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Política
Nuevomexicanos and American Political Incorporation, 1821â"1910
By Phillip B. Gonzales UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS
Copyright © 2016 Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8032-8828-7
CHAPTER 1
Nuevomexicano Politics and Society on the Eve of the American Conquest
New Mexico in the early 1840s operated politically as a department of the Republic of Mexico. The official structure of the New Mexico Department had some equivalencies to the American territory while displaying important differences. Both were founded on a legal-rational framework, itself a hallmark of liberal modernity. Governance headquarters were seated in a regional capital, Santa Fe. A governor (jefe político) was appointed by the Mexican president just as the American president appointed the governor of the U.S. territory. The governor occupied his seat of office in the historic Palace of the Governors on the Santa Fe Plaza. Nuevomexicanos enforced the right to select the departmental governor from among their own ranks. Small chance of that happening in the American territory, where the president tended to reserve the appointment as a patronage reward to one who had supported his election or worked for their shared party. The New Mexico governor appointed an executive staff, including the secretary (department deputy), collector of special taxes (revenues derived from interstate and international commerce), and director of internal revenue. An important executive duty involved the granting of common lands to individuals and groups of family petitioners.
The New Mexico Department included a legislative assembly (asamblea de diputación departamental) just like the American territory. Historically it was granted by the Mexican Congress to satisfy citizen demands for relative autonomy and to counterpose the extensive powers of the governor. An 1843 congressional decree mandated an eleven-member asamblea for departments, with a minimum of seven allowed. A minimum age of twenty-five was required to be a member. Historian Joseph Sánchez describes the duties of the assembly as "establishing taxes with congressional approval, regulating spending, and appointing necessary employees. The asamblea regulated the acquisition, alienation, and exchange of property with legislation in accordance with colonization laws. Attending to the departmental infrastructure was a priority, and the asamblea provided for opening and maintaining roads. Among the many responsibilities of the asamblea were the promotion of public instruction, the recruitment and maintenance of the army, and the establishment of municipal corporations." The assembly journals reveal additional duties: organizing town judiciaries; deciding on district seats; settling disputes over assembly membership; and setting forth the organization of municipal laws and regulations according to the Bases Orgánicas. "Congress retained the right to review and, if need be, annul legislation or actions by the asambleas," Sánchez notes, identical to the American territorial system.
Juan Gómez-Quiñones characterizes politics in the far northern regions of Mexico as "Mexican Republicanism on the Frontera." In contrast to what prevailed in the American territory, New Mexico did not have a system of popular elections. Vocales (assemblymen) were selected in an indirect election by members of the junta electoral (electoral body), who came from the ranks of propertied men and were appointed by the governor by district. Replacements were elected by the outgoing session in staggered terms. Deputies met on a weekly basis during a term. Traveling from far-flung settlements to attend sessions in Santa Fe was no easy journey, yet assemblymen stood committed to what they deemed the "sacred duty" of representing the interests of the people. Vocales were supposed to be paid for their service, as in the American system. The department treasury was generally insufficient to provide full or steady salaries. Gifts and the appropriation of public resources, including land, often served as remuneration.
Both the U.S. territory and the Mexican department sent a delegate to represent them in the halls of Congress in the national capital. Governor Melgares convened in 1821 without authorization of any national office forty electors to name a seven-member provincial council tasked with creating the congressional delegate position. A brief hiatus in filling the post followed. The large land holder Rafael Sarracino assumed it in 1830. The centralist 1835 Constitution sought to give the weak position some teeth. The delegate's primary duties came to lie as counsel to the governor and assembly. The governor during the department's last electoral meeting under the Mexican flag named three individuals to a commission so that they could appoint the next regular delegate to the assembly and his substitute as well as five new members and three alternates.
The Mexican state strove to effect regional attachment to the national center. According to Joseph Sánchez, Nuevomexicanos in 1821 "had scant understanding, and cared little, about the meaning of a republic." It began to sink in after the nascent Mexican government disseminated a decree throughout the country to celebrate independence. Governor Facundo Melgares received an order from the national capital in December 1821 for him and other New Mexico officials to take an oath of allegiance to independent Mexico. Nuevomexicanos put on a fittingly enthusiastic commemoration. Speakers at the Santa Fe Plaza praised the Three Guarantees of the Revolution — Religion, Union, and Independence — under cloth bunting and the national flag. The alcaldías (mayorships) swore loyalty to Mexico. Santa Feans celebrated the coronation of Iturbide as emperor of the Mexican regency. In two months they were hailing the triumph of the republicans and a constitutional government. Nuevomexicanos celebrated the fifteenth anniversary of Mexican Independence as well.
