The Rancheros of Pisaflores: The History of a Peasant Bourgeoisie in Twentieth-Century Mexico 9781487579821

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FRANS J. SCHRYER is a member of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Guelph.

This case study of the 'ranchero' region of Sierra Alta de Hidalgo offers a new perspective on the rancheros and their role in the Mexican Revolution and its aftermath. Focusing on the economic and political history of the municipio of Pisaflores over the past hundred years, the author demonstrates that the rancheros were not subsistence family farmers, as they have been described by other scholars, but commercial farmers, a local elite employing wage labourers. This 'peasant bourgeoisie' far outnumbered the absentee owners of huge haciendas who figure so prominently in the literature, and they played an important part in the armed phase of the Mexican Revolution that started in 1910. The Revolution, in fact, provided individual members of this rural class with a unique opportunity to improve their economic and social position. In the Sierra Alta de Hidalgo many rancheros became local revolutionaries, recruiting their own employees and tenants, and two members of prominent ranchero families eventually became governors of central states. A detailed political history of Pisaflores between 1920 and 1970 shows how the rancheros responded to the larger economic changes in twentiethcentury Mexico. The author suggests that the political behaviour of the peasant bourgeoisie was a logical outcome of the pattern ofland tenure and its corresponding class structure . The book as a whole provides new insights into the operation of the de facto one-party system of Mexico, the use ofan agrarian ideology, the operation ofland reform, and the changing network of links between local, regional, and national politicians in this remote but not insignificant rural region.

FRANS J. SCHRYER

The Rancheros of Pisaflores: The History of a Peasant Bourgeoisie in Twentieth-Century Mexico

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

© University of Toronto Press 1980 Toronto Buffalo London Printed in Canada Reprinted in 2018

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Schryer, Frans J The rancheros of Pisaflores. Bibliography : p. 1. Peasantry- Mexico- Pisaflores region (Veracruz) - History. 2 . Pisaflores region, Mexico (Veracruz) Rural conditions. 3. Political participation - Mexico - Pisaflores region (Veracruz)- History . I . Title. HD330.P57s37 301.44'43'09726 79-2o686 ISBN 0-8020-5466-8 ISBN 978-1-4875-8089-6 (paper)

All photographs are from the author's collection.

To the memories of FRANS JOHAN SCHRYER

soldier and craftsman and JOZEF MACOVICH

merchant and anti-cleric

Contents

PREFACE

ix

I

Introduction 3

PART ONE

LAND TENURE AND POLITICS IN THE SIERRA ALTA 2

The History of a Ranchero Economy 23

3

Village Politics and Class Structure: An Analysis 48

PART TWO

PISAFLORES : A CASE STUDY OF AGRARIAN POLITICS 4

Landowners as 'Revolutionaries': 1910-32 69 5 Agrarianism as Politics: 1932-44 85 6 PRI Patronage and Factional Politics: 1945-6o 7

Middle Peasants in the Struggle for Land 113 8 A Case Study of Co-optation: 1900-76 127

IOI

9

Conclusion 145 EPILOGUE APPENDIX

152 157

NOTES 159 BIBLIOGRAPHY INDEX

189

195

FIGURES 1 The Sierra Alta de Hidalgo region 11 2 The municipio of Pisaflores 12 3 Land tenure (1973) 45 4 Changing composition of the class structure of Pisaflores, 1910 to 1972 52 5 Genealogical Chart 81 6 Major lines of cleavage in factional conflicts, I 932-44 88 7 Linkages between politicians on the local, state, and national levels 93 8 Lines of cleavage and changing composition of factions, 1945-8 103 9 The network of political links between local and regional politicians 105 10 Land boundaries in Las Moras, La Arena, and PiedraAncha 119 TABLES 1 Data on land ownership, I 880- 19 IO 32 2 Heads of all households as percentage of total population , 1880-1910 33 3 The social classes of Pisaflores (1972) 53 4 Data on membership in two peasant organizations 136 5 Four-square table comparing middle peasantry with all other social classes in terms of membership on peasant organizations ( 1960 to 1970) 137

Preface

I saw the whitewashed houses along the main road of Pisaflores for the first time in the summer of 1967, after a weary five-hour trek from the national highway. It struck me as a peaceful, secluded village, though somewhat dilapidated. Life in this small village and in the even more rustic hamlets scattered throughout the rest of the municipio seemed uneventful and even monotonous. Travelling on foot through the mountains as a student volunteer working on a community development project, I gradually became accustomed to the usual greeting - a barely audible 'buenos dias' and a light touch of fingers against my hand. At regular intervals the sound of dogs and roosters announced the presence of a small hamlet with thatchroofed huts. Occasionally, when climbing up an almost nonexistent footpath through a sloping cornfield, a defiant shout or a high-pitched voice singing a Huasteca tune greeted me from the opposite hillside . Little did I realize that this remote, peaceful region, with its lush green mountains, had been the setting for innumerable ambushes, political assassinations, and skirmishes between rival armed bands. A few days after my arrival I heard about a fierce and not entirely verbal battle between a peasant union and government officials. The informal leader of this peasant union was a militant Catholic priest who was organizing the people 'in order to open their eyes.' He was also fighting the 'immoral' values being propagated by 'communist' schoolteachers. One of the union peasants had just been put in jail for being a 'trouble-maker' and for making false accusations against the mayor of Pisaflores, a landowner who ran one of the local cantinas or bars . But this landowner also claimed to be an 'agrarian leader' fighting for the rights of the peasants and was acting as treasurer for the local ejido, a form of communal land tenure. This complicated political situation, contradictory reports about the

x Preface conflict involving a peasant union, and stories concerning agrarianism and armed attacks by a neighbouring village in the 1930s aroused my curiosity during the two summers I spent in Pisaflores. When I returned for the third time in 1971, this time as a student of anthropology, my study of local politics raised more questions than I could answer. The aim of this earlier research was to study the relationship between class conflict and village factional disputes and to trace the network of linkages between local, regional, and national politicians. Although I had not intended to return, Pisaflores drew me back for doctoral and postdoctoral research. Before writing my PH D dissertation, I spent eight months in the field (September 1972 to May 1973). This period of intensive immersion in the social life of Pisaflores gave me the opportunity to observe the entire cycle of annual activities. I talked to most of the landowning farmers who lived in forty-odd hamlets and carried out a formal survey of the economic activities of the heads of all households in the village of Pisaflores and several nearby hamlets . Besides carrying out extensive informal interviews about both economic and political history, I was able to observe the electoral campaign preceding the municipal elections of 1973. Just before my return to Canada, the last-minute discovery of an almost complete set of historical documents in the attic of an old schoolhouse, covering the period from 1870 to 1920, kept alive my interest in doing further research on this rural region even after I had finished my degree. I was back in Pisaflores in the summer of 1975 to work in the municipal archives and subsequent field trips brought me to several nearby towns, to the state capital, and to Mexico City. This book was primarily written in order to deal with the problems raised by the historical documents I collected in local archives. At first I had only hoped to fill in some background material for a case history of political conflict in a remote, rural Mexican municipio. However, a closer examination of the data on land tenure and politics in the pre-revolutionary period, as well as the manner in which the region under study experienced the Mexican Revolution, forced me to question some basic assumptions made by other scholars who have written about Mexico. This research problem led me to develop a new perspective for looking at the Mexican Revolution and the political system that came out of this political upheaval, a perspective which in tum shed light on the local political events already analysed in my dissertation. This monograph is thus not only a detailed account of the political life of a little-known rural region, but also a re-examination of the last one hundred years of Mexican history. The economic and social structure of Pisaflores prior to 1920 was recon-

xi Preface structed on the basis of both local oral tradition and written documents, including an historical account dealing with the founding and early history of this area written by a local resident around 1906. The archival records found in Pisaflores as well as in the administrative centre of Jacala, in the state capital of Pachuca, and in Mexico City were sorted and selectively copied during three summers of research, carried out between 1975 and 1978. Data on land tenure, economic activities, and local demography primarily came from two sources: a series of village censuses carried out in the municipio of Pisaflores, and several lists containing information about all rural and urban properties for taxation purposes. Additional information was also obtained from several incomplete lists of merchants and farmers eligible to pay taxes on the production of coffee and sugar cane or for cattle butchered in local slaughterhouses. After the initial task of recording and filing all this material had been completed, data pertaining to individual landowners and merchants who lived in the municipio of Pisaflores between 1850 and 1920 were recorded on 706 separate index cards. These cards also included data on political posts held, genealogical information, and other pertinent facts, obtained from a variety of sources. Some of this information was then coded and transferred onto computer cards for the purpose of quantitative analysis . The resulting data were interpreted in the light oflife histories provided by older informants, other historical records, and my knowledge of production techniques, land tenure, and social organization in the contemporary period. The research for this book was made possible by generous grants from the University of Guelph Research Advisory Board and the Canada Council. I would like to thank the members of the lnstituto de Estudios Sociologicos of the Colegio de Mexico, especially Dr Rodolfo Stavenhagen, Dr Sergio Alcantara, and Cynthia Hewitt de Alcantara, for their help and encouragement during my trips in Mexico. Special acknowledgment is due to the late Richard Frucht of the University of Alberta, to Joan Miller, to Robert Rhodes, to Pierre Beaucage of the Universite de Montreal, to professor Donald Von Eschen of the department of Sociology at McGill University, and to my colleagues here at Guelph, especially Ken Menzies, Peter Sinclair, and Stan Barrett. These and others gave me invaluable criticism, comments, and advice. I am likewise indebted to Jesus Jauregui and Victor Raul Martinez, who did research in the town of Zimapan and who showed me their fieldnotes on that region. I wish to thank Hector Samperio Gutierrez, Miguel Nunez, Omar Rivera, Jose Arevalo, Elfidio Cano, Luis Angeles, and the many more people in Mexico who offered me

xii Preface their hospitality and friendship . A special word of thanks goes to Catherine Foy-Schryer, who put up with my long absence in the field and with my tedious requests for advice in the editing of this work . It is my wish that some of my friends in Pisaflores may one day have the opportunity to read this work and thus gain greater insight into their own society. Without their co-operation and folk wisdom, which cannot be credited in any formal academic way, this book would have been impossible. This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Social Science Federation of Canada, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada, and a grant to the University of Toronto Press from the Andrew E. Mellon Foundation. FRANS J. SCHRYER

May 1979

General Nicolas Flores, governor of Hidalgo, 1918

The central plaza of Pisaflores on market day, 1919

Six members of the agrarian faction of Pisaflores, 1937

Five members of the Union of Veterans of the Revolution in El Bonigu, 1942

Interim government Uunta de administracion civil), 1945

National holiday celebration in the plaza of Pisaflores, 1971

Campesino ploughing field

Independence day celebration in Pisaflores, 1971

THE RANCHEROS OF PISAFLORES

1

Introduction

The Mexican Revolution, a period of violent civil war that broke out in October of 1910, was one of the great political upheavals of the twentieth century . This largely agrarian revolution and its aftermath not only gave birth to a new political system, based on a virtual monopoly of power by a single 'revolutionary party,' but also altered the entire social and economic structure of modern Mexico. Between 1910 and 1940 the large landed estates that had hitherto been the dominant form of landholding gradually disappeared to give rise to the ejido, a collective form of property, as well as to a rejuvenated private sector of small and medium-sized farms . The standard interpretation of what happened during this period is that the widespread rural conflict and the process of land reform that accompanied it represented an ongoing struggle between landless peasants and the owners of huge haciendas , a struggle that reached its peak during the presidency of Lazaro Cardenas (1934-40). 1 This class struggle, which erupted in 1910, was the outcome of a series of bitter disputes between latifundists and communal villages in the fifty years prior to the revolution. During this pre-revolutionary period, known as the Porfiriato, the majority of Indian peasants associated with such communal villages as well as the numerous owners of small plots of privately owned land were dispossessed , resulting in an extremely high level of concentration of rural properties . 2 The subsequent chaos, lasting a decade, which broke out as a result of this very unequal distribution of land ownership, involved widespread unrest and the destruction of the professional army and the old ruling elite, thereby creating a vacuum of power that became the source of fierce competition between rival military factions made up of self-proclaimed generals. Rivalry between these different revolutionary leaders continued after the signing of a new constitution, the official end of the Mexican

4 The Rancheros of Pisaflores Revolution, until Plutarco Calles managed to unite the diverse elements who made up the opposition to the old regime by forming the National Revolutionary Party in 1929. According to this standard account of the Mexican Revolution , the political stability enjoyed by Mexico over the past forty years has been largely due to the ability of the leaders of this revolutionary party and its successors to maintain the support of the peasant population through repeated land reforms .3 While most scholars dealing with the Mexican Revolution have placed primary emphasis on the outbreak of armed clashes between recently dispossessed peasants and latifundists , they have not ignored the existence of regional cleavages or the important role played by other segments of Mexican society in order to explain the extremely complex events that took place between 1911 and 1929. For example, the Revolution is also portrayed as a revolt by merchants, manufacturers, and small businessmen in northern Mexico against the southern clique of hacendados who ruled Mexico prior to 1910. 4 This northern 'middle class,' who already resented the fierce competition from foreign (mainly American) enterprises resulting from the laissez faire policies of the Diaz regime, were hard hit by a lack of access to credit following a fiscal crisis in 1907. 5 Their dissatisfaction also gave the Revolution an anti-imperialist flavour. It is well known that these northern states, whose social structure was somewhat different from that found in the rest of the country, produced not only Francisco Madero, whose political campaign against the dictator Diaz triggered off the Mexican Revolution, but also most of the strongmen or caudillos who ended up ruling Mexico between 1915 and 1934.6 Some historians consider these northern revolutionaries, especially the Carrancista faction, as the representatives of a national bourgeoisie who sought the support of the peasantry in order to overthrow a dominant class of 'semi-feudal' landowners.7 Another social force whose support has been considered as crucial in determining the outcome of the struggle between rival revolutionary factions was the numerically small but influential urban labour movement, under the leadership of anarcho-syndicalist leaders. 8 A more abstract version of the interpretation outlined above has also been expounded by a number of recent Marxist scholars who look more closely at the 'bonapartist' nature of the new revolutionary establishment which consolidated its power in the 1920s. 9 They use the same type of class analysis but point out that the revolutionary forces which most clearly represented these social classes - the agrarian peasant armies of Zapata, the counter-revolutionary forces of Huerta (representing one faction of landowners), and the radical labour movement - were either militarily

5 Introduction defeated or incorporated into more heterogeneous political movements (the Villistas or the victorious Carrancistas). 10 Some of these heterogeneous revolutionary groupings even included dissatisfied segments of the hacendado class. These scholars interpret the complex realignments that took place during the armed phase of the Revolution as creating a situation in which none of the major social classes was able to exert a dominant influence. The self-made military strongmen who emerged out of this period of violent social conflict could thus set up a state that was temporarily able to stand above all class interests. The leaders of the new revolutionary government had to implement limited reforms (land distribution, the protection of national interests, and liberal labour legislation) in order to maintain a balance of power between workers and employers, peasants and landowners. However, the left-wing tendencies of this new military regime did not prevent many revolutionaries-turned-politicians from enriching themselves in the name of the 'revolution.' This process of upward mobility through political means facilitated the re-emergence of a dominant capitalist class. 11 While accepting the general theoretical framework used by those who have interpreted the Mexican Revolution and its aftermath in terms of the interaction of different social classes, I feel that the different versions of a class-cum-regional analysis so far developed are inadequate. In dealing with the social basis of various revolutionary factions, many writers use the extremely broad category of' middle class' or 'petite bourgeoisie' to designate everybody from lawyers to small landowners, without specifying what were the differences in political behaviour among particular fractions or segments of this middle sector of Mexican society. 12 It is frequently stated that this middle class, especially in northern Mexico, provided most of the leaders who constituted the military-bureaucratic apparatus that came out of the Revolution. 13 Although we are generally left with the impression that this 'middle' or sometimes 'lower middle' class was primarily an urban class, some historians have shown that the northern revolutionaries also recruited many of these activists from a rural middle class of prosperous farmers, especially in the state of Sonora. 14 However, we know little about the political behaviour of their counterparts in other regions of Mexico or even if such a rural middle class of small landowning farmers or entrepreneurial tenants existed elsewhere. It is also not at all clear what part was played by the landless peasants who were supposed to be the driving force of the Revolution, outside of Morelos, the centre of the Zapatista revolt. While usually starting off their accounts of the Mexican Revolution by emphasizing the long-standing struggle between militant landless peasants

6 The Rancheros of Pisaflores and landowners throughout southern and central Mexico, many authors also claim that the majority of peons or sharecroppers attached to the large haciendas were politically passive or easily manipulated by the nonpeasant (i.e. petit bourgeois) leaders of rival revolutionary factions. 15 Existing interpretations have also failed to ask such questions as what was the rural basis of support for the various revolutionary factions led by northerners in central Mexico, or exactly what was the social background of a new breed of regional strongmen from southern and central Mexico who rose to prominence during the revolution and many of whom later became leading politicians on the state level. THE

ROLE OF THE

REVOLUTION:

