Agrarian Rebellion and Defense of Community

Agrarian Rebellion and Defense of Community: Meaning and Collective Violence in Late
Colonial and Independence-Era Mexico

Author(s): Eric Van Young
Source: Journal of Social History, Vol. 27, No. 2 (Winter, 1993), pp. 245-269
Published by: Oxford University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3788302
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AGRAR1AN REBELL1ON AND DEFENSE OF COMMUNITY:
MEAN1NG AND COLLECTIVE VIOLENCE IN LATE
COLONIAL AND INDEPENDENCE ERA MEXICO
By Eric Van Young University of California, San Diego
Riot at Atlacomulco
On the evening of 1 November 1810 All Saints Day a riotous crowd in

the village of Atlacomulco, in the Toluca area about sixty miles to the northwest
of Mexico City, attacked the home of don Romualdo Magdaleno Diez, a local
peninsular-bom Spanish merchant and landowner.1 Magdaleno Diez himself,
along with his Spanish-born estate administrator, was killed by the mob in
the action of that evening, and his son and son-in-law executed the following
day in the town square and cemetery. The riot was fielled at least in part by
widely current rumors that an army of gachupines (European-born Spaniards)
was advancing on the town to slaughter its non-European inhabitants, and that
the baker in Magdaleno Diez's employ had at his master's command poisoned
the bread he was making that evening.2
According to a number of witnesses (including don Romualdo's wife and adult
daughters, left virtually destitute in the aftermath of the attack) the ethnically
mixed crowd of local Indian peasants and mestizo townsmen had advanced on
the Magdaleno Diez home from the village plaza at about 8 p.m. that evening,
throwing stones when in sight of the house " . . . with the greatest fury, and to
such an extreme that [the stonesl appeared [to fall] like hail." Despite entreaties
to reason by the family and servants, the rioters quickly smashed down the doors
with axes and entered the courtyard, where they encountered don Romualdo
holding a rosary and a prayer-book. The unfortunate man was seized immediately
by a number of hands in the crowd, and dispatched with a lance-thrust which
drenched his now-hysterical youngest daughter in her father's blood. As don
Romualdo slumped to the ground mortally wounded, members of the crowd
attacked him with stones and clubs. His eldest daughter
... saw her father fall tO the ground, and so many [men] throw themselves on
him that she could distinguish none of them; but she did see that they gave him
so many wounds, and so many blows with sticks and stones, leaving him covered
with stones, that they left him in a wretched condition, almost unrecognizable
(casi sin Egura corporal).
His son Jose Antonio, seeing he could do nothing to aid his father, ran from th
house toward the home of the village priest, seeking sanctuary while brandish-
ing a passport or safe-conduct from Father Miguel Hidalgo (the nominal leader
of the anti-Spanish rebellion which had just six weeks before engulfed central
Mexico).3 His flight availed him nothing, however, since a number of the pur-
suing rioters caught up with him near the plaza and wounded him gravely even
246 joumal of social history winter 1993
while he clutched the knees of the local vicar, imploring his protection
next day Jose Antonio and his Spanish born brother-inSlaw were dragged
the town jail where they had spent the night (the son by this time nearly
from his untreated wounds) and executed by a large crowd of Indian villa
from the neighboring hamlet of San Juan de los Jarros.
The fearfil violence directed against Romualdo Magdaleno Diez and
household may have been spontaneous in the sense that it was unexpected
it certainly did not spring out of a social vacuum. For more than three de
before 1810 the relationship of Magdaleno Diez with local villagers had b
one of almost unrelieved antagonism, chiefly over the issue of land owner
Arriving in the district in the early 1770s or so, don Romualdo had purcha
first hacienda by 1776, and was subsequently to buy other property. He certa
appears to have been one of the most aggressive and grasping of local hxe
(estate owners), enclosing and engrossing land, manipulating local politic
justice to favor his own economic interests, and even tuming to extra-jud
violence when formal institutional means failed or moved too slowly to
him.4
Yet in these practices and in his habitual conflict with local Indian peasS
ants and other landowners he was by no means alone. There had been a long
history of stzggles over land and water in the area, involving villagers of Atla
comulco, Sarros, and other hamlets, pitted against local caciquRs (Indian nobles)
and non-Indian landholders. Accompanying the generalized competition for
land and water resources in the area were serious indications of peasarlt land
hunger, outright invasions of hacienda lands by Indian villagers, fairly frequent
incidents of violence, and abusive labor practices by estate owners. These were
the avatars of processes virtually universal in late colonial Mexico, comprising
the recovery of indigenous population and resultant land pressure; the growing
commercialization of large-scale agriculture; the increasing competition between
Indian villagers and others over land resources; and the developing social dif-
ferentiation within indigenous communities.5 This generalized situation in the
eighteenth century was compounded and facilitated in the Mexico City area,
where Atlacomulco was roughly located, by the growth of the urban market and
the consequent spread of irrigated wheat culture. Locallys the agrarian equation
shifted between 1650 and 1750 from a situation in which land had been plentiful
and labor scarce, to one in which land was scarce and labor plentiful, creating
conditions under which a large part of the farming population enjoyed access
neither to adequate real wages nor sufficient subsistence holdings for farming.
In a sense, then, Romualdo Magdaleno Diez may have served as a sort of
lightning rod for peasant discontent-a proxy for local white power-holders as a
group, and to some degree a surrogate victim for them. But he was hardly a faceless
victim or a sociological abstraction to the people who killed him. Indeed, victims
and killers knew one another, as the testimony in the case makes abundantly
clear, and possibly dealt with each other on a day-to day basis. Under such
circumstances it must be supposed that personal animosities and vendettas of
a highly personalized and possibly longSstanding nature, and rivalries political
and economic, as opposed to simply blind rage and/or ideological considerations,
aimed the assassins at their victims and lent strength to their mortal blows.6
Nonetheless, Magdaleno Diez was definitely a scapegoat the proximate object
AGRARIAN REBELLION AND DEFENSE OF COMMUNITY 247
for the acting out of intense social discontent which might more reasonably
have been expected to be (and in some other cases was) directed against white
society and the colonial regime as a whole. The social displacement implied by
this process was a complex one much in evidence during the late colonial period
and the era of civil struggle which brought it to a close.7
The Analytical Issues
On the whole, local grievances were probably much more important than ide-
ological differences in defining where actors stood in relation to the September
1810 rebellion inageneral and incidents like the one at Atlacomulco in partic-
ular. Adding to the social volatility of the situation in Atlacomulco was the
decline in power, wealth, and influence of the local cacique group after about
1700, and most notably after 1750, which produced within the diminutive so-
ciety of local Indian householders a legitimacy vacuum ultimately compounded
by the larger political crisis of the early nineteenth century. At the same time,
the growing economic hegemony of non-Indian landowners was not matched by
a parallel reinforcement of the structures of influence and legitimacy weakened
by the very process of its creation and the cession of local dominance by the
indigenous elite. Overall, the wider rebellion initiated by Miguel Hidalgo and
subsequently taken up by other leaders seems to have provided an organizing
principle a pretext, a framework- upon which existing patterns of enmity, ri-
valry, and faction could be hung. These occurrences seem to offer a miniaturized
version of events on a "national" level, at least in part, in which a middling sec-
tor of rural non-Indians (abetted by socially marginal elements) in some cases
initiated a rebellion against the colonial regime and in some cases joined one
already in progress, and in which Indian rural people participated massively for
reasons growing more out of local conditions than out of engagement with their
ostensible leaders' ideological concems.
