Chapter 2
Rebellions in the Sierra Norte
The UCI rebellion is the most recent of many insurgencies that speakers of indigenous languages have carried out in the Sierra Norte de Puebla. Stresser-Péan (2012: 63–78) found evidence from the colonial period (1521–1821) that Nahuas, Totonacs, and Otomí in northern part of the Sierra Norte, near Huachinango, Xicotepec, Tutotepec, and Matlatlán, were involved in at least six revitalization movements.1 The leaders organized resistance to the friars who suppressed the autochthonous religion and attempted to convert the indigenous population to Christianity. Nahuas, Otomí, and others promoted an ancient religion focused on rain gods who were part of a fertility cult (Broda 1971; Stresser-Péan 2012: 63–78) that continues to be part of the Nahuas corn-farming-based culture.
One of the best described revitalization movements took place between 1766 and 1769 and involved the Otomí of Tutotepec. The Otomí had built a chapel on top of Mt. San Mateo or Cerro Azul (Blue Mountain), where the devout made offerings “to the spirits of lightning and rain” (Stresser-Péan 2012: 85). Their leader was known as Juan Diego, named after the Nahua who was said to have witnessed the Virgin of Guadalupe appear on a hill known as Tepeyac in the Valley of Mexico over two centuries earlier. The Otomí Juan Diego had a vision in which “the crucified Christ appeared before him to reveal the coming of great prodigies and a new age.” Christ predicted that God would descend to the top of Cerro Azul and bring an end to the world with a great flood (Stresser-Péan 2012: 84). The Otomí had hoped a flood would drive out the Spaniards, Creoles, and Mestizo settlers, who had come into the Sierra Norte from Central Mexico (82). Events came to a climax during Carnival in 1769, when Juan Diego celebrated “great festivities at the top of Cerro de San Matero [Cerro Azul]” (89). Several dozen Spaniards, Creoles, and Mestizos attacked the gathering and killed or captured the leaders and their lieutenants (90). At its peak, the uprising of 1769 involved participants from twenty-one communities (Stresser-Péan 2012: 87).
Insurgency movements with similar nativist aspirations occurred in the early 1800s in the southern Sierra Norte de Puebla where Nahuas resisted the influx of Mestizos, who had begun settling in the Cuetzalan area in the late 1700s. Thomson (1991: 210) noted that in 1807:
Indian leaders put up fierce resistance to granting formal political status to a barrio of non-Indian corn farmers who had established a settlement at the ‘rancho of Xocoyolotopeque’ during the Great Famine of 1785–86.
The migration of Mestizos into the Cuetzalan area nevertheless continued, and by the 1850s “a rapidly growing Indian population confronted an intensified influx of more ambitious and wealthy (compared with previous immigrants) gente de razón [Mestizos], who chose to settle in their midst rather than at a discreet distance” (Thomson 1991: 214). The Mestizos wanted land to raise their cattle, grow sugarcane for aguardiente, and grow coffee for export.
The Nahua leader of the resistance was Pala Agustín Dieguillo, who had “fought at the battle of Puebla on May 5, 1862, when General Ignacio Zaragoza’s hastily assembled Liberal army defeated the French expeditionary force” (Thomson 1991: 205). On April 2, 1867, Pala Agustín Dieguillo participated in a second battle of Puebla, leading 100 Nahua soldiers from Cuetzalan, under the command of Juan N. Mendez and Juan Francisco Lucas, in a more definitive defeat of the French and Austrian soldiers that helped end the French intervention (Thomson 1991: 205). When Pala Agustín Dieguillo returned from the second battle of Puebla, he led the resistance against the new wave of Mestizos. Pala Agustín Dieguillo employed a dual strategy of “clientelism and collective action” to resist the efforts of Mestizos to apply the Ley Lerdo and acquire communal indigenous lands as private property (Thomson 1991: 207). The Ley Lerdo “prohibited corporations [that is, religious foundations and civic communities] from holding real property” (Simpson [1941] 1966: 273–274). Civic communities included indigenous villages that held land communally. The law became article 27 of the Constitution of 1857 (Simpson [1941] 1966: 275), and Guy P. C. Thomson (1991: 206) reports that Mestizos used it to gain rights to communal land in Nahua villages in and around Cuetzalan. Pala Agustín Dieguillo’s resistance movement grew into a protest of 200 men and increased to 400 by 1868. Thomson (1991: 207) described the movement’s nativist focus:
Pala Agustín and his followers organized an armed movement aimed at expelling non-Indians from their midst. This took the form of a three-year campaign of intimidation, commercial boycott, and the destruction of cattle pens and coffee plantations accompanied by military encirclement of Cuetzalán (cabecera), where most of the municipality’s non-Indians resided.