RANCHEROS

IN

THE

MEXICAN

A REINTERPRETATION

This case history will reveal some major new factors in the Mexican Revolution by focusing on the small and medium-sized landowners, who are frequently referred to as rancheros in the Mexican literature. No segm~nt of the rural population, prior to the Mexican revolution, has been so neglected or misunderstood as these rancheros. The meaning of the term itself is ambiguous, referring at the same time to farmers of predominantly Spanish descent in the state of Jalisco, to traditional landowners occupying very modest estates in more isolated regions in other parts of central and southern Mexico, or to pioneer cattle ranchers in the more sparsely populated northern frontier. 16 The common denominator seems to be their 'middle-class' status in rural Mexican society, or their intermediate position between the mass of landless peons or sharecroppers and a small elite of hacendados. Sometimes the term is also used to refer to relatively prosperous commercial farmers, working as tenants within the boundaries of large landed estates, 17 or even to prosperous 'capitalist' landowning farmers in northern Mexico.' 8 Most scholars, however, including Eric Wolf, George McBride, Rodolfo Stavenhagen, and Roger Hansen depict the typical ranchero as an independent smallholder, a type of poor family farmer who mainly relies on his own labour and that of his immediate family. 19 This depiction is part of the more widely held view which portrays the social structure of rural Mexico prior to 1910 as consisting of a small group of hacendados pitted against a great mass of equally downtrodden peons, sharecroppers, tenants, and tiny plotholders. In this schema, the ranchero is numerically insignificant and socially unimportant. Contrary to other researchers, I will argue that the rancheros, and especially the rancheros of central Mexico, constituted a significant politi-

7 Introduction cal force during and after the Revolution and that their actions helped to determine both the direction and the outcome of this political upheaval. During the Revolution not only did the rancheros often act to protect their common interests, but also individuals from this class of small landowners were provided with a unique opportunity for upward social mobility. I will also argue that the rural regions of central Mexico where landowning farmers or rancheros were numerically important prior to 1910 were not characterized by a homogeneous group of family farmers, as a superficial examination of statistical data pertaining to such regions seems to indicate. Rather, the farmers who owned land in these areas constituted but a small minority of the local population. Moreover, while these landowners included genuine family-sized plotholders, the economically important, socially influential, and politically dominant rancheros regularly employed wage labourers and rented out part of their land to sharecroppers or part-time cash tenants. 20 This class of small landowners, which emerged in the middle of the nineteenth century, 21 was actually numerically larger than the owners of huge haciendas so often portrayed in the literature. In spite of a weakly developed sense of class identity and strong paternalistic ties between employers and workers, these rancheros definitely constituted a local upper class vis-a-vis the poor peasants dependent on them. The rancheros described above can be distinguished from the large hacienda owners in a number of ways. Unlike the hacendados, who were absentee landlords, the rancheros resided on their small estates or in small rural communities. They also managed their own farms or were actively engaged in local commerce or the small-scale processing of agricultural products grown on such small estates. Like the large absentee landowners, the majority of rancheros employed seasonal wage labourers or peons as well as renting out part of their land . Unlike the hacendados, however, they shared the dress, deportment, and speech of their economic subordinates. These small landowners or rich peasants can be characterized as a peasant bourgeoisie. 22 This term is used to emphasize both their 'peasant' or rustic style of life, which gave them low status in the eyes of a metropolitan elite, and their actual economic position as employers and entrepreneurs. Most of the farms owned by members of this social class were found in the mountainous areas in the more densely populated central part of Mexico. Although it is difficult to determine exactly what proportion of Mexico's landholders were rancheros or members of the peasant bourgeoisie, a rough estimate can be made on the basis of the figures for land ownership available for 1923,just after the Revolution when little land reform had yet taken place. If the rancho is defined as a property between 11 and 1,ooo

8 The Rancheros of Pisaflores hectares, ranchos represented a little less than a third of all rural properties (including 'parcelas' of IO hectares or less), probably corresponding to approximately a third ofall of Mexico's arable farm land. 23 Although these small and medium-sized estates did not represent a large percentage of the arable land in Mexico as a whole, they did include a considerable proportion of the rural population because smaller estates tend to be more intensely exploited and employ a larger number of workers per unit ofland. 24 Although the peasant bourgeoisie directly or indirectly controlled a sizeable proportion of the rural population, regions with this type of local upper class have been ignored or misrepresented by most social scientists or historians interested in Mexico. Because of their preoccupation with the conflicts between landless peasants and the owners of haciendas, most regional studies or monographs dealing with agrarian politics have studied areas dominated by large-scale latifundism at the turn of the century and have focused on the operation of ejidos established in such areas. 25 The sparse references to rancheros are contradictory. Some scholars claim that the rancheros tended to be passive and uninterested in politics. 26 Others argue that these same farmers were the rural counterpart of a radical middle class at the time of the Revolution, but only in northern Mexico, a frontier area of extensive cattle raising and capitalist farms. 27 According to those who espouse the second view, the rancheros of central Mexico did not take part in the revolution but rather became militant supporters of conservative and pro-clerical movements in the 1920s and 1930s. Differences between these two groups of rancheros are explained primarily in terms of levels of political consciousness, in turn related to the influence of the Catholic Church. 28 Even in dealing with the supposedly revolutionary northern rancheros, however, some writers make tautological statements. For example, one author claims that a particular revolutionary faction (the Obregonistas) gained the bulk of its rural support from 'progressive' rancheros, a statement that does little to inform the reader about how many of these rancheros were 'progressive' or what factors, apart from purely personal preference, would make some rancheros more 'progressive (i.e. revolutionary) than others. 29 Moreover, for most of these writers the term ranchero, especially when applied to central Mexico, means family farmer, a connotation that is quite misleading. Because the members of this peasant bourgeoisie did not seem to act in a consistent manner, apart from the fact that their numerical strength has been grossly underestimated, previous scholars dealing with the Revolution have simply assumed that these landowning farmers did not effect the outcome or the course of larger political events. They have therefore been either omitted or else subsumed

9 Introduction under the same category as 'middle class' (or petite bourgeoisie), rather than treated as a separate class with its own characteristics and interests, just like the large landowners or hacendados, the industrial proletariat, the poor, landless peasants or peons, and the urban bourgeoisie. I take the position that if a 'bonapartist' type regime, largely composed of 'petit bourgeois' elements, did come to power in 1917, then the peasant bourgeoisie must have constituted a major part of it. I also believe that the frequent divergences in political behaviour of these landowners after 1920 represent alternative responses to a series of economic changes emanating from the larger society to which they belonged . These very different patterns of political behaviour, including active support of or vehement opposition to the policy of land reform propagated by the new revolutionary government, were not only associated with different substrata or geographical segments of the peasant bourgeoisie, but also with members of the same stratum or with the same individuals at different times . This monograph will show that such political behaviour can be explained by the structural implications, for local politics, of a certain type of land tenure pattern and its corresponding social relations. A careful analysis of the class structure of the type ofregion dominated by a peasant bourgeoisie can thus provide the basis for a reinterpretation of both the Mexican Revolution and the revolutionary party that came out of it. Until recently, this party, set up by Calles in 1929, represented to a great extent the patronage structure, the political tactics, and the traditions associated with the Mexican peasant bourgeoisie. The specific region I have chosen to carry out such an analysis and to substantiate my claims concerning the role of the rancheros of central Mexico during the revolution is the Sierra Alta de Hidalgo. 30 This region, located in the northwestern corner of the state of Hidalgo, is representative of other parts of Mexico characterized by small and medium-sized agricultural estates or ranchos, and the absence of large-scale latifundism and landlord absenteeism prior to 1920. THE CASE STUDY

The Sierra Alta de Hidalgo consists of the rugged foothills of the Sierra Madre Oriental range which borders on the Huasteca, a low-lying, semitropical region of abundant vegetation that also includes parts of the states of San Luis Potosi and Veracruz. The Sierra Alta roughly corresponds to the district of Jacala, which includes five municipios (see figure 1): Jacala, Chapulhuacan , La Misi6n, Pacula, and Pisaflores. 31 Each municipio, which is the effective unit of local government, is represented by a pres-

IO

The Rancheros of Pisaflores

idente municipal (mayor) who is the executive and chief administrator of this lowest (and poorest) level of the highly centralized Mexican political system. The presidente is assisted by a municipal council known as the ayuntamiento, composed of five members called municipes and their respective suplentes (alternates) who meet at irregular intervals to discuss matters of public interest. The municipal council and the mayor are officially 'elected' by the population at large every three years. During the elections, polling booths are set up in several electoral zones in the municipio. However, since only the Institutionalized Revolutionary Party (PRI) has representation in this area, as in most of rural Mexico, the real struggle for political power goes on prior to the elections. Rival slates of candidates are drawn up and presented to higher authorities in the state capital of Pachuca for approval. Only one official slate, the result of internal manreuvring, compromise, and sometimes the direct imposition of the will of the state governor, is presented to the electorate. Their 'vote' only confirms the official appointment and it is not unusual for entire hamlets, whose inhabitants did not turn up at the nearest poll, to have their ballots marked in favour of the PRI by a paid representative (see chapter 9). One of these five municipios, called Pisaflores, was selected for special investigation. 32 This municipio, which is divided into a small valley and three parallel mountain ridges, covers an area of 159 square kilometres. 33 Its 10,000 inhabitants, who are Spanish-speaking, live in a main village of almost 1,200 people, also known as Pisaflores, and in forty hamlets or rancherias, whose population ranges from a half a dozen families to over a thousand inhabitants (see figure 2). The main village or cabecera is the administrative centre for the entire municipio and the only village with such facilities as running water and electricity. The cabecera is also the site of a weekly market held in a central plaza. The main crops grown in Pisaflores and in the surrounding region today are sugar cane (locally processed into pilon or sugar loaO and coffee (mainly sun-dried, second-grade coffee destined for the national market). The landowning farmers, who use quite primitive techniques, employ wage labourers on a seasonal basis and generally also raise cattle and engage in speculative activities, buying up crops from part-time cultivators before harvest. In order to keep their pasture land cleared, they also rent out shrubland to landless peasants for subsistence farming. In 1972, these landowning farmers represented 18 per cent of the population of the municipio of Pisaflores, but there were differences of wealth within this class. Only a small percentage of them could afford to process first-grade coffee beans or apply modem technology to the production of cattle; these

11

Introduction \

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(Cabemras underlned)

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Limits of exhacienda of Tampochocho Villages

P~. lees than 2000

Towns

P~. 2000 to 9,999

Cities

P~. 10,000 & C1VfJ(

Scale: 1 :750,000

Figure

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The Sierra Alta de Hidalgo region

HI DALGO

The Rancheros of Pisaflores

12

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this illegal sale be stopped as soon as possible.' 10 The government inspector referred to in this letter did not visit Las Moras until several years later, and the ex-governor was unable to prevent the sale of the land to the union co-operative in this remote and isolated hamlet. Padre Jesus' project got under way as planned. He started a co-operative in Las Moras with forty peasants and provided them with credit and personal supervision. Only the Protestant families refused to participate. Opponents of the priest in the cabecera now tried various tactics to have him removed from the parish. At one point an anonymous letter was sent to the chief of police in Mexico City, accusing the priest of various misdemeanors. However, a delegation of citizens from Pisaflores immediately travelled to the capital to defend their pastor and leader. Finally rumours of an attempt against the priest's life were circulated through thearea. 11 Padre Jesus' friends then persuaded him to seek help from influential people outside the municipio. A leading member of the peasant union (a rifle repairman and carpenter) introduced the prkst to Martinez, the strongman of Zimapan, and also to a congressman (federal deputy) who had recently been elected for the district. 12 These PRI officials, who were old adversaries of the ex-governor of Queretaro, guaranteed the personal safety of the priest as a way of embarrassing an old rival. In fact, the deputy in question (who was also an opponent of the state congressman who closely collaborated with the setting up ofa new agrarian committee in 196o), even advised the peasant union and Padre Jesus to continue with plans to rent or buy a part of the property owned by Nieto' s 'widows,' already under review as an ejido. 13 Needless to say, these actions angered local and regional agrarian politicians. In order to boost their sagging influence, the 'agrarian' ex-governor and his friends pressed government officials to speed up the processing of the petition from the local agrarian committee and to give the properties under dispute (including that of El Garabato, whose earlier request for land was still pending) to the peasants of Pisaflores. A list of the names of 144 eligible members, some of them fictitious and some the names of local merchants and landowning farmers, was finally published in the official state newspaper, as required by law . 14 A year later, Diaz Ordaz, the president of Mexico, put his signature on a document giving the solicited land to Pisaflores. Thus, many members of the Catholic union, who had signed an earlier petition for land reform, finally became ejidatarios even though their own organization had tried to buy or rent some of this land half a year earlier. The ejido of Garabato was also formed at the same time through a joint distribution of the old Alvarado estate. However, the formal estab-

132 The Rancheros of Pisaflores

lishment of an ejido in Pisaflores did not mean that all of the land that had been 'donated' in 1935 by Nieto to the peasants of Pisaflores was actually distributed to those who had signed the agrarian petition. The land surrounding the hamlet of El Coyol (which was the main object of dispute in the early forties) was not affected by this agrarian reform and continued to belong to another grandson of Porfirio Rubio who lived in Agua Zarca. According to several members of the ejido, the ex-governor personally instructed government engineers to mark the boundaries of the proposed ejido well below its original limits near the hamlet of El Coyol and then persuaded the members of the agrarian committee to overlook this 'error.'15 Thus, after more than thirty years of bloodshed and endless petitions, about 800 hectares of mostly very steep and eroded land (less than a tenth of the total surface of the municipio) was finally given to two villages in order to undermine the influence of a powerful opponent - the radical priest! The implementation of land reform did not immediately end the bitter opposition between members of the peasant union, some of whom also became ejidatarios, and the local authorities . When these peasants continued to agitate against the ex-governor, agrarian officials , all members of the pro-Rubio (or pro-ex-governor) faction, refused to recognize the Catholic union though it was legally registered as a civil organization. They even tried to destroy the union by threatening to evict members of the union from the new ejido. Local political tensions again increased when Lamarca, the rancher and storekeeper who was now the president of the ejido, was also nominated as candidate for the upcoming municipal elections to be held in 1966. At this point the priest used his connections with politicians on the regional level to protest to state officials about Lamarca' s nomination. In response, the government changed the official slate to include the president and main spokesman for the peasant union (a middle peasant whose father had been a landowning farmer) as a candidate for vice-president in order to placate the priest's faction . But this union candidate was not allowed to exercise any authority during his term of office and became an even more bitter opponent of Lamarca. 16 The role played by Padre Jesus in this election suggests that he was not averse to using contacts in the power structure at higher levels to achieve his ends, despite his dislike of the Mexican political system. However, while capable of at least partially manipulating anticlerical and nominally 'leftist' government leaders, he was less successful in maintaining good relations with his own ecclesiastical establishment, as illustrated by his last project in Pisaflores. This project consisted of the construction of a small

133 A Case Study of Co-optation: 1960-76 ' hospital' or medical dispensary on the outskirts of Pisaflores with money obtained from the American embassy. Part of this project involved the setting up of a small and very discreetly run family planning centre , probably the first in rural Mexico. (Both the government and the church were at that time opposed to any form of birth control.) This brought a strong reaction from his church superiors who quickly had the padre replaced by another pastor, and ordered him to cease his social activities and leave the area. His departure immediately brought about a realignment of political loyalties. When this 'radical' priest left Pisaflores in 1967, the peasant union continued to operate in opposition to the local authorities and to a new parish priest who was given orders to improve church-state relations. However, the landowners, artisans, and rich tenant farmers who had been supporters of Padre Jesus abandoned the union, leaving it completely in the hands of small tenant producers (middle peasants) . These tried to strengthen their organization, which was scattered over seven hamlets throughout the municipio . One union member, who owned a mule, was put in charge of visiting local branches in the mountainous zone , where several union members had recently become involved in violent confrontations with landowning farmers supported by the authorities. 17 The new priest also became an adversary of the union . He closed all the Catholic schools in the mountainous zone and urged his parishioners to petition for government teachers . In the cabecera the peasants who still belonged to the union continued to hold meetings in the 'hospital' (now a meeting-hall) to criticize the local authorities and the new pastor. They also kept in touch with Padre Jesus and with the larger organization to which they were affiliated. The CLASC representatives in Mexico City tried to help the leaders of the peasant union of Pisaflores, but communication by mail or telegraph with local members was extremely slow and unreliable. Consequently, the representatives did not have a very good idea of what was happening on the local level nor were they able to provide the union with financial assistance or guidance . During the next few years, the union disintegrated as membership dwindled. This decline was due to several factors : internal disputes over co-operative stores, personal rivalries, and the absence of a common enemy as the political conflict with local authorities slowly dissipated . The internal disputes within the union were partly the result of diverging interests between wage-earning peasants and small tenant producers. Without credit, the day labourers found that they could neither participate in nor profit from such projects as productive co-operatives. For example , in Las Moras, where the property bought by the local union had not yet been

