Peripheral Visions: Politics, Society, and the Challenges of Modernity in Yucatan

Index

Preface

The seeds for this work were planted when the Alfredo Barrera Vásquez Center for Yucatecan Studies of The University of Alabama and the Centro de Investigaciones Regionales Dr. Hideyo Noguchi of the Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán organized an international conference on Yucatecan history and culture, Colonización, Nación y Nacionalismo, which was held in Mérida on October 8–9, 1993. Following the conference the volume was slow to bloom, but happily not so slow as the region's signature henequen plant, which reportedly takes a hundred years. Sadly, the project was set back by the deaths of one of the editors and one of the contributors. It is to the memory of these two esteemed colleagues and longtime friends, Edward H. Moseley and Hernán Menéndez Rodríguez, that we dedicate this book. Ed Moseley played a foundational role in the creation of Yucatecan studies in the United States, and his editorial hand is much in evidence here. Hernán Menéndez, one of Yucatan's foremost journalists and researchers, also was instrumental in advancing historical studies of the region; indeed, no one worked harder to foment discussion and debate among local, national, and international scholars.

The long editorial process had the compensation of enabling us to include contributions by a new generation of Yucatecólogos, and thereby craft a collection that is intergenerational as well as international and interdisciplinary. Peripheral Visions contributes to a tradition of scholarship and publishing on the Yucatan Peninsula that began at The University of Alabama in the 1950s and has continued to the present. In a real sense this book traces its lineage to, and updates the cross-disciplinary research found in, Yucatan: A World Apart (University of Alabama Press, 1980), edited by Edward Moseley and Edward Terry. Significantly, all of the present editors, save the youngest, contributed a chapter to that volume.

It is impossible to acknowledge all of the individuals who helped advance this project over the past fifteen years. We would especially like to thank Othón Baños Ramírez, Alejandra García Quintanilla, Luis Alfonso Ramírez, and José Luis Ponce García of Mérida for their timely support of the project over the years. Special thanks go to Eric Baklanoff, who critically read and commented on most of the essays, and to Helen Delpar, who also contributed her editorial skills and generously agreed to collaborate on the introduction after the death of Ed Moseley. Finally, we are grateful for the incisive comments of The University of Alabama Press's anonymous readers and for the patience and encouragement provided by the press's staff.

Gilbert M. Joseph

Edward D. Terry 

Introduction

Helen Delpar and Ben W. Fallaw

The disciplinary diversity of this volume—history, anthropology, sociology, economics—poses some enjoyable challenges to anyone introducing it. Helen Delpar places contributors in the context of Yucatan's ongoing struggle to come to terms with what was once called modernization—a slippery term that typically implies capitalism, individualism, and secularism. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, modernity was the imagined future of Yucatan. Independence, the Reform, the war against the Cruz’ob rebels, the revolutionary projects of Salvador Alvarado (governor, 1915–1918) and Lázaro Cárdenas (president, 1934–1940), mid-twentieth-century developmentalist schemes like Cordemex, the neoliberal mirage of Carlos Salinas (president, 1988–1994)—all were seen as halting steps on the path to modernity.

This book also represents the latest in a series of volumes published by The University of Alabama Press summing up Yucatecan studies.¹ With that in mind, Ben Fallaw surveys recent trends in the scholarly literature that have helped resolve scholarly debates and generate provocative new questions as well.

Yucatan has been called a world apart, cut off from the rest of Mexico by geography and culture. Yet, despite its peripheral location, the region experienced substantial change in the decades after independence. Much as was the case elsewhere in Mexico, apostles of modernization introduced policies intended to remold Yucatan in the image of the advanced nations of the day. Indeed, modernizing change began in the late colonial era and continued throughout the nineteenth century as traditional patterns of land tenure were altered and efforts were made to divest the Catholic Church of its wealth and political and intellectual influence. It is clear, however, that some changes produced fierce resistance from both elites and humbler Yucatecans, and modernizers were frequently forced to retreat or at least reach accommodation with their foes.

Stretching from the early nineteenth century to the late twentieth century, the essays in this collection illuminate both the processes of change and the negative reactions that they frequently elicited. Reform in Yucatan generally followed one of two paths. In the first, elites pursued policies associated with economic liberalism, especially the development of new export commodities.² In the second, modernizers sought to modify the behavior of women, peons, and others deemed in need of edification, often through changing the role of the Roman Catholic Church in Yucatecan society.

