Ladinos with Ladinos, Indians with Indians: Land, Labor, and Regional Ethnic Conflict in the Making of Guatemala 9780804767774

Citation preview

~&ru~~~~~ fu~m~~fu~m

Ladinos with Ladinos, Indians with Indians Land, Labor, and Regional Ethnic Conflict in the Making of Guatemala

RENE REEVES

Stanford University Press Stanford, California 2006

Stanford University Press Stanford, California © 2006 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Reeves, Rene. Ladinos with Ladinos, Indians with Indians : land, labor, and regional ethnic conflict in the making of Guatemala I Rene Reeves. p. em. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN o-8047-52I3-3 (cloth: alk. paper) I. Mayas-Guatemala-Ethnic identity. 2. Mayas-Land tenure--Guatemala. 3. Mayas-Guatemala-Politics and government. 4- Ladino (Latin American people)-Guatemala-Ethnic identity. 5- Ladino (Latin American people)-Land tenure-Guatemala. 6. Ladino (Latin American people)-Guatemala-Politics and government. 7- Land reform-Guatemala-History. 8. Ethnic conflict-Guatemala-History. 9- Social problems-Guatemala-History. IO. Guatemala-Ethnic relations. II. Guatemala-Social conditions. I2. Guatemala-Politics and government. L Title. FI435-3-E72R44 2006 323.II97' 420728I-dc22 200503324I Original Printing 2006 Last figure below indicates year of this printing: I5 I4 I3 I2 II IO 09 08 07 06 Typeset by TechBooks, New Delhi, in ro.5/r2 Bembo.

Contents

List of Tables

vi

Acknowledgments

vii

Introduction: Rewriting Guatemala's Nineteenth Century r. The Transformation of Mam Quezaltenango from Culaha 17 to Independence 2.

Disputing Property: National Politics and Local Ethnic Conflict 39 in the Formation of a Guatemalan Coffee Zone

3. Debt, Labor Coercion, and the Expansion of Commercial 72 Agriculture 4. Intoxicating Politics: Gender, Ethnicity, and Alcohol in the Transition 103 to Liberal Rule 5. From Ladino State to Ladino Nation: The Malformation 136 of Guatemalan National Identity 6. Popular Insurrection, Liberal Reform, and Nation-State Formation: 170 Final Reflections on Guatemala's Nineteenth Century Notes and Abbreviations Index

245

195

List

I.

Coffee Exports, 1853-1885

of Tables

5

2. Coffee Production in Guatemala by Department, 1880 and 1887

3. Occupations of Indigenous Men by Family Position and Marital 86 Status, ca. 1830 4- Clandestine Aguardiente Arrests, 1862-1886

120

5. Export Earnings and Gross Government Revenues

164

40

Acknowledgments

reflect the input, assistance, and cooperation of many, many people. I wish to thank some of them here, with the foreknowledge that the failings of my own memory will prevent me from giving appropriate recognition to all who deserve it. In San Juan Ostuncalco, where I carried out the bulk of the research on which this study is based, I received a warm reception and much patient indulgence from a large number of the town's municipal officials and employees. I would like to single out Concejal Ramon Diaz, Alcalde Miguel Perez, and Luisa Perez in the Treasurer's Office. Many other municipal employees offered crucial assistance and camaraderie during the months of research in Ostuncalco. I especially would like to thank Alejandro Elias, Carlos Monterroso, !beth Ralda, Amilcar de Leon, Marco Antonio Tirado, and Eddy Castillo. In Quezaltenango Francisco Cajas was most helpful and accommodating, maintaining the Archivo Historico de Quezaltenango against difficult odds. Likewise, Ana de Rosario Tobar performed a similar function in the singularly important Archivo de Gobernacion de Quezaltenango with no appreciable budget and in addition to all of her other duties. Rainer Hostnig, formerly regional coordinator for Guatemala and El Salvador of the Instituto para la Cooperacion Internacional de Viena, Austria, and now based in Peru, pointed me to many key sources on Ostuncalco housed within the Archivo General de Centro America (AGCA), and later he single-handedly published virtually the entire documentary record of Mam Quezaltenango. In Guatemala City a number of archivists, employees, and students of history associated with the AGCA were indispensable to my research. I would like to acknowledge Liseth Jimenez, Ana Carla Ericastillo, and Margarita Garcia Lopez. Thanks also to Hector Aurelio Concoha Chet of the Archivo Historico Arquidiocesano, and to Arely Mendoza, directora of the BOOKS, LIKE MOST OF LIFE'S PROJECTS,

viii Acknowledgments Biblioteca Cesar Brafias. In Antigua the staff of the Centro de Investigaciones Regionales de Mesoamerica aided my research efforts immeasurably, and I always looked forward to visiting them on the journey from Quezaltenango to Guatemala City and vice versa. Many North American-based colleagues and friends aided this project. I owe an intellectual debt to Florencia Mallon, Francisco Scarano, and Steve Stern at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, which I will never adequately repay. Florencia was beyond generous in helping to see this manuscript through to publication. In one way or another Ana Patricia Alvarenga, Nancy Appelbaum, Blenda Feminias, Eileen Findlay, Greg Grandin, Ann Jefferson, Anne MacPherson, Patrick McNamara, and Karin Rosemblatt, influenced the present shape of this work. Hopefully, from their vantage point, for the better. Jorge Gonzalez, Todd Little-Siebold, and Chris Lutz all shared their knowledge of Guatemala with me, and provided crucial advice and encouragement when it was needed. Both Greg Grandin and Peter Guardino read drafts of this manuscript and responded with helpful, constructive ways to improve it. I hope the results are not disappointing. Finally, my colleagues at Fitchburg State College have provided the most welcoming and supportive environment that one could hope for when navigating the complexities of a new teaching career and continued scholarship. Over the years I have received research funding from the Latin American and Iberian Studies Program at the University ofWisconsin-Madison and the Fulbright-Hays Program at the U.S. Department of Education. A Ruth Butler Grant from Fitchburg State College provided funding for the maps. Finally, I wish to thank my family and friends for never forgetting to ask about that nebulous research project that would, someday, reach publication. My parents will be proud, I know, even if it does not make the best-seller list. I dedicate this book to Deb and Rowan, the two people whose lives have been most touched by this project, and without whose spark and care I would have been hard-pressed to finish it.

El Peten

ristobal Cabr)ican• Huitan

•

Si~ilia

San Vicente Buenabaj • .\an Carlos Sija

~ancisco

Cajola San La Union Palestina de los Altos f"-1 s·IQUI.. "I"a •• Olintep1.que • \ San M.~ue '"':\ .. San Juan O,stuncalco • • • •SflcaJa Concepcion Chiquirichapa • San \*Quezalte~ango San Martin Sac!tepequez • Mateo • • Cantel Almolong.~ } La Esperan;a •zu/ Santa Marfa de Jesus

-~ El Palmar

MAP

r. Department of Quezaltenango, Twentieth-Century Municipalities

, ,,

, ,,

c?.

.a. •

Zaculeu

Huehuetenango

San Miguel lxtahuacan

.

~ .' c" ' ' 0

~

• -- -

Town or City

Areas over 3000 m Border with Mexico L--...J Approximately 10 Kilometers

MAP 2.

The Political District of Sanjuan Ostuncalco, ca.

I87D

Ostuncalco • 1200 m

300m

Town or City Area over 3000 m • • Ejido of San Martin (approx. boundary) cW Costa Cuca @> XolgOitz @ Chuva •

~

Approximately 10 Kilometers

MAP

3· Quezaltenango's Costa Cuca, ca.

1850

Introduction: Rewriting Guatemala$ Nineteenth Century

ON THE AFTERNOON OF MARCH 8, 1837, several thousand Mayan residents from the Mam towns of Quezaltenango gathered in San Juan Ostuncalco to demonstrate their opposition to newly appointed circuit judge Felix Morales. Initially the protesters amassed in front of the interim circuit courthouse, where they confronted Morales with their grievances. When the apprehensive judge attempted to excuse himself from the increasingly heated discussion, however, he was pursued into the nearby quarters of two appellate-level court officers-Justice Luis Cardenas and Fiscal Manuel Rivera-who were visiting from Quezaltenango. There, despite the intervention of Ostuncalco 's parish priest, the encircling crowd began to taunt and jab all three of the beleaguered judicial officials. Rivera and Cardenas endeavored to flee the house on horseback, but in the process the latter was knocked from the saddle. As Rivera raced from the scene, Cardenas fell to the ground, the force of the descent sending him into unconsciousness. Only the efforts of the parish priest kept the justice from further harm. Judge Morales, meanwhile, barricaded himself inside Cardenas' bedroom, where he remained until his pursuers broke through the door and dragged him to the town jail. The rebels freed the existing prisoners, and then shackled the judge. Not content to leave matters there, however, they returned "to inflict additional torture ... ," or at least that was how Morales saw it. According to the judge, "they removed the shackles and placed me in stocks, where I found myself sentenced to death each time that [my captors] felt compelled to make such a pronouncement, which occurred every minute over the course of the entire night .... " 1 Before the fatal sentence could be imposed, however, Morales was rescued by a force of about forty ladinos from San Marcos, who entered Ostuncalco early the following day. After

2

Introduction

much delicate negotiation the rescuers persuaded the rebels to release the captive judge into their custody so that he could be tried for his crimes before the proper authorities. The rescue force "conducted me with all the demonstrations of a dangerous criminal to deceive the [crowd]," recalled Morales. "But even so, the tumult accompanied the escort for nearly two leagues ... , insulting them, and hurling stones furiously, from which many were injured." 2 So began the first of a wave of rebellions that swept "more than thirty [Guatemalan] Indian villages in mid-r837," according to the count ofhistorian Mario Rodriguez. 3 The factors and perceived injustices that precipitated such a widely dispersed eruption of largely spontaneous and uncoordinated uprisings were legion, yet nearly all of them could be traced, in one way or another, back to the Liberal factions that had dominated Guatemala City and Guatemala's incipient postcolonial state since the late r82os. Under the activist administration of Mariano Galvez in particular, the state implemented a series of dramatic reforms culminating with the notorious Livingston Codes. Few aspects of Guatemalan society were left untouched by Galvez's ambitious reform project. The Livingston Codes, for example, overhauled the entire judicial system, in the process completely redefining community-state relations. Local political autonomy was greatly diminished, and special legal channels that had privileged indigenous access to the courts were abolished. In addition, Liberal reformers discouraged various outward manifestations of Mayan culture, among other things eroding the legal foundations of corporate landholding-the predominant form among the indigenous majority. They also increased taxes and ceded vast expanses of national territory to foreign entrepreneurs in the name of fostering economic growth, promoting European immigration, and "modernizing" Guatemala's purportedly backward populace. Needless to say, the Liberal reform project alienated many in a land where the stability and continuity of Spanish colonialism remained a compelling memory. Although the uprising ofQuezaltenango's Mam communities, centered in San Juan Ostuncalco, was crushed less than three weeks after it had begun, subsequent rebellions were not so easily dispatched. Those that erupted to the east of the national capital-Guatemala City-coalesced into a sustained and effective popular insurgency in large part because the region's history of mestizaje and hacienda formation made cross-ethnic and crossclass alliances much more possible than in the west, where regional ethnic antagonism prevented indigenous-ladino coalition building, and the lack of wealthy landowners with large, subservient labor forces inhibited the emergence of clientelistic, regionally based political and social movements. This eastern-based insurgency, which came to be known as the Carrera Revolt, eventually toppled the country's postcolonial Liberal state, and established

Introduction

3

peasant-turned-rebel leader Rafael Carrera as the kingpin of Guatemalan politics. Carrera instructed his allies to countermand the offending Liberal reforms and to restore the colonial-era laws that had protected the indigenous majority, beginning a thirty-year period of a nearly unbroken Conservativepopular rule. Fast forward to June 30, I87r. On that day Liberal rebel Justo Rufino Barrios led his troops unopposed into Guatemala City after routing Conservative forces just west of the capital. His triumphal entrance marked not only the definitive defeat of Guatemalan Conservatives, but also the start of another round of sweeping Liberal reforms designed to revolutionize the nation's economy and society. These reforms included the "terrenos baldios" laws of I 87 3 and I 87 4, which instructed Quezaltenango 's jife polftico to auction off the department's fertile coffee lands to the highest bidder while simultaneously refusing any special consideration for the large number of subsistence cultivators who already used the area. 4 They also included the infamous decrees I70 and I77, which called for privatizing communally held property and press-ganging unindentured rural laborers, respectively. 5 Surprisingly, this reform project did not break apart on the anvil of popular opposition as occurred in the late I830s, nor was Barrios, or the Liberals more generally, driven from office by widespread, sustained insurrection. Instead, the Liberal Reforma-as it has come to be called-survived to leave its legacy for the twentieth century. 6 But why? What had changed from the I830s to the I87os to make a repeat of the Carrera Revolt improbable in the face of such apparently similar reforms? Was it that the Reforma-era Liberal state possessed a much more formidable and effective repressive apparatus? Or did the same depth and breadth of popular outrage that had greeted, and ultimately shattered, the first generation ofLiberal reforms simply fail to materialize during the I870s and I88os? Juxtaposing the Carrera Revolt with the Liberal Reforma demands that questions such as these be addressed because it points to the potential, rather than the impossibility, for popular mobilization to challenge effectively and offer alternatives to elite designs. Simultaneously, such a comparison denies presumptions of Liberalism's inevitability. Instead, it challenges us to explain the Liberal Reforma's success in light of how popular sectors had so thoroughly defeated the earlier reform project. Unfortunately, most existing narratives of Guatemala's nineteenth century fail even to recognize, never mind address, the paradox or explanatory problem posed by the Liberal Reforma. Instead, their authors are lulled by the overwhelming preponderance ofLiberal opinion into accepting the Reforma as a resumption of the country's fated historical trajectory after the aberrant detour represented by the Carrera Revolt and the Conservative interregnum. For much the same reason, few authors question the fundamental outline of

4 Introduction Guatemala's nineteenth century sketched by Liberal intellectuals and ideologues. In this scenario, Liberalism was the progressive force that overcame much Conservative and popular foot-dragging to lead Guatemala down the road to North Atlantic-style development. Despite the initial setback of the I83os, Liberal reformers returned with a vengeance in I87I, implementing sweeping changes in land tenure, labor relations, and the state. 7 Recent revisionists have correctly disputed the meaning of the Reforma for Guatemala's social and economic development by challenging Liberal notions of progress-asking the question "Progress for whom?" for example. And although they have turned conventional wisdom on its head by inverting Liberal depictions of Barrios the hero and Carrera the barbarian, they still have not gone far enough in challenging the basic contours of the Liberal paradigm. Principally, revisionists continue to agree with Liberal partisans and commentators of years past who heralded I 87 I as the start of a decade of unprecedented, even revolutionary, change. For good or bad, it seems, the Reforma was the watershed event of Guatemala's postcolonial nineteenth century. 8 Perhaps the most significant achievement attributed to the Liberal reforms of the I 870s is that they established the necessary conditions for coffee to become the produit moteur of the Guatemalan economy. Indeed, in the minds of many authors, the Reforma is synonymous with a dramatic expansion of coffee production. Yet how accurate is such an association? Let us briefly review the details of coffee cultivation in Guatemala over the course of the nineteenth century. In particular, let us examine coffee's emergence as the country's economic mainstay and most important agricultural export. 9 Coffee has been cultivated on a consistent basis in Guatemala from at least the mid-I83os. This early period is often neglected in terms of the magnitude of production because the first coffee exports were not recorded until I853. Apart from the export data compiled by the state's Customs Administration, there is little additional evidence by which to calculate annual production. Yet the absence of such information in the early years does not mean that harvests were insignificant. Rather, annual production was directed toward meeting the growing demand for coffee that existed within the country itself. Even after Guatemala already had begun to ship coffee abroad, for instance, its domestic market consumed the lion's share ofEl Salvador's first exports, which amounted to nearly ninety thousand pounds in I855-56. 10 Still, given the difficulties associated with trying to determine the magnitude of Guatemalan coffee production prior to I853, let us turn to the export figures that exist for the subsequent decades (see Table I). The export data demonstrate that coffee production grew consistently from the mid-I85os to the mid-I88os. In other words, expansion began well before I 87 I, and in this sense, the year of the so-called Liberal revolution

Introduction TABLE I.

Year

5

Coffee Exports, r8s3-r885 Pounds

1853 1854 1855 1856 1857 1858 1859 1860 1861 1862 1863 1864 1865 1866 1867 1868 1869

5,000 800 9,500 14,500 17,000 10,400 47,355 155,689 558,866 1,207,415 2,026,468 1,628,979 2,242,872 3,253,064 3,465,650 7,505,102 7,183,887

1870

11,322,982

1871 1872 1873 1874 1875 1876 1877 1878 1879 1880 1881 1882 1883 1884 1885

13,121,293 13,913,779 15,050,668 16,158,381 16,195,900 20,740,017 20,993,476 20,935,877 26,228,213 28,976,267 26,037,289 31,327,156 40,406,939 37,130,600 52,031,815

Increase

%Increase

-4,200 8,700 5,000 2,500 -6,600 36,955 108,334 403,177 648,549 819,053 -397,489 613,893 1,010,192 212,586 4,039,452 -321,215 4,139,095 1,798,311 792,486 1,136,889 1,107,713 37,519 4,544,117 253,459 -57,599 5,292,336 2,748,054 -2,938,978 5,289,867 9,079,783 -3,276,339 14,901,215

-84.0 1087.5 52.6 17.2 -38.8 355.3 228.8 259.0 116.0 67.8 -19.6 37.7 45.0 6.5 116.6 -4.3 57.6 15.9 6.0 8.2 7.4 0.2 28.1 1.2 -0.3 25.3 10.5 -10.1 20.3 29.0 -8.1 40.1

Sources (by year): 1853-56, r867-74, 1876-83, and r885, Manuel Rubio Sanchez, Historia del comercio del cafl en Guatemala. Siglos XVIII-XIX, parts 2 and 3, ASGHG 51 (1978): 124-204, and 52 (1979): 110-127; 1859-1866, Michael]. Biechler, The Coffee Industry of Guatemala: A Geographic Analysis (Ph.D. diss., Michigan State University, 1970), 265; 1875 and 1884, David ]. McCreery, Coffee and Class: The Structure cif Development in Liberal Guatemala, HAHR 56 (August 1976): 485. The years 1857-58 were estimated from export earnings reported by Ignacio Solis, Memorias de Ia Casa de Moneda de Guatemala y del desarrollo econ6mico del pals (Guatemala: Ministerio de Finanzas de Guatemala, 1979), 844, and an approximate price per pound of o. 10 pesos calculated from 1856 and 1859. I have highlighted 1870 to indicate the year that coffee surpassed cochineal as Guatemala's single most important export. On this point see Ralph Lee Woodward, Rafael Carrera and the Emergence cif the Republic cif Guatemala, 1821-1871 (Athens: University of Georgia, 1993), 379, 383.

6

Introduction

hardly stands out. Indeed, by I870, coffee already had become Guatemala's single largest export earner, surpassing even cochineal. Considered in terms of average annual growth rates, coffee exports increased at well over roo percent per year between I853 and I87r. They grew at little more than IO percent per year from I872 to I885. Even in absolute rather than relative terms, annual growth by the end of the I86os mirrored figures from the late I870s and I88os. In both I868 and I870, for example, exports grew by over four million pounds, a feat that was not repeated again until I976 and I 979. If not for the military disruption of I 87 I, and the regime change that followed, it is quite likely that export figures would have continued to grow by several million pounds annually through the early I87os as well as beyond. Thus, when viewed from the standpoint of coffee production, I87I does not appear to have been much of a watershed event at all. The health of Guatemala's coffee industry would seem to have been assured well before it received all of the supposed benefits that most authors attribute to the Liberal Reforma. The results of this cursory analysis of coffee export data are surprising because a central pillar of the "Reforma-as-revolution" perspective is the close association of Guatemala's Liberals with the period of rapid coffee growth. As we just saw, however, coffee export figures indicate that this pillar may be standing on shaky ground. Could the same be true for other pillars of the "Reforma-as-revolution" perspective? Might the dramatic rise in coffee production prior to I87I, for example, suggest a concomitant transformation of indigenous community land into privately held agricultural production units, and indigenous peasants into seasonal wage laborers? Perhaps the Liberal Revolution of I87I was not such a revolution after all. Perhaps, if revolutionary change did mark Guatemalan society during the nineteenth century, and coffee was at the heart of it, "then the Liberal reforms were more capstone than cornerstone in the process."II If such a reinterpretation is accurate, then it was Conservatives, not Liberals, who presided over the most important transformations of the nineteenth century, even if they were not themselves the intellectual authors, and Guatemala thus joins a host of other Latin American nations and regions that implemented Liberal-oriented development policies under the direction of Conservative authorities. 12 To assert that Rafael Carrera and his Conservative camarilla, rather than Reforma-era Liberals, dealt a fatal and irreversible blow to the indigenous communities of Guatemala's potential coffee zones is to challenge two interrelated interpretations of the nineteenth century that prevail in the historiography of Guatemala. First, such an assertion questions the work of revisionists, who, over the past two decades or so, have painted a more favorable portrait of Rafael Carrera. E. Bradford Burns is among the earliest and best-known proponents of Carrera as a champion of the underclass rather than a reactionary

Introduction 7 despot. 13 And although it is certainly true that various aspects of Carrera's rule needed to be recuperated from the weight of Liberal mischaracterizations, his purported sympathy for indigenous communities has been overstated greatly by Burns and other revisionists. Secondly, my take on Carrera and the Conservatives diminishes the importance of post-1871 Liberal legislation and disputes the notion that the Reforma constituted the key moment in nineteenth-century Guatemala. Supporters and detractors of Guatemalan Liberalism alike perhaps have been too quick to accept the triumphalism and greatly inflated claims of the contemporary Liberals themselves. 14 Several revisionist works on the period have begun to recognize the need for a reconsideration of these issues. David McCreery suggested such a possibility as early as 1983 when he wrote that "[r]ural Guatemalan communities did not suffer the sweeping land confiscations that characterized some late nineteenth-century Liberal regimes." 1 5 McCreery's argument, which he makes most forcefully in the more recently published Rural Guatemala, is that unlike countries such as El Salvador, where community lands were more successfully legislated out of existence, in Guatemala many indigenous towns were able to retain significant landholdings long after the Liberal Revolution. 16 Indeed, in some cases Liberal authorities actually helped communities protect and even expand their land base. ' 7 Although this challenge to traditional accounts of the Reforma period differs significantly from the one that I pose above, it provides a nuanced and necessary corrective to our understanding of Guatemala's post-1871 Liberals and the policies they pursued. ]. C. Cambranes is another of the revisionist pioneers whose work has helped to demystifY Guatemala's nineteenth century. In particular, his 1985 study of land tenure during the Conservative years helps put the lie to Carrera's supposed bias in favor of the indigenous community. As Cambranes notes, "The Conservative Government permitted agrarian redistribution in Guatemala by fostering the handing over ofland to private parties, which by law belonged to the peasant communities .... [T]he sympathy displayed by the Conservatives ... with respect to the demands and complaints made by the rural population, was more apparent than real." 18 By presenting a less romanticized view of Carrera, Cambranes helps to tear down the great divide between Conservative and Liberal rule that marks many other scholarly treatments of the period. More recently, emerging in the early I 990s, a new wave of scholarship has begun to question seriously the Conservative/Liberal duality present in much of the existing literature. Examples include Ralph Lee Woodward's monumental social history of the Carrera years, Jorge Gonzalez' dissertation on Central America's ephemeral Los Altos state, McCreery's Rural Guatemala, and Robert Williams' comparative investigation of state formation in the

