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Christopher R. Boyer is Assistant Professor of History and Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

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Becoming Campesinos

Stanford University Press

Contents

Acknowledgments...................................................................................ixIntroduction......................................................................................11. Becoming Campesinos: From Political Category to Cultural Identity..............................162. Land, Community, and Memory in Postrevolutionary Michoacn.....................................463. Francisco Mgica and the Making of Agrarian Struggle, 1920-1922................................804. Village Revolutionaries........................................................................1145. Refusing the Revolution: Catholic Nationalism and the Cristero Rebellion.......................1546. Lzaro Crdenas and the Advent of a Campesino Politics.........................................1887. Conclusion: The Politics of Campesino Identity in Twentieth-Century Mexico.....................223Appendix: Land Reform in Michoacn, 1917-1940.....................................................245List of Abbreviations.............................................................................246Notes.............................................................................................249Glossary..........................................................................................286Bibliography......................................................................................289Index.............................................................................................310

Chapter One

EARLY IN THE DRY SEASON OF 1921, the members of an indigenous community not far from the town of Zitcuaro in the eastern highlands of Michoacn decided to confront the North American mining company that owned the land surrounding their homes. People in the village of El Asoleadero were outraged that the company had scrapped an arrangement that had proved mutually beneficial for more than a decade. The company had employed most of El Asoleadero's men as lumberjacks, paying them to cut timber out of the jagged mountainside and deliver it to the sawmill, where it was made into railroad ties and mine shaft stays. In exchange, the villagers earned money to supplement the meager livings they made raising their own crops and herding a small amount of livestock, and they were also granted the right to log as many trees as they needed for their own domestic use. However, a company foreman abruptly fired the villagers that fall and ordered them to keep away from the woodlands. In response, a handful of men from El Asoleadero fortified themselves with alcohol on the afternoon of September 15 and rushed into the sawmill shouting, "Death to the company!" while shooting their guns into the air.

The mining operation claimed that it had changed its policy because the villagers were overexploiting its woodlots and degrading the forest, but that was not the real crux of the problem. Company administrators primarily intended to discourage the villagers from participating in Mexico's postrevolutionary land reform program. If the government went ahead with plans to grant a permanent land reform parcel (ejido) to the community of El Asoleadero, the company stood to lose both a valuable source of labor and a sizable portion of its property. As it turned out, though, it was too late to stop the villagers from recovering their land. Several months before the incident in the sawmill, a local political activist, in his capacity as the self-described "Delegate and Representative of the community of Indians" at El Asoleadero, had petitioned the government for an ejido, and Francisco J. Mgica, the radical young governor of Michoacn, had ordered that a large tract of the company's forestland be turned over to the petitioners. The company answered back with a lawsuit challenging the governor's determination. For good measure, foremen also sent around some hired hands to intimidate anyone who had signed the petition asking for the restitution of El Asoleadero's property.

The scare tactics did not dissuade the villagers, who moved onto their fields soon after they received the governor's permission. Another eight years passed before all the paperwork came through officially finalizing the villagers' rights to the land, however, and some members of the agrarian community developed an affinity for revolutionary politics in the interim. In 1924, land reform beneficiaries donated a parcel of land to the village's federally run elementary school. Two years after that, a few residents agreed to join a military expedition against the Catholic-inspired peasant uprising known as the Cristero rebellion. This grassroots support for postrevolutionary policies did have its limits, though. Villagers refused to send their children to school if they felt the teacher did not show the proper respect for religion. And when the army tried to conscript eight men for yet another campaign against the Cristeros in 1929, community leaders complained directly to the president, explaining that they did not "judge it appropriate" to contribute to the war effort a second time. "We have already lent our services once before," they wrote, "and now we need everyone to prepare for the planting season."

Ten years later, a new generation of El Asoleadero's village leaders met with a dozen or so of their counterparts from other nearby indigenous communities that had also received land grants. The purpose of the meeting was to sign a declaration expressing solidarity with President Lzaro Crdenas, whose political temperament and personal style they had first experienced when he had served as governor of Michoacn a few years earlier. In their declaration, the community leaders voiced their support for the president's plan to create what they understood to be "a united front of campesinos." The document was shot through with spelling errors that betrayed the authors' untutored backgrounds, but its overall message came through clearly enough. The signatories began by declaring their "formal oath" to support the principles of the "Revolution as incarnated by the current Government" and their readiness "to join together to safeguard the interests of workers, campesinos, and agrarian [reform] communities." They summed up by declaring their solidarity with rural people everywhere who sought "to defend their class interests and defend themselves against the iron hand of the bourgeoisie and the religious zealots [clericales] who undermine the sound principles of the Revolution."