The Three Powers: Ricos, Officers, and Priests
Three distinct sectors controlled New Mexico's governance by the 1840s. The power of each derived from the Revolt of 1837. The Mexican department had less autonomy than a territory, much less a state. A significant tension arose from the fact that Mexico remained a "country of regions," while the United States managed its territories on the model of Great Britain's sustained bureaucratic administration of the colonies. Mexico's chronic political instability, weak economy, and primitive communications subverted effective oversight of the periphery. While villagers held tight to familial and local ties, an "exaggerated regionalism" joined to the divisions of race and class to form one of the country's "most intractable problems during its early decades." Mexican histories quote a moderado's contemporary lament that "there has not been, nor could there have been, a national spirit, for there is no nation."
The Santa Fe asamblea received a steady stream of official notices regarding political affairs in Mexico. The departments of Puebla, Oaxaca, and Yucatan threatened or mounted secessionist movements while Sonora persisted in virtual civil war. More prosperous states fought off central control as well. The administration of the moderate liberal President Joaquín Herrera resisted the trend in the 1830s of moving toward national centralism. In Santa Fe El Payo (the Rustic) de Nuevo Méjico praised Herrera and assailed the deposed President Santa Anna "as the chief of a party founded on vice, prostitution and brigandage." The paper pledged to reproduce official communications of the "supreme general government." It would support the politics of autonomy of the departments by publishing the reports of their honorable assemblies, prefectures, and courts. The proclamations showed how to promote "liberty, equality, individual guaranties and the division of powers."
Nuevomexicanos favored political autonomy in the face of irregular funding from the central government for running the department. Department officials received sparse salaries for their public service. Lack of resources kept the military from adequately protecting the villages at times of battle with surrounding tribal bands. Resentment of the national Congress grew because it turned a deaf ear to New Mexico's claims for greater self-governance. The assembly asked to retain more of the public rents. It also petitioned for the privilege of waiving fees for export products, both to no avail. Modest requests for special appropriations to manage public lands were rejected. The assembly cautioned the treasurer to economize. Father Antonio José Martínez's 1831 appeal to the national Congress pointed to the assembly's lack of capacity to deal with regional problems and complained of the vague definition of the separation of powers among the governor, the assembly, and local governments. The barrister and territorial judicial assessor, Antonio Barreiro, lamented the power of the assembly as "null and insignificant."
The Mexican Congress renewed a centralist constitution in 1835. The powers of states were abrogated and department councils mandated to report directly to the Congress. Tension between national and regional loyalties broke out painfully in New Mexico in 1837.34 The president appointed as governor of New Mexico a native of Mexico City, violating the custom since 1827 of Nuevomexicanos choosing their own governor. Governor Albino Pérez had orders to bring the department under tighter central control, and he complied by replacing the assembly with an advisory council, ordering prefects to report to him, imposing various taxes, and effecting other executive controls. Bishop José Antonio Laureano de Zubiría, headquartered in Durango, was enjoined to reinforce centralization, which he did by extracting coin from parishioners. An 1837 federal decree gave additional power to jefes político. Pérez sparked resistance when he had an alcalde arrested for not obeying a reversal of his decision in a court case. A crowd liberated the alcalde from his jail cell and fled to a mountain stronghold.
Three to six thousand lower-class Mexicans, military officers, Pueblo Indians, and large land owners moved on Pérez. The so-called Chimayó Revolt flared for over three weeks. The rebellion had "religious overtones" as grassroots Catholics attacked priests who had raised the costs of saving souls by enforcing church fees and regulating burials. The outbreak led to the assassination of Governor Pérez, his cabinet, and collaborators. Former Taos alcalde and militia lieutenant colonel Pablo Montoya led Taos area resisters. Two other Montoyas, Abad and Desiderio, and Truchas nativo Antonio Vigil sent circulars to mobilize communities. A rebel pronunciamiento swore to "God and the Nation and the Faith of Jesus Christ" that the land would be defended "to the last drop of blood." Rebel forces appointed José Gonzales governor of the revolutionary government; they negated Pérez's Department Plan with its onerous taxes; and they called their autonomous district a cantón.
The triumphant coalition soon split apart. Anti-centralists called for a complete break from the national government. Moderates pressed for a program of fair representation in Mexico City. Liberals favored reinstatement of the federalist constitution of 1824 with popular elections. Some sentiment was expressed for having the United States annex New Mexico. The rebel government randomly jailed persons not actively opposed to Pérez. Priests were forced to bury people in the church edifice in violation of an edict against it. A counterrevolutionary movement coalesced in the Río Abajo below the capital of Santa Fe. The Plan of Tomé called for the restoration of order and loyalty to the Constitution and its laws. A Río Abajo public figure was appointed commander of the movement. A "Liberating Army," joined by outside military aid, acted as agent of the Mexican state and guarantor "of the national constitutional order." The restored department command moved to put down the Chimayó Revolt.