134 The Rancheros of Pisaflores entirely paid off, most of the day labourers had to leave the co-operative when the dues, needed to pay off this debt, were raised. With the drying up of external funds, the productive co-operative ended, leaving only a sociedad dedicated to the common purchase of the land. The few opponents of this project, the Protestant agrarian faction, then joined this venture. All but two of the eleven members who remained in this corporation and who finally paid off the debt were middle peasants, and some of them even had small plots ofland elsewhere . Apart from beingjoint owners of this sociedad, these peasants also had access to the communal lands of Las Moras, only part of which fell inside the limits of the communal lands of Conchintlan. 18 The conflicts that took place in the 196os had much in common with earlier factional disputes. Competing leaders (Padre Jesus versus the exgovernor) built up local support by implementing public projects, dispensing personal favours, and acting as brokers between the local population and external institutions. 19 Like the earlier agrarian politicians, the organizers of CLASC, and to some extent the priest himself, addressed themselves to specific class interests. For example, they sometimes openly urged the peasants to 'organize themselves against their biggest enemy, the large landowners.' However, actual disputes over land ownership did not play an important role in these conflicts. Instead the priest and the union stressed the need for consumers' co-operatives, collective public projects, and the raising of educational standards. Although this brought about a conflict with local authorities who represented one particular clique of small-town merchants and landowning farmers, the priest never confronted some of the largest and most abusive landowners. Indeed, while he spoke in terms of 'helping the poor,' some of the landowning farmers of Pisaflores ended up receiving more financial help from the priest than did their employees or tenants. The ideology used by the priest and by the CLASC organizers was therefore in discord with the reality of their practice. Their main objectives were to augment agricultural productivity through technical improvements and at the same time create a large number of small, self-employed peasants who owned their own land. In actual fact the type of'viable family farm' they envisioned would have turned out to be a more mechanized and capital-intensive version of the local landed estates. Their actions would not have made the already large number of minifundist farms on rented land any more viable. The fact that the very visible and active middle peasants of the region, who presented themselves as 'typical' peasants, lacked a separate identity (see chapter 3) reinforced the illusion that the majority of peasants of Pisaflores were basically small entre-

135 A Case Study of Co-optation: 1960-76 preneurs rather than wage labourers increasingly dependent on working as migrant labourers. Moreover, the priest's emphasis on Catholicism hindered the very unity and co-operative spirit he sought to instill in 'the poor' by creating factional splits in a number of hamlets, such as Las Moras, where Protestant sects had become firmly entrenched. These factional divisions, corresponding to pre-existing cleavages that divided both landowners and peasants, came to overshadow the struggle for better economic conditions for the majority of the population that did not have land. THE CLASS COMPOSITION OF COMPETING FACTIONS IN THE SIXTIES

Although the political events in the 196os primarily consisted of disputes between rival factions led by landowning farmers, a certain element of class opposition was evident. As in the thirties, a significant number of middle peasants were incorporated into these factional disputes and continued to agitate on their own after the departure of outside agitators and the betrayal of their interests by local factional leaders. We can thus discern not only a competition for power by different segments of the peasant bourgeoisie, but also a complex pattern of political conflict involving members of different social classes. A closer examination of the exact composition of the competing groups involved in the conflicts of the 196os provides some statistical evidence for the propositions presented in chapter 3 concerning the political behaviour of various social classes in this region. Table 4 presents data collected in the valley of Pisaflores in 1971, and contains figures on the participation of members of four different classes in the two formal peasant organizations with political overtones: the peasant union (CLASC affiliated) and the ejido (whose principal members constituted the agrarian committee prior to 1965). The four social classes whose political behaviour was thus compared were the day labourers (poor peasants), the middle peasants (small peasant producers), the artisans, and the peasant bourgeoisie. Small-town merchants, including butchers and storekeepers who did not own their own land, were included in the last category for reasons that have already been outlined (see chapter 3). 20 The respective membership or lack of membership of each social class in different political organizations is shown in table 4, in both absolute numbers and percentages. It should be noted that row 3 refers to people who joined both the union and the ejido, even if they later quit one or the other. The numbers in row 4 (those who belong to the union or the ejido) were obtained by subtracting the number of people belonging

136 The Rancheros of Pisaflores TABLE 4 Data on membership in two peasant organizations Peasant bourgeoisie Artisans

Middle peasants

Day labourers

TOTAL

n

%

n

%

n

11

1 Those who belonged to the ejido Percentage by class

11

23

13

42

2 Those who belonged to the union Percentage by class

3

3 Those who belonged to both union and ejido Percentage by class

2

4 Those who belonged to the union or ejido Percentage by class

12

5 Those who did not belong to any organization Percentage by class

36

TOTAL

48

TOTAL PERCENTAGE BY CLASS

n

% 3

10

23

6 6

9

8

31

16

3

10

22

11

75

18

17

19

62

12

15

17 16

12

32

2

29 10

61

31

39

151

31

11

7

40

14 100

1

5

15 100

17

73

83

217

25 100

42

182 100 63

75 100

70 100

17 100

13

5 100

48

30

26

8 100

52

67 38

12

%

44

40

7 25

21

27

4 13

%

290

100

100

to both the ejido and the union at the same time (row 3) from the total combined membership of both organizations (i.e. row I plus 2) . As some of the percentages in the table show, the peasant bourgeoisie, including the small-town merchants, made up 23 per cent of the membership of the ejido, officially an institution created to benefit the 'rural proletariat,' while making up only 16 per cent of the population of the valley of Pisaflores. Three of them also made up 8 per cent of the membership of the union and altogether people belonging to this class category represented 17 per cent of all memberships (row 4) . In contrast, the day labourers, 63 per cent of the population of the valley, constituted only 44 per cent of the ejido membership and 30 per cent of the union membership. Landowning farmers and merchants were therefore over-represented on these peasant organizations, especially the ejido, while the day labourers were very much under-represented. Indeed, 151 day labourers (a vast majority

137 A Case Study of Co-optation: 1960-76 TABLE 5 Four-square table comparing middle peasantry with all other social classes in terms of membership on peasant organizations (1960 to 1970) Middle peasants

All others

f,

Those who belonged to peasant organizations

19 (61%)

54 (21%)

73

Those who did not belong to peasant organizations

12 (39%)

205 (79%)

217

TOTAL

31 (100%)

259 (100%)

290

Value of chi-square (corrected for continuity)

21 . 94 O.D (Chi-square of 6 . 64 would be significant with a set at 0 .01) ~~~~

of 83 per cent) did not belong to any organization whatsoever; this last figure indicates that they were the least active in local public affairs. Moreover, no day labourers ever held any executive positions in either the union or the ejido (e.g. president, treasurer, or vice-president). The artisans, who in many ways resembled the middle peasants in the 196os, were actively involved in both the union and the ejido. Although they made up IO per cent of the population of the valley of Pisaflores, where they were mostly concentrated, they constituted 15 per cent of the memberships of all the organizations. They were especially active in union affairs, 22 per cent of their membership being thus involved. The figures in table 4 relating to the middle peasantry are the most revealing, however. The middle peasants constituted 27 per cent of the ejido membership and 40 per cent of the union membership between 1960 and 1969. The figures for their overall representation in both organizations (row 4) show that they formed 26 per cent of all memberships; had their representation been proportional to their numerical size in the population this would have been only 11 per cent. A chi-square test on data comparing the middle peasants with the rest of the population according to overall representation on peasant organizations showed that this correlation between being a middle peasant and being politically active was significant when a was set at 0.01 (see table 5). The middle peasants were thus more likely to be members of peasant organizations with political overtones. They also tended to join not just one but two organizations (they represented 67 per cent of row 3) even if the leaders of these respective organiza-

138 The Rancheros of Pisaflores tions were engaged in a bitter factional dispute. The actual executive positions, which are not indicated in table 4, show even more clearly to what extent the middle peasants were politically active. Out of fifteen such positions in the peasant union, between 1960 and 1969, eight were held by middle peasants, compared with six held by artisans and only one by a landowning farmer. Moreover, one middle peasant who belonged to the union also managed to get elected to a minor post in the ejido administration, even though this administration was completely dominated by landowning farmers prior to I 971 . RANCHO POLITICS :

1969

TO

1976

The short-lived conflict between the peasant union, almost exclusively run by middle peasants after the departure of Padre Jesus, and local authorities gave way to a renewal of petty bickering revolving around the nomination and election of a new group of municipal officials in the 1970s. These local elections involved the usual in-fighting and scheming among rival politicians, most of whom were landowning farmers and small-town merchants. However, in contrast to what had happened in previous elections, the ten most powerful landowners in the municipio were noticeably uninvolved in these factional disputes, either as candidates or as informal leaders. Such wealthy landowning farmers, with good connections in the government bureaucracy, no longer needed to participate in these local manreuvres to defend their economic position or obtain access to patronage as a channel of possible upward mobility. Furthermore, municipal politics no longer had any bearing on agrarian conflicts which might affect their properties, since, as we have seen in the last chapter, small groups of militant peasants now sought contacts with outsiders rather than with would-be agrarian leaders from the cabecera. Another segment of the population that was largely uninterested in local politics was made up of the day labourers who lived in the main village of Pisaflores, especially those who had recently come to the cabecera from outlying hamlets. Such full-time labourers primarily depended for their income on seasonal migrant labour and local construction work, not agricultural activities in the municipio. 21 For them, Pisaflores was only a temporary place of residence and a stepping-stone in further migration, not a setting for permanent jobs or political activity. Politicians in the cabecera therefore increasingly turned their attention to the poorer peasants and other inhabitants of the many hamlets scattered throughout the municipio in order to justify their position as official spokesmen for the 'peasant population' of Pisaflores and to ensure the

139 A Case Study of Co-optation: 1960-76

public support needed to maintain recognition from government officials. The municipal election of 1972, in particular, can be used as an example of how such politicians had to establish a network of contacts in the small hamlets (rancherias or ranchos) in order to exercise political influence over a largely landless and destitute population . This and other recent elections also illustrate how regional strongmen or influential politicians on the national level continued to interfere in the selection of candidates for public office, despite a great deal of propaganda that the 'era of caciquismo' was finally coming to an end and that 'the only people with influence today' were the 'duly elected representatives of the people.' In order to understand the background to the 1972 electoral campaign , it is necessary to go back to 1968 when Lamarca, a member of the pro-Rubio faction in Pisaflores and a bitter enemy of the Catholic union, was still municipal president. This was also the first year in office of a new state governor, Manuel Sanchez Vite, who was anxious to build a stronger base of support in the rural areas. During Sanchez' term of office, numerous public projects were implemented. For example, a new school was built in Pisaflores to replace an older building dating back to the Porfiriato, the road was finished as far as the river, and an electrical system run by a diesel engine was installed . The municipal president, who wanted to present a better image of the local government after the departure of the radical priest , collected contributions from local landowners to pay for the cost of transporting materials needed for these projects, and not covered by the state budget. However, his demand for 'voluntary' contributions, which antagonized many people, caused a factional split between Lamarca and the other supporters of the ex-governor and a direct confrontation between Lamarca and his political patron when the latter expressed his disapproval of the local administration. Lamarca then contacted the ex-governor's opponent, Martinez (the regional cacique of Zimapan) who was also a good friend of the new governor of Hidalgo. The conflict between Lamarca and the ex-governor, and between their respective supporters on the local level, became a public issue during the municipal elections of 1969. Lamarca submitted the name of his sister, a widow active in community affairs, as a candidate for president, while his opponents initiated a campaign to collect signatures for a rival slate of candidates. They thus hoped to prove to the government in Pachuca that a different candidate had more popular support. Martinez of Zimapan backed Lamarca whereas the ex-governor was in favour of the opposing slate even though it contained the names of several people who had previously been associates of Padre Jesus. The authorities in Pachuca studied

140

The Rancheros of Pisaflores

the situation and drew up a new slate of candidates containing the names of members of each faction, thus effectively minimizing the chances of open conflict. A local butcher-merchant became the new municipal president while Lamarca's sister was 'elected' vice-president. One year prior to the elections of 1972, Martinez threw his support behind Lamarca for a second time and sent him official authorization to draw up a slate of candidates. 22 Lamarca's choice for president and vicepresident were two young men; one was the son of a wealthy landowner from one of the mountain hamlets, the other was a partner in his father's business (a butcher shop and a store) in the main village . The candidate proposed by the outgoing president was a man called Fernandez, who had come to live in Pisaflores about eight years before, and who operated a beer store and cultivated sugar cane in the fertile valley on land rented from the ex-governor. Earlier that year he had been appointed as president of the local branch of the PRI and had recently been seen with the tax collector, the ex-governor's right hand man in Pisaflores (and a landowning farmer). When it became clear who the respective candidates on each side would be, a great deal of manceuvring and politicking developed. This involved several social gatherings sponsored by the supporters of Fernandez in a local bar, trips to the district administrative centre, and discussions about the relative merits of the different candidates. Fernandez' main disadvantage was that he was not yet well known in the outlying mountain hamlets of the municipio, unlike the candidates nominated by Lamarca. He therefore had to forge a series of personal links that would enable him to create a network of supporters in at least the more populous rancherias. This was accomplished through the mediation of a man by the name of Ledezma. Ledezma was originally from the hamlet of Chalahuite, the largest village and the main coffee centre of the mountainous zone, where his sister had married the nephew of a prominent landowner. He was also related by marriage to the family of Severino Orosco from El Bonigu (the landowner who played such a prominent role in the politics of the thirties and forties), whose son was still a tenant farmer in that village. Although he spent most of his time in the town of Pisaflores-, Ledezma had bought coffee orchards near the hamlet of El Bonigu with money saved from working in the United States. Through Ledezma, Fernandez had an opportunity to meet prominent landowning farmers in various mountain hamlets and form alliances with local political leaders. He visited Chalahuite on several occasions and promised to help the village obtain electricity and a schoolteacher if elected. To reinforce these personal contacts, Fernandez used his influence as the local PRI representative

141 A Case Study of Co-optation: 196o-76 to help get Ledezma appointed as head of the electoral committee responsible for naming delegates to a local party convention. At the next meeting of the municipal council in the cabecera, a provisional slate of candidates was drawn up: Fernandez as president and a schoolteacher (the son of a middle peasant who had fought in the rural defence corps in the thirties), who was also an ejidatario and a firm Rubio supporter, as vice-president. Various other members of the Rubio faction were also nominated as candidates for representatives on the municipal council. About forty people, including a number of Fernandez supporters from Chalahuite, then accompanied the municipal president to Jacala, to present their slate to the regional electoral commissioner. A separate delegation of about eight people headed by Lamarca also went to Jacala. The delegation of Lamarca was not warmly received because the influence of their political patron, Martinez of Zimapan, was rapidly waning. Martinez had already lost some power as a result of a recently announced change in electoral boundaries. The deliberate policy of Echeverria, the president of Mexico, to reduce the power of regional strongmen further lessened their ability to influence the outcome of local elections. 23 The supporters of the Fernandez slate, however, were told that they would have to collect at least a thousand signatures if they wanted their candidate to be seriously considered by the state authorities for approval. The president of Pisaflores and the local representatives of the electoral committee immediately sent out copies of their slate to most of the ranchos for approval. They asked the juez of each hamlet to collect as many signatures as possible and have them returned to the committee the following day. Lamarca, who still harboured some hope, also collected signatures from members of his own network of local supporters and friends. The manner in which the authorities managed to collect the necessary number of signatures is illustrated by an incident in La Arena, one of the mountain hamlets . 24 At five in the morning the village bells were rung to call a meeting in the schoolyard. All the peasants slowly gathered in the centre of the village where a messenger had just arrived on foot with a letter from the municipal president asking everyone to approve the official list of candidates of the PRI. The meeting started at daybreak and the son of a rich tenant farmer, who could read, explained how everyone should put his signature or thumb print on the list as well as on two attached blank sheets (for copies). The number of each person's party membership card was also supposed to be added, but not everyone understood the instructions because new cards had not yet been issued and many people did not remember their numbers. Some people mentioned that they had never heard

142

The Rancheros of Pisaflores

of Fernandez and wondered whether they should sign at all. But the local juez warned them that it was an order from the municipal president. Nearly everyone then approached a table set up in the yard, and one by one they put their signatures on the papers and departed for work. The situation of the opposition, led by Lamarca, was not completely hopeless, even after the collection of a large number of signatures by the municipal authorities. The ex-president of the Catholic union (also a former municipal vice-president and long time opponent of the ex-governor) suddenly decided to back the slate of his former enemy Lamarca. This man helped to obtain signatures from former union members and went to see Padre Jesus (now living in Mexico City and also periodically on a farm he owned in a neighbouring municipio) to persuade the priest to use his personal influence with officials in the state capital. Needless to say, Lamarca suddenly had nothing but praise for the padre and stressed that the family of one of his candidates had been good friends with Padre Jesus. Several other former union members, mostly local shopkeepers and artisans who supported Fernandez, also went to see the priest to give him different advice. They pointed out that Fernandez was a good man who never opposed the Church and that even the ex-governor had hesitated before giving his approval of Fernandez' nomination. 25 Padre Jesus, according to his own statement, told the government that Fernandez would be the best man, but that he did not approve of the schoolteacher since he was a henchman of the ex-governor. 26 However, in the end, the higher authorities ratified the decision of the municipal council of Pisaflores and allowed the slate of candidates with the names of Fernandez and the teacher to stand. Only then was a formal convention held in the municipal hall of Pisaflores. Lamarca did not attend, and the meeting was presided over by the brother of the ex-governor who had come back to the municipio to look after their family estate. Rubio simply announced the official slate of candidates and asked if anyone disapproved or if anyone else had properly registered another slate of candidates. No one objected, and all but three or four of the delegates present voted for the approval of the official slate by a show of hands. It should be pointed out that nearly all of the sixty delegates present had been hand-picked by Ledezma, Fernandez, and the local authorities. Only five of the forty ranchos of the municipio were represented, and many delegates from these hamlets were friends and relatives of Ledezma from El Bonigu and Chalahuite. These delegates were also supposed to represent two official wings of the PRI, the peasant sector (CNC) and the popular sector (CNOP). However, the basis on which the delegates were classified,