8 Introduction

five Central American republics. ' 9 Two additional works-one by Wayne Clegern, another by Lowell Gudmundson and Hector Lindo-Fuentes-issue particularly explicit challenges to the bipolar characterization of Guatemala's Conservative and Liberal regimes. 20 The consensus of this new revisionism is that far from marking a r8o-degree reversal, some important aspects of the Reforma were foreshadowed by trends in Conservative policy. Although most of the aforementioned revisionists still would assert that the Conservative period did not see a significant shift toward "Liberal" policies until after the death of Carrera in r865, they acknowledge some telling prior exceptions, particularly in the case of land tenure. 21 Woodward, for example, notes that "By the r86os ... and sometimes even earlier, we find the Ministry of Gobernaci6n sometimes siding with Ladino coffee planters encroaching on Indian ejidos." 22 Clegern is even more emphatic: "It is well documented that from the early r8sos on the coffee revolution had unleashed massive encroachments on village lands .... It is also documented that in large measure both Carrera and Cerna turned a deaf ear to village complaints, both having committed themselves to developing the coffee culture." 23 Only Gudmundson and Lindo-Fuentes, however, go so far as to argue that "the Liberal reforms only formalized a situation long in the making:" [W]e downgrade the significance of the reform movement of the 1870s as a turning point in the economic, political, and social history of Central America, however great its historiographic and ideological significance for Liberal historians and statesmen thereafter ... [N] o longer can one seriously argue that coffee and Liberalism were synonymous in Central America. Coffee allowed for a second coming of Liberalism, to be sure, but proexport policies were anything but a Liberal monopoly. 24 As I will demonstrate in this study, the evidence from western Guatemala supports such a contentious assertion. The main difference between Liberals and Conservatives, particularly with regard to matters of economic development, was not fundamental beliefs but strategy. The core group of western Liberals that backed the insurgency of r868-7r and the subsequent Liberal Reforma was motivated more by regionalist resentment-what Jorge Gonzalez calls "situational" Liberalism-than a fundamental ideological or even programmatic disagreement with Guatemala City Conservatives. 25 The historiographical postulates that Conservatives desired to protect Mayan lands whereas Liberals coveted them, and that Conservatives desired to preserve the peasant status of the Mayan population whereas Liberals pushed for proletarianization are unfounded. Conservative authorities simply viewed a wholesale attack on Mayan society to be foolhardy. In contrast to Liberals, whether they hailed from Guatemala City or the western provinces, Conservatives were not as inclined to use the state in an activist manner. Instead they presided over a slower, piecemeal, but ultimately much more effective dismantling of

Introduction

9

indigenous communities from the r 84os onward and with little deviation, at least when it came to Guatemala's fertile Pacific coast. McCreery's characterization of the Reforma in fact applies equally well to the Conservative interlude. The greater a region's commercial agricultural potential, and the more important the ladino who desired to exploit it, the more likely it was that the state would intervene to weaken or dismantle the autonomy of the respective region's indigenous communities. 26 This is not to say that Liberals and Conservatives were indistinguishable from one another. First and foremost, they deeply disagreed over the Catholic Church. Conservatives generally desired to maintain the Church as a significant cultural and social actor, whereas Liberals generally opposed any institutional competition with the state, hoping to replace important Church functions with an expanded state apparatus. To this disagreement, secondgeneration Liberals from the western highlands added their regionalist resentment of capital-city privileges, which they attributed to conservatism. As manifested by the failed separatist project of the r830s and r84os-the short-lived state of Los Altos-provincial Liberals desired to diminish the political prerogatives of the Guatemala City elite, prerogatives that allowed the latter to impose monopolies and other trade restrictions that funneled much of the region's commerce through one or two official ports and a handful of capitalino merchants and their allies. Lastly, Conservatives and Liberals disagreed over how to conceptualize the country's indigenous majority. In essence, the conflict pitted Conservative caste-based hierarchalism against Liberal universality. Conservatives held a racialized or biologically deterministic view of society, in which the Maya were considered a distinct class of citizens because of their supposedly stunted intellect. Legally speaking, the Conservatives treated indigenous people as wards of the state. Liberals, by contrast, believed that the "Indian problem" was more cultural in nature. Mayan "failure" to conform to "modernity" had little to do with biology, and everything to do their implacable resistance to change and a stubborn determination to retain their distinctive culture and identity. Caste hierarchy had to be ended, then, not simply because Liberalism demanded formal equality before the law, but also because caste-based legal distinctions were viewed as tantamount to helping the indigenous majority resist further ladinization (read: modernization). In sum, Conservatives preferred to usurp indigenous lands and exploit indigenous labor under the logic of caste hierarchy and paternalism, whereas Liberals used formal, legal equality as a mechanism to do the same. As we shall see, however, if the Liberal deployment of equality worked rather well to disenfranchise indigenous land, it raised questions when placed in the context of forced indigenous labor, and generated contradictions that doomed the process of Guatemalan state formation.

ro

Introduction

Indeed, it is probably a mistake to assume that western Liberals ever conceptualized state formation in ethnically inclusive terms. As the leaders of the new economic center of the country, they believed that they deserved direct access to the halls of government. As ladinos, the vehicle by which they would cement their hold on that government was the creation of a ladino national identity that would unite less privileged sectors of the nonindigenous population against the foil of Mayan backwardness. 2 7 Their goal was to establish a nation in which western ladinos would be on an equal footing with capitalino elites, many of them Creoles, and in which the state would be directly under their control as they dealt with the regional Mayan majority. Equality, for these provincial Liberals, meant equal access to the state by all political subjects. And just as was true in British North America at the time of the anticolonial struggle there, the category of political subject did not include indigenous Americans. The big difference in Guatemala, however, was that the dividing line between indigenous and nonindigenous was cultural rather than biological. Acculturated Maya could be brought into the body politic by "becoming" ladinos. Those who refused, however, to shed their attachment to the community of their birth, to forfeit their corporate land rights, to acquiesce before the influx ofladino outsiders who had been entering the western region since the late eighteenth century, could not be citizens in Liberal Guatemala. Ladino nationalism had been forged on the anvil of Mayan resistance to the ladino presence in the west, and the antagonism toward indigenous insularity on which it was based had only grown stronger over the course of the nineteenth century. In 1821 Nicolas Juares, an indigenous resident of Concepcion Chiquirichapa, expressed the following sentiment, widespread throughout the Mam communities west ofQuezaltenango: "We do not want a ladino to enter our area. Ladinos with ladinos, Indians with Indians." 28 By I871, as they readied to take state power, western Ladinos had developed an understanding of nationalism that was almost a mirror image: theirs was to be a Ladino nation, and Mayan peoples would not be allowed to enter unless they checked their cultural identities at the border. This study represents a twofold reevaluation of Guatemala's nineteenth century. At the broadest level it is an attempt to place Guatemala's rural, subaltern majority firmly at the center of the country's national-level political narrative by addressing the paradox posed earlier in this introduction. Why did popular sectors reject and destroy one Liberal reform project only to acquiesce to another? At a more concrete level, it is a bottom-up examination-in both social and geopolitical terms-of the meaning and impact of Liberalism and Conservatism in Guatemala. That is, the study's focus is subaltern, but also regional. The region is southwestern Guatemala, centered in the political

Introduction

I I

district of SanJuan Ostuncalco, as I will describe below, but also including significant segments of the K'iche' highlands and coast in the present-day departments of Quezaltenango, Totonicap:in, Retalhuleu, and Suchitepequez. Given the ethnic composition and political dynamics of western Guatemala during this period, such a regional focus implies that the subaltern subjects of the study are primarily Mayan. Unfortunately, however, it was not as easy as one might expect to uncover the voices of indigenous Guatemalans, never mind documents produced by their own hand. After several months "organizing" two of the region's municipal-cum-district archives, literally with a wheelbarrow and shovel, it became clear that ladinos had generated most of the documents at the subdepartmentallevel that had not completely turned to dust. 29 Even documents that contained oral testimony or petitions from the Mayan majority usually were written by a ladino scribe in one capacity or another. Nonetheless, despite the predominance of nonindigenous sources, it was frequently possible to find at least some record of the actions and opinions of indigenous community leaders as a body-the "municipalidad y principales del comun," for example-if not of particular individuals. Had Mayan-authored documents been more plentiful, it still would not be inconsistent to include ladino voices in an investigation of nineteenthcentury subalterns in western Guatemala. First of all, acknowledging the ethnic divide that separated indigenous from nonindigenous, and that consistently subordinated the former to the latter, especially in the west, does not deny the existence of many poor, disenfranchised, and yes, subaltern, ladinos in the department of Quezaltenango during this time. Even some of San Juan Ostuncalco's nonindigenous political leaders arguably could have been considered subaltern from the standpoint of the departmental capital and regional elites, let alone Guatemala City. 30 Secondly, as practitioners of subaltern studies suggest, it is impossible to analyze subaltern groups in complete isolation from those that are dominant. The very category of subaltern is fundamentally relational, and cannot be understood without some consideration of its opposite, or at least, of the interactions and practices that link subalterns and elites together in their unequal embraceY In sum, then, this work employs a range of documentary perspectives to plumb subaltern experiences in western Guatemala over the course of the nineteenth century. My goal is to demonstrate in concrete ways how state policy, both Liberal and Conservative, challenged, limited, and was perceived by the rural folk who inhabited the region of study. In addition, I have attempted to uncover why rural subalterns chose to respond as they did, and how their responses, whether quotidian or extraordinary-including collaboration as well as indifference, "everyday forms of resistance" as well as rebellion-in turn challenged and shaped the state. As such, this book joins

I2

Introduction

a host of recent works on Mexico, Central America, and the Andes, that trace the connection between regional-often rural-tensions and movements and national-level political developments. 32 In addition, like some of these works, this study uncovers the linkages between local ethnic identities and conflicts and the national-level policies and processes that defined citizenship and contributed to the formation of national identity. Not only has this focus on the subaltern-state nexus in a specific region allowed me to present a more accurate picture of what Liberals and Conservatives and their respective policies meant for rural dwellers nationwide, but it also has convinced me that the existing narrative of Guatemala's national-level politics in the nineteenth century is fundamentally flawed. In many ways this book is an attempt to rewrite that flawed narrative based on the lived experiences ofMam Quezaltenango's rural subalterns. Chapter I establishes the cultural and political roots of the Mam region of the department of Quezaltenango-roughly equivalent to the nineteenthcentury political district of San Juan Ostuncalco-from pre-Columbian times to independence. Whether San Juan Ostuncalco's role as the region's administrative seat preceded the Spanish conquest or not, the town acquired cabecera-status with the founding of a Mercedarian doctrina or missionary district in the midsixteenth century. The doctrina included the towns of Concepcion Chiquirichapa, San Martin Sacatepequez, and its namesake in the highlands, and Santa Maria Magdalena and Santa Catalina Retalhuleu on the coast. 33 Aside from the Mercedarian priests themselves, the area was entirely indigenous. By the end of the colonial period, however, the coastal towns had withered away, additional highland municipalities had been formed at San Miguel Sigiiila, Santa Cruz Cajola, and San Cristobal Cabrican and ladino populations had emerged in Ostuncalco proper, San Antonio Bobos (Sibilia), and additional outlying areas of the parish. Despite the questionable legality of the ladino presence in Mam Quezaltenango, the Crown granted municipal status to the nonindigenous settlers of Ostuncalco and San Antonio Bobos in I8o6. And when the region was established as a political district following independence, it was Ostuncalco's ladino municipal officials who initially were charged with the administrative responsibilities. Beginning in I837, however, district-level executives and judicial appointees were named by the corregidores and judges of Quezaltenango. Geographically, the political district of Ostuncalco comprised well over half the territory of the department of Quezaltenango. It stretched from San Cristobal Cabrican in the north, southward through the present-day coffee towns of Flores Costa Cuca, Genova, El Asintal, and Nuevo San Carlos. Indeed, most ofQuezaltenango's potential coffee land fell within Ostuncalco's administrative jurisdiction, in an area that came to be called the Costa Cuca sometime around the midnineteenth century. As property, however, almost

Introduction

I

3

the entirety of the so-called Costa Cuca had been titled by San Martin Sacatepequez in I744· In Chapter 2, I trace the conversion of San Martin's municipal territory from indigenous ejido, utilized for subsistence cultivation by sanmartineros as well as the Mam residents of the district's other towns, to Guatemala's preeminent coffee zone. In addition, I compare this process with similar conversions that occurred in several nearby K'iche' towns of the present-day departments ofSuchitepequez and Retalhuleu. Contrary to existing narratives of the nineteenth century, in almost all cases this conversion did not occur during the Reforma, but rather under Rafael Carrera. For it was Conservative authorities, including Carrera himself, who from the very beginning of their rule refused to use state power to guarantee the legal sanctity of corporately held indigenous piedmont and coastal property before a growing wave of invading ladino agriculturists. Instead, the Conservative state strong-armed the affected towns into accepting the unwelcome usurpers as tenants. Never mind that these "tenants" rarely paid the rent stipulated by law, or that they treated their "rented" parcels as private property with the full blessing of the state. By the time that Barrios and company retook Guatemala City in late June I 87 I, private-nonindigenous-hands already controlled much of the costa del sur's best coffee land, and coffee plantations proliferated. What did this transformation of the Costa Cuca mean for Quezaltenango's Mam subsistence farmers? The highland frontier had closed by the end of the colonial period, and with the expansion of cattle, sugar, and-after IS socoffee estates, the lowland frontier became increasingly crowded as well. To make matters more difficult, the highland population had been growing apace since the beginning of the eighteenth century. How did aspiring peasants find sufficient land as their own numbers enlarged and as commercial agriculture engulfed more of the lowland frontier with each passing decade? The short answer is that they did not. It became more and more difficult for rural households to depend on milpa agriculture as their primary method of subsistence. Inste.ad they were forced to rely more heavily on other activities to meet their needs, including petty commodity production and trade and working for a wage. Chapter 3 explores the expansion of this last alternative-paid labor-in Mam Quezaltenango over the course of the nineteenth century, as well as its historic relationship to debt and credit since the days of the colonial repartimientos, and the ever-constant state policies that attempted to enforce debtfor-labor contracts while simultaneously enlarging the workforce through extraeconomic coercion. Although it is true, as the existing literature contends, that indebted labor and forced work brigades proliferated in the last decades of the nineteenth century, this proliferation did not begin with the Reforma, at least not in the Costa Cuca. Rather, indebted labor expanded alongside commercial agriculture in the wake of the state-sanctioned assault

14 Introduction

on San Martin's community property that began in the I83os and that continued through the 1870s, receiving an additional boost shortly after ruidcentury with the establishment of the first coffee plantations. More overtly coercive methods became commonplace when the Conservative state reintroduced conscripted labor drafts or mandamientos around 1858. Despite bold proclamations, then, Liberal policies resembled quite closely the coercive measures of their Conservative predecessors. The only saving grace for the region's Mam population was that the demand for labor on the coastal plantations remained extreme at a time when neither Conservative nor Liberal authorities were able to enforce debt contracts with much consistency. In the face of intense competition among finqueros to recruit and maintain a workforce, at least some of those who turned to plantation labor were able to defend their autonomy despite the openly coercive legal environment, and to demand additional wages regardless ofhow much they already owed and to whom. Besides wage income, many of the households in Mam Quezaltenango relied on the manufacture and sale ofpetty commodities as part of a diversified subsistence strategy. Unfortunately, the true extent of these activities cannot be accurately gauged due to the inadequacies of the existing demographic record. Small-scale production and trade escaped the census-taker's eye, when it was not simply ignored outright, because it was conducted informally and frequently by women and children. Thus, for example, although some census data indicate that Mayan men produced wool and woolen textiles, we can only guess from our knowledge of the eighteenth-century repartimientos that indigenous women probably played an important role as well. One surprising exception to the dearth of information on women's economic endeavors was the production and sale of illegal rum or aguardiente clandestino. Officials at all levels documented this activity with rare zeal precisely because of its proscribed status. Chapter 4 elaborates the conflict that emerged in western Quezaltenango as Conservative officials dedicated greater and greater resources to repressing this booming cottage industry. Women suffered most directly from the state's heavy-handedness because they were the primary distillers and vendors, regardless of their ethnicity. Male indigenous leaders, however, also came to harbor a special resentment toward the state's repressive alcohol policy because it authorized increased ladino intervention within their administrative jurisdictions. Hence, when Liberal rebels announced their intention to abolish all restrictions on the production and sale of aguardiente, women as well as men, Maya as well as ladino, probably nodded their heads in agreement. This, along with popular disillusionment at Conservative land and labor policies, may help explain why Barrios and his companions had such an easy time retaking Guatemala City in 1871. There was little popular mobilization on behalf of Vicente Cerna, Carrera's handpicked successor.

Introduction

I

5

Once in power, Reforma-era Liberals pursued a multipronged strategy for keeping themselves there. Chapter 5 details how they aggressively cultivated their nonindigenous supporters in the west with land grants and other perks. In addition, they consolidated their power base throughout the country by celebrating ladinos as the bearers of national progress and, hence, the true citizens of Guatemala. Although this vision of the nation necessarily excluded the indigenous majority, it still implied a strengthening of the state's ties among a significant minority. Moreover, privileging subaltern ladinos over the Maya further damaged the potential for multiethnic popular opposition. At the same time, post-1870 Liberals were not opposed to eschewing the inflexibility that had served their ideological forebears so poorly in relations with indigenous communities. Taking a page from Conservative rulers, Barrios and company exhibited a remarkable pragmatism, discarding Liberal principles when expedient and doling out a combination of repression and rewards to divide Mayan loyalties while isolating unyielding opponents. In the end, however, Reforma-era Liberals maintained their hold on power in no small part because they had taken control of the state at an extremely auspicious moment in the nineteenth century. Conservatives, and Rafael Carrera in particular, had restored a degree oflegitimacy to Guatemala City that was sorely lacking in the immediate postcolonial years. State institutions, including the administrative and military apparatuses, were larger and stronger than ever before, and revenues had just begun a period of unprecedented growth. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the Reforma did not loom in the popular imagination as a harbinger of impending disaster. Most of the disruptive changes in land tenure, labor relations, and local politics already were well underway, facilitated by Conservative authorities over the preceding three decades. Second-generation Liberals succeeded where Mariano Galvez had failed precisely because they did not introduce radical reform so much as cement on Gudmundson and Lindo-Fuentes' metaphorical capstone.

CHAPTER

The Transformation if Mam Quezaltenango from Culaha to Independence

1

parish church rises starkly into the radiant blue sky of Guatemala's western highlands, an austere reminder of the town's colonial past, when it served as the religious center for all the Mam communities of the Quezaltenango region. During the nineteenth century, Ostuncalco's expansive religious jurisdiction was paralleled by broader administrative and judicial powers, acquired when the town was designated the cabecera of a political district soon after independence. In subsequent decades Ostuncalco was variously home to an assistant j efe politico or corregidor, a circuit court and judge, a juez preventivo, and a political commissioner. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, the political district had been eliminated, and Ostuncalco was a simple municipality once more. Over the course of the early twentieth century the town's religious reach also was reduced, although a small number of neighboring communities remain part of the parish even today. Ostuncalco's rise and fall from municipality to political district and back again is largely the story of ethnicity and state formation in western Guatemala during the nineteenth century. Late in the colonial period the town became a center ofladino settlement in an otherwise indigenous zone, and as such it acquired increased importance in the eyes of the state. Formal recognition of this fact came in 1806, when colonial authorities granted Ostuncalco's ladinos permission to form their own municipal council alongside the preexisting indigenous one, established back in the sixteenth century. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the late colonial and early postcolonial states turned to these new ladino governing councils as they endeavored to expand their presence in the overwhelmingly indigenous western hinterlands. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, however, given the proliferation of ladino SAN JUAN OSTUNCALco's

r8

Chapter

1

municipalities, the ethnic significance of Ostuncalco and other early ladino centers diminished, and thus the state moved to end their supramunicipal powers. In the case of Ostuncalco, however, ladino state formation is only part of the story of why the town had inordinate religious and political importance when compared to its Mam neighbors. Indeed, Ostuncalco's prominence among the Mam Maya towns of Quezaltenango predated the influx ofladinos in the late colonial era, and may well have been why ladinos chose to migrate there in the first place. To explain Ostuncalco's historical significance among the Mam of western Quezaltenango it is necessary to consider the town's development over a period of several centuries. It is to this process that I now turn.