Economy, Society, and Politics

Marie Lapointe's essay, The Caste War of Yucatan in Long-Term Perspective (chapter 1), explains the origins of the 1847 insurgency by using a global approach that takes into account a longue-durée, or long-term, perspective and the proximate conditions under which the conflict took place. As she points out, the Bourbon reformers of the late eighteenth century liberalized trade regulations (with mixed success) and abolished the encomienda (grant of a tribute-paying village), a vestige of the conquest period long defunct in most other parts of the Spanish empire. She emphasizes the significance of the post-independence alienation of public lands, long worked by the Maya, especially in the east and south. Creoles coveted these lands for the production of sugar and other commercial crops, but their loss disrupted traditional patterns of life for the Maya and their caciques.

Marie Lapointe's perspective is just one of many that have recently enriched our understanding of the Caste War of Yucatan (1847–1901), which has been the subject of endless historical inquiry by both professionals and the general public. The idea that the Caste War was a racial conflict has long been used to define Yucatan, and politicians have used the supposed struggle of brown against white to advance their own interests. The practice began in the heat of battle and remains alive today.

While many distinguished scholars long viewed the conflict in essentialist terms, recently scholarly literature has begun to shift our vision of the Caste War. Don E. Dumond not only recounted the long history of violent clashes, raids, and frustrated negotiations among Cruz’ob rebels, Mexicans, Yucatecans, and Belizeans, but he also began the process of questioning the idea of the Caste War as a Manichean power struggle fought largely along racial lines.³ In recent years a new generation of historically minded anthropologists and historians informed by anthropological approaches has deepened our understanding of the war's ethnic complexities. Significantly, most of these new scholars speak and read Yucatec Mayan.⁴ For instance, in Xuxub Must Die, anthropologist Paul R. Sullivan examines the 1875 sacking of a sugar estate and the murder of the Irish–North American owner by a raiding party headed by fearsome rebel caudillo Bernardino Cen. Sullivan uses the raid to tease out the complex frontier society that emerged between rebel and state-controlled zones, showing how the expanding global export economy, Mérida's political cliques, and factional struggles in the Cruzo’ob state all helped feed the Caste War bloodshed.⁵ Wolfgang Gabbert's painstaking ethnographic and archival research places the revolt against the backdrop of the long-term evolution of racialized social strata on the Yucatan Peninsula.⁶ Terry Rugeley's work, Rebellion Now and Forever (2009), documents how decades of chronic Caste War violence warped the fragile liberal state, bled capital, and pushed thousands of war-weary people to the peripheries of the peninsula from Carmen to southwestern Quintana Roo. Rugeley's work also goes a long way to explain why many Yucatecans willingly accepted a Hobbesian bargain with the strongman of Tuxtepec, Porfirio Díaz.

During the long period of apparent peace under the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz (1876–1911), Yucatan emerged as one of the most prosperous states in Mexico because of the tremendous growth in the production of henequen, which got under way in earnest after 1880 in the northwestern quadrant of the state. In recent decades a number of important studies have rewritten the history of the henequen economy from its birth in the mid-nineteenth century to its bust a century later.⁷ In addition, Allen Wells and Gilbert M. Joseph moved beyond the old structuralist analysis of the hacienda to take into account how planters crafted an idiom of domination to control hacienda workers through persuasion as well as coercion.⁸

Yucatan, like Mexico as a whole, wished to display its arrival among modern and civilized states by taking part in the world's fairs of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As Helen Delpar shows in Casting an Image of Modernity (chapter 2), Díaz sought a worthy representation for Mexico at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, as did Yucatan's leaders, whose contributions included samples of the state's agricultural and forest products. To elites, products such as these signified the actual or potential wealth of the state. Ironically, however, it was representations of the pre-Columbian Maya past that garnered the most favorable attention at the fair and paved the way for Yucatan's participation in two other modern forms of enterprise: archaeology and tourism.

