A Brief History of the Caste War in Yucatán, Chapter 3
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| Mayan Leader Jacinto Pat. |
By 1535 the Maya had driven every last Conquistador out of the Yucatán Peninsula. The Conquistadors regrouped, enacted the clever game plan that Hernán Cortés successfully used against the Aztec. And they established the city of Mérida by 1542.
The Christian Conquistadors could not or would not conquer the eastern Yucatán Peninsula.
A word about the free Mayan people of the eastern Caribbean side of the Yucatán Peninsula: They are community-minded with a social conscience for one and all with the philosophy that those who worked the land owned the land. They were not united as a nation with the other Mayan groups and often engaged in feuds that made divide and conquer possible.
Spiritually the Mayan people established their civilization and worshiped the same gods several thousand years before the notion of Christianity was conceptualized.
The town of Felipe Carrillo Puerto has a long and tortured historical past but little remains today to tell the agonized story that I will summarize in this presentation from a Mayan point of view. Remember; peaceful places have no history.
The capitulated Indigenous Mayan of western Yucatán under the Spanish Conquistadors were beaten, tortured, degraded, brutally enslaved. and starved nutritionally and spiritually while they attempted to protect their families, homeland, and way of life.
What would it take to push these long suffering people to say;
“enough is enough?”
The opportunist Yucatecan Spanish
conquerors had no problem putting a gun in the hand of the Mayan
people when they had a political ax to grind with the Mexicans, but
could instantaneously change tactics when these cannon fodder
services were no longer needed.
The eastern Yucatán Peninsula would remain in Mayan hands for more than four hundred years due to men such as Gonzalo Guerrero and Juan Bautista Vega.
Of great importance to the Maya independence was the assistance that came from their southern neighbor, British Honduras, now known as Belize. The British had been at war with the Spanish and took every opportunity to exasperate them. Thus by being a supplier of arms and ammunition to the independent Maya of eastern Yucatán a lucrative trade was developed. The Maya could supply natural rubber harvested from their jungle forests. Sapote trees were in abundance and the sap from these trees was a key ingredient in chewing gum and rubber products which they bartered with the British for guns and ammunition. Their virgin jungle forests also provided exotic lumber that the British made into a profitable enterprise.
THE CASTE WAR
The so-called “Caste War” in Yucatán cost 300,000 lives; it ended up reduced to historical ill-feelings, with no political peace, and no armistice. It is, of course, one of the bloodiest episodes in the history of the peninsula. There are many theories regarding the motives that caused the war to start, one of which is that the outbreak was due to the build up of hatred and bitterness among the Mayan faced with tyranny from whites who exploited and abused them for centuries.
The following are excerpts from Nelson Reed’s book The Caste War of Yucatán.
Yucatán’s only natural resource had been the land and the people to work it. Now the land was recovered, but not the people, and there wasn’t enough food for those that survived. Taking their chances with snipers and the machete as they harvested rebel Mayan fields, the soldiers weren’t happy to see that same corn wasted on captive savages. They didn’t take prisoners except under direct command, or occasionally for a five-peso reward.
With these facts in mind, Yucatán Governor Barbachano took a step
for which his name is still bitterly remembered in Mexico. He begin
selling the Maya to Cuba. There were many apparent justifications:
Barbachano claimed it was to save their lives; they were rebels and
thus liable to the most severe punishment (execution, or as was
decreed by Congress, ten years’ banishment); they were sold on a
ten year work contract; and finally the state needed money. But
still, it was nonetheless slavery.
The Maya held out though the
war officially ended in 1855 after 247,000 were killed. End of
excerpts.
The Maya were not capitulating, they were fighting for their homeland, their freedom and their families. At their capital of Chan Santa Cruz, today known as Felipe Carrillo Puerto, Quintana Roo, a religious cult sprang to life and was organized by Venancio Puc and called The Talking Cross. Puc was judge and jury, priest, general, and absolute commander of his new religious sect, interviewing all visitors, appointing all chiefs, and ordering assassinations. Puc made it perfectly clear that there could be no treaty or compromise with the whites and ordered all prisoners brought to Chan Santa Cruz for execution.