The Political and Cultural Origins

cif Mam

Quezaltenango

On September rs, r583, a group of enraged K'iche' Maya from Quezaltenango entered fields cultivated by their Mam neighbors in the foothills of the volcano Siete Orejas de la Culebra. According to witnesses from San Juan Ostuncalco, the K'iche' "harassed and beat up all of the [Mam] Indians that they found .... " One poor fellow "named Nicol:is, they tossed in the river ... pushing him in and pulling him out of the water until the point of death." "Not content with this," the witnesses continued, the K'iche' rampaged through "the milpas of corn that the [Mam] Indians of the town of Ostuncalco and its estancia [Concepcion Chiquirichapa] had there ... cutting down and destroying much of[it] .... "' Representatives of Ostuncalco and its "estancia" Chiquirichapa quickly brought charges against the K'iche' of Quezaltenango before Guatemala's Royal Audiencia, demanding that "the guilty be punished." The legal proceedings that resulted are one of the few sketches of conquest-era MamK'iche' relations that are known to exist. Anthropologist Robert Carmack has called the Mam-authored portion of these proceedings the "Titulo Mam," and he notes "that it is the only early Mam document extant." 2 Aside from this source, all of our knowledge of the Mam Maya people in the years before and immediately after the Spanish conquest derives from a handful of testaments and reports produced primarily by the K'iche' or by Spaniards in the second half of the sixteenth century, and from an even smaller number of archaeological studies. Ostuncalco's leaders began the "Titulo Mam" by asserting their historic claim to the entire Rio Samala valley, from its headwaters in northern Quezaltenango all the way to the Pacific Ocean. 3 This was the land that their ancestors had peaceably possessed, and to which they were the rightful heirs. But "the Achies [K'iche'] of Utatlan province, being ambitious and

The Traniformation

of Mam

Quezaltenango from Culahti to Independence

19

inclined to action and warfare ... , forced us to retreat from the plains [of Quezaltenango], where we were living, to the high mountains where we built fortifications." As luck would have it, however, "within a few years after we left-ten-God was served by the arrival of the Christians and the adelantado Don Pedro de Alvarado ... to convert and to reduce this people to the faith ofJesus Christ and the royal dominion of the Crown of Spain." "We and our forbears," continued Ostuncalco's leaders, "welcomed them [the Spaniards] and served them without fail as was right, but also in order to seek [Alvarado's] help ... to deliver us from the vexations and harassment of the Achies [K'iche'] and to restore our lands that they tyrannically had taken from us a short time before."4 According to the "Titulo Mam," then, when Pedro de Alvarado entered Guatemala's western highlands for the first time in early 1524, Mam control over the present-day valley of Quezaltenango had only recently been challenged. Ostuncalco's inhabitants remembered well how the K'iche' had driven them from the valley of Quezaltenango by military force. They were quite willing, therefore, to help the Spanish invaders subjugate their historic enemies. "We descended to the plains and with the favor of God, we defeated the Achies and they abandoned our lands with much loss oflife ... and thus we were left as the quiet and peaceful masters of our [former] territory." Unfortunately for the Mam, however, Alvarado quickly betrayed their service to him. "The adelantado ordered us to allow the [K'iche'] to populate ... the location where Quezaltenango is now ... [despite] our having protested that these are our lands." In the end, the Mam acquiesced to the conquistador's demands because the K'iche' were "his Indians, and part of his encomienda, and to avoid any negative repercussions, since he was such a powerful man and lord of the entire land .... " 5 And so Mam-K'iche' rivalry took a new form within the framework of the Spanish Empire. The two antagonists continued to wrestle over the territory that lay between them, but now their contest was refereed by Spanish administrators and judicial officials. The violent events of1583 were only the latest round in a series of disputes that had marked the preceding decades of the sixteenth century; disputes that arose, according to the Mam leaders of Ostuncalco, because "as the said Achies are numerous, they have continued spreading out." Unfortunately for the Mam, however, the Spanish courts did not always find their claims ofK'iche' expansionism very compelling. Ruling in response to a K'iche' complaint against Ostuncalco in the mid-1550s, for example, Guatemala's Audiencia ordered Mam leaders "not to disturb or to bother the Indians or naturales of the said town of Quezaltenango in the possession of the lands that [they] now have.... " 6 In Ostuncalco's petition of September 1583, Mam leaders asserted that they had territorial rights to the area where Quezaltenango's residents had

20

Chapter

1

attacked cultivators from Ostuncalco and Chiquirichapa, and that this had been affirmed in the early I56os by one of the Audiencia's own judges, an oidor who they referred to as "doctor Mejia." They had called upon the judge to determine the boundary between their lands and those of the K'iche' after the latter had established a cacao settlement called San Luis on Mam coastal territory near the town of Santa Catalina Retalhuleu. Doctor Mejia's solution had been to demarcate a boundary line halfway between Ostuncalco and Quezaltenango, approximately one league east of the former and one league west of the latter.? In the view of Ostuncalco's leaders this division placed the disputed area where Quezaltenango's residents had beaten the Mam cultivators firmly within their control. 8 Quezaltenango's representative agreed that the line separating K'iche' territory from Mam lands to the west had been established earlier in the century, but he did not hark back to the boundary demarcation that oidor Mejia had carried out ca. I 56 I. Rather, he invoked "the Adelantado Pedro de Alvarado as the person who [had] apportioned the land to [the K'iche'] by command and order of His Majesty." Alvarado had erected "a cross as a signal or marker ... so that each town would know its boundaries and jurisdiction .... " Although he had placed the cross "more than a league from where Ostuncalco el viejo was located," apparently the town had since been moved to the east, because now the marker sat on "a line ofhillsjust ahead of. .. Ostuncalco el nuevo .... " In other words, most of the territory that separated Quezaltenango from San Juan Ostuncalco in I583 already pertained to the K'iche'. Mam leaders disputed the tale of Alvarado's cross, claiming that the conquistador had never even visited the area where it was alleged to have been placed, but apparently the K'iche' version of events was more convincing to royal officials. In early I584 Guatemala's Audiencia declared that the two leagues separating Quezaltenango from Ostuncalco had not been apportioned evenly, but rather that the boundary fell I. 5 leagues west of the former town, and o. 5 leagues east of the latter. 9 The extent to which every detail of the "Titulo Mam" accurately reflects historical events and circumstances is difficult to determine. The Audiencia's I584 ruling in favor of Quezaltenango certainly casts doubt on Mam recollections of earlier boundary adjudications, although it may be that the judges were more concerned with providing for the subsistence needs of differently sized communities than with strictly adhering to legal precedent. With regard to the Spanish conquest, Mam claims that they helped Alvarado drive the K'iche' from Quezaltenango cannot be verified given the dearth of potentially corroborating archival evidence. There would have been ample reason, however, for Ostuncalco's leaders to believe that they might gain legitimacy in their struggle with the K'iche' by exaggerating the level of their involvement in the adelantado's exploits.

The Traniformation qf Mam Quezaltenango from Culaha to Independence

21

Leaving aside the minutia of specific boundary disputes and legal battles, what about the larger claims staked out in the "Titulo Mam?" Had the Mam once inhabited much of the Samala river basin? Did the K'iche' expel them from the valley of Quezaltenango? These claims indeed are corroborated by the documentary and archeological evidence. The K'iche' themselves concede this point in their response to the "Titulo Mam." According to Quezaltenango 's representative, [I]t is notorious that the [K'iche'] came from Utatlan to settle this land. [I]n heathen times one group warred with another, and those best able to dispossess and take the land from those who fled ... were the victors, and they had and possessed [the land] as their own. [T]hus in heathen times [the K'iche'] had a war with [the Mam] in which they were made to flee, and [the K'iche'] took and won from them the land by force of arms, and cornered them where they were when the Adelantado Don Pedro de Alvarado came with the rest of the Spaniards .... 10 In addition to this response to the "Titulo Mam," several K'iche' titulos also recount successive waves of K'iche' expansion prior to the Spanish conquest. u Utatlan's first significant usurpation of Mam territory may have begun as early as 1300, although it probably did not occur until after 1375. Carmack dates the invasion to the reign ofK'ucamatz (1375-1425), whereas anthropologist Adrian Recinos points to the early years of Q'uik'ab's rule (1425-1475). 12 Regardless ofthe exact date, it is clear that the K'iche' conquered a large swath of highland territory in what was to be the first of several military campaigns against the Mam. They took the valleys of Totonicapan and Quezaltenango as well as the areas that correspond to the present-day towns ofMomostenango, Santa Maria Chiquimula, Santa Catarina Ixtahuacan, Cantel, Zunil, Almolonga, Ostuncalco, Sibilia, Huitan and San Miguel Ixtahuacan. 1 3 Under Q'uik'ab, the K'iche' conquered Zaculeu, the most important stronghold of the northern Mam, and left behind a contingent of nobles to rule over the new tributaries. 14 They also attacked south again, vanquishing a large Mam settlement near the volcano Santa Maria, and then moved on to the coast where they took several towns along the Rio Samala. The conquered peoples ceded the K'iche' the entire coastal strip westward to the border of Soconusco. Q'uik'ab established military outposts in several locations along the K'iche' -Mam border, including Momostenango and Quezaltenango, but nevertheless, Utatlan's hold on this vast area began to slip near the end of the fifteenth century. According to Carmack, even provincial K'iche' groups began to chafe under Utatlan's yoke. Thus subsequent military campaigns were launched to reestablish dominance over such outlying areas as northern and western Momostenango as well as the coastal region that stretched west from the Rio Samala into Soconusco. 15

22

Chapter

1

Together the K'iche' titulos establish that Utatlan was able to conquer the entire eastern strip of the Mam region south of the Cuchumatanes, as well as the entire Mam coastal zone. Less clear is what happened to the defeated populations, or what sort of relationship developed between the two groups in the conquered areas. Perhaps the most clear-cut case is that of the northern Mam stronghold of Zaculeu. Utatlan placed Zaculeu in a subordinate tributary relationship, and apparently imposed a permanent stratum of K'iche' rulers. ' 6 In the region immediately west of the central K'iche,' it appears that local people were either pushed out to make way for K'iche' demographic expansion, or that they were completely assimilated by the victors. ' 7 A little further south and west, the valley of Quezaltenango suffered two K'iche' military campaigns, suggesting an interim period during which the native Mam continued to resist complete subjugation or complete expulsion. ' 8 Although Carmack asserts that the valley's Mam inhabitants were made tributaries by the K'iche', it is not clear under what circumstances this occurred. ' 9 I have not encountered any reference to the Mam people that clearly locates them in the valley of Quezaltenango during the first decade following the Spanish invasion, with the possible exception of the far western corner. Based on the "Titulo Mam" and the response of Quezaltenango's leaders, I would suggest that most, if not all, of the Mam were driven from the area as the K'iche' colonized the zone. 20 On the south coast various K'iche' titulos indicate the presence ofK'iche' or K'iche' allies on the eastern banks of the Rio Samala, an area called Zapotitlan. 21 West of the Rio Samala, however, all the way to Soconusco, was an ambiguous territory. Although the K'iche' invaded this area at least once in the late fifteenth century, there is no evidence to suggest that they were able to impose a lasting tributary relationship on the towns of the region. 22 In sum, the K'iche' were able to dominate the former Mam areas of Zaculeu south to the valley ofQuezaltenango. North, West, and South of this territory, however, their control was inconsistent and may have corresponded to brief military incursions. 23 In the case of the Quezaltenango region, Ostuncalco's leaders stated that they were forced to abandon their settlements on the valley floor and to seek refuge in the mountains, where they built defensive fortifications. Presumably they were referring to the mountains that surround the western end of the valley. This would make sense given K'iche' claims that Ostuncalco "el viejo" had been situated approximately one league west of its present location, placing the old town center somewhere in the high valleys directly north of the volcanoes Cacaix and Lacand6n. The Mam remained in their mountainous strongholds until the arrival of the Spaniards. At that point, if we are to believe the Mam account, they played an active role in helping the Spaniards defeat the K'iche' forces amassed in the valley. Rather than returning their historic lands, however, Pedro de Alvarado

The Transformation

cif Mam

Quezaltenango from Culaha to Independence 23

forced the Mam to allow the K'iche' to repopulate the valley at the site of present-day Quezaltenango. 2 4 Shortly thereafter, Alvarado granted the entire southern Mam region in a single encomienda to fellow conquistador and a close associate Pedro Portocarrero. Called "Sacatepequez and Ostuncalco" after its two main towns, this was the largest encomienda in all Guatemala, and among the most valuable. 25 It passed on to Portocarrero's wife Dona Leonor de Alvarado in the late 1530s following her husband's death and a brief power struggle that pitted her father, the adelantado Pedro de Alvarado, against rival encomenderos. In 1541 Dona Leonor remarried to Guatemala's interim governor, Francisco de la Cueva, and the encomienda remained under their control through the I 58os, when it was inherited by their son. Although some sources indicate that Ostuncalco was transferred to Crown control as early as 1589, other evidence suggests that at least some of the town's residents continued to be apportioned in encomienda well into the late seventeenth century. 26 Like most of far western and northern Guatemala, Ostuncalco was placed under the administration of the Order of Mercy by the second half of the sixteenth century, where it remained until the parish was secularized in 1768. Francisco Fuentes y Guzman claims that Mercedarian friars actually established a mission there in 1538. Whatever the exact date, however, they subsequently "reduced" Ostuncalco "el viejo" from its mountainous stronghold to the valley floor and the site of the present-day town. The new location, referred to by the K'iche' as "nuevo" Ostuncalco in their 1583 response to the "Titulo Mam," was approximately one league closer to Quezaltenango. Although the Mam did not regain more of their former territory with this move, they do not appear to have opposed what must have been an otherwise disruptive process, perhaps because they approved of having the political center of their population relocated to the valley that they had once dominated. 27 That said, in the long term Ostuncalco's inhabitants did not abide congregaci6n in the new town center. Instead, they opted for a more dispersed network of smaller settlements that by the end of the colonial period had formed the basis for Quezaltenango's several additional Mam municipalities as well as many ofOstuncalco's present-day hamlets or cantones. The dynamics of this dispersion probably reflected some combination of the following three processes. First, segments of the Mam, perhaps linked by real or fictive kinship, may have desired to stake out or resettle territory that they had lost to the K'iche' during the fourteenth or fifteenth century. Similarly, particular Mam clans may have retraced the path of congracaci6n itself, reinhabiting areas from which they had been removed by Spanish missionaries in the aftermath of the conquest. Finally, the dispersion probably also reflected the exigencies of peasant agriculture as families decided more or less in piecemeal fashion to move closer to their subsistence base. Whatever the exact mechanism, however, as early as the late sixteenth-century archival documents mention

24

Chapter

1

two additional Mam settlements bordering Ostuncalco in the mountains to the south, the "estancias sujetas" Concepcion Chiquirichapa and San Martin Sacatepequez. 28 By the early seventeenth-century indigenous officials also presented evidence of a northward dispersion, stating that at a location called San Cristobal Cabrican, well over 30 km to the north, "twelve Indians [and their families] ... from this said town ofOstuncalco ... have the majority of their milpas and a limestone operation [calera]. Said Indians have moved there to process the limestone and to tend said milpas." 29 Ostuncalco's highland "estancias sujetas" grew in number, and eventually in size, over the course of the colonial period, splitting off to form independent municipalities throughout the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. Concepcion Chiquirichapa and San Martin Sacatepequez were both considered separate towns by the late seventeenth century, as was San Cristobal Cabrican. 30 The entangled histories of San Miguel Sigiiila and Santa Cruz Cajola offer a somewhat more complicated example. Although San Miguel received mention as early as 1632, it did not show up in the documentation with regularity until the late 16oos, and then as an "estancia" of Chiquirichapa. Following a thirty-year absence from the tribute roles, it resurfaced in 1728 as the "Parcialidad de San Miguel." A little before the midcentury, however, Spanish officials started to confuse the town with another indigenous settlement further to the north, the precursor of Santa Cruz Cajola. The two places were not clearly differentiated, at least in Spanish minds, until ca. 1775. Although I would cautiously suggest that San Miguel achieved autonomous status during the 1740s, Cajola remained a "paraje" of Ostuncalco until 1790.3' Santa Cruz Cajola was a rather ambiguous entity in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, just as Ostuncalco had been before its erstwhile estancias delineated the town's boundaries by breaking away to form separate municipalities. Indeed, Cajola emerged amidst charges that its residents were invading the lands ofSan Miguel Sigiiila and SanJuan Olintepeque. The new town consisted mostly of people from Ostuncalco and Chiquirichapa who had been forced to go in search of their own lands to the north of Ostuncalco and San Miguel Sigiiila. Like Ostuncalco before it, Cajola's tributaries stretched as far north as Cabrican, to the parajes of Huitan, Paxoj, Vixben, and Xacana. These parajes were administered by Cajola's municipal authorities until the late 186os, when Huitan achieved independent municipal status and gained administrative jurisdiction over Paxoj and Vixben. 32

Highland Mam Society and the Costa del Sur By the end of the eighteenth century, Quezaltenango counted five Mam towns in addition to San Juan Ostuncalco. The emergence of these communities over the course of the colonial period reflected the demographic

The Transformation

if Mam

Quezaltenango from Culaha to Independence 25

dispersion and expansion of the population that Spanish colonial authorities originally had concentrated in or near San Juan Ostuncalco. I have suggested that this migration of Mam peoples from Ostuncalco to the surrounding lands represented a return to areas that they had occupied at some time in the past. A similar process of reoccupation occurred to the south of the valley of Quezaltenango and the tierras Jrias that surrounded it, in the coastal piedmont and tropical plains that stretched to the Pacific Ocean below. The highland Mam communities of southwestern Guatemala had an enduring relationship with the adjacent coastal region. Early K'iche' testimonies, produced to bolster the territorial pretensions of the postconquest K'iche' elite, indicate that present-day Guatemala's westernmost coastal region pertained to the Mam in pre-Columbian times. Sixteenth and early seventeenth century testimony from various Mam authorities provides additional evidence of historical ties to the Pacific lowlands, particularly those west of the Rio Samala. The report of Spaniard Diego Garces (ca. 1570), alcalde mayor ofZapotitlan, corroborates Mam claims that SanJuan Ostuncalco and San Pedro Sacatepequez-the two major highland Mam centers located in southwestern Guatemala-maintained several coastal "estancias y sujetos" into the late sixteenth century. Santa Catalina Retalhuleu and Santa Maria Magdalena were the most prominent of those with ties to Ostuncalco, although the coastal settlements ofNejapa Tepintepeque and San Geronimo Cuyamesumba also were said to have been under the town's control. 33 The genesis of these coastal dependencies, as well as their exact relationship to the highland centers, remains unclear. Information from neighboring indigenous societies, however, as well as other evidence from the colonial period, is suggestive. Residents of the piedmont and lowland colonies of Santiago Atitlan, the Tz'utujil capital, reported in the late sixteenth century that their ancestors had originated from Atitlan prior to the Spanish conquest, and that for as long as they could remember their communities had paid tribute to the highland capital in the form of cacao and other tropical products. These informants recalled that Altitlan's elite had maintained cacao estates in the lowland colonies, and they claimed that many highland inhabitants continued to tend cacao groves from which they derived their livelihood and the resources to pay crown tribute. In addition, the informants noted that prior to the Spanish conquest the inhabitants of Atitlan's colonies had been much greater in number, and had lived in a more dispersed fashion throughout the piedmont and lowland jungle. 34 Tz'utujil accounts of the historical relationship between highland indigenous political centers and coastal settlements are reinforced by the writings of sixteenth-century Spanish observers. Alcalde Mayor Diego Garces affirmed that the residents of Santiago Atitlan kept cacao groves in the coastal colonies, and he noted that the lowland settlements also produced cotton and corn in significant quantities. Juan de Pineda, in his 1594 "Descripci6n de la

26

Chapter

1

Provincia de Guatemala;' gave similar evidence for the K'iche of Quezaltenango, who maintained cacao plantations in two coastal estancias. According to Pineda, most of the sierra towns situated along the Pacific rim had commercial and familial ties with the coastal settlements below, regardless of whether they continued to exercise formal administrative or political control. Highland residents traveled to the coast to sell their crops and goods in exchange for cacao, cotton, and other hotland products that were consumed directly or resold for a profit. 35 Based on these accounts, it is quite likely that highland Mam communities also established lowland colonies in pre-Columbian times in order to maintain control over coastal territory, and, in particular, the cacao groves located therein. Writing ca. 1570, Garces noted that certain of Ostuncalco's residents controlled cacao groves in the town's coastal estancias. Highland residents probably migrated to the coast to grow food crops and to gather and cultivate tropical products, whether permanently or on a seasonal basis that corresponded to periods of slack-time in the highland milpa cycle. Coastal territory would have allowed highlanders to acquire both luxury items and basic necessities year-round and thus would have helped to maintain the burgeoning sierra population of the late pre-Columbian era. 36 Similar to the Tz'utujil communities, highland Mam centers probably extracted resources from their lowland estancias through trade and tribute as well as the direct cultivation of coastal land by highland residents. In addition, highland elites may have maintained cacao estates that presumably were worked in the manner of Mexican cacicazgos. Resident serfs or mayeques would have tended the cacao groves and paid a substantial portion of the harvest directly to the estate owner. 37 Sometime between the report of Alcalde Mayor Garces, approximately 1570, and the second decade of the seventeenth century, the coastal estancias of Ostuncalco and San Pedro Sacatepequez were granted independent municipal status. Garces had complained of the difficulties that beset the lowland Mam settlements because they were required to pay tribute to the crown by way of the highland cabildos. He wrote Guatemala's Audiencia that the estancia Santa Catalina "is fifteen leagues from Ostuncalco, and [yet] it goes there with its tribute, something that is not just nor should it be permitted."3 8 Whether or not the Audiencia was swayed by Garces' advice alone, witnesses reported in 1617 that several years earlier the former estancias had pressed for, and been granted, administrative autonomy from Ostuncalco and San Pedro Sacatepequez. The independent communities were transferred from the jurisdiction of Quezaltenango to Suchitepequez for the purposes of administration and tribute collection. 39 In marked contrast to the rest of Guatemala, evidence indicates that western coastal settlements, including the Mam estancias, began to experience a

The Traniformation of Mam Quezaltenango from Culaha to Independence 27

temporary demographic recovery near the end of the sixteenth century. This recovery appears to have been based on the growing influx of highland residents who sought to partake in the continuing profitability of Guatemala's cacao economy. Although the heyday for Mesoamerican cacao had long since passed, Suchitepequez still supplied significant quantities to Mexico City through the first half of the seventeenth century, surpassing even Soconusco by the 1630s. Garces, as well as later commentators, lamented the fact that many highland Mam were obliged to journey to the Pacific lowlands to purchase the cacao and cotton necessary to satisfY their tribute payments to the crown. In the process, migrants established concubines and second households in the coastal communities, and some even took up residence in them permanently. 40 Although such relocation must have made it easier to collect the much sought after lowland commodities, it also may have allowed migrants to lessen or even escape the burden of tribute by assuming Jorastero status. For much of the colonial period Jorasteros were exempted from paying tribute in their place of residence because they continued to be included in the tribute roll of their community of origin. Aided by distance and difficult terrain, many Jorasteros found it possible to avoid tribute obligations altogether. Regardless of why it occurred, however, migration probably accounts for early seventeenth century observations that the Mam's lowland dependencies had gained population over the course of the sixteenth century, in marked contrast to the population decline noted for Guatemala as a whole. 4' Sometime in the second half of the seventeenth century, however, coastal demographic trends reversed course. Once again, cacao appears to have played a determining role. Although competition from South American producers had eroded Mesoamerican cacao exports since the 1620s, a surge in Venezuelan production around the midcentury spelled imminent collapse. As a result, cacao's promise no longer compelled highlanders to seek out the coast, and even lowland residents may have decided to move elsewhere in the face of severe economic downturn. In sum, highland migration no longer offset nor obscured the high mortality rates that characterized sixteenthand seventeenth-century Guatemala, and, as a result, the population of the former estancias plummeted dramatically. 42 Two examples illustrate the contours of this decline. Santa Catalina Retalhuleu, one ofOstuncalco's former estancias, counted 400 "almas de confesi6n," or roughly 500 people, near the end of the sixteenth century. 43 In 1770, however, Guatemala's Bishop Pedro Cortes y Larraz estimated only 278 residents. By 1806 the town was "abandoned."44 Santa Maria Magdalena, another of Ostuncalco's erstwhile sujetos, was described as "extinguido" by 1712.45 From the midseventeenth century onward, then, the coastal communities began their precipitous demographic decline, and one by one they were

28

Chapter

1

abandoned. During this same period, however, the highland Mam towns began a slow demographic recovery. They also began to show a renewed interest in exploiting the lowland region that historically had been under their control. The first towns to manifest their interest in an explicit manner were San Martin Sacatepequez and Concepcion Chiquirichapa, themselves former highland estancias of Ostuncalco. Together, they purchased over twenty caballerias of coastal land in 1712, near the abandoned community of Santa Maria Magdalena. 46 Then, in 1744, San Martin successfully titled a much greater area that included a large swath of coastal piedmont abutting the community to the south, as well as the tierras frias that surrounded the town center itself. Residents of San Martin had been using the piedmont land informally for an unspecified number of years, and they considered it a part of the community's ejido or territory. The agrimensor who surveyed the boundary markers, Juan Antonio del Bosque y Artiaga, estimated that the circumscribed area contained 346 caballerias. Due to the inaccuracies of eighteenth-century surveying methods, however, later revisions found an astounding 1,085 caballerias, or nearly 500 sq. km. 47 San Martin unknowingly had titled a majority portion of the potential coffee lands in what would become, after independence, the department of Quezaltenango. Although San Martin and, to a lesser degree, Chiquirichapa were the only highland Mam towns to aggressively title land in what had once been Mam coastal territory, all of the communities with origins in Ostuncalco made use of the Pacific lowlands by the late colonial period. Some highlanders migrated regularly on a short-term basis to hunt the coastal forests, or to collect fruits and other tropical items to sell in their home communities or in the markets of Quezaltenango. Others migrated for longer periods of time, taking advantage of the coastal climate and ecology to pasture their sheep and/ or cultivate corn during the highland dry season. Some migrants made the trip only infrequently, for example, during a bad harvest year, whereas others did so annually. Then there were those "highlanders" who settled the coast more or less permanently, maintaining lowland milpas on a yearround basis. Although the majority of this latter group probably originated in San Martin and Chiquirichapa, some hailed from San Juan Ostuncalco as well. 48 The resurgence in highland migration to the coast did not reverse the continuing disintegration of Ostuncalco's former lowland estancias like Santa Catalina Retalhuleu and Santa Maria Magdalena, perhaps because the latter's cacao groves were no longer the target of this new wave of immigrants. Instead of cacao, the resurgence was fueled by an increasing need to complement highland milpa production with the additional one or two growing seasons made possible by the coastal environment. Thus the new migrants did not integrate themselves into the old piedmont estancias that colonial officials

The Traniformation

rf Mam

Quezaltenango from Culaha to Independence 29

had separated from the highlands towns, but rather initiated a new series of informal, loosely agglutinated settlements while continuing to participate in the cultural and political structures of their highland home communities. Even well into the nineteenth century this burgeoning population of transplanted highlanders had no interest in severing ties with the communities of origin. In this way the new settlements replicated the demographic pattern of the pre-Columbian estancias and their relationship to highland authorities.