143 A Case Study of Co-optation: 1960-76

when issued with their identification cards, was extremely arbitrary . For example, a very large landowning farmer and merchant from Chalahuite was designated as a representative of the peasant sector while a middle peasant from the cabecera, who also did some petty trading in his spare time, became a member of the 'popular' (theoretically middle-class) sector. A week after the convention, PRI posters, printed by the government, appeared on walls and posts throughout the municipio. The names of the official candidates, and the pictures of Fernandez and the schoolteacher, were thus exposed to the public eye. Such posters for the upcoming elections meant sure victory since there is only one party to vote for in Pisaflores, as in most of rural Mexico. Many people expressed their disapproval of the candidates, some of whom were known as town drunks or loafers, by defacing posters or refusing to vote. The actual election, held in the cabecera on the same day as the weekly market, was uneventful. A table was set up among the stands in the plaza and various people gathered around from time to time to 'x' their approval of the new authorities. Voting turn-out in two other polling booths in mountain ranchos was very sparse . Here local scrutineers, themselves peasants hired for the day, simply filled out the entire list of eligible voters as having indicated their preference for the PRI, regardless of whether or not those people even showed up. A last-minute complication developed when the necessary papers (an act needed to close the polls) did not arrive in time for the electoral zone to which Chalahuite belongs. One of the delegates from that village later told me that they simply used some old forms they found in the municipal office and changed the dates. He thought that the missing papers might have been a tactic used by some 'opposing elements higher up in order to affect the outcome of the election or to discredit the local authorities. ' 27 Between the swearing-in ceremony of Fernandez as municipal president in January of 1973 and the electoral campaign of 1975 the network of political connections between local and national levels underwent further changes. Martinez, the cacique of Zimapan, finally lost all political influence when his main patron, Sanchez Vite, lost favour in the Echeverria regime. 28 Sanchez Vite, the former governor of Hidalgo, had left the governorship in 1971 to take up the post of president of the Institutionalized Revolutionary Party in Mexico City and later returned to state politics . Accused of being a caudillo and a traitor to the revolution by radical students in 1975, he was publicly denounced after the death of several demonstrators who stormed the state legislature. He was quickly demoted by higher authorities. Sanchez Vite's downfall and the dismissal of an

144 The Rancheros of Pisaflores interim governor, originally appointed by him, allowed Rojo Lugo, a close associate of President Echeverria, to become a candidate for the upcoming gubernatorial elections. Rojo Lugo, the son of Rojo Gomez, the prominent Cardenista in Hidalgo in the thirties, visited Pisaflores by helicopter in August of 1975 as a part of his campaign tour. Just before his arrival, Sanchez Vite's name, engraved in stone on a new speaking platform and bandshell erected in the plaza under his sponsorship, was erased with charcoal. Since Rojo Gomez had been a friend of the former governor of Queretaro originally from Pisaflores (Rubio), it is not surprising that one of Rubio's sons was nominated as official candidate for local deputy several weeks later. This set of events meant that Lamarca (municipal president from 1969 to 1972) lost all hope of wielding any influence whatsoever on the local level. Although he supported candidates critical of Fernandez' term of office, this slate was not even brought up for consideration during the 1975 municipal elections. Fernandez' (as well as the ex-governor's) choice, another schoolteacher who was the son of a landowning farmer from the hamlet of El Rayo, headed the new municipal government that came to power in 1976. Despite the increasing use ofleftist rhetoric by the Echeverria regime, the factional pattern of politics and the local structure of power had changed very little.

9

Conclusion

The history of the Sierra Alta region suggests that the development of the contemporary political system in Mexico can be attributed, at least in part, to the political behaviour of the peasant bourgeoisie. This class of commercial landowning farmers and its allies in local commerce (in terms of personnel these groups were often indistinguishable) benefited from the Revolution which allowed many of them to become local 'revolutionary' caciques or to rise through the ranks of a new state bureaucracy. The case study of Pisaflores shows that even those landowning farmers who did not improve their economic position in the subsequent period of regional decline were accommodated or co-opted by this new establishment through the operation of a de facto one party system. At the same time, the national government was able to control such regions, at least up until 1970, without having to channel many resources to the majority of inhabitants of such areas. The incorporation, between 1930 and 1970, of increasingly larger segments of the population in regions such as the Sierra Alta might give the impression that the official 'revolutionary' party gradually broadened its base of support from a local landowning elite, which had originally helped it to come to power, to include the lower classes of such areas. This conclusion would be erroneous. What happened is that a small middle sector and an increasing number of less successful members of that same class of landowning farmers and merchants who had always dominated local politics were integrated into an existing network of patronclient relations involving personal contacts between local, regional, and national politicians. The key middle men in this process of mediation continued to be those members of the peasant bourgeoisie who had fought on the side of Carranza during the Revolution, or their immediate descendants . The passivity and lack of political participation of the poor peasants

146 The Rancheros of Pisaflores or day labourers throughout this period excluded the possibility of an effective integration of the majority of inhabitants of the Sierra Alta as a separate interest group in the larger political system. Indeed, the limited land reform eventually carried out, ostensibly on behalf of the poor peasants in this region, was not only compatible with the interests of the landowning farmers but even helped some members of the peasant bourgeoisie to improve their economic and social position . I feel that the political phenomena observed in the Sierra Alta de Hidalgo can also be found in other regions where large haciendas did not exist, even in such traditionally 'conservative' central states as Jalisco and Michoacan. For example, a recent monograph dealing with the Altos de Jalisco region, written by two social anthropologists, indicates that this typical ranchero region had a class structure consisting of an upper class of small or medium landowners and a subordinate class oflandless peons and sharecroppers, similar to the Sierra Alta de Hidalgo, between 1900 and 1940. 1 Such an area could certainly not be labelled as one with primarily family farmers or small peasant producers, or one that did not have a great many landless peasants, as portrayed by some authors. 2 Although this monograph on Los Altos de Jalisco does not provide much detail on exactly what happened during the early revolutionary period, it is evident that several members of what these two authors refer to as local oligarchic families (rich rancheros) became important politicians on the state level as a result of contacts they established during the violent phase of the Mexican Revolution. 3 Moreover, the same landowners from this region who were active supporters and participants in the anti-government Cristero movement in the 1920s later organized local chapters of the National Revolutionary Party. 4 The authors of this book also mention a case of land distribution carried out by an agrarian committee set up by a local landowner, similar to what happened in the Sierra Alta. 5 Much of the data provided by other scholars who have worked in areas dominated by a ranchero economy are consistent with my own observations concerning the political behaviour of the peasant bourgeoisie in Hidalgo, especially in regard to the nature of village factionalism, the ideological inconsistency of such rancheros, and the kinds of alliances they established with politicians on the national level. 6 Unfortunately such studies, carried out by anthropologists or regional historians, have tended to focus only on certain aspects of political behaviour after the Revolution, and primarily on the local level, while ignoring those landowning farmers who became prominent politicians as a result of their revolutionary activity prior to 1920. Politicial phenomena recorded in such rural communities are rarely

147 Conclusion explained with reference to the local class structure, nor do the authors of many case studies try to relate what happens in the village to the larger political economy of Mexico. While the restricted scope of the data presented in this monograph lends itself to comparison with other regional histories and traditional ethnographies, the main conclusions reached in this case study of a peasant bourgeoisie can also be used to reinterpret existing data on the Mexican Revolution and its aftermath as a whole. One could argue that most of what is said in this book about the peasant bourgeoisie of the Sierra Alta simply validates what many Marxist sociologists and historians have already written about what they call the petite bourgeoisie. Although this case study does use the same theoretical approach as other writers who analyse the Mexican Revolution in terms of the interaction of various social classes, it also criticizes one of the most basic assumptions made by previous investigators: namely, that the politicially active members of this broad category called the petite bourgeoisie or 'small capitalists' primarily came from urban areas. Such an assumption is part of a more generally accepted view, which portrays the social structure of rural Mexico prior to 191 o as consisting of a group of hacendados pitted against a great mass of equally downtrodden peons , sharecroppers , tenants, and tiny plotholders . In this schema, the ranchero, usually conceived as a type of family farmer, is numerically insignificient and socially unimportant (see chapter 1). There is no doubt that the distribution of land ownership in Mexico was very concentrated when the Revolution broke out in 1910. According to one author, 1 per cent of the population owned 97 per cent of the national territory while the bottom 96 per cent of the population only possessed 2 per cent of the land. 7 However, more detailed studies of the different categories of rural property listed in the last census taken before the overthrow of the Porfiriato indicate a considerable number of farmers who were neither hacendados nor poor peasants . For example, in his classic study, Land Systems of Mexico , McBride shows that there were 47 ,939 ranchos compared to 8,245 haciendas in 1910, although he emphasizes that the ratio in amount of property held would be quite different. 8 Likewise, a recent work on economic statistics during the Porfiriato lists 410,000 agricultores (farmers), a term which in the context of northwestern Hidalgo referred to the uppermost stratum of the rancheros .9 It is interesting to compare these figures with statistics on other aspects of rural society at the time of the Mexican Revolution . Frank Tannenbaum, in Peace by Revolution, tries to estimate the number of people who actually lived within the boundaries of the large estates by comparing the number of 'free villages,'

148 The Rancheros of Pisaflores primarily located in mountainous regions in central Mexico, with 'plantation communities' existing within the boundaries of haciendas . While the latter numbered 56,825 or 81 per cent of all inhabited communities, their average size was less than a fifth that of the 12,724 'free villages' (97 compared to 541 inhabitants). 10 Thus, less than half of the rural population of Mexico lived in communities under the direct control of hacendados . Previous studies, including those which cite these statistics, have emphasized that the 'small properties' owned by these different categories of farmers, together with the few remaining communally owned lands surrounding Indian villages, were rapidly being encroached upon by larger haciendas and that most of their inhabitants in fact worked as seasonal day labourers in neighbouring haciendas. 11 For example, even though one author claims that the rancheros lived much better than the mass oflandless peons, he says that 'the ranchero must earn wages to supplement the meagre produce of his land. ' 12 Even Simpson , who regards the rancho as a small replica of the hacienda, still lumps together the ranchero and the peasant plotholders as small subsistence farmers . 13 Simpson also uncritically accepts McBride's statement that 'the primary aim of the ranchero is to produce the necessities of life for his family, and only secondarily does he attempt to raise either stock or crops for market.' 14 Such conclusions, based on library research or the observation of a few selected and more accessible regions , are at odds with the results ofmy research in the Sierra Alta de Hidalgo. Rather than being 'completely overshadowed by the hacendados ,' 15 the agricultores or rancheros in more remote regions did exercise effective control in their home regions. The internal social organization of the small estates found in such areas, the labour relations practised on them, and the cultural characteristics of their owners were all quite different from those of the classical hacienda, as we have seen in this case study . Although the arbitrary or ambiguous nature of such census categories as ranchero, Labrador, or agricultor makes it very difficult to calculate exactly how many landowners in Mexico were members of the peasant bourgeoisie, it would not be too far-fetched to say that the peasant bourgeoisie must have controlled at least a third of the rural population of Mexico at the time of the Revolution. 16 We can now understand why so many macro-studies have underestimated the revolutionary role of the peasant bourgeoisie, a rural class largely ignored or misrepresented in the literature. Even Shulgovski, a Soviet scholar who recently claimed that the revolutionary caudillos from the state of Sonora represented the interests of 'rancheros and capitalisttype landowners,' adds that these rancheros were primarily found in the

149 Conclusion northern states of Mexico. 17 Moreover, Shulgovski makes a sharp distinction between such capitalist farmers in the north, who were closely associated with Alvaro Obregon, and the 'real' petite bourgeoisie (i.e. shopkeepers, small traders or artisans, teachers, professionals, etc .) who 'played an important role in the revolution' and many of whom were also incorporated into the new bonapartist-type regime set up in the 1920s. 18 While correctly pointing out that the ideological inconsistency and the diverging interests of this social stratum (the petite bourgeoisie) made it ideally suited to participate in a military government which came to power in a period when none of the major social classes of Mexico was able to exert its hegemony, nowhere does Shulgovski provide empirical data about the social background and actual class interests of the many military leaders who formed the new government. 19 The case study of the Sierra Alta shows that the military leaders, the politicians, and the administrators who came to power in Hidalgo during the Revolution (often these were the same men) were all 'capitalist farmers' like the northern rancheros . Moreover, these rural revolutionaries had a definite advantage over their urban counterparts in terms of their ability to recruit armed followers, their skill as guerilla fighters, and the possibilities open to them for forming alliances with urban labour leaders. All of these traits set them off as members of a rural social class which had as little (or as much) in common with the small traders, professionals, and artisans of Mexico's cities as with the large absentee landowners generally referred to as hacendados. Because the peasant bourgeoisie has been nearly as socially invisible to historians and sociologists as it has been to many of the leading urban (or northern) leaders who participated in the Revolution, its political actions have been attributed to that vague and all-encompassing category of 'petite bourgeoisie' or even to the large landowners themselves, some of whom supported certain aspects of the Revolution and many of whom were also incorporated into the new 'revolutionary' establishment. Little did Shulgovski realize that he wrote just the right thing for the wrong reason in the following passage, referring to the capitalist farmers of the state of Sonora: 'Certain characteristics of the social psychology of the ranchero, which were preserved among the men of the new revolutionary regime to a greater or lesser degree, put a special stamp upon the most important facets of their polity. ' 20 This polity, consisting of a programme of social reform combined with the protection of 'small private property' and the regulation of class conflict within the context of a capitalist path of development, was the hallmark of most of the governments run by such revolutionary leaders in the next five decades. We could also add that the ranchero origins of many

150

The Rancheros of Pisaflores

of these politicians, especially on the regional and state levels, also helps to explain the persistence of caciquismo in so many rural areas. Since the end of the Revolution, a great deal has happened to modify the class structure of rural Mexico. Not only were the large haciendas finally divided up, largely as a result of the land reform implemented under Cardenas, but the economy of many of the regions once dominated by the peasant bourgeoisie has also been radically altered. This book has traced the gradual evolution of one such ranchero region and has shown how this region is today characterized by increasing social tensions, economic decline, and the downward mobility of most of the members of the peasant bourgeoisie. The future trend of socio-economic change in the Sierre Alta region will probably proceed along the following lines. Over time, the properties of the majority of 'poor' landowning farmers will be divided through sale or inheritance, and their descendants will either join the ranks of the urban proletariat (probably as skilled or clerical workers) or become family farmers of a new type, owning their own land. These downwardly mobile capitalist farmers (i.e. the less successful members of the peasant bourgeoisie who cannot survive the competition with larger and technologically more efficient producers) will probably replace the small tenants as a middle stratum on the local level, while the middle peasants of today will, in turn, become members of the rural proletariat. This will leave only a reduced upper class of relatively prosperous cattle ranchers and coffee or fruit tree cultivators. Such modern landowning farmers will use a much smaller labour force or hire workers from other even poorer regions during the harvest. 21 At the same time, improved amenities in the cabeceras and other small towns in the Sierra Alta will attract increasing numbers of under-employed day labourers from the smaller hamlets, the first step in eventual migration to other parts of Mexico. While some small tenant farmers (middle peasants) will continue to request and possibly even to achieve the partition of one or two properties now owned by rich agriculturalists, this period of economic transition will involve declining standards of living for the majority of people remaining in Pisaflores and other municipios in northwestern Hidalgo. The development of a new class structure in rural Mexico today, and especially the emergence of a large class of increasingly proletarianized migrant workers and the mechanization of agriculture in many regions, must cause changes in the operation of the larger political system and the internal composition of the official government party . The increasing 'dualization' of Mexican agriculture and the growth of urban industrial centres have reduced the relative importance of such 'traditional' areas as

15 I

Conclusion

the Sierra Alta that have been the most important rural bases of support for the PRI. The reduction in the size of such backward areas, in terms of relative population as well as surface area, is bound to affect the form and method of political control on both the local and national levels. It is not the task of this monograph to speculate on the form political trends on the national level may take. Several political scientists foresee a rift in the PRI as more conservative elements, which have a strong position in the north, find it increasingly difficult to co-operate with the leftist-oriented faction associated with Echeverria, the former president of Mexico. One certainly cannot exclude the possibility of another violent period of civil war, regionally based uprisings, and the appearance ofnew political forces, should some form of national cleavage occur. Such political events would have immediate repercussions on factional alignments in the Sierra Alta de Hidalgo and might even trigger off the class warfare between peasants and landowners so notably absent in this region during the Mexican Revolution. Whatever happens on the national level in the short run, however, the 'modernization' of all sectors ofagriculture and the accompanying process of class and regional polarization in Mexico will bring about the demise of the peasant bourgeoisie in remote, underdeveloping regions. Ironically, these landowners using backward technology, who first emerged in the Sierra Alta de Hidalgo and in other mountainous regions at the time of the liberal land reform under Juarez, and who subsequently took such an active part in the Mexican Revolution, now suffer under the very system which they helped to create. Indeed, the peasant bourgeoisie, a class so far largely neglected by scholars of rural Mexico, may soon disappear!