The fact that popular collective action in the countryside of New Spain (as
Mexico was then called) was overwhelmingly local in origin and localocentric
in worldview does not prevent our generalizing about it, of course. Popular and
elite rebels had in mind very different and mutually incomprehensible social and
political agendas when they took up arms against the Spanish colonial regime
between 1810 and 1821. Peasant villagers, in particular, fought in defense of em-
battled communities which they conceived as antecedent to, and in some sense
existing outside of, the colonial state. The creole directorate of the loose inde-
pendence movement, on the other hand, struggled toward a proto-nationalist
vision of an autonomous nation-state in which active political citizenship would
be limited to a white native elite and a penumbra of ethnically mixed secondary
players. That strong ethnic and class divisions, always present but now politically
salient in new ways, emerged within Mexico during the period of the indepen-
dence struggle accofints in large measure for the fears of caste war expressed by
many creole insurgents and social observers, and for the socially conservative
auspices under which independence finally arrived in the early 1820s. Beyond
issues of political horizon, state, or citizenship, popular rural rebellion also com-
prised elements of cultural resistance linguistic survival, religious cult, local
status and power arrangements, gender relations, issues of self and group iden-
tity, and worldview in general which lent the threeSway struggle a

villages, creole insurgent directorate, and colonial state a certain sha
violence it would otherwise have lacked had not that cultural resistance been
conflated with the defense of community.
The Atlacomulco disturbance, and dozens of similar ones that erupted in
1810 and after, raise a number of interesting issues about culture and society
in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Mexico. One of these, and the principal
question to which I want to devote the remainder of this essay, is the following: to
what degree can economic grievances of the sort outlined for Atlacomutco and
the hamlet of Jarros in the late colonial period credibly account by themselves for
violent collective behavior of this intensity, and its absorption, frequently, into
the insurgency against Spain? There is a substantial doubt, in other words, as to
whether and how our rural rioters framed their decisions to act with reference to
explicitly economic goals. A simplified model of such collective behavior, with
land hunger as its engine or motive force, should enable us to predict that peasant
villagers in such situations would overturn the existing structures of colonial
oppression in terms immediate to their own experience, by expropriating land
and destroying its owners and their capital. The focused violence and destruction
are present in the Atlacomulco incident and many others of the time, but not the
expropriation, and even less any systematic expression of an agrarian program on
the part of popular rebels. A subsidiary theme, therefore, consists in the question
of why there is so little evidence of a widespread agrarian ideology during this
period, or even of expropriation by poor rural people of the property of the rich.
Admittedly these are somewhat different issues, and each will receive at least
abbreviated treatment in passing.
The absence of land, for the mo.st part, as a major issue in policy formulations,
public pronouncements, and ideological elaborations in the rebellion in New
Spain as a whole (always exceptirlg the somewhat murky case of Jose Maria
Morelos, another country curate who inherited the mantle of Hidalgo's leader-
ship after the latters death in 1811, and who espoused some agrarian reform)
does not of course mean that it was not an issue in bringing peasants to arms.8
Nor should the absence of such a cc)herent, generalizing ideology of agrarianism,
either from above or from below, surprise us; indeed, its existence would have
seemed peculiarly anachronistic given the time and place. And even had such
a program been elaborated and seriously promoted by the insurgent leadership,
its wide diffusion among country people, and their adherence to it, would have
been blocked by such factors as the constricted channels of communication
between elite insurgent directorate and common masses (linguistic differences,
an overwhelmingly illiterate population), and the still strongly patriarchal and
patemalistic flavor of social relationships prevailing between the laboring and
owning classes in many parts of the Mexican countryside.
Nonetheless, in the case of Atlacomulco conflict over land between rioter-
rebels and their victims, in one form or another, seems to be the main element
in the etiology of local political violence. Partly, of course, this may be the
result of the differential survival of documentation, granting that the possibility
that the sheer frequency of land conflicts and the obviousness of their paper
trail may distort our view of what actually motivated collective violence on
the part of peasants. Where we can trace local economic relationships from
the eighteenth century into the insurgency era, certainly, agrarian conflict is
often in play. And where insurgency-era documentation itself is thickest, there
is abundant evidence, as we shall see, of ad hoc popular agrarianism acts of
vengeance against landlords, destruction of property, looting, and so forth-
generally, however, stopping short of even short-term land expropriation.9
What other possible candidates exist as motives for localized popular action.7-
tribute and tax collections ? relationships to the Church ? the mercantile network ?
separatist political inclinations ? None of these seems as credible an explanation
for collective action as the land question, because they would probably have af
fected people in a less uniform manner; because except in the case of the Church
they would probably have lacked the symbolic power necessary to send villagers
across the affective threshold into collective action; and because there is no
concrete evidence that they were at issue in Atlacomulco or most other cases of
village uprising. What occurred, in fact, was that the land question was trans-
muted into other issues capable of mobilizing rural people to violent collective
action under, or alongside, the banner of political protest, though the alchemy
of the process is not entirely clear. It is not necessary to accept a knee-jerk hy-
pothesis concerning the relationship between agrarian conditions and violent
protest, nor does it seem possible to do so in this case. But the land question
as a motivation for rebellion can be preserved if we begin to think in terms of
intervening variables instead of the simpler formulation. What is novel in my
own interpretation of popular action in the period is not emphasis on agrarian
grievance, certainly, since in recent scholarly work this has come to occupy an
ever more important place. Rather, I am concerned to explore the nature of
popular agrarianism, its limits, and more importantly its relationship to an even
deeper level of struggle in the countryside-the struggle over the continued
political viability of peasant communities and their existence as substantially
autonomous reproducers of local ethnic culture.
Here the idea of a "compromise of community" as a motivation for peasant
insurrection may be helpful, especially where the class position, and the ethnic
and cultural identity of the peasantry were highly congruent. The historical re-
silience of the peasant community in Mexico suggests that the maintenance of
village identity and autonomy are key factors in understanding the history of
rural society there.l° This resilience, when expressed in political terms, as during
the wars of independence, could sometimes take on a flavor at once zenopho-
bic and reactionary vis d vis the encroachment of outsiders, including the state.
Nor was the overt expression of such sentiments unknown during the initial
phases of the independence movement; the incidents at Atlacomulco should
be seen in this light. It has even been suggested by a number of anthropologists
and other scholars that the communal Indian village (and communal peasant
villages in general) breeds a particular peasant cognitive formation which tends
to see the social world relationships within communities, as well as between
them and outsiders in very dehnite terms, with the village at its center and
with the universe as a kind of zero-sum game. The struggle to preserve village
identity intact may then be seen as subsuming the land question, inasmuch as
the land question was inextricably related to a coherent cosmology which had
the communal village as its central entity. The most extreme formulation of
this view would completely invert the materialist causal arrow by positing that
250 journal of social history winter 1993
during "normal" times land conflict was a pretext or collectively uncon

representation of a deeper social and cultural conflict, although it might
real enough practical aspects in itself.1l In this scenario, the generalized c
tions of social and political upheaval initiated by the insurrection of 1810
concretized here in the case of the Atlacomulco incident, would have cr
an open space or breach, as it were, to play out a much larger social dra
which agrarian grievances rarely took center stage.
We have, then, a series of agrarian or agrarian-inspired uprisings, ofter
flated with a diffuse movement of "national" liberation and a state of int
war, with a rough and ready (though truncated) agrarian ideology and pr
but also embodying a more broadly cultural conflict fueled by the pressu
change in rural society and transmuted into a rebellion in defense of commu
It is essential to remember, however, that the long-term evolution of agr
structures in colonial Mexico-of the social chafing attendant upon the d
opment of regional commercial economies, land grabbing, and peasant def
of community-did not occur in a social or economic vacuum. Broad c
in colonial economy and demography tended to deepen over several gene
tions the spreading shadow of impoverishment for major sectors of the r
population. Furthermore, this tendency was compounded by shorterSterm,
junctural factors which positively influenced the propensity of rural peop
engage in collective action with the advent of the political crisis of 1809
The metaphor here would be the generation by the erosion of popular li
standards of a sort of political hyperesthesia which in itself might not spu
lective violence, but which in combination with sharpening cultural and p
cal conflict might produce that very effect. Without some understanding of
economic backgroundl therefore, agrarian conflict and a peasant posture i
fense of community are not readily comprehensible. Here we turn, therefo
look very briefly at the conditions of life for rural working people in late co
New Spain, and at agrarian structures in general; then to an arlalysis of w
one could call popular agrarianism in practice; and finally to village rebelli
texts, to see what they tell us about the thinking and aspirations of rural peo
The General Economic Context of Rural Violence
As the study of colonial Mexican rural history, and of economic history m

generally, has advanced over the last several decades, historians have bui
and begun to dissolve again a number of conventional wisdoms. One of th
that the eighteenth century was a time of substantially uninterrupted econ
expansion and prosperity, a silver century if not a golden one.12 More rece
however, our view of the half-century or so leading up to the outbreak of
independence movement in 1810 has begun to take on a darker shading,
that I could not unreasc)nably characterize the eighteenth century in a re
essay of my own as a century of chiaroscuro-of starkly contrasting light
dark.13 Indicators of economic movement and general welfare once though
be unequivocally positive for the eighteenth century are now proving to be les
or even negative in sign.14 Most basically, the impressive demographic inc
of the early decades of the century began to slacken or stutter after about 17
in some regions earlier, in some later. Despite important differences of schol
opinion as to the causes for this sapping of demographic vitality, it seems likely
to have stemmed at least in part from an increasingly unfavorable man/land ratio
in the years after mid-century or so. This Malthusian situation was aggravated
or compounded by recurrent subsistence crises linked to meteorological cycles,
stagnant agricultural productivity, and a markedly uneven distribution of income
and wealth in the late colony.