Ladino Penetration qf Mam Quezaltenango The indigenous population was not the only one expanding geographically and eventually numerically over the course of the colonial period. Ladinos began establishing haciendas in the interstices ofQuezaltenango's Mam towns from at least as early as the seventeenth century. By 1749 a handful had settled in Ostuncalco proper itself, despite Crown prohibitions against Spaniards or mestizos living in indigenous towns. 49 This number grew to over 250 before the end of the century, and in 1806, due to their relatively large numbers, Ostuncalco's ladinos were authorized to form their own municipal government alongside that of the indigenous populace. Thus began the town's dual-municipality tradition that lasted well into the 1900s. 50 The ladino haciendas, too, often developed into larger settlements, or "Valles." On Ostuncalco's northeastern periphery the "Valle de Sija" was said to have 60 "almas de confesi6n" in 1688Y Another, the "Valle de Bobos," emerged due north of the town proper, but south of Cab ricin and the paraje of Huitan, thus splitting "greater" Ostuncalco in two. The lands of San Antonio Bob6s, as it came to be called, were originally titled in 1653 by two Spaniards. The area was still being described as a simple hacienda as late as 1770. That same year Archbishop Cortes y Larraz estimated Bob6s' population at fifteen families or eighty individuals. Within three decades the Valle's populace had risen to 269, sufficient to meet the requirements of a municipality, and thus, in 1806, it too was granted legal municipal status.SZ In addition to the two Valles of Sija and Bob6s, the haciendas Veinte Palos, Los Granados, Zacualpa, Las Manzanas, and Maden were established to the north and west of Ostuncalco and the surrounding Mam towns. Maden, like Sija and Bob6s, also achieved the status ofValle and then Pueblo. 53 The Mam towns resisted the formation of these ladino haciendas and settlements, which they viewed as encroachments on lands that had pertained to their communities since time immemorial. Unfortunately, however, as the number ofhaciendas that achieved municipal status demonstrates, they frequently were unsuccessful. In addition, the sixteenth-century battle that introduced this chapter, and which had pitted Ostuncalco against Quezaltenango, resurfaced again in the late colonial period as a boundary

30

Chapter

1

dispute primarily between San Mateo, a K'iche' offshoot ofQuezaltenango, and Chiquirichapa, although both of the former towns continued to be involved. 54 Another area of Mam-K'iche' contention was the eastern periphery of Cajola's parajes Huitan and Paxoj. Buenabaj, an aldea of Momostenango, along with the Mejia's of San Cristobal Totonicapan-all K'iche'-also claimed the disputed lands. Then there were the conflicts that emerged among the Mam towns themselves. Cabrican challenged Cajola's possession of the parajes Xacana and Vixben, as well as Huitan. 55 And from the early eighteenth century Chiquirichapa pushed royal officials to allow them to split their municipal lands from Ostuncalco's, rather than maintaining them as a single common ejido. 56 The most heated conflict between southern Mam towns, however, was over the territorial boundaries of Ostuncalco and San Pedro Sacatepequez to the west. This dispute frequently involved the other Mam communities as well, because both Ostuncalco and San Pedro presumed to dominate the smaller indigenous towns that had emerged on their respective peripheries. 57 Following independence, the costa del sur also became a major theater in the struggle over land that marked Mam Quezaltenango. The battle lines that had been drawn between Mam communities and ladino invaders in the tierras Jnas over the course of the late-seventeenth and eighteenth centuries now began to extend to the piedmont and coastal plains that stretched south from San Martin Sacatepequez. Throughout the late colonial and independence periods the highland Mam had increased their reliance on the coast in order to meet their subsistence needs. By 1836 even Cabrican, the northern-most Mam town in the district of Ostuncalco, was involved to such an extent that it could not respond to an inquiry from the departmental governor because its officials were "on the coast out of necessity." 58 San Martin's municipality complained on several occasions about the residents of neighboring communities who were using its coastal lands without permission and, worse yet, challenging the town's legal claims. The latter problem was attributed in particular to the ladinos of Ostuncalco who had begun to establish cattle ranches and sugar trapiches on costa lands with increasing frequency in the last decade of colonial rule. 59 Ladino penetration of San Martin Sacatepequez's coastal territory during this period occurred within the context of a general move by ladinos from the Quezaltenango-San Marcos highland zone into the western Pacific lowlands as the colonial era came to a close. 60 The region between the Rio Naranjo and the Rio Samala-which included San Martin's ejido-was subject to a spate of denunciations from the 1780s onward. 6 ' The pace merely quickened following independence. In the area just described, at least twenty-five denunciations were filed in the decade preceding 1837 alone. 62 This figure

The Traniformation

of Mam

Quezaltenango from Culaha to Independence

3I

is almost certainly incomplete, and probably vastly underrepresents the true number of denunciations that occurred by the late I83os. During its initial phase, the increase in ladino denunciations of coastal lands probably resulted from three interrelated trends. The first of these was the expansion ofQuezaltenango's regional economy-centered in the city of Quezaltenango itself-throughout the second half of the eighteenth century. Although unimportant in terms of exports to Spain, the southwestern highlands became a significant supplier of food stuffs, especially wheat, as well as cotton and woolen textiles, to the rest of the isthmus, and in particular, to the enclaves that produced dyes and other items for interoceanic trade. By the I790s Quezaltenango was arguably the most important textile center in all of Guatemala. 63 Ostuncalco and the surrounding Mam towns appear to have participated in the expansion by supplying wheat, lamb, wool, and cotton and woolen thread and weavings to Quezaltenango's Corregidor as part of their tribute and repartimiento obligations. Community residents also sold these goods directly in the markets ofQuezaltenango. Among Ostuncalco's ladino residents, an I 8 I I census revealed that over 50 percent of the economically active males were engaged in the production of wool or woolen textiles. Regional economic expansion coincided with an influx of ladinos from the environs of Guatemala's capital, Santiago de los Caballeros. Their numbers grew especially quickly following the earthquakes that devastated Santiago in I773, and the establishment of a new capital, Guatemala City, in I776. 64 Aside from the city of Quezaltenango itself, the incipient ladino communities of Salcaja, San Carlos Sija, and San Marcos also experienced rapid growth. It is during this period, as well, that Ostuncalco's ladino population increased from a little more than a dozen, to nearly three hundred, and that the ladino settlement of San Antonio Bob6s emerged in the interstices of Ostuncalco's northern indigenous towns. 6 5 A third trend that paralleled regional economic expansion and significant ladino immigration was the growth of aguardiente production. The city of Quezaltenango, for example, experienced a rapid proliferation of aguardiente producers and vendors during the second half of the eighteenth century, despite crown restrictions on alcohol distillation and sales. Their ranks included ladinos and indigenas, women and men, subaltern and elite, and as they increased in number, so did the demand for raw sugar, the main ingredient of aguardiente. 66 Although Ostuncalco's aguardiente industry does not appear to have flourished as early as Quezaltenango 's, there is evidence of its existence by the end of the colonial period. 67 These three trends-a growing local market for alcohol, substantialladino immigration, and regional economic expansion-impelled increasing numbers of ladinos to seek their fortunes on the coast. Both sugar and cotton, inputs of aguardiente and textile manufacturing, respectively, required a

32

Chapter

1

tropical environment for their cultivation. Cattle, although not restricted to the coast by climatic factors, could be pastured there most profitably because of the vast tracts of lush vegetation, relatively unbroken either by a dry season, or by cultivated areas or settlements. Fodder was never a problem, and labor costs were kept to a minimum, because herds grazed and roamed freely. In sum, by the end of the eighteenth century, more and more ladinos laid claim to coastal lands with the intention of supplying the nearby highland population centers with sugar, cotton, and cattle. 68 The appearance in Guatemala oflow-priced cotton textiles from Britain at the end of the 1790s signaled the beginning of a gradual slowdown for Quezaltenango's regional economy. During the first decades of the nineteenth century, stagnation replaced economic expansion. Highland spinners and weavers who specialized in cotton were hardest hit, though woolen textiles also suffered. 69 Nevertheless, this economic slowdown does not seem to have dampened the ladino appetite for coastal land. Denunciations persisted and, in the immediate aftermath of independence, even increased. The evidence from Ostuncalco suggests that the region's ladino population continued to grow apace, as did local demand for aguardiente, and this may help to explain why, despite a wounded textile industry, ladino interest in the coast did not abate. Although many of Ostuncalco's ladinos persisted in rais:_ ing sheep and producing wool through at least the r830s, and probably until the midcentury, they increasingly also turned their attention to cultivating and milling sugar on the coast. 70

The Struggle over Indigenous Community Land and the Difmition of "Ejido" Another important factor that probably helped to elevate the number ofland claims on the coast, despite the decline of Quezaltenango's regional textile industry, is the changes that were made to the laws governing land tenure between r8r3 and 1835· The Cadiz Cortes and, following independence, Liberal reformers, attempted to promote land privatization by repeatedly exhorting regional and local authorities to sell off all untitled areas that did not pertain explicitly to a particular community's ejido. Individuals or corporations-such as municipalities or cofraclias-that had settled, or otherwise utilized, so-called terrenos baldlos without obtaining a proper title would be subject to confiscation and eviction. Underlying these measures was a minimalist definition of the term "ejido" that had serious implications for indigenous community landholding because it denied the equivalence that indigenous authorities assigned to municipal and ejido boundaries. In addition, reformers dramatically lowered land prices from approximately thirteen pesos per caballeria to a maximum price of four in order to promote private acquisitions. 7 '

The Traniformation

cif Mam Quezaltenango from Culaha to Independence 33

For most of the colonial period, ambiguities in crown law had provided grounds for widely divergent views of the community ejido. On paper, statutes described the ejido as an area that comprised one square league, or approximately thirty eight caballerias. 72 Indigenous authorities, however, generally ignored the one-square-league definition employed by the crown. Instead, they insisted that their ejido comprised all of the land within the town's administrative boundaries. Although some portions were reserved for communal use, and others were allotted for individual or family use, ultimately all of the town's territory was considered to be the exclusive patrimony of the community and its residents. This discrepancy between the letter of the law and on-the-ground practices was possible because the crown also guaranteed each community the right to whatever subsistence lands were needed in addition to the ejido itself. Where municipal authorities tended to see a single "ejido," royal officials perceived a combination of ejido and other lands used by community residents for subsistence purposes. In either case, the entire territory qualified for protection against outside purchase or usurpation. 73 The problem that emerged, however, was how to determine a particular community's subsistence needs. Indigenous representatives argued that historical use and occupation were sufficient to prove "need." Local royal officials, on the other hand, intent on pushing through composiciones, particularly those of family members, friends, and business associates, attempted to claim that much of the land over and above one square league was excessive and unnecessary for community subsistence. Despite these problems of interpretation, however, and the potential for favoritism and corruption on the part of royal officials, crown law did at least offer a modicum of protection for extraejido community territory, and this was what the legal reforms of the Cadiz Cortes, and succeeding republican governments, aimed to eliminate. By withdrawing official support for untitled community territory in excess of the ejido proper, reformers hoped to make it easier for private individuals to title land in indigenous communities, be they residents or outsiders. In fact, however, the post-1813 legislation merely displaced the point of contention from the question of how to define a community ejido, to what constituted legal title. Many communities had taken advantage of the colonial-era statutes that allowed them to title nonejido subsistence lands. Indeed, many communities had titled more or less their entire municipal territory. Were these titles still valid after 1813, even though they had been granted at a time when communities were allowed to claim legal right to territory that had not been "composed" or purchased outright? The complexities of this situation are illustrated by the case of the jointly titled ejido of Ostuncalco, Chiquirichapa, Sigiiila, and Cajola. In 1744 the four towns titled an ejido of 259 caballerias. Upon remeasurement in 1816,

34

Chapter

1

the circumscribed area actually was found to contain 513 caballerias.7 4 As one crown official remarked, even if all four towns were granted an ejido of one square league, for a combined total of approximately 155 caballerias, this would remain well below the hundreds of caballerias that had been titled. Yet it did not appear that the excess had ever been paid for or otherwise "composed," despite the fact that a title did, indeed, exist. 75 Aside from failing to resolve the ambiguities inherent in colonial-era land laws, the post-1813 legislation posed its own particular difficulties. Consider the statutes of the early 1830s that established a "contribuci6n territorial" or land tax to replace the church-run diezmo. Under the new tax regulations, all properties, including those held by communities, had to be registered. Property-holders were called on to present their titles, measurements, or whatever documentation they possessed, to demonstrate legal ownership and to establish the amount ofland in question. As a check against noncompliance, the statutes proclaimed that all unregistered properties would revert to state control as "terrenos baldios." The problem, however, was that compliance could mean a heavy tax burden, particularly on municipalities that had titled large areas. Although an exemption was allowed for ejidos, provided a community could demonstrate financial hardship, the law specifically limited an ejido to one square league, or approximately thirty eight caballerias.76 Indigenous communities, then, were stuck between a rock and a hard place: if they divulged the full extent of their territory they would be saddled with an astronomical tax burden. Ostuncalco and the three other Mam towns, for example, would have been liable for paying the "contribuci6n territorial" on at least 358 caballerias, at an annual cost of 179 pesos. The other option, however, was no better: to risk that titled community land would be reclassified as terreno baldio. Records from 1834 and 1835 suggest that this is precisely what most indigenous towns probably did. In the departments of Quezaltenango, Totonicapan, and Solola, for example, 9 3 of the 126 towns did not register their land as mandated by the new tax laws.7 7 Some of the ambiguities in the late-colonial and early-republican legislation were cleared up in 1836 with two new laws that simply ended the ban on selling ejido land. The new laws authorized municipal governments to sell off portions of their ejido as a means to raise funds for public works projects. In addition, and probably even more upsetting to indigenous communities, anyone who currently rented ejido land could now purchase it, regardless of their ethnicity or place of residence. 78 This latter stipulation built on earlier statutes that permitted ejido usage by ladino newcomers, and authorized censo rental of ejido land to noncommunity members more generally. 79 As a result of these new laws the discrepancy between legal and indigenous conceptualizations of the community ejido lost much of its significance. Now it no longer mattered if community land had been titled or not, or whether

The Traniformation

if Mam

Quezaltenango from Culaha to Independence 35

it legally could be construed to be an ejido, because this status had ceased to afford legal protection against nonindigenas. The result of the new laws, according to Quezaltenango's departmental chief, was an impressive increase in land denunciations. 80 In sum, then, the reform legislation of the late-colonial and earlyrepublican periods fed ladino aspirations for land, even if it did not entirely simplifY the complex web of laws regarding land tenure. Colonial-era regulations, although far from perfect, had offered indigenous communities at least a modicum of legal protection. The dismantling of these regulations increased the potential for ladinos and noncommunity members to acquire property from municipal holdings. Nowhere is this potential made clearer than in the Pacific piedmont and lowlands that lay to the south and west of San Martin Sacatepequez, a topic that will be explored in greater detail in chapter 2.

The Roots qf Nineteenth-Century Land Conflict: Toward an Explanation In this chapter I have outlined two interrelated trends in the political demography of the Mam region of highland Quezaltenango. The first is the establishment of an increasing number of independent municipalitiesindigenous and ladino-in the centuries following the Spanish conquest. I have suggested that all of the indigenous towns began as "estancias sujetas," if not direct offshoots, of San Juan Ostuncalco. A second trend is the growing frequency ofland and boundary disputes between indigenous and ladino settlements, and among the indigenous municipalities themselves. By the early nineteenth century these conflicts had become commonplace. Taken together, these two trends indicate yet another: the sharp decline of vacant agriculturallands in the tierras Jrfas of Quezaltenango during the late colonial period. By independence the region's internal frontier had largely disappeared. The idea of a land shortage should come as no surprise to those familiar with the historiography of Guatemala's nineteenth century. The chronology that I suggest for the onset of this shortage, however, may give rise to some skepticism. Much of the literature does not recognize that in the years prior to I 87 I indigenous communities suffered substantial territorial losses in frequent land disputes with ladinos, nor that increasing numbers of rural dwellers were forced to undertake an ever-widening search for agricultural lands. Indeed, some authors propose the years I8oo-I88o as a sort of heyday for the indigenous community, cut short by Barrios' agrarian legislation. 8 ' Another reason for skepticism lies in the fact that for most of the nineteenth century, if one views Guatemala as a whole, there still existed large uncultivated expanses with very few people. This was the case, for example,

36

Chapter

1

with the Pacific piedmont and coast. How, then, can one speak of intense land pressures in early nineteenth-century Guatemala? Differences in focus and scope explain this apparent contradiction. My argument in this chapter is restricted to the highlands, and, more specifically, to western Quezaltenango. That is where indigenous and ladino settlements alike had expanded to fill what remained of the highland frontier. As I will demonstrate in the chapter that follows, the relatively open terrain of the boca costa or piedmont and Pacific lowlands became the new agricultural frontier, partially mitigating the problem of inadequate tierras frias. In addition, however, the new frontier also became a new locus of conflict over land, and it was here that indigenous communities suffered some of their most devastating losses during the nineteenth century. Finally there is the apparent objection posed by demographic studies that conclude Guatemala's population did not return to pre-Columbian levels until the twentieth century. 82 My own estimates for Ostuncalco suggest that the preconquest population of approximately 40,000 was attained slightly earlier, probably by the r86os. 83 In r82r, by contrast, the area counted little more than 9,000 people. Given this relatively small number, why so many complaints of insufficient land? Why the myriad disputes? These questions are themselves based on the premise that the preconquest populace, despite its relatively large size, was able to reproduce itself under more favorable conditions. Such a claim is hard to substantiate and requires an in-depth comparison of land use and agricultural productivity before and after the Spanish invasion. Studies of this kind are markedly absent from the historiography of Guatemala. Nevertheless, what little scholarly attention has been focused on this point indicates that pre-Columbian social organization and agricultural techniques may have been better suited for the reproduction of a large population. Murdo MacLeod is one of the few authors to approach this issue even speculatively. In his now classic Spanish Central America he suggests that preconquest agricultural techniques and settlement patterns were able to support a large population. Irrigation, intensive and specialized crop planting, the rotation of cultivated areas through multiyear fallow periods, and a dispersed rather than nucleated populace combined to sustain Guatemala's numerous peoples. Spanish interventions such as wheat and livestock, by contrast, lowered agricultural productivity. The policy of congregaci6n concentrated people away from their agricultural lands. Composici6n discouraged communities from leaving agricultural lands fallow, a necessary step in maintaining fertility and lessening erosion, and in general diminished community territory by facilitating outside encroachment. These trends became especially problematic during the late seventeenth century as Guatemala's western highland population began to grow intermittently. Some communities challenged

The Traniformation of Mam Quezaltenango from Culaha to Independence

37

ladino control of nearby areas in an attempt to satisfY their increasing subsistence requirements. As this route often ended in failure, however, they found themselves face-to-face with other communities in the scramble for sufficient agricultural lands. 84 Geographer Thomas Veblen is probably the only scholar who has tackled the question of population and agricultural subsistence in Guatemala in greater detail than MacLeod. His investigation of the area composing present-day Totonicapan points in the direction that future demographic/ environmental studies should take. 85 Veblen explores the social-ecological nexus of pre- and post-Colombian populations and reaches conclusions that reinforce and extend MacLeod's tentative findings. His research indicates, for example, that by the end of the eighteenth century land pressure in Totonicapan was high, manifesting itself as constant intercommunity boundary disputes. Perhaps even more importantly, however, Veblen gives a more thorough accounting of why such pressures existed even though the population was less than 50 percent of the preconquest level. He points to several interconnected factors. Like MacLeod, Veblen highlights the negative impact of wheat. Although wheat can be grown at slightly higher altitudes than corn, allowing for a greater overall area of cultivation, its yield is much smaller. Furthermore, in practice, wheat was frequently planted not at the higher, marginal elevations, but on fertile valley floors where it displaced the more productive indigenous milpas centered around corn. This was true of the Valleys ofTotonicapan and Quezaltenango. Ladinos migrated to the area in ever-increasing numbers to pursue wheat cultivation on the ejido lands of nearby indigenous communities. Indigenous communities themselves were induced to plant the grain by demands that tribute be paid in wheat. 86 Veblen also provides a more detailed look at the problems associated with the introduction of livestock. To begin with, livestock produces far fewer calories per unit of area than do food crops. In the case ofTotonicapan, and Guatemala more generally, however, this was compounded by the fact that much of the livestock was not being raised for food at all, but rather for wool. Production of wool was encouraged by tribute demands for woolen thread and weavings, and by the seventeenth century it had begun to replace cotton as a source of clothing fabric in the highlands. Note that cotton, unlike sheep, does not compete with highland crops for land because it derives entirely from the coast. By 1740 every town in Totonicapan was engaged in raising sheep. Like wheat, sheep also supplanted traditional milpa cultivation on Totonicapan's fertile valley floor. Areas of Totonicapan outside the central valley that had once been noted for their fertility, despite more marginal soils, suffered severe erosion from overgrazing during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and today are considered almost barren. In sum, writes Veblen, "It is evident that at the end of the colonial period, a population of

38

Chapter

1

only 30,000 to 40,000 in the Partido de Totonicapan did not find the land resources sufficiently ample to support itself." 87 Turning back, now, to the case of Ostuncalco, I will offer some tentative observations and hypotheses based largely on the political demography provided in the first half of this chapter. The evidence suggests that Ostuncalco was "reduced" to its present location sometime in the early- to rnidsixteenth century. 88 This shift of the population center, along with the massive disease-induced decline that accompanied the Spanish conquest, left large areas of formerly settled and cultivated land to the north and west wide open. Ostuncalco 's population reoccupied the area over the course of the late sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. So too did ladino ranchers. Especially in the later years, this reoccupation probably reflected the shift from population decline to population growth among native peoples. It may have also reflected, however, the deterioration in soil productivity engendered by Spanish agricultural techniques and policies. Congregaci6n, for example, by grouping together dispersed settlements, created small pockets with artificially high population densities. This may have discouraged the extensive system of agriculture based on rotating cultivation. Composicion, as MacLeod suggests, could have given added impetus to such a tendency since lands left fallow too long were sometimes swallowed up by ladino hacendados. 89 Evidence of cattle raising in the Ostuncalco area dates from 1549. Encomendero Francisco de la Cueva employed fourteen incligenas to care for his livestock. 90 Wheat cultivation and sheep herding were present at least as early as r69o. 9 ' All of these endeavors, as has already been discussed, are far less efficient than traditional rnilpa agriculture. Moreover, their products were sometimes destined for tribute payments rather than local consumption. The combined effects of soil damage from grazing and more intensive agriculture, and less efficient food production due to wheat cultivation and livestock husbandry, forced Ostuncalco's residents to search farther and farther afield for suitable land despite a slow population recovery. As they did so, they ran into ladino cultivators and ranchers who had settled former Mam lands and established expansive haciendas. Boundary conflicts and property disputes became endemic, not just between Maya and ladino, but also between Mam and K'iche', and among and within the Mam communities themselves. Thus Quezaltenango's Mam people resorted in larger and larger numbers to an outlet that had proved reliable in earlier times of need: the Pacific piedmont and coast. Yet as we shall see in the chapter that follows, their access to the coastal zone also became increasingly difficult with the passage of time.

