To Die in this Way: Nicaraguan Indians and the Myth of Mestizaje, 1880-1965
336
To Die in this Way: Nicaraguan Indians and the Myth of Mestizaje, 1880-1965
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Overview
Through interviews with indigenous peoples and records of the elite discourse that suppressed the expression of cultural differences and rationalized the destruction of Indian communities, Gould tells a story of cultural loss. Land expropriation and coerced labor led to cultural alienation that shamed the indigenous population into shedding their language, religion, and dress. Beginning with the 1870s, Gould historicizes the forces that prompted a collective movement away from a strong identification with indigenous cultural heritage to an “acceptance” of a national mixed-race identity.
By recovering a significant part of Nicaraguan history that has been excised from the national memory, To Die in This Way critiques the enterprise of third world nation-building and thus marks an important step in the study of Latin American culture and history that will also interest anthropologists and students of social and cultural historians.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822398844 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 07/07/1998 |
| Series: | Latin America otherwise |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 336 |
| Lexile: | 1500L (what's this?) |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Jeffrey L. Gould is Professor of History and Director of the Center for Latin American Studies at Indiana University. He is the author of To Lead as Equals: Rural Protest and Political Consciousness in Chinandega, Nicaragua, 1912–1979.
Read an Excerpt
To Die in this Way
Nicaraguan Indians and the Myth of Mestizaje 1880â"1965
By Jeffrey L. Gould
Duke University Press
Copyright © 1998 Duke University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-9884-4
CHAPTER 1
"¡Vana Ilusión!": The Highlands Indians and the Myth of Nicaragua Mestiza, 1880–1925
An Indian girl of 18 years old came to tell us all about the suffering her people [the Guatusos of Río San Juan] endured and that many people treated them badly, they treated them like monkeys, like wild animals; more than half of her people had died from these treatments.... The Indian girl came with a child, crying, and she told the Bishop how she had been sold to a woman for forty pesos. —Bishop Bernardo Thiel (Costa Rica), reporting on his observations of the slavery of Guatuso Indians in San Carlos, Nicaragua, 1882
In order to help the indigenous caste emerge from the state it is immersed in ... it is vital to provide this race with some kind of industry to whom they could provide 20,000 to 30,000 workers and learn to love to labor and to live in settlements. —Gregorio Cuadra, jefe político (departmental governor), Matagalpa, 1880
It is notable that around here there are a multitude of people who live dispersed and isolated and mosdy without work, without any known means of subsistence, without hope and without a future. It is thus very necessary to apply the law so that they must move to settiements. —William Reuling, jefe político, Matagalpa, 1897
In the disgraced Matagalpa that hosted organized fanaticism [there occurred] a caste rebellion against civilization; thirsty for blood they attempted to exterminate civilized people. —Editorial in El Ferrocarril, 1882
I'm 70 years old and I'm going to live another 50 years so I can go on making revolutions. —Toribio Mendoza, Indian rebel leader, 1884
Following Mass on August 4, 1881, most of the congregation walked over to attend the inaugural ceremonies of the new telegraph office. The telegraph would connect Matagalpa, a mountain settlement of 3,000, with Managua, 140 kilometers to the southwest. After several speeches lauding the government, town, and progress, the two telegraph operators tapped out their message and awaited the response. None came. One of the operators, Alejandro Miranda, shook off his shame and disappointment and set off on horseback to the valley town of Metapa to see where the problem lay. Because Metapa still had communication with Managua, Miranda rode back up to Matagalpa following the line. After riding for seven hours he found the problem—six posts had been torn down and the lines cut. As he stared at the damage an old man approached and informed him that the Indians, as they had on March 30, once again were laying siege to Matagalpa. The old man told him: "It's that piece-of-shit telegraph, they screw those poor folks and make them work for nothing, and what's more, they ran off the Jesuits and prohibit them from making chicha" [a corn- and sugar-based alcoholic drink].
Miranda was worried, but not entirely surprised. A few days earlier a band of 200 Indians had attacked the village of Esquipulas, thirty kilometers south of Matagalpa, and a week earlier an Indian band had defeated a military patrol in the Cañada of Yúcul. Many families had left Matagalpa in fear of an invasion, but others thought that they would be safe in town. As he arrived at the outskirts of the city, Miranda could hear the shouts of the Indians in praise of their chief and in condemnation of the government: "¡Viva Lorenzo Pérez, Muera la Gobierna!"
