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Conflict and Carnage in Yucatán
The Yucatán Peninsula has one of the longest, most
multifaceted histories in the Americas. With the arrival of
Europeans, native Maya with long and successful cultural and
diplomatic traditions of their own had to grapple with outside
forces attempting to impose new templates of life and politics on
them.
Conflict and Carnage in Yucatán provides a
rigorously researched study of the vexed and bloody period of
1855 to 1876, during which successive national governments
implemented, replaced, and restored liberal policies.
Synthesizing an extensive and heterogeneous range of sources,
Douglas W. Richmond covers three tumultuous political upheavals
of this period. First, Mexico’s fledgling republic
attempted to impose a liberal ideology at odds with traditional
Maya culture on Yucatán; then, the French-backed regime of
Emperor Maximilian began to reform Yucatán; and, finally,
the republican forces of Benito Juárez restored the liberal
hegemony. Many issues spurred resistance to these liberal
governments. Instillation of free trade policies, the suppression
of civil rights, and persecution of the Roman Catholic Church
mobilized white opposition to liberal governors. The Mayas fought
the seizure of their communal properties. A long-standing desire
for regional autonomy united virtually all Yucatecans. Richmond
advances the thought-provoking argument that Yucatán both
fared better under Maximilian’s Second Empire than under
the liberal republic and would have thrived more had the Second
Empire not collapsed. The most violent and bloody manifestation
of these broad conflicts was the Caste War (Guerra de Castas),
the longest sustained peasant revolt in Latin American history.
Where other scholars have advocated the simplistic position that
the war was a Maya uprising designed to reestablish a mythical
past civilization, Richmond’s sophisticated recounting of
political developments from 1855 to 1876 restores nuance and
complexity to this pivotal time in Yucatecan history.
Richmond’s
Conflict and Carnage in Yucatán is a welcome
addition to scholarship about Mexico and Yucatán as well as
about state consolidation, empire, and regionalism.
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