The Cuetzalan movement may have helped set the stage for the land invasion that occurred in Huitzilan in 1977, just over one hundred years later. Pala Agustín Dieguillo’s nativist movement may have driven some Mestizos from the Cuetzalan area and into Huitzilan, where they found Nahuas who spoke the same dialect of Nahuat. One of the first was Juana Gutierrez, who came from San Antonio Rayón, near Cuetzalan, and settled in Huitzilan around 1880. She reputedly brought gold coins with her and used them to buy a great deal of land. She left many descendants, one of whom owns “a world of land,” in the words of a Mestizo who was born and lived most of his life in Huitzilan. Juana Gutierrez’s estate included the Talcuaco and Taltempan pastures that Nahuas invaded in the late fall of 1977 and early winter of 1978.
Juana Gutierrez was not the first Mestizo to acquire land in Huitzilan. A prominent Mestizo in Huitzilan provided, in an interview,2 some of the historical background to the UCI rebellion. The interview began with a discussion of who owned the land that became the Ixtahuatalix ejido. What emerged is an account, from a native son, of Nahuas losing a great deal of their land prior to the arrival of Juana Gutierrez around 1880, and how and why the non-Nahuas Antonio Aco from Tetela and Ponciano Bonilla from Huitzilan acquired political power in Huitzilan. Ponciano Bonilla was the son of Ramón Bonilla, who had come from Tetela de Ocampo, and Virginia Bonilla, who was born in Huitzilan to Juana Gutierrez.3 An important part of this interview is the narrator’s description of the complex ties of kinship and friendship among Antonio Aco and Isidro Grimaldo; the jefe político of Tetela de Ocampo whose jurisdiction included Huitzilan; Juan N. Mendez, the general who, with Juan Francisco Lucas, led the Nahua brigade from Cuetzalan in the second battle of Puebla; and Gabriel Barrios, who became the cacique (political boss) of the Sierra Norte de Puebla after the Mexican Revolution.
These figures and their relationships are important because they explain the formation of an elite group of Mestizos who gained power to govern Huitzilan in the years leading up to the UCI rebellion.
At that time the land in the southern half of Huitzilan, including all that Antonio Aco’s son later owned, all of what used to be the ejido of Ixtahuatalix, and all that is now section five, it all belonged to Juan N. Mendez and Grimaldo. Juan N. Mendez probably grabbed the land in the southern half of Huitzilan, only no one knows exactly what happened, but the results are that he had a lot of land here. They [Juan N. Mendez and Isidro Grimaldo] brought . . . Antonio [Aco] from Tetela to Huitzilan to administer the land Doña Elena [a close friend of Antonio Aco’s sister and the daughter of Juan N. Mendez] had acquired with her marriage to Isidro Grimaldo. She did not just have land here. She also owned land on what is now a settlement called Santa Elena below Zongozotla [a Totonac community adjacent to Huitzilan]. The name Santa Elena was in honor of Elena Grimaldo.4
Huitzilan was on the margins of the struggles during the Mexican Revolution (1910–1917) and became part of the political dominion of Gabriel Barrios, who took over the Sierra Brigade after the death in 1917 of its former commander, the Nahuat-or Nahuatl-speaking Juan Francisco Lucas. General Gabriel Barrios resided in the Tetela area and was the cacique or political leader of the Sierra Norte de Puebla until May 27, 1930. On that date, the Guerra y Marina (Mexican Secretary of Defense) transferred the general and his Serrano brigade to Mexico City after trade unions and agrarian reformers gained power, and openly criticized the general (Brewster 2003: 154–158).
The Mestizo finished his interview by explaining how Antonio Aco, along with Ponciano Bonilla, continued to hold power in Huitzilan once Gabriel Barrios became the cacique of Tetela de Ocampo in 1917. Kinship also played an important role in the alliance between Antonio Aco and Gabriel Barrios.