Ultimately Puc was killed and his Talking Cross fell silent. Puc’s
loyal military followers discovered the deceit of the Talking Cross
and attempted to expunge the fraud of the Cross that only spoke for
thirteen years and died with Puc
I don’t want to kill the
intrigue of this extraordinary story by telling you all. I do however
encourage you to read this history and discover a true narrative
stranger than a fairy tale.
Quintana Roo territory did not become a Mexican state until 1974 and until recently was a duty free territory rift with smugglers and contraband goods.
During the years of the Caste War Mexico was a political mess of changing governments. In the 1860s and 1870s Presidents Santa Anna and Benito Juarez were in and out of office interspersed by Emperor Maximilian of the Hapsburg's. Not until Mexican President Porfirio Dias brought stability beginning in 1876 that lasted until 1910 did Mexico prosper. Porfirio Dias had a capitalist game plan for Mexico that was to ruthlessly exploit the Ingenious and enrich the richest.
The Maya continued to resist. In 1899 Mexican General Ignacio
Bravo came to Yucatán to crush all of the Maya with British
complicity. The British had been supplying guns and ammunition to the
Maya but had a change of heart and cut off their cooperation, thus
leaving the Maya nearly defenseless.
In 1901 Mexican federal
troops conquered the Mayan capital city of Chan Santa Cruz, and the
government established Quintana Roo as a federal territory.
During the course of the war the Maya that could be rounded up
were sold off to Cuba as slaves and the city of Tihosuco was totally
abandoned for the next 80 years. Read more the Caste War here:
Yucatan for Travelers by John M. Grimsrud
In 1915 Mexican revolutionary General Salvador Alvarado was sent into the Yucatán to restore order. This was five years after Porfirio Dias fled Mexico during the bloody revolution or civil war. The war murdered thousands and dragged on for over ten years.
Yucatán had become Mexico’s most prosperous state due to the booming henequen and sugar industries.
Governor Alvarado canceled all ‘debt labor’ and freed 60,000 Mayan and their families following 350 plus years of slavery. The Caste War did not end here.
Cult of the Talking Cross
The story of the Cult of the Talking Cross (La Cruz Parlante) and the start of our journey along the route of Caste War sites begins in the seldom visited Mexican town of Felipe Carrillo Puerto, the former Chan Santa Cruz, Quintana Roo. This is where the Talking Cross prophesied victory to the Maya and told them they were the chosen race, the true Christians and the children of God. Although final victory never came, the Cross helped the Maya resist the Mexicans for fifty more years. Chan Santa Cruz was the capital of the Mayan territory during the Caste War that began in 1847. No Caucasians were safe here during the time of the conflict.
Chan Santa Cruz was invaded and overrun by Mexican federal troops in 1901, and the Chan Santa Cruz Maya retreated to the jungle to fight a guerrilla war that caused the federal troops to capitulate by 1915. The Maya only returned to their old city of Chan Santa Cruz to fill wells poisoned by federal troops and tear up the railway tracks connecting to the Caribbean Sea. The Chan Santa Cruz Maya then lived in relative peace and harmony with nature in their jungle territory.
In 1936 some of the Mayan communities signed treaties with the Mexican government. At that time, the capital of the territory of Quintana Roo was relocated by Mexican President Cardenas to its present location of Chetumal.
Today the city of Felipe Carrillo Puerto is almost too peaceful and quiet. It remains the home of one faction of the Cult of the Talking Cross, a relic of the Caste War and of the Mayan attempt to keep their brand of spirituality alive.
The Mayan church of Balam Nah where the religion of the Talking Cross was practiced was constructed during the Caste War. It is now open for business as a Catholic church.
Ironically, the large church in Chan Santa Cruz was built by slave labor. It was appropriately put up by captured Creoles (Mexicans of Spanish descent) under the Mayan whip during the Caste War. It has the distinction of being the last Mayan temple ever built. The indigenous Maya had been enslaved from the mid-1500’s under the Inquisition crazed Spanish. They had been forced to tear down their sacred temples and erect countless cathedrals and convents for the Spanish for more than three hundred oppressive years.
The Caste War had been a long time in coming and the Cult of the Talking Cross was a direct result of the Mayan attempt to regain their old religion. The Mexican government recognized the Cult of the Talking Cross as a legitimate religion in 2002. Before that time the priests of the Cult were considered by Mexican civil law and the Roman Catholic Church as practicing witchcraft. The former democratically elected governor of Yucatán, Felipe Carrillo Puerto, a Mexican of Spanish heritage, dedicated his life to rectifying many of the wrongs done to the Maya.
