The Indigenous Population

The 1857 constitution denied Indian communities the juridical recognition they needed to defend village lands and provided no social legislation to favor them. Maximilian reversed this trend, restoring to Indian communities the right to own land. In 1866, the empire published two decrees, in Spanish and Nahuatl, establishing a mechanism for towns to recoup lost village land. In the end, imperial decrees concerning redress of grievances backfired. Hopes raised by such decrees were dashed when those asserting their rights were repressed.218

Neither the 1857 constitution nor Maximilian’s decrees had any discernible impact on nomadic Indians in the north. In 1861, Captain Charles P. Stone, the U. S. consul in Guaymas, described Sonora as “the great Apache rancho, where they went when they needed cattle or horses.”219 Between 1861 and 1870, Sonora’s population declined by 25,000 as the state’s residents fled from Indians and moved on to greener pastures in the United States. The war with the Apache dragged on into the 1880s, especially in Chihuahua.220

Finally, the combined military action of Mexican and U. S. armies defeated the Apache. Geronimo surrendered in 1886, virtually ending the Apache threat. A few Apache, who attempted to avoid contact with outsiders, survived in Sierra Madres, perhaps as late as the 1950s.221

After 1850, Comanche incursions into Coahuila declined due to U. S. forts near the border and the extinction of game such as buffalo. In addition, settlements of Kickapoo, Seminole, and Mascogo Indians were established to serve as a barrier to the Comanche, who also suffered from such contributions of the white man as liquor, small pox, and cholera.222

Unlike the Apache and the Comanche, the Yaqui living along the coast of Sonora were sedentary. During colonial times, the Yaquis were the only Indian group in the area willing to perform wage labor, and after independence, the Yaqui remained an integral part of Sonora’s labor force. After 1850, outsiders sought to exploit not only Yaqui labor but their lands. In 1860, Sonoran governor Ignacio Pesqueira, who established a company to exploit Yaqui land, declared:

It is not part of the elevated policies of the state to exterminate at one time the Yaqui Indians. Its only objective is to subdue them and subordinate them to the progress of civilization. They would always have sufficient land to cultivate for their own subsistence. But it is very essential for the prosperity and well being of the state that the unused land of the Yaqui River be cultivated.223

To facilitate the appropriation of Yaqui land, the government began their forced removal. In 1861, the prefect of Hermosillo received a party of more than 150 captured Yaqui women and children whom he sent to the prefect of Altar so they could be dispersed in his district as servants. As a result of this policy, in urban areas of Sonora, abducted Yaqui children formed a great percentage of household servants.224

The Yaqui’s fertile, irrigated land came under increased pressure from commercial farmers after the railroad made it possible to transport crops grown on Yaqui land to markets in the United States. When the Yaqui defended their lands against encroachment, the Mexican army supported the interlopers in a genocidal war that lasted for decades.

A 1903 report on the Yaqui published by the Mexican War Department noted:

The primordial tendency of these Indians is to maintain their independence from the white race, to live apart and govern themselves with their customs, habits, and ceremonies. Due to tradition, instinct, and the education they receive from birth, they hate civilized people.225

The report commented on Yaqui tactics:

The Yaqui have staged large and small uprisings, and hide in haciendas, towns, and mines when they are pursued or defeated. In towns, they mingle with Yaqui workers who are hired since they are the only workers found there. There, the warriors rest, obtain supplies, and rebel again, always protected and aided by their fellow Yaqui who send them what they can and replace them. Thus, the war has no end.226

Figure 123 Yaqui prisoners in penitentiary

Source: Reproduced courtesy of the Benson Latin American Collection, the University of Texas at Austin

The author of the report concluded the Yaqui wars could be ended in three ways: 1) exterminate the population; 2) deport the Yaqui from Sonora; or 3) colonize their lands. The author rejected the first as too brutal. He rejected the second not only because of its brutality but because it would deprive Sonora of a labor force. Thus he recommended the third choice.227

In 1897, the eight Yaqui pueblos expressed their views in a letter to the Mexicans after signing a peace treaty with Mexicans at Ortiz. The letter was addressed to Mexican General Luis Torres:

What we want is that whites and soldiers leave. If they leave willingly, then we will have peace; if not, then we will declare war. The peace we signed in Ortiz provided that whites and soldiers leave, and this condition has not been met.228

This plea fell on deaf ears, and later General Torres boasted:

Thousands of prisoners taken of the Indians have been remitted to diverse parts of the Republic, so that under the vigilance of the federal government and the supervision of the state authorities, they could be adapted to the uses and customs of civilized life.229

For each Yaqui received, hacendados in Yucatan paid a bounty, which was divided between the Ministry of War and the military officer in charge. Colonel Francisco B. Cruz received ten pesos for each of the 15,700 Yaqui he was credited with deporting. By 1908, a quarter to a half of the Yaqui population had been sent out of the state by rail. Other Yaquis fled across the border to

Arizona. By the end of the Porfiriato, these massive deportations had broken the back of Yaqui resistance.230