Antonio [Aco] had become the brother-in-law of General Barrios [when Antonio’s sister, María, started living with the general]. He also took advantage of the general’s political position to maintain or add to his hold on political power in Huitzilan. Antonio’s brothers had less power probably because they were younger. In addition to Antonio [Aco], Ponciano Bonilla was also closely allied with General Barrios. Don Ponciano knew General Barrios, and so did the Aco brothers, all of whom had a certain amount of political power in the town because of their friendship with the general.5
Huitzilan Ejidos
The ejido land redistribution program provided some relief to the Nahuas in Huitzilan. Land distribution was “one of the major goals of the revolution” and was carried out “by ejido grants to individuals” and “to communities” (Wilkie 1971: xi). Lesley Byrd Simpson ([1941] 1966: 321) reports: “During the four effective years of his term [1936–1940], Cárdenas distributed more land to the peasants than had been distributed in all of the years since the beginning of the Revolution.” According to documents I read in the Departamento de Asuntos Agrarios in Mexico City, “the citizens of Huitzilan filed a petition on December 13, 1943, to designate 335 hectares” as ejidos. The source of the land is unclear. According to the documents the land originally belonged to the municipio. However, the Mestizo declared in his interview that the ejido, which became Ixtahuatalix and consisted of twenty-seven hectares, was land once held by Juan N. Mendez and Isidro Grimaldo. The documents in the Departmento de Asuntos Agrarians specify that the ejido of Ixtahuatalix only bordered on land owned by María Elena Grimaldo to the east and land owned by Juana Gutierrez to the south. The other ejidos were La Cumbre, a parcel of five hectares at the northern end of the community; Escorial, a parcel of eight hectares to the east of Huitzilan; and the much larger ejido of Chachaloyan, a parcel of 295 hectares halfway between Huitzilan and the junta auxiliar of San Juan Totutla.6
At the very least, these four ejidos slowed the alienation of lands that Nahuas needed to grow their corn and build their houses, but many still had to rent land owned by Mestizos to grow their food. Only 35 percent of 450 Nahua married couples owned any land in fee simple tenure, according to the census on domestic group social composition and land ownership that Florentino Perez and Nacho Ángel Hernández carried out for me in 1969 (Taggart 1972: 147). Many of the 35 percent owned only a house site and a small coffee orchard. The creation of the Chachaloyan ejido was an important resource for Nahuas seeking land to grow their corn and beans. However, the Nahuas in Huitzilan had to share the 295 hectares with the people of San Juan Totutla and the small settlement of Chachaloyan itself.
For the Nahuas in Huitzilan, the creation of the four ejidos fell short of Leslie Byrd Simpson’s ([1941] 1966: 302) characterization of the government’s intent for the ejido program as “nothing less than a complete restoration of land to the Indians.” The expansion of the ejido program in the Sierra Norte de Puebla ran up against a number of obstacles. Marc Edelman (1980: 35) notes that for the Zacapoaxtla region in the southern Sierra Norte de Puebla, “Most of the largest haciendas in the region were divided and sold before they could be expropriated. For this reason there are few ejidos . . . in the area.”
Moreover, the ejido program conflicted with other political priorities, particularly the need to feed workers who began to migrate to cities to work in factories with Mexico’s “rapid post-1940 industrialization” (Edelman 1980: 29). With U.S. factories retooled for war, Mexico faced a scarcity of industrial goods from the north and turned to manufacturing them in its own factories (Edelman 1980: 29). To produce food for the factory workers, the Mexican state promoted industrial agriculture particularly in “the northwestern states of Sonora and Sinaloa and in the Bajío region” (Edelman 1980: 29). The turn away from agrarian reform and toward industrial agriculture meant that the people of Huitzilan would not see any more ejidos after the redistribution of 1943. Edelman (1980: 29–30) explains that the “smallholding regions of the country were viewed primarily as sources of inexpensive labor for both the urban sectors and for capitalist agriculture.” Mexican industrial agriculture, however, was unable to “meet the nation’s need for grains” and the Mexican state reoriented agrarian policy to “stimulate commercial production of basic foodstuffs by peasant smallholders” (30). Part of the motivation to make this shift was “a spreading agrarian crisis marked by land occupations and violent conflicts between peasants and landowners” (30).
