The most studied of Mexico's regions during the nineteenth century, Yucatán has nevertheless attracted a narrow band of scholarship around two main themes: the Mayan uprising of 1847–53 known as the Caste War, confined to the east of the peninsula, and the agricultural revolution around henequen (sisal) that transformed the state's north-west corner during the second half of the century. Terry Rugeley has not been immune to this tendency. His first book, Yucatán's Maya Peasantry and the Origins of the Caste War, offered an important revision of the causes of the Caste War, placing the Mayan uprising squarely within the context of factional rivalry and violence among petty municipal elites of a kind common to most parts of the Hispanic world during the middle decades of the nineteenth century. A subsequent book, Of Wonders and Wise Men, explored varieties of religious practice across Yucatán's stubbornly enduring ethnic boundary. The book under review, the result of two decades of tireless research across the state's archives, is a logical sequel to, and partly subsumes, Rugeley's first two books. An ambitious enterprise, Rebellion Now and Forever provides a comprehensive account of the evolution of post-colonial government and politics across the Yucatán's entire territory, not just its rebel eastern margins or compact north-western growth pole.
More a reluctant protectorate than an active or willing member of the Mexican federation, Yucatán shares closer affinities – in its free-wheeling agrarian capitalism and combustible racial geography – with its Caribbean neighbour Cuba (where it was able to send its out-of-favour politicians and sell its rebel Indians into slavery). Like Cuba, Yucatán's elites were intermittently tempted by the attractions of annexation to the United States. In both Cuba and Yucatán, uprisings from Oriente towns acted as prime movers of progressive politics throughout the century. Indeed, Rugeley starts and ends the book with the story of Santiago Imán y Villafaña, the yeoman federalist – and haemorrhoid-afflicted – caudillo of Tizimín, whose arming of Mayan peasantry during the 1830s and 1840s might have led Yucatán along a ‘popular federalist’ and even onto a ‘peasant nationalist’ route, had not colonial inertias weighed so heavily and precipitated the Caste war. In 1878, when each Yucatecan municipality was invited to select an illustrious predecessor whose name would permanently be appended to the town, no settlement chose a pre-1867 political leader. Even today, lamenting Yucatán's weak sense of posterity (which this study does a lot to explain), Rugeley has to remind the people of Tizimín of their illustrious federalist hero, Santiago Imán.
Rugeley does not dwell on lost causes, however – he merely uses them as markers for explaining the tragic and violent course of Yucatán's nineteenth century. Three analytical axes structure the book, each rooted in the experience of colonial rule: ‘violencia’, the everyday violence and insecurity that resulted from the combination of a weak state, an open and globally exposed economy and an ever-shifting native population; ‘buen gobierno’, the aspiration (mostly unfulfilled) of this weak state to command obedience according to Hispanic centralist traditions; and ‘municipio libre’, a tradition of local autonomy rooted in the colonial ‘pueblo de indios’ (known as ‘repúblicas’ in Yucatán) and complicated by the legacy of municipal sovereignty emanating from the Cádiz constitution. These interwoven impulses are explored chronologically in seven chapters, from the early decades of the republic to the high Porfiriato, following Mexico's standard periodisation. Assiduous attention to regional, social and ethnic differences, to a rich gallery of personalities and to a multiplicity of actors at all levels, makes for dense prose and places heavy demands upon the reader, but the writing is lightened by a colourful and ironic style and buttressed with comparisons (occasionally far-fetched) to events drawn from far beyond the Mexican regional studies repertory, aimed at helping erudite history students navigate Yucatán's nineteenth-century labyrinth.
By de-centring the story away from Merida and the Caste War to the varied experience of Yucatán's vast, far-flung and lightly populated territory, Rugeley succeeds both in drawing our attention to hitherto ignored or obscured features of the peninsula's history and in providing a fascinating and vividly drawn set of tableaux vivants which greatly enhance our understanding of Spanish America's post-colonial predicament. Several key themes currently occupying historians are developed at length and in detail in this rich regional study: the struggle between New Spain's domineering eighteenth-century clergy and liberal secularisers (particularly damaging given the fragile context of Hispanic–Mayan coexistence); the stubborn survival of folk Catholicism and the importance of a Mayan para-clergy – sacristans and folk practitioners – in compensating for the decline in ordained priests; the survival both of a cadre of native community leaders and the civic and religious underpinnings of Mayan ‘republics’, as colonial batabs transmuted into the caciques common to most twentieth-century rural settlements; the unfolding of successive projects of land privatisation judged necessary to foster economic development, and how Mayan habits of common land use often survived in spite of formal enclosure; the endurance of an enterprising Mayan rural middle class (which, Rugeley reflects, might have held the territory together and closed the cultural rift between Hispanics and Mayas had the disaster of the Caste War not split Yucatán asunder); and the importance of local militias and a generalised possession of arms in shaping citizenship and in preventing further fragmentation of the territory (as late as 1894, 800 officers and 19,000 mainly Mayan soldiers manned Yucatán's ‘colonias militares’ and frontier settlements).
Not for beginners, the book will appeal most obviously to Yucatecans, who will discover their antepasados, and to seasoned Mexicanists, who will welcome the most comprehensive and deeply researched nineteenth-century regional history written to date. More generally, those seeking to understand the origins and consequences of the Caste War, or the impact of henequen monoculture and peonage, or how the revolution would be received in Mexico's most distant and different territory, would be foolish to ignore this extraordinarily complex and courageous book.
