A Necessary Condition

Scott mentioned (1985: 341) that the “typical revolutionary crisis” comes about when “small but essential demands that are experienced by large numbers of people simultaneously” are “thwarted.” The Nahuas in Huitzilan, in the years leading up to the UCI rebellion, met this condition in the following way. The ostensible aim of the rebellion that broke out in late 1977 was to obtain land for growing corn. Many Nahuas, interviewed during the first stage of fieldwork, declared that they wanted to grow enough corn to fill their household granaries to last for one year. The concentration of land by the Mestizos made it difficult for many Nahuas to achieve their goal. Most of the land within Huitzilan had become the private property of non-Nahuas or Mestizos even before they had moved into the community during the last decades of the nineteenth century. The Nahuas regained some land through the ejido program in the 1940s, but the days of land reform in Mexico ended. Nahuas faced the prospect of working for low wages on the estates of the Mestizos in their own community or looking for work in other parts of Mexico and, more recently, the United States.

Some Mestizos had acquired their land through questionable means, such as demanding land titles from Nahuas who had run up tabs for food and drink in stores. Nahuas who were victims of such practices could not expect a fair hearing if they registered their complaints with the municipio authorities, who were powerful Mestizos or agents acting on their behalf. Their best recourse was to appeal to authorities in the former district capital of Tetela de Ocampo, which required making an arduous journey by foot and going to considerable expense without a guaranteed outcome.

The situation in Huitzilan was reaching a crisis and erupted in the UCI rebellion. Some Mestizos hoped that state intervention might mediate or adjudicate the situation. They expressed dismay that none was forthcoming, and a tense situation turned into a tragic one for Nahuas and Mestizos alike. To be sure, state police carrying riot gear appeared every once in a while to chase Nahua insurgents off the Talcuaco cattle pasture. However, these efforts did little to resolve the situation because the fleet-footed Nahua insurgents scurried up and over the ridge bordering Huitzilan on the east, and blended with other Nahuas in Xinachapan working on their corn and bean plots. A Mestizo whose family was embroiled in the conflict reported getting little help from the authorities when he, and a contingent representing elite families, asked for assistance to drive the UCI from Huitzilan. This man told me that an official suggested that he and others from Huitzilan form their own militia and drive the UCI out of the community. The man from Huitzilan did not want to take this course of action because it would have meant a violent confrontation with a large group of armed Nahuas. Nahuas and Mestizos alike reported that eventually the army became involved and burned down the UCI’s cornfield, triggering what one Nahua observer called the rage or cualayot. Throughout the rebellion and particularly after the death of the UCI organizer, Felipe Reyes Herrera, and the burning of the Talcuaco cornfield, Nahuas in the UCI turned on other Nahuas who did not want to join in what they regarded as a risky venture. Left to their own devices, Nahuas and Mestizos endured a tense seven years of low-level violence, during which an estimated 200–300 Nahuas and some Mestizos perished. The UCI rebellion ended when the Antorcha Campesina took control of the municipio government in March 1984.

Indirect Connections

Long-term fieldwork on the developmental cycle of the rebellion revealed indirect and direct connections between the Nahuas’ stories of rain gods and water-dwelling animals and the formation of the UCI in Huitzilan. Among the indirect connections are oral stories like those that Scott (1990: 18–19) called the “third realm of subordinate group politics that lies strategically between” what he (1990: 2) referred to as the “public transcript” and the “hidden transcript.” He (1990: 2) defined the public transcript as “a shorthand way of describing the open interaction between subordinates and those who dominate.” The hidden transcript (Scott 1990: 7) included accounts of the offensive behavior of the dominant elite that appeared in the stories from Huitzilan, such as “The Land Transaction” and, especially, the “The Kidnapped Wife.” The third realm of political discourse refers to myths such as “The President and Priest,” “The President of Hueytlalpan,” “The Water in Ixtepec,” “The Humble Man’s Predicament,” and “Malintzin” that narrators dissimulated sufficiently so that they would not be held to account for their disguised criticisms of the elites’ behavior.

Collective Memories

These stories of rain gods, who collectively organized to attack the water-dwelling animals (achane)—the companion spirits of bad-acting local authorities and non-Nahua settlers—are collective memories (see Ricoeur 2006: 119) of past insurgencies in the Sierra Norte de Puebla that played a role in the history of Huitzilan. Miguel Ahuata’s story of “The President and the Priest,” recounted at least one year prior to the UCI’s appearance in the Sierra Norte de Puebla, anticipated and modeled the UCI rebellion. It offered a roughly sketched plan for how the Nahuas could carry out an armed rebellion in the future by taking advantage of their numbers and their collective value of “working for one” to challenge the authority of the less numerous but nevertheless very powerful non-Nahua elite. The UCI rebellion began as an organized rebellion in the sense that thirty to forty Nahuas armed themselves, collectively invaded two intestate cattle pastures, planted several crops of corn, shared the harvest among themselves, and carried out torchlit marches through the town, painting the whitewashed houses of the wealthy non-Nahuas with slogans such as “Death to the rich.”