Furthermore, the most important sectors of the Mexican economy mining,
commerce, and agriculture all offer a mixed picture during the last decades of
the colony. The production of silver, for so long the bellwether of the colonial
enterprise, echoed the overall movement of population, experiencing its longest
period of sustained growth during the first quarter of the century.l5 It would
also appear that even signs of subsequent absolute growth in production levels
masked a real economic slippage and structural problems of a serious long-ter
nature. And the Mexican economy, of course, did not stand still around the
mining sector. Although the value of Mexican exports during the entire colonial
period and well after it was overwhelmingly comprised of silver bullion and coin,
the relative share of mining output in the colonial gross domestic product fell
towards the end of the eighteenth century to something like four or five percent
of the total.l6 Fiscal revenues and commerce, two thermometer-like indicators
of the general state of the economy, tended in the late eighteenth century to
travel the same bumpy, curvy trajectory.17 If the situation of the mining sector
has been somewhat controversial, that of agriculture is necessarily even foggier,
but on the whole it seems likely that although agricultural production grew
perceptibly during the eighteenth century in many parts of New Spain, there
was little in the way of productivity gain or technological improvement. It is
true that selected parts of the country, most notably the Guadalajara and Bajio
regions, were characterized by an agricultural dynamism unknown elsewhere,
though the reasons for this are not as yet entirely clear.l8 But in general terms,
judging by the incomplete and equivocal figures we presently possess, population
growth, aggravated by urbanization ( i.e., the agglomeration of larger non-farming
populations), was running ahead of agricultural production at the end of the
eighteenth century.19
The evidence for a fall in real wages and incomes for rural working people over
the course of the last colonial century is virtually incontrovertible. Estimates of
per capita income at the close of the colonial period tend to support this view.
Even allowing for the fact that silver output, which drives most estimates of gross
domestic product, fluctuated considerably, it seems fairly clear that per capita
income in New Spain at best remained stable or declined slightly during the last
six decades of the colonial period, and at worst declined sharply during the last
two decades or so.20 If one takes into account qualitative evidence indicating
that the distribution of wealth within the colony tended to become ever more
skewed in the late eighteenth century, the conclusion is nearly inescapable that
substantial popular impoverishment, if not immiseration, must have been the
inevitable result. The movements of prices and wages certainly point in the di-
rection of a loss of effective purchasing power, with consumer prices in Mexico
rising substantially from at least the last quarter of the eighteenth century and
into the first decades of the nineteenth. 1 As nearly as we can determine in
the absence of reliable wage series, nominal cash wages for the most common
types of unskilled and semivskilled work, both mral and urban, remain
much at a dead level during the eighteenth century. The combination
prices and stagnant nominal wages, therefore, produced a drop in real
during the latter half of the eighteenth century of something like 25
and a concomitant fall in the living standard for most working people in
While this would certainly have reduced the real incomes of urban wor
ple, most fully exposed to market forces because of the cash wage nex
severely affected a large proportion of the country population, most e
rural wage laborers and peasants whose landholdings were not adequate
port their family subsistence and other needs. At a guess} something like
Mexican labor force earned most, or a substantial part, of its livelihoo
and would therefore have seen itS economic position perceptibly erode
late colonial decades. Compounding this secular trerld there occurred a
harvest failures and sharp price rises in articles of basic popular consumpt
1800, producing the same effects popular immiseration, unemploymen
ness collapse, cityward migrations, and SQ forth-characteristic of mos
regime economies in the grip of crises de subsisterces.
Agrarian Unrest, Village Rebellion, Ideolognr, Culture
The signs of mounting agrarian conflict, fuelled and aggravated by a w

drop in popular living standards, may be seen in virtually every corner of
tral part of the country. Even with the slackening of momentum in p
growth, the upward drift continued and the demographic pressure acc
in the dynamic early decades of the century subjected the structure of l
ing to new stresses by its end. Waves of land conflict and rural crimin
to a crescendo at the close of the colonial period. In central Mexico, as
developed areas of the country, the incidence of land suits involving al
landholders-Indian villages, haciendas, other private owners-about tripled
from the middle of the eighteenth century until its end, so that the colonial
courts were virtually flooded with new and continuing litigation by the early
nineteenth century. 2 As to criminality in general and rural brigandage in par-
ticular, most contemporaries and modern scholars would agree that they were
notably on the upswing in the eighteenth century.23 The colonial countryside
was "innundated" and '4infested" with brigands many of whom entered the ranks
of the insurgents after 1810* There was also a pretty clear upward trend in the
incidence of rural collective violence-of village tumultos (riots)-during the
late colonial decades. Of the 150 or so riots that occurred in central Mexico
between 1700 and 1820, over a hundred took place after 1765 and nearly fifty in
the period 179S1810, though there is no particulat periodicity observable and
no clear relationship between rural riot and recurrent subsistence crisis.24
There is a quite marked continuity between the types of rural deviance and
protest before 1810 primary among them the village riot and nlral brigandage
just mentioned-and those forms of popular violence and rebellion which came
to be associated loosely with the cause of independence. It bears emphasizing
that rural riots were perhaps the most visible sort of unambiguously popular
violence during the earlier years of the insurgency.25 As we shall see, the closely
circumscribed mental horizons defining traditional village life cc)nditioned the
broader participation of country people particularly indigenous peasants in

a striking manner. Moreover, it is in the form and objects of such outbreaks that
agrarian rebellion reveals itself, albeit mostly in a very inchoate way. We now
turn to some consideration of the agrarian elements in independence-era village
uprisings, followed by a brief discussion of the cultural constraints which kept
these movements localized and politically fragmented.
The three most common forms for the expression of agrarian unrest in rural
disturbances both before and during the independence struggle were victim-
ization of local non-indigenous landowners and their allies and representatives,
invasion of haciendas by rioting villagers, and vaguely programmatic pronounce-
ments about property rights and the redistribution of wealth.
An example of the first sort we have seen in the Atlacomulco case. In con-
nection with the land question, this most often took the form of conflict with
"outsiders," primarily, of course, an etic category reconstructed in the main
from evidence concerning the victims of communitarian violence. These people
tended to share certain characteristics. First, they were frequently non-village-
born (and generally non-Indian) power-holders, or allies or creatures of such
people.26 Second, such structural "outsideness" was most often complemented
by strong signs of"othemess," such as language and/or ethnic difference. Third,
the upset or threat of upset linked to such people, and ostensibly at the root of
popular violence, required some aspect of dynamism (a perceptible element of
"more" or "recently") and/or of normative violation (to be "excessive" or "ille-
gitimate") in order to create a level of stress or conflict sufficient for collective
violence to arise in the absence of alternative resolution mechanisms. Where
such individuals existed within or proximate to a village community, precipi-
tating events could turn them from tolerated neighbors, functionally necessary
mediators, or even symbiotic allies into noxious elements against which whole
or part-communities might tum their destructive rage. Longstanding social or
economic boncls (which in any case tended to have markedly exploitative as-
pects), or even personal familiarity on a day-to-day basis (as the Atlacomulco
episode tragically demonstrates) were not enough to exempt such "outsiders"
from collective attack.