Nahuas in the Huasteca of Hidalgo, north of the Sierra Norte, began carrying out land invasions in the late ’60s. Frans J. Schryer (1990: 186–190, 194–195, 208–209) noted that President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz set the stage for the land occupation movement when he signed an order creating forty-nine ejidos in the district of Huejutla. The president’s action created the expectation among peasants for the restoration of their ancestral community lands. It encouraged Nahuas to create “their own interpretation of history according to which a few rich Nahua families and the coyomeh (Mestizos) had ‘stolen’ the land that rightfully belonged to all the macehualli (Nahuas).” The first invasions took place in 1968 in the villages of La Corrola and Tenexco with “legal advice and moral support” from the CCI or the Central Campesino Independiente (Central Organization of Independent Farmers). The local peasant leader, Felipe Naranjo, was a Mestizo who grew up in Tenexco and then worked cutting cane in the Huasteca of Veracruz, where he had exposure to the “ideas of left-wing agrarian politicians.” Land invasions continued through the ’70s under other leaders, such as Crisóstomos Arenas, who spoke fluent Nahuatl, had “a modern outlook” and was an “ideal political broker.” By 1979 the movement reached a peak and could claim 23,171 hectares.
It is quite possible that the UCI emerged as an offshoot or copy of the organizations that operated in the Huasteca de Hidalgo that included the CCI and the CAM, the acronym for the Consejo Agrario Mexicano (Mexican Agrarian Council). Nahuas and Mestizos, who had worked on plantations on the Veracruz coast, had exposure to the ideas of peasant activists and perhaps even knew about the CCI and CAM. In February 1976, the UCI organized a demonstration of more than 10,000 farmers in Martínez de la Torre, the agricultural center of Veracruz (Beaucage 1994: 39). This was the destination of Nahuas from many parts of the Sierra Norte who migrated to the coastal plain in search of wage labor. Soon thereafter, the UCI appeared in the southern Sierra Norte and started organizing Nahuas and Totonacs to invade cattle pastures for which there was no clear title. Edelman (1980: 35) reports that an agrarian crisis broke out in the southern Sierra Norte when “landless members of the Acoaco ejido in Texocoyohuac, Zacapoaxtla, occupied the adjacent San Isidro Finca in 1976.” The invasion followed years of “fruitless efforts” to obtain the finca (estate) by legal means. Edelman (1980: 35) cites reports that the owners of the finca, Gustavo Macip, who lived in the city of Puebla, and his brother, René Macip, who was the municipio president of Zacapoaxtla, or their agents, called in the army and the Federal Judicial Police to drive out the invaders.
The affiliation of the invaders of the San Isidro Finca may have been the UCI, which by 1977 had organized several land occupations in Cuetzalan and Zacapoaxtla. Eventually UCI organizers worked their way down the rough dirt road that extended partway from the Zacapoaxtla-Cuetzalan highway toward Huitzilan. The UCI began organizing land invasions where the road ended at that time in the small hamlet of Pahuata, from which they could enjoy a beautiful view of Huitzilan in a valley below. In late 1977, several Nahuas from Huitzilan went to Pahuata to ask the UCI leader, Felipe Reyes Herrera, to help them organize to defend themselves against a Nahua strongman, Pedro Manzano. Some said Felipe Reyes Herrera came from Veracruz, others named Xochiapulco, and no one said he had any ties to Huitzlan. Pedro Manzano had threatened Luis Vino, one of the Nahuas who made the trip to Pahuata, over a romantic attachment the two men had developed with the same woman. Luis Vino lived above Talcuaco, and from the porch of his house one had a beautiful view down into the center of Huitzilan.
Talcuaco had been the object of a conflict between the descendants of Juana Gutierrez and Juan Aco, the younger brother of Antonio Aco, whom Isidro Grimaldo, perhaps with the help of Juan N. Mendez, had brought from Tetela to administer the land in Huitzilan belonging to Grimaldo’s widow, Doña Elena Mendez. Juana Gutierrez did not leave a written will, so her descendants fought over her estate, which included the Talcuaco and Taltempan pastures. Antonio Aco’s younger brother, Juan Aco, believed he had rights in Talcuaco because his daughter had a child with one of the descendants of Juana Gutierrez. The UCI leader, Felipe Reyes Herrera, encouraged the Nahuas in Huitzilan to invade intestate land for which there was no clear title. He repeated the justification for this tactic by evoking the slogan attributed to Emiliano Zapata that “land is for those who work it.” He denounced the elite by urging death to the “rich ones.”
