Forced Marches PROOF UNCORRECTED Fallaw_Rugeley.indb 1 5/5/2012 2:13:01 PM PROOF UNCORRECTED Fallaw_Rugeley.indb 2 5/5/2012 2:13:01 PM Forced Marches Soldiers and Military Caciques in Modern Mexico Edited by PROOF Ben Fallaw and Terry Rugeley UNCORRECTED tucson Fallaw_Rugeley.indb 3 5/5/2012 2:13:02 PM PROOF © 2012 The Arizona Board of Regents All rights reserved www.uapress.arizona.edu Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data [to come] Publication of this book is made possible in part by the proceeds of a permanent endowment created with the assistance of a Challenge Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, a federal agency. UNCORRECTEDManufactured in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper containing a minimum of 30% post-consumer waste and processed chlorine free. 17 16 15 14 13 12 6 5 4 3 2 1 Fallaw_Rugeley.indb 4 5/5/2012 2:13:03 PM Contents PROOF Acknowledgments vii Redrafting History: The Challenges of Scholarship on the Mexican Military Experience 1 Terry Rugeley and Ben Fallaw 1. An Unsatisfactory Picture of Civil Commotion: Unpopular Militias and Tepid Nationalism in the Mexican Southeast 23 Terry Rugeley 2. The Mobile National Guard of Guanajuato, 1855–1858: Military Hybridization and Statecraft in Reforma Mexico 49 Daniel S. Haworth 3. Behaving Badly in Mexico City: Discipline and Identity in the Presidential Guards, 1900–1911 81 Stephen Neufeld 4. Heliodoro Charis Castro and the Soldiers of Juchitán: Indigenous Militarism, Local Rule, and the Mexican State 110 Benjamin T. Smith UNCORRECTED5. Eulogio Ortíz: The Army and the Antipolitics of Postrevolutionary State Formation, 1920–1935 136 Ben Fallaw Fallaw_Rugeley.indb 5 5/5/2012 2:13:03 PM vi • Contents 6. Revolutionary Citizenship against Institutional Inertia: Cardenismo and the Mexican Army, 1934–1940 172 Thomas Rath 7. Military Caciquismo and the PRIísta State: General Mange’s Command in Veracruz 210 Paul Gillingham Conclusion: Reflections on State Theory through the Lens of the Mexican Military 238 David Nugent About the Contributors 269 Index PROOF271 UNCORRECTED Fallaw_Rugeley.indb 6 5/5/2012 2:13:03 PM Acknowledgments PROOF The co-editors of this volume would like to thank Ben Huseman of the University of Texas at Arlington Library; Edward Montañez Pérez of the Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán’s Fototeca Guerra; and Russell Martin, Anne Peterson, and Cynthia Franco of Southern Methodist University’s DeGolyer Library for their invaluable assistance in locating photographs to accompany the text. Finally, special thanks to Patrick Campbell of Colby College for his invaluable research assistance into the intricacies of Mexican military history. UNCORRECTED vii Fallaw_Rugeley.indb 7 5/5/2012 2:13:03 PM PROOF UNCORRECTED Fallaw_Rugeley.indb 8 5/5/2012 2:13:03 PM Forced Marches PROOF UNCORRECTED Fallaw_Rugeley.indb 9 5/5/2012 2:13:03 PM PROOF UNCORRECTED Fallaw_Rugeley.indb 10 5/5/2012 2:13:03 PM Redrafting History The Challenges of Scholarship on the Mexican Military Experience Terry Rugeley and Ben Fallaw PROOF At times historical change takes place as slowly and imperceptibly as the growth of an olive tree. But at other times it lurches forward through what might be called a forced march, when people suddenly find themselves dragged out of cozy domesticity and plunged into conflicts not of their choosing. In the case of Mexico, anyone wanting to understand this land of diverse peoples and their complex past can find few better instances of such marches than the story of its militias and militaries. The topic is confusing and often uncomfortable. Anyone familiar with Mexico knows the historical centrality of such themes as arms, coercion, recruitment, and collective violence. Indeed, when this land began its life as a nation, the military was one of the few cohesive institutions besides the Catholic Church, and yet that cohesion failed to translate into politi- cal unity. For the past eighty years, Mexico has been one of the least mili- tarized of Latin American societies in institutional terms, even though the country continues to register high levels of guerrillas, paramilitaries, and criminal assaults. Armed force created the colony of New Spain, and still another surge of armed conflict tore that colony from the mother country three centuries later, but other themes have drawn more atten- tion (ethnohistory, religion, politics, economic imperialism, and popular cultures come to mind). When scholars have explored the role of arms UNCORRECTEDhere, it has often been through the prism of the national leadership of generals such as Antonio López de Santa Anna or Alvaro Obregón. We know considerably less about the men who followed them, or of the women they left behind, or of the nature of life in the barracks, or of what 1 Fallaw_Rugeley.indb 1 5/5/2012 2:13:03 PM 2 • Rugeley and Fallaw perceptions and skills former soldiers took with them when returning to civilian life. For all intents and