This pattern was nearly universal in central Mexico and has been exhaustively
documented as a result of the scholarly attention paid to it during the last twenty
years or so. Although it had been present since the early post-conquest period-
since the first Spaniard's cow nibbled the first Indian's corn patch the incidence
of such friction was apparently on the upswing during the late colonial decades.27
We have many straightforward examples of village riots preceded by years and
even decades of conflict with white landowners in the neighborhood. Such cases
are straightforward in the sense that the observer can see fairly clear class, ethnic,
and institutional dividing lines between rioters and outsiders, and it does not
require much theoretical imagination to make some link between conflict and
violence.
To cite but one additional example among many, there occurred a number
of village riots in the Jilotepec area, to the northwest of Mexico City, begin-
ning at least with the late eighteenth century and overlapping well into the
independence period. It is also worth noting that this district and the zone adja-
cent to the east, and especially the town of Huichapan to the north, comprised
a theater of endemic insurgent activity well into the middle of the d

the 1810s. Recurrent land invasions and attacks by local indigenous pe
landowners, government officials, and then later on royalist soldiers,
the period from the 1780s on, and are to be understood as peasant res
the expansion of haciendas onto community lands, the pushing aside
tenantry arrangements, and highly abusive labor practices by local hace
The underlying motive of the conflict in the area, and of the collecti
and insurgent activity which grew out of it, appears mainly to have
intensi*ing use of local resources, both landed and human, accompani
increased competition between large-scale mixed farming estates and
producers. This, in turn, can be linked to the penetration during the
and later decades of the eighteenth century of a commercial market
previously marginal to it. The Jilotepec area we may suppose to have
that of Atlacomulco to the southwest (and for roughly similar reason
endowment, relatively sparse population, etc.) drawn fully into the d
and ramifying late colonial market economy relatively late. The drive
landowners in the area to abrogate customary tenantry arrangements
standing, and to extract larger and more predictable money rents and
puts, and the efforts of Indian peasants to resist these demands, refl
conditions favorable, grosso modo, to large-scale grain producers. Thi
torical iitOhU we can expect to encounter repeatedly in any analysis of the
events of 1810 and the years on either side, with the bass playing the heavy
repeated chords of agrarian discontent and the upper clef picking out the almost
infinitely varied melody of local collective action.
The first sort of expression of agrarian unrest obviously overlaps with the
second, comprising invasions of neighboring privately held lands haciendas,
generally by peasant villagers. During the insurgency, it was naturally to be
expected that rural estates would become targets for local villagers, guerrilla
bands, and even bandits. Since the rebellion itself was overwhelmingly mral,
the countryside, dominated as it was in many areas of the country by large ha-
ciendas, formed the major theater for fighting and collective violence. Rural
estates were also tempting targets because of their often strategic location, the
considerable wealth concentrated on them, and their long histories of conflict
with surrounding villages and small property owners. To the degree that local
people participated in such actions, attacks against landed estates pretty clearly
indicated one of the major components of popular thinking about the social con-
stitution of the colony. Thus, attacks on haciendas became an almost formulaic
element in insurgent military tactics in the Mexican countryside from the very
beginning of the independence struggle. For example, when in August of 1811
a wellSarmed force of some sixty rebels briefly captured the town of San Juan
Teotihuacan (familiar to modern tourists for its ancient monumental nlins), just
to the northeast of Mexico City, their actions followed a familiar pattern. They
went directly to the offices of the royal tobacco monopoly, the customs house,
and the local magistrate, and to the homes of prominent Spanish householders,
gathering as much cash and weaponry as they could. The judicial archive in the
casas reales (government building) was burned, and they freed the single prisS
oner in the town jail. Their business in Teotihuacan Snished, they thoroughly
sacked a neighboring hacienda, though the property escaped the incineration
that befell so many rural estates in similar circumstances.29 Haciendas all over
the country were regularly subject to extortion of money, had their livestock
stolen, and were sacked and/or burned.30
More interesting for our present purposes are those instances of attacks on
rural estates which can be linked unambiguously to local peasants, and which
reflect programmatic elements of the popular insurgency within the context of
local economic and social conditions. Though on occasion villagers remained
indifferent to such depredations or even helped estate employees offer resistance
to them, more often they demonstrated considerable willingness and even en-
thusiasm in joining in attacks on rural estates initiated and led by non-local
rebels. Such was the case of the attack on the Hacienda Nuestra Senora de
Guadalupe, near Pachuca, in September, 181 1, in which twenty men from the
nearby pueblo of Santa Monica helped a rebel force sack the estate and execute
two European Spaniards found hiding in the casa grande (main house). When
the village men returned to their pueblo early the next morning laden with
items carried off from the hacienda, the Indian akalde was awaiting them in the
cemetery with fresh pulque (a mild intoxicant), which they all sat down and
drank together, almost as though in acknowledgement of a planned task well
accomplished.3l To take another example, the passage of Hidalgo's insurgent
army through the neighborhood of Toluca at the end of October 1810 seems to
have spurred a wave of attacks around the Cuajimalpa area, in the mountains
between the Toluca Valley and the Valley of Mexico. The haciendas Buena-
vista, Venta de Cuajimalpa, and Batan were almost picked clean by people from
a half-dozen or more local villages, whose inhabitants came en masse, directed by
their local Indian oficials, to harvest the standing maize in the estates' fields and
share out the livestock between themselves and the passing insurgent forces.32
Even more revealing is the fairly typical case of Juan Valerio, an Indian of
about 40 years old from the barrio of Santa Maria in Malinalco, who- had worked
for a number of years as a laborer on the local Hacienda de Xalmolonga by the
time of his capture as an insurgent on 25 August 181 1. The previous day he had
participated in an attack on the hacienda, where a number of witnesses had seen
him putting the torch to estate buildings, and he had taken part in an earlier
attack on the same estate led by the well known rebel chieftain Ruvalcaba on 1
November 1810. Valerio had received as part of the booty in the earlier incident
a bull to divide up among his fellow laborers. Witnesses recounted his statement
that " ... a priest was coming from the interior (tierra allentro) who would fix
everything, since the viceroy no longer existed, and this hacienda and all its
lands would be divided among its laborers."33
Juan Valerio's ingenuous remark brings us to the third (and least well docu-
mented) type of expression of agrarian discontent explicit, typically fragmen-
tary programmatic statements regarding property rights and the redistribution
of wealth in the countryside. An example is that of Albino Vicente, Indian gob-
err of the pueblo of San Marcos, in the Tula district, arrested on 15 October
1810 on suspicion of insurgent sympathies. Among other crimes, Vicente was
accused of having encouraged an Indian villager named Mariano Pascual, from
a sujeto (subordinate hamlet) of San Marcos, to write a letter to the insurgent
chief Ignacio Allende " . . . asking him to give them the lands usurped from his
pueblo." The naive Pascual had gone to the local escribiente (scribe) in the main
joumal of social history
256 winter 1993
plaza of Tula and asked him how much such a letter would cost. Pascual's pueblo
had long had a suit pending in Mexico City against the accused usurpers of its
lands, the noble counts of Moctezuma and la Cortina, and he testified that the
goberrulor had told him Allende had restored lands to villagers wherever he
went throughout the colony.34 Evidence of a similar sort shows unmistakable
elements of a rudimentary agrarian program at play in some village disturbances,
and of tendencies toward levelling ideologies. A few days after the rillage up-
rising at Tamasunchale in February 1812, for example, a local rebel commander
in the neighborhood wrote to the representative of the Indians of nearby Cha-
pulhuacan pueblo, offering him a commission in the rebel army and inviting
him " ... to receive in the name of his constituents the lands to which they
aspired."35
This and other evidence of an explicit popular agrarian ideology and of the
aggression that could be unleashed against haciendas makes it all the more
notable that in most cases of independence-era endogenous village uprising
there should have been so little sign of any such ideology or action, and certainly
little inclination on the part of creole leaders to tum it into a broader platform
for popular political mobilization in the countryside. There is a difference, of
course, between goals, or levels of goals, and the instrumentalities employed
to realize them. In almost no recorded instance was the actual expropria-tion
and redistribution of hacienda land undertaken by villagers. But a generalized
tendency for villagers to initiate or join in the sack of nearby rural estates a
short-term solution to problems of wealth distribution, as well as an outlet for
the acting out of aggressive impulses would not necessarily be incompatible
with a deeper aspiration to redress by more fundamental steps long-standing
agrarian grievances. It is probably reasonable to assume, therefore, that peasant
sentiments
evidence in favor of land expropriation were more widespread than the direct
indicates.