Epilogue

When I returned to Pisaflores for the seventh time in 1978, I no longer had to cross the Moctezuma River , separating the municipio from highway number 85, in a flat-bottom boat or an old dug-out canoe . A bridge many people had long dreamt about had become a reality ; the main pillars, which were started in 1975 , had finally been completed and a provisional timber surface allowed small trucks and cars to pass in the rainy season. When I arrived in town I discovered that a number of other improvements had also been carried out. The electrical system, previously run by diesel engine , had finally been connected to the main power line along the highway in Chapulhuacan ; the basketball court in the main plaza had been improved ; and a new, galvanized steel pipe now connected the water line of the main village to a small reservoir on a hillside overlooking Pisaflores. Most of the new prefabricated schoolhouses constructed in larger rancherias with government help in the sixties even had teachers . However, while the new bridge and the electrical system brought promises of further economic development , most day labourers of the municipio complained about the lack of steady work and the rising cost of living. These grievances are not typical of Pisaflores alone but reflect economic conditions in all of the so-called marginal or underdeveloped rural regions of Mexico. In response to this problem of growing unemployment in the rural sector, the federal government expanded its programme of public works. Numerous roads are now being built in isolated and depressed areas, some largely by pick, shovel, and wheelbarrow. In the municipio of Pisaflores, for example, more than a hundred men have been recruited to work in the construction of two new roads, one to Chalahuite and the other to the hamlet of El Rayo, both in the mountainous zone. However, unless offset by the creation of more permanent jobs, the road project may actually aggravate the problem of

153 Epilogue unemployment in Pisaflores. By paying more than twice the local wage, such public projects are helping to destroy the inefficient but labourintensive farms which have up to now provided the only source of employment for many destitute peasants. Another new development was the collectivization of the ejido of Pisaflores. For the first time since its official establishment in 1965, the members of this ejido (but not those of Garabato) received credit from a government bank to raise cattle and fruit trees and to introduce a simple irrigation project in the flat section of their ejido near the river. The new comisariado of the ejido, the son of a small-town merchant and a petty trader himself (also a former caretaker for the ex-governor) was given a regular salary to overlook these operations . He was also charged with paying daily wages to the rest of the members of the new collective ejido for clearing land, sowing pastures, putting up fences, and watering a new crop of papaya and avocado trees. However, this new collective format did not satisfy all of the ejidatarios. In 1977 three middle peasants and several day labourers who had already planted sugar cane patches or their own fruit trees were told that their plots would have to be destroyed to make way for the new pasture and better varieties of trees. They did not receive any compensation, while several better-off peasants who already owned a few head of cattle were allowed to keep and graze them in this new communal pasture. In addition, these peasants received higher wages than the other members as vaqueros ('cowboys') to look after a new variety of cattle purchased in common. The poorer peasants, who now worked at menial tasks, complained that their wages, established at a general meeting of the ejido, were lower than those of workmen finishing the new bridge. One day labourer told me that they were strongly discouraged from seeking work elsewhere in order not to lose their rights as members of the ejido. Two middle peasants, who were self-employed but did not own cattle, left the ejido when they lost their private plots, one to set up a small store in the cabecera, the other to work as a carpenter and a tenant farmer. These peasants were not interested in 'working for the government' for what is still less than the official minimum wage . At the same time, two landowning farmers who never perform manual labour retained their membership in this collective ejido, hiring day labourers to do 'their share of the work.' When the clearing of more land for cultivated pastures required additional hands, the comisariado then hired a number of peasants from outside the municipio on a temporary basis . Further problems arose when most of a large corn crop cultivated in common (the last one to be harvested before the sowing of fodder) was not

154 Epilogue distributed to the membership at large. Again, the poorest peasants, who had always combined wage labour with the cultivation of corn, complained that they were only given a small amount of corn, already partly decomposed after months of storage in an old stone building, while the 'good corn' was being used to feed the horses of the vaqueros or to pay off debts incurred by the ejido. These poor, wage-earning peasants, and now members of a collective farm supposedly organized according to the socialist principles of the Revolution, will have to wait a long time before they receive any additional 'profits' after paying off the interest on the huge sum of money used to set up this model farm . However, while sixty-odd members of the ejido of Pisaflores were being collectivized, an even larger number of peasants in the hamlet of Amolar, the most impoverished rancheria in the municipio, lost their rights to cultivate corn plots in a sociedad that had up until 1978 included all the people who lived in that village. The one better-off family of Amolar, consisting of two brothers who were middle peasants and who in 1972 already owned fifteen head of cattle between them, persuaded the municipal president to 'sell' them this sociedad. This made it even more difficult for the majority of men in that hamlet, already working periodically as peons for one of the wealthiest landowning farmers who owns a huge pasture bordering on the former sociedad, to practise subsistence cultivation. These and other cases of injustice or favouritism on the part of the new municipal government are again creating a political climate favourable to the support of political groups opposed to the PRI government. Between 1976 and 1978, left-wing schoolteachers, small groups of radical students from southern Hidalgo, and the representative of an independent peasant federation (ccr) have been separately agitating in the municipio. In 1977 a group of peasants from several hamlets, including a contingent from AmoJar and another from La Arena (see chapter 7), even met in the plaza of the cabecera to demonstrate against the municipal president and shout for his resignation. This and other incidents were followed by visits from the state police and 'routine' army patrols to check for unregistered firearms. However, more recent outside agitators have had even less success in Pisaflores. than their predecessors. Two teachers who invited representatives of a recently formed Marxist political party to their rancherias were transferred to another district closer to the state capital where the government could keep a close eye on them; the radical students did not return after they were summoned to the municipal offices and given a stiff warning 'not to meddle in local affairs without prior authorization,' and the woman organizer of the independent peasant federation only keeps sporadic contact with her local

155 Epilogue supporters. 1 Like earlier cases of social conflict involving class opposition, local peasant leaders (mainly middle peasants) have allied themselves to rival factional politicians only interested in having a greater influence in the local government. However, while political protest has remained sporadic and uncoordinated, a high rate of homicides continues to give the municipio a reputation for lawlessness and violence. An ejidatario from Pisaflores was bludgeoned to death by the sons of a landowner in a mountain hamlet after their father was accidentally shot with his own revolver during a brawl in the village . The son of another landowning farmer shot and killed one of the skilled labourers working on the road project when the latter got involved in a fist fight in a local bar. In both cases the guilty parties were not prosecuted 'because their families are friends of the municipal president.' 2 On the other hand, an old landowner from a mountain hamlet who did not enjoy such personal connections was arrested by two state policemen for having paid several hired killers (also local peasants) to assassinate a former employee for stealing coffee. This landowning farmer, an old-fashioned but wealthy ranchero , known as the local miser, was severely beaten and forced to walk barefoot to the cabecera , a three-hour trip. However, his captors were more interested in forcing him to pay them large sums of money than in administering justice. A peasant who shot another landowner (the brother-in-law of the wealthy landowner from Tripuente) for sleeping with his sister was subsequently pursued by hired killers as far as the house of a friend in one of Mexico City's slums . These incidents, some of which were recorded in one of Mexico's largest scandal sheets, are symptomatic of the high level of social tension, personal conflict, and economic disruption in rural Mexico. Nevertheless, many urban middle-class Mexicans still hold an idyllic and even romantic image of the Sierra Alta de Hidalgo. One such urbanite, an insurance broker for a large company who once came to the region with Padre Jesus, brings a group of friends, all young professionals, for a hiking tour through the mountains around Pisaflores once a year to 'enjoy the peace and tranquillity' of the countryside . Almost oblivious to what is happening around them, they continue to believe that the local inhabitants are 'quite happy' and 'lucky to live in such beautiful natural surroundings.'

Appendix: The Most Important Documents Found in the Archives of Jacala and Pisaflores

THOSE

RELATING

TO

POPULATION/DEMOGRAPHY

Population censuses (men, women, and children), listing place of residence, sex , age, marital status, occupation and literacy : 1869 (for municipio of Pisaflores, not Xochicoaco); 1872 (municipio of Pisaflores only, also listing place of origin and ' race' (i.e. language or ethnicity); 1873 and 1874 (for municipio of Pisaflores only); 1889 (not complete; several rancherias missing) ; 1890 and 1892; 1893 and 1897 (incomplete); 1912 Censuses of all adult males (those eligible to vote or to pay personal taxes) , listing literacy, age and occupation (sometimes marital status); 1852 (for municipio of Xochicoaco only); 1873 (for municipio ofXochicoaco only , not Pisaflores); 1893 and 1897 (incomplete; several rancherias missing); 1907 (incomplete) THOSE

RELATING

TO

LAND AND OTHER

PROPERTIES

Individual copies of land titles issued to communal land holders ('titu/os de adjudicaci6n'), from 1872 to 1893 A list of all such titles issued up until 1887, with names of those who inherited or bought these titles from original grantees Individual copies of records pertaining to the transfer of rural properties through sale or foreclosure, from 1890 to 1920 (incomplete) Censuses of all urban and rural properties (including moliendas), listing name(s) of owner(s) , and fiscal values: 1888, 1908, 1911, 1916, 1922, and 1930 Incomplete list of co-owners of hacienda of Pisaflores (valley of Pisaflores only), 1893 List of names of all co-owners(' co-due nos' or• accionistas ') and the numbers of shares held (or fractions thereof), 1888 and 1898 (hacienda ofTampochocho)

158 Appendix List ofall titles issued to co-owners ofTampochocho, listing numbers of lots issued, size of each lot in hectares and names of owners, 1902 Individual copies oflegal documents pertaining to last wills, boundary disputes and leins put on rural properties for loans (incomplete) Cattle censuses, listing all cattle destined for the slaughterhouse, including brand marks and distinguishing features, with names of owners of cattle and those who bought cattle for butchering: 1885, 1886, 1889, 1893, 1910, 1918 List of names of principal coffee or sugar cane producers of municipio of Pisaflores and names of landowners who have certain species of trees, suitable for the production of timber, 1907 List of all the aguardiente producers in the municipio, 1897 List ofall 'commercial establishments' (stores) and 'factories' (distilleries), 1906 List of merchants owing fees ('derecho de patente '), 1914 List of persons eligible to pay taxes on the production oflocal agricultural commodities, suchaspil6n,coffeeoraguardiente('igua/as'): 1870, 1873, 1876, 1881 OTHER

DOCUMENTS OR

RECORDS

List ofall men eligible to pay taxes for 'professions productive of gain' ('cuasantes de profesiones lucrativos'), with names and amount to be paid 1889, 1892, 1906, 1908 List of all articles of commerce entering the municipio, with contents, place of origin and destination and names of merchants, 1905 List of peddlers(' comerciantes ambulant es'), 1897 Summaries of census data (total population for each sex and school attendance figures): 1889, 1890, 1897, 1898, 1900, 1901, 1903, 1905 List of most important landowning farmers ('agricultores caracterizados '), 1910 Five issues of Instinto def Pueblo, small newspaper published in Pisaflores in 1877 and 1878

Notes

CHAPTER 1

2

3 4

5 6

7

I

See Charles Cumberland, Mexican Revolution: Genesis under Madero (New York, 1969), pp. 20-4; Frank Tannenbaum, Mexico: The Struggle for Peace and Bread (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1964), pp. 52-3; Jesus Silva Herzog, Breve historia de la revo/uci6n mexicana (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Economica, 1973), p. 30; Ronald Atkin, Revolution: Mexico 1910-20 (London: Granada, 1969), pp. 37-49; George McCutcheon McBride, The Land Systems of Mexico (New York: Octagon Books, 1971, first printed in 1923), p. 158. This process of concentration of land ownership accompanied a rapid commercialization of Mexican agriculture. See James Cockcroft, Intellectual Precursors ofthe Mexican Revolution ( 1900-1913) (Austin: University ofTexas Press, 1968), pp. 31-4; Charles Cumberland, The Struggle for Modernity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), chapter 8. See Roger Hansen , The Politics of Mexican Development (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971), pp. 176-7. Eric Wolf, Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century (New York: Harper and Row, 1969), pp. 32-6; Barry Carr, 'Las peculiaridades del norte mexicano, 1880-1927,' Historia Mexicana, 22(3) (1973), 234. Cockcroft, Intellectual Precursors, p. 36; Carr, 'Las peculiaridades,' p. 333 . Wolf, Peasant Wars, pp. 21-2 ; Hansen, Mexican Development, p. 157; Tannenbaum, Peace by Revolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 1966, first printed in 1933), pp. 136-7. See Cockcroft, Precursors, p. 6; Wolf, Peasant Wars, pp. 40-1; Pierre Beaucage, 'Les gouvernements industrialistes en Amerique latine et la nouvelle penetration imperialiste; le cas du Mexique,' Canadian Journal ofLatin American Studies, 3 (1978), 30.

160

Notes

8 Cockcroft, Precursors, pp. 228-9; Tannenbaum, Peace by Revolution, p. 136. 9 Roger Bartra, 'Campesinado y poder politico en Mexico,' in Caciquismo y poder politico en el Mexico rural (Mexico: Siglo Veintiuno, 1975), edited by Roger Bartra, pp. 24-30; Juan Felipe Leal, 'The Mexican State, 1915-1973, A Historical Interpretation,' Latin American Perspectives 2 (1975), 48-63; Anatoli Shulgovski, Mexico en la encrucijada de su historia (Mexico: Ediciones de Cultura Popular, 1972), pp. 39-43. IO Cockcroft, Precursors, p. 214; Gerrit Huizer, 'Peasant Organizations in Agrarian Reform in Mexico,' in Masses in Latin America, edited by Irving Horowitz (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), pp. 445-502. 11 Hansen, Mexican Development, p. 97; Shulgovski, Mexico en la encrucijada, pp. 482-91 . 12 See Michel Gu tel man, Reforme et mystification agraires en Amerique la tine. Le cas du Mexique (Paris: Maspero, 1971), pp. 45-62; Leal, 'The Mexican State,' p. 51; Carr, 'Las peculiaridades,' 334; Hansen, Mexican Development,f). 156. 13 See Shulgovski, Mexico en la encrucijada, p. 13; Robert Quirk, 'Liberales y radicales en la revolucion mexicana,' Historia Mexicano 2(1953),518. 14 Carr, 'Las peculiaridades,' 334. 15 See Arturo Warman, Los campesinos ( hijos predilectos def regimen) (Mexico: Nuestro Tiempo, 1972), p. 102; Gutelman, Reforme et mystification, p. 62; Bartra, 'Campesinado y poder politico,' 25. Some Marxist writers deal with this inconsistency by saying that the peasants were the principal, but not the directing force of the revolution. See Bartra, 'Campesinado y poder politico,' 25; Beaucage, 'Les gouvernements industrialistes,' 30. 16 See George M. McBride, The Land Systems of Mexico, pp. 82-102; Wolf, Peasant Wars, pp. 18-19; Cumberland, The Struggle for Modernity, p. 202; Jean Meyer, Prob/emas campesinos y revueltos agrarias( 1821-1910) (Mexico: Sep-Setenta, 1973), pp. 34, 227. 17 Roger Bartra, Estructura agraria y clases sociales en Mexico (Mexico: Ediciones Era, 1974), p. 137. 18 Anatoli Shulgovski, Mexico en la encrucijada, p . 41. 19 See Wolf, Peasant Wars, p. 18; McBride, Land Systems, p. 82; Hansen, The Politics of Mexican Development, p. 27; Stavenhagen, 'Aspectos sociales,' p. 43. 20 For a good description of how such ranchos operated in one region of central Mexico, see Luis Gonzales, Pueblo en vilo ( Microhistoria de San Jose de Gracia) (Mexico: Colegio de Mexico, 1972), especially chapter 1, and Tomas Martinez Saldana and Leticia Gandara Mendoza, Politico y sociedad en Mexico: el caso de Los Altos de Jalisco (Mexico: Sepinay, 1976).

161

Notes

21 Apart from the ranchos created through the settling of new land, this form of holding can also be related to the process of class differentiation that took place as a result of the influx of mestizo peasants into closed corporate Indian communities and the spread of plough cultivation. See Eric Wolf, 'Aspects of Group Relations in a Complex Society : Mexico ,' American Anthropologist 58 ( 1956), !056-78. 22 I have adopted this term from Rodolfo Stavenhagen, Las clases sociales en las sociedades agrarias (Mexico: Siglo Veintiuno , 1971), p. 95 , where he uses this phrase, together with the term 'rural bourgeoisie,' to refer to a contemporary stratum of commercial landowning farmers who combine commerce with agricultural activities. In his later article, 'Aspectos sociales de la estructura agraria en Mexico,' he dropped the term peasant bourgeoisie and retained that of• rural bourgeoisie' to define a new class of commercial middle men, residing in medium-sized cities, who have displaced the hacendados as a dominant class in rural Mexico. See Stavenhagen et al. Neolatifundismo y explotaci6n (Mexico: Nuestro Tiempo, 1968), pp. 53-4. The closest equivalent to the term ranchero would be the word ' kulak' used in the Russian context. 23 Eyler N . Simpson, The Ejido: Mexico's Way Out (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1937), pp. 490-2. For a more detailed discussion of my interpretation of these and other statistics, see chapter 9. 24 Peter Dorner, Land Reform in Latin America (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1971). 25 For example, Judith Adler (Hellman), 'The Politics of Land Reform in Mexico (With Special Reference to the Comarca Lagunera),' unpublished master's thesis, London School of Economics, 1970; Salomon Eckstein, El ejido colectivo en Mexico (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Popular, 1966); Paul Friedrich , Agrarian Revolt in a Mexican Village (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1970); David Ronfeldt, Atencingo (The Politics ofAgrarian Struggle in a Mexican Ejido) (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1973); Simpson, The Ejido: Mexico 's Way Out; Raymond Wilkie, San Miguel: A Mexican Collective Ejido (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1971). 26 McBride , The Land Systems of Mexico, pp. IOl-2. 27 See Eric Wolf, Peasant Wars, p. 39; Shulgovski, Mexico en la encrucijada, p. 41. 28 See Liisa North and David Raby, The Dynamics of Revolution and Counterrevolution : Mexico under Cardenas, 1934-1940,' Latin American Research Unit 2 (1977), 23-56. 29 Barry Carr, 'Las peculiaridades,' p. 334, quoted in North and Raby, The Dynamics of Revolution,' p. 33.

