Interpretation

Nacho’s story has three episodes: (1) the appearance of the water in Ixtepec and the alarmed response; (2) the recruitment of the rain gods to get rid of the achane that is source of the water; (3) chasing the achane to Tetela and the appearance of the devil as a coyot in Huitzilan. Nacho described numerous parallels between the way the people of Ixtepec first responded to the water and the way the people of Huitzilan greeted the first Mestizo settlers. The people of Ixtepec, a community on the top of a ridge, welcomed the water because they did not have an easily accessible source of water in their community. They saw the water as “a beautiful thing” (line 5) because it saved them hours of hard work hauling water from a source below the top of the ridge. They changed their minds when they realized that the water posed a threat to people, animals, and the church building itself. The initial positive response to the appearance of water in Ixtepec is like the Nahuas welcoming the first Mestizo who settled in Huitzilan. One elderly Nahua woman told me that the Mestizos created jobs and brought medicine, making life easier at first. However, by the time I began my fieldwork in 1968, many other Nahuas were critical of the behavior of some Mestizo settlers, particularly from Tetela, just as the Totonacs became critical of the water bubbling out of the ground in Ixtepec.

Nacho made his devotion to the Church a conspicuous part of his story. He told how the water posed a threat to the structure of the church building itself, first appearing at the base (line 3) and then oozing out of the upper walls (lines 20–23). He told how the people of Ixtepec implored the priest to do something about the water (lines 28, 31). Despite his devotion to the Church, however, Nacho turned his story into an affirmation of his belief in the efficacy of rain gods. Nacho had expressed his own admiration for the rain gods when he remarked on their beauty when dressed in the costume of San Miguel dancers.22 The priest could not do anything about the threat, so the Totonacs decided to appeal to a rain god’s human companion in Huitzilan to get rid of the achane that brought the water to Ixtepec. Nacho and his brothers identified the rain god’s human companion as Petra, who lived on a ridge just above Calyecapan (line 25). It might just be a coincidence, but there are parallels between the way the Totonacs of Ixtepec went to Huitzilan asking Petra for help and Luis Vino and Vicente Peralta’s trip to Pahuata to ask for the help of the UCI organizer, Felipe Reyes Herrera. Luis Vino and Vicente Peralta needed his help to form a group that would protect them from Pedro Manzano.

Nacho told how some rain gods chased the achane through the water from Ixtepec all the way to Tetela de Ocampo, where other rain gods were waiting to strike it down (lines 46–50). Tetela de Ocampo is where the Mestizos, Juan N. Mendez and Isidro Grimaldo, who had acquired a great deal of land in Huitzilan, resided. It was also the place of origin of Antonio Aco, whom Gabriel Barrios sent to administer the lands of Isidro Grimaldo’s widow, Doña Elena.

Nacho expressed nativism telling how the achane was the animal companion (tonal) of a coyot as ahmo cualli (devil) whom the worker from Huitzilan encountered in his return from the hot country. Their encounter took place as the worker was climbing up from the Zempoala River toward the ridge above Clayecapan. The coyot was coming from Tetela and descending the same ridge, headed toward the Zempoala River with the aim of returning to Ixtepec.23 The coyot is the ahmo cualli or devil who says to the worker: “They may have chased me away [from Ixtepec] but I shall pull them down [into the land of the dead] when I want them” (line 63). Later, the ahmo cualli as coyot appeared in Huitzilan and asked the president for permission to settle in his community (lines 65–69). Nacho blames the president for neglecting to ask the coyot about his origins (lines 70–72). The president gave the coyot permission to build his house wherever he desired (line 78), and soon water began to bubble out of the ground (lines 79–81). The Nahua community was lost (line 79).