CHAPTER

2

Disputing Property: National Politics and Local Ethnic Conflict in the Formation of a Guatemalan Cciffee Zone

of 1871 has become synonymous with dramatic changes in land tenure, labor relations, and agricultural production in much of the literature on Guatemala's nineteenth century. The leaders of the revolution, most notably Justo Rufino Barrios, are either credited or blamed, depending on the author's perspective, for initiating the Reforma, a fifteenyear period of sweeping legal reforms that supposedly separated indigenous communities from their land, and then forced newly disenfranchised community members to enter the coffee workforce. In brief, Barrios and his fellow "revolutionaries" are believed to have established the conditions that made possible Guatemala's transition to a coffee economy. 1 But did they? By r88o Quezaltenango's Costa Cuca region had become the most productive coffee zone in all of Guatemala (see Table 2). 2 As such, it epitomized the goals as well as the success of the Liberal Reforma. Yet as I will show over the course of this chapter, the transformation in land tenure and agriculture that allowed the Costa Cuca to achieve these dramatic production levels had little to do with post- r 870 Liberal reforms. Instead, the roots of this process trace back to the 1830s and 1840s, the years of transition between the first generation of Liberal reformers and their Conservative-popular successors, and well before coffee had been introduced to Guatemala's western Pacific piedmont. At that time almost the entirety of the Costa Cuca-nearly 500 sq. km-constituted the ejido of San Martin Sacatepequez, a Mam Maya town located in the political district of San Juan Ostuncalco. 3 The push to open this area to ladino agriculturists, and commercially oriented agriculture more generally, found its initial raison d' etre THE LIBERAL REVOLUTION

40

Chapter

TABLE 2.

2

Coffee Production in Guatemala by Department, 1880 and 1887 Year

Department

Alta Verapaz AmatitLin Baja Verapaz Chimaltenango Chiquimula Escuintla Guatemala Huehuetenango Jalapa Jutiapa Peten Quezaltenango Quiche Retalhuleu Sacatepequez San Marcos Santa Rosa Solola Suchitepequez Zacapa

Year

188o

Trees Planted

Coffee Harvested (in quintales)

6,584,992

52,244

1,169,956

1,591

5,167,278 781,203 15,446 87,855 141,380 20,478

Trees Planted

1887

Coffee Harvested (in quintales)

51,669 4,287 706 420 620 264

4,145,011 5,949,208 2,002,257 3,713,200 989,545 5,636,353 760,598 625,276 30,246 140,000 18,823

18,351.9 27,329.2 1,279.9 24,968.5 3,982.4 38,696.4 3,011.7 20,479.4 147.4 104.5 138.0

6,913,294

68,798

8,229,542

155.537.8

6,575 2,847,625 3,277,943 3,023,119

28,778 49,284 25,863

5,289,541 4,915,300

45,190.2 38,051.0

11,699.480

133.480.0

19,097 39,124 538

4,667,790 2,830,829 5,054,389 56,746

3,382.0 50,777.4 89,357.0 810.3

2,320,827 4,077,719 44,497

Sources: The information for I88o is found in Augusto Cazali Avila, "El desarrollo del cultivo del cafe y su influencia en el regimen del trabajo agricola epoca de Ia Reforma Liberal (I87II88s)," Anuario de Estudios Centroamericanos 2 (I975): s6-s9, under the heading "Estadisticas sabre Ia producci6n del cafe (I 88o) ." The information for I 887 comes from a document entitled "Producci6n de cafe babida en cada Departamento de Ia Republica, durante el aiio de I 887 ," dated November I888, and transcribed in Jorge Lujan Munoz, Econom{a de Guatemala 175a1940: antolog{a de lecturas y materiales, 2 tomos (Guatemala: Universidad de San Carlos, I98o), I:207. Data from the two highest coffee producing departments in I88o and I887 have been highlighted. A quintal equals roo lbs.

in sugar and cattle, and in sum, it predated both coffee and the Liberal Reforma. As the case of Quezaltenango's Costa Cuca will show, this push to appropriate indigenous land from the 1830s onward was aided by the conflicts and rivalries that rent indigenous communities themselves. Although scholars have sometimes treated indigenous communities as unified, cohesive entities unsullied by politics or the messiness of factional maneuvering, in fact, internal divisions were common, and they could have dire consequences for a town's ability to preserve its historical land base. This was certainly true

Disputing Property: National Politics and Local Ethnic Conflict 41

for San Martin Sacatepequez. Although most sanmartineros eventually came to oppose the presence ofladinos within the municipal territory, others were more ambivalent, mindful that lucrative financial rewards might accrue to the town's impoverished coffers, as well as to their own pockets, if outsiders were allowed to remain on community land. This ambivalence, coupled with persistent and unremitting state support for commercial agriculture on indigenous community land, is what finally brought San Martin into an uneasy coexistence with the ladino usurpers that the state euphemistically referred to as "tenants." This chapter will begin to address the paradox raised at the start of the book: why did popular sectors react so differently to the two generations of Liberal reformers, given the apparent similarity of their reform projects? Why was the first round of reforms crushed by a massive, sustained insurrection, whereas the second round encountered only sporadic armed resistance? Again, the answer lies, at least in part, in the fact that the second, or postr 87 r, generation of Liberals did not initiate a revolutionary transformation in land tenure. Rather, the body oflaws that comprised the Reforma was a de jure recognition of changes that had been legislated by the first generation of Liberal reformers in the r83os, and implemented largely by Conservative authorities in the decades leading up to 1871. As historian David McCreery has noted, it was precisely the years of Conservative rule-the middle third of the nineteenth century-that experienced the greatest number of rebellions. By the time of the Reforma, ·popular resistance no longer manifested itself as violent opposition with such frequency. 4 In short, what I intend to demonstrate is that Conservative authorities, not Liberals, broke the indigenous hold on the fertile lands of Guatemala's western Pacific coast. Such an endeavor requires an understanding of community claims to the coastal region, followed by a detailed examination of how those claims were subverted.

The Ejido if San Martin Sacatepequez on the Eve if the Carrera Revolt By the r830s a substantial number of ladinos from Ostuncalco, Quezaltenango, and other highland population centers had occupied, denounced, or otherwise begun to exploit lands located in the historically Mam region of the costa del sur. Although those of modest means limited themselves to planting corn and other food crops on a small scale, their wealthier cohorts established livestock ranches and sugar trapiches. Indeed, the first was often predicated on the second, because sugar cultivation and production required a number of draft animals to harvest and transport the cane and to run the mill. 5 Sometime around 1838 or 1839 Ostuncalco's ladino municipality was

42

Chapter 2

obliged to establish an alcalde auxiliar for the area because so many of the ladino townspeople resided there at least part of the year. The most important task of the new official, other than keeping order among a populace supposedly prone to "excesses," was to collect the national head tax from among the trapiches of the region. 6 The stretch of costa land to which so many of Ostuncalco's residents had migrated, however, and to which the new alcalde auxiliar had been given administrative responsibility, did not pertain to Ostuncalco at all. Only a very narrow slice of the town even dipped toward the coast, and it was subject to frequent challenges, legal and otherwise, from San Pedro Sacatepequez. Rather, the area under the new alcalde's jurisdiction sat squarely within the municipal boundaries of San Martin Sacatepequez, and it comprised the rich piedmont land that would come to be known as the Costa Cuca. What was San Martin's response to the growing number ofladino ranches and trapiches that had been established within its territory? Did the town object to the administrative pretensions ofOstuncalco's ladino municipalidad? Or did it derive some sort of advantage from the ladino presence? In particular, for example, did San Martin have a history of generating income by renting community land to nonresidents? Based on the documentary evidence, the answer to these last two questions appears to be "no." That is, the influx ofladinos from Ostuncalco, Quezaltenango, and elsewhere, that began soon after the turn of the century, was not initiated, nor was it viewed as a positive development, by community leaders or residents. Rather, the influx was tolerated, at least until the late I830s, because municipal officials lacked the documentation that they believed they needed to mount an effective court challenge to the intruders. "Unfortunately," wrote the self-described" comun de Principales and other vecinos of the town of San Martin Sacatepequez" in early I 84 I, "our forefathers lost the title of the composed lands and ejido of our town, and for many years we were without it. ... During such time, there were created, with our permission, some farms, which we could not make pay [a rental fee] because we lacked the documents that guaranteed us [our property rights] ." 7 Additional detail is provided by the brief that San Martin's legal representative or apoderado, Juan Bautista Flores, submitted to the central government in December I84I. According to Flores, "the comun [of San Martin], my client, ... declared the loss of its titles in a fire that occurred the year of I 8 I I," leaving behind only a notebook containing the original records of the measurement that agrimensor Juan Antonio del Bosque had conducted in I744It was in this context that "some ladinos from Ostuncalco, ... taking advantage of the ignorance of the indigenas, and of their negligence, introduced themselves on the land [of San Martin) with no more title than their general inclination to acquire land with little or no work." 8

Disputing Property: National Politics and Local Ethnic Conflict 43

This last claim, in particular, is corroborated implicitly by the documents generated by the ladino interlopers themselves. "In the area called Santa Ana Pie de la Cuesta," stated Maximo Castillo in a typical testimony, "located on the lands of the town of San Martin, I possess three trapiches ... [that I established] more than twelve years ago [ca. I 826], having cultivated the land since then with the understanding that it was baldio. Moreover, I have made several denuncias, which have had no effect, in the first instance for lack of an agrimensor, and thereafter due to the opposition ... of San Martin." 9 Neither Castillo nor any of the other ladinos claimed to have occupied the land that they exploited within San Martin's municipal territory as part of a rental agreement, at least not prior to I839. Indeed, all of them denied that the land even had pertained to San Martin at the time that they initially had occupied it. Rather, the ladinos insisted that originally their possessions had been so-called terrenos bald{os, and thus they had denounced them on one or more occasions in an attempt to gain formal legal ownership, especially following the spate ofland reform laws that issued from the state beginning in the early-I83os. Not until I839, when it became clear that San Martin really did have a compelling legal claim to the area in question, did the ladino squatters enter into rental agreements or other financial arrangements with San Martin's officials in exchange for permission to use the town's land. 10 In sum, then, because San Martin had lost its official land title in I 8II, the town's authorities feared bringing legal suit against, or even demanding a rental fee from, the ladinos who established trapiches and ranches within the community ejido over the course of the I8Ios, I82os, and early I830s. By the mid-I830s, however, San Martin's authorities began to reconsider their options. In I834, and then again in I835 and I836, they issued a series of indirect challenges to the ladino usurpations. These included using the recently passed Liberal reform laws to denounce some of the sought-after lands on the town's behalf, as well as issuing complaints of crop damage against the intruders. Finally, in I836, municipal authorities took the bull by its horns: they embarked on a campaign to restore the community's official title so that they might dispute the usurpations once and for all. II Why did San Martin's leaders and residents decide on this new course of action, particularly in light of their earlier fears? Several factors may explain the town's change of heart. At a very general level, the ladino population of the western highlands was increasing dramatically throughout the early nineteenth century. Ostuncalco's ladinos, for example, jumped from approximately 400 in I8II to 850 by I840. 12 And this increase was reflected in their numbers within San Martin's ejido. By I84I Quezaltenango's Corregidor estimated that over roo ladinos maintained possessions there. IJ Thus, what began as a slow, if annoying, trickle in the early years, threatened to become an unmanageable torrent by the mid-I83os.

44

Chapter 2

To San Martin's residents the growing presence ofladinos on community land was alarming in and of itself. But of even greater consequence than the ladinos' simple presence was the fact that their expanding numbers had a very serious, and harmful, impact on the viability of indigenous agriculture. Ladinos, unlike indigenous cultivators, were much more likely to introduce cattle into the area, either as part of a livestock ranch, or as beasts of burden necessary for harvesting and milling sugar cane. And because most cattle were allowed to roam freely, eating and trampling whatever lay in their path, the potential for livestock damage to indigenous crops increased with each new ladino enterprise. Keep in mind, as well, that the Mam population of greater Ostuncalco, and of San Martin in particular, also was expanding over this same period, implying increased indigenous reliance on coastal milpas. 14 Needless to say, complaints of crop damage on the coast emerged in the r830s and proliferated thereafter. 15 The plethora ofland reform legislation that marked the r83os meant that the growing presence of ladinos within San Martin's ejido had a second negative implication. Recall the earlier discussion of ladino petitions and documents that concerned coastal possessions. Like Maximo Castillo, most ladinos exhibited a ready willingness to denounce areas within San Martin under the cover of these new reform laws. In this endeavor they were joined by regional government officials, eager for their own slice of the pie, and willing to engage in questionable practices to abet their own efforts, and those of their associates, to expropriate land from San Martin. 16 This second implication, in particular-the overt push to formally and irreversibly dismember San Martin's ejido, property by property-underscored for community leaders the need to recover the town's title. Each new Liberal land law moved the ladinos' disingenuous assertions that they simply were occupying terrenos bald{os another step closer to reality. Indeed, as the example of Castillo demonstrates, many of the ladinos who occupied San Martin's ejido repeatedly denounced their informal possessions with each new round of reform legislation. This trend culminated in the potentially devastating laws of r836, which provided a legal avenue for privatizing community ejidos.'7 In response, San Martin decided to put aside its fears, and to embark on the risky process of recovering the legal title to its territory. Municipal officials began a community-wide collection and then, in early r837, they sent a formal request to the state, asking for the revalidation of their lost title. Surprisingly, in what can only be characterized as a dramatic reversal of state policy, Liberal officials responded by quickly issuing San Martin a new title in March of that same year. 18 Why would a government so intent on promoting the privatization of community ejido land extend title to an indigenous municipality for over 346 caballerias? In answer, let us turn to the events that were unfolding

Disputing Property: National Politics and Local Ethnic Conflict 45

simultaneously in early 1837. Less than two weeks before San Martin recovered its title, several thousand indigenous residents of Ostuncalco and the surrounding Mam towns rebelled against the judge of Ostuncalco's newly established circuit court. The post had been created the previous year as part of the Livingston Codes, a major reorganization of the Guatemalan judicial system based on the ideas ofEdward Livingston. Liberal reformers desired to rid Guatemala of what they viewed to be the retrograde influence of Spanish colonial rule, and the Livingston Codes represented the culmination of their efforts. ' 9 Felix Morales assumed the position of Ostuncalco's circuit judge in late January 1837. As the first person to fill this post, he confronted the difficult task of setting up the physical and organizational infrastructure that a circuit judge would need to exercise his duties. In addition to a census of potential jurors, something specifically called for by the Livingston Codes, Morales also was charged with establishing a circuit courthouse, complete with messengers and assistants; a circuit jail; and accommodations suitable for Quezaltenango's district court justices when they brought their tribunal to Ostuncalco three times a year. The only problem was that the state did not provide Morales with the resources that he required to implement any of these projects. Instead, he was forced to enjoin the municipalities of his jurisdiction to supply the labor and funds needed for the new facilities. 20 Censuses and public works projects were delicate matters in nineteenth century Guatemala, even in communities long inured to the permanent presence of higher-level state authorities, and the frequent demands that their presence implied. Ostuncalco, however, had never been in such close proximity to a direct representative of the national state. For many of the town's residents, the sole fact that a circuit court justice had been placed in their midst probably was cause for concern, never mind the alarming matter of a census, often linked to higher taxes, or the new courthouse and jail required by judge Morales. If the latter hoped to gain municipal support for embarking on these projects, he would have to proceed slowly, and with extreme caution. Instead, almost from day one, Morales studiously set about alienating local authorities, ladinos and indigenas alike, with a constant barrage of onerous demands delivered in an arrogant and abrasive manner. It should not be surprising that local residents decided to demonstrate their dissatisfaction with the policies of the Liberal Galvez regime against such an obvious and provocative target. 21 Of particular concern to the Mam towns were the legislative changes that had removed barriers to the expropriation of the community ejido. They paid close attention to the conflicts that were developing in San Martin and elsewhere. The state's own agrimensor, Valerio Ignacio Rivas, appears to have been instrumental in alerting indigenous leaders to the danger they

46

Chapter 2

faced from unscrupulous authorities and wealthy ladinos. In particular, Rivas singled out Macario Rodas, Felix Morales' superior in Quezaltenango, as a key force behind the unscrupulous takeover of areas within San Martin's ejido. When Morales ordered Ostuncalco to sell a piece of community land that abutted the church in order to pay for the construction of the new court house, he set off the rebellion. Unbeknownst to the judge, this very same area had been the subject of controversy for almost fifteen years. Throughout the early I 82os the town's indigenous leaders had fought to prevent its sale, at one point even amassing hundreds of residents to block the transaction. 22 In sum, the circuit judge's order was the proverbial spark that set the tinder box ablaze, and on March 8, I 837, the Mam towns of western Quezaltenango erupted in conflagration. Less than two weeks later, on March 2I-still three days before the Ostuncalco rebellion was definitively crushed-the state issued a new title for San Martin Sacatepequez's 346-caballeria ejido. 23 Was the timing of the new title mere coincidence, or had the fear of popular insurrection impelled Liberal authorities to swallow their objections to community land ownership in a hurry? In contrast to Ostuncalco, Cajola, Sigiiila, and Chiquirichapa, no direct evidence implicated San Martin's authorities in the rebellion. One state official speculated that perhaps the town had not participated precisely because it wished to avoid jeopardizing its petition for a new title. 24 Regardless of whether or not sanmartineros involved themselves directly in the Ostuncalco rebellion, it is clear that the Liberal state could be forced to bend under the weight of public pressure. Following the events in Ostuncalco, dozens of other communities rebelled against various aspects of the Liberal reform project in what would come to be called the Carrera Revolt, and before the year was out the Galvez administration had begun to backpedal on many key issues. 25 Perhaps most importantly, the Liberal regime restored the ban on privatizing community ejidos. 26 Whether because of the Ostuncalco rebellion, or a forthright commitment to the pursuit of justice, Liberal authorities reissued a title to San Martin in late March I837. The next step for community leaders was to remeasure the town's boundaries and to reestablish deteriorated or vandalized markers. For this purpose they hired agrimensor Valerio Ignacio Rivas, as well as a legal representative, or apoderado, Jose Maria Colomo. 27 Despite this promising start, the town was unable to place an agrimensor in the field for a full two years. The most formidable obstacle was the opposition of the ladinos who occupied parcels of land within the community ejido. This group was led by Macario Rodas, the jife polftico of Quezaltenango during the mid-I83os, and subsequently, under the secessionist state of Los Altos, of Totonicapan. 28 According to agrimensor Rivas, the sanmartineros claimed that "Rodas ... tried to intimidate [the townspeople] by making use of third parties to tell them that the remeasurement would do nothing but

Disputing Property: National Politics and Local Ethnic Conflict 4 7 incur expenses and cause disputes with the new [ladino] possessors." 29 At the same time, Rodas and his cohorts also resorted to more heavy-handed tactics. In the fall of 1837, for example, Quezaltenango notable Gertrudis Robles threatened the town's coastal milpas with a large herd of cattle just as the crops were nearing harvest. When various residents blocked the passage ofRobles' cattle, he denounced San Martin's "revolutionary character" before Quezaltenango's magistrado ejecutor. 30 As a result, the town's alcalde, as well as municipal secretary Miguel Ralda, a ladino from Ostuncalco, and Ostuncalco's ladino juez de paz, Perfecto Galindo, were jailed for several days before the case was thrown out for lack of evidenceY Although such intimidation did not cause San Martin to retract its call for a remeasurement, it did help delay the process significantly. Rivas himself was a party to these delays, fearful of the wrath of Quezaltenango's important ladinos. Early on, he resigned his commission with San Martin when ladino opposition to the remeasurement became manifest. Only persistent, energetic pleas from the apoderado, Jose Maria Colomo, as well as community leaders, convinced the agrimensor to reverse his decision. Nevertheless, Rivas still held off on commencing the remeasurement until things died down in the wake of the Robles affair. When he finally made his way to San Martin in early March 1838, Quezaltenango already had seceded from Guatemala as the capital of the new state of Los Altos. Shortly after entering town, the agrimensor received an urgent message from Los Altos authorities ordering him to appear in Quezaltenango. San Martin's leaders protested vigorously, fearing a ruse, and at one point they even prevented Rivas from leaving. In the end, however, the agrimensor was given safe passage out of town. But just as the sanmartineros had suspected, once in Quezaltenango, Rivas was promptly tossed into jail under the charge of having collaborated with rebel leader Rafael Carrera. He remained in prison for over a month before being banished from Los Altos altogether. 32 Macario Rodas, meanwhile, reported to Los Altos authorities that a rebellion was imminent in San Martin. Four hundred troops were organized immediately, and placed under the command of Gertrudis Robles and Jose Maria Galvez. By the time that the punitive expedition reached Ostuncalco, however, San Martin's officials already had released the agrimensor. Rivas assured Robles and Galvez, as he passed them in Ostuncalco, that the situation had been resolved, and that the town was nowhere near rebellion. This did not stop Robles, however, from insisting that the troops continue on anyway "to intimidate the indigenas ... so that [they] would not try again to measure their ejido." 33 Apparently Robles' tactic did have a chilling effect, even if it did not bury San Martin's desire for a remeasurement once and for all. Community leaders refrained from pressing for another agrimensor until May 1839, more

48

Chapter 2

than a year later. 34 This delay also may have been due to the fact that the town's apoderado, Jose Maria Colomo, was forced to go into hiding for an unspecified period of time following the so-called rebellion in San Martin. 35 Nevertheless, in the interim period, community leaders continued to plan for the eventuality of a remeasurement, which, they promised, finally would allow them to remove the ladinos from the town's coastal territory. Beginning sometime in I838, and through part ofr839, a second collection was levied to pay for the expenses that were anticipated for the project. In its latter stages, the collection was overseen by SanMartin's first alcalde, Pedro Vasquez Ysara. All told, each of the town's households contributed twenty-one reales. 36 Any number of reasons might explain why San Martin returned to petition for the remeasurement of its ejido in May I839. Perhaps the passage of time had damped the flames ofladino antagonism. Perhaps the Los Altos regime no longer considered apoderado Colomo persona non grata. Or perhaps, with a burgeoning war chest, community leaders simply felt emboldened to risk the ire of the ladino interlopers once again. In any case, regardless of the actual reason, San Martin submitted its request for remeasurement on May I3, and this time Los Altos authorities responded with haste rather than obstacles. They immediately assigned the commission to Manuel Vargas, an agrimensor accused by Rivas of corruption and favoritism toward his wealthy ladino patrons. 37 Vargas, however, refused to play along on this occasion. He rejected the appointment, thus upsetting official expectations for an "acceptable" outcome. Instead, the commission passed to agrimensor Lorenzo Meza. 38 Meza entered the field in mid-June, but his activities soon were halted by none other than Gertrudis Robles. Presenting land titles that had been issued to him by the Liberal Galvez administration in March and April of I837 (the same time at which Galvez retitled San Martin's territory), Robles convinced Los Altos officials to suspend the remeasurement until judicial authorities could sort out the conflicting claims. In response, San Martin's apoderado, Jose Maria Colomo, rushed to Quezaltenango and struck a deal with Robles. San Martin would refrain from challenging Robles' possessions, under pain of a 500 peso fine, apparently in exchange for the latter allowing the remeasurement to resume immediately. 39 State officials then reversed their earlier call for a suspension, and instructed Meza to push on. They also advised Robles, and any other ladinos who believed themselves affected by the remeasurement, that their respective possessions would not be prejudiced until each case had been reviewed on an individual basis. Over the next several weeks, a number of additionalladino claimants appeared before the Los Altos state to demand protection for their possessions. 4o As agrimensor Meza's survey progressed, however, demonstrating clearly that San Martin's ejido encompassed the entirety of the disputed area, the claimants also negotiated separate accords with community officials. They