The issues of land or the distribution of wealth actually came up as explicit

programmatic elements relatively seldom during the insurgency, at least as com-
pared with the Mexican Revolution of a century later or some other great modern
peasant movements.36 Certainly village riots and other violence related to land
disputes between Indian villages, and between villages and neighboring non-
Indian property owners, were common enough in most areas of the country up
to 1810, but they do not figure as prominently thereafter. The reasons for this
hiatus in explicitly agrarian violence-and it was simply an hiatus, since it ap-
pears to have picked up again after Mexico had gained its independence are
not entirely clear, but several may be suggested. On the one hand, it may be that
the unsettled conditions which prevailed intermittently in many parts of the
country during the period 1810-1821 worked against the normal functioning of
the colonial justice and administrative systems to some degree, so that documenS
tation on such incidents might not have been generated, or if produced might
have been partially destroyed or lost. On the other hand it may very well be the
case that the substantial survival of the central government intact its failure
to collapse or implode over a period of months as the regime of Porfirio Diaz
was to do in 1910-1911 and its ability to reimpose itS political and military
control over large areas of the colony, discouraged peasant groups in particular
from undertaking land expropriations or other forms of longSterm solution to
the problem of agrarian pressure in the countryside. The most obvious sort of
limit here would be that, while one could sack an estate in a matter of hours or
even minutes, the equitable parcelling out of land to village insurgents or rioters
might require weeks or even months, a leisurely framework not often available.
Third, to the degree that the elite creole directorate of the separatist move-
ment in New Spain exercised any real influence at all over the popular in-
surgency at the village level, it did not particularly encourage a radical or far-
reaching agrarian reform or other types of property redistribution, even as the
sort of tactical measure in which Lincoln emancipated the slaves during the
U.S. Civil War. The contrast with the ideology and actions of at least a seg-
ment of the Revolutionary leadership of 1910-1920 Zapata and other populist
leaders, particularly-could not be clearer here, though it is true that men like
the northem politicians Francisco Madero and Venustiano Carranza paralleled
in their social conservatism figures of a century earlier, such as the elite cre-
ole officer Ignacio Allende.37 Even in the revolutionary Mexico of 1910-20,
however, after nearly a century of increasingly ideologically influenced agrarian
disturbances, including the diffusion of liberal political doctrines, centralized
efforts at some land reform, and anarchist agitation in the countryside; and even
with the presence and substantial national diffusion of agrarian ideology of a
vindicationist stamp (Zapatismo and other programs), agrarian action at the
local level still bore the stamp of politicalSmilitary necessity, on the one hand,
or of longstanding vendetti or short-term looting on the other.38 It would seem
that some peasant attempts at the seizure and re-distribution of property did
occur in 1810 and after, but it may be that they were not more widespread in the
period, and have therefore left a limited documentary trail, because a genuinely
popular agrarian ideology had not yet developed in the Mexican countryside,
but only bits and pieces of one activated on an ad hoc basis if at all. In this sense
the step from a profoundly localocentric, defensive, and reactive posture on the
part of peasant villagers, from which they sought in the end to prevent further
erosion of their economic position, to a broader, more systematically aggressive,
proactive posture, from which they might actually expand the limits of village
economy, was likely to be a short but difficult one.
This brings us around again to the question of culture and mentalite among
the indigenous Mexican peasantry at the end of the colonial regime. Briefly put,
the solipsism of village life-the intensely localocentric worldview, the xeno-
phobic attitudes towards outsiders, and the conflation of economic, cultural,
and personal identity in community membershiprecluded the development
of an agrarian ideology that might have helped local protest movements against
the colonial regime coalesce into larger ones. Furthermore, at the top of the
movement the creole and provincial directorate-always excepting the some-
what murky case of Father Morelos and one or tWO other people was unlikely
to embrace such doctrines, which they would have viewed as too radical.
Even had a coherent, generalizing, and widely diffused agrarian program ex-
isted in the ranks of the independence movement's creole directorate, the in-
commensurability of their political lexicon with that of the popular rural classes,
and the cultural dead air between these groups, would have acted to dampen its
broad appeal. The creole leadership and mass rural following of the insurgency
were characterized by diametrically opposed worldviews and mentalities. These
joumal of social history
258 winter 1993
differences nourished entirely distinct views of citizenship, and therefore strongly

conditioned the reach of ideological appeals. The conventional wisdom about
the movement for Mexican independence is that the primary objective of both
popular and elite rebels was national autonomy and the capture of state power.
But whatever else they may be, states are also mental constructs, and one's per-
ception of them is likely to change as one's structural perspective and conception
of citizenship changes. For people esren to conceive of the state, or of its active
intervention in altering the social distribution of wealth or property relations,
they are required to share a cognitive map which includes a view of a wider world
beyond locality, and of the integuments which hold it together. For much of the
population of late colonial Mexico such a vision did not-could not exist,
and to assume its presence is anachronistic. In fact, the common cultural and
political ground shared by the representatives of the colonial regime with the
creole leaders of the rebellion and their allies was much larger than any between
the latter and their mass following. Within this framework it can be seen that
the critique of the late Bourbon state fashioned by the creole directorate of the
independence struggles, and the project for a national state experimented with
in the decades following the break with Spain, were artifacts of elite, essentially
urban culture linked to a European great tradition. The assumptions and preoc-
cupations of that culture and the political projects that arose from it resonated
only dully, if at all, with the popular culture of rural and predominantly Indian
Mexico. In sum, what seems to have mattered most to the vast majority of rural
people was not state, but community. An ideology of agrarianism embracing the
country as a whole, or an identifiable regional space, or even the neighboring
village, would not have made much sense to country people of the time.39
Decoding Collective Behavior
Finally we come to the question of what rural uprisings do show about the indeS
pendence movement in particular and late colonial Mexican society in general.
Here I would like tO take up briefly in turn three aspects of the insurgency specifz
ically with regard to village-based collective violence: language and othemess,
the organization of collective violence, and patterns of popular participation.
Language comprised one of the main mediums of "othemess" in the localized
village disturbances that accounted for so much of popular violence during the
insurgency struggle. Nothing else demonstrated so clearly the lack of uni*ing
ideologies among the rebels, the gulf between indigenous people and outsiders,
or, most importantly, the cultural markers bounding and reinforcing the com-
munitarian spaces whose viability and defense constituted the main item on the
agendla of popular collective action. The form that threats and verbal abuse, diS
rected by Indians at non-Indians, could assume during village riots struck many
non-indigenous victims and witnesses, and nonrioters in general as very menac-
ing. Although many non-Indians spoke Nahuatl or other indigenous languages,
most probably did not, and the fact that much rebellious discourse was carried
on in unknown speech associated with the mercurial, suggestible, violent brown
masses of the countryside must have seemed to them particularly sinister. Ac-
counts by such people of the chanting and shouting that went on in some riotous
situations are, in fact, oddly chilling, especially when large groups of people were
involved. Not surprisingly, rioting Indian crowds expressed themselves reflexo

ively in Indian languages, even if large elements of them were bilingual. But the
yelling and anarchy so often described, for example, by witnesses to late colonial
land measurements where possession of village lands was at issue, became more
alarming as it dropped in volume, since the menace of the protest (at least in
the perception of non-Indians) was apparently inversely related to its loudness.
In the Malinalco riot of 1803, for example the alguscil mayor (constable) of
the town found the Indian crowd in the patio of the casas reales very sinister,
not least because to the pushing and shoving " ... was added a murmuring or
whispering among the Indians which only they understood, since it was in their
language? and also because everyone talked at the same time."40 In the uprising
at Chicontepec in 1811, the terliente de justicid (deputy magistrate) noted that
the crowd of Indians which came to arrest him in his house spoke exclusively
their "Mexican language," and at one point began chanting "Grab him, grab
him" ("Cojanlo, cojanlo'').41 During one phase of the 1810 Amecameca uprisS
ing, a crowd of local Indians were heard to chant "War, war with the gachupines"
("Guerra, guerra con los gachupines").42
Passing on to forms of collective violence, the organization of many village
uprisings both before and after 1810 tesembles nothing less than rural soviets,
or perhaps free communes along Fourierist lines. These cases consisted of short-
lived attempts by rural communities apparently to cut their political and other
bonds with the outside world and govem themselves in utopian independence.
