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Popular Politics and Rebellion in Mexico
Manuel Lozada and La Reforma, 1855â"1876
By Zachary Brittsan Vanderbilt University Press
Copyright © 2015 Vanderbilt University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8265-2046-3
CHAPTER 1
Honorable Thieves, 1824–1856
In the wake of the Wars of Independence in 1824, the region newly designated as the state of Jalisco demonstrated an apparently smooth political transition from colonial to republican governance. Despite a history of unrest that includes an 1801 indigenous uprising in the region's northwest corner led by a mysterious individual remembered as "El Indio Mariano," and by wartime occupations of Guadalajara by Mexico's most famous insurgent, Father Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, a general sense of calm characterized the region. Such was generally the case across much of Mexico for the next thirty years, despite the ongoing and considerable upheaval in the highest levels of government. The general consensus among historians is that the fragmentation of the colonial political and economic apparatus, aided by slow population growth coming out of the Wars of Independence, reduced demographic pressure and restored significant autonomy to regional polities. Paradoxically, for a while at least, the inconsistent implementation of a new regime of federal law and order may have enabled rural stability.
An analysis of the material and nonmaterial core of daily life in rural Jalisco during the first thirty years of independence reveals a social milieu that is consistent with other places in Mexico. Limited population growth in most of the region did not portend a Malthusian crisis. Much of Jalisco's seventh canton operated with great political autonomy, relatively free to adhere as much or as little as desired to decrees emanating from Guadalajara or Mexico City. This was especially true of land reforms and early state attempts to turn presumably communal Indians into private landholders. Towns and villages in the area issued titles of individual land ownership at their discretion. Disputes over property boundaries, especially instances in which haciendas encroached on indigenous lands, were not infrequent, but these cases were settled locally and usually without armed conflict.
In the absence of consolidated state power in rural Mexico, another institution, the Catholic Church, proved much more influential. Remote mountain communities scarcely appear in civil records—a reflection of their autonomy—but most featured a chapel of some kind and observed many Catholic teachings alongside indigenous traditions. Remarkably, the church, like the state, largely failed during the early days of the Republic to establish a regular presence of personnel in the region. Rural communities chose to perpetuate Catholicism of their own accord, reflecting a cultural identification with the institution. This colonial holdover—with its ubiquitous structures and practices, core set of beliefs that could unite communities across caste and class, and variety of devotional celebrations and feasts—proved to be a formidable source of social glue across rural Mexico well into the nineteenth century. The indigenous communities of Jalisco's seventh canton proved no exception to this tendency.
Yet for all the apparent stability that characterized those first thirty years after independence, signs of unrest became increasingly widespread by midcentury. Modernizers of all political stripes in the government, along with wealthy merchants in the private arena, sought to accelerate economic growth in Jalisco, generating a push to bring the seventh canton under the effective control of legislators in Guadalajara. State forces began to appear more regularly in the foothills surrounding the primary route of commerce in an attempt to curtail the endemic banditry that presented an ostensible threat to business and good governance. Violence flared, and previously anonymous individuals like Manuel Lozada gained notoriety in the press for their exploits (characterized as banditry), some imagined and some very real. Rural residents confronted difficult decisions with regard to which side best protected their interests. Justice on the frontiers of Mexico could look very different depending on the beholder. Indigenous communities did not uniformly adhere to conservative politics, mapping neatly onto the emerging ideological divide between conservatives and liberals, but they recognized in the accelerating changes of the mid-nineteenth century a liberal state defined by increasingly ambitious rhetoric rendered hollow by limited local implementation.
Liberals may have imagined clear goals for Mexico's future as a nation, but they failed to demonstrate a place in that future for a significant portion of the seventh canton's residents. By late 1855, after the victory of the Revolution of Ayutla (1854–1855) and amid hardening ideological lines, it became clear that Lozada and his armed followers represented for a broad swath of rural society a viable alternative to the liberal project. Beyond the indigenous communities and mestizo towns that supplied workers for area haciendas—areas traditionally frequented by Lozada—prominent merchants living in Tepic eyed more drastic means of protecting their interests. Eustaquio Barrón and William Forbes, founders of the Barrón y Forbes Company, sought out Lozada as a sort of hired gun. In addition to the obvious financial incentives for each party, this otherwise unlikely pairing constituted a peripheral closing of ranks against an increasingly intrusive political center. The soon-to-be rebels in Tepic had not yet issued a political program of their own, but they were not prepared to sacrifice their local autonomy for an uncertain future.
Inauspicious Beginnings: Tepic's Early Road to Statehood
Political divisions in Jalisco during the mid-nineteenth century were more than just imaginary lines on the ground. It is certainly true that borders between states and cantons were chronically unstable. Territorial limits remained controversial and ill defined throughout the period under study as ranch owners, town residents, Lozadistas, and government soldiers regularly crossed borders to lay claim to neighboring pieces of terrain or towns. But changing political designations were part of not just a strictly technical process associated with liberal and conservative conflict but also a social, historical one. Over the course of the Lozadista rebellion, the defense of local autonomy became increasingly intertwined with the creation of a state known as Nayarit. Manuel Lozada and his followers did not initiate their rebellion as a quest for statehood, but they appropriated an admittedly federalist conceit to enhance the status of their conservative movement.