The political importance of collective memory in Huitzilan is consistent with Victoria Bricker’s (1981) observation that Maya, in the Highlands of Chiapas and Guatemala and the lowlands of the Yucatan peninsula, conserved and shared their memories of interethnic conflicts in their myths and rituals. Miguel Ahuata’s 1975 story and the 1977 UCI rebellion are examples of Bricker’s (1981: 179) notion of “myth becoming history,” by which she meant that “events conform to their mythological antecedents.” It is significant that Miguel Ahuata was a man who was devoted to his church and who was taken seriously by his peers, who nevertheless told a story expressing a revolutionary consciousness. In telling this story, he marked a change in how the Nahuas positioned themselves from opposing the Church to becoming an ally of the priest in a struggle against Mestizo authority.

Direct Connections

The stories of “The Land Transaction” and “The Kidnapped Wife,” recast as “Malintzin,” described or alluded to behaviors that contributed directly to the UCI rebellion in Huitzilan. This does not necessarily mean that the stories as culture are the cause of the rebellion, but they contributed to forming a collective consciousness favorable to the UCI insurgency. The Nahuas’ stories contributed to the rebellion much as Shiller (2019: 3) argues that “popular stories that spread through the word of mouth, the news media and social media” can drive economic events. “The Land Transaction” describes the member of an elite family demanding title to a fourteen-hectare plot in payment for an unpaid tab for food and drink that an elderly Nahua man with a drinking problem had run up in the elite man’s store. In the views of the Nahuas I know, the Mestizo took cruel advantage of the old man’s weakness. Other Mestizos also volunteered that this transaction violated local ideas of fairness. The story is becoming a myth commemorating three of the old Nahua man’s descendants, who joined the UCI in the hopes of getting the land back.

There is also a direct connection between the events alluded to in the story of “Malintzin” and the decision of a Nahua man, who became a local UCI leader, to invite Felipe Reyes Herrera, the UCI organizer, to Huitzilan. The Nahua turned his house above Talcuaco into the headquarters of the rebellion. Malintzin is a virtuous woman who passes by a spring and bends down to pick up a crying infant. The infant turns into a serpent and pulls her down into deep water, never to be seen again. The story is an allusion to an actual event that took place just before the UCI rebellion, when the son of an elite family kidnapped the wife of a Nahua man at gunpoint. Members of his elite family were also involved in the dispute over the ownership of the Talcuaco pasture in the years leading up to the UCI rebellion. The actual kidnapping took place in April 1977 when the son, along with his cousin, burst into the home of the Nahua man who lived above Talcuaco, and snatched his wife from her marital bed at gunpoint in front of her husband. The husband later joined a contingent of Nahuas that walked over to the neighboring village of Pahuata and invited Felipe Reyes Herrera to form a chapter of the UCI in Huitzilan, ostensibly to protect the Nahuas from their enemies and to carry out their own acts of vengeance.

A Sufficient Condition: The UCI

A sufficient condition for the Huitzilan rebellion was the appearance of the UCI organizers in the southern sierra and particularly in the neighboring community of Pahuata. The organizers came with the aim of persuading the Nahuas and Totonacs to invade intestate lands. The UCI organizers began their campaign by holding a workers’ rally in Martínez de la Torre, a destination for many migrant Nahua laborers from communities in the southern Sierra Norte de Puebla that included Huitzilan. This rally took place against a backdrop of what Schryer (1990: 186–189) refers to as the revival of agrarianism on the national political level. The UCI were a catalytic agent, which appeared in the Sierra Norte at a time when the Nahuas in Huitzilan had built up considerable anger against several members of elite families and expressed their sentiments in stories that offered a blueprint for and then mirrored an organized rebellion. Felipe Reyes Herrera led torchlit marches through the streets of Huitzilan, broadcast speeches from the UCI headquarters above Talcuaco, and probably suggested to the Nahuas how to utilize their greater numbers. However, the Nahuas had raised their own consciousness with stories of rain gods and water-dwelling animals before Felipe Reyes Herrera had appeared on the scene. Miguel Ahuata’s story was a good example of what Scott (1977a: 5) meant when he urged for a shift in focus away from “the precipitants of peasant rebellions” and onto “the shared values and goals which find expression through rebellion.” In Miguel Ahuata’s story of “The President and the Priest,” the rain gods strike and kill the animal companion spirit of a municipio president who practiced negative reciprocity. One of the most conspicuous shared values in Nahua culture in Huitzilan in 1975 was reciprocity, which was the basis of their value of working for one in the extended family. The Nahuas in the UCI put this value into practice when they cooperatively cultivated a milpa in the soil of Talcuaco.