Occasionally one sees in such episodes hints of attacks on local systems of priv-
ilege and propertys such as occurred at Chicontepec in May 1811, where the
admittedly scant evidence of an insurgent program points to the local landhold-
ing structure as the most specific item of grievance. The one concrete proposal
talked of in the village, and in rather diffuse terms at that, was that " ... the
lands of private individuals be divided amongst all the sons of the village, and
that [other] goods be set aside for the maintenance of the lords who were com-
ing [presumably Ignacio Allende and his army]."43 This local agrarianism was
occasionally accompanied (as in the Chicontepec case) by actual or threatened
violence directed against non-Indian racial groups, and a highly amplified, alS
most obsessive concem with local political legitimacy and authority. It is true
that one sees this village utopianism prehgured in occasional incidents before
1810 or so, and also true that during the insurgency it was sometimes complicated
by the presence of outside rebel influences. Nonetheless, as a manifestation of
the localocentric identity and worldview of peasant communities it was more
frequent, and achieved its most developed expression, during the insurgency
period.
One fairly vivid example of the pueblo-as-soviet during the insurgency is that
of the village of San Lorenzo Ixtacoyotla, near Metztitlan to the northeast of
Mexico City, taken by force of royalist arms on 15 November 1811. Though the
defenders of the town had virtually no firearms (only bows and arrows clubs}
and stones), they had held it as an avowedly insurgent commune for some two
months. The major leadership seems to have ome not from outsiders} but from
the goberruldor of the pueblo and the local insurgent cabecillas (leaders) Luis Vite
(also an Indian) and Vicente Acosta. Local men were recruited to steal maize
from the nearby Hacienda San Guillermo and other estates. Other villages in
the area were known to the rebels as 'scantons," though their action in co
was virtually non-existent. Local roads connecting the insurgent villages
other areas were cut, the rebels '4 . .+ thinking with this that the pueblo w
remain safe" not only, one suspects, for tactical reasons, but to underline
autochthonous nature of the uprising.44 Local men loyal to the insurrection
the most part wore a device with a representation of the Virgin of Guadal
and a feather on it. Acosta enjoined the village rebels not to believe i
acknowledge the authority ofl King Ferdinand VII (" ..* que no creyeran
el Rey"), and Vite convinced them that the royalist troops operating in t
region " . . . came killing everyone because since they were gachupines they
not like the local men ("los hijos" [del pueblo]) because they are Indians."
was also widely believed by village insurgents in the area that the gachupine
other non-Indian locals were allied against the Indian villagers, ;' . . . and if
non-Indians help the gachupines, we have no other support than our Lady
Guadalupe." One captured rebel testified ingenuously that the insurgents w
eventually triumph because they followed the commands ('sla ley") of"Nues
Senora de Guadalupe, la Americana." When questioned specifically what th
commands consisted of, he said " ... he doesn't know what the laws conta
but that they were promulgated by those iniquitous men who are persecuting
Europeans and embargoing lthe property ofl and arresting all the non-Indi
of the town who are their allies."45
So we have here and in other cases what looks to be the embryonic stage o
insular village utopia, substantially cut offfrom other such communes, actin
expropriate property from non-Indians, and following at least to some degr
ideology of American religious legitimation, ethnic exclusion, and rejection
the colonial state from the top down. The creation of these village soviet
even the tendency to move in that direction, short of actually instituting
a commune- was pregnant with significance conceming indigenous village
views on political authority and the colonial regime in general. One can r
sonably infer from their actions in these situations- as in the "normal" vil
politics of the previnsurgency period-the localocentric worldview and po
cal ideology we have been describing. A diagnostic sign of this collective ha
of mind is the preoccupation with political legitimacy that one sees in m
rural disturbances during the era. The basic model in play here seems to ha
been one in which sovereignty (to some extent) and legitimacy (to a grea
extent) were seen as immanent in the local indigenous polity, or at least co
be disaggregated to several levels, the bottom-most of which was the comm
landholding villageP The model resonated strongly with the concept of the
republics much talked of in the sixteenth century, in which Spanish and In
polities were seen in theory to be separate from each other politically, tho
they might touch at points for purposes of religious conversion and maintenan
and (uneven) economic exchange.46 A hermetic sealingooffof indigenous fr
conqueror society was never envisioned in this doctrine, of course, except amo
its most extreme advocates, but in actu,ality a substantial village political aut
omy was widely customary even by the close of the colonial period. The po
is that this seems rsot to have been imposed from the top of the imperial stru
ture down, but was rather accommodated to as it cotltinued to well up from t
smallest political cells in rural society.47
Finally patterns of popular participation in the insurgency tend to reinforce

the model of peasant collective action we have been exploring here. Throughout
its life, but most especially in its early phases, the popular following of the
insurgent cause was in the main identifiably Indian as opposed to mestizo.48 This
conclusion is based upon a computer-analyzed sample of nearly 1,300 individuals
captured as insurgents between 1810 and 1815. Of those individuals (about 85
percent of the sample) whose ethnicity can be determined, some 55 percent
were Indian, 25 percent Spanish (overwhelmingly creole, or New World-born),
15 percent mestizo, and 5 percent mulatto or black. This corresponds fairly
closely to the generally accepted overall ethnic makeup of New Spain at the
end of the colonial period, when the population was comprised of 60 percent
Indians, 18 percent whites, and about 22 percent mixed-blood groups. Some
well substantiated conclusions from the sample of captured insurgents extend to
other variables, as well, including age, marital status, occupation, place of origin,
and so forth. To summarize here, the modal rebel of the period tums out to have
been a married Indian farmer or rural laborer-a peasant, it is fair to say-of
about thirty years old (almost elderly by the standards of the time), probably the
head of a nuclear family, and most likely captured within sixty miles or so of his
home, a two- or three-day trip by foot.49
This last point is of some particular interest to us, since it provides a picture of
the physical mobility of people in times of acute social upheaval, and therefore
some insight into the worldview of popular rebels and the sub-set of cultural ideas
they shared amongst themselves. There are significant differentials amongst eth-
nic groups insofar as distance between home and place of capture is concerned.
The clearest of these is between Indians and Spaniards (that is to say, whites),
the former about four times more likely that the latter to be captured within a
short distance (say, three hours or so by foot) of their homes. On the whole, these
findings and results of other cross-tabulations among the variables suggest a sort
of von Thunen's ring-like arrangement in the propensity of groups in the insur-
gent population to act in a spatial field centered on their home towns, villages,
and hamlets. Indians, laborers and farmers, and married men tended generally to
stay closest to home, while Spaniards, small merchants and muleteers, and single
men wandered furthest afield. The most likely interpretation of this hinges on
differences in mentality among the groups in question, the most important of
these in the present context being a metaphorical political horizon defining the
effective limits of people's action in collectivities. Indian peasants, who made
up the largest group amongst the insurgents, were profoundly localocentric in
their worldview, and their actions tended to be constrained by the political and
affective camparlilismo characteristic of their mentality. Spaniards, on the other
hand, were much more likely to enjoy a higher degree of physical and social
mobility, to have experienced something of a wider world, and therefore to be
able to conceive of an abstract entity such as a nation in whose nominal interest
they might take up arms. There would appear to be a spatial gradient, therefore,
corresponding closely to an ethnic one which reflected not the importance of
race per se in stimulating or damping collective action, but the largely unarticu-
lated views of different groups as to what constituted the appropriate community
of reference for such action.