162

Notes

30 I carried out fieldwork in this region for both my master's and doctoral dissertations, between 1968 and 1974. This was later followed up with two summers of postdoctoral research in local archives (see preface). 31 The district of Jacala, the area of jurisdiction of ajefe politico before the Revolution, now only serves very minor judicial and administrative functions. 32 This municipio is the subject ofF.J. Schryer's 'Social Conflict in a Mexican Peasant Community,' unpublished doctoral dissertation, McGill University, Montreal, 1974. 33 Secretaria de lndustria y Comercio, Censo General de Problacion de Hidalgo, 1970, p. 4, t. I. 34 They especially resented the high level of taxes on the production and processing of local agricultural produce and the widespread corruption associated with the government of Porfirio Diaz. 35 Antonio Ugalde, Power and Conflict in a Mexican Community (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1970), chapter 4. 36 For a discussion of the social background of such intellectuals, see Cockcroft, Precursors. CHAPTER

1

2

3 4

5 6

2

Roger Hansen, The Politics of Mexican Development (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971), chapter 3; Cynthia Hewitt de Alcantara, La modernizaci6n de la agricultura mexicana, 1940-1970 (Mexico: Siglo Veintiuno, 1968). The local population has also suffered from the effects of endemic inflation, especially after the devaluation of the Mexican peso at the end of 1976. Hansen, The Politics of Mexican Development, p. 76. The nomadic tribesmen of this region included both Nahuatl and Otomi speakers who inhabited the larger region known as the Cibola. Cata logo de Construcciones Religiosas de/ Estado de Hidalgo (Pachuca, Secretaria de Hacienda Publico, 1932), with introduction by Manuel Toussaint. A map drawn up by Frarn;:ois Chevalier in Land and Society in Colonial Mexico (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963), also indicates that the Sierra Alta region was located inside the area inhabited by nomadic tribes during the early colonial period. This area is also known as the Sierra Gorda, Banda Oriental. Catalogo de Construcciones Religiosas. See section dealing with Chapulhuacan. From Jacala, settlers moved into the neighbouring municipio of La Mision.

163 Notes

7 8

9 10

11

12

13

14

Theodomiro Manzano, Geografia de/ Estado de Hidalgo (Mexico, 1897). Sections from this chapter dealing with the early history and the emergence of a rancho economy were previously published by Duke University Press . See F .J. Schryer, 'A Ranchero Economy in Northwestern Hidalgo,' Hispanic American Historical Review, 59 (3) 1979. Archivo General de la Nacion, Ramo Tierras , vol. 2255, Meztitlan. The name Pisaflores comes from the two words pisar ('to step on') and.flares ('flowers'). It was so called because of the abundance of pink blossoms from the palo de rosa tree which covered the valley at springtime . These and other statements concerning the early history are partly based on a handwritten account by a local merchant, Luciano Cruz, 'Apuntes hist6ricos de Pisaflores: Su fundaci6n , desarrollo econ6mico, social y politico hasta su erecci6n en pueblo,' unpublished ms ., n.d. (ca. 1910). Cruz, 'Apuntes .' The War of the Reform was the three-year period of civil war between liberals and conservatives which lasted from 1857 to 186o. A liberal victory was followed by foreign occupation of the port of Veracruz in 1862. This incident then led to the invasion of Mexico by French forces who established the short-lived empire of Maximilian of Austria. Sugar cane was locally processed in small mills known as moliendas, which consisted of a simple metal contraption called a trapiche with two revolving wheels to crush the cane stalks . The trapiche, still used in the region today, is set in motion by means of a long horizontal pole, to which a team of mules or oxen are hitched. The resulting sap (agua miel) is first boiled in low vats and then poured into moulds to produce pilon or piloncillo. These Italian immigrants, followers of Garabaldi in Italy, had come to Mexico because of political persecution at home. One family of French origin and an Arab who married a local girl later became Pisaflorenses as well. Arabic coffee trees were introduced on an experimental basis in the Sierra Alta in 1845. The first coffee orchard was planted in the valley of Pisaflores in 1859, but coffee beans produced in Pisaflores were not sold in Tampico, the nearest port of export , until 1871. Cruz, 'Apuntes.' In the early nineteenth century, when the area still belonged to the state of Mexico , Xochicoaco and Pisaflores were both under the jurisdiction of the district of Meztitlan, to be later transferred to the district of Zima pan . Pisaflores actually became a municipio, separate from Xochicoaco, in the 186os, prior to the formation of the state of Hidalgo in 1869, although it retained its legal status as rancheria. Xochicoaco was formally incorporated into an expanded municipio under the jurisdiction of Pisaflores one year after General Porfirio

164 Notes

15

16 17 18

Diaz defeated the government of Lerdo de Tejada. Many prominent farmers from the mountainous zone moved to the new cabecera, or continued to assume political posts under a new local government. In 1878, the municipio of Alamos also became part of that ofChapulhuacan. See El Instinto de/ Pueblo, 1 Oct. 1877. The institution of joint ownership (conduenazgo), whereby a number of people own shares in a property which remains undivided after the death of the original owner, is found when the subdivision by inheritance or sale has been carried out without the prescribed legal formalities. George M. McBride, The Land Systems of Mexico (New York: Octagon Books, 1971), pp. rn3-4. In the Huasteca region which borders on the Sierra Alta, the descendants of the original owner could sell to tenants, colonists, or other persons, for x pesos, shares which stood in direct relationship to the number of hectares in such an estate. Joaquin Meade, La Huasteca veracruzana (Veracruz: Ed . Citlaltepetl, 1962), p. 356. Such shareholders had the right to occupy and cultivate any unused portions of the property and also enjoyed the use of pastures, woods, and forests. Land surface was measured in amounts of maize that could be sown in an area specified by the system of metes and bounds. Solicitud de Las Moras, 18 Aug. 1874, Archivo Municipal de Pisaflores (abbreviated hereafter as AMP). El lnstinto de/ Pueblo, 15 Oct. 1877, p. 4. This figure is consistent with those obtained from population censuses carried out in 1869, 1872, 1873, and 1874, AMP.

19 In 1878 several enterprising rancheros from Pisaflores set up a limited company called Sociedad Agricola Porvenir, with 30 shares of I oo pesos each, in order to purchase virgin land in the municipio of Lolotla, Hidalgo, to be used for coffee and sugar cane production . El lnstinto de/ Pueblo, 8 July 1878. One of these rancheros later bought several shares in another small company set up in Jacala for mineral exploration. These joint ventures do not seem to have come off the ground, however. 20 This was largely due to the irregular terrain of the Sierra Alta de Hidalgo as well as the lack ofa communications network in such a mountainous region. These conditions were not conducive to centralized control and also tended to favour much smaller units of production. 21 The details of several more serious disputes over competing land claims, which involved the intervention oflawyers, are found in the records of the district judicial office in Jacala, Archivo del Juzgado de Primera Instancia (abbreviated hereafter as AJPI). 22 Testimonio de las diligencias mandadas protocolizar en eljuicio promovido sobre la division de la Hacienda de Tampochocho, 3 Oct. 1888, AJPI, Jacala.

165 Notes 23 Acta de eleccion de los miembros de la Hacienda de Tampochocho, elevado a instrumento publico, AJPI, Jacala , Libro de Protocolos, no. 15 . 24 Details concerning this assassination, including a statement by this witness that the gunman responsible for this murder had been paid by Evaristo Alvarado, were recorded in a lengthy investigatory report: En averiguacion del homicidio de Severo Rubio, 1899, AJPI, Jacala. News concerning these events even appeared in several daily newspapers in Mexico City: El Universal, 6 Nov. 1898; El Popular, 8 Nov. 1898; but charges of a cover-up were vehemently denied by the official state newspaper. Peri6dico Oficial de/ Est ado de Hidalgo, 8 Nov., 16 Nov . 1898. 25 Peri6dico Oficial, 20 July 1899. 26 Registro de una informacion ad perpetuam sobre hechos y derechos de la Hacienda de Tampochocho, AJPI, Jacala, Registro Publico, Ano de 1902, Seccion primera, no . 1 . 27 These data were obtained from various censuses of the municipio of Pisaflores. See appendix listing the most important documents found in the archives of Jacala and Pisaflores. 28 One hectare ofland had a fiscal value of anywhere from one to ten pesos, depending on the location of the rural property . The fiscal values of rural properties listed in a census compiled in 1908 (see appendix) were used as a common basis for comparison. Except for lots created as a result of the partition of the hacienda ofTampochocho, these fiscal values did not change from 1880 to 1911, when all such values were augmented (prior to 1880 local documents recorded land values in terms of the number of bushels of corn that could be sown thereon , following local custom). Because of the great variations in quality ofland, especially between valley and hillsides, this standard fiscal value is a more meaningful figure for comparing the real worth ofland than the actual size of rural properties in hectares. 29 This classification into social strata is also based on the amount of processing equipment, urban real estate, and other productive property owned. 30 Although these terms roughly correspond to the various categories listed in table 2, there was no consistency in the use of such labels as agricultor, labrador, peon de campo, or jornalero in official censuses. For example, while most 'small landowning farmers' were referred to as labradores at least once in the written records, they were often labelled asjorna/eros and sometimes as agricultores. In fact even some of the wealthiest 'large landowners' were sometimes listed asjorna/eros! Not only were there variations according to the type of census (electoral, general population, or for taxation purposes) carried out, but during the politically volatile revolutionary period nearly everyone, including the wealthiest landowning farmers, were listed as peones de campo!

166 Notes 31 'Full-time tenant farmers' is a residual category including all heads of house-

32 33

34

35

36

37 38 39

40

41

42 43

holds who produced cash crops or cattle and did not own land and who were also not members oflandowning families . There were considerable differences in the scale of operation among such tenants , ranging all the way from small family tenants who must have recently worked mainly for wages to capitalist tenant farmers. Their decreasing proportion in the population of this period represents both the process of purchase or inheritance of land (through marriage) by wealthier and more successful tenant farmers and the financial ruin of many smaller tenant farmers. AJPI, Jacala, Registro Publico. Alvarado also had the finest horses in the district and considerable real estate in the cabecera. From the personal diary of Coronel Cuauhtemoc Cordoba, unpublished n.d. (ca. 1925). According to the available archival records, owners of plots ofland ofless than 50 pesos' worth were always listed as day labourers (jornaleros) and such tiny rural properties were rarely passed on from father to son. Local records indicate that about 58 percent of the landowning farmers of the municipio born before 1875 were illiterate, but only one of these illiterate rancheros lived in the cabecera. After 1890, two hamlets in the mountainous zone also established three-grade primary schools. See John Womack, Zapata and the Mexican Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1969). The photographs of Zapata and Evaristo Alvarado of Pisaflores bear a striking resemblance. Memorias administrativas, 1890 and 1901, AMP. Peri6dico Oficial, 1 March 1904. In 1899 snow fell in Pisaflores and many coffee orchards were destroyed. The following summer many of the desiccated trees caught fire and most of the area thus destroyed was planted with maize. Interview, Antonio Resendiz, Pisaflores, 1973. For a discussion of the effects of coffee production on the social structure of another rural region in Mexico, see Pierre Beaucage, 'Anthropologie economique des communautes indigenes de la Sierra Norte de Puebla (Mexique),' Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology IO (1973), I 14-33. See Clark Reynolds, The Mexican Economy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), pp. 36,113; Roger Hansen, The Politics of Mexican Development, p. 69. There was, moreover, a sudden foreign demand for Mexican exports in response to the devaluation of the Mexican peso after World War 11. Highway no . 85 . People have been leaving the area on both a permanent and a temporary basis

167 Notes

44 45

46 47 48 49 50

51

ever since the building of the highway in the thirties . Small groups of men , most of them from better-off families, first went to work in the United States as contracted labourers during the Second World War. Migrant labour did not start on a really massive scale until the mid-fifties, however, when professional recruiters called enganchadores came to hire local day labourers to work on the large cotton and sugar plantations around Tampico and Matamoros . The change-over from the cultivation of cotton to sorghum (a type of fodder) and the increasing mechanization in many of these areas have reduced the demand for seasonal labourers. Since 1964 most people have boarded the third-class bus that passes through Chapulhuacan and Santa Ana for a six-hour trip to the national capital to work in construction, demolition, and in a few cases even agriculture . In the winter of 1973 every hamlet in the municipio had at least five or six young men away in Mexico City or on the coast. The government first finished the last stretch of road to the valley of Pisaflores. This was followed by other public projects in the main village (see chapter 8). Prior to 1974, this institute had only provided seedlings and technical advice. However, at the end of the term of office of Luis Echeverria, it started to provide credit for working capital to both small and large coffee producers and also bought coffee beans directly from the producers at guaranteed prices. Unfortunately the embezzlement offunds by higher executives in this government agency in 1978 has given a great deal of discredit to this organization. Secretaria de lndustria y Comercio, Censo General de Poblaci6n de Hidalgo, 1900, 1921, 193c, 1940, 1950, and 1970. Ibid., 1970. The population density for the municipio in 1930 was 65.81 persons per square kilometre (cuadro 1 , p. 4). The construction of this road was started in 1957 but did not reach all the way to the village of Pisaflores until 1970. No data are available for 1940. Censo agricola , ganadero y ejidal, 1930, 1950, and 1960. The preliminary data from the 1970 agricultural census indicate a further decrease in the number of predios, but many individual predios within the boundaries of the ejido set up in 1965, counted separately in 1960, were lumped together as a single predio in 1970. This phenomenon, sometimes referred to as self-exploitation, whereby petty producers are willing to work longer hours than if they were wage labourers has been analysed by the Russian economist A .V. Chayanov, The Theory of Peasant Economy , edited by Daniel Thorner, Basile Kerbley, and R. Smith of the American Economics Association (Homewood: Richard D. Irwin, 1966). Recently Juan Martinez Alier has shown that landowners may use this to their own

168 Notes

52

53

54 55

advantage, by converting their day labourers into sharecroppers or small cash tenants. Martinez, Haciendas, Plantations and Collective Farms (Agrarian Class Societies) (London, Frank Cass, 1977). A survey conducted by a group of Mexican students in 1971 indicated that about a third of the population of a group of villages (including the cabecera) could not afford to buy sufficient local staples (maize, beans, and coffee) necessary for three square meals a day . More than half of the people interviewed did not own shoes and had sandals or other items of clothing deemed to be in a state of bad disrepair. Most of the older peasants I spoke to complained that they were unable to buy meat or such luxuries as beer on the weekends , as they had in the past. My figures are based on a survey carried out while I was in the field as well as records available in the local tax office. Because local landowners generally underestimated the amount ofland they owned, I had to use a variety of written and verbal sources in order to reach the rough approximations indicated in figure 3. Unfortunately, the fiscal values of properties listed in 1973, many of them under names other than those of the real owners, could not be compared in a meaningful way with the data on the ownership ofland in the pre-revolutionary period. Certain tasks, such as the clearing of paths and the creation of a common pasture, are carried out by all the members in co-operative fashion. The question of payment of dues led to hard feelings and anxiety among the members of this ejido. Apart from a lack of information concerning the allocation of funds, all peasants, regardless of the amount of corn and other crops grown (or even if they only used the ejido lands to collect firewood) had to pay the same amount. CHAPTER

1

3

Village factionalism, the object of numerous studies by political anthropologists, can be defined as noncorporate conflict groups which have political functions. These factions have leaders who recruit their followers on the basis of diverse principles, such as kinship, economic dependence, and religious or ethnic affiliation. Ralph Nicholas, 'Factions: a Comparative Analysis' in Political Systems and Distribution of Power, ASA monograph no . 2 (London: Tavistock , 1965), pp. 27-9. Such factions have also been designated as 'quasi-groups' whose informal leaders are entrepreneurs competing 'commercially as well as for votes and influence .' See Daniel Gross , 'Factionalism and Local Level Politics in Rural Brazil,' Journal of Anthropological Research 29 (1973), 125 .

