Detailed Contents
Preface xv
Acknowledgments xix
Central Themes xxi
Map: The Viceroyalty of New Spain 1786–1821 xxii
Map: States of Modern Mexico xxiii
Introduction 1
Part 1. Pre-Columbian Mexico (200–1519 CE) 9
1. Copán and Teotihuacan: Shared Culture Across a Great Distance (200–900 CE) 13
Image: Temple of Quetzalcoatl, Teotihuacan,
detail showing talud-tablero and the rain god, 14
Image: Painted vessel from the Margarita tomb, Copán, in the Teotihuacan style, 15
2. The Popol Vuh (“the Community Book”):
The Mythic Origins of the Quiché Mayas (1554–1558) 16
3. Maya Royalty and Writing (c. 667 CE) 22
Image: Maya king Hanab-Pakal’s sarcophagus lid, 24
4. The Origin of the Nahuas and the Birth of the Fifth Sun (1596) 25
5. A Treasury of Mexica Power and Gender (c. 1541–1542) 30
Image: Tribute list from Tochtepec, 33
Image: Midwife and newborn babies, 35
Image: Education of children and marriage ceremony, 37
6. Markets and Temples in the City of Tenochtitlan (1519) 38
7. The Mixtec Map of San Pedro Teozacoalco (1580) 43
Image: The Mixtec map of San Pedro Teozacoalco, 46
8. The Urban Zoning of Maya Social Class in the Yucatán (1566) 47
9. The Nomadic Seris of the Northern Desert (1645) 51
Part 2. The Spanish Conquest and Christian Conversion (1519–1610) 57
10. Hernán Cortés and Moteucçoma Meet, According to a Spanish Conqueror (1568) 61
11. Moteucçoma and Hernán Cortés Meet, According to a Nahua Codex (c. 1555) 68
12. The Nahua Interpreter Malintzin Translates for Hernán Cortés and Moteucçoma (1580) 72
Image: Malintzin translates for Cortés and Moteucçoma, 73
13. Acazitli of Tlalmanalco: Nahua Conqueror on the Mesoamerican Frontier (1541) 74
14. Poetic Attempts to Justify the Conquest of Acoma, New Mexico (1610) 80
15. The Tlaxcaltecas Stage a Christian Pageant, “Like Heaven on Earth” (1538) 85
16. The Spiritual Conquest: The Trial of Don Carlos Chichimecatecotl of Texcoco (1539) 88
17. The Inquisition Seizes Don Carlos’s Estate: The Oztoticpac Map (1540) 95
Image: The Oztoticpac lands map of 1540, 98
18. Father Fernández Attempts to Convert the Seris of Sonora Single-handedly (1679) 100
Part 3. The Consolidation of Colonial Government (1605–1692) 105
19. The Silver Mining City of Zacatecas (1605) 109
20. Chimalpahin: Indigenous Chronicler of His Time (1611–1613) 113
21. The Creation of Religious Conformity (the Early Eighteenth Century) 120
22. On Chocolate (1648) 124
23. The Treatment of African Slaves (the Seventeenth Century) 128
24. The Persistence of Indigenous Idolatry (1656) 132
25. Afro-Mexicans, Mestizos, and Catholicism (1672) 137
26. Sor Juana: Nun, Poet, and Advocate (1690) 142
27. The 1692 Mexico City Revolt (1692) 149
Part 4. Late Colonial Society (1737–1816) 155
28. Indigenous Revolt in California (1737) 157
29. Maroon Slaves Negotiate with the Colonial State (1767) 162
30. Mexico’s Paradoxical Enlightenment (1784) 170
31. Casta Paintings (1785) 174
Image: Francisco Clapera, “De Español, y India nace Mestiza”
(From Spaniard and Indian comes Mestiza), 175
Image: Francisco Clapera, “De Español, y Negra, Mulato”
(From Spaniard and Black, Mulato), 176
32. Hidalgo’s Uprising (1849) 177
33. José María Morelos’s National Vision (1813) 184
34. A Satirical View of Colonial Society (1816) 187
Part 5. The Early Republic (1824–1852) 197
35. Address to the New Nation (1824) 199
36. Caudillo Rule (1874) 205
37. A Woman’s Life on the Northern Frontier (1877) 211
38. Female Education (1842, 1851) 219
“The Education of Women,” 220
“Advice to Young Ladies,” 221
39. Mexican Views of the Mexican-American War (1850) 223
40. The Mayas Make Their Caste War Demands (1850) 228
41. Mexico in Postwar Social Turmoil (1852) 233
Part 6. Liberalism, Conservatism, and the Porfiriato (1856–1911) 241
42. The Reconfiguration of Property Rights and of Church-State Relations (1856) 245
43. Offer of the Crown to Maximilian by the Junta of Conservative Nobles (1863) 249
44. Porfirio Díaz’s Political Vision (1871) 251
45. A Letter to Striking Workers (1892) 256
46. A Positivist Interpretation of Feminism (1909) 260
47. Precursors to Revolution (1904, 1906) 264
“Valle Nacional,” Regeneración, 1904, 265
Mexican Liberal Party Program, 267
48. The Cananea Strike: Workers’ Demands (1906)
270
49. Land and Society (1909) 272
50. Popular Images of Mexican Life (the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries)
