Chapter 1
Introduction
This book presents the cultural basis of an agrarian revolt that took place between 1977 and 1984 in a Mexican community of Nahuas and Mestizos in a remote part of the Sierra Norte de Puebla. By cultural basis is meant a tradition of storytelling through which Nahuas became radicalized, inspiring some among them to take political action to remedy their predicament. Usually agrarian revolts in Mexico develop with the benefit of political brokers with close ties to a community and experience outside of it. The brokers import, translate, and modify a political ideology to fit local conditions, sometimes with the help of peasant organizations that provide moral support and legal advice.1 I shall argue that a Nahua rebellion in the Sierra Norte de Puebla was primarily, but not exclusively, a grassroots phenomenon that oral narrators anticipated and described in stories of rain gods’ organizing and attacking, with bolts of lightning, the companion spirits of autocratic local leaders and unwanted non-Nahua settlers. The narrators of the rain god stories presented examples of behavior that violated deeply held values in Nahua culture.
The stories were fantasies of revenge that erupted in a rebellion late in 1977 when thirty to forty Nahuas in Huitzilan armed themselves, invaded two cattle pastures, and planted them with corn. The insurgency became known locally as the UCI, an acronym for Unión Campesina Independiente or Union of Independent Farmers. The Nahuas invited an UCI activist, with no prior ties to the community, to help them organize a group to protect themselves from their enemies and to recover land lost to Mestizos. The UCI activist encouraged the Nahuas to locate and invade intestate land, so the thirty to forty Nahuas seized two cattle pastures, which were the subject of a bitter dispute between the members of two elite Mestizo families. A bullet ended the life of the UCI activist within a year of the land invasion but the rebellion lasted until 1984, when the Antorcha Campesina (Torch of the Farmer), the military arm of the PRI party, drove out the UCI and took control of the local government.
History of Rebellions
The UCI insurgency was one of many that have taken place in the northern sierra of Puebla. During the colonial period (1521–1821), there were at least six revitalization movements aimed at resisting the friars’ efforts to convert Nahuas, Totonacs, Otomí, and Tepehuas to Christianity (Gruzinski 1989; Stresser-Péan 2012: 63–110). After Mexican independence from Spain in 1821, Nahuas in and around Cuetzalan attempted to drive out Spanish-speaking settlers, who had come into the sierra from the Mexican highlands in search of land to graze their cattle and grow sugarcane and coffee (Thomson 1991). The rain gods played a role in all of these movements.
Collective Memory
This study builds on Victoria Bricker’s foundational work, in which she (1981:177–181) asserted that Maya rituals and stories are collective memories of former interethnic conflicts that have the potential of becoming another historical event. When using the term “collective memory,” I shall employ Paul Ricoeur’s (2006: 119) definition of “a collection of traces left by events that have affected the course of history of the groups concerned, and that is accorded the power to place on stage these common memories.” He equated a collective memory with “the concept of ‘worlds of culture,’ understood in the sense of ‘concrete life-worlds in which the relatively or absolutely separate communities live their passive and active lives’” (118).
I aim to expand upon Bricker’s argument by drawing on my long-term fieldwork in Huitzilan, which involved recording stories of the rain gods’ rebellion and making observations of the context in Huitzilan before, during, and after the UCI insurgency of 1977–1984. Fieldwork took place in three stages: (1) between 1968 and 1975, prior to the land invasion in 1977; (2) in 1978, during the first months of the rebellion; and (3) between 2003 and 2012, after the insurrection had come to an end.
A Cultural Theory of Peasant Unrest
To organize the observations carried out during the three periods, I turned to James C. Scott’s (1977a, 1977b, 1985, 1990, 2005) cultural theory of peasant unrest that uses observations like those that I made in Huitzilan. Scott (1977a: 5) argued for a change in the approach to peasant rebellion, declaring that “far too much scholarly labor has been expended on the precipitants of peasant rebellion and far too little on the shared values and goals which find expression through rebellion.” He (1977a: 20) recommended searching for those shared values in folktales, myths, rituals and other expressions of local culture. Kalyanakrishnan Sivaramakrishnan (2005: 2) traces Scott’s intellectual origins to the Manchester School that included Max Gluckman (1965: 259) and his work on “rituals of rebellion.” Gluckman meant by this term rituals that affirm commonly shared values by dramatizing the negative case of leaders who fall short of expectations. Rather than dividing a community, the rituals convey the illusion that “we are in fact united” but nevertheless have revolutionary potential.
