For God and Revolution: Priest, Peasant, and Agrarian Socialism in the Mexican Huasteca

by Mark Saad Saka

Overview

During the early 1880s, a wave of peasant unrest swept the mountainous Huasteca region of northeastern Mexico. The rebels demanded political autonomy for their pueblos, protection for their churches, and restoration of the land, water, and foraging rights that were a part of their heritage—issues with nationwide implications that foreshadowed the revolution of 1910. This account traces the material and ideological roots of the rebellion to nineteenth-century liberal policies of land privatization and to the growth of a radical anarchocommunist agrarian consciousness.

Elite landholders had held sway in the Mexican state of San Luis Potosí since colonial times. In the nineteenth century their seizures of agricultural lands clashed with the rising political consciousness of the Huastecos, who rose up to fight for their way of life. Saka further traces the roots of the Huasteco rebellion to the grassroots religiosity that had developed in the course of centuries of local clerical leadership as well as to a nationalism derived from Huastecan participation in Mexico’s wars against the United States in the 1840s and France in the 1860s.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780826353399
Publisher:	University of New Mexico Press
Publication date:	09/01/2013
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	208
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

Mark Saad Saka is associate professor of history at Sul Ross State University, Alpine, Texas.

Table of Contents

Maps ix

Preface xi

Acknowledgments xiii

Introduction xv

Chapter 1 The Cultural Geography of the Huasteca Potosina 1

Chapter 2 From Pueblo to Nation: The Huasteca Potosina, 1810-1848 17

Chapter 3 Peasant Nationalism and Agrarian War, 1848-1856 33

Chapter 4 War, Foreign Invasion, and Revolution, 1856-1876 51

Chapter 5 The Liberal Assault, 1856-1884 63

Chapter 6 The Capitalization of the Countryside, 1856-1884 83

Chapter 7 Toward a Mexican Theology of Liberation: Padre Mauricio Zavala 103

Chapter 8 Death to All Those Who Wear Pants!: The Huastecan Peasant War, 1879-1884 123

Conclusion 143

Notes 145

Glossary 167

Bibliography 169

Index 177