The Porfirian celebration of a Eurocentric, laissez-faire modernity was ended by the Mexican Revolution. General Salvador Alvarado's stunning victory over the Yucatecan planters’ home guard in early 1915 seemed to mark the beginning of a new future. The northern-born general was the most visionary and ambitious of Venustiano Carranza's revolutionary proconsuls, to borrow Alan Knight's famous phrase, and his rule profoundly altered Yucatan. Since Gilbert Joseph's now-classic study Revolution from Without (1982), scholars armed with new methodologies encouraged by the new cultural history have invaded newly opened archives, such as the state judicial archives.⁹ Recently several scholars have shed light on important contradictions in the emancipation promised by Alvarado and his successor, Felipe Carrillo Puerto (1922–1924). Two of them—Paul Eiss and Stephanie Smith—are represented here.

In A Measure of Liberty: The Politics of Labor in Revolutionary Yucatan, 1915–1918 (chapter 3), Eiss argues that Alvarado's liberation of peons on haciendas was ambiguous at best. Although his reforms were touted as freeing Yucatan's peons from conditions approaching slavery, the behavior of the presumed beneficiaries belied their supposed passivity and indolence. According to Eiss, hacienda workers regularly challenged planters and revolutionary officials. In response, these officials, who had hoped to see the emergence of a free market in labor, moved to control and co-opt workers in a pattern similar to that followed later by Mexico's authoritarian state.

In Removing the Yoke of Tradition: Yucatan's Revolutionary Women, Revolutionary Reforms (chapter 4), Stephanie Smith describes how Alvarado and Carrillo Puerto aimed to mobilize women for the revolution by transforming them from ‘submissive’ females into efficient citizens. She contends, however, that women themselves directly and indirectly shaped many of the government's policies. Elsewhere she has argued that women were the mainstay of the revolutionary schools founded by Alvarado. Even so, not only did they have to contend with low pay and a hostile workplace at times, but they also were frequently constrained by the limits of Alvarado's avowed feminism. His regime marginalized women who overstepped what was considered their boundaries.¹⁰ Smith has also examined how the introduction of divorce during the revolutionary era ironically emancipated men.¹¹

Smith's work builds on a long tradition of inquiry into feminism in revolutionary Yucatan. Anna Macías, a pioneer in Mexican women's history, devoted much of her pathbreaking monograph to Alvarado's and Carrillo Puerto's regimes. Alma Reed, a radical North American journalist who became engaged to Carrillo Puerto, helped publicize his initiatives, such as expanded educational opportunities for women, divorce, and the extension of citizenship to women. Her own story—rich with insights into the heady years of the Carrillo Puerto regime—was published in 2007, thanks to the heroic efforts of Michael Schuessler.¹² Carrillo Puerto's famous sister, Elvia, a leading feminist in Mexico, has also finally received serious scholarly attention.¹³

The revolution challenged ideas about ethnicity as well as gender. Modernizers in Mexico, as in the rest of Latin America, usually hoped for the arrival of European immigrants who they believed would provide manpower, skills, and enterprise and improve the race through intermarriage with native populations. Unlike Argentina or southern Brazil, Mexico attracted few foreign immigrants, and they were not always deemed to be the most desirable. Among the latter were a small number of Lebanese Christians, who began arriving in Yucatan in the late nineteenth century.¹⁴ In Against Great Odds (chapter 6), Eric N. Baklanoff explains how Lebanese immigrants in Yucatan became itinerant peddlers who traveled to villages and haciendas offering to the poor an assortment of wares not previously available to them, while Spanish and German merchants saturated the markets of socially prominent urban customers. Baklanoff emphasizes the interplay between the distinguishing characteristics of the Lebanese—their exceptional family and ethnic solidarity, radical future orientation, and unremitting labor—and the often hostile Old World environment of the Yucatan Peninsula. These attitudes and propensities—their entrepreneurial culture—enabled their near descendants to prosper economically and ultimately gain social acceptance.