Disputing Property: National Politics and Local Ethnic Conflict 49

agreed to supplement the town's coffers with rental fees and ad hoc payments as long as San Martin refrained from challenging their possessions. It is unclear whether the initial impetus for these accords emanated from within ladino or indigenous ranks, or how many indigenous leaders, or commoners, for that matter, knew that a modus vivendi had been reached, and on what terms, with the ladino interlopers. San Martin's governor, Andres Paz, and the town's apoderado, Jose Maria Colomo, are named most frequently in the agreements, although municipal secretary Miguel Ralda-a ladino-also is mentioned, as are the municipalidad and alcaldes of 1839, in generic terms, and one or two additional individuals, presumably principalesY The example of Manuel Orellana, although not necessarily representative, sheds light on the process by which the indigenous-ladino accords were reached. Orellana inherited a sugar trapiche from Ostuncalco's parish priest, Jose Maria Orellana, ca. 1835. 42 Named El Aguacate, the trapiche was located within the coastal territory of San Martin Sacatepequez, and appears to have been established during the early 18ros. Orellana continued to operate the trapiche following Padre Jose Maria's death, during the period when crop damage from ladino-owned cattle such as his prompted San Martin to pursue the retitling and remeasurement of its ejido described above. Sometime in late 1839, probably December, Orellana approached the town's governor, Andres Paz, when the latter happened by El Aguacate in the company of municipal secretary Miguel Ralda and interpreter Francisco Peres. He asked Paz if "he alone had the authority to delineate ... the properties that the ladinos held in the lands of the town of San Martin," and if not, "would he please convey [Orellana's request] to the Municipalidad ... so that they might delineate his property [in exchange for] an annual rent," or for Orellana's promise to contribute financially to community-wide collections "like any other son of the town. [E]very year the municipal officials change," Orellana concluded, "and I do not want to be in conflict with each Municipalidad over the land." 43 Paz responded, according to Orellana, that "the town was quite happy with what he had suggested, and that they would consider him like a criado [dependent] of San Martin, and that he would be able to possess the property called El Aguacate without being harmed ... since he would be respected by all the town .... " Moreover, Paz assured Orellana, as governor, he alone could "demarcate the boundaries of the property ... without need of the Municipalidad." 44 Evidently, Orellana remained skeptical of this last claim, because he continued to press Paz to involve the latter body. At this point secretary Ralda inteljected that "in the name of said Municipalidad," Orellana indeed was recognized as a "criado of San Martin," and all he had to do at the moment was fork over one peso for church repairs. 45 Sometime later, although again, Orellana does not specifY the date, "the alcaldes, accompanied by many individuals of the town of San Martin;'

50

Chapter 2

arrived at E1 Aguacate to collect an additional ten pesos. Presumably, their intention was to cement the deal worked out earlier between governor Paz and Orellana. Finding the latter absent, however, they informed Orellana's wife that he should pay ten pesos to apoderado Colomo as soon as possible to secure the status ofEl Aguacate. This Orellana did on January 2, 1840. 46

Community Land under Conservative Rule (Or, How San Martin Lost Its Ejido) Agrimensor Meza finished his remeasurement in late October 1839. He found that Juan Antonio del Bosque had made many errors when he calculated the size of San Martin's territory in 1744. Although this should not be surprising, the cumulative magnitude of the errors defies imagination. Meza's final tally of r ,08 5 caballerias is over three times del Bosque's original estimate. Nevertheless,' the agrimensor concluded that San Martin held legal title to the entire area despite the fact that its true size had never been known. He turned in his report to the Los Altos government, where it was placed before the official revisor or inspector, Juan Jose Flores, to be checked for accuracy. Flores completed his review by early February 1840, and San Martin retrieved its land title and accompanying documents sometime thereafter.47 The fortunes of the state of Los Altos, meanwhile, went from bad to nonexistent. Rafael Carrera's successful conquest of Guatemala City in early r839, far from diminishing the threat posed by the secessionist state's former suzerain, merely reinforced the likelihood of a future invasion. At the same time, Los Altos authorities found it more difficult, with each passing day, to maintain control over the indigenous communities that fell within their own, self-proclaimed, national boundaries. Indeed, it is not clear that Carrera's military victory over Los Altos troops at Solola on January 26, r840 was necessary to seal the secessionists' downfall. Quezaltenango's indigenous municipalidad, along with those of several surrounding communities, rose up against Los Altos officials, and proclaimed their support for Guatemala and the rebel leader turned kingpin, almost as soon as the city's defensive forces had left to repel Carrera's imminent invasion. 48 Thus, by the time that San Martin could have begun acting on the results of Meza's remeasurement, the town-and indeed, all of Guatemala-had been reunited under Conservative authorities and the de facto rule ofRafael Carrera. What were the implications of this political turn of events-of the defeat of Guatemalan Liberalism, as well as of the state of Los Altos-for the indigenous petitioners of San Martin? Had their situation improved simply by virtue of Carrera's victory? Almost all of the literature on Guatemala's nineteenth century would answer this question in the affirmative. By comparing Liberal and Conservative policies, not only in terms of their own

Disputing Property: National Politics and Local Ethnic Conflict 5I

rhetoric, but more importantly, in light of their actual impact on particular people and places, we can test the accuracy of this historiographical claim. Recall that even before Carrera's triumph, popular pressure had forced the Liberal state to backpedal in its efforts to reform land tenure legislation. The law of November 1837 restored official protection to the community ejido, and explicitly restricted bald{os-areas eligible for denunciation and privatization-to the former category of realengos, or crown lands that had never pertained to a community, corporation, or individual. In addition, the law no longer sought to specifY how communities had to administer their ejido. For example, communities no longer were obliged to rent ejido land to noncommunity members. 49 Carrera evidently found the intent of the November 1837 law sufficiently supportive of community land rights, because he never altered it significantly at any time during his rule. 50 Given this new, apparently sympathetic climate, how did San Martin plan to proceed? What would it do about the recurrent crop damage inflicted by ladino-owned livestock? More to the point, how would the town reconcile the existence ofladino possessions within its municipal borders? Part of the problem in answering these questions lies with how we conceptualize San Martin itself. In contrast, perhaps, to the image projected by Eric Wolf's "closed corporate peasant community," San Martin was not a unified, organic whole that acted with singular purpose or reflexive cohesion. 5' Rather, it was a municipality of some two to three thousand people whose cohesiveness, when operative at all, was the end result of political struggles that submerged and repressed dissent while building alliances from disparate, and frequently antagonistic, factions. Thus, although the shared culture, ethnicity, and history of San Martin's inhabitants might lull state administrators and visiting anthropologists alike into believing that they acted with an inherent or natural unanimity, the very elements that bound the community together also provided the foundation and the weapons for tearing it apart. 52 In answer to the questions posed above, then, not all sanmartineros agreed on what to do next, now that the town had recovered its lost land title, and remeasured and demarcated its territorial boundaries. Despite earlier promises to use the new documentation to remove outsiders from community land, governor Paz and a handful of involved or allied principales, including former first alcalde Pedro Vasquez Ysara, appear to have been satisfied with doing nothing at all apart from adhering to the vague status quo that they had negotiated with the ladino squatters. The latter would be allowed to remain in exchange for financial contributions and, as before, crop damage would be investigated on an ad hoc basis, particularly if the public demanded it. Paz and his associates had no intention of challenging the continued presence ofladino benefactors who had paid several hundred

52

Chapter 2

pesos toward remeasuring the community's territory and, conversely, insuring themselves against eviction. 53 Throughout the remainder of I 840, in the wake of Carrera's rise to power, and the fall of Los Altos, San Martin remained outwardly calm. Perhaps a substantial portion of the town's inhabitants abided their governor's decision to do nothing with the recovered land title and the results of Meza's remeasurement. Or perhaps, as some evidence suggests, they simply were never informed about his change of heart. Instead, they waited, wondering when would the governor begin the process of kicking out the ladino intruders? As 1840 turned into 1841, patience began to wear thin. Several interrelated factors spurred growing frustration with the governor's inaction. First, ladino-owned livestock continued to damage indigenous milpas, but now Paz no longer exhibited much enthusiasm for investigating the charges. Among the most insensitive and flagrant violators were some of the very men with whom he and the municipal officers of 1839 had made financial arrangements. These ladinos brushed aside demands to fence their cattle or provide restitution by arguing that the destroyed crops had been planted on land that they had purchased from San Martin's governor and municipal officials. In other words, it was not the ranchers and trapicheros who were at fault, but rather the indigenous cultivators, for establishing their milpas on ladino-owned land, within easy reach of foraging cattle. 54 The problem with this line of reasoning, however, was that instead of exculpating the guilty parties, it placed them squarely at the center of a second, related, controversy by exposing their behind-the-scenes negotiations with the governor and his associates. Worse still, the ladinos' inept defense was based on the inflammatory claim that Paz et al had sold them community land outright. Although this claim does not appear to have any basis in the documentary evidence, a significant number of sanmartineros found it credible. Even among those who did not, however, the governor's less-than-open manner of conducting town business-exemplified by his failure to consult the wider community before making financial deals with the ladino squatters-had become unacceptable. In the words of principal Andres Vasquez, unlike ... [other governors, who] call together the principales and residents of the town to consult with them about everything, [Paz] does not involve the town at all. [O]n the issue of[community]lands, he has not consulted with [us] about anything, nor has he informed the town about their status. [F]rom the rumors people know that the ladinos have given money, but the governor has not told anybody whether it is loaned or on account of the lands. 55 What bothered a growing segment of San Martin's populace, then, was not just that governor Paz had threatened the integrity of their ejido by treating with ladino squatters, but that in making this decision he had neglected to

Disputing Property: National Politics and Local Ethnic Conflict

53

involve or even inform many of the town's leaders as well as the community as a whole. The sense ofbetrayal was reinforced by persistent rumors that Paz and company had skimmed off some of the monies that they had collected to pay for the remeasurement and associated legal fees. Nor was it allayed by the increasingly frequent binges of Paz and former first alcalde Pedro Vasquez Y sara, or the revealing recriminations that the two men showered upon one another as their intoxicated cheer degenerated into angry squabbling. According to principales Andres and Martin Vasquez, various townspeople had heard "the governor say to Pedro Vasquez that he is a thief [because] he has the town's money, and Vasquez say to the governor that he, too, is a thief, because he is asking for money from the ladinos for the land." After listening to the drunken pair shout "publicly that both have money that they collected for the land remeasurement ... the residents say no wonder nothing has resulted from remeasuring the land, since their money ... still may be in the hands of the governor and Pedro Vasquez." 56 Crop damage, land sales, secret agreements, embezzlement, drunken debauchery ... by early I 84 I there were ample reasons for community residents to be concerned, and to speculate, about why governor Paz did not challenge the ladino squatters now that the town's ejido had been retitled and remeasured. A number of dissident principales, led most forcefully by Antonio Peres, and including several past and even present elected municipal officers, openly questioned his failure to act. 57 They proclaimed that the only way truly to safeguard the community-against both crop damage and land usurpation-was to expel all ladinos from the town with the utmost haste. Tensions mounted as more and more sanmartineros reached the same conclusion. Finally, on April 7, the conflict came to a head. A large crowd sought out and threatened governor Paz and his like-minded companions. Although no physical harm actually came to them, the governor was shaken nonetheless, particularly by the calls for his resignation. 58 Both factions then petitioned the Corregidor ofQuezaltenango, Francisco Cascara, to punish the other. The governor and his associates pressed Cascara to round up Antonio and Nicolas Peres, Diego Juares, and Martin Vasquez for "having incited the uprising ... [of] the greater part of the town" in order to achieve "our destruction .... " These "restless enemies of the public good ... menace us with death if we do not comply with their petitions" to expel the ladino "renters of our lands, who annually satisfY their corresponding quotas without any fault whatsoever. ... We cannot, nor should we," concluded the governor, "deprive the tenant of the Uand] as long as he fulfills his obligation."59 The "conspirators," meanwhile, called on the Corregidor to relieve the town of the governor and his accomplices, because they ... cannot govern ... without committing offenses and disturbances .... The drunkenness of the Governor and Principales

54

Chapter 2

who accompany him continues day and night ... without doubt, with money that they request from the [ladino] agriculturists, an evil that we wish to avoid so that, in short, no part of our land ends up being alienated without our knowledge.... In addition, the petitioners continued, the "Governor and his companions should be ordered, along with the Apoderado and the Secretary, to render before [the Corregidor] the accounts of income and expenses [related to the land remeasurement], specifYing which ladinos made a contribution, for how much, and under what conditions." 60 Cascara immediately called on his lieutenant in Ostuncalco-encargado Maximo Castillo Ocampo-to investigate the conflict. After questioning witnesses for both factions, as well as at least one of the ladinos who was involved in the case, the encargado returned his report to the Corregidor. To begin, Castillo wrote, "impartial witnesses cannot be found because it is the comun itself that stands against the Governor and principal Pedro Vasquez." Only four men-of whom three were lay religious officials-agreed to testifY on behalf of the governor. 6 ' As for those who identified with the so-called rebels, the encm;gado reiterated, "if all of these were questioned, there would be no end because the entire comun is in agreement against the Governor and Vasquez .... " 62 "With regard to [the charges that] the comun puts forward in its petition," Castillo continued, "the only exaggeration ... is when they say that the Governor is drunk day and night. This is not so, although it is true that he frequently gets drunk with Pedro Vasquez." Otherwise, the encargado concluded, the opposition's allegations "are all true." The governor "does not keep public order," and his intoxicated revelry with the former first alcalde only helps to encourage "the introduction of contraband Aguardiente [into the town], something that the comun will not tolerate, and for which reason even the women stand against him." In reference to the monies that the ladino agriculturists paid to governor Paz and apoderado Coloma, "some have given this without all of the comun being informed, and in the interest of perpetuating their respective possessions without being challenged by the indigenas. Moreover, some of the [contributions] were not disclosed in the contracts" that were signed between the two parties. Finally, on the topic of crop damage, the encargado wrote, "some ~adino] agriculturists imprudently have not wanted to pay the indigenas for the injury that their livestock have caused them .... " 63 As for the charges leveled against the "rebels" by the governor and his associates, Castillo found them baseless. "They are all false without a doubt," he wrote, a conclusion amply supported not only by the testimony taken between April2o and May 8, but also by the additional documentation that both preceded and followed the so-called uprising of early I 84 I. There was no evidence of any rental agreement or financial quid pro quo between

Disputing Property: National Politics and Local Ethnic Conflict 55

San Martin and the ladino interlopers until mid-1839, after agrimensor Meza already had commenced remeasuring the community's ejido. And the ad hoc payments made between September 1839 and January 1840 hardly could be construed as "annual rental quotas." 64 Nevertheless, after completely rejecting the veracity of the governor's claims, Castillo ended his report with a series of recommendations that incorporated the basic substance of the former's argument, at least where it concerned the ladino usurpers. "To oblige the ladinos to vacate [San Martin's] lands would not be just," he wrote the Corregidor, "because they have large fincas on them, which they established with the knowledge of the indigenas many year ago." Thus, in addition to deposing governor Paz, as well as ordering him, along with former first alcalde Vasquez and apoderado Colomo, to account for the money they had collected from ladinos and indigenas alike, Castillo suggested that the Corregidor force the town to send its land documents to the capital for further scrutiny. If the Supreme Government decided to accept the veracity of San Martin's claims vis-a-vis the vast territory in question, then it also should oblige community officials to accept "an agreement with the [ladino] agriculturists, allowing them to continue cultivating their fincas for a just and moderate rent [and the promise] not to cause harm to the indigenas." 6 5 Perhaps from the perspective of the ladinos involved, officials and nonofficials alike, the encargado'sjudgment appeared even-handed and reasonable. He openly acknowledged the veracity of the testimony given by sanmartineros opposed to compromise with the ladino agriculturists. He accepted that San Martin's governor, former municipal officials, and the apoderado had made questionable, behind-the-scenes deals with ladinos who wished to avoid as much public scrutiny as possible. He also accepted that some of the ladino agriculturists had attempted to avoid paying for the damages that were caused by their livestock. To remedy the situation, the encargado called on the Corregidor to force the embezzling officials to pay up, and to make sure that in the future the ladino finqueros would pay an annual rent for the use of San Martin's land and that they would prevent their livestock from destroying any more crops. From the perspective of San Martin's indigenous opposition, however, encargado Castillo's findings simply reinforced the suspicion that localladino officials were incapable of impartiality in disputes between ladinos and indigenas. On the one hand, the encargado recognized the surreptitious manner in which ladino finqueros had attempted to maintain their possessions and the callous disregard they had exhibited at the destruction caused by their livestock. On the other hand, his proposed remedy gave indigenous plaintiffs little reason to believe that their problems would be resolved. The practical difficulties alone in enforcing annual rental payments and a moratorium on

56

Chapter 2

future crop damage by ladino-owned livestock rendered the encargado's recommendations unrealistic and naive at best. Add the fact that many ladinos still denied any wrongdoing, and the historical record ofladino indifference in the face of indigenous complaints, and the potential for a resolution along the lines envisioned by the encargado diminished to nil. Indeed, it was precisely the historical framework that Castillo had to ignore, because it directly challenged the appropriateness ofhis recommendations while simultaneously providing ample grounds to evict the ladinos from San Martin's territory. Although it appears to have been true, for example, that some ladino possessions originally were established with the knowledge of San Martin's authorities, this had been contingent upon the latter's fear that any legal challenge would be difficult due to the destruction of the town's title by fire, and in lieu of the remeasurement and retitling that finally occurred between 1837 and 1839. In addition, whether established with San Martin's permission or not, ladino .finqueros had engaged in various tactics over the years to challenge the legal basis of San Martin's territory and to appropriate it for themselves. In light of this historical precedence, it appeared obvious to San Martin's indigenous plaintiffs that the continued presence of ladinos within their boundaries posed a danger to the integrity of the town's territory. Castillo, however, remained studiously oblivious. Perhaps the encargado's obliviousness was reinforced by his own ties to San Martin's coastal land. According to the indigenous opposition, the encargado himself maintained four estates there. In sum, he could not acknowledge that the combination of San Martin's well-documented property rights to the Costa Cuca, and the historical precedence of ladino attempts to abrogate these rights, justified more dramatic state action-even eviction of the offending ladinos-without risking the loss of his own possessions. 66 Corregidor Cascara responded to encargado Castillo's recommendations by deposing San Martin's governor and by ordering the municipalidad to return a slate of new candidates from which he would choose a successor. 67 Predictably, however, many residents were completely unsatisfied with these measures. Public sentiment had gelled around the demand for the complete expulsion of allladinos. On May 24leaders of the dissident faction sent off another petition, but this time they bypassed the Corregidor and went straight to the president. The petition repeated past grievances of crop damage and corruption, but in addition a new charge was leveled: ladino squatters were now attempting to use violence against individual community members who were active in organizing the opposition. The only acceptable solution, the petitioners concluded, was to order allladinos off San Martin's land. Moreover, they added, although the Corregidor already had been informed of their demand, he had done nothing about it. 68 San Martin's petition never actually made it to the president. It was sent to the office of the Fiscal, and from there back to the Corregidor. The latter

Disputing Property: National Politics and Local Ethnic Conflict

57

interviewed several additionalladino litigants, and filed a report in late June. Unfortunately for San Martin, the Corregidor's interpretation of events was based even more firmly in ignorance, or a willful disregard for the facts, than the encargado's. At least the encargado had recognized that because of the 17 44 measurement San Martin's ejido predated the title issued by the Liberal state in I837· The Corregidor, by contrast, repeated the assertions of the ladino usurpers. He stated that when the ladinos first began to utilize the coastal lands they were considered terrenos baldios. In the Corregidor's view, San Martin had not had control of the disputed area prior to I837. Even after that date, he argued, the town only had rights to 346 caballerias. There was no way that San Martin could claim the additional 700 caballerias measured by Lorenzo Meza in I839. 69 After receiving the Corregidor's report, the Fiscal agreed that San Martin did not have a legal right to the entire I,085 caballerias measured by Meza. Like the encargado, however, the Fiscal clearly believed that the 346 caballerias retitled by San Martin in 1837 had constituted community territory from the time of del Bosque's I7 44 measurement. As for the additional700 caballerias, that was another matter. The town would have to pay the state for the amount of land over the original 346 caballerias in order to retain legal possession. If San Martin chose this route, the Fiscal warned, then it would be almost impossible to force the town to part with any land at all. In either case, the Fiscal predicted a difficult struggle, and he advised the Corregidor that it probably would be far easier to convince the sanmartineros not to expel the ladinos than to try to disabuse them of their belief that every one of the I,085 caballerias measured in I839 pertained to their community. Why did it matter if San Martin continued to count the disputed area as a part of its municipal territory, the Fiscal asked, as long as the ladinos were allowed to remain? In conclusion, he suggested that the Corregidor propose the following arrangement. San Martin would permit ladinos to use its land in exchange for formal recognition of the town's legal claim, a rental contract specifYing the size and annual fee of each property, and a promise from each tenant to fence their livestock where necessary. 7o San Martin's new apoderado,Juan Bautista Flores, delivered San Martin's rejection of the Fiscal's proposal on August 2, I 84 I. Town authorities adamantly opposed the continued presence of ladinos on community land, and they continued to appeal directly to Rafael Carrera and the president to intervene on their behalf. In December I84I apoderado Flores addressed state officials with an especially clear and reasoned justification for the community's demands. He began with Juan Antonio del Bosque's I744 measurement of San Martin's ejido. The importance of this document, Flores wrote, was not the actual amount of land that had been measured, but rather that del Bosque had established the validity of the town's historical boundaries. After the restoration of its title in I 837, he continued, San Martin resolved to

58

Chapter 2

remeasure its territory to see which ladinos in fact were usurping its land. Using newer, more accurate techniques, agrimensor Lorenzo Meza counted r ,085 caballerias within the area that del Bosque originally had estimated at 346. Although such a difference might seem difficult to believe, Meza's notes make clear that his survey did not deviate from the boundaries followed by del Bosque in 1744. The only difference between the two measurements was in how the area of the circumscribed territory had been calculated. In other words, it was incorrect for the Corregidor and Fiscal to speak of 700 excess caballerias. These caballerias had been present within San Martin's boundaries all along. They simply had never been counted accurately.7' In response to Flores' petition on behalf of the town, the Fiscal recommended that the government wash its hands of the case. If San Martin insisted on trying to expel the ladinos, he wrote in late January, it would have to appeal to the courts to determine the legality of abrogating the "contracts" that Governor Paz et al had signed with the ladino agriculturists. The Fiscal's ruling was forwarded to Quezaltenango's Corregidor in a presidential decree dated April r8, 1842: Given that it is not within the province of the Executive Power to make the determination requested by the comun of the town of San Martin Sacatepequez, since whether or not the contracts are invalid or binding, or whether they are or are not rescindable, are points ofjustice that correspond to the Tribunals, the Government, in conformity with the recommendations of the Fiscal, agrees: that the comun of [San Martin] should appear ... before the Court of First Instance of Quezaltenango to determine its legal rights.