The Cantares Mexicanos

This and other stories of the rain gods’ rebellion express sentiments of nativism that are like those that appeared in the Cantares Mexicanos in the sixteenth century (Bierhorst 1985). In the rain gods’ stories, bolts of lightning strike down and kill or try to kill the achane, who are the animal companions of bad municipio presidents and unwanted settlers. In the Cantares, souls of dead warriors descend as birds, raining from paradise to earth with the aim of driving out the Spaniards. Both fail in their ultimate purpose. They are fantasies of revenge by narrators and singers who are members of societies and cultures living in a “context of subordination” (Scott 1977a: 12). The narrators and singers shrouded their messages in obscure symbolism that outsiders find challenging to understand (Bierhorst 1985). Nacho Angel Hernández, like de la Co Ayance, dissimulated his critique of Mestizos who settled in the Sierra Norte by placing the action of the story in a Totonac community north of Huitzilan. Dissimulation, however, did not mean that all Mestizos were fooled. Since 1968, more and more Nahua children have attended school with Mestizo children, some of whom picked up Nahua beliefs and heard Nahua stories. Some Mestizos I knew suspected that the Nahuas’ deference was “inauthentic” (Scott 1985: 286). They expressed their suspicions by remarking that Nahuas look like good people but they are not. Some feared a Nahua rebellion, and, when I returned after the UCI uprising had ended, they described “acts of savagery” that confirmed their worst suspicions. One told me that living under the reign of the Nahua-led UCI in Huitzilan was far worse than living under any other regime.

There are notable differences between Nacho’s nativism and that of the singers of the Cantares Mexicanos and the Nahuas who resisted the friars during the early colonial period. The Nahuas of the early colonial period lamented their political subjugation, resisted the religion of the friars, and continued to promote their ancient religion (Stresser-Péan 2012: 63–79). Following Mexico’s independence from Spain in 1821, Nahuas faced new challenges with the migration of a new wave of Mestizos into their territory. Nahuas eventually became talticpac cristianos (Christians from earth), showed respect to Christian gods, and expressed their criticisms of Mestizos as they allied themselves with the Church (Chapter 3).

Selective Nativism

Nacho, moreover, was selective in his nativism, targeting only some individuals whose families had come from Tetela de Ocampo and who had violated “professed values” (Scott 1985: 336) that Nahuas and Mestizos considered to be important. Among those professed values are the ideals of respect expressed when celebrating a new relationship of ritual kinship. Nahuas in the UCI had grudges against individuals who violated those values and carried out some vendettas against them, but they showed no sign of attempting to eradicate all Mestizos from Huitzilan. On the contrary, Nahuas in the UCI and Mestizos became implicated with each other to avenge their enemies, who were as likely to come from the same ethnic group as from across ethnic lines. Nahua nativism was mitigated by biological kinship and ritual kinship, the experience in specific relationships that crossed ethnic lines, and the way Nahuas thought of descent and ethnicity.

I have already described the ritual kinship ties that Nahuas had established with Mestizos. An example of biological kinship across ethnic lines is Nacho’s deceased wife, Victoria who was the daughter of Juan Bonilla Pereañez, the son of Ponciano Bonilla, and María Pereañez, a Nahua woman. Mestizos referred to Juan as Juan Pereañez rather than Juan Bonilla to stress his Nahua heritage and to discount his Mestizo one. In an ethnically stratified community like Huitzilan, the effect was to create resentment; it is no coincidence that Juan Pereañez became one of the leaders in the UCI and was the first to fall when the Antorcha Campesina, with the support of the army, drove the rebels out of Huitzilan. Nevertheless, one of Ponciano’s sons, a Mestizo, expressed sorrow that his brother, Juan Pereañez, and several of Juan’s children had died in violence that culminated in a massacre at the end of the UCI rebellion.

The way Nahuas reckon descent and ethnicity is also important for understanding their selective nativism. Stressing biological descent as a basis of kinship can, under the right circumstances feed into a racist form of nativism. However, Nahuas define their kinship connection to another person with a combination of biological ties to their ancestors as well as ties created through human activity or work (tequit).24 For example, Nacho described his kinship connection with Luis Vino by mentioning genealogical origin as well as human activity. He began by stressing that their ancestors came from the same locality in Huitzilan: “[Luis] was our relative. From where I came, he was from where my grandmother came, from where my father came. We were from one stalk.” (“Topareinte catca. Campa neh nihualliuh, yeh campa nohuienan catca hualliuh, notaht catca campa hualliuh. Ce tactozn ticen catca.”)25 Nacho used the term tactzon, which is a combination of tac-ti, or torso, and tzon-ti, or head of hair (Karttunen 1992: 256, 318). Nacho defined tactzon as the stalk of a plant because he, like the ancient as well as contemporary Nahuas (López Austin 1988 I: 162; see Sandstrom 1991), identified the human body with the corn plant. Regarding the ancient Nahuas, López Austin (1988 I:162) notes that the word tonacayo (the whole of our flesh) “is applied to the fruits of the earth, especially to the most important one, corn, thus forming a metaphoric tie between man’s corporeal being and the food to which he owed his existence.”