Scott and other scholars (See Friedrich 1970, 1986; Schryer 1990) have demonstrated the value of taking local culture into consideration when trying to understand insurgency, and their approach has gained support among contemporary scholars in different disciplines (See La Serna 2012; Johnson and Zellen 2014; Smith and Jones 2015), some of whom warn that a failure to take local expressions of discontent into account can lead to costly mistakes. Reconsidering the U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, Smith and Jones (2015: 25) charge that attempting to access accurately “the nature of the enemy and the goals it sought, while recognizing the limits of political commitment, might have offered the United States a more realistic set of options about how to prosecute its war on South Vietnam, or, indeed, whether to prosecute it at all.” Johnson and Zellen (2014) express a similar view of U.S. involvement in Afghanistan.
Scott developed many of his insights into the culture of peasants through ethnographic research he carried out in 1978–1980 in a seventy-household Malaysian village he called Sedaka. He described Sedaka as “a rice-farming community in the main paddy growing area of Kedah” (Scott 1985: xvii). His interpretations of peasant culture in Sedaka are transferable to Huitzilan, which was, and to some extent still is, a corn-farming and coffee-raising community in the northern sierra of Puebla. The Nahuas in Huitzilan are a good fit for Scott’s observation that one who experiences humilities and indignities as a result of being socially subordinate “may develop a personal fantasy of revenge and confrontation, but when the insult is but a variant of affronts suffered systematically by a whole race, class, or strata, then the fantasy can become a collective product” (1990: 9).
The examination of the rain god stories recorded during the three periods of fieldwork in Huitzilan revealed that when Nahuas had negative experiences, they repeated accounts of them in stories; some became myths, particularly when their experience was a synecdoche (part for the whole) for the experience of others. Stories of the rain gods’ rebellion fit William Bascom’s (1965: 5) definition of myth as a prose narrative of action regarded as fact, set in the remote or unspecified past, and involving non-human characters in a world different from the one narrators experience in their present.
One aim of this book is to identify the role that myths played in turning Nahua expressions of discontent into the rebellion of 1977–1984. Scott (1985: 341) was cautious about this point, noting that “there is no necessary relationship between the small and limited demands typical of a ‘reformist’ consciousness and the kinds of actions taken to achieve these demands.” In the recent history of eastern Mexico alone, Nahuas have reacted to their subordinate status in multiple and complex ways ranging from land invasions to religious pilgrimages. Nahua farmers in the Sierra Norte de Puebla, the Huasteca of Veracruz, and the Huasteca of Hidalgo have carried out small-(Sandstrom 1991: 89–90, 174–175) and large-scale land invasions (Schryer 1990: 186–190, 194–195, 208–209), sometimes targeting land owned by other Nahuas as well as by Mestizos (Schryer 1990: 46–47).2 Nahuas also organized with other groups ritual pilgrimages to the extinct volcano of Postectli in the Huasteca of Veracruz in response to Mestizos who treated them with “disrespect” and caused them to suffer “sickness, drought, and misfortune” (Sandstrom 2008: 178).
In the Sierra Norte de Puebla, the UCI land invasion in Huitzilan appears to be a secular response to Mestizo encroachment. However, a fuller examination of the Nahuas’ rituals and rain god stories revealed that it had a religious dimension. The stories and rituals derive from an ancient tradition that stems from what Johanna Broda (1971: 246) called a fertility cult that she traced to an early Pre-Hispanic cultural strata of cultivators in Central Mexico. I shall argue that the UCI rebellion was an indigenous phenomenon that developed out of the Nahuas’ frustrations in attempting to live according to the cooperative values of their corn-farming culture, which they shared in stories that are contemporary expressions of this cult.
Huitzilan’s Location in the Sierra Norte
In 1968 I chose Huitzilan de Serdán as a location for fieldwork because it had a large population of monolingual speakers of a Nahua language. My original aim was to describe a culture with deep roots in the Mesoamerican past. Huitzilan is located in the Sierra Norte de Puebla, a strategically located region of “eight thousand square kilometers of almost impenetrable mountains populated by Nahua, Totonac, and Otomí villages” (Brewster 2003: 2). The Sierra Norte lies along the most direct route from Mexico City to the Gulf Coast. However, the difficult terrain and the high level of precipitation make travel through the sierra difficult (Brewster 2003:2–3). Rough dirt roads passable by car and truck did not reach Huitzilan until 1975; before then travel in and out of the village was by foot or horseback on steep and rugged dirt paths.
Guy Stresser-Péan (2012) distinguished between the northern and southern halves of the Sierra Norte. He (2012: 37) defined the northern half as made up of the Totonac, Nahuatl, and Otomí areas in “the northern half of the municipality of Huauchinango, the western end of the large municipality of Xicotepec” and extending “to the small municipalities of Naupan, Pahuatlán, and Chila-Honey in Puebla.” The northern half also includes “the western part of the Acaxochitlán municipality and part of Tenango de Doris, both in the state of Hidalgo.”