On the afternoon of August 8, the townsfolk looked up to the mountains and could make out the Indian positions. The women and children were rushed to the cabildo (town hall) and to the priest's house and a few people snuck out of town to try to reach Metapa to wire for reinforcements.
At seven-thirty the next morning the skies darkened with tafistes (spearlike arrows) as two groups of several hundred Indians each came down from the hills and occupied positions in the city's abandoned south side. From their base in the Laborío church, throughout the day, some 3,000 to 7,000 Indians advanced through the town. The 170 soldiers and volunteers defending the town counted only a good defensive position and rifles (repeating and single-loading) in their favor, but they enjoyed the superiority in weapons (the Indians had hunting rifles and shotguns with the women carrying the gunpowder) for only a brief two hours. The garrison's commander, Captain Villalta, ordered firing to cease when ammunition ran low.
All night long, the ladinos peered out to see the glow of ocote (a type of pine) torches throughout the rest of the town. From across enemy lines, the Indians howled (like hungry wolves in the words of a government soldier) threats against the ladinos: "Tomorrow we will see those ladinos, we will see what happens to them." Captain Villalta began to lose hope. Embittered he exclaimed: "By tomorrow we will all be dead because of that son-of-a-bitch telegraph."
The next morning the Indians attacked again. Shortly after noon, as the rebels prepared another attack and the townsfolk were about to use up the last of their ammunition, reinforcements miraculously appeared on the horizon. "We saw the troops from Managua approaching from the Laborío side of town. We were overcome with relief and everyone shouted 'Viva el Gobierno!' and the shooting began with renewed vigor." The eighty troops from Managua led by Captain Inocente Moreira, armed with a canon and repeating rifles, battled for three hours, claiming the city street by street. The Indian forces were not only taken by surprise; they were tricked by Captain Moreira into believing that the troops came from León to support them. In a letter captured by government forces, the Indian leader Lorenzo Pérez explained to an ally,
The sad part was the betrayal when 200 Managuas loaded with ammunition and a cannon came in and passed our outpost by the León entrance. So our troops started firing and then one of their officers told our leaders that we shouldn't shoot at them because they had come to fight on the side of the nation and that they believed them because they saw that half of them had white emblems on their clothes, and that's the way that they let them advance. It was that military plan of betrayal that allowed them to give us that terrible blow, so that in one hour they killed one hundred and fifty of our soldiers.
The cannon ripped apart the Indian positions. Of thirty Indians holed up in one house, cannon balls killed twenty-two. By nightfall, the Indian forces retreated into the mountains leaving behind 400 to 500 dead. Fewer than thirty ladinos died in the fighting. Within days 500 well-armed government troops arrived in Matagalpa and fanned out into the mountains in search of the rebels.
President Zavala participated in strategy planning and followed the troop movements closely. In a letter to the commander of military operations, he scolded him for not carrying out his orders to destroy all homes and crops:
In the report that you gave me regarding the expedition in Yúcul, I did not see that you had destroyed huts or cultivated lands. It is necessary that you look after this matter because only in this way will we be able to obligate the Indians to surrender unconditionally.
Government troops killed hundreds of Indians during the several months of this scorched-earth campaign. By February of 1882 the troops had caught most of the Indian leaders and had executed many. Some thirty years later the memory of the insurrection was still fresh in the minds of the Indian survivors. A German Nicaraguan son of a coffee planter recounted how plantation workers who had fought in the rebellion enjoyed reminiscing:
We had encircled them in Matagalpa, and not even an armadillo could get through there, and we were advancing toward the center of the town ... but when the ladinos got there with the cannon, they wiped us out. Yeah, that cannon was awful, it killed us off like flies.
Thus, the last major Indian uprising in western Nicaragua ended in disaster and defeat. Matagalpino intellectual Carlos Arroyo Buitrago, reflecting in 1954 on the event, was moved to write, "The truth is that the uprising of the Matagalpino indios in 1881 was the death sentence for this race."