On the surface, at least, the invasion of the Talcuaco and Taltempan pastures appeared to be a Nahua rebellion with a nativist focus aimed at reacquiring land lost to Mestizos in previous centuries. Nativism—the desire to expel non-indigenous outsiders (Wallace 1956: 278)—is a common thread running through all the rebellions that have taken place in the Sierra Norte de Puebla since colonial times. As will become apparent, however, Nahua nativism was a complicated phenomenon because of the ties of kinship, ritual kinship, and, in some cases, friendship between members of the two ethnic groups in Huitzilan. (See Chapter 7, “The Water in Ixtepec,” 1978).
Less clear is the role that cultural revitalization may have played, in part because the Mesoamerican antecedents in contemporary Nahua culture in the southern Sierra Norte are in dispute. Before the UCI land invasion in Huitzilan, Pierre Beaucage (1974: 112) carried out fieldwork in Zacapexpan and Atzalan, near the Acoaco ejido in Texocoyohuac, Zacapoaxtla, the site of the first land invasions in 1976 (Edelman 1980: 35). Beaucage concluded that the Nahuas in that area were proletarians who had worked for wages on the estates of wealthy landowners and merchants for many years. He dismissed the idea that there was much left of indigenous Nahua culture other than perhaps a few rituals and some aspects of kinship (Beaucage 1974: 112).
However, when the Nahuas in Huitzilan joined the UCI and invaded the cattle pastures of Talcuaco and Taltempan, he expressed surprise because they did not behave like proletarians:
On the one hand, they demonstrated that, yes, there is class conflict and not just an expression of traditional culture; on the other, there was also a challenge to Marxist theory because as semi-proletarians they did not demand better wages much less socialism: They wanted land! (Beaucage 1994: 40)
Beaucage (1999: 459, 465–468) came to the conclusion that Nahua culture is different than he had imagined. He examined narratives collected in the Cuetzalan area by the Taller de Tradición Oral (Oral Tradition Workshop) and two ethnographers (1999: 466) on how Nahuas in that part of the southern Sierra Norte remembered their history of political struggles. Beaucage (1999: 468) discovered that Nahuas identified San Miguel as a helpful intermediary in battles that took place during the French intervention (1862–1867) and the Mexican Revolution (1910–1917). It turned out that the Nahuas in Huitzilan regard San Miguel as the alter ego of their rain gods, which is the subject of the next chapter. First, however, I shall present two views, one from a prominent Mestizo and the other from a Nahua, on how the UCI appeared in Huitzilan.
Two Views on the Origins of UCI Rebellion
The Mestizo and the Nahua both began their accounts with a contingent of Nahuas making the trip to the neighboring community of Pahuata and inviting an UCI organizer, Felipe Reyes Herrera, to come to the community and help them organize a group that would defend them from their enemy, a local Nahua named Pedro Manzano. Neither one mentioned a charismatic leader with ties to Huitzilan, and I did not see one when I resumed fieldwork within a month of Felipe Reyes Herrera’s arrival in the community.
The Mestizo’s Account
The Mestizo, who provided his view of the circumstances of Felipe Reyes Herrera’s arrival in Huitzilan, is a relative of Antonio Aco, whom Isidro Grimaldo had brought from Tetela to administer the properties of Grimaldo’s widow, Doña Elena. He attributed the appearance of Felipe Reyes Herrera to the Nahuas’ dispute with Pedro Manzano and played down the UCI’s agrarian aims by characterizing them as providing a justification for the group’s existence.