280
Image: José Guadalupe Posada, “Grand Electric Skeleton,” 281
Image: José Guadalupe Posada,
“The American Mosquito,” 282
Image: José Guadalupe Posada, “The Mutiny of Students”
(street newspaper), 283
Image: José Guadalupe Posada,
“Cemetery of Ancient Epitaphs,” 284
Image: José Guadalupe Posada, “Visit and Farewell to the Señor de Ixtapalapa Who Is Venerated in Said Village,” 285
51. Corridos from the Porfiriato (the Early 1900s) 286
“The Corrido of the Rural Police,” 287
“The Corrido of the Electric Trains,” 288
Part 7. The Mexican Revolution (1910–1940) 293
52. Francisco Madero’s Challenge to Porfirio Díaz (1910) 295
53. Revolution in Morelos (1911) 300
54. Land, Labor, and the Church in the Mexican Constitution (1917) 305
Article 27, 306
Article 123, 308
Article 130, 310
55. Revolutionary Corridos (1917, 1919) 312
Fragment of “The Corrido of the Constitutional Congress of Querétaro” (1917), 312
“The Death of Emiliano Zapata” (1919), 314
56. The Catholic Church Hierarchy Protests (1917, reprinted 1926) 318
57. Petitioning the President (the 1920s) 320
Telegram (1922), 320
Telegram (1924), 321
Letter (1922), 321
Letter (1927), 323
58. Plutarco Elías Calles: The Legal Challenges of the Postrevolutionary State (1928) 324
59. Feminism, Suffrage, and Revolution (1931) 328
60. Chronicles of Mexico City (1938) 333
In Defense of What’s Been Used, 334
The Markets, 337
61. The Responsibility of Government and
Private Enterprise to the Mexican People (1937–1938)
340
The Real Purposes of the Companies, 341
Images of Oil Workers, 344
Image: Drinking Fountains, 344
Image: English Colony, Tacoteno, Minititlán, Veracruz, 344
Image: Recreation Centers for Foreign Management, 345
Image: Workers’ Camp, Poza Rica, Veracruz, 345
Image: Restrooms, South Side, 346
Cárdenas Speaks, 346
Part 8. The Institutionalization of the Revolution (1940–1965) 351
62. An Assessment of Mexico from the Right (1940) 353
63. We the Undersigned (1941, 1945) 359
Letter (1941), 360
Letter (1945), 360
64. Modernization and Society (1951) 361
65. Official History (1951) 366
Image: “Social Differences,” 368
Image: “The Conquistador: Hernán Cortés, standing on the bridge of his ship . . . ,” 369
Image: “Moctezuma II, Emperor of Mexico,” 370
Image: “Political Consequences,” 371
Image: “Ethnic Consequences,” 372
66. Chicano Consciousness (1966) 373
67. Rubén Jaramillo and the Struggle for Campesino Rights in Postrevolutionary Morelos (1967) 377
Part 9. Neoliberalism and Its Discontents (1968–2006) 385
68. Eyewitness and Newspaper Accounts of the Tlatelolco Massacre (1968) 389
María Alicia Martínez Medrano, Nursery-School Director, 390
Gilberto Guevara Niebla of the CNH, 391
Ángel Martínez Agis, Reporter, Excelsior,
Thursday, October 3, 1968, 392
“Bloody Tlatelolco,” Excelsior, Editorial Page, Thursday, October 3, 1968, 394
“Insidious News from UPI: On This Date
We Cancel the News Agency’s Service,”
El Sol Morning Edition, Thursday, October 3, 1968, 395
José A. Perez Stuart, “Opinion,” El Universal, Saturday, October 5, 1968, 396
Image: “Precaution—It’s González, the one who lives in Tlatelolco!” (editorial cartoon on Tlatelolco), 397
“General Lázaro Cárdenas Condemns the Agitators: He Calls on the Sense of Responsibilities in Defense of National
Unity,” El Heraldo de México, Sunday, October 6, 1968, 398
69. Theft and Fraud (1970) 399
70. Serial Satire: The Comic Book (1974) 403
Image: “How to Fill Your Gut,” 404
71. The 1985 Earthquake (1985, 1995) 417
“Eight Hundred Factories and Sweatshops Totally Destroyed:
The Earthquake Revealed the Exploitation of Women
Textile Workers,” 418
Evangelina Corona Interview, 419
72. The EZLN Views Mexico’s Past and Future (1992) 423
73. Popular Responses to Neoliberalism (the Late 1990s) 429
74. Jesusa Rodríguez: Iconoclast (1995) 432
75. Maquila Workers Organize (2006) 437
76. Lies Within the Truth Commission (2006) 442
Glossary 445
Index 447
Introduction
The sources in this collection portray nine important topics in Mexican history: indigenous people, state formation, urban life, the northern frontier, popular culture, land and labor, religion, gender, and race and ethnicity. Readers new to the subject of Mexican history may benefit from the narrative of the major political, economic, military, and institutional events that these sources can be used to tell.
