Peasants, Politics, and the Formation of Mexico's National State: Guerrero, 1800-1857 9780804743648

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Peasants, Politics, and the Formation of Mexico's National State GUERRERO, I800-1857

PETER F. GUARDINO

Peasants, Politics, and the Formation of Mexico's National State GUERRERO,

I800-I857

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS STANFORD, CALIFORNIA

Stanford University Press Stanford, California © 1996 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University Printed in the United States of America CIP

data are at the back of the book

To Estelle Guardino, Francis Guardino, and fane Walter

Acknowledgments

Many people and institutions were instrumental in the research and writing of this book. The staffs at the many archives listed in the bibliography consistently provided cheerful professional service. Many other individuals in Mexico provided valuable insights and helped orient me in my search for materials. Among those who did so in Mexico City were Jonathan Amith, Dori Burnham, Alicia Hernandez, David Marley, and Mina del Valle. I benefited from the advice of Roberto Velez Pliego and Reina Cruz in Puebla and Maria Teresa Jarquin, Irma Cardenas Barraza, and Rosaura Hernandez in Toluca. In Chilpancingo I profited from the insights and support of Camilio Valchi, Jesus Alvarez Hernandez, and especially Jaime Salazar Adame. Also in Chilpancingo, Blanca Heredia, Arturo Solis Heredia, and Blanca Salinas Heredia aided my unsuccessful efforts to locate the papers of their famous ancestor Juan Alvarez, and Hernando Anzaldua allowed me to use the materials collected by his late father. I am also forever in debt to Efrain Bermudez and his entire family for the hospitality, friendship, and moral support they provided during my stays in Chilpancingo. This book first took shape as a doctoral dissertation at the University of Chicago. The work is so rooted in my many years there that it is impossible for me to identify any given moment as the one in which I started the project. The research owes much to the intellectual and moral support provided by numerous fellow graduate students. These friends and colleagues include Kate Bjork, Luis Cerda, Deborah Cohen, Dawn Fogle Deaton, Robin Derby, Michael Ducey, Carlos Espinoza, Patricia Fernandez, Javier Garciadiego, Robert Hal-

viii

Acknowledgments

den, Aldo Lauria, Laura Lewis, Paul Liffman, Lucia Melgar, Zoila Mendoza, Daniel Nugent, Andy Oorta, Friedrich Schuler, Charles Walker, Jane Walter, and Richard Warren. I also enjoyed the valuable insights of visiting faculty including Manuel Burga, Alicia Hernandez, Nils Jacobsen, Scarlett O'Phelan, and Enrique Serna. Friedrich Katz provided incomparable advice on Mexican history in general and Mexican peasants in particular. More than any other single individual, John Coatsworth helped make this book what it is. He helped in so many ways that it is impossible even to begin to list them. Financial support from a variety of sources made this work possible. Mellon and Tinker Summer Travel Grants administered by the Center for Latin American Studies at the University of Chicago supported my preliminary dissertation research in 1986 and 1987. The bulk of my research in 1988-89 was funded by a U.S. Department of Education Fulbright-Hays Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship and a Social Science Research Council Fellowship. I completed the writing of the dissertation during a year in San Diego at the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies of the University of California, supported by a Visiting Research Fellowship provided by the Center. Many historians graciously read drafts of all or part of this book. These colleagues, who include many individuals mentioned above as well as Marjorie Becker, Margaret Chowning, Jeff Gould, Jaime Rodriguez, John Tutino, and Eric Van Young, strengthened the work immeasurably. I am especially grateful to Florencia Mallon for her insightful comments on several drafts and moral support at difficult moments. I believe that all academic endeavors are collective products. I hope that I have given some idea of the variety of individuals and institutions that have helped produce whatever of value is contained in this work. However, none bear responsibility for any errors it contains. Someone's name has to go on the title page, after all. P.G.

Contents

I.

ABBREVIATIONS

xi

INTRODUCTION

I

Society and Politics in Colonial Guerrero

2. The War of Independence in Guerrero, I808-I82I

15 44

3·

State Formation in Republican Guerrero, !820-1840

4·

National Politics and Local Social Movements in Guerrero, I82o-184o

IIO

5·

Guerrero in the 184os: Peasant Rebellions and Elite Politics

147

6.