purposes, those who shouldered arms remain names on a roster, buried in an archive or else subordinated to some far different story. This volume attempts to fill a long-standing void in our understanding of Mexican history by addressing the multifaceted role of militias and armies as social institutions. For over two hundred years, men stationed with rifles in hand provided the means for maintaining law and order, but they also constituted a breeding ground for rowdiness and discontent. For genera- tions of Mexicans, and especially following the twin mobilization peaks of 1810–1821 and 1910–1920, service at arms was a shared experience, much in the way that compulsory enlistment during World War II pro- vided a bond for men from the United States. But what did it mean to wear a uniform or fasten a bayonet? Was service simply a matter of fighting, or more an unending exile from home and family? Did conscriptionPROOF mean freedom from routine, or fear and hardship? Arms may have represented different things to Spanish landowners and to Indian and ethnically mixed guerrillas, but whatever the final answers to these questions, understand- ing the history of forging state and society in Mexico requires coming to terms with that country’s two centuries of forced marches. A Nation’s History in Military Perspective The importance that the military assumed following 1821 might well have surprised an observer from the early centuries of colonial Mexico—three centuries of Pax Hispánica, in Friedrich Katz’s words.1 Although battles— the fire and sword of so many romantic narratives—certainly mattered in the conquests, even more critical were subtle processes such as the coop- tation of native elites and the diversion of seignorial and tributary pat- terns away from Indian nobility and into the hands of powerful Spaniards and their preferred institutions.2 Much of the subsequent colonial order depended on letting the Indians be Indians. Franciscan, Dominican, and Augustinian friars did most of the work of bringing native peoples into the Spanish system of governance, wherein Hapsburg’s global monarchy ruled indirectly though intermediaries.3 UNCORRECTEDFor two centuries after the conquest, New Spain gradually gelled into a new society. Spaniards, of course, dominated the social and political order. But while Indian peoples occupied inferior roles, they still enjoyed key rights such as access to legal defense, freedom from slavery and the Fallaw_Rugeley.indb 2 5/5/2012 2:13:04 PM Redrafting History • 3 Inquisition, and the indivisible community land grant known as the ejido. Creoles, or the American-born heirs of Spaniards, multiplied in number and came to play critical roles in the society and economy. Increasing even more rapidly were the so-called castas: a broad category of racially and culturally mixed peoples that included Africans, African-Indians, mulattos, and above all, mestizos—the offspring of Spaniard and Indian. While the heady years of plunder economy soon ended, New Spain’s economy diver- sified and enjoyed slow but steady growth.4 In the 1700s, however, new pressures began to affect the colony. Populations grew rapidly as native peoples acquired immunity to the European contagions that had scourged them for so long. A new royal house in Spain, the Bourbons of French pedigree, who aspired to rule as enlightened despots, launched an ambi- tious program to revive imperial fortunes on the backs of the Americas. The Bourbon reformers liberalized trade restrictions, simplified tax struc- tures, and encouraged investment in mining and agriculture.PROOF But they also tightened their administrative grip by expanding and militarizing the pen- insular bureaucracy, ratcheting up tax demands, consolidating control of outlying territories (in places such as Texas and California), and building a militia to fend off rival imperialists such as England and France.5 Throughout this heady period, the army and local, part-time provincial militias functioned both as political pillars—providing institutional stabil- ity of a crude sort—and launching pads for individual officers’ ambitions. Since 1780, military service provided an avenue of social mobility for those who had no other hope to rise above their station in life, including more than a few Afro-Mexicans and mestizos. It was also one of the few undertakings likely to carry a young man beyond the often claustrophobic confines of the village. The army taught new and rarified knowledge such as mathematics (the international language of the Enlightenment), book- keeping, and the magic of technology. Bourbon-enlightened despotism fattened fiscal revenues, but offended virtually every strata of colonial society from criollos (or creoles, American- born Spaniards) and clergy to caciques (Indian village headmen), casta artisans, and yeomen farmers. By uniting many Americans against Spain, Bourbon administration laid the groundwork for independence. The nascent militias factored prominently in the struggle.