In the southern half are the commercial and political centers of Tlatlauquitepec, Zacapoaxtla, and Cuetzalan (Stresser-Péan 2012: 39, 52) [see map]. Huitzilan has cultural and economic ties to Zacapoaxtla but is in the political jurisdiction of Tetela de Ocampo. From Huitzilan in 1968, one walked or rode a horse sixteen kilometers to Huahuaxtla and then took a bus another thirteen kilometers to reach the commercial center of Zacapoaxtla. One walked or rode a horse forty-seven kilometers from Huitzilan to reach Tetela de Ocampo. The few Nahuas who went from Huitzilan to Cuetzalan traveled thirty-nine kilometers, at least half of which were on foot or by horseback.
Nahuas in Huitzilan speak the Nahuat dialect of Nahuatl (Stresser-Péan 2012: 39), which Frances Karttunen (1992: xxi) defined as “a T-dialect” that closely resembles Nahuatl except that it does not have “the characteristic lateral release of TL.” Karttunen added that otherwise “it is not distant, at least lexically, from the Nahuatl described by Carochi.” Some linguists consider Nahuat the older version of Nahuatl spoken by the Toltecs of ancient Tula near the Sierra Norte de Puebla.3
Many speakers of Nahuat as well as Totonac in the southern Sierra Norte live in ethnically stratified communities created when Mestizos, called locally gente de razón (people of reason), settled in their villages in the late 1800s. Mestizos in Huitzilan make up about 10 percent of the population. Two hundred seventy-five respondents identified themselves as Mestizos and 2,373 said they were Nahuas in a census that Florentino Perez and Nacho Ángel Hernández carried out in the main settlement of Huitzilan in 1969. At that time, many Mestizos referred to the Nahuas as the humble people or gente humilde, and some used the derogatory term nacos, short for Totonacs. Nahuas referred to themselves as Christians from Earth or talticpac cristianos, speakers of Nahua or macehualmeh, and sometimes the poor ones or pobres. Nahuas referred to the Mestizos as a the rich ones or ricos, people of reason or razón, or, more often, coyot, the Nahuat word for coyote and the character in the popular trickster tale “Rabbit and Coyote,” who tries to eat the rabbit.
In an effort to avoid reifying negative stereotypes when describing ethnic relations in Huitzilan, I shall refer to the people of reason (gente de razón) as Mestizos, the term that some members of elite families in Huitzilan told me that they prefer. I shall use the term Nahuas to refer to the native speakers of Nahuat, also in accord with their preferences. A reader will find exceptions to the rule in the Nahuat transcriptions of narratives and in my translations where I tried to find the most appropriate English word for the Nahuat one used by the narrators.
Method
I constructed a picture of how Nahuas interpreted, in their stories, their experiences prior to, during, and after the UCI rebellion. Narrators defined an oral story as a lesson (neixcuitil) passed on from the ancestors, which I interpreted in four ways. One was to record, transcribe, and compare stories to discover how the Nahuas expressed their worldviews during each of the three stages of fieldwork. Some of the stories described experiences that “generated anger and collective action” (Scott 1985: 347). A second was to ask narrators to explain passages in their stories I could not understand. A third was to carry out interviews with Mestizos and Nahuas to discover their views of their community. A fourth was to make observations of community life and Nahua culture that provided the context for the stories I recorded, during all three stages of fieldwork.
Stages of Fieldwork
The first stage of fieldwork (1968–1975) began with a study of the developmental cycle of domestic groups from which I learned the Nahua value of cooperation in the extended family (Taggart 1972, 1975). The Nahuas I interviewed used the phrase “working as one” or ce cosa tequiti to refer to men in the domestic group pooling their harvest of corn and beans in a common granary for the use of all of the women according to need. In retrospect, the Nahuas, who rebelled in 1977, put into practice the value of working as one they had learned in their domestic groups. After invading the cattle pastures, they planted them with corn and divided the crop as if they were members of a large extended family.
In 1973, after learning and speaking Nahuat with sufficient fluency, I turned to the study of oral narratives to probe deeper into domestic group culture. At that time, the Nahuas told many stories that grappled with domestic group internal dynamics. I also heard in 1975 the first of many rain god stories in which Nahuas imagined a rebellion against the hierarchical social structure of Huitzilan. I realized at that point that contemporary Nahuas had a revolutionary ideology with roots in the ancient figures of the rain gods. Some Nahuas are the human companions of rain gods and are variants of what Alfredo López Austin (1989: 61) has called the human-god or hombre dios.