Those who would like to examine history in terms of social structures and cultural processes and from the point of view of the non-elite will discover ample material here as well. This introduction provides an overview of the significance and historical development of these subjects and a discussion of how the sources included in this reader can best be used for their analysis.
Indigenous people were the first authors of the history of Mexico, and native people have remained key historical agents up until the present. Using phonetic alphabets, the Mayas and other indigenous peoples had written their own history since before the arrival of Europeans. We include many examples of indigenous writing, starting with the inscriptions on Maya King Hanab-Pakal’s tomb more than 1,300 years ago (Source 3) and ending with Zapatista communiqués disseminated on the Internet (Source 72). One of the aims of this volume is to dispel the view—particularly wide-spread outside of Mexico—that Europeans obliterated indigenous civilizations. The sources included here recount the fascinating story of how and why indigenous people survived and maintained important aspects of their civilizations. Indigenous history has played a more central role in the development of Mexican national identity since the Independence Wars (1810–1821) than in any other part of North America. Today Mexico has one of the largest indigenous populations in Latin America.
According to a Mexican census of 2000, the indigenous population of Mexico numbered 10 million, including 2.5 million speakers of Nahuatl, the language of the Nahuas, sometimes called the Aztecs. This volume includes a substantial section on PreColumbian history because we believe that Mexico's ancient peoples established historical patterns that were carried forward into subsequent periods long after the arrival of the sixteenth-century Spanish conquistadors (conquerors). The most fundamental of these trends was a settlement pattern that concentrated human populations in the central and southern portions of Mexico. The Pre-Columbian Mesoamerican cultural zone included the areas of greatest indigenous population concentration on the North American continent, stretching from central Mexico through the Yucatán Peninsula into presentday Guatemala, western Honduras, and El Salvador. The dense population, productive soil, and complex societies of this region virtually determined that upon their arrival in the sixteenth century the Spanish would concentrate their colonization efforts here. Although
silver strikes in the 1540s pulled more settlers north of Mesoamerica, the majority of the population of colonial Mexico remained in the south-central region, as ancient populations had also been done (Source 19).
Many of the primary sources collected here treat the topic of state formation, broadly defined as the centralization of political power in a single government that controls a territory from a capital city. From ancient to modern times, Mexican states have exerted powerful control over the shape of urban life, borders, labor, and religion in the territories they control. When Europeans first arrived on the mainland in 1519, the powerful Mexica (Aztec) state had developed an advanced urban culture in its capital city of Mexico-Tenochtitlan in the central highlands of Mexico (sources 5 and 6). Called simply “Mexico” soon after the Conquest, the city became the capital of the colonial Viceroyalty of New Spain and the post1810 independent Mexican republics.
