Borges, asked what he thought of One Hundred Years of Solitude, is supposed to have said that he quite liked the first fifty. Historical epics can pile story upon story until one damn thing after another overwhelms; therein the dangers of the genre. In his new history of Tabasco Terry Rugeley has the baroque material, the storyteller's bent and even the setting, as close to a Guajira as Mexico can offer, to create something of the sort. His book is duly baroque in both style and content, simultaneously wide-ranging and fine-detailed, but it is no chronicle. It is, rather, an exemplar of the analytical, comparative and entertainment potential of the particular. His Gulf Coast characters just want to be left alone, swamp-dwelling serranos; in their uphill struggles to achieve regional anti-sociability, however, they provide some much broader insights into Mexican society and its political idiosyncrasy.
Tabascans have, in the argot of international relations or ‘peace studies’, functioned as spoilers across most of their modern history: in their travails with the three empires of the Spanish, Americans and French – or vice versa, more accurately – they have sooner or later managed to spoil all of their would-be overlords’ plans. It is typical of this eclectic work that it should deploy this contemporary practitioners’ term (in a brisk and straightforward introduction) before turning to a classical historian's narrative and the pleasures of a richly allusive but unaffected prose. Rugeley draws on an unusual range of references, some explicit – Louisiana and ancient Greece turn out to have a fair bit to say about Tabasco – and others implicit, interweaving, among others, Hemingway, Bolívar, Rabbie Burns and the Ancient Mariner. He has at the same time a flair for the telling metaphor, comparing indigenous ceremonies to office parties (both rituals to ensure that ‘village hatreds remain … concealed beneath a patina of conviviality’, p. 35) and the great colonial magnate Pedro Romero to the great California magnate Howard Hughes. There is, finally, a clever periodic self-deflation through tactical shifts into chattiness. The Lacandon Maya were, it seems, ‘an affable bunch’ (p. 275), their far-off rulers possessed by the ‘God-given duty to clobber lowland provincials into submission’ (p. 3). This is historical writing as, among other things, high entertainment.
Just as the style occupies something of a crossroads, so too does the story, very much one of the circum-Caribbean. There is a fine and significant irony in that a saga of obstreperous locals should have so many foreign characters, outsiders among outsiders, in its cast. When the great filibuster ruler Francisco Sentmanat falls it is a fellow Cuban who kills him (and boils his head in oil); the governor of Chiapas a couple of years later is another Cuban. The strongman who succeeds Sentmanat, Miguel Bruno Dazo, is a Colombian whose Italian father fought for Napoleon in the French army. The US consul is ‘the polymath Transylvanian, Count Félix de Nemegyei’ (p. 261). The mahogany barons are (almost) all foreign. One in three Tabascans in the late colony has African blood. The eponymous sauce is made by a Marylander in New Iberia, which happens to be in Louisiana. Even the Lacandones, about as echt locals as you can get, one might think, turn out to be comparatively recent products of intermarriage between Yucatán Maya and Caribs.
Yet from early on there was, Rugeley argues, a regional identity that centred on environment, isolation, patriarchy and recalcitrance, and by independence many people saw themselves as Tabascans. There were some cultural specificities, such as counting agricultural produce in base five, but above all there was a pronounced dislike of central meddlers like Bourbon tax collectors. Like more literal serranos – northerners, Afghans or Scots Highlanders – these regional populations enjoyed the landscapes to do something about it. Water made the plains that cover most of the state fertile yet untrustworthy, the communities fragmented by painfully slow communications, and while this kept the province poor it also kept it independent. Inside regional politics it also meant that a few tens of men constituted an appreciable force for destabilisation, if not for rule. This, combined with the wealth to be had from tropical commodities, above all cacao, gave ample raw material for the nineteenth century's recurrent civil wars, vendettas between planters, merchants and federal commanders. Amid the unintentional nihilism there were not that many lasting winners, but there were numerous, notable losers, including Commodore Matthew Perry, driven out by yellow fever, malaria and guerrillas in what Rugeley calls the ‘war of a thousand puddles’ (p. 180).
This is regional history at its finest. It is strongly environmentally-inflected, and there is a strong sense of place from the ethno-historical outset, which is in the preconquest era, and a chronological sweep which roots the nineteenth century firmly in the colonial formation of cacao economy and society. The accounts of the ensuing wars – centralists against federalists, federalists against federalists, liberals against conservatives, Tabascans against all comers – do not lose sight of the structural, but do not waste the best of the particular, from the outré sex lives of the Maldonado cacao barons to the tax evasion strategies of the poorest, such as secret burials to avoid paying death dues to the priest. (This clearly worked, as one year the village of Teapa could muster only a jar of peaches in syrup as tithes for the bishop in Mérida.) Analytical summaries interspersed throughout the text point out the relevance of detail to interpretation: thus while the Tabascan story reinforces the fragility of the independent state and national identity, it also waters down the identification of federalism with popular mobilisation advanced by Michael Ducey (in A Nation of Villages, University of Arizona Press, 2004) and Peter Guardino (Peasants, Politics and the Formation of Mexico's National State, Stanford University Press, 1996), among others. The state's is a story for which there is relatively paltry material; as Rugeley points out, any paper that did not make it out of the state by the 1880s was doomed. As he also points out, though, stories of imperial spoilers make for terrific reading, and in his hands they do just that.