Well, there was a person here who had a very bad reputation because he mistreated people. He threatened them—he and his gang—and that person was Pedro Manzano. Some people came to hate him, and among them were Vicente Peralta and Luis Vino because he had mistreated them. Vicente and Luis knew that there was a representative of the UCI, Felipe Reyes Herrera, in Pahuata [neighboring Huitzilan]. They went to Pahuata and said, ‘Listen, we have a problem. There is a person who mistreats us, who is very bad with us. He must be eliminated. Right? It is necessary to get rid of him, and so we want to form a group to do it.’ So then they started forming a group but the one they wanted to get rid of was very clever. What began as a project to get rid of a person turned into something more political. ‘We’re now a group. But to justify our existence, we need to invade a plot of land.’ So then they were about thirty people, and they said, ‘What land are we going to invade? What land would work for this purpose?’ Well, there was a plot of land that Juan [Aco] had taken, using a lot of tricks because he was not an honorable person. He had grabbed this plot of land [Talcuaco] with every trick in the book. Everyone knew about what he had done. ‘What land are we going to invade? That plot of land.’ So that is what they did.7
The Nahua’s View
The Nahua spoke from the perspective of one who refused to join the UCI and feared reprisals from his brothers-in-law who had become members of the group. He offered a more complete picture of the history of the personal dispute that led the contingent of Nahuas to make the journey to Pahuata from Huitzilan. He provided more detail of the plan that the UCI organizer presented for alleviating the Nahuas’ need for land on which to grow their corn. He began with a more detailed description of the background to the conflict between Pedro Manzano and Luis Vino.
That Pedro Manzano, he was very big womanizer. . . . He had a relationship with that woman, the one who lived up there, Fulana8. . . . Then there was this kid [who was Fulana’s lover] down there [in Ixtahuatalix] whom they called, they called him José [Pescado]. . . . They were hiring workers here in Zapotitlán to work the sugarcane press. They looked for a team, a team of workers and two women. That is when they hired Fulana, who was grinding tortilla dough for [the team that included José Pescado]. That made Pedro angry. So with that, according to what they say, Pedro went to José Pescado’s house one night. Pedro called to José [making the sound of a bird], and [when José opened the door to his house], Pedro shot him and his mother. They were next to each other, and the bullet went straight through him and reached his mother. Pedro killed them both. . . . They took him to jail. [A rich person] got him out. He got him out. The person who got him out had a lot of money.
The deceased Luis Vino also talked to Fulana. . . . That made Pedro angry. One time I went to Luis’s house—he was already an UCI by then—looking for some medicine. My wife said that Luis sold vitamins. ‘Go see him.’ ‘I’ll go see him.’ I found him in his house. And I did not have a problem with him. They accepted me. They invited me to drink coffee. There we were, talking with Luis. That is when he told me. He said, ‘I would not have joined up with them [the UCI]. I would not have gone in with them. But this [Pedro Manzano], wherever he sees me at any time, it is important that he shoot me. Wherever we run into each other, it is important that he shoot me. So then that is why I went in with the UCI so that he would not shoot me.’ That is the way it was. And it was because of that woman. Sometimes Pedro was stupid. He had his wife. Luis also had his wife. Why did they want another woman to fight over?
(Pedro tel, bueno, tel mujeriego catca. . . . Entonces quipiya non, ne ahco, non Fulana. . . . Entonces yetoya ce telpoch ne tani, quiliaya, bueno quiliaya José. . . . Entonces quitrataroaya tequit nican Zapotitlán, de trapiche tequit. Entonces quintemoa ce grupo, ce grupo de tequitinini huan ome cihuameh. Entonces ompa cuicaya non Fulana, no ompa teciliaya. Entonces nin Petzin cualan. Entonces ca non, según quihtoya, ca non yaqueh ichan ca yohual. Quinalnotzato huan quimicti in telpoch huan ninan. Toctamelahuetztoya,9 cihuat quiahcic tiro ninan. . . . Quinmicti. Yehha cuiaqueh carcel. Yeh quixtique. Quixti. Quipiya tomin.10 Luis Vino catca no ica monotzaya non cihuat. Huan Petzin no quinonotzaya. Pues yehha ca non cualantiaya. Ce tiempo, nyahca ichan Luis, ipa UCIs ya, huan quitemocatoya pahti. Entonces quiht[o]a nocihuauh, quihtoa quitemaca vitamina. ‘Xa quittati.’ ‘Nyo niquittati pos.’ Niahcic ichan. Como ahmo nicpiya problema ihuan. Pues nechceliqueh. Nechhuantiqueh cafen. Ompa timononotzah ihuan non Luis. Tons ompa non pehuac nechtapohuia. Quiht[o]a, ‘Ahmo nicalaquizquia ca nin,’ quiht[o]a. ‘Ahmo nicalaquizquia. Pero nin tacat,’ quiht[o]a, ‘cada vez campa niquitta,’ quiht[o]a, ‘que importa que nechmaca,’ quiht[o]a. ‘Campa ticnamiquih, importa que nechmaca,’ quiht[o]a. ‘Entonces,’ quiht[o]a, ‘por eso nimocalaqui can nin,’ quiht[o]a, ‘para ahmo nechmacau,’ quiht[o]a. Ca non. Huan ce por in non cihiuat.11 Quemazah mimiquiloyot Petzin. Quipiya nicihuauh. Ne no quipiya nicihuauh. Para toni quinequih occe mocualantitozqueh?)12
The Nahua then turned to the UCI’s agrarian aims that resulted in the land invasions of the Talcuaco and Taltempan cattle pastures.