Writers of the 1824 federal Constitution created the state of Jalisco and established its political boundaries in accordance with the colonial territory known as Nueva Galicia. This territorial designation, which had held up for over three hundred years of colonial rule, slowly disintegrated over the course of the nineteenth century. Today the state of Nayarit is a relatively compact state in western central Mexico, roughly equivalent in size to North Carolina. It shares relatively short borders with Sinaloa to the north, Durango to the northwest, and Zacatecas to the east. Jalisco, Nayarit's most prominent neighbor, wraps around the majority of Nayarit's southern and eastern borders. Although the southern and northern boundaries are marked along the meandering paths of the Ameca and Cañas rivers, respectively, much of the eastern boundary resembles the edges of a jigsaw-puzzle piece cut out of the mountainous western Sierra Madre. To the west, Nayarit possesses an extended coastline on the Pacific Ocean (see fig. 4). Much of this coastline consists of salty marshlands, with only the town of San Blas serving as an active port of entry. Most economic activity occurs along Nayarit's southern coast and border with Jalisco, where nearby Puerto Vallarta draws in a sizeable tourist trade. Large hotels and resorts now dot the Pacific shores of Nayarit, where Nueva Vallarta has expanded dramatically during the past decade. Inland, the city of Tepic sits away from the new highway that connects the metropolitan center of Guadalajara with Puerto Vallarta, yet it remains a bustling capital city of nearly three hundred thousand people. Apart from serving as the political center of Nayarit, Tepic functions as a regional economic center and stopover for goods and people moving north and south between coastal Mazatlán in Sinaloa and Guadalajara along the Pan-American Highway.
One hundred and fifty years ago, Nayarit's political borders and economic orientation looked much different. Although Guadalajara functioned as the largest economic engine in the region, and most goods traveling over land from Guadalajara to the Pacific coast passed through Tepic, their departure and entry point was San Blas rather than Mazatlán or Puerto Vallarta. No reliable road connected Mazatlán to Tepic, and Puerto Vallarta had not been developed into a serviceable port during the colonial and early republican periods. Tepic was the only municipality in the vicinity to have a formal town council staffed with a mayor, councilors, and a trustee, but surrounding villages and towns remained off the political and administrative grid. Most importantly, the state of Nayarit did not yet exist in any formal sense. Instead, it formed an integral piece of Jalisco known as the seventh canton. Northern and western borders with Sinaloa, Durango, and Zacatecas were already established much as they are today, but the canton itself sat on the periphery of the Jaliscan center, economically oriented toward the market that was Guadalajara and the port of San Blas.
The federal Constitution of 1824 formalized the existence of the state of Jalisco with eight cantons (roughly equivalent to US counties) containing twentysix departments. Authorities designated five departments (Ahuacatlán, Compostela, Tepic, Sentispac, and Acaponeta) within the jurisdiction of the seventh canton, the territory that would later become the state of Nayarit. For the most part these designations corresponded to colonial territorial demarcations and represented a very limited alteration of political orientation. Until 1851 the district court for Tepic was located in Guadalajara, a clear indicator of the strength of the state government in judicial matters. Unwilling or unable to expend the resources necessary to place a representative in Tepic, state officials established the largely symbolic post in the capital. By midcentury, however, the state had stepped up efforts to administer its most far-flung canton. Officials attempted, for example, to reduce transportation costs for goods traveling between Guadalajara and the port in San Blas with limited investment in commercial infrastructure. By 1852, Governor Joaquín Angulo had successfully set aside funding to improve the road connecting Tepic to San Blas, and he subsequently encouraged the initiation of regular stagecoach service between Tepic and Guadalajara. Officials also agreed to install a judge in Tepic in June of 1851 but reduced both the responsibilities and the normative salary of the position by 25 percent in the move from Guadalajara. Judge Buenaventura, the first magistrate nominated to take the post, protested the reduced salary and requested further financial aid to facilitate his transfer to Tepic. State officials balked at the request and cancelled the move, if only temporarily. By midcentury, the state's attempt to consolidate territorial control clearly manifested itself in Tepic, if only on a very limited basis.
Next-Door Neighbors a World Apart: The Sierra de Álica at Midcentury
If the state had gained a marginal foothold in Tepic in its efforts to marshal the flow of goods between Guadalajara and San Blas, the nearby Sierra de Álica, an imposing array of mountains and canyons, remained beyond its reach. Only treacherous footpaths traversed the inhospitable terrain, linking small indigenous villages and connecting them with haciendas and small towns in the foothills. It was not quite the dry, desolate badlands of Northeastern Brazil, but the comparison, especially from the perspective of military officers pursuing Lozada in subsequent years, is particularly apt. Apart from the infrequent police or military incursion, state officials had little interest in the comings and goings of the region's residents.