This chapter will examine some of the causes of the rebellion and of the tenaciousness of indigenous resistance; we will concentrate on how ladino elites came to view and act upon "the Indian problem" following the uprising. Moreover, we will attempt to reconstruct how those views and policies, in short the emerging discourse of Nicaragua mestiza, affected the lives of the Matagalpino Indians. If the defeat was indeed "the death sentence for the race," under what conditions was it carried out and how did the condemned endure the constant stays of execution?
The Formation of the Matagalpino Indians
Migrations and ethnic fusions over the previous 100 years created the Matagalpino Indians—estimated at between 25,000 and 60,000—who rebelled in 1881. During the early eighteenth century three parcialidades (lineage groups, also called "barrios"), residents of the pueblos of Matagalpa, Molagüina, and Solingalpa, united for the purposes of purchasing a large tract of communal land. Between 1750 and 1820 these lineage-based, dispersed settlements apparently disbanded and the people moved into nearby mountains. Excessive colonial tribute demands and ladino migration contributed to this slow disintegration of the settlements. In the mountains, the three parcialidades formed cañadas or joined preexisting ones.
During the eighteenth century the Matagalpino Indians also experienced the birth of a new parcialidad, Laborío, composed of converted and resettled "Caribe" (a branch of the Sumo) Indians. These Caribes had been hostile to Spanish rule and had often raided the "pacified" Indians of the highlands. By 1816, Laborío, augmented by a flow of "reduced" Caribes, formed the largest parcialidad among the Matagalpino Indians. Moreover, it continued to grow at a faster rate than the other groups over the next decades; by 1841, Laborío accounted for 43 percent of all Indian births. The rapid growth of Laborío suggests a continuous process of integration of "Caribes" and a quite fluid boundary between the "civilized" and the "wild" Indians. Their acceptance of escaped "civilized" Indians into their ranks prompted one Spanish official to explain the rebellious character of the highlands peoples by the "facility with which they pass over into the Bárbaros."
Throughout the nineteenth century the four parcialidades continued to maintain a vital existence, although their members no longer inhabited specific geographical areas. Two neighbors of the Cañada of Samulalí, for example, might belong to different parcialidades, but they would all cooperate within the same local political structure led by a capitán de Cañada (the low-level official in charge of the cañada). The military structure of the Matagalpinos, shared by the Indians of Boaco and Jinotega, was a legacy of the colonial period in which the Spanish relied on them to fight against the English allies: the Miskitos, Zambos, and Sumos. At the same time, the neighbors would belong to different civil-religious hierarchies led by alcaldes de vara corresponding to their respective parcialidades. The religious function of lineage groups united parcialidad members in different cañadas and thus perpetuated a basic unit of ethnic identity despite the scattering of the original populations. The elders of each lineage group appointed helpers, regidores, priostes, and mayordomos for each of the seven saints. The four alcaldes de vara also comprised the political directorate of the entire Comunidad.
The slow growth of the ladino population in the city of Matagalpa—ladinos made up 20 percent of the department's population in 1880—had a significant impact on the economy of the highlands Indians well before the introduction of coffee. One writer, recalling a visit in the mid-1850s, offered a description of the Indians' economy, commenting that they used the many rivers and streams to power "the simple machines ... that milled the large quantities of wheat to make flour, grown in abundance [and to bake bread]. The agriculture of Matagalpa was impressive: sugarcane, rice, beans, potatoes, garlic, onions."
Market relations between the Indians and ladinos were not harmonious, however. During the 1860s townsfolk would travel several miles to meet Indian traders, indicative of the strained ethnic relations. At one point, the Indians, in effect, went "on strike," refusing to sell any produce to the ladinos, "being dissatisfied with the shabby way in which the townspeople had behaved." A reinforced military garrison eventually persuaded the Matagalpinos to resume trade.
The missionary work of the Jesuits from 1871 to 1881 also played an important role in stimulating the ethnic pride and unity of those Indians who rebelled in 1881. The Jesuits' willingness to go out and minister to the Indians in their cañadas contrasted notably with other ladino political and ecclesiastical authorities. Moreover, the Jesuits' aura of grace and mystery appealed directly to the Indians' religiosity; they did not attack the beliefs of these people whose only previous exposure to Christianity was at baptism. In 1877, one missionary wrote about 696 people who confessed for the first time in one village:
And the most marvelous part of it was that as soon as I spoke to them and repeated [the gospel], they lost their fear, and they became adept at repeating it ... then they brought the rest of their families and ended up becoming extremely affectionate.... From Samulali only three people did not take part in confession.