With the exception of using the military against Indians in northern border states, Mexico did not have a coherent Indian policy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Liberals associated the white man with technology, a spirit of enterprise, good manners, and progress. They associated the Indian with lethargy and treachery. Policy makers felt that the Indians’ extensive land holdings formed the patrimony of all Mexicans and resented Indian attempts to cling to their ancestral domains.231

The political elite disapproved of the Indians’ high degree of self-sufficiency and sought to make Indians consumers as well as producers for the market. In 1870, Veracruz Governor Francisco Hernandez y Hernandez stated:

Indians have a fanatical adoration for the land, and yet their only benefit from it is their constant communion with it. They are rich due to their surroundings. Strictly speaking, they have no needs. Their ambition is satisfied by a contemplative gaze at their land sowed with various flowers and fruits. They know nothing else and want nothing else. Theirs is an easy life because within their reach is all the food they need. A handful of corn thrown on the ground they tread provides enough for their table. They do not want to participate in public affairs nor do they want anything from the government. . . The government continues to insist on subdividing land, convinced as it is, that once these Indians become landowners, they will soon become worthy citizens. Today they are neither producers nor consumers and they only serve as cannon fodder.232

Diaz realized that rural peace depended on defending Indian rights to land in central and southern Mexico. He favored Indian communities by failing to enforce the Lerdo Law, which required villages to subdivide their land. By 1882, only four or five communities in Veracruz had divided their lands, and they had transferred ownership to large groups of co-owners. As late as 1910, an estimated 41 percent of indigenous communities in Mexico retained some of their ancient lands. In some communities, residents purchased land that had been communally owned and became small-scale agricultural entrepreneurs.233

In 1901, Article 27 of the constitution was amended to allow non-religious groups, such as villages, to legally own land. Neither the constitution as written in 1857 nor the constitution as amended in 1901 actually determined land ownership. As historian Charles Gibson observed: “In Mexican history significant changes have rarely occurred as a consequence of law. Law provides an approximation of historical happening, or a commentary upon it.”234

Some explanations for the income disparity between indigenous people and non-Indians were based on race. In 1910, papers presented at the Seventeenth Congress of Americanists meeting in Mexico City expressed the academic consensus that Indians were racially inferior, as indicated by bone measurement of their skulls. Bulnes claimed that Indian poverty resulted from a lack of energyreleasing nitrogen in their corn-based diet. Positivist writer Luis Mesa claimed the Indian suffered from the negative impact of the Church, and suggested the Indians’ redemption lay not in more nitrogen but in less religion. Others, such as Justo Sierra, felt Indian poverty resulted from inadequate education. He stated that “given the equality of circumstance, of two groups of people, the one that is less educated is inferior.”235

Elite discourse centered on bringing the Indian into contemporary society. Historian and philologist Francisco Pimentel stated that Indians must “forget their customs and even their language.” Mestizos and Creoles felt assimilation would benefit not only the Indian but also the nation as a whole, since cultural homogenization would lead to true nationhood. As was the case with most liberals, Juarez himself believed that full citizenship for indigenous peasants could only be achieved by cultural assimilation, as he had shown with his own example.236

Figure 12.4

Tehua woman

Source: Reproduced courtesy of the Benson Latin American Collection, the University of Texas at Austin

Efforts at Indian education were generally limited to teaching Spanish. Expressed interest in Indian education remained largely intellectual rhetoric. While most Mexicans at least paid lip service to the desirability of educating Indians, others, such as Francisco Cosmes, editor of the positivist daily La Libertad, stated that Indians should not be subjected to compulsory education laws, since they were “impervious to all civilization.” Cosmes also stated the state should not deprive Indian families of child labor in a futile effort to educate them. Opposition to the introduction of alien ways from within the Indian community further complicated the meager effort at Indian education. In 1909, the Kickapoo burned a school that had been built for them on the day it was to be inaugurated. Such rejections occurred in other parts of Mexico.237

Depriving villages of communal lands and the Indians’ increased incorporation into the national market caused many Indians to lose their Indian identity and to be considered henceforth mestizos. As a result, after the middle of the nineteenth century, the Indian population began to decline. In 1877, 38 percent of Mexico’s population spoke an Indian language, while, in 1910, only 13 percent did.238

During the latter part of the nineteenth century, systematic academic study of Mexico’s Indians began. Such studies emphasized that, rather than there being a monolithic Indian culture, the indigenous population was highly differentiated by village, language, and ethnic group. Their loyalty to community above loyalty to nation and their poverty provided their thread of commonality. Francisco Pimentel provides an example of such scholarship with his Cuadro comparativo de las lenguas indigenes de Mexico (Chart of the Indigenous Languages of Mexico). In it, he identified 108 indigenous languages, which he grouped into twelve families based on their structure.239

Mexico’s indigenous people did not reject the varied forces of modernity outright, but negotiated, innovated and adopted those that they felt would meet their needs. Growing coffee is an example of an innovation that Indians wholeheartedly embraced. Under Indian control, raising coffee became an important income source. As a result of this selective embrace of elements of alien cultures, the designation “Indian” did not automatically denote a poor peasant. In some areas, especially in Oaxaca, there were comfortable indigenous artisans and wealthy indigenous landowners.240