The Catholic Church, on the other hand, had a measurably stronger if somewhat neglected presence in some of the mountain communities. Foothill towns like San Luis and San Andrés each possessed chapels constructed of grasses and weeds that could be mistaken for huts, whereas Pochotitan enjoyed a more formidable adobe structure with beams. These structures, which priests in Tepic considered indecent and only periodically visited, had been maintained since Mexico's independence but required residents of more mountainous villages to walk a considerable distance to receive religious services. In terms of religious practice, indigenous communities of the Sierra de Álica observed Catholic conventions that had been adapted to traditional religious celebrations (mitote ceremonies) over the course of the preceding centuries. This religious syncretism dated back to the sixteenth-century arrival of Franciscan missionaries, who by the mid-seventeenth century had established houses of worship throughout the Sierra de Álica, including smaller towns such as Mesa del Nayar, Jesús María, Huaynamota, Santa Teresa, and Atonalisco. The Catholic Church initially had limited success attracting converts, and throughout the seventeenth century friars were occasionally killed by local residents. The church probably did not achieve a lasting presence until sometime in the eighteenth century. But by the nineteenth century, the long history of hosting Catholic missionaries meant that religious officials were relatively integrated into the daily existence of indigenous communities.
This integration can be measured in a few ways. Cora and Huichol people, who constituted the largest indigenous populations in the Sierra de Álica, traditionally spoke different dialects of the same language family, sharing a cultural and historical ancestry befitting their close geographic proximity. Nonetheless, the majority also understood Spanish, even if some did not speak it well. The spatial organization of mountain villages also marked the Catholic imprint, as ceremonial plazas inevitably featured a Catholic church to one side, easily the largest and most impressive structure in town. Although most residents lived in dispersed homesteads radiating out from the central plaza, they would convene at the plaza to hear visiting friars. The declining presence of the Franciscans in the early nineteenth century created something of a Catholic void; some chapels fell into ruin as the secular church largely failed to establish a regular presence. Although priests often lamented the ongoing worship of false idols, such as the sun and the moon in Huichol communities, they simultaneously noted that many continued to pursue the Catholic doctrine. Even in the early 1850s, after decades of freedom from Catholic evangelism, Huichol Indians generally baptized their children, celebrated marriages, and buried their dead in accordance with Catholic practice. Despite fluctuating numbers of religious personnel living in the Sierra de Álica during and after the Wars of Independence (a state-led count of population in 1855 found that the seventh canton of Jalisco housed thirteen permanent parishes), rural residents continued to blend indigenous and Catholic ceremonialism throughout the nineteenth century. Very little is known about Manuel Lozada's religiosity during this period, though it is possible that he got married in the early 1850s. At some point—the actual date is unknown—Lozada paid Father González, a parish priest who served in the early 1850s in Jalisco (the town and parish seat near Tepic, not the state), one hundred pesos to not publish banns in Jalisco and instead travel on two occasions to Lozada's hometown in San Luis, where the confession and public ceremony were held. The concerted effort by Lozada to sanctify the matrimony in San Luis instead of Jalisco may well point to the importance of locating important Catholic rituals closer to a historically underserved population. As will be seen below, such behavior is consistent with Lozada's larger campaign on behalf of the residents of the Sierra de Álica to elevate the profile of San Luis as a religious center in the 1860s and early 1870s.
If the first thirty years of independence marked a lull in church activity in the Sierra de Álica, the 1854 ordination of a new bishop in Guadalajara, Pedro Espinosa y Dávalos, marked something of a revival. A native of Tepic, Espinosa detested the lack of Catholic representation in rural communities and embarked on a personal tour of the Sierra only months after assuming his new post. His visit, accompanied by the parish priest of Tepic, Ignacio Castro, provides a revealing assessment of the region. In addition to the topographic features that included deep canyons and hot, arid passes "with paths no wider than a bandage," Espinosa and Castro encountered many locals who gave them a warm reception. The ecclesiastical visitors were initially somewhat alarmed by the lack of clothing worn by the Coras, but this only enhanced their surprise and relief when they discovered that these same people knew the sign of the cross, the Sunday prayer, and the Ten Commandments. Buoyed by a consistent interest in his services, Espinosa performed numerous confirmations, held masses, and took confessions—sometimes before hundreds of assembled Indians in places like Jesús María and Huaynamota or, on other occasions, before as few as one or two individuals encountered along the winding mountain paths.
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Excerpted from Popular Politics and Rebellion in Mexico by Zachary Brittsan. Copyright © 2015 Vanderbilt University Press. Excerpted by permission of Vanderbilt University Press.
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