The Revolution of Ayutla and La Reforma

I?8

CONCLUSION

2II

NOTES

223

BIBLIOGRAPHY

275 311

INDEX

81

Abbreviations

ACDEM

ACEG AGEG AGN AGNDF

AHEM ANEG ASRA BN

Archivo de la Camara de Diputados del Estado de Mexico, Toluca Archivo del Congreso del Estado de Guerrero, Chilpancingo Archivo del Gobierno del Estado de Guerrero, Chilpancingo Archivo General de la Naci6n, Mexico City Archivo General de Notarias del Distrito Federal, Mexico City Archivo Hist6rico del Estado de Mexico, Toluca Archivo de Notarias del Estado de Guerrero, Chilpancingo Archivo de la Secretaria de Reforma Agraria, Mexico City Biblioteca Nacional, Mexico City

Peasants, Politics, and the Formation of Mexico's National State GUERRERO, I

800- I 8 5.7

Introduction Was independence made for all of the classes of the state with the exception of only this one? No, the patria reconquered its political rights for the happiness of all its children; and this good should be enjoyed first of all by the Indians, along with the other farmhands and laborers. -Juan Alvarez, Manifiesto que dirige ala naci6n, 1845 Dear Sirs: All of those in this field and the rest of the villages who accompany us ... invite you to join our ranks so that this way you do not pay the burdensome taxes that are ruining all of the settlements because the Government, what it is doing with the great quantities that it solicits as taxes is to exalt itself and annihilate the sons little by little, falling upon us with armed force to finish us, but now it seems that God wants to help us continue to acquire prestige with our brothers so that enough come to us and so that among all of us we ask that th~ head tax and all other taxes be removed. -Juan Francisco Mendoza and Juan de Nava to the justices of the peace, Field of Honor, February 22, 1843

The formation of national states has been one of the most important processes in Latin American history. Latin America is currently divided into a number of national territories, each of which is governed by an organization that claims sovereign power over the territory's inhabitants and resources. This claim is largely honored by those inhabitants. Opposition to a given government is almost always conceived in terms of replacing state structures and personnel rather than abolishing them or radically altering the scope of their activities and claims for loyalty. This is as true of the violent warfare of Peru's radical Sendero Luminoso as it is of the electoral campaigns of Mexico's conservative Partido de Acci6n Nacional. Furthermore, each state governs a population of nominally equal individuals, each with identical rights and obligations in relation to the state. Not all inhabitants belong to this body of "citizens"; some are excluded on a variety of bases, especially age. Nevertheless, neither the concept of "citizenship" nor its boundaries are questioned by Latin American political groups today. National states exercise sovereign power in given territories over

Introduction

2

bodies of juridically equal individuals. As recently as three centuries ago, they did not exist and were probably inconceivable to any inhabitant of Latin America. The formation of the Mexican national state took place over centuries rather than decades, but it is nevertheless possible to identify periods of relatively rapid change within this process, when possibilities took definitive form and were sorted out. One such period stretched from the cataclysmic end of Spanish royal sovereignty to the beginning of what later became known as La Reforma, when liberalism became dominant in Mexican political culture. This work analyzes this period, from roughly r8oo to roughly 1857. This book is a study of how Mexico's national political system was formed through local struggles and alliances that involved groups from Mexico's impoverished rural majorities. Among the most important actors in these conflicts were peasants, especially those who took part in the many local, regional, and nationa:I rebellions that characterized early-nineteenth-century politics. The study focuses on a single region, Guerrero, which became a state in 1849. Guerrero's peasantry was crucial to the two most important broad-based revolts of the early nineteenth century. The region was a major stronghold of the insurgents during the War of Independence in r8ro-2r. Guerrero's population also formed the major social base of the r 8 5355 Revolution of Ayutla, the rebellion that began La Reforma. An examination of these two episodes, and the continual political interaction between peasants and other groups in the intervening period, will help illuminate the ways in which Mexico's peasantry participated in the formation of the Mexican national state.