At first glance, it might appear that Nacho invoked the image of a family tree when talking about his kinship ties with Luis Vino. However, his image of the stalk alludes to some of the ways he and other Nahuas think about kinship as something created by work as well as by blood. When talking about Luis Vino, Nacho was alluding to the equation between planting and procreation, which runs through many of his stories. Planting is a form of work, or tequit, which is the word Nahuas use for many forms of human activity. The equation between planting corn and procreation also appeared in the ancient myth of Tamoanchan in which Xochiquetzal gave birth to Cinteotl, the god of corn, after picking the flower from the tree in Tamoanchan, an act that probably referred to sex (Graulich 1997: 56; Quiñones Keber 1995: 29, 183). The ancient Nahuas described conception with the phrase “The infant (seed) is seated in the womb” (Ihctic motlalia in piltzinti), which conveys an image very similar to the contemporary practice of planting corn (tzint[l]i) by inserting kernels in the moist feminine earth (López Austin 1988 I: 297).

Nahuas have had time to create ties by working with Mestizo settlers. Ties between ethnic groups had become “highly segmental, functionally specific and instrumental” and “circumscribed by well-defined roles,” to borrow from Benjamin N. Colby and Pierre L. van den Berghe (1969: 157), who carried out a study of an ethnically stratified community in Guatemala. Nahuas in Huitzilan made a point of distinguishing between good and bad work relationships they have had with Mestizos. Aurelio Aco and his wife, Mencha, had good relations with Nahuas in Huitzilan. Vicente Peralta, one of the leaders of the UCI, had worked for Aurelio and his wife and had eaten in Mencha’s kitchen. Vincente had a warm relationship with Aurelio and Mencha’s children; their son, Alonso, went to school with Vicente’s brother, Cirilo. Such ties are perhaps the reason that Vicente Peralta, at a very tense moment in the rebellion, told Mencha that the UCI would not harm her children.

Aurelio reported that he got into trouble because he transported the wounded from Huitzilan to the hospital in Zacapoaxtla, regardless of their political affiliation. He charged each wounded person 100 pesos to make the fifty-kilometer trip. The Nahuas in the UCI were unhappy that Aurelio consented to take their enemies to Zacapoaxtla and vice versa. He received anonymous notes under his door threatening harm to him and his family if he continued the practice. Unable to appease both sides, he decided to leave the community and live in Puebla for a period of four years during the UCI rebellion. However, unlike some of his relatives, he later returned to Huitzilan and resumed his business as a store owner and coffee exporter.

In sum, by the time the UCI rebellion broke out in Huitzilan in late 1977, the Nahuas’ nativism had become diluted and was focused on only a few Mestizos who had violated commonly held values. About a year later, the violence reached a new level after Pedro Manzano allegedly shot and killed the UCI activist, Felipe Reyes Herrera, and Juan Aco allegedly orchestrated the burning of the UCI’s cornfield on Talcuaco. However, much of the violence was less the result of ethnic hatred than a consequence of Nahuas in the UCI fearing that those who did not join them in their rebellion were plotting against them. I have already described how some Nahuas in the UCI put Nacho on a hit list because he did not join in the land invasion and they feared he would betray them. Mestizos were also split among themselves; Juana Gutierrez did not leave a will and her descendants were also bitterly divided among themselves. Some saw the UCI as providing them with the opportunity to get back at Juan Aco, the younger brother of Antonio Aco, for claiming Talcuaco as his property. Moreover, there were serious disputes within the extended family of Antonio Aco that had originated before the appearance of the UCI in Huitzilan. When I returned to Huitzilan for the third period of fieldwork, a Mestiza told me her uncle had given arms and ammunition to the UCI in the hope that they would carry out vendettas against his cousins. The comparatively rare Nahua attacks on Mestizos usually took place when grudges harbored by the members of the two ethnic groups focused on the same individual.

Nevertheless, the power asymmetry between wealthy and impoverished Nahuas was real. A wealthy Mestizo had a great deal of power over the Nahuas who worked on their estates, but the asymmetry of power could produce what appeared on the surface to be remarkable contradictions. The next chapter will feature a humble Nahua man’s story of what it means to be at the whims of a powerful Mestizo patrón (employer). The story expresses the narrator’s contradictory feelings of wishing to be a powerful and wealthy Mestizo patrón while also criticizing the patron-client relationship.