The second stage of fieldwork took place during the 1977 and 1978 academic year, first in the monoethnic Nahua community of Santiago Yaonáhuac (1977) and then in Huitzilan (1978), where the UCI rebellion was in its early phase. My purpose was to discover how Nahuas in Huitzilan and Yaonáhuac described in their stories their different degrees of subordination to Mestizos. I discovered that, compared with Nahuas in Huitzilan, those in the monoethnic community of Yaonáhuac enjoyed a great deal more access to land, passed more of their land to their daughters as well as sons, and did not have to deal on a daily basis with Mestizos living in their community and controlling their municipio government. The comparison between Yaonáhuac and Huitzilan revealed how ethnic hierarchy contributed to the radicalization of the Nahuas in Huitzilan. Early signs of radicalization were particularly evident in stories of the rain gods’ rebellion that Nahuas in Huitzilan circulated before the UCI insurgency. Their stories during the first months of the UCI rebellion expressed how narrators were revitalized by the challenge the rebels now posed to the elite families in Huitzilan.
The third stage of fieldwork (2003–2012) took place in Huitzilan several years after the rebellion had come to an end. The Antorcha Campesina, whose members were Mestizos from outside the community, had taken over the town government, displacing the local Mestizo elite from their position as the politically dominant group. At that time, I recorded the Nahuas’ accounts of the behavior of some local Mestizos who had tricked them out of their land and assaulted their women. A comparison of narratives recorded at this time with those heard earlier revealed how beliefs about rain gods, water-dwelling animals, and weather had changed as more Nahuas turned away from corn-farming and toward wage labor in and outside of Huitzilan. Nahua narrators also told “The Storm,” a lesson from the ancestors on how to endure a frightening rainstorm that threatened to unleash a landslide. The ancestors’ lesson is transferable to how to endure another rebellion by being alert and keeping one’s fears in check.
Ethical Considerations
I faced ethical considerations while carrying out fieldwork in Huitzilan during and after the rebellion that affected my decision not to seek out and interview Nahuas who had joined the UCI when their rebellion was in full swing. Huitzilan went through a tense period in the fall of 1977, after Nahuas invited the UCI activist to come to Huitzilan and organize a group to protect them from their enemies and recover land lost to Mestizos. The UCI had just taken the risky step of posing a serious challenge to elite Mestizos and to some Nahuas. The Nahuas who had joined the UCI were extremely suspicious of those who were reluctant to join their movement. They kept apart from the rest of their community and put some Nahuas on a hit list. They did not welcome anyone from outside interviewing and exposing them to authorities in Puebla. Challenges continued after the rebellion when many in the UCI leadership were dead or had fled from the community, never to return. I knew that some were in hiding in Huitzilan and that any attempt to seek them out would expose them to risks. The Antorcha Campesina had been ruling the community since 1984, and broadcast speeches over a loudspeaker denouncing the UCI and asserting that, were it not for the Antorcha’s rule, the UCI would return and more blood would flow in the streets of Huitzilan. In this environment, I decided to keep a low profile and resort to indirect methods to reconstruct what had taken place in Huitzilan after I left in the spring of 1978.
The Narrators
All of the narrators who contributed rain god stories to this book were native speakers of Nahuat. None had joined the UCI, and some were on the rebels’ hit list because they were reluctant to take part in the land invasion. However, all the narrators knew someone, often a relative, who had participated in the insurgency. A few of the narrators were closely related to the local leaders of the rebellion and heard firsthand from them why they had joined the UCI. Most narrators were closely allied with the priest; they participated in the ritual life of their community; and they were among the more religiously involved citizens of Huitzilan. The Nahua narrators came from the two main population clusters. One is in the south and consists of the contiguous settlements of Ixtahuatalix, the Colonia de la Concepción, and Tenampulco (known as Sección Quinta). The other is in the north and consists primarily of Calyecapan (Sección Tercera).
Ixtahuatalix was an ejido, meaning land that was redistributed, following the Mexican Revolution, to communities and individuals but held by the federal government.4 In general, the families who lived on or near Ixtahuatalix had tiny ejidos for their house sites. They possessed very little other land, and lived by planting as much corn as they could on rented land and working for wages on the estates of the Mestizos in and near Huitzilan and on the Veracruz coast. Those who lived in Calyecapan were related by kinship to Domingo Hernández, one of the wealthiest Nahuas, who owned a considerable amount of land in Huitzilan, including a sugarcane field and press. Domingo Hernández sponsored many of the patron saint celebrations that took place in Huitzilan during the first period of fieldwork (1968–1975).