Yucatan's tiny Lebanese community prospered despite, or perhaps because of, the political and economic turmoil of the twentieth century. The rise of the Lebanese was the result of hard work and entrepreneurial zeal, but their close connections to the Socialist Party of the Southeast played an important role as well.¹⁵ Felipe Carrillo Puerto enjoyed important Lebanese backing.¹⁶ Neguib Simón, an old friend of Carrillo Puerto, became a crucial nexus between the Socialist Party and the Lebanese business community. Lebanese Mexicans in Yucatan and as far away as Puebla and Mexico City (including one Pedro Slim) helped bankroll Bartolomé García Correa's 1929 gubernatorial campaign.¹⁷ According to Baklanoff, Yucatecan Lebanese entrepreneur Cabalán Macari acquired substantial interests in the state-run sector of the henequen economy under García Correa. He also acquired the large cattle ranch San Antonio in eastern Yucatan, thus becoming part of the landowning peninsular gentry. Pluck and political pull in equal measures explain his rise: Cabalán Macari reportedly started his first cordage factory with a jerry-rigged engine taken from an old automobile.¹⁸ His close friendship with García Correa gave him entrée into the highly regulated cordage industry.

The Yucatecan Lebanese made their most impressive political and economic gains during the crucial but understudied period between Carrillo Puerto's murder in 1924 and the Cárdenas years. We are still coming to grips with the checkered legacy of Bartolomé García Correa, who dominated the Socialist Party of the Southeast from 1924 until the mid-1930s. His politicized economy and populist political style were the shaky pillars of the postrevolutionary order in the state.¹⁹

In The Crusade of the Mayab (chapter 5), Ben Fallaw discusses the various facets of the modernization program introduced to Yucatan by President Lázaro Cárdenas (1934–1940). According to Fallaw, the cornerstone of Cardenismo in rural Yucatan was the collective landholding unit known as the ejido, which was intended to bring about improved agricultural methods, raise the living standards of beneficiaries (ejidatarios), and create a reliable base of political support for the national government. Yet from the outset the ejidos did not perform as expected for a variety of reasons explored by Fallaw, and population growth in subsequent decades, as well as the global decline of henequen (and other hard fibers) as a profitable commodity, eroded the viability of Yucatan's ejidos.

In The Decline and Collapse of Yucatan's Henequen Agro-Industry (chapter 7), Othón Baños reviews the history of the state's ejidos from their creation in 1937 to their demise in the late twentieth century. Starting in the 1980s, a new generation of modernizers moved to divide the collective ejidos into small farm units and to privatize the state's cordage manufacturing plants, which had been nationalized in 1964. Baños concludes that the neoliberal medicine turned out to be deadly for the very sick, declining henequen agro-industry. Whether new opportunities for rural Yucatecans in urban commerce, services, and industry would prove adequate remained to be seen.

Many Mexican and North American scholars have greatly expanded our knowledge of recent Yucatecan history, an era stretching from the watershed Cárdenas reforms to the present day. In this volume Othón Baños explores two of the most important transformations in Yucatan in the latter twentieth century: the rise of true opposition parties and neoliberal reforms that destroyed the developmental-ism and subsidies that supported the henequen ejido. Much ink has been spilled describing the slow death of henequen as well as the inexplicable wealth enjoyed by politicians and bureaucrats close to state-run henequen agencies.²⁰ They have been slower to explain why Yucatan is the only southern state in Mexico to support the right-of-center National Action Party (PAN).

Much of the political history of the late twentieth century remains to be written. In the 1970s and early 1980s the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) seemed on the verge of internal collapse. But the PRI enjoyed a surprising resurgence under Víctor Cervera Pacheco, the last reputed strongman of the postrevolutionary era, who was twice governor (1984–1988, 1995–2001).²¹

Anticlericalism

Anticlericalism was the second path to progress for many reformers. Yucatecan liberals, like their counterparts in other sections of Mexico, supported a plethora of policies aimed at weakening the Roman Catholic Church, which was seen as an obstacle to modernization for various reasons. Its wealth and financial activities were thought to inhibit economic development while its prominence in education and intellectual life in general supposedly fostered ignorance and obscurantism. Clerics who served the Maya were accused of exploiting their charges, encouraging superstition, and generally hindering their adoption of modern ways of thinking and behaving. As several chapters show, however, the position of the church in Yucatan differed from that in other parts of Mexico because of the relative poverty of the region in the first half of the nineteenth century, the large numbers of Maya in relation to the total population, and the effects of the Caste War. In chapters 8 (José Canuto Vela and Yucatan's ‘Benign’ Clergy from Independence to the Reforma, 1821–1861) and 9 (From Santa Iglesia to Santa Cruz: Yucatecan Popular Religion in Peace and War, 1800–1876), respectively, Lynda S. Morrison and Terry Rugeley discuss religion and the role of the clergy in the early and middle decades of the nineteenth century. Morrison stresses the generally positive image of the church in Yucatan, which led Benito Juárez to suspend enforcement of anticlerical measures there in 1861. She offers various explanations for this favorable perception and gives her own interpretation, using the career of Father José Canuto Vela (1802–1859) as a case study. She points to the increasing number of priests of modest origin after 1800, the participation of many in politics as moderate liberals, and their exemplary conduct during the Caste War.