State governments centralized in Mexico City have always had to contend with challenges on their
borders, and sometimes the outcome has been a loss of influence over territory or the shrinking of borders. Almost fifty years into the nine-teenth century, Mexico's weak federal government scarcely exercised dominion over its national territory owing to endemic civil wars, an anemic economy, and foreign intervention. When the Yucatec Maya rose up in rebellion in 1847, they established an independent Maya government, and Mexico City almost lost the entire state, which the army did not completely secure until 1901 (Source 40). The Mexican-American border in the north presented an even greater challenge. In the after-math of independence from Spain in 1821, Mexico's proximity to the United States of America shaped its subsequent history to a much greater degree than would be the case with more distant Latin American countries. In 1848, as the loser of the Mexican-American War (or as it is called in Mexico, la guerra de la invasion Yankee), Mexico relinquished half of its national territory to its northern neighbor (sources 39 and 41). Modern Mexico's uneasy
relationship with the United States has been central to the formation of its modern identity.
The study of state formation also examines how Mexicans challenged or consented to the power of their governments from within the country's borders. The form that the Mexican state has assumed is the result of the interplay between different actors over the distribution of political, economic, and social resources. Thus, state formation is often founded in labor relations, control over land, and negotiation over religious practices. State power has undergone major reconfigurations repeatedly in Mexican history, most notably during the Pre-Columbian Classic (200–900 CE) and Post-Classic periods (900–1519), at the time of the Spanish Conquest (1519–1610) , with independence from Spain (1810–1822), and during the Mexican Revolution (1910–1920). Each time an invasion, revolution, or coup d'état transformed the state, new governors tried to win some voluntary support from the people so as not to perish in continuous rebellion or revolution. After 1521, when the Spaniards removed the indigenous hereditary
ruling classes from state power, the Europeans in charge still required indigenous labor, tribute payments, and souls for conversion. If the political elites wanted to secure the basic material necessities of life and prosper in the colony, they depended on the labor of the non-elite indigenous, black, and mixedrace people, who vastly out- numbered the wealthy Europeans (sources, 19, 23, and 24). The political elite’s de- pendency on common people gave the latter some bargaining power (sources 20 and 29). The colonial state could not simply force subjects to comply with govern- mental authority but had to convince them that they had some stake in this govern- ment. In exchange for consent, the state at times offered its subjects humane treatment on the basis of a shared Catholic religion. It also sometimes relinquished political authority by granting local autonomy to communities of indigenous peo- ple or escaped African slaves (sources 13, 20, and 25). The formation of states has never been a purely top-down process. Indigenous people and the mixed-race poor frequently disturbed the peace of the colonial period
with protests when the gov- ernment reneged on its side of the bargain, as illustrated by the Mexico City Riot of 1692 (Source 27). One century later, while the Spanish monarchy barely held on to the colony, independence fighters like José María Morelos demanded government by the people (Source 33). After the Mexican republic won its sovereignty from its colonial masters in 1822, expectations for popular participation in state power rose because, at least formally, Mexican democracy had expanded. Conflicts over church-state relations and federalistcentralist political models hampered the Mexican government’s de- velopment in the nineteenth century. These conflicting positions crystallized into violent clashes between the Liberal and Conservative Parties at mid-century. Mod- ern Mexicans reenacted the traditions of participation in state-making initiated in the colonial period when they rose in revolt against the oppressive government of Porfirio Díaz (1876–1911) and when they helped shape significant clauses of the Revolutionary Constitution of 1917 (Source 54). Similarly, the governing party brought to power with
the close of Mexico’s 1910 Revolution, adopting the name Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) in 1939, reenacted the colonial state’s strategy of incorporating the populace into the rhetoric and practice of its rule through bureaucratic institutions that addressed the demands of many sectors of society, particularly in the arenas of health care, education, and housing. The stu- dent movement of 1968 and the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN, or the Zapatistas) insurgent movement, which declared war on the federal government in 1994, are latter-day heirs to the tradition of popular challenges to state au- thority (sources 68 and 72). One of the Zapatistas’ major grievances with the Mexican government was the privatization of communally owned land. Land and labor are central themes in Mexican history that take on different meanings in changing historical contexts. In Mexican history, control over land and labor has also been linked to conceptions of race and ethnicity. During the colonial period, for example, access to indigenous communal lands was in part defined by ethnicity; non-