Creating a Written Record of an Oral Tradition
I recorded the narrators’ stories in their homes, usually in the presence of other family members who participated in the storytelling process. I expressed an interest in all of the stories they told, not just ones having to do with the rain gods’ rebellion. During the first two stages of fieldwork (1973–1975 and 1978), I transcribed all the narratives and corrected them with Nacho Ángel Hernández’s help. Nacho Ángel Hernández was born in Calyecapan and provided invaluable help by teaching me his language and explaining his culture. By the third stage of fieldwork, I had become more proficient in the language and used better recording equipment, so I could transcribe the recordings on my own. Nacho continued to play an invaluable role explaining allusions in stories that Nahuas in Huitzilan understood but I, as an outsider, did not.
Summary of Results
Long-term fieldwork resulted in a partial written record of an oral tradition. Vansina (1985: 149, 160) defined the corpus of oral tradition as memories of memories “heard from somebody else” within a locality. A community corpus is not homogeneous; it differs from that of other localities, and memories heard from others change faster than personal memory (Vansina 1985: 150–162). The stories of rain gods that circulated in the oral tradition of the Nahuas in the southern Sierra Norte manifest these characteristics. The stories show considerable variation from one narrator to another, and those from Huitzilan are different from the ones I recorded from Nahuas in Santiago Yaonáhuac.
Only in Huitzilan did Nahuas tell stories of rain gods organizing to topple municipio presidents by killing their animal companion spirits. Nahuas in Yaonáhuac told stores about rain gods doing many things but not organizing to attack and kill the animal companion of a municipio president. I was first struck by this difference in 1977 when in Yaonáhuac recording numerous stories of rain gods, none of which sounded like the one I had heard in 1975 from Miguel Ahuata in Huitzilan. In Miguel’s story of “The President and the Priest,” the rain gods kill the animal companion spirit of a municipio president who practiced negative reciprocity. The President refuses to fulfill his obligation to provide the priest with a meal in reciprocity for performing a mass. Nahuas had explained on numerous occasions, during early fieldwork, that negative reciprocity was a threat to the unity of the extended family domestic group because it undermined the value of working as one. At that time the Nahuas were struggling to hold their extended families together because land for growing corn and beans was becoming expensive to rent.
In 1975, the Mestizo elite in Huitzilan was firmly in control of the local government and the UCI had not yet appeared in the Sierra Norte de Puebla. Miguel Ahuata had anticipated by two years the actual rebellion in which the Nahuas in the UCI put into practice the idea of a collective rebellion loosely resembling the one Miguel had described in his story. I suspect that Miguel Ahuata’s 1975 narrative was a collective memory of earlier rebellions that had taken place in the southern Sierra Norte, such as Pala Agustín Dieguillo’s insurgency in the Cuetzalan area following the French intervention (1862–1867) (Thomson 1991).
During the second period of fieldwork, when the UCI were tending to their first corn field on Talcuaco and Taltempan, de la Co Ayance, Nacho Angel Hernández, and Antonio Veracruz told other stories expanding on the themes in Miguel Ahuata’s story. Their stories expressed more pointed critiques of local officials and unwelcome Mestizo settlers that I attribute to the narrators’ feelings of revitalization as a result of the UCI rebellion. At about the same time, Miguel Fuentes told the story of “Malintzin” or Precious Mary, a virtuous woman whom the devil, who had changed into a crying infant and then a serpent, dragged into a bottomless pool. “Malintzin” is derived from accounts of the actual kidnapping of a Nahua woman that inspired her husband to invite the UCI organizer to Huitzilan. “Malintzin” is the first of two examples of local expressions of discontent in narrative form playing a direct role in the UCI rebellion. The second example is an oral narrative, which is in the process of becoming a myth, explaining why three Nahua men joined the UCI to recover a fourteen-hectare plot of land their grandfather had actually lost many years earlier to a Mestizo in an unfair and much criticized land transaction.
After the rebellion collapsed, the Ángel Hernández brothers in Calyecapan told the new story of “The Man from Ayehual,” in which they revised their ideas about the relationship between achane (water dwellers) and rain gods, reducing their polarization in accord with changes in interethnic relations. Also new was their rendition of “The Achane of Apohpocayan,” which marked the end of the era in which the Ángel Hernández brothers worked as one by cultivating a common corn field to feed their families. They also told the story of “The Storm,” which summed up their horrific experiences during the UCI rebellion. “The Storm” is a lesson for how to live through a powerful tropical depression as well as a political upheaval.