Moreover, the Jesuits' antidemocratic convictions—a disdain for the progressive Conservative government and for parliamentary democracy—in no way impeded their evangelical efforts among society's most marginalized groups. Whatever their intentions, the Jesuits contributed to the ethnic unity of the Matagalpinos.
Evidence demonstrates the overwhelming success of the Jesuits among the country's indigenous population. First, the Matagalpino Indians provided voluntary labor (all accounts agree on this) throughout the 1870s for the construction of the cathedral. Second, upon the expulsion of the Jesuits, the Indians of Sutiaba and Monimbó rioted in protest. Finally, indigenous prisoners in 1881 cited the defense of religion as the principal cause for the August uprising. As indicated by Bishop Thiel's remarks at the beginning of this chapter, Indian slavery was still practiced, albeit in a limited and informal way, in Nicaragua. The Jesuits offered an antidote to such a venomous level of racism.
The Roots of Rebellion in Matagalpa
On the morning of March 30, 1881, some 1,000 Indians attacked the town of Matagalpa; their principal military objective was to storm the barracks. For two and a half hours they shot arrows, hurled stones, and fired some shotguns. Then they retreated, leaving behind twenty-five dead and five prisoners. Three soldiers died in the fighting. The rebellion was not, as Jaime Wheelock and others have argued, directly related to coffee cultivation. In 1880, there were only 18,000 coffee trees in production. Although there had been some complaints and petitions about land over the previous decade, agrarian capitalism contributed to the rebellion chiefly in the form of a rumor that circulated through the Indian villages: "the government wanted to sell their children to the yanquis and take 500 women to Managua to make them pick coffee for nothing."
However, the drive to modernize infrastructure did contribute to indigenous discontent. The Jesuits' account, supported by the rebels' letters and by other observers, cited compulsory and underpaid labor for building the telegraph from Managua, roads, and the cabildos as the major cause of the armed protest. In addition to protesting conscripted labor, the Indians had other grievances: census taking for tax and military purposes and a prohibition against making chicha. A letter to the Jesuit priest Cáceres underscored the Indians' resentment against the labor drafts:
We rose up because we couldn't stand that nasty whip any longer.... We're not going to let any more of our people go work for nothing.... Since these señores see that we are indios, they want to have a yoke around our neck, but we just can't stand it anymore.... Today there is no division between the captains, it's all the people of the casta indigena that are resolved to take part. Today we say as the casta indígena that the Señor Perfecto should moderate his orders because we aren't thieves to be carried off with our hands tied behind our back.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from To Die in this Way by Jeffrey L. Gould. Copyright © 1998 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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Table of Contents
Contents About the Series Acknowledgments Chronology Introduction 1. "Vana Ilusion!": The Highlands Indians and the Myth of Nicaragua Mestiza, 1880-1925 2 "Not Even a Handful of Dirt": The Dawn of Citizenship and the Suppression of Community in Boaco, 1890-1930 3. "The Rebel Race": The Struggles of the Indigenous Community of Sutiaba, 1900-1960 4. Gender, Politics, and the Triumph of Mestizaje, 1920-1940 5. "En Pleno Siglo XX": Indigenous Resistance, Indigenismo, and Citizenship, 1930-1940 6. Crimes in the Countryside: Burning Bushes, Stolen Saints, and Murder, 1940-1954 7. Memories of Mestizaje, Memories of Accumulation: The Indigenous Dimension in the Peasant Movements, 1954-1965 Epilogue Conclusion Selected Bibliography IndexWhat People are Saying About This
Delving into Nicaragua's myth of mestizaje, Gould provides a powerful analysis of the political and cultural mechanisms that eradicated indigenous identity throughout Latin America. His careful analysis of indigenous cultural loss, unlike that of others, does not require an essentialist reading of indigenous culture.
—University of California at Davis
Twenty years from now To Die in This Way will still be read as a classic work heralding (one can only hope) a wave of studies deconstructing ethnic identity and nationalism throughout modern Central America.
—From Mount Holyoke College
To Die in This Way is an extraordinary achievement. The research required to sustain such an innovative and original argument is truly impressive, ranging from searches through political and legal archives to ethnography and oral history. In short, this is a pathbreaking major work in Latin American history.
—From Harvard University