Those who actively opposed the revolt established political dominance over New Mexico. The moderado Manuel Armijo became governor and mopped up remnants of the rebellion. The final encounter occurred on January 27, 1838, at the Battle of La Cañada. José Gonzales was captured and executed. Rebel leaders were executed by decapitation .41 The revolt failed to dislodge Mexican centralization. Historian Andrés Reséndez convincingly argues that as a result of the Chimayó Revolt the boundaries of three ruling sectors became more clearly defined than before. Their members composed the minority of New Mexican society who could read and write. They were in this regard New Mexico's version of what specialists in Spanish American history call los letrados, a special learned class of men whose literacy empowered them to interpret and manipulate the written word "on behalf of the masses."
An aristocracy of large land owners, the vernacular rico class, which made up 5 percent of the population, held primary economic power in the department. The basis of rico wealth lay in the wide expanses of pasturage, primarily in the river-bottom Río Abajo (southern) district with some such pockets in the northern Río Arriba district where Santa Fe sat. Rico rancheros raised cattle, horses, and mules, although sheep constituted the basis of their wealth. Profits from mutton (not wool) may hardly have compared to American advantages from livestock, but they made for a stratified order in New Mexico. Rico families held title to large land parcels received originally as personal grants for military and administrative service to the crown and the later Mexican government. An expanded demand for sheep and their products at the turn of the nineteenth century, spurred by the fiscal and market policies of the Mexican-Bourbon reforms, supported rico class consolidation. Large-scale sheep owners drove their stock to the Mexican interior and occasionally to California by 1800. Sheep operations expanded from 1821 to 1846. Thousands of head were driven biannually to markets in Durango and the mining districts of Chihuahua and Zacatecas. Sheep formed a general economic staple well before 1846, often the medium of exchange and payments. The personal resources of the landed gentry were indispensable to the support of the departmental administration.
Politically, the ricos and their allies in the military constituted the Nuevomexicano version of Mexico's hombres de bien (men of goodwill, men of good breeding, well-born men). The hombre de bien category originated among Mexico City's rising middle class. Hombres de bien were men of means who rose to political dominance in the centralist decade of 1835–46. They posed as ideal citizens of Mexico, each the kind of "gentleman" that "the electorate was always urged to vote for by all parties in every election campaign." Such a man was typically white, a property owner, in a profession that permitted investment capital or professional employment. Hombres de bien upheld the Catholic faith but favored secular elections and believed that election to public office should be restricted to their civilized class of property owners or to those above a certain income level. They desired economic growth and valued political stability, social harmony, the rule of law, social order, and public morality. In this vein, they helped dismantle the federal republic of 1824 because of its chaotic mass-based support. They opposed the 1840 Mexico City movement to restore federalism once it appeared as a bloody "caldron" with criminals committing acts of vandalism. Hombres de bien leaned toward a moderate variety of liberalism. Much like moderados, they claimed to stand above the rabble "mob."
Upper-class Nuevomexicanos represented the typical hombre de bien ideologically. In an essay published in 1848, Capt. Donaciano Vigil used the term to mean New Mexico's "men of higher quality." Consistent with both moderado and conservative outlooks, New Mexico's hombres de bien who participated in the 1837 counterrevolution condemned the Chimayó Revolt for its disrespect of the Mexican state and its ruthless violence. Governor Manuel Armijo entrenched himself into what Reséndez calls New Mexico's "political demiurge." Armijo publicly condemned the tumultuous factions that in "anarchy, ruin, and desolation, shatter[ed] the national unity to which we [in New Mexico] are tied in sweet obedience to a free, paternal, and magnanimous government which fortunately leads us." In stressing social order, Armijo proclaimed that fraud and deceit could never prevail "against truth and justice," for "the people ought to be undeceived by error and be certain of the constitutional laws that raised this territory to the rank of department, which puts it equal in pleasures and rights with the rest of the republic." Armijo charged the rebels with "maliciously and falsely" opposing Pérez's taxes "to satisfy villainous and invidious passions working for private interest." He declared in favor of the central state, emphasizing that the taxes authorized by law would "positively prohibit abuses ... being a particular attribution of the only supreme legislative power that has the faculty of doing so when the necessities of the country demand it." Armijo thus dismissed the homeland identity of autonomy that motivated the Chimayó Revolt.
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Excerpted from Política by Phillip B. Gonzales. Copyright © 2016 Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS.
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