Morrison also sees a rupture between the clergy and the Maya by the mid-1840s. Rugeley makes a somewhat similar argument in From Santa Iglesia to Santa Cruz, his discussion of the origins of the cult of the Speaking Cross that arose in eastern Yucatan in the 1850s. Rugeley finds anticlericalism strong among middling Creoles and mestizos rather than members of the elite. Anticlericalism filtered down to rural Maya without, however, disrupting their folk Catholicism.

In chapter 10 (The Resurgence of the Church in Yucatan: The Olegario Molina–Crescencio Carrillo Alliance, 1867–1901), the late Hernán Menéndez Rodríguez, with Ben Fallaw, reviews the resurgence of the church in Yucatan during the Porfiriato, or Díaz era, through an alliance of two successive bishops—Leandro Rodríguez de la Gala and Crescencio Carrillo y Ancona—with the moderate liberal faction led by Olegario Molina, who became the most powerful economic and political figure in the state. Despite the fulminations of radical liberals, or puros, the church was able to regain substantial financial strength. Moreover, according to Rugeley in chapter 9, during this period Yucatan became a laboratory for the church's own modernization program.

In From Acrimony to Accommodation (chapter 11), Ben Fallaw describes how the coming of the Mexican Revolution to Yucatan in 1915 brought a revival of anticlericalism and new efforts to secularize society. These were especially strong during the governorships of General Salvador Alvarado and Felipe Carrillo Puerto. After 1925 anticlericalism diminished in Yucatan, even as it was reaching its peak in the rest of Mexico. Although President Cárdenas kept the fires of anticlericalism banked, he promoted cultural reform as a corollary to his agrarian reform program in Yucatan. As Fallaw points out in The Crusade of the Mayab (chapter 5), various federal agencies trumpeted the virtues of sport, and plans for the construction of a large stadium got under way. Numerous attempts were also made to educate the populace about the evils of alcohol.

Besides the promising new contributions to the history of Yucatecan Catholicism in this volume, much has been published elsewhere on syncretic or folk Catholicism. Terry Rugeley has challenged the dichotomy between elite and popular religiosity. Paul Eiss and Ron Loewe have revealed different aspects of the folk Catholic gremio, or confraternity. Eiss stresses its link to the commodification of nature while Loewe considers its role in reproducing social hierarchies.²²

Still, healthy disagreement over the role of the church remains. For instance, exactly what role did the church play in constructing the Porfiriato and sustaining debt peonage? Hernán Menéndez has argued that the church blessed peonage; Franco Savarino sees the church helping to craft a Christian Democratic road to modernity.²³

Resistance and Accommodation

Modernizers in Yucatan, whether they advocated private appropriation of public lands, anticlericalism, or cultural reform, frequently encountered resistance to their projects. The Caste War is the most dramatic example, for, as Lapointe states, the devastating effects of this bitter conflict were felt until the start of the twentieth century. In chapter 11 Ben Fallaw describes numerous instances of resistance to anticlericalism and the institutions created to further its goals during the 1920s and 1930s, such as the school in Espita that failed because parents believed it was disseminating ideas that were hostile to the church. In chapter 5 Fallaw shows that local resistance doomed the Cardenista crusade against alcohol.²⁴

Similarly, according to the chapters by Eiss and Smith, neither hacienda workers nor women passively accepted or acquiesced in all the government's initiatives during the Alvarado and Carrillo Puerto administrations. Peons frequently defied officials and landowners to demand higher wages and lower prices at the hacienda store. In Smith's account, many prostitutes resisted regulations imposed by Alvarado, while other women used revolutionary tribunals and feminist groups to achieve their goals.