The village leaders' manifesto-like the political activation of the El Asoleadero villagers in the first place-attested to the massive changes that were overtaking rural Michoacn between 1920 and 1935. The horizon of village politics expanded beyond the confines of the community itself and came to encompass the abstract social collectivities envisioned in postrevolutionary ideology. Whereas the original leader of the agrarista movement in El Asoleadero had described his followers as a "community of Indians" who wanted to recover their access to land and timber, the new generation of village headmen now made grand proclamations about class struggle and the promotion of revolutionary principles. Agrarista militants within the village had somehow transformed from a group of gun-shooting protesters into an organized cadre of self-declared revolutionaries who saw themselves as the allies of the president of the republic.

The radicalized language that village leaders evoked in their letter to Crdenas also demonstrated that they regarded themselves as members of a specifically postrevolutionary social category: rather than describing themselves as Indians or villagers or members of some other social group, they depicted themselves as campesinos (a term that literally means "country people"). Rural folk such as the residents of El Asoleadero had made a living in the forests and cornfields of central Mexico since time immemorial, of course, and in this sense they had always been campesinos. But in the years after the Mexican Revolution, these rural folk found a new political vocabulary and a new set of concepts through which to think about their place in rural society. As villagers in El Asoleadero and similar communities throughout Michoacn in the 1920s and 1930s organized and solicited lands that had once belonged to wealthy outsiders, they tentatively engaged postrevolutionary notions of class and citizenship. In the process, many of them came to regard themselves as members of an abstract collectivity with a shared historical legacy, similar social attributes, and a unique set of collective politico-economic interests, and in this sense to imagine that they belonged to a new social category that had never existed in Mexico before, a collectivity of class-conscious revolutionary citizens known as campesinos.

THE TRANSFORMATION OF POPULAR IDENTITY IN POSTREVOLUTIONARY MEXICO

It is easy to assume that rural folk, politicians, and scholars have always conceived of the rural masses in Mexico as a more or less homogeneous class of campesinos. Yet the idea that marginalized rural folk constitute a discrete social group by virtue of their shared political and economic status is in fact of relatively recent origin. I seek to show in this book that the understanding of what it means to be a campesino in Mexico today is essentially an ideological construct-a particular way of understanding the world-that was framed during the revolution and consolidated in its aftermath. Specific historical processes associated with postrevolutionary agrarian politics led rural people to rethink their place within Mexican society, a process that in Michoacn began around 1920, when populist politicians and radicalized rural leaders started to depict campesinos as the incarnation of rural masses who (it was said) had played the leading role in the Mexican Revolution. This newly emerging political discourse construed campesinos as belonging to a political category, that is, as a potential constituency to be mobilized through an appeal to their political and economic interests. Soon, however, certain groups of rural people appropriated elements of this postrevolutionary ideology and invented other ones, thus transforming campesino-masses (campesinaje) from a political category into a new form of cultural identity.

Campesino identity as it came to exist in postrevolutionary Michoacn therefore originated with the interaction of state formation and the lived experiences of rural people who participated in the land reform and agrarista movement. The establishment of the campesinaje as a new pressure group in Mexico was evidenced by the plethora of political organizations (many of them called campesino unions) and forms of popular militancy that appeared in the countryside during the 1920s and 1930s, but it was particularly visible in the changing vocabulary that political leaders and country people used to describe rural society itself. Whereas the word campesino appeared only occasionally in the political lexicon of nineteenth-century Mexico (and even then as little more than a value-neutral description of the rural masses), it became a fundamental element of Mexican political discourse sometime in the mid-1920s. By the early 1930s, it had acquired a good deal of the ideological cargo it continues to bear today. People who called themselves campesinos usually meant to imply that they belonged to a classlike group of rural folk who worked the land and were locked in an inherently conflictive relationship with large-scale landowners and other dominant social groups. The term also carried with it the connotation that politically militant country people had earned a privileged status as revolutionary citizens because they had supported both the revolution and the controversial initiatives such as the land reform that had grown out of it.