Cascara informed municipal officials and ladino squatters alike of the government's decision, and returned to each their respective documentation in anticipation of the legal battle to come. 72

Quezaltenango's Costa Cuca: From Indigenous Ejido to Lucrative Coffee Zone Unfortunately, this is where the official record of the dispute ends. Testimony presented during a subsequent crop damage suit suggests that San Martin indeed did pursue the case in Quezaltenango 's court of first instance, and that the court upheld the binding nature of at least some of the agreements that had been negotiated between Paz and the ladino usurpers. Still, this evidence is far from definitive, and the exact details of how San Martin's legal battle concluded remain unclear. 73 What is clear, however, is that ladino exploitation of San Martin's territory continued to grow over the next several decades. In 1841 Quezaltenango's Corregidor had claimed that there were upwards of one hundred ladinos cultivating sugar cane and raising

Disputing Property: National Politics and Local Ethnic Conflict

59

livestock on the community's land. By 1856 there were eighty two ladinos from Ostuncalco alone actually residing in San Martin. 74 Unlike the Corregidor's 1841 estimate, this figure did not include ladinos originating outside Ostuncalco, nor did it count seasonal migrants or the laborers and other employees who staffed the lowland trapiches and haciendas. The significant size of the latter group, in particular, is suggested by the attention that Ostuncalco's Padre Martin Burbano de Lara paid to it as early as 1850. He feared for the "miserable and scandalous state" in which he believed that the trapiche workers lived, and he petitioned Ostuncalco's ladino municipalidad to order its alcaldes auxiliares on the coast to instill the lowland underclass "with the fear of god and respect for authority." 75 Two years later Burbano began tithe collections among coastalladinos.76 Some of the ladinos with haciendas, trapiches, or residences on San Martin's land served with frequency in Ostuncalco's ladino municipalidad.7 7 Even so, the latter body complained bitterly throughout the early r 850s about townspeople who had forsaken Ostuncalco for the coast. The municipalidad's chief complaint was that tax collection became much more burdensome and time consuming. Evidently, many of the ladinos who moved to settle and farm the vast expanse of San Martin's community lands believed that they had left the law behind. As a result they simply refused to pay their taxes. Soldiers had to be sent on more than one occasion to establish the authority of the alcaldes auxiliares to collect them.7 8 By r863 fully 75 of Ostuncalco's 275 ladino taxpayers-male heads-of-household-lived on the coast.7 9 Ostuncalco's ladino municipalidad was not the only government body that encountered difficulties due to the large number of ladinos who had migrated to the coast. Complaints issued from other quarters as well. In early r863 the departmental military commander admonished his subordinate in Ostuncalco for allowing over roo members of the town's militia unit to be on the coast simultaneously. The local commander had failed to muster even 25 percent of his forces for the last four weekly drills. 80 The militia commander of the ladino town San Antonio Bob6s also encountered similar problems. His repeated attempts to force the return of militia members presently cultivating the coastal territory of San Martin were, in his words, "easily mocked." 8 ' Several administrative developments also indicate a burgeoning ladino population within San Martin's community land from the 1840s onward. First, the number of alcaldes auxiliares and regidores was increased from one to two sometime in the mid-r84os, reflecting the creation of a new administrative subdistrict within the area. By the r86os the number of administrative districts had increased to five, and each alcalde auxiliar was assigned not one, but two regidores to assist him. Whereas Ostuncalco's ladino municipalidad had named these officials in the past, now they were appointed directly by

6o

Chapter 2

the sub-Corregidor. 82 Some of the settlements mentioned in these districts developed into the coffee towns of Colomba, Flores Costa Cuca, Genova, and El Asintal. 83 Another revealing administrative development was the initiation of maintenance operations on the roads that connected San Martin's coastal districts to Ostuncalco, Coatepeque, and Retalhuleu. Ostuncalco's ladino municipalidad was instructed to name commissioners for all of the highland communities, Mam and ladino alike, that corresponded to the district of Ostuncalco. 84 Each commissioner was responsible for recruiting a work crew from his respective town to maintain a particular section of the roadway between coast and highlands. On the coast itself, hacienda and trapiche owners were ordered to maintain the roads that abutted their lands. Finally, in r866, a construction project was undertaken to improve the road connecting Ostuncalco with Retalhuleu by way of San Martin. Although slow to start, rotating crews were at work before the end of the decade. Between March r869 and May 1871, over 6oo laborers passed through a week-long shift on the project. 85 One final event helps to demonstrate the growth of a permanent population, both ladino and indigenous, within San Martin's coastal territory. In late 1855 Governor NicoLis Peres, elected municipal officers, and more than a dozen principales authorized the formation of a new town on one square league of community land near the present-day site ofColomba, at a location called San Jose Pie de la Cuesta. 86 According to Quezaltenango's Corregidor, the new town was needed because "more than I ,ooo inhabitants of. .. San Martin, Concepcion and Ostuncalco ... live dispersed throughout the wilds of the southern slopes that descend toward the Pacific Ocean." They commit "all the excesses consistent with the frontier lifestyle that they have adopted in order to evade ... the police and social order." As a result, the Corregidor concluded, it was necessary to concentrate or "reduce" them to a single population center where they could be better administered and supervised. 87 Ostuncalco's parish priest Martin Burbano also gave crucial backing to this idea because of his proclaimed concern for the state of moral decay in which coastal inhabitants were reputed to be living. Earlier in the year, in anticipation of the new town, he had solicited permission from Guatemala's Archbishop Francisco de Paula Garcia Pelaez to erect a church at the projected locale. Another important supporter was San Martin's own municipal secretary Miguel Ralda, a ladino from Ostuncalco. Ralda had played a lessthan wholesome role in the agreements oflate 1839 and early 1840 that had facilitated ladino squatters in obtaining de facto control of community territory. This time around he apparently was instrumental in convincing San Martin's municipalidad to contribute land for the new town's ejido. 88 Nevertheless, opinion within San Martin as a whole was far from united. Although the governor supported the project, as did the elected officials of

Disputing Property: National Politics and Local Ethnic Conflict 6 I

I855, and several additional principales, many others did not. And whether by chance or by design, the proposal to establish a new municipality on land donated by San Martin, deep within community territory, coincided with a resurgence in frustration over the continued influx of outsiders onto town land. During the previous year municipal officials had complained to the Corregidor on more than one occasion about "the advances of ladino agriculturists onto the lands of[the] town, occupying them with their crops without obtaining the consent and permission of [the] Municipality and comun .... " 89 In addition, evidence surfaced that governor Peres and secretary Ralda had authorized a number ofK'iche' Maya from San Sebastian to cultivate community territory. When the governor and municipalidad proposed regularizing the continuing invasions with formal rental contracts, the opposition went public. Peres wrote Ostuncalco's juez preventivo on June 22 that he and the municipal officers had suspected a conspiracy against them for some time, and that the previous evening Manuel Ramires and "several compafieros" had attempted "to assemble the town in order to take away [their] staffs of office." Ramires, for his part, called Peres et al "thieves," and charged them with "selling the lands of the Costa." 90 Although the case against Ramires eventually was dropped, the opposition to governor Peres continued, and he resigned his post in October I856. His replacement, Francisco Gusman, immediately embarked on an energetic campaign to rid San Martin of sansebastianos, and, subsequently, to crush the still-embryonic town ofSanJose Pie de la Cuesta. 9 ' Petitioning President Rafael Carrera in March I 857, Gusman and the elected municipalidad stated that although it is true that their predecessors had agreed to the formation of a new town within community territory, due to their "ignorance and rusticity" they had failed to recognize all of the ramifications of such a project. "[D]espite our opposition, and that of the town of Chiquirichapa," the authors wrote, the project continues to be pushed forward by the likes ofPadre Burbano and the "ladinos ofSija, [San Marcos], and other towns," who have established themselves on our land in an effort to rob it from us. "Our resistance is not unfounded or capricious," but based on the reasonable suspicion "that once established there, said [town] will go on expanding, and in time the new inhabitants will take control of all of the land that now pertains to us." 92 After unsuccessfully attempting to reconvince San Martin's authorities of the project's utility, the Corregidor reluctantly conceded defeat. In this instance San Martin won a small victory. Nevertheless, the Fiscal's subsequent report to the Minister of the Interior reveals much about the Conservative state's position vis-a-vis San Martin's efforts, and those of the indigenous populace more generally, to retain control of community land. Although the Fiscal advised the minister to forget about a new town for the time being,

62

Chapter 2

he did not believe that the idea deserved to be abandoned altogether. According to Padre Burbano, the Fiscal wrote, "the retraction of [San Martin's] Municipal officials is due to the present Governor of the town .... " Thus, he concluded, the Corregidor should be instructed to watch for some future moment when the project might be implemented with less resistance.93 In sum, the decades following San Martin's initial attempts to rid its territory ofladino usurpers were marked, instead, by the latter's continued demographic growth. Neither the Conservative state nor Rafael Carrera sided with the town despite a supposed desire to protect indigenous community interests. Although Conservative authorities did not revoke San Martin's title, they essentially disregarded its legal significance. Thus, instead of backing the title with the force of law, Conservative authorities bestowed de facto property rights on the land claims of the ladino "squatters" who had surreptitiously invaded the town's ejido. State sanction allowed the "squatters" to treat their claims as virtual private property, buying and selling them at will, and passing them down to their children when they died. 94 Certainly these quasi-property owners would have preferred outright legal title. In practical terms, however, legal title was not nearly as important to the sanctity of their possessions as the implicit commitment made by the state when it refused to enforce San Martin's property rights. The only way that San Martin's historic and legal rights to its community territory were recognized at all was in the annual rental payments that the ladino squatters apparently were supposed to pay the municipalidad. This stipulation had been part of the Fiscal's proposal in I 84 I. All available evidence, however, suggests that at best these payments were made on an infrequent, piecemeal basis. At worst, they were not made at all, or they degenerated into the occasional bribery of municipal officials. Thus even this partial acknowledgment of the legality with which San Martin possessed its community lands was little more than a half-hearted attempt by the government to placate the town's disgruntled populace.95 What conclusions can be drawn from the experiences of San Martin, and Greater Ostuncalco more generally, in the pre-Reforma years of the nineteenth century? First, Liberal policy and legislation prior to I837 was viewed negatively by many indigenous communities and did engender uprisings and other forms of resistance. The rebellion in Ostuncalco, and those that followed around the country, forced Liberal authorities to revoke some of the most hated laws even before Rafael Carrera's first invasion of Guatemala City in February I838. The statutes that had broadly dismantled the protection of community lands, for example, were essentially reversed in November I837. Second, despite these legislative changes, and despite Carrera's definitive victory over Liberal forces, and his defeat of the state of Los Altos, ladino invasions that focused on indigenous coastal lands still went largely unchecked,

Disputing Property: National Politics and Local Ethnic Conflict 63

and in fact continued apace. Without the conspicuous banner ofblanket legislation, the new regime was more successful than its Liberal predecessor at allowing ladino agriculturists to appropriate key agricultural lands from particular indigenous communities. Although towns with primarily highland territory may well have enjoyed full protection under the law, and perhaps even the benefit of the doubt from Conservative authorities, a two-tiered set oflegal standards applied on the coast. Ladino holdings, despite their illegal origins, and despite their location on lands to which indigenous communities held legal title, were essentially inalienable. Indigenous properties, by contrast, whether legally documented or not, were unprotected by the state and could be appropriated by others. In sum, then, well before the Liberal Revolution of I 87 I, or the death of Rafael Carrera in I 86 5, or even the introduction of coffee into the western piedmont in the I85os, the Conservative state had dealt a decisive blow to indigenous control of the fertile south coast-Guatemala's prime agricultural region. As the case of San Martin demonstrates, however, Carrera and his Conservative allies could not have succeeded so easily without the internal political struggles that split indigenous communities from within. Although many of San Martin's residents and leaders eventually opposed the presence of outsiders within municipal territory, others were lured by the financial rewards that promised to accrue to the town, and to themselves personally, if the outsiders were allowed to remain. This cleavage, coupled with unrelenting state support for the ladino agriculturists, is what finally brought San Martin into an uneasy modus vivendi with its newfound renters.

San Martfn in Comparative Context: The Example vvestern Suchitepequez

cif San Felipe and

In terms ofland area, San Martin's nearly 500 sq. km territory represented a significant segment of Guatemala's Pacific coast. In terms of the economy and society, the town's massive ejido became the site of Quezaltenango's Costa Cuca, one of Guatemala's most productive coffee regions. In sum, San Martin certainly serves as an important example of how Guatemala's indigenous communities fared during the nineteenth century. By itself, however, this single example may provide a misleading basis from which to generalize about the whole of Guatemala. To explore the extent to which San Martin's experiences under the Conservative state were anomalous, or, conversely, representative of broader trends, let us turn to the four indigenous towns due east of the Costa Cuca: San Felipe, San Martin ZapotitLin, San Sebastian, and El Palmar. Although I will focus primarily on the first-San Felipe, the three other towns will emerge as important players in the events and developments that marked the region during the midnineteenth century.

64

Chapter 2

Presently San Felipe, San Martin ZapotitLin, and San Sebastian are located in the department of Retalhuleu, but for most of the nineteenth century they belonged to Suchitepequez. 96 Indigenous titulos written in the decades following the Spanish invasion indicate that all three towns fell within the boundaries of what was once the K'iche' empire, although only San Felipe and San Martin are mentioned by name as having preconquest roots. 97 Indeed, San Felipe in particular probably developed as an "estancia" of the K'iche' settlement corresponding to present-day Quezaltenango. 98 As was true of many coastal communities, however, San Felipe and San Martin both decreased in population throughout the colonial period. According to historian Adrian Van Oss, the two towns were empty of people by 1776 and 1806, respectively. 99 Sometime thereafter indigenous residents of the highland K'iche' community Zunil began to repopulate the sites. In the case of San Felipe, they titled an ejido of about thirty-eight caballerias and used it for their milpas and for grazing livestock, much as the highland Mam towns around Ostuncalco used the ejido of San Martin Sacatepequez. 100 In contrast to the above-mentioned three communities, El Palmar pertains to the department of Quezaltenango. During the nineteenth century there was some confusion regarding this point because the site was originally settled by indigenous residents of Momostenango, Totonicapan, and it continued to rely on the latter town's municipal authorities until the 186os. Nevertheless, by 1864 Quezaltenango's Corregidor insisted that the community fell within his jurisdiction. 101 Unlike San Felipe and San Martin Zapotitlan, there is no evidence of El Palmar in the preconquest period, nor is there much to suggest that it existed prior to the early-nineteenth century. Although residents of Momostenango claimed that they had been cultivating and seasonally inhabiting the location "since time immemorial," the first documents to mention the site date from the 1830s. These indicate that Momostenango requested title to the area as early as 1832, suggesting that it may have been settled, if only on a temporary basis, sornetime in the preceding two or three decades. 102 Returning to the example of San Felipe, ladinos from San Antonio Suchitepequez, and possibly other towns, began to occupy community lands over the course of the mid-nineteenth century, and perhaps as early as the 1830s. Like the ladinos ofOstuncalco and elsewhere who were invading San Martin Sacatepequez's coastal ejido, they probably engaged in sugar production and cattle ranching. Unlike the former, however, their numbers remained small until 1853, when a decree issued by the Carrera government authorized bounties for coffee cultivation and production. Planters were offered a one-time bonus of twenty-five pesos for each I ,ooo trees planted. In addition, they were promised two pesos for each quintal of coffee exported annually. ' 03 As a result of this decree, the ladino presence in San Felipe increased dramatically, and so too did the conflict over land. ro4

Disputing Property: National Politics and Local Ethnic Conflict 6 5

The problem confronted by the newly arrived, aspiring coffee planters was how to gain access to land that already belonged to the indigenous community. Although the details are somewhat unclear, it appears that they pursued two avenues toward this end. The indigenous municipalidad was not entirely adverse to permitting the ladino newcomers a small portion of community ejido on which to establish subsistence milpas, and, initially at least, they authorized a number of such plots. The ladinos returned the favor, however, by clandestinely cultivating coffee trees among their food crops. They also conspired to form their own municipalidad, perhaps because the plots that they were offered were smaller than they desired, or because indigenous officials, upon discovering the duplicity of their new neighbors, refused to turn over any more land in this manner. Regardless, the ladino council, once formed, proceeded to appropriate large areas of community land for the incipient coffee planters despite the fact that its very existence had not yet been ratified, and thus, that it lacked all legal right to engage in any activity whatsoever. ros San Felipe's K'iche' residents were outraged at these attempts to usurp their territory and the political authority of their own municipalidad. As early as 1858 they responded to illegal encroachments by destroying coffee trees. They also petitioned the government for protection on numerous occasions, although before long they came to view the Corregidor himself as part of the problem. They complained that not only were the ladinos conceding community land illegally, but that they also were taking control of such areas of municipal administration as the jail and tax collection. Finally, the petitioners lamented, hardly any of the ladinos who received concessions of ejido land paid their rent. 106 At around the same time San Martin Zapotitlan also began to complain of outside encroachment. Since the late I85os, if not before, ladinos had been soliciting the Corregidor for permission to cultivate the town's ejido via rental contract. Although it does not appear that permission was ever granted, this did not stop the ladino influx. San Martin's officials wrote that ladino coffee plantations were proliferating and that the community's own subsistence milpas were being devastated by the latter's unfenced cattle. They requested state sanction to remove the offending livestock, destroy the coffee trees, and expel allladinos from their community. 107 Unfortunately, the government's response to these petitions was equivocal at best. The Corregidor, for his part, did not address the issue; rather, he attributed the conflict to agitators from Momostenango and El Palmar who, he claimed, were stirring up trouble throughout the indigenous towns of the coast. Even so, he hardly deserves all the blame for the fact that little was done to protect the legal rights of the region's indigenous residents. Regarding San Felipe's complaints, state officials at all levels recognized the illegitimacy of the ladino's municipalidad as well as the surreptitious manner in which they

66

Chapter 2

had acquired town land. In addition, officials acknowledged that almost to a person the ladinos were not paying the annual rental fee required of them. Nevertheless, nothing was done to return community land, and efforts to enforce ejido rental laws were little more than cosmetic. As a rule, although indigenous authorities were forced to replace coffee trees they destroyed in self-defense, the ladinos continued their illegal appropriations with no fear of state reprisal whatsoever. ros The point of no return on the road to a violent showdown was passed as r862 came to a close. Under the auspices of the Corregidor, San Felipe's indigenous officials agreed to allow the town's ladinos to retain the land that they had acquired so far, as long as they complied with the following stipulations. First, each ladino who possessed community land had to declare their possession before the indigenous municipalidad, and promise to pay the rental assessed given the size of the area in question. Second, no land held under these terms could be sold without prior permission from said municipalidad. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, there could be no expansion of coffee cultivation, nor could new plantations be established, without the express permission of indigenous authorities. rag The accord was signed by representatives of both municipalidades on December 19, r862. In less than a week, however, the ladinos were already chafing at the restriction on coffee expansion. The ladino alcalde complained to the Corregidor that indigenous officials had not approved any new coffee planting in the short time already elapsed. This was well within the terms of the accord, however, and he was forced to admit that the ind{genas had done nothing to abridge any of the agreed upon stipulations. Nevertheless, he urged the Corregidor to authorize new concessions for coffee cultivation. The Corregidor agreed. rro Given their complete abandonment by departmental and central government authorities, it is not surprising that San Felipe, along with the other indigenous towns of the region, began to formulate plans for a widespread rebellion. By August r863 the Corregidor ofSuchitepequez reported rumors that ind{genas from the nearby towns of El Palmar and San Sebastian were conspiring to attack area ladinos. Shortly thereafter, a group of palmarefios destroyed several coffee plantations in San Felipe. m Even more alarming rumors surfaced in January r864. Ind{genas from San Sebastian, El Palmar, San Felipe, San Martin Zapotitlan, and a number of other towns were believed to be plotting against the ladinos of Retalhuleu. The Corregidor invaded San Sebastian preemptively, and, after several tense days, the incipient rebellion stalled, but not without several fatalities and much damage. Indigenous leaders from most of the involved towns were implicated. Quezaltenango's Corregidor, Narciso Pacheco, who had been sent to San Sebastian with reinforcements, concluded that the main impetus behind the rebellion was

Disputing Property: National Politics and Local Ethnic Conflict 67

indigenous resentment at the establishment of coffee plantations on community land. '' 2 Unfortunately for San Felipe and the other K'iche' towns immediately to the east of the Costa Cuca, the rebellion against ladino cafetaleros ended in failure. In fact, however, it probably never had much of a chance anyway. There was little left that the uprising could have salvaged, even assuming a more successful military campaign on the part of the rebels. As David McCreery concludes, "In fact, the communities had already lost and soon were in full retreat. Some of the Indian officials themselves now seized the opportunity to acquire town land and become coffee producers, and the priest of San Felipe was openly siding with 'progress' ."n 3 Of all the towns involved, it would appear that only El Palmar had acted somewhat preemptively. That is, although evidence from the other three, especially San Felipe, indicates a significant ladino presence and a substantial land loss by the early r 86os, the documentation for El Palmar suggests that aside from a handful of cases the community did not suffer such deprivations prior to the 1870s. n 4 Let us return to the question that began this section: do the cases of San Felipe, El Palmar, San Martin Zapotitlan, and San Sebastian help to resolve the problem of San Martin Sacatepequez' representativeness, particularly within the context of Guatemala's Pacific coast? Clearly they do. First, they demonstrate that the experience of San Martin Sacatepequez under Rafael Carrera and his Conservative cohorts was not anomalous. San Felipe, San Martin Zapotitlan, and San Sebastian all lost large quantities ofland during Carrera's reign. More importantly, state officials effectively challenged the control that these indigenous communities had held over their respective territories, whether legally titled or not. Indeed, it was this loss of the battle for state support, rather than legal control over a particular parcel or quantity ofland, that spelled defeat for the indigenous communities. On the other hand, these examples demonstrate that San Martin Sacatepequez was not entirely representative, either. Although many other towns did lose land under Carrera, typically their battles postdated that of San Martin by a decade or more, and were tied more directly to the entrance of coffee on Guatemala's Pacific coast. In that sense, San Martin Sacatepequez was a harbinger of the future. This suggests a second conclusion: some coastal communities lost land before others because ladino demand for their land, and community resistance to such demands, was uneven, not because the state gave preferential treatment to one coastal community over another. That said, it also may be true that where ladino demand was low the state was more willing to countenance the letter of the law and thus offer a modicum of protection. El Palmar is a case in point. Without diminishing the community's agency or the efficacy of its energetic resistance, available evidence suggests that it did not have to fend off anywhere near the onslaught experienced by

68

Chapter 2

the other towns considered here, at least not before the I87os. Moreover, in the few cases of outside encroachment that were brought before the state prior to I 87 I, it seems that the intruder was repulsed. Perhaps this reflected, at least in part, the fact that El Palmar's authorities had already expelled the individual, presenting state officials with a fait accompli. us In sum, the examples discussed here demonstrate that at a minimum the Conservative state was not nearly as protective of indigenous communities as most studies would have us believe. Furthermore, these examples, which document state support for ladino appropriation of indigenous ejidos from the early I840s through the I86os, indicate that this phenomenon was not confined to the rule ofVicente Cerna alone, nor to the last years of Rafael Carrera or even the period following the introduction of coffee to the Pacific coast. Rather, state-backed ladino appropriation of indigenous community land was present from the very beginning of the Conservative era. The main difference between Liberals and Conservatives, then, was not fundamental beliefs but strategy. Conservative authorities simply viewed a wholesale attack on community lands to be foolhardy. Instead they presided over a slower, piecemeal, but ultimately much more effective, alienation of these same lands from the I84os onward and with little deviation, at least when it came to the fertile slopes of the Pacific coast. McCreery's characterization of the Reforma in fact applies equally well to the Conservative interlude. The greater potential an area had to produce agricultural wealth, and the more important the ladino usurper was in the eyes of government officials and the elite more generally, the less likely it was that the community being despoiled would receive state support in expelling the trespasser. u 6 In addition to avoiding the widespread scare that would have resulted from the pronouncement of a blanket expropriation of community lands, Conservative authorities also saw little to be gained by openly derogating the land titles of specific communities threatened by ladino encroachment. As the government Fiscal commented in I 84 I, did it really matter whether San Martin Sacatepequez was allowed to maintain legal title to I ,085 caballerias if the town was unable to bar ladinos from exploiting the area? Yet it is precisely the continued existence of community titles that has led historians excessively preoccupied with the legal formalities of privatization and private property more generally to overlook the significance of untitled ladino appropriations. What did it matter if indigenous communities retained de jure claims to an area when de facto control, including the right to improve, sell or bequeath, and retain all profits derived from said area, had passed to ladino outsiders with the full knowledge and backing of the state? Indeed, at a time when the idea of private land ownership was not widely accepted by rural Guatemalans, was state sanction not more important than a piece of paper?n 7

Disputing Property: National Politics and Local Ethnic Conflict 69

Guatemala's Conservatives, despite the letter of the law, supported the virtual privatization of indigenous lands by ladinos, where and when it occurred, from the very beginning of their rule. In fact, very little positive action was required of them to facilitate such an outcome. They simply refused to employ state power to prevent the usurpation of legally· titled community land; to enforce the rental contracts under which these usurpations ostensibly occurred; to intervene when these illegally usurped lands were bought and sold without the permission of the community to which they officially pertained; and to stymie the explosive expansion of coffee cultivation undertaken during the I8sos and I86os against the express wishes of the indigenous municipalidades. Moreover, when Conservative authorities did use state power, they employed it to crush indigenous resistance and to protect the ladino usurpers. In sum, the move to convert community lands into commercially oriented production units began well before the Liberals declared their apparently sweeping reforms in the I87os, well before Vicente Cerna took office in I865, and even before coffee made its grand entrance in the mid-I8sos.