Researchers have yet to fully tease out the complex relationship between political reforms from above and social change from below in the formative years of the PRI regime. In the 1930s federal schoolteachers were not always welcomed as modernizing missionaries.²⁵ Cárdenas's embrace of the left and championing of land reform inspired much political ferment, and women's activism was especially notable. Yet the same infighting that doomed Cárdenas's reforms as a whole was especially detrimental to women.²⁶

These essays also show that the outcome of clashes between modernizers and their foes was often accommodation, especially in the realm of religion. This tendency was apparent at an early date. The popular religious culture discussed by Rugeley was an amalgam of pre-Columbian and Roman Catholic practices and institutions adapted to the needs of peasants. The cult of the Speaking Cross reflected these religious traditions as well.

Rugeley's chapter and the others dealing with the church reveal that it had a remarkable ability not only to resist but also, more significantly, to accommodate itself to changing conditions. This can be seen in the willingness of priests such as José Canuto Vela to participate in state and national politics. For his part, Rugeley observes that despite the Reform laws and other challenges, Catholicism was not down for the count. During the Porfiriato a resurgent church adopted new techniques for funding and support, which tied it more closely to urban Yucatecans, while folk Catholicism flourished in rural areas. Menéndez Rodríguez gives details about church revival while Fallaw's chapter From Acrimony to Accommodation explains how the governors who succeeded Carrillo Puerto preferred to come to understandings with Catholics and avoid conflict by muting anticlerical efforts. After an interruption of this détente in the mid-1930s, President Cárdenas's decision to shelve radical attacks on the church, combined with successful civil resistance by Yucatecan Catholics, ended revolutionary anticlericalism in the state by the end of the decade.

Quiet conciliation is also evident in the often conflicted relations between the state and federal governments, described by Lapointe as contributing to the outbreak of the Caste War. That Porfirio Díaz's aim of expanding central authority over state leaders was only partly successful is evident from Menéndez Rodríguez's account of the president's unwillingness or inability to control gubernatorial succession in Yucatan. The limitations of presidential power are even more obvious in Fallaw's account of the failure of Cárdenas's Crusade of the Mayab. Regional cliques and local bosses blocked the formation of a united front of workers and peasants even as the Great Ejido Plan accepted by Cárdenas placed the henequen ejidos and agrarian bureaucracy under state rather than federal control.

After the mid-twentieth century, however, federal dominance prevailed as control of henequen production and cordage manufacturing passed to Mexico City. The ills that afflicted the industry brought massive federal subsidies that were eventually deemed unsustainable. Even after the application of neoliberal measures to Yucatan, however, the federal government continued its economic assistance to the henequen zone, thus perpetuating the state's dependency. In Othón Baños's view, the policies adopted by the federal government with respect to the ejido system were fundamentally political: they changed according to the tide of politics . . . in conformity with the dominant ideology of the president's six-year term.

The research agenda of the twenty-first century will undoubtedly lead Yucatecologists in unpredictable directions. Still, a few major trends are discernable. One is politics after the decline of the PRI. What are the important institutions, practices, and discourses of politics in a post-postrevolutionary era? Yucatan seemed to be at a crossroads at the start of the new century, in the words of Yucatecan historian Sergio Quezada.²⁷ But will it turn left or right?

A second trend is the scholarly demystification of the Maya. Anthropologists Quetzil Castañeda, Peter Hervik, and Juan Castillo Cocom have shown the difficulties of applying monolithic terms like Maya in a society where ethnic relations are often situational and ethnic boundaries are fluid. Castañeda's analysis of Chichén Itzá and the neighboring community of Pisté demonstrates that rather than being a timeless essence, Mayan identity is constantly being negotiated and contested. Similarly, Hervik's work shows how professional ethnography and popular media such as National Geographic magazine exoticized the idea of the Maya. Perhaps most provocatively, Juan Castillo Cocom asks only half jokingly if he is post-Maya.²⁸

Third, researchers are only beginning to grapple with the region's transition to a post-henequen economy based on tourism, migration, and the assembly plants known as maquiladoras.²⁹ The economic upheavals associated with globalization and neoliberalism will not only profoundly change where and how Yucatecans work, but they will also affect the structure of family and community. The peninsula's fragile karst topography and unique environment, which was transformed by henequen in the late nineteenth century, will undoubtedly have to confront new challenges, such as the impact of industrial hog farming.³⁰

Notes

1. See Edward H. Moseley and Edward D. Terry, eds., Yucatan: A World Apart (1980); Gilbert M. Joseph, Rediscovering the Past at Mexico's Periphery: Essays on the History of Modern Yucatan (1986); Jeffery Brannon and Eric N. Baklanoff, Agrarian Reform and Public Enterprise in Mexico: The Political Economy of Yucatan's Henequen Industry (1987); Jeffery T. Brannon and Gilbert M. Joseph, eds., Land, Labor, and Capital in Modern Yucatan: Essays in Regional History and Political Economy (1991); and Eric N. Baklanoff and Edward H. Moseley, eds., Yucatan in an Era of Globalization (2008).