In conclusion, if we analyze popular violence, thinking, and mentality it begins
262
journal of social history winter 1993
to become clear how agrarian discontent could have bred continuing

violence in the absence of an overarching ideology of agrarianism. A
the intervening variables between agrarian change and collective actionn
the structure of mral communities on Indian cultural identity, and on ethnic
relations-indicates that agrarian discontent, while real enough in itself, was
only one aspect of a broader, ongoing struggle of cultural resistance. The floodgate
of opportunity provided by the Spanish imperial crisis allowed this struggle to
overdow its normally restricted banks and betray its totalizing character. But
if this is the case, what does it do to our understanding of the independence
movement? The conclusion is inescapable that popular and elite rebels had
substantially different and mutually incomprehensible agendas when they took
up arms against the Spanish colonizers} and that the independence conflict was
less a twoSway struggle than a threeSway conflict amongst the Mexican masses,
the elite creole directorate of the insurgency and the colonial regime.
Depart of History
LaJolkl, CA 92093-0104
ENDNOTES
1. The brief account presented here is based on a detailed reconstruction of the occuro
rence in Chapter 3, "Anatomy of a Riot 1* Atlacomulco 1810 " in my book-inoprogress
sw we Other Rebellion: Popular Violence and Ideology in Mexico, 1810-1816." ' [the doco
umentation on the Atlacomulco case, except where oierwise noted, is tO be found in
Archivo General de la Nacion, Mexico (hereafter AGN), Criminal, vol. 229, no expeo
diente no., fols. 263rQ13v, 1810; vol. 231, exp. i, fols. lr-59r, 1811, vol. 238, exp. 1
fols. lrX6vt 1811; and AGN, Infidencias, vol. 24, exp. 13, fols. 246r-254v, Fagoaga tO
Venegas, 1 July 1811.
2. Such rumors were common among rural people especially during the early years of
the insurgency in Mexico, recalling to some extent in form and content the rapidly cir
culating, panic-inducing tales of marauding armies of sanguinary counterSrevotutionary
aristocrats traced by Georges Lefebvre in The Great Fear of 1789: Rural Panic i71 Revolu
tionary France (Princeton, 1973).
3. The rebellion had broken out on 16 September 1810 under HidalgoE leadership
at the central Mexican town of Dolores, his own parish. At first autonomist in its aims
it quickly came to espouse a complete political rupture with Spain, though it embraced
both monarchist and republican tendencies. After a series of initial military victories,
Father Hidalgo and several of his lieutenants were captured and executed in mid<1811
the same fate that in 1815 befell Hidalgo's sometime seminary student and politicai
successor lose Maria Morelos, also a parish priest. Guerrilla warfare continued in many
parts of the country until a conservative creole (Mexican-bom white) military officer
Agustm de Iturbide, consummated the break with Spain in 1821, establishing a short-
lived empire with himself on the throne. For a solid recent interpretive history of the
Mexican independence movement, also embodying much new primary research, see Brian
R. Hamnett, Roots of Insurgency: Mexican Regions, 1750-1824 (Cambridge, 1986), and
specifically on the Hidalgo period (Septemberl 181NJanuary, 1811), Hugh M. Hamill
Jr., The HiMlgo Revolt: Prelude to Meencarl IrEpendence (Gainesville, 1966).
4. For a detailed reconstruction of local agrarian conflicts between about 1775 and
1810, but also reaching back into the seventeenth century, see the discussion in my
manuscript mentioned in note 1 above, and the sources from AGN, Tvlerras} cited there.
5. For a survey and some case studies of these phenomena, and their relationship to
popular collective violence in general and the outbreak of the independence movement
in particular, see the essays in Eric Van Young La crisis del orden colonial: Estructura agraria
y rebelion popular en la Nueva Espana, 1 750-i821 (Mexico City, 1992).
6. For example, there is some evidence to indicate that one of the men prominently
implicated in the murder of Magdaleno Diez himself, Jose Maria Reyes, was a somewhat
less successful commercial competitor of the murdered man, and that old grudges relating
specifically to local politics and law enforcement arrangements played their part in polar-
izing the community into factional struggles that entered heavily into the victimization
of Magdaleno Dlez.
7. I have elsewhere explained this dynamic as one in which violence directed by Indi-
ans and other popular groups against European Spaniards should be seen as a displacement
of hostile affect away from whites as a whole (both creole and Suropean) and toward Eu-
ropean Spaniards in particular, following along the lines of scapegoating. A compellingly
cogent model of this behavior is provided by the concept of "splitting," which grows
out of the object-relations school of psychoanalytic theory. Explorations of the concept
of splitting, and allusions to it, in the object-relations literature are many; see, among
others, Margaret S. Mahler, "Rapprochement Subphase of the Separation-Individuation
Process," Psychoanalytic Quarterly 41 ( 1972): 487-506; P. Giovacchini, Treatment of Prim-
itive Mental States (New York, 1979), 20-39- Richard Galston, "Teasing as an Inducer of
Violence," in Justin D. Call, Eleanor Galenson, and Robert L. Tyson, eds. Frontiers of
Infant Psychiatry (New York, 1984), 2: 307-312; and especially Louise S. Kapian, Oneness
and Separateness: From Infant to Inzlividual (New York, 1978), 42S8, 252-253.
8. It is doubtful that Morelos himself favored large-scale agrarian reform the break-up
and redistnbution to the peasantry of large, secularly owned rural estates though such
plans were apparently authored by more radical urban-based creole rebels associated with
his movement; Morelos's own proposals touched more upon the abolition of tribute and
slavery, and in the agrarian realm on the preservation and disposition of village common
lands. On Morelos's tepidity as an agrarian reformer, see Wilbert H. Tlmmons, "Sose Maria
Morelos: Agrarian Reformer?", Hispanic American Historical Review 35 (1956): 183-195-
Tlmothy E. Anna, The Fall ofthe RoyalGovemment in Mexico City (Lincoln, 1978), 240, n.
31; andSorge I. Dominguez, Insurrection or Loyalty: The Breakdown of the Spanish American
Empire (Cambridge, MA, 1980), 199-200.
9. John Tutino, in his book From Insurrection to Revolution in Mexico: Social Bases of
Agarian Violence, 1750-1940 (Princeton, 1986), has traced these linkages in an extremely
suggestive way for a number of important Mexican regions over two centuries, though I
would take issue with some of his conclusions (see n. 21 below).
10. On this theme see, particularly, the work of William B. Taylor, Drinking Homicide
and Rebellion in ColonialMexican Villages (Stanford, 1979); and Tutino, From insurrection
to Revolutiorl.
1 1. .lames Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven,
1985 ), especially Chapter 2, has some interesting observations to make on consciousness
collective behavior, and class interest among Malaysian peasants, and among peasants
more generally, but his view tends to be that relationship to the means of production
is antecedent to what one might call "cultural" variables. This stance is even clearer in
his more recent work, Dominatiorl and the Arts of Resistance: The Hidden Transcript (New
Haven, 1990). For further development of the view of agrarian conflict as a cultural
project, see my forthcoming article "Dreamscape with Figures and Fences: Cultural Con-
journal of social history winter 1993
264
tention and Discourse in the Late Colonial Mexican Countryside," in Serge Gruzinski
and Nathan Wachtel, eds., Le Nouveau Morie Mondes Nouveaux (Paris, forthcoming);
and for a critique of some of Scott's ideas, my article, "The Cuautla Lazarus: Double Sub-
jectives in Reading Texts on Popular Collective Action," Colonial Liin Amencan Review
2 (1993): 3-26.
12. See, for example, the classic treatment of Lesley Byrd Simpson, Many Mexicos, 4th
ed., revised (Berkeley, 1967) (but to be fair, Simpson [203] noted the lack of any "trickle-
down effect" from silver-based wealth); Colin MacLachlan and Jaime E. Rodrigue2, The
Forging of the Cosmic Race: A Reirlterpretation of Colonial Mexico (Berkeley, 1980); Jaime
E. Rodriguez, Down from Colonialism: Mexico's Nineteer Cerltury Crisis (Distinguished
Faculty Lecture, University of Califomia, Irvine, 1980); and more recently, John S. Leiby,
Colorlial Bureaucrats and the Mexicarl Economy (New York, 1986).
13. Eric Van Young, "The Age of Paradox: Mexican Agriculture at the End of the Colo-
nial Period, 1750-1810," in Nils Jacobsen and Hans-Jurgen Puhle, eds., The Ecorlomies
of Mexico a7ul Peru Durirlg the Late Colonial Period, 1760-1810 (Berlin, 1986), 64-90.