Conclusions The historiography of nineteenth-century Guatemala is marked by two persistent problems. The first concerns how scholars have conceptualized and juxtaposed the Conservative and Liberal eras. When David McCreery writes that "the Conservative state generally sustained the claims of communities," he is well within the mainstream of current historical opinion. Conservativeera legislation made it difficult for individuals to title land in indigenous communities, the story goes, and thus the private appropriation of such land must have been insignificant until after I 87 I. " 8 This problematic interpretation of Guatemala's nineteenth century is compounded by another: the historiographical emphasis on coffee as the motor force behind the transformation of rural society, and in particular, the conversion of community land to private property. Even Gudmundson and Lindo-Fuentes, intent on "downgrad[ing] the significance of the reform movement of the I 87os as a turning point in the economic, political, and social history of Central America," nevertheless proclaim coffee's "revolutionizing" role. II 9 And because coffee exports do not begin in earnest until the I85os, or surpass cochineal until I870, most scholars continue to believe that significant changes in land tenure were confined to the late nineteenth century, particularly to the years ofLiberal rule. The case of San Martin Sacatepequez, however, suggests that as early as I84I-well before coffee reached the area-Conservative officials systematically refused to enforce documented community claims to land that was

70

Chapter 2

utilized by ladinos for state-favored products such as sugar or cattle. True, Conservatives did not call for the blanket transformation of community land into private property as had their Liberal predecessors; but that is because the Guatemalan state was too weak to defend itself from the popular backlash against such a policy. Recall that it was the Liberals themselves, in late 18 37, who reversed their earlier land legislation in a last ditch effort at selfpreservation. Instead, Conservative authorities simply turned a blind eye as ladino after ladino invaded the coastal territory of indigenous towns, sometimes, as the case of San Martin Sacatepequez demonstrates, with the support, or at least collusion, of certain municipal officials. In effect, the state left the difficult task of transforming indigenous community land into commercial agricultural enterprises to the cumulative efforts of those individuals and sectors within civil society who desired the transformation in the first place. When, in response, affected towns sometimes threatened to take the law into their own hands, then, and only then, did the state resort to the use of coercion. I believe that this type oflow-key policy would have been necessary regardless of which group-Liberals or Conservatives-had retained control of the state after the Carrera revolt. In sum, the dramatic changes reflected by Reforma-era land legislation were all too real. But if the examples of Quezaltenango's Costa Cuca and western Suchitepequez are at all representative, then they were changes that had largely taken place. The very communities believed to have suffered the most under the Liberal reforms-those within the prime agricultural zone of the Pacific coast-did not, in fact, have much left to lose. In this sense the case of El Palmar was the exception rather than the rule. It is the one town studied here which does not appear to have lost a significant land area prior to the Reforma. Returning for a moment to the 183os, one can understand why the first round ofLiberal reforms appeared to be such a threat despite the chronic weakness of the state at that time. Before then, most towns had not faced significant challenges to the very foundation of their territorial integrity even if they had been involved in disputes with neighboring hacendados and other indigenous communities. A belief in the inviolability of community land persisted unshaken. During the 183os, however, ladino encroachment into coastal communities began in earnest. Within this context the intent and rhetoric of the new Liberal legislation represented an untenable escalation even if the state's ability to make good on its threat was only as great as the number of individualladinos who were willing to carry it out. Whether we focus on the Conservative interlude or the Reforma years, the highland territory of most indigenous communities probably fared better than its lowland counterpart precisely because the former was unsuitable for the most lucrative agricultural commodities. Within the highland zone, for example, indigenous communities as a whole, as well as individual residents,

Disputing Property: National Politics and Local Ethnic Conflict 71

sometimes succeeded in using the new Reforma-era regulations to secure the validity of their own claims to community land. 120 Nevertheless, there is no doubt that even highland towns such as Ostuncalco and its Mam neighbors to the north, which had few legal ties to the coast, found it increasingly difficult to rely on milpa agriculture for their subsistence as the Costa Cuca became less and less accessible to them. The highland frontier had closed long ago, and San Martin's inability to slow the influx of ladinos or the expansion of commercial agriculture meant that the coastal frontier, too, would soon be a thing of the past. As I will demonstrate in Chapter 3, the outlet to which residents of the highland Mam towns turned in increasing numbers was wage employment on the coastal plantations. Indeed, it was no coincidence that a growing demand for labor within an expanding commercial agricultural sector paralleled the slow closure of the coastal frontier. This demand for labor somewhat softened the blow caused by the transformation of coastal lands from milpas into fincas.

CHAPTER

3

Debt, Labor Coercion, and the Expansion if Commercial Agriculture

EXCELENTISIMO SENOR PRESIDENT:

At nine o'clock this morning the indigenous municipalidad and principales of [Ostuncalco], together with the alcaldes auxiliares and comun of Pie de la Cuesta de la Laja [an aldea of Ostuncalco], presented themselves before me, stating that for the past three years they have been working on opening the road from Quezaltenango to [the coast] and that they are tired of continuing with the project, of sending r6o men every 2 months .... They and their families have suffered many problems on account of the weekly labor rotation that each head of household is required to fulfill, leaving behind wives and children to suffer from hunger, such that they have acquired large debts and have been made homeless, renting their fields and houses to others; or they have had to sell the labor of their children to pay for the family's necessities while their fathers work on the aforementioned road project .... 1

The Riforma-as-revolution perspective rests on a belief that, for better or worse, the Liberals who took state power in I 87 I imposed sweeping changes on Guatemalan society and engendered a dramatic break with the colonialera institutions and elite sensibilities that had dominated the previous threeand-a-half decades. Two developments frequently attributed to Barrios and his cohorts are the widespread expropriation of indigenous community lands and the rapid expansion of coffee production. Both of these topics were addressed in the preceding chapter. Here I will focus on a third development thought to have resulted from the policies initiated during the I87os: a qualitative increase in coercive labor relations. Many authors, spanning several decades, have proposed that the forcible recruitment of workers through debt contracts or other extraeconomic mechanisms flourished under Liberal tutelage after I87r. Prior to that point,

Debt, Labor Coercion, and the Expansion if Commercial Agriculture 73

by contrast, during the period of Conservative rule, Guatemala's rural poor is believed to have been largely unencumbered by coercive labor practices. David McCreery's recent and favorable comments on Oliver LaFarge's 1940 "Sequence of Cultures" article illustrate the strength and longevity of such an interpretation. According to McCreery, "LaFarge argued that the years between I8oo and I88o constituted something of a golden age for the indigenous communities of highland Guatemala" because "of the weakened condition of the late colonial and independence states and of a stagnant cash and export economy that had little need of the land or labor of most of the Indian communities." 2 A similar appraisal, also based partly on LaFarge, is given by historical geographer W George Lovell. The Conservative regimes of the midcentury, writes Lovell, "particularly when headed by peasant populist Jose Rafael Carrera, effectively undid the reforms carried out by the preceding Liberal administration of Mariano Galvez and created a stable, paternalist state founded on restored Hispanic institutions." The subsequent policies of Justo Rufino Barrios, by contrast, "entailed both an attack on native land and an assault on native labor. ... For the Maya of Guatemala, the [post-1871] Liberal Reforms were the equivalent of what the events leading up to the Caste War became for the Maya of Yucatan-both initiated a second cycle of conquest."3 Keeping in mind the scholarly consensus on Guatemala's nineteenth century, consider the passage that began this chapter. It comes from a petition that Ostuncalco's indigenous gobernador addressed to the president of Guatemala on behalf of the community. As one might expect, the petition ended with a plea to relieve the town's indigenous residents of the onerous burden of the road project. In particular, the gobernador went on to request that the president order a three-year suspension. Although he probably exaggerated the direct link between forced participation in the road project, and the various ills ascribed to it, he was not exaggerating the hardships that the Mam people of western Quezaltenango faced in their daily lives. Aside from the rotating labor drafts, it was all too common for a family's immediate subsistence needs to require that they exchange the use of their milpa, or the labor of their children, for a few bushels of wheat or corn. What may come as something of a surprise to the reader, however, is the fact that this petition was submitted on February 26, I86I, and described conditions existing well over ten years before the Liberal returned to power, and almost twenty years before the Liberals imposed regulations specifYing the use of forced labor drafts. 4 In presenting this example my aim is not to completely reject the scholarly consensus described earlier. There is no doubt that Justo Rufino Barrios intended a dramatic harnessing of indigenous labor for commercial agriculture, and it cannot be denied that the web oflabor coercion grew to entangle more people, in both absolute and relative terms, in the decades after 1871.

74

Chapter 3

Nevertheless, as I will make abundantly clear, both debt peonage and forced labor drafts were common, and increasing in importance, well before the Liberal resurgence. In western Quezaltenango, for example, debt peonage was widespread by the midcentury, and forced labor drafts or mandamientos occurred with increasing frequency during the tenure of both Carrera and his successor, Vicente Cerna. In addition, intent does not automatically translate into reality, and Barrios' revamping of existing labor relations took several years to implement. Even then, as McCreery has shown, his coercive measures were not nearly as effective or starkly repressive as they appeared on paper. 5 The state was simply too weak, and the possibilities for noncompliance too great. In sum, debt operated during the I87os and I88os much as it had in the two or three decades preceding I 87 I: primarily as an inducement in a highly competitive labor environment, rather than as a method of entrapment in an efficiently operating police state. Forced labor expanded under Liberal tutelage, but it had been expanding since the I850s at least. To suggest that the post-I87I labor regime was not as harsh as some authors have implied is not to deny that such measures were fundamentally unjust or that their goal was to facilitate the exploitation of one social class for the benefit of another. But just as the Conservative state found it difficult to enforce debt contracts with much regularity, so too did its Liberal successor. The Liberal's overhaul of the legal codes surrounding labor and debt were not watertight. Although the state certainly was stronger under their tutelage, the demands on its repressive apparatus were also greater as the number of indebted workers increased. On one hand, if a planter, or the state, or both, desired to single out a recalcitrant laborer, they clearly had the potential to make life miserable. Some people simply could not escape the nexus of debt and planter-state repression even when they so desired. On the other hand, as long as the labor supply did not overwhelm the demand, and as long as the state was stretched too thin to do more than target a small number of noncompliant debtors, the space existed for people to negotiate the conditions under which they toiled. The fact that greater and greater numbers entered debt-for-labor contracts is not so much due to the success of extraeconomic coercion as the decreasing ability of highland milpa agriculture to provide exclusively for a rural family's subsistence. Growing numbers of indigenous people were entering the debt cycle for purely economic reasons, yet this did not preclude fleeing a particularly severe patron, nor spending less time on the finca than the patron desired. A general inability to escape peonage altogether, however, reflected subsistence requirements rather than the long arm of the law. A central goal of this chapter, then, is to recontextualize the history of labor in Guatemala's nineteenth century so that I 87 I no longer bursts forth as a great historical rupture, but rather emerges as part of an established

Debt, Labor Coercion, and the Expansion cf Commercial Agriculture 7 5 continuum. Aside from providing a useful corrective to the Riforma-asrevolution perspective, this recontextualization will also contribute to a better understanding of why resistance to the second generation of Liberal reforms did not develop along the lines of the Carrera revolt. First of all, the growing turn toward wage labor among highland residents roughly paralleled increased planter demand. A large number of those who migrated to the coastal coffee fincas did so out of necessity, not because they had been tricked or roped into an unending cycle of debt peonage. Secondly, the post-I87I labor statutes did not represent the qualitative shift in exploitation and repression that they implied on paper. Popular sectors still retained the space within which to resist planter and state claims on their labor and to effect an outcome more amenable to their own necessities. Finally, the new regulations and bureaucratic linkages that evolved as the state attempted to further develop its organizational and coercive capacity vis-a-vis an expanding labor force provided lucrative possibilities for local officials and those involved in municipal governing apparatuses. This was true of indigenous as well as ladino municipalidades. Ultimately, whether planters wanted state help in recruiting labor, or enforcing debt contracts, they had to purchase such assistance from representatives at the local level. Frequently there was no other way to mobilize the state apparatus than· by paying for it oneself.

The Relationship between Debt and Labor bifore 1871 The first step toward an explanation of why the Liberal reforms of the I 87os did not signifY a watershed in nineteenth century labor relations is to place them within the context of the preceding decades. Was the unfree labor regime that we have come to associate with the Riforma really a Liberal invention, a reformulation of colonial-era practices with little precedence in the nineteenth century? Or, conversely, did the efforts of Barrios and his cohorts to step up the enforcement of labor contracts and to expand the overall labor force signifY a continuation of already established practices? In this section I will demonstrate the latter. Debt peonage flourished prior to I87I, and forced labor drafts, or mandamientos, grew in importance after the midcentury even though Conservative authorities usually did not employ them as widely as their Liberal successors. Viewed from this perspective, the Riforma neither initiated labor coercion nor qualitatively transformed its conditions. Rather, it helped to speed an expansion of existing labor relations that was already underway. DEBT AND THE RURAL ECONOMY

Regardless of whether one focuses on Guatemala's nineteenth century before or after I 87 I, the practice of paying labor in advance of the work was

76

Chapter 3

widespread. Simply put, most people who worked for pay did so to compensate for wages, or goods, already received. Perhaps this helps to explain why coercion and work seem inextricably linked in Guatemalan history. Because labor was paid in advance, economic necessity did not always serve to impose workforce discipline, at least not in the short-run. And where necessity failed, employers and the state often attempted to substitute violence in its stead. The fact that worker resistance remained ubiquitous, however, suggests that ecological and social factors favored labor with certain advantages vis-a-vis capital. It also suggests that the continuing practice of pay advances may have been a reflection of labor's relative advantage rather than its submission to planter control. 6 This custom of working to pay off money or goods received probably had its roots in the repartimientos of the colonial period. McCreery notes, with regard to the repartimientos de brazos or colonial-era forced labor drafts, that they generally were preceded by a pay advance for each of the workers. 7 The effect of the repartimientos de mercancias, which were used by colonial officials to enrich themselves as well as force indigenous communities to pay their tribute to the Crown, was quite similar. Quezaltenango's Corregidor, for example, distributed bales of cotton, hoes, bolts of rough cloth, and money to each indigenous community of his jurisdiction when they came to make their biannual tribute payments. Six months later, at the time the next payment was due, the community delivered the cotton as spun thread and thereby discharged its tribute obligation in addition to the cost of the hoes and rough cloth that had been received previously. As for the money that had been distributed, it was repaid in some combination of woolen thread, sheep, or wheat. In effect, the Corregidor indebted indigenous laborers by forcing cash on community officials, and through them, on community residents, who thus were obligated to supply items that derived from their labor: sheep from the flocks they tended; woolen thread from their sheep; and wheat from their fields. The Corregidor then converted these goods into money. Because the market value of sheep, woolen thread, and wheat was much greater than the amount for which the Corregidor credited the community, he was able to line his own pockets with the surplus. 8 To better understand the relationship between debt and labor that prevailed in the nineteenth century it is helpful to first understand how debt functioned in the rural community-its importance in daily life-during this period. The municipal archive ofSanJuan Ostuncalco contains information on several hundred debt agreements made over the course of the nineteenth century. Unfortunately, however, the details are too inconsistent to support a rigorous analysis of debt from one year to the next. Such an analysis would not be very representative anyway because most agreements, especially those

Debt, Labor Coercion, and the Expansion of Commercial Agriculture 77

that involved small amounts of money and exclusively indigenous parties, were probably dealt with by the indigenous municipalidad and never made it into the records of the town's ladino officials unless a dispute arose which the former could not resolve. Keeping these qualifications in mind, I will nevertheless suggest some tentative observations, based on the extant documentation, about how debt operated in the Mam region of Quezaltenango in the years leading up to 1871. 9 Transactions in which goods, services, or money, were offered on credit were common in the Ostuncalco area from the very first decades of the nineteenth century. Most debts, by far, whether the borrower was indigenous or ladino, were associated with wheat or corn. Sometimes the debtor accepted money or goods against the future delivery of wheat or corn to the creditor based on an anticipated harvest. On other occasions the debtor simply purchased said grains on credit. Additional reasons for assuming debt that were mentioned with some regularity include buying other agricultural commodities, such as rice, pane/a, cotton, or coffee, or paying for church-related exactions, marriage expenses, health care, or release from the town jail. Most debts were assumed in the months of March through July, and this no doubt reflected the agricultural cycle on which the local economy was based. ro Typically, corn and wheat are harvested as early as September and as late as February in Guatemala's western highlands. Woodward's reconstruction of commodity prices for Guatemala City during the midnineteenth century shows that corn and wheat prices rose substantially in May and remained high through September. II If this same pattern held for the western part of the country, then perhaps the increased debt levels from March to July indicated the efforts of debtors to stockpile grain ahead of the price curve, whether for internal consumption, seed, or resale at a later date at a higher price. Conversely, the higher debt observed during these months also may have reflected the activity of creditors who desired to secure cultivators' future harvests at below-market prices. Three parties were normally involved in a debt contract: the creditor, the borrower, and the borrower's fiador or guarantor. A breakdown of these parties by gender and ethnicity suggests some interesting, if tentative, conclusions. First, women made up a significant segment of creditors, as well as debtors, although they were nearly absent from the category of fiador. For example, of the debt agreements recorded by Ostuncalco's ladino alcalde, women accounted for almost 29% of the creditors whose gender could be determined. I 2 As I will show in Chapter 4, this may have been the case because they filled such a pivotal role in the commercial life of the community. Women frequently worked as store keepers and market vendors, and, moreover, they were far and above the biggest sellers of aguardiente. By contrast, their absence from the category offiador might reflect a social

78

Chapter 3

bias against having women serve in such a legal capacity. It also might have resulted because the position of .fiador was sometimes used to accumulate the loans of other creditors as a form of investment, and apparently this sort of financial dealing was strictly a male province. Whatever the reason, .fiadores were almost exclusively men. 1 3 A second observation that stems from the perusal of debt contract signatories is that Ostuncalco's Mam residents, far from remaining "outside" the market economy, were integrally involved. On one hand, they comprised a majority of debtors, even in the record books of the ladino alcaldes, and not simply for reasons of immediate personal consumption. The commercial focus of their transactions is suggested by the number of debts that involved wheat, an item which generally is not consumed in Mayan households even to this day. In some cases debt reflected the market orientation of indigenous wheat producers who accepted advances against future harvests. In other cases debt resulted when an indigenous trader purchased wheat with the aim of subsequently reselling it, perhaps in a distant market. Both of these practices had roots in the colonial period. With regard to the first, the eighteenth century repartimientos imposed by Quezaltenango's Corregidor included monies advanced to the corregimiento's indigenous communities in exchange for their extorted promise to turn over wheat harvests at belowmarket values. 14 With regard to the second, historian Chris Lutz, in his study of Santiago de Guatemala, concludes that indigenous producers and merchants were among the most important suppliers of wheat to the capital city throughout the colonial period. Aside from Santiago's immediate vicinity, many hailed from the regions of Quezaltenango and Totonicapan, where, according to Lutz, "[t]he cultivation of wheat. .. appears to have been even more common than in the vicinity of Santiago." By transporting grain to the capital, they hoped to obtain the best price. 1 5 On the other hand, the market orientation ofOstuncalco's Mam residents also is indicated by their roles as creditors and .fiadores. In a large majority of the cases where ethnicity could be determined, indigenous .fiadores backed indigenous debtors. Often the two parties were linked by family ties. The fact that some .fiadores reappeared time and again, however, may indicate that their interest in guaranteeing debt was remunerative as well as familial. Aside from their ability to extract additional concessions from the debtor, they also provided a service to the creditor. This was particularly true if the creditor was ladino and, therefore, unable to capitalize on ethnic or kinship ties to ensure the successful recovery of a loan. Perhaps this helps account for the prevalence ofindigenous.fiadores. They could make a lucrative enterprise out of a ladino creditor's difficulties. Within the record books of the ladino alcalde indigenous creditors were greatly outnumbered by their ladino counterparts. Nevertheless, even in this

Debt, Labor Coercion, and the Expansion if Commercial Agriculture 79 source, prone as it was to underrepresenting indigenous activity, more than one out of every five creditors of identifiable ethnicity was Mayan. Other documents indicate that indigenous c