2. Classical economic liberalism has been defined as that corpus of ideology, theory, and policy prescription that sought to free economic activity from all constraints on the market and to promote the international division of labor through the alleged complementarity of parts of the world economy. See Joseph L. Love and Nils Jacobsen, eds., Guiding the Invisible Hand: Economic Liberalism and the State in Latin American History (New York: Praeger, 1988), vii. The study of Mexican liberalism has produced extensive literature. Important recent studies include Francie R. Chassen-López, From Liberal to Revolutionary Oaxaca: The View from the South, Mexico, 1867–1910 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004); Jaime E. Rodríguez O., ed., The Divine Charter: Constitutionalism and Liberalism in Nineteenth-Century Mexico (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005); and Peter Guardino, The Time of Liberty: Popular Political Culture in Oaxaca, 1750–1850 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005).

3. Don E. Dumond, The Machete and the Cross: Campesino Rebellion in Yucatan (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997).

4. For the new views of Maya ethnicity in Yucatan, see the special issue of the Journal of Latin American Anthropology 9 (Spring 2004), titled The Maya Identity of Yucatan, 1500–1935: Re-thinking Ethnicity, History, and Anthropology, and Juan Castillo Cocom and Quetzil Castañeda, Estrategias identitarias: Educación y la antropología histórica (Mexico City: Universidad Pedagógica Nacional, 2005).

5. Paul R. Sullivan, Xuxub Must Die: The Lost Histories of a Murder on the Yucatan (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004). Robert Patch, Maya Revolt and Revolution in the Eighteenth Century (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2002), although chronologically in the late colonial period, is another important contribution to the new ethnohistorical approach to the Maya.

6. Wolfgang Gabbert, Becoming Maya: Ethnicity and Social Inequality in Yucatan since 1500 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2004).

7. Allen Wells, Yucatan's Gilded Age: Haciendas, Henequen, and International Harvester (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1985); Brannon and Baklanoff, Agrarian Reform; Othón Baños Ramírez, Ejidos sin campesinos (Mérida: Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán, 1989); Allen Wells, From Hacienda to Plantation: The Transformation of Santo Domingo Xcuyum, and Jeffery Brannon, Conclusion: Yucatecan Political Economy in Broader Perspective, in Brannon and Joseph, Land, Labor, and Capital in Modern Yucatan; Ben Fallaw, Bartocallismo: Calles, García Correa y los henequeneros de Yucatán, Boletín del Archivo Plutarco Elías Calles 27 (April 1998): 1–32.

8. Allen Wells and Gilbert M. Joseph, Summer of Discontent, Seasons of Upheaval: Elite Politics and Rural Insurgency in Yucatan, 1876–1915 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996).

9. See Gilbert M. Joseph, Revolution from Without: Yucatan, Mexico, and the United States, 1880–1924 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1982). Duke University Press published a second edition with a foreword by Alan Knight and a new introduction by Joseph in 1988. On the new cultural history, see Gilbert M. Joseph and Daniel Nugent, eds., Everyday Forms of State Formation: Revolution and the Negotiation of Rule in Modern Mexico (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994). See also Paul Eiss, Redemption's Archive: Remembering the Future in a Revolutionary Past, Comparative Studies in Society and History 44 (January 2002): 106–36.

10. Stephanie Smith, Educating the Mothers of the Nation, in The Women's Revolution in Mexico, 1910–1953, ed. Stephanie Mitchell and Patience Schell (Boulder, CO: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007), 37–51.

11. Stephanie Smith, ‘If Love Enslaves . . . Love Be Damned!’: Divorce and Revolutionary State Formation in Yucatan, in Sex in Revolution: Gender, Politics, and Power in Modern Mexico, ed. Jocelyn Olcott, Mary Kay Vaughan, and Gabriela Cano (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 98–111.