So how did people conceive of the rural masses before the revolution if they did not think of them as a socially unified, classlike collectivity known as campesinos? Perhaps because most people lived in the countryside in the nineteenth century, they tended to discern rural social complexities in great detail. Nineteenth-century political discourse tended to highlight the markers of social difference among rural people rather than the putative similarities among them. On the local level, the language that rural people used to describe themselves depended on their own circumstances and their intended audience. Country people called themselves "indigenous people" or "villagers" or "Catholics" or (republican) "citizens," as the situation demanded. In other circumstances, they referred to their form of land tenure, tagging themselves as "common landholders," "casual hacienda workers," and so on. Perhaps most often, they simply described themselves in terms of locality. Well into the 1920s, rural people often used a colonial-era idiom of "residents" (vecinos) or "natives" (originarios) of their home villages, although these terms had lost some of their former capacity to index ethnic differences in the countryside.

Outside observers used many of the same categories when describing rural society, though they were particularly apt to emphasize rural people's relationship to the land. Rural people worked the land in any number of ways in the nineteenth century: as private landholders, resident hacienda workers, hacienda day laborers, sharecroppers, holders of common land, woodcutters, or (perhaps most frequently) as some combination of these. At other times, observers referred to rural folk as "the agrarian population," though a few political militants had begun to use a language of class and to speak of "agricultural workers" by the late nineteenth century or so. When observers or rural people wanted to describe country folk as a collectivity, they often used the time-honored term "el pueblo" (the people) or, perhaps more commonly, "los pueblos" (the villages). Both of these words could refer equally well to the residents of rural communities as to the nation itself.

Most of these conceptual categories derived from intellectual currents associated with liberalism, the dominant ideology of late-nineteenth-century Mexico that promised all members of society equal rights and economic opportunities. As a number of historians have demonstrated, certain groups of rural folk appropriated liberal ideals because they discovered that these tenets could be used to defend community autonomy. After all, liberals promised to uphold municipal self-rule and the rights of people to possess their lands, or at least to do so as long as the lands were held as private property. Some villagers did not learn until the late nineteenth century that liberal politicians regarded the privatization of communal property as an essential step in the modernization of rural Mexico. It was then that a new generation of landowners-who had wealth, political savvy, and good connections-began to use liberal doctrines to divest peasant communities of their common lands. Even then, the disparities in the way that villagers and politicians understood liberalism set in motion a regime of conflict and negotiation that had yet to be resolved by the time the revolution erupted in 1910.

Even then, most revolutionary factions continued to describe their aims in quintessentially liberal terms. To take one notable example, Emiliano Zapata's grassroots revolutionary movement in the state of Morelos drew heavily on the tradition of popular liberalism. The Zapatistas' declaration of principles set forth in the Plan of Ayala made rhetorical use of such liberal shibboleths as Mexico's constitution of 1857, the doctrine of fair elections, the rule of law, and in general the people's need to "reconquer liberties and recover their rights which have been trampled on." In stark contrast to the agraristas' later proclivity to lump all country folk together as a single political agglomeration, they took it for granted that the individual and the community constituted the fundamental political units of rural Mexico. According to the Plan of Ayala, the salient social actors were the "Mexican pueblos and citizens," not an undifferentiated mass of campesinos. The Zapatistas saw their enemies in primarily political terms, as "landlords, cientficos [venal politicians], and bosses," not in structural terms, as the oppressors of campesinos as a class.

Indeed, it did not appear obvious to most people that villagers and field hands who made a living by tilling the soil belonged to the same social class at all. Early-twentieth-century observers of the countryside typically emphasized the economic diversity of rural people's relationships with the land, not their similarity. After all, some country people had easy access to farmland, while others did not; some depended heavily on hacienda wage labor, while others used it as a supplement; and some people were relatively wealthy by village standards, while others had to struggle to make ends meet. In addition, the land reform created an entirely new sector of rural people (land reform beneficiaries known as ejidatarios) who had economic interests of their own to worry about. So even though it was true that most rural people were relatively impoverished and sustained themselves on some form of agricultural activity, the conditions in which they did so often differed in critical respects. And the same could be said for other important social distinctions. Lumping rural folk together in a single category of campesinos failed to reflect the great variety of ethnic groups that existed in the countryside; nor did it take into account the fact that many people gave their primary allegiance to their families and their home communities rather than to their putative social class.

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Excerpted from Becoming Campesinosby CHRISTOPHER R. BOYER Copyright © 2003 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission.
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