According to the UCI, they came to divide up the land to help the poor. A lot of people gathered around them with that [message]. They thought they would really help them. (Huallayah segun yehhan quixexeloquih tal, quinpalehuitih pobres. Can non miaqueh tacayot motoquiayah. Moliayah melauh quinpalehuitih.)13
The narrator recalled the specific tactic that the UCI leader, Felipe Reyes Herrera suggested to the Nahuas.
After the meeting, they were emboldened to ask where there was an excess of land. There is a man who stood up [and told them] to look for who has land that is called ‘intestate,’ that is, who has it now does not have [ownership] papers. (Zatepa de junta quinyolchicaauhqueh ma tahtanqueh can sobra tal. Yetoya ce tacat aquin quechiliznequi14 quitemohuaya can quipiya tal de non monotza, bueno ce tal quilia ’intestado’ ca moquipiya aconi axcan, ahmo quipiya amat.)15
Many Nahuas knew about the dispute between Juan Aco and the descendants of Juan Gutierrez over the ownership of the Talcuaco and Taltempan cattle pastures. However, the Nahua declared that who had planted the land was more important than the twisted history of claims and counterclaims of land ownership. He noted that Juan Aco did not plant on Talcuaco and just took it for himself.16
The UCI organizer provided the Nahuas with some small arms, led torchlit parades down the main street of Huitzilan, and delivered speeches denouncing the ricos that alarmed the Mestizos, some of whom had close ties of blood kinship and ritual kinship with Nahuas. However, the cultural roots of the UCI rebellion are in the stories Nahuas told, before the UCI appeared in the Sierra Norte, of rain gods who organized to kill, with bolts of lighting, the animal companions or achane of badly acting municipio presidents and unwanted non-Nahua settlers. The narrators’ description of the personage of the rain god reveals how, prior to the UCI rebellion, Nahuas positioned themselves relative to the Mestizos, the Church, and their ancestors as they resisted secular local authority, particularly in the figure of municipio president. Years prior to the UCI rebellion, the president served in the local government with the consent of Antonio Aco or Ponciano Bonilla, the governing arms of Isidro Grimaldo and Gabriel Barrios in Tetela de Ocampo. Antonio Aco and Ponciano Bonilla and members of their families continued to occupy positions of power following Barrios’s transfer from Tetela de Ocampo to Mexico City.
In their struggle against secular authorities, Nahuas allied themselves with the priest while asserting their cultural autonomy by holding onto their theory of water and weather. According to their theory, rain gods bring the pluvial waters as rain, and the terrestrial water-dwelling animals (achane) bring water in springs. The rain gods probably derive from the ministers of Tlaloc, of the pluvial waters, and the terrestrial water-dwelling animals or achane originated from Chalchiutlicue. Tlaloc and Chalchiutlicue were central figures in Johanna Broda’s (1971) reconstruction of the ancient fertility cult.
The Nahuas’ accommodation with the Church has not been easy and has at times required dissimulation and disguise. One example of this emerged in the different interpretations that Mestizos and Nahuas attached to the drama that impersonators of San Miguel regularly performed in Huitzilan during the first period of fieldwork (1968–1975). When performing the public ritual drama, the Nahua impersonators of San Miguel do not reveal that they are enacting the story of the rain gods’ rebellion against local, secular authorities.