Huitzilan Is an Unusual Case

There are special circumstances in Huitzilan’s history and culture that played a role in turning everyday acts of resistance into an organized rebellion. During the first stage of fieldwork, the Nahuas were living in what amounted to a colonial situation in which non-Nahuas had come into their community and established themselves as the dominant group, much as they had in other indigenous communities in the Sierra Norte de Puebla. There is a long history of resisting the settlement of non-Nahuas in the Sierra Norte that dates back to the colonial era. Stories of the rain gods’ human companions organizing rebellions trace to Andrés Mixcoatl who, in the sixteenth century, opposed the friars’ efforts to convert the Nahuas and other indigenous groups to Christianity. As Serge Gruzinski (1989: 37) recounted, Andrés Mixcoatl practiced divination with grains of corn2 and was interrogated in 1537 for being a shaman. He worked as a healer, acted on the clouds and the elements, and used hallucinogens. Some believed him to be a god. From 1533 on, he took up an itinerant life that led him northeast from the Valley of Mexico to the Sierra Norte de Puebla. There is a direct line from Andrés Mixcoatl to the human rain gods like Petra in Huitzilan, who organized other rain gods to expel the achane who brought the water that threatened the Totonac community of Ixtepec with a flood.

Ethnic Hierarchy

A comparison of the experience of Nahuas in comparatively egalitarian, monoethnic communities and ethnically stratified ones in the southern Sierra Norte provides support for the hypothesis that living under the direct domination of Mestizos radicalized the Nahuas in Huitzilan. While the Nahuas were organizing the UCI in Huitzilan, those in the more class egalitarian community of Yaonáhuac were participating in a bitterly contested but democratic election between the candidates of the PRI and Socialist parties. The Nahuas’ political participation in Yaonáhuac was relatively peaceful. At the same time, the stories Nahuas in Yaonáhuac told about rain gods and water-dwelling animals did not manifest the polarization and militancy compared with the ones recorded in Huitzilan at about the same time. Yaonáhuac then was primarily a mono-ethnic community of Nahuas who did not live in daily contact with Mestizos. The situation was very different in the bi-ethnic community of Huitzilan, where Nahuas lived in close association with Mestizos and had far more opportunities to experience indignities and humiliations.

Not all Nahuas in Huitzilan responded in exactly the same way to their subordinate status. One of the most gifted storytellers in Huitzilan expressed a wish to become a wealthy patrón, but he was not paralyzed by his false consciousness and did not think his suffering was legitimate (See Scott 1985: 323, 324, 345). He, like other Nahuas, was keenly aware that some Mestizos took advantage of their situation and abused their power by violating a tacit agreement to live according to shared values expressed in compadrazgo rituals. Ironically, those Mestizos who attempted to exert their brute dominance over the Nahuas inadvertently promoted a revolutionary consciousness that some Nahuas put into practice when they invaded the Talcuaco and Taltempan cattle pastures and planted them with corn.

After the UCI Rebellion

The UCI rebellion that began with that invasion has become a painful collective memory for Nahuas and Mestizos alike in Huitzilan. The community changed in many ways as a result of that rebellion, some of which narrators express in new stories about rain gods and achane. Before and during the early months of the UCI rebellion, narrators described a polarized relationship between rain gods and water-dwelling animals (achane) in a moral drama that parallels the contest between good and evil in the San Miguel dancers’ morality play. In the years following the UCI rebellion, Nahua narrators described achane and rain gods in new ways that are important for understanding the current predicament of Nahuas in Huitzilan following the UCI rebellion. One is the turn away from cooperative milpa farming expressed as the disappearing voice of the achane of Apohpocayan, and another is a change in the interethnic hierarchy manifest in less polarized and asymmetrical images of rain gods and achane.

Nahuas have turned away from cooperative milpa farming and turned toward wage labor in part because the UCI rebellion did not result in a significant redistribution of the land Isidro Grimaldo and others had taken from Nahuas many years earlier. Local wealthy elite Mestizos continue to own the bulk of the arable land in Huitzilan, and Nahuas are the workers on their estates. Regarding interethnic relations, Nahua narrators have softened or even reversed the polarization and asymmetry between rain gods and water-dwelling animals that characterized their earlier stories. Narrators appear to be responding to a new order in which local elite Mestizos ceased to be a threat after they lost control of local political authority. Nevertheless, the Nahuas continue to live under the authority of other Mestizos who bring orders from outside of their community.

In conclusion, examination of the Nahuas’ rain god and achane stories recorded during all three periods of fieldwork in Huitzilan revealed how the Nahuas have positioned themselves relative to their ancestors, the Church, and the Mestizos during a turbulent time in their history. Their stories are collective memories, social commentary, and an inspiration for taking political action. They are a record of the Nahuas’ long struggle to live according to their values. They are a connection to their ancestors, whose lessons have helped them cope with powerful forces of weather and politics over which they have little control.