169 Notes

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

Also, Janet Bujra, 'The Dynamics of Political Action: A New Look at Factionalism,' American Anthropologist 75 (1973), 132-52. A number of recent scholars, influenced by the Marxist structuralist school of thought associated with Althusser and Bali bar, have attempted to conceptualize the class structure in contemporary rural Mexico in a more rigorous manner. See Roger Bartra, Estructura agraria y clases socia/es en Mexico (Mexico: Ediciones Era, 1974), and Pierre Beaucage, 'Anthropologie economique des communautes indigenes de la Sierre Norte de Puebla (Mexique),' Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology 2 and 4 (1973), 114-33, and 289-307. Non-capitalist relations of production have played a similar function in other regions of the 'third world.' See Ivar Oxaal et al. Beyond the Sociology of Development (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975), for a number of regional case studies. The role of large groups of people in the social division of labour is also part of this definition, as developed by Marx and further elaborated by V.I. Lenin. There is some disagreement among Marxist scholars, however, whether the concept of social class is as appropriate at the local as the national level. I believe that such an analysis can be fruitfully applied at the micro as well as the macro level. Theotonio Dos Santos, 'The Concept of Social Classes,' Science and Society 34 (1970), 166-93; Rodolfo Stavenhagen, Las clases socia/es en las sociedades agrarias (Mexico: Siglo Veintiuno, 1962), pp. 23-63. Ibid . Marx himself made a distinction between 'class-in-itself' and 'class-foritself' to distinguish between two stages in the development of the industrial proletariat, a class which he claimed would become aware of its common interests, but was ambiguous when referring to the peasants of France as only 'partly' a class, in his Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (New York: International Publishers, 1957). The development of many small coffee farms, regardless of the system of land tenure in Pisaflores, can be explained by the limits to expansion inherent in the cultivation of coffee in highly irregular terrain. See Pierre Beaucage, 'Anthropologie economique,' p. 123. Many Marxists, following Lenin's model of the decomposition of the peasantry in rural Russia at the turn of the century, speak of an• inevitable' tendency for a differentiation between poor, wage-earning peasants and rich, capitalist peasants to occur as a result of the introduction of commodity production and the increasing use of money. While this is frequently the case (it certainly was in the Sierra Alta in the mid-nineteenth century), local class structures also undergo changes quite different from what a mechanical application of Lenin's model

170

9

IO

11

12 13 14

15 16 17 18

19

Notes

would suggest. The emergence ofa class of small tenant producers in the Sierra Alta in a postwar boom , or the transformation of landowner-employers into family farmers at a later date, are cases in point. They could not be labelled as a full-fledged rural proletariat because they were also part-time subsistence cultivators. Some authors, using a rather simplistic class model, would not consider such a numerically large semi-proletariat as a separate class but rather as a transitional grouping gravitating towards the rural proletariat and the petite bourgeoisie. See Joaquin Noval, 'Acerca de la existencia de clases sociales en la comunidad pequena,' £studios (Revista del Cfrculo Jose Joaquin Parado, Universidad de San Carlos) (2) (1973), 31-41. Since the poor, landless peasants of the Sierra Alta, whatever they are called, retained the same structural features between 1880 and 1970, they have been analytically treated as a special type of rural proletariat. For a recent detailed analysis of the numerical importance and characteristics of the various sectors of Mexico's rural proletariat or 'landless peasantry,' see Luisa Pare, El proletariado agricola en Mexico (Mexico: Siglo Veintiuno, 1977). Jeffery Paige, Agrarian Revolutions (New York: Free Press, 1975), p. 49. Compadrazgo or co-parenthood is a form of ritual kinship established through such religious ceremonies as baptism, holy communion, or matrimony, involving one of the children of the co-parents who thereby becomes the padrino or godparent of the child. In Mexico, as in most of Latin America, the relationship between the godparent and the real parent has greater social significance than that between godparent and godchild. Hamza Alavi, 'Peasants and Revolution,' The Socialist Register ( 1965), 241-77. Beaucage, 'Anthropologie economique,' p. 123. Gerrit Huizer's thesis that a constant deterioration of standards ofliving or a sudden reversal after a period of improvement leads to rural unrest is certainly consistent with my observation of events that took place in Pisaflores in the 196os. Huizer, The Revolutionary Potential of the Peasantry (Lexington: Heath, 1972), pp. 143-4. Eric Wolf, 'On Peasant Rebellion .' International Social Science Journal 21 (1969). Hamza Alavi, 'Peasant and Revolution,' 274-5. All except two of these tenant farmers lived and worked in the mountainous zone in 1972. In fact, the survival of the middle peasants largely depends on the continued existence of such poor landowning farmers who cannot undertake modem cattle raising on a large scale. All three of these young men had been sent away to continue their education but returned to their home village because they 'didn' t like the city.' The education

171

20

21 22

23

Notes of the male children of the wealthier landowning farmers, most of whom eventually became professionals in other areas, tended to act as a 'siphoning off' mechanism, preventing the break-up of larger estates or leaving room for the upward mobility of other farmers in the municipio. See Paul Friedrich, 'A Mexican Caciazgo,' Ethnology 4 (1965), 190-209; also Luisa Pare, 'Diseiio teorico para el estudio del caciquismo actual en Mexico,' Revista mexicana de sociologia 34 (1972), 335-54. Friedrich, 'A Mexican Caciazgo,' p. 190. Eric Wolf and Edward Hansen have made similar observations about the hacienda system in the early nineteenth century. Although their analysis applies to the national level and to the large 'criollo' haciendas, some of their comments are applicable to the type of land tenure system found in the Sierra Alta region prior to the Revolution. 'Caudillo Politics: a Structural Analysis,' Comparative Studies in Society and History 9 (1967), 168-79. Quantitative data on the economic power of all the members of the peasant bourgeoisie between 1870 and 1910 (based on fiscal values of both rural properties and urban real estate) was correlated with the number of political posts held. Each political post occupied by a particular person was assigned a numerical value from I to 5, depending on its relative importance (e.g. 5 for municipal president, 4 for vice-president, and I for each term as member of the municipal council). A statistical analysis of706 cases revealed a Pearson Correlation Coefficient of 0.3541, which was significant at the 0.001 level. CHAPTER

4

1 Homenaje al General Nicolas Flores (Gobierno Del Estado Libre y Soberano de Hidalgo, 1971), p. 13. 2 Ibid., p. 30. 3 Jacala, the administrative centre and largest town of the Sierra Alta, was one of two places in Hidalgo that were specially honoured by Juarez himself as hijos predilectos de la patria ('favoured sons of the fatherland'), and presented with wooden plaques bearing this inscription. The best-known Juarista in Jacala was General Joaquin Martinez. 4 This is indicated by electoral records showing the number of votes received by competing candidates for municipal posts. Such 'free voting' (similar to that of any municipal election in Canada today) contrasts with the restrictive voting for only one government-approved candidate in rural areas dominated by the PRI in the last few decades. 5 El Instinto de/ Pueblo , published in Pisaf'lores in 1877 and 1878. Anonymous writers from Pisaf'lores also contributed articles to newspapers critical of the

172

6

7

8

9

JO

11 12

13

Notes

government well into the Porfiriato: El Estado de Hidalgo -Semanario Politico, Literario , Comercial y Agricultor, 9Aug. 1885, remetido mandado de Pisaflores por M. V.; El Combate, 8 Sept. 1898. Porfirio Dfaz, one of Juarez' generals who fought against the French, overthrew the government of Lerdo de Tejada when Lerdo announced that he would run for a second term of office. He then called for a new election, which he won by a landslide, using the slogan 'Effective Suffrage' and 'No Re-election.' Dfaz himself ended up being re-elected seven times! Margarito Mata took up residence in the mountainous zone, in the hamlet of Las Moras, with his older brother Clemente, during the French occupation of Mexico. They were officers in the 'imperialist army' under the command of General Rafael Olvera, in charge of the district of Jalpan. The Matas were reconciled to the liberal faction in 1867 and Margarito later supported Porfirio Diaz' revolt against Lerdo de Tejarda in 1876. This information is based on the recollections of older people alive at the time of this incident. The exact date and some details concerning this ambush were confirmed by a written report found in the regional archives. Instruida contra Gregorio Balderas y socios por homicidio de don Miguel Acosta, 22 Aug. 1903, AJPI, Libro de Exhortos, no. 55. This incident has become part of oral tradition. According to official records in Jacala, this constable was shot when attempting to arrest Nicolas' brother for disorderly behaviour and drunkenness.Nicolas had intervened in this arrest and had tried to persuade the constable to let his brother 'sleep it off' at home before a fight broke out. Subsequent investigation revealed that the constable had been shot by a third party, who was never caught. Criminal por homicidio, 22 Oct. 1895, AJPJ, Jacala, Libro de Exortos no. 79. Margarito Mata to president of municipal council, 16 May 1911, AMP. Fausto Cruz Morales, interview held in Pisaflores, 1975. Expediente no. 8- relativo a la aprehensi6n de Margarito Mata por el delito de rebeli6n, AMP. Mata slipped away to Mexico City and was reconciled to the Madero government with the help of a former friend, Jesus Silva, then provisional governor of Hidalgo. Although Mata subsequently tried to regain his political influence, local opponents, especially in Jacala, prevented his return to Las Moras. Mata was then appointed as military commander of three towns in San Luis Potosi, a position he held until around 1913, when he was apparently poisoned by personal rivals. According to the personal diary ofCuauhtemoc Cordoba, in possession of his daughter in Jacala. According to records on file in the old municipal archives of Pisaflores, Evaristo Alvarado provided 75 pesos for the revolutionary cause in 1912, one of the largest personal contributions in the municipio. (AMP.)

173 Notes 14 In this period of military mobilization, such rebel leaders were usually civilians who recruited their own soldiers. See Richard Roman, Ideologia y clase en la revoluci6n mexicana (Mexico: Sep-setenta, 1976), p. 26 . 15 Noradino Rubio, interview held in Mexico City, 1976. 16 Cuauhtemoc Cordoba, La Revoluci6n , 1910 a 1923 (Apuntes) n.d. These

17

18 19

20 21 22

23

24 25

26 27

unpublished notes, written by a close associate ofN icolas Flores, say as follows : 'Todos regresaron a atender sus trabajos de campo , pues en su mayoria las fuerzas revolucionarias bajo el mando del General Flores estaban compuestas de rancheros.' At least one member of the Rubio family (Crisoforo, the son of Severo Rubio), however, did support Huerta and even collaborated with his former personal enemy , Evaristo Alvarado. Homenaje al General Flores, p. 15 . Miguel A. Sanchez Lamego, Historia de la Revoluci6n Constitucionalista , quoted in Homenaje al General Flores, p. 19. Although Flores spared the lives of Evaristo Alvarado and his son , they were both shot by a firing squad in Jal pan later that year, upon orders of another revolutionary general . Homenaje al General Flores, p. 22 . Ibid., p. 23. The municipal office next came under the direction of another military commander of the convencionalista army, Mayor Teodoro Silva, a ranchero and tenant farmer from the hamlet of El Caracol in the mountainous zone. According to the official account published in 1971 , Governor Flores played a leading role in the partition of two huge haciendas, that of Ulupan in Mixquiahuala and El Zoquital in Atotonilco el Grande . (Homenaje al General Flores, p. 26.) However, according to an official government investigation carried out in the twenties, the division of the hacienda of Ulupan was never properly implemented; most of the land was divided among a few agrarian leaders , one of whom alone received seventy hectares. This situation later gave rise to violent conflicts between 'rich' and 'poor' within the ejido. Archivo de Governacion, Exp. vu/oII . 12(724.6/1). According to an interview with the son of this landowner, Pisaflores, 1973 . The few larger landowners who owned more than one rancho (Mata, Rubio, and Alvarado) entered into agreements with other landowning farmers to look after specific sections of their estates. These same rancheros/administrators continued to look after these farms after they had been expropriated and later bought sections of the scattered Alvarado estate. Several peasants were even prosecuted for desertion. Oficio de la Honorable Asamblea, 25 Jan . 1918. AMP . The main revolutionary leaders who came from these other municipios were:

174 Notes

28

29 30

31

32

33

Francisco Mayorga, Waldo Martinez, Eduardo Cisneros, Otilio Villegas, Cuauhtemoc Cordoba, all from Jacala; Victor Monter from Octupilla (near San Nicolas); Porfirio Rubio from La Mision and Nicolas Angeles from Chapulhuacan . Such military titles were abundant in the revolutionary armies that grew out of the anti-Huertista movement. Often 'generals' or 'colonels' were simply the leaders of small rebel bands officially recognized by Venustiano Carranza. Roman , Ideologia y clase en la revoluci6n mexicana, p. 26. Porfirio Rubio was originally from the town of San Nicolas, near Jacala, where his family also owned land. These two men already experienced difficulties during the Revolution. Villegas thought that Rubio did not fully contribute to the revolutionary effort while Rubio disapproved of the lack of discipline among soldiers under the command of other revolutionary officers. Such minor disagreements burst into personal animosity after the Revolution with the assassination of a good friend of Porfirio Rubio while Villegas was municipal president of Jacala. When the federal constitution was formally approved in January of 1918, Governor Flores refused to proclaim certain judicial reforms that would have lessened the powers of the state executive. This matter was subsequently fought out in the Supreme Court. Homenaje al General Flores, p. 26 . From 1920 to 1929 the threat of renewed civil war and anarchy, resulting from coups d'etat or regional revolts, was ever present. In 1920, a strike of railroad workers in the state of Sonora, which was put down by federal troops sent by Carranza, led to a secession of that state and a declaration by its governor, Adolfo de la Huerta, against Carranza. He was supported by Plutarco Calles and Alvaro Obregon, causing Carranza to flee from the capital. De la Huerta controlled Mexico as interim president until Obregon was elected as the new head of state. Three years later Adolfo de la Huerta staged an unsuccessful rebellion against an Obregon-Calles coalition. Obregon was assassinated in 1928 while campaigning for his election for a second term of office. This position enabled him to intervene in various judicial cases in Pisaflores involving the use of arms. The appointment and one such case are recorded in the municipal archives of Pisaflores. Minutario de oficios, 13 Oct. and 17 Oct.

1921, AMP. 34 During this period of office, Francisco Lopez, a renowned bandit and henchman

of the governor, not only terrorized southern Hidalgo but was allowed to sit as a member of the state legislature. See Ernest Gruening, Mexico and Its Heritage (New York: Appleton-Century, 1928), pp. 436-8. 35 Porfirio Rubio accused the federal government of being incapable of controlling banditry and blamed several army commanders for excesses committed in the

175 Notes

36 37

38 39 40

41

42

43 44

45 46

47

area under his jurisdiction . Alfonso Ordaz, a Rubio sympathizer, interview, Pisaflores, 1972. This story was corroborated by two other informants who were present at this incident. Caterino Rodriguez , interview, Pisaflores, 1973. Satumino Cediiio was an influential politician from San Luis Potosi who rebelled against his former ally, Lazaro Cardenas, in 1938. This interim government, not the last of its kind in local political history, was known as ajunta de administraci6n civil ('civil administrative council'). Valentin Rivera, interview, Atitalaquia, Hidalgo, 1973. According to Rubio, he was commissioned to organize the peasants of the Sierra Gorda region (the continuation of the Sierra Alta in the state of Que re taro) by president Calles himself. Interview , Mexico City, 1976. Several small tenant farmers stopped paying rents to Rodolfo for coffee trees planted in his land and set up an agrarian committee . This committee sent their petition to the state capital on 24August 1925. Archivo de la Reforma Agraria, ramo ejidal . Rodriguez, at that time a strong leftist, came to power after a violent electoral campaign between the Labour and Agrarian Party of Hidalgo and the Confederate Party, representing the powerful Azuara clique. See Gruening, Mexico and Its Heritage, pp. 434-9. Rodriguez was to dominate political life in Hidalgo right up until the election of Rojo Gomez during the Cardenas era. Daniel Bisuet (a day labourer from El Rayo), interview, Pisaflores, 1973. An evangelical sect had been successfully established in the main village since the 1890s. It attracted converts from a number of families, including one of Nicolas Flores' sisters who later married the local minister. While Protestantism had practical! y died out in the town of Pisaflores itself, about halfof the families in El Rayo still belonged to one of two rival Protestant denominations in 1972. Valentin Rivera, interview, Atitalaquia, Hidalgo, 1973. Every Sunday mule drivers from as far away as Rio Verde and Queretaro came to town. Merchants from other regions sold a variety of goods and bought aguardiente, pilon, coffee, and other regional products. Several local merchants also brought in imported luxury goods. In 1927 a telephone line was constructed connecting Pisaflores and several large villages in the municipio to Jacala. All the older men I interviewed in 1972 clearly remembered the prosperity of the municipio, and especially of the valley of Pisaflores. Ironically, this period of repression against peasants was also characterized by rabid anticlericalism, as 'revolutionary' strongmen , anxious to legitimize their position, attacked the Catholic Church, an institution that had already lost most

176 Notes of its economic power during the liberal reforms of the previous century. The Church in tum closed all of its churches in protest, an action that triggered off the violent Cristero rebellion in parts of western Mexico. See Anatoli Shulgovski, Mexico en la encrujicada de su historia (Mexico: Cultural Popular, 1972), translated by Armando Verdugo, pp. 52-7. 48 A copy of the original bill of sale is included in the Pisaflores file in the archives of the Reforma Agraria in Mexico City. CHAPTER

5

1 David Raby, 'Mexican Political and Social Development since 1920,' Canadian Journal of Latin American Studies 1 ( 1976), 34-9. See also Morris Singer,