12. Anna Macías, Against All Odds: The Feminist Movement in Mexico to 1940 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1982); Alma Reed, Peregrina: Love and Death in Mexico, ed. Michael K. Schuessler, foreword by Elena Poniatowska (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007).

13. Piedad Peniche Rivero, Las ligas feministas en la Revolución: El pensamiento de Felipe y Elvia Carrillo Puerto, Unicornio: Suplemento Cultural de Por Esto! 275, July 7, 1996, 8–11; Monique J. Lemaitre, Elvia Carrillo Puerto: La monja roja del Mayab (Monterrey: Ediciones Castillo, 1998).

14. For the Lebanese experience in other parts of Mexico, see Theresa Alfaro Velcamp, Immigrant Positioning in Twentieth-Century Mexico: Middle Easterners, Foreign Citizens, and Multiculturalism, Hispanic American Historical Review 96 (February 2006): 61–91.

15. Other recent research on the Lebanese includes Teresa Cuevas Seba and Miguel Mañana Plasencio, Los libaneses de Yucatán (Mérida: Impresiones Profesionales, 1990), and Luis Alfonso Ramírez, Secretos de familia: Libaneses y élites empresariales en Yucatán (Mexico City: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, 1994).

16. Marisa Pérez de Sarmiento and Franco Savarino Roggero, El cultivo de los élites: Grupos económicos y políticos en Yucatán en los siglos 19 y 20 (Mexico City: Conaculta, 2001), 164, 170, 183, 241.

17. Edmundo Bolio Ontiveros, ed., El P.S.S. y el futuro gobierno del Profesor Bartolomé García Correa (Mérida: Pluma y Lapiz, 1930), 53–57.

18. Carlos Loret de Mola, Los caciques (Mexico City: Grijalbo, 1979), 121–25; Rodolfo López Sosa, Tarjeta presidential (Mérida: Guerra, 1952), 6, 53; Diario del Sureste, December 16, 1931.

19. Ben Fallaw, Dry Law, Wet Politics: Drinking and Prohibition in Revolutionary-Era Yucatan, 1915–1935, Latin American Research Review 37, no. 2 (2002): 37–64, and Los fundamentos económicos del Bartolismo: García Correa, los hacendados yucatecos y la industria del henequén, 1930–1933, Unicornio, October 19, 1997, 3–9, and October 26, 1997, 3–9.

20. On the crisis of the henequen economy, see Brannon and Baklanoff, Agrarian Reform and Public Enterprise; Baños Ramírez, Yucatán; and Othón Baños Ramírez, ed., Estructura agraria y estado en Yucatán (Mérida: Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán, 1990).

21. Rose Spaulding, Political Parties in Yucatan: Regionalism, Strategy, and Prospects for the PRI, paper presented at the Twenty-first International Congress of the Latin American Studies Association, 1998, and Opposition Politics, Party Pluralism, and Electoral Democracy in Yucatan, paper presented at the Twenty-second International Congress of the Latin American Studies Association, 2000.

22. Terry Rugeley, Of Wonders and Wisemen: Religion and Popular Cultures in Southeast Mexico, 1800–1876 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001); Paul Eiss, Hunting for the Virgin: Meat, Money, and Memory in Tetiz, Yucatan, Cultural Anthropology 17 (August 2002): 291–330; Ron Loewe, Marching with San Miguel: Festivity, Obligation, and Hierarchy in a Mexican Town, Journal of Anthropological Research 39 (Winter 2003): 463–86.

23. Hernán Menéndez Rodríguez, Iglesia y poder: Proyectos sociales, alianzas políticas económicas en Yucatán (1857–1917) (Mérida: Editorial Nuestra América y Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, 1995), 237–78; Franco Savarino Roggero, Pueblo y nacionalismo: Del régimen oligárquico a la sociedad de masas en Yucatán, 1894–1925 (Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Estudios Históricos de la Revolución, 1997), 189–216.

24. For the failure of what Alan Knight calls the radical cultural project of the Revolution in Mexico as a whole, especially during the 1930s, see his Popular Culture and the Revolutionary State in Mexico, 1910–1940, Hispanic American Historical Review 74 (August 1994):