When the right-wing conservatives snatched power in Yucatán, the then governor Felipe Carrillo Puerto and his brothers were marched out to the Mérida cemetery and executed by firing squad as they stood before their graves. That was 1924. With the popular governor dead, the Mayan hope for social justice died, but the Caste War continued to smolder among the Maya.
Tihosuco
When author Ronald Wright arrived at the Mayan controlled church in Quintana Roo territory at Tihosuco, the priest was chasing a large pig out of the vestry. He was a Spaniard from Barcelona. “The people here are better than in Spain,” he said. “When Mayas get drunk they speak to God, when Spaniards drink, they deny him.” Ronald Wright, Time Among the Maya, 1989.
The Tihosuco church is a bizarre relic of the Spanish Conquistadors. It collapsed in 1841 and was rebuilt, and then it was partially demolished by the Maya of Chan Santa Cruz in the Caste War. After that Spanish controlled Tihosuco was abandoned for 80 years. To this day, the church remains in a state of frightful time-warp with its aged battle scars.
Looking out from the altar to the rear of this one-of-a-kind church, you are confronted by a shocking revelation. This otherwise complete structure has an entire wall missing, and it has been gone since the 1850s. If symbolic implications are intended, then this edifice conveys an almighty message.
At the time Ronald Wright visited Tihosuco, the church and the statue of Jacinto Pat were the only two points of interest, but recently the Mayan Caste War museum has opened. We were told by friends not to miss it. We were in luck in that Carlos Chan Espinosa, the administrator, was there. Carlos is the man who makes this place work. He also aids the local community by bringing such valued services as food and lodging to visitors. Area homes are opened to travelers so that they can sample the home life of the region. This was positively splendid, and Carlos located a place for us after we had bicycled in on our Caste War fact finding rote. The Mayan Caste War museum is on a side street across from the town plaza.
The Tihosuco museum has an extensive presentation on the Caste War and also a Mayan herb garden complete with many medicinal plants. Ongoing seminars and lectures plus numerous interactive community events keep the museum a vital part of the public community information exchange.
Jacinto Pat, a Mayan leader of prominence and large hacienda owner, was one of the driving forces that inspired the Mayan people to fight in what is known as the Caste War for their homeland, independence, and liberty. Jacinto Pat is perpetually remembered with a commemorative statue in the main plaza of Tihosuco.
At nearby Tepich, the town has one claim to fame, and that is their home town hero, Cecilio Chi who rallied his fellow Mayans in May of 1847 to rise up against the oppressive Mexican land owners in order to gain their freedom from subjugation.
Adjacent to the church is a forlorn graveyard where the town hero, Cecilio Chi, was buried in 1848.
The Caste War now had its first true martyr, and the long suffering Mayan people would pick up Spanish war tactics that Gonzalo Guerrero had passed on to them nearly three hundred years earlier. Enough was finally enough and this would spark the longest lasting Indigenous uprising in the history of the Americas.
At nearby Valladolid the Spanish residents forbid any Mayan people to enter the city and this is where Cecilio Chi was tortured and hanged.
The inscription on his statue reads: “Glory to Cecilio Chi, Liberator of the Mayan nation and immortal symbol of justice and liberty.” This monument is in Tepich’s small park adjoining the main highway.
Abutting the church is a forlorn graveyard where the town hero, Cecilio Chi, was buried in 1848.
The mainland of Quintana Roo had remained an isolated and unexplored land because of the presence of the Cruzoob Maya. For over four hundred years the Mayas of Quintana Roo successfully repelled the Spanish and Mexican conquistadors until the last shots of the Caste War of 1847 rang out at Dzula, territory of Quintana Roo in 1935. This became the longest lasting insurrection in the history of the Americas.
The Mexican Revolutionary War story continues this ongoing narrative. While the Caste War still Smoldered, the Mexican Revolutionary War Commenced, Chapter 4.
Links to: The Maya, Mexico and Spanish Colonialism:
Prelude to the Caste War, Chapter 2.
A Brief History of the Caste War, Chapter 3.
While the Caste War still Smoldered, the Mexican Revolutionary War Commenced, Chapter 4.
Juan Bautista Vega, Chapter 5.
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