2

3

4

5

6

7

Growth, Equality and the Mexican Experience (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1969), p. 17 . Michel Gutelman, Reforme et mystification agraires en Amerique La tine: le cas du Mexique (Paris: Frarn;:ois Maspero, 1971), p. 94. During his term of office, Cardenas also nationalized the oil industry, which brought hostile reaction from the United States and several Western European countries. One of the boldest moves of his regime, also aimed at foreign ownership, was the expropriation of the fertile cotton estates in the Laguna area of northern Mexico. These were turned into collective farms. This land reform prepared the way for the future development of a more efficient, modem form of farming within the private sector. Roger Hansen, The Politics ofMexican Development (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971), p. 36; Hiroji Okabe, 'Agrarian Reform in Mexico: an Interpretation,' Developing Economies 4 (1966), 171-94. Albert Michaels, 'Las elecciones de 1940,' Historia Mexicana 21 (1971), IOI. See also Pedro Carrasco, 'Tarascan Folk Religion: An Analysis of Economic, Social and Religious Interactions,' preprinted from Middle American Research Institution, Publication no . 17 (New Orleans: Tulane University, 1952). For a detailed description ofN azi and right-wing Japanese infiltration in Mexico during this period see Betty Kirk, Covering the Mexican Front (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1942), chapter 12. General Manuel Pelaez rebelled against Carranza in 1914, ostensibly in support of Villa , and controlled the oil-producing region around Tampico until 1917. Young Flores sold this liquor directly in Mexico City, transporting it in a hidden compartment in the bottom of his truck to avoid licence fees and tax duties. His main purchaser was a former army officer under whom he had served during the Revolution. This and other information about Nicolas Flores' younger half-

177 Notes

8 9 IO

11

12 13

14

15

16 17

18

brother was obtained through an informal interview with Luis Flores in Alfajayucan, Hidalgo, 1976. Valentin Rivera , interview , Atitalaquia , Hidalgo , 1973. Villegas held various posts, including that offederal deputy, during this period . In a personal interview with me, young Flores himself admitted he had introduced agrarianism in Pisaflores 'for political reasons.' This election is discussed in an interview recorded by Jesus Jauregui, who carried out research in Zimapan . See 'Autobiografia de un cacique del Mexquital ,' second appendix in Caciquismo y poder politico en el Mexico rural, edited by Roger Bartra (Mexico: Siglo Veintiuno , 1975), p. 200. Based on an interview conducted with several peasants who had some dealings with Nieto. The family naming system in Mexico, as elsewhere in the Hispanic world , consists of two surnames; the first surname is that of the father and the second one that of the mother, while an illegitimate child bears the first surname of the mother. Well-known public figures are often referred to by one or both surnames . Reyes (Christian name) Lamarca Manning (his two surnames) was the illegitimate son (hijo natural) of the daughter of Blas Lamarca, an Italian immigrant. His real father, whose last name was Manning, was an English engineer who came to Pisaflores at the turn of the century to do a survey for a proposed railway . Since he had no male offspring, Blas Lamarca adopted his own grandson who retained his mother's (and his adopted father's) last name. This statement is based on interviews concerning the occupation and economic activities of all members, including executive members , of the agrarian committees . A list of such members was obtained from records on file in the Reforma Agraria, Mexico City . The artisans and petty merchants also engaged in agricultural activities on a part-time basis . According to several informants who witnessed these events, young Flores hid. in the bushes on two separate occasions, while his friends shot it out with their opponents . Pedro Hernandez, one of the peasants who migrated to Pisaflores in this period, interview, Pisaflores, 1973. One of Porfirio Rubio' s collaborators, a landowning farmer in the village of Santa Ana, told me in 1976 that he received several shipments of arms destined for Porfirio Rubio, directly from Lazaro Cardenas, in the 1930s. Rival caciques loyal to the government also received arms in this way . This shoot-out was vividly described by three different informants who either personally witnessed this event or heard about it later that night from some of the participants.

178 Notes 19 According to one of the daily newspapers in Mexico City, this assassination was carried out by a gunman who apparently mistook them for somebody else. El Excelsior, 22 Dec . 1936. 20 Rojo Gomez became a prominent politician during and after Cardenas' presidency, not only in Hidalgo but on the national level. 21 After this incident, he was immediately escorted to Agua Zarca under a heavy escort made up ofRubio' s soldiers. 22 This transfer of title was accomplished in 1932 . In a letter to the then department of agrarian affairs in 1935, the tax collector of Pisaflores refers to these women as amasias, though later records also refer to one of them as Nieto's former wife. 23 This letter is on file at the Reforma Agraria, Mexico City. 24 For example, Nieto also owned a hotel in Jacala. 25 El Observador (Peri6dico de la Vida Popular), Pachuca, Hidalgo, 6 Jan . 1936. 26 Pedro Hernandez, interview, Pisaflores, 1973. 27 This organization was headed by Gabino Biscavaro on the national level. He was later assassinated. 28 Severino Orosco, interview, Pisaflores, 1972. These facts were verified by inspecting several letters in a file of personal correspondence. 29 Genaro Guillen, interview, Higueron (Pisaflores), 1972. 30 At the end of his period of office, Cardenas stepped down in accordance with the constitution, which does not allow re-election. 31 Albert Michaels, 'Las elecciones,' p. IO). 32 Ibid., p. to2 . 33 This shows that factional leaders on the local or regional levels are in turn clients of higher-level patrons. 34 Epifanio Trejo, interview, Pisaflores, 1973. 35 The blacksmith, interview, 1973. 36 Almazan proclaimed that he was in favour of extending civil rights to women (at that time women were not allowed to vote or hold public office in Mexico). This incident shows that he was thus able to win the support of many women, even in the countryside . 37 The sudden popularity of Almazan, whose platform was not really that different from the PRM (Avila Camacho declared himself to be a practising Catholic and opposed to Communism), surprised Cardenas. Although the government of Mexico has since continued to present an image of a multi-party democracy, this was not the last time that its official party used such tactics as the closing of polling stations, fixing ballots, or declaring as invalid the outcomes oflocal elections not to their liking. For a further analysis of such tactics , see Bob Anderson and James Cockcroft, 'Control and Cooptation in Mexican Politics,'

179 Notes

38 39

40 41

42

International Journal of Comparative Sociology 7(1969),11-28; Judith Adler Hellman, Mexico in Crisis (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1978), chapter 4. Actas de la Honorable Asamblea, 1941, AMP. He moved back to his wife's home town where he took over the management of his former father-in-law's pig farm. Young Flores subsequently became the fiscal auditor for the state of Hidalgo. Interviews with several peasants from Pisaflores who used to cultivate their subsistence crops in El Coyol. This version of how the ambush was executed was held by the majority of people I interviewed. This conscious collaboration is certainly consistent with the apparent willingness of the former companions of Reyes Lamarca to enter into negotiations with Porfirio Rubio after this incident. Epifanio Trejo, interview, Pisaflores, 1973. CHAPTER

6

1 Fausto Cruz, interview, Pisaflores, 1973. These men had all been companions during the Revolution and had al I supported the de la Huerta revolt in 1924 together with Nicolas Flores. A number of political assassinations in Jacala resulted from this factional split. Modesto Rubio, interview, Jacala, 1976. 3 Valentin Rivera, interview, Atitalaquia, Hidalgo, 1976. 4 The blacksmith later discovered that part of this land had actually been legally sold by a previous municipal authority, but without notifying the peasants of the hamlet of Casas Viejas who had long cultivated this land. In this case too, the unofficial spokesman for this hamlet and the most active peasant in this struggle was a middle peasant. Matias Trejo (the son of this peasant leader), interview, Miraflores (Pisaflores), 1973; Tomas Ramirez, another peasant originally from Casas Viejas, interview, Pisaflores, 1973. 5 Most of the municipal elections that occurred in Pisaflores, as well as the numerous case studies on local level politics in other parts of Mexico, illustrate this principle. See Luisa Pare, "Disefto teorico para el estudio del caciquismo actual en Mexico,' Revista mexicana de sociologia 34 (1972), 335-54; Eyler Simpson, The Ejido: Mexico's Way Out (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1937), chapters 17, 20, 23, and 25; Henry Torres-Trueba, 'Factionalism in a Mexican Municipio,' Sociologus 19 (1969), 134-52. 6 Valentin Rivera, interview, Atitalaquia, Hidalgo, 1973. 7 According to one informant, whose father was a member of Alvarado's faction, the blacksmith actually fired one of the shots in this assassination attempt which took place in his father's store. 2

180

Notes

8 Valentin Rivera , interview, Atitalaquia , Hidalgo, 1973. 9 The blacksmith, interview held in 1973 . 10 The blacksmith now lives in a small town in southern Hidalgo, where he

11 12

13 14

15 16 17

18 19 20 2I

22

combines an administrative job as municipal secretary with a small business in welding. His three sons have all been able to attend high school and receive some technical training (two hold jobs in Mexico City and one owns a small restaurant) , something that would have been almost impossible if they had been brought up in Pisaflores. Porfirio Rubio died in 1958, leaving two sons, who have continued to live in Agua Zarca. These caciques were 'bureaucratized' with the more effective integration of these remote regions into the national system . See Pablo Gonzales Casanova, La Democracia en Mexico (Mexico: Ediciones Era, 1965) , pp. 40-1. See published interview by Jesus Jauregui, in Roger Bartra, Caciquismo y poder politico en el Mexico rural (Mexico: Siglo Veintiuno , 1975), pp. 200-1 . As federal deputy, he was harshly condemned by a local correspondent of the Communist newspaper El Machete, who mistakenly took Rubio to be a senator. An article published in 1937 accused Rubio of being a local cacique who 'brutally exploits the peasants' and persecuted socialist schoolteachers in this region . Quoted in David Raby, Educaci6n y revoluci6n social en Mexico ( 1921-1940) (Mexico: Sep-setenta, 1974), pp. 172-3 . According to an interview held with Rubio in 1975, he ' was closer to Cedillo than to Cardenas' and visited Cedillo at his estate in Palomas on several occasions. Including director of an ejido bank and promotion manager of an institute of agricultural research. This enmity, based on purely personal issues , dates back to the twenties when Martinez was tax collector in Pisaftores for one year and allegedly seduced one of the ex-governor's sisters . At that time they also belonged to opposing local factions; Rubio was connected with the group allied to Agua Zarca while Martinez supported the pro-Villegas faction . Salvador Rojo, interview, Chalahuite, 1972 . Secretaria de Industria y Comercio, Censo General de Poblaci6n de Hidalgo, 1950 and 1960. Jose Arevalo, interview, Pisaflores, 1972 . This secretary, now an elderly man, had also served as municipal president as a young man just after the Revolution. At that time he owned some land in the hamlet of La Pena and was also a member of the pro-Rubio of Agua Zarca faction . Apart from several contributions in cash, he donated a wall clock for the primary school, four large hanging petroleum lamps for the local dance hall, and concrete benches for the central plaza.

181

Notes

23 The ex-governor, interview, Mexico City, 1972. 24 Primitivo Rangel, one of the peasants closely associated with the 'photographer', interview, Pisaflores, 1971. 25 His name, which appears on a census carried out in Pisaflores, was subsequently published in the official government bulletin of the state of Hidalgo. Peri6dico Ojicial de/ Estado de Hidalgo, 24 May, 1966. 26 Lamarca, who later became secretary and comisario of the new agrarian committee, claimed that he secretly helped the agrarian group with money in 1958. However, this was vehemently denied by several of the peasants who took part in the invasion of 1960. 27 Some of these original peasant members claim that their leader, the 'photographer,' was even run out of town by Lamarca. Primitivo Rangel, interview, Pisaflores, 1971. 28 See Bob Anderson and James Cockcroft, 'Control and Cooptation in Mexican Politics,' Internationa/Journal ofComparative Sociology 7 (1969); Roger Hansen, The Politics of Mexican Development (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971), p. 231. 29 Before an application for land distribution is finally processed by the department in charge of land reform in Mexico City, it is first reviewed by this state-level commission. CHAPTER

7

1 These two hamlets belonged to a singlefracci6n, a political and administrative sub-unit of the municipio, represented by ajuez auxiliar. 2 Fausto Cruz, interview, Pisaflores, 1976. 3 Actas de la Honorable Asamblea Municipal, May, 1936, AMP. 4 According to municipal records, the payment of such rents were only sporadically enforced. Assembly meetings for both 1927 and 1931 mention the existence of municipal properties where peasants owned coffee trees or grew com without paying rents to the local government. 5 Actas de la Honorable Asamblea Municipal, 1938, AMP. 6 This information was provided by two peasants, one of them originally from Piedra Ancha, in Jacala, 1976. 7 A peasant from La Arena, interview, Pisaflores, 1973. This incident is also mentioned in a letter written by his widow to the municipal authorities, asking for his death certificate in 1945. Esquivel S. Vasquez Sanchez to municipal president, 15 May 1945, AMP. 8 This landowner was the descendant of a man who had come to Pisaflores in the 1870s, when he claimed more property in the mountainous zone than any other outsider.

182

Notes

9 Archivo de la Reforma Agraria, ramo ejidal (Piedra Ancha), Mexico City . IO Leopoldo Ramirez, interview, La Arena (Pisaflores), 1972 . 11 Secretaria de lndustria y Comercio, Censo General de Poblaci6n de Hidalgo, 1960. 12 The peasants of Las Moras and of this viilage across the state line are ethnically

13

14 15 16

related; both were once Indian-speaking villages and both were infiltrated by mestizos who migrated to this region during the nineteenth century. Conchintlan is really called Agua Zarca. I have used this pseudonym in order to avoid confusing this village in San Luis Potosi with the village in the state of Queretaro (home of Porfirio Rubio) which has the same name. Although the official booklet published in honour of General Flores in 1971 mentions Mata as an ' exploitative landowner,' many peasants recall with nostalgia stories told by their parents and grandparents about the benevolence of Mata and their access to such municipal land. These same peasants were unanimous in their condemnation of a former estate supervisor who later became a landowning farmer himself and who apparently used to whip his day labourers if they did not obey his orders . Noradino Rubio, interview, Mexico City, 1975 . According to several interviews with peasants from Las Moras, La Arena and Zapotal de Moras, 1973 . Fausto Cruz, interview, Pisaflores , 1972 . There are various records relating to this dispute, going back to 1883 when ajoint commission met near Las Moras to establish the exact boundaries between the states of Hidalgo and San Luis Potosi. Margarito Mata acted as representative of the newly created municipio of Pisaflores on this occasion. Letter from Mata to municipal president, 1 May,

1883, AMP . 17 A large group of evangelical missionaries, headed by several Americans, pros-

18 19 20

21

elytized in this area during the fifties. Their converts gained access to such external resources as medical supplies, salaries (for peasant preachers) and money or material for the construction of 'temples• and other small public projects . This document is on file in the Reforma Agraria , Mexico City, ramo comunal (Agua Zarca, San Luis Potosi). This governor was a prominent politician originally from Matlapa, a town close to Tamazunchale . Fausto Cruz, interview , Pisaflores, 1972 . Another schoolteacher was also killed because of his involvement in these political disputes . This gave Las Moras such a bad reputation that they were unable to obtain another teacher for their three-grade primary school until 1972 ! Fortino Acosta, the son of one of these tenant farmers and himself a middle peasant, interview, Garabato, 1972.

183 Notes 22 Preciliano Campuzano, interview, Garabato, 1972. 23 The usual strategy of such landowning farmers was to invite landless peasants to clear their land for a mil pa without charging the customary rents, if such peasants would also sow fodder between their com plants just prior to harvest. 24 Information about this young peasant was obtained from several interviews conducted with him in Piedra Ancha, La Arena, Pisaflores, and Jacala between 1972 and 1978. 25 Provisional agrarian committees were set up in Tripuente, Gargantilla, Zapotal de Moras, and Xochicoaco, resulting in the organization of a corresponding 'organization of small proprietors' by landowning farmers in the region. 26 Interview with one of the peasantsofLaArena,Arena(Pisaflores), 1978. In 1976 I also interviewed the two peasants from Piedra Ancha in the district jail in Jacala. CHAPTER 8

Padre Jesus objected more to the ideology than the actions of the Mexican government and in particular disapproved of the outspoken atheism of many teachers working in public schools. 2 This chapter is primarily based on extensive interviews with the people involved in these events, including the pastor. I witnessed some of the conflicts myself (see preface). 3 Confederaci6n Latinoamericana Sindical Cristiano. This organization, which had its headquarters in Caracas, Venezuela, later joined together with two small independent peasant organizations in Mexico to form the Authentic Labour Front (FAT). The latter has since moved into a Marxist direction. 4 Pedro Hernandez, a middle peasant and local union official, interview, Pisaflores, 197 1. 5 Padre Jesus, interview, Mexico City, 1972. 6 Particularly bitter conflicts occurred in the hamlets of Rancho Nuevo, Caracol, Las Moras, and La Arena. 7 In 1964 Padre Jesus learned of a Canadian volunteer association and invited a group ofuniversity students to Pisaflores to help him in these projects during the summer months . This organization, the Conference oflnter American Student Projects (CIASP), originally founded in the United States, was later disbanded. 8 Actas de La Honorable Asamblea, October 1964, AMP. 9 Emilio Delgado, interview, Taman, San Lufs Potosi, 1971. IO This letter is on file with the Reforma Agraria, Mexico City (ramo ejidal, Las Moras). The 'false promises' mentioned in this letter refer to an attempt by Padre Jesus to establish a small colony in the state of Veracruz. Many peasants

184 Notes

11

12 13 14 15

16

17

18

19

20 21

22

23

of his union had already contributed sums of money for the implementation of this project, but it was abandoned when it became apparent that the proposed colony would involve conflicting rights with an ejido in the same area. The priest himself certainly felt threatened: the ex-governor once warned him he might be assassinated. I have also heard about an unsuccessful attempt against the priest's life from other informants. Alfonso Ordaz, interview, Pisaflores, 1973. Donaciano Morelos, interview, Pisaflores, 1973. Peri