be our short-term interests, but I see no evidence that peasants are more mystified about their interests than the rest of us. Since the hypothesis that peasants do not understand political issues cannot explain why at times they choose to go to war in massive numbers, a most unpeasantlike activity, its corollary is that peasants are forced to participate, manipulated by more politically sophisticated groups, or caught up and carried along by forces outside their control. This last view provides the thesis of the famous novel by Mariano Azuela, Los de Abajo (The Underdogs), about peasants in the Mexican Revolution. The less famous study by Oscar Lewis, Pedro Martinez, based on interviews with peasants who participated in that revolution, unequivocably establishes the fact that at least some of these illiterate peasants understood the issues very well. Another root reaches into the mid-twentieth-century civil war in El Salvador. In 1986, a year that would turn out to stand at the mid-point of the hostilities that began in ix 1979, I attended a labor conference there which was called by the National Union of Salvadoran Workers (U.N.T.S.), an association of labor unions. When the rector of the national university addressed the group-at great length, as the Central Americans are wont to do--he gave an analysis of the war that relied heavily on the concept of institutional violence. The war did not begin, he explained, when the Salvadoran campesinos took up arms to fight the state, but rather when the Salvadoran elite attacked the economic and social foundations of the life of the majority of the population. His thesis was that poor people do not easily make the decision to leave their subsistence activities and rise up against a powerful and well-armed government, but if the systems of force and justice are structured and administered in such a way that the common people are losing the life they know and trust, they come to distrust their leaders and, quickly or slowly, depending on the speed of events, they move into an oppositional stance.