State Formation In state formation, preexisting solidarities, organizations, and ties are delegitimated and the nation-state becomes the primary focus of individual loyalties as well as the most powerful institution in society. The process has two components. One is institutional: the state acquires resources and powers and reduces those of alternative organizations ranging from tribes to -churches; in particular it seeks to monopolize the use of force within a territory. The other component is cultural: the state becomes the primary focus of loyalties and the most important frame of reference for political thought and political action; it represents itself as the embodiment of a "nation," or what Benedict Anderson calls an "imagined community." 1 Both components are essential to the process, but they have not

Introduction

3

always gone hand in hand. In many settings the growth of state power preceded its representation as "national." This introduction will briefly discuss some of the approaches scholars have taken to each of these components before addressing some of the problems with the literature. The tendency of early modern territorial and monarchical states to expand their power at the expense of such institutions as churches, towns, guilds, and monastic orders has long interested social scientists. Perhaps the first historian to recognize this phenomenon as a key to the formation of modern political systems was Alexis de Tocqueville in his The Old Regime and the French Revolution, first published in 18 56. The process was intimately linked to competition among European monarchies and the resulting need for revenue, a point stressed by the various works of Charles Tilly. 2 In Spanish America, this process of institutional change was begun by Bourbon monarchs in the eighteenth century but continued after independence. The institutional dimension of state formation in various Latin American cases has drawn the attention of a number of scholars. 3 However, as Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayer note, state formation is more a cultural process than an institutional one. 4 The cultural and ideological nature of state formation has figured prominently in recent studies. Again, the increasing identification with national "imagined communities" that is the most prominent cultural aspect of modern state formation was often preceded by the transfer of loyalties to monarchs from more localized groups and symbols. 5 This process has what Corrigan and Sayer call"totalizing" and "individualizing" components: state formation is "totalizing" in that people become citizens of a "nation" to which they owe their primary loyalty; it is "individualizing" in that their citizenship is on an individual basis, rather than through membership in subordinate organizations. All citizens have the same rights. The state stands head and shoulders above a mass of juridically equal individuals. 6 These approaches to state formation, valuable as they are, generally do not assign peasants and other subaltern groups any active role in the process. For instance, Barrington Moore and Theda Skocpol both emphasize the role of "backward-looking," defensive peasant mobilizations in destroying state structures but assert that "to the subsequent work of reconstruction they have brought nothing." 7 Skocpol sees peasants as "incorporated by circumstances beyond their control into political processes occurring independently of them, at the societal center." 8 In a series of works on state-building published

4

Introduction

between I 97 5 and I 990, Charles Tilly repeatedly asserts that in Western Europe peasants influenced state formation only through their opposition to the process.9 Although Tilly points out that popular resistance forced state-builders to make concessions, he does not seem to believe that these concessions, such as "guarantees of rights, representative institutions, [and) courts of appeal," themselves changed the nature of the state. 10 Even in Corrigan and Sayer's seminal work the lower classes appear only through their opposition to state formation.U All of these authors see the state itself as the central actor in the process, whether it acts in the interests of some sector of society or with more autonomous motives. State formation, however, was not a process through which the state unilaterally imposed itself on previously constituted societies. State-making was a dynamic and multilateral process in which social groups contested and thereby altered what the state was, what it did, and who had access to its resources. 12 In early-nineteenth-century Mexico, these issues were disputed by many different social actors, including the peasants who participated in the many local, regional, and national rebellions and political movements of the period. Mexico's peasants were central to both the destruction of the Spanish colonial state and the formation of the Mexican national state. The struggles in which peasants took part in nineteenth-century Mexico were not battles over whether there was to be a state: they were contests over what· the state was to be. This distinction implies that peasants are not, as Eric Wolf asserts, "natural anarchists"; they seek to influence the form of the state and also use existing state institutions for their own ends. 13

Politics in Nineteenth-Century Mexico The first half of the nineteenth century has long been regarded as one of the most neglected periods in Mexican history. In recent years, however, historians have made great strides in unraveling the complexities of the period's political and social struggles. Many studies now go beyond rehashing the biased and confused accounts of contemporaries that previously served as the foundation for much of the historiography. 14 Historians have begun to produce nuanced studies of social groups, shifts in political economy, the changing compositions of political coalitions, and the formation of political ideologies. However, few of these studies look beyond Mexico City or attempt to understand the p