indigenous peoples were prohibited from purchasing communally held indigenous lands. In the midnineteenth century, the liberalizing Laws of Reform reversed this prohibition, with varying effects on indigenous peoples according to their differing economic posi- tions and possession of written or oral records of land ownership (Source 42). The Mexican Revolution of 1910 threw into question the basis for the ownership of pri- vate property, and conflicts over the land, some that dated back to the early colonial period, erupted again in the language of revolution (Source 54). The argument of revolutionaries like Rubén Jaramillo for the rights of Mexicans to land and labor ef- fectively limited the federal government’s control of workers, production, and polit- ical participation (Source 67). Throughout the time period treated here, as availability permits, we have included examples from Mexican popular culture (widely distributed culture produced outside of the state) because they reveal how broad sectors of the population viewed the political actions of the elite, as well as how they understood a variety of other topics,
from sex to art to the economy. These sources include newspaper articles, sar- donic comics, passionate ballads (corridos), and transcriptions of performance art (sources 47, 51, 55, 68, 70, and 74). They present readers with an entertaining means to access the viewpoints of members of society not represented in more tradi- tional documentary forms. Frequently political, these popular culture sources allow readers to research the question of whether the non-elite consented to or resisted po- litical regimes, mainstream moralities, and established economic orders. As well as supplying the populace with a measure of power, Mexican states from the PreColumbian era up until the onset of the postrevolutionary secularist PRI state used religion as a means of legitimizing rule. Conversion was an integral aspect of Spain’s conquest of Mexico’s indigenous population. Catholicism became the predominant ideology in colonial Mexico, shaping how people conceived of such di- verse issues as gender, justice, and race. However, throughout Mexico’s history, religion has served purposes beyond that of
legitimizing the state, and across time spirituality has sprung from sources beyond its reach. Through their creation myths, for example, Pre-Columbian peoples meditated on such issues as the ephemeral quality of human life and the dangers of excess. In their spirituality, they recognized that human beings are part of the order of the natural world. Although they sought to eradicate Pre-Columbian religions, sixteenth-century Christian friars also brought the first kernels of humanism and the first notions of human rights to Mexico. Under the influence of the European Enlightenment, the eighteenth-century Bourbon state introduced secularizing reforms to its colonies.
Postindependence governments, unlike PreColumbian and colonial states, constructed their author- ity without theological underpinnings. And despite the presence of powerful dis- sent from such figures as conservative Lucás Alamán, by the end of the nineteenth century liberal democratic citizenship had replaced shared Catholicism as the ideo- logical justification for social harmony (Source 41).
Objections to this secularist po- sition were manifest,
however, in such events as the 1928 Cristero Rebellion and the growth of the political party that grew from it, the Partido de Acción Nacional (PAN) (Source 62), the party that broke the PRI’s monopoly on state power in 2000. Today, despite two centuries of anticlerical state policy, an overwhelming ma- jority of Mexicans continue to identify themselves as Christian, and a majority of those Christians remain Catholic. From the time of the Spaniards’ arrival onward, another important legacy of Catholicism was its influence on the development of powerful gender ideologies in Mexico. The new religion increased paternalism and encouraged a stronger separa- tion of women and men in the private and public spheres. Although Pre- Columbian women were not warriors and generally not rulers, they did act as religious leaders, educators, and medical professionals, as in the case of Mexica soci- ety (Source 5). Mesoamerican motherhood was political because dynastic marriages built empires and increased state power (Source 7). Catholicism pushed a paternal vision of the cosmos and replaced Pre-Columbian deities, which
possessed both masculine and feminine guises, with God the father and his son Jesus. During the colonial era, Spanish Catholicism reinforced the notion of distinctive pub- lic/masculine and private/feminine spheres and emphasized the centrality of honor and sexual purity in the lives of women. Even so, it was the nun Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz who questioned accepted female norms (Source 26). With early industrializa- tion and the separation of home and work, gender ideology privileged men’s realms over women’s in new ways. In the late twentieth century, significant sectors of Mex- ican women challenged the country’s gender ideologies, often doing so most power- fully from within the very occupation that gender ideology had dictated would be women’s work: motherhood (sources 71 and 75). As well as exerting a formidable influence on the development of gender ideol- ogy, Catholicism played an important role in shaping notions of race and ethnicity in Mexico. The ability to trace genealogical lines back to old, Spanish Christian families determined one’s degree of racial purity, not pseudo-Darwinian ideas about race, as
found later in the nineteenth century. The Spanish, however, did not intro- duce the notion of distinctive ethnicities into Mexico, nor did their arrival initiate the notion of racial and cultural mixing. Pre-Columbian Mesoamerica was a multi- lingual, multinational culture zone. Indigenous people like the Mexica and the Mixtecs had strong ethnic identities, not because they were isolated from each other, but because they were aware of each other (sources 1, 5, and 7). One of the significant features of the Mesoamerican zone was that different indigenous linguis- tic groups changed when they came into contact with each other. Cultural mixing happened prior to the arrival of Europeans.