14. The discussion of the late colonial economy is based substantially on two articles
by Eric Van Young: "A modo de conclusion: el siglo parad6jico," in Arij Ouweneel and
Cristina Torales Pacheco, eds., Empresanos, indios y estado: Perfil de la economia mexicana
(Siglo RJIII) (Amsterdam, 1988), 20S231; and Chapter 2, "Los ricos se vuelven mas
ricos y los pobres mas pobres: Salarios reales y estandares populares de vida a fines de la
colonia en Mexico," in Van Young, La crisis del orden colonial.
15. See, particularly, John H. Coatsworth, "The Mexican Mining Industry in the Eigh-
teenth Century," in Sacobsen and Puhle, eds., The Economies of Mexico and Perus 26-45;
the same author's, "La historiografia economica de Mexico," in John H. Coatsworth,
Los origenes del atraso: Nueve ensayos de historia economica de Mexico en los siglos XVIII y
XIX (Mexico City, 1990), 21-36; and Coatsworth, 'Obstacles to Economic Growth in
Nineteenth-Century Mexico," American Historical Review 83 (1978): 8N100. In ad-
dition, see Richard L. Garner, "Silver Production and Entrepreneurial Structure in
Eighteenth<Century Mexico," Jahrbuch fur Geschichte qJon Staat, Wirtschaft und Gesellschuft
Lateinamerika 1 7 ( 1 980 ) :15 7-1 85.
16. The figure on exports as a percentage of gross domestic product is drawn from John H.
Coatsworth, "El estado y el sector extemo de Mexico, 1800-1910," Secuencias 2 (1985):
4S41. David Brading, Miners and Merchants in Bourbon Mexico, 1763-1810 (Cambridge,
1971), 96, and Laura Randall, A Comparative Economic History of Latin America, 1500-
1914, vol. 1, Menaco (Ann Arbor, 1977), 234-235, would both put the share of exports
as percentage of GDP somewhat higher. Jaime E. Rodriguez, Down from Colonidism, 3
estimates that silver constituted 1545 percent of all Mexican exports by value for the
period 179S1820. Rodriguez would put the level of exports at about 14 percent of GDP
around 1800, feasible but improbably high, in my view, because of the enormous weight
of unmonetarized and uncounted subsistence production in the economy as a whole.
17. John TePaske, "Economic Cycles in New Spain in the Eighteenth Century: A View
from the Public Sector," in Richard L. Garner and William B. Taylor, eds., Iberian Colonies,
New World Socieiies : Essays irl Memory of Charles Gibson (n. 1. , 1985 ), 125 and passim; and
the same author's "The Financial Disintegration of the Royal Government of Mexico
During the Epoch of Independence," in Jaime E. Rodriguez, ed., The Indepervlence of
blexico an{l the Creation of the New Naiion (Los Angeles, 1989), 6344. See also, in Garner
and Taylor, eds., Iberian Colonies, the essay of Stanley ). Stein, "Prelude to Upheaval in
Spain and New Spain, 180W1808: Trust Funds, Spanish Finance, and Colonial Silver,"
185-202. For figures on exports, see Brading, Miners anil Mercha7lts, 96; and Randall,
A Comparative Economic History, 1:234-235, both of which are based on Miguel Lerdo
de Tejada, Comercio exterior de Mexico desde la Conquista hasta hoy (Mexice City, 1967;
originally published 1853), Table 14, 30o1.
18. Fordetailed studies of these two regions, see, respectively, Eric Van Young? Hacier
and Market in Eighteenth-Century Mexico The Rural Economy of the Guailajara Region
1675-1821 (Berkeley, 1981 ); and David A. Brading, Harienis a7ul Ranchos in the Mexicar
Bajio: Leon, 1700-1860 (Cambridge, 1978).
19. This is the gist of the argument presented by Richard L. Garner, "Price Trends in
Eighteenth Century Mexico," Hispanic Ame7ican Historical Review 65 (1985): 279-325
and more recently by Arij Ouweneel and C. C. J. H. Bijleveld, "The Economic Cycle in
Bourbon Central Mexico: A Critique of the 'recaudacion del diesmo llquido en pesos,"'
Hispanic American Historical Review 69 (1989): 479-530.
20. These schematic conclusions are based on the income estimates of John TePaske in
his "Economic Cycles," 126, which depend in turn upon determining an appropriate mul-
tiplier for silver output; lePaske derives these from Coatsworth, "Obstacles to Economic
Growth." A number of such calculations have been made, several of them differing as to
the magnitude of the terms to be employed total population, mining output, mining as
a percentage of total economic production, and so forth. Most other estimates of GDP
and per capita income rely on basic figures set forth in Jose Maria Quiros, Memoria de
estatuto (Veracruz, 1817). Coatsworth, "Obstacles to Progress," 82 asserts that Mexican
per capita income in 1800 was about half that in the U.S. and a third that in Great Britain
while Rodriguez, Down from Colorlialism, 4, on the basis of small population estimates
pUtS Mexican per capita income at about two-thirds that of its northem neighbor.
21. This discussion, as that of wages and living standards, is based primarily on Chapter
2 in Van Young, La crisis del orderz colonial, and the sources cited there. In addition
see particularly, Garner, "Price Trends," and his more recent essay, "Prices and Wages in
EighteenthoCentury Mexico," in Lyman L. Johnson and Enrique Tandeter eds., Essays on
the Price History of Eighteenth-Century Laiin Ame7ica (Albuquerque, 1990j, 73-108- and,
among other recent works, the essays of Clara Suarez Arguello and Virginia Garcta Acosta
on wheat production and prices in Ouweneel and Torales Pacheco, eds., Empresarios indios
y esudo, 103-115 and 11S137, respectively. For a dissenting view on the generai price
trend, see the idiosyncratic and somewhat self-adulatory article of Ruggiero Romano
"Some Considerations on the History of Prices in Colonial Latin America," in Johnson
and Tandeter, eds., Essays, 35-72. In a short article in the same volume (21-34) John
Coatsworth notes the still-primitive state of price history for colonial Latin America.
22. For the Valleys of Mexico and Toluca, see John Tutino, "Creole Mexico: Spanish
Elites, Haciendas, and Indian Towns, 1750-1820" (PhD. diss., University of Texas at
Austin, 1976), 242-247; for a somewhat larger zone see Ouweneel and Bijleveld, 'The
Economic Cycle in Bourbon Central Mexico," ani Chapters 3 and 4 of my book-in-
progress, 'The Other Rebellion: Popular Violence and Ideology in Mexico, 18101816."
Tutino and Ouweneel /Bijleveld indicate that land disputes were increasing faster than
indigenous population. For the Guadalajara region at the end of the eighteenth century
see the impressionistic discussion of land disputes involving Indian villages, amounting
tO much the same conclusion, in Van Young, Hacier and Market, Chapter 14.
23. On the upsurge in rural brigandage and other sorts of crime in the eighteenth
century see, for example, Paul J. Vanderwood, Disorder arld Progress: Bandits, Police, and
Mexican Development (Lincoln, NE, 1981), Colin M. MacLachlan, Criminal Justice ira
Eighteenth-Century Mexico: A Stuxly of the Tribunal of the Acordads (Berkeley, 1974), and
especially Hamnett, Roots of Insurgency, 5947. The upsurge in rural brigandage, as might
be supposed, was echoed by the increase in urban crime, which has been much better
studied, especially for Mexico City. Among the most interesting of recent treatments of
crime in the viceregal capital is Teresa Lozano Armendares, La c7iminolidufl en 1 ciNdad de
Mexico, 1800-1821 (Mexico City, 1987), who strongly implies that the overall frequency
of crime of all sorts in Mexico City was increasing at the turn of the nineteenth century-
and for a similar situation in Puebla and Guadalajara, see Hamnett, Roon of Irlsurgency
6(>61.
24. The tally of rural disturbances is based on a combination of data from Taylor, DrinkS
ing, Homicide, anzl Rebellion, especially Appendix A, 173-177, with that produced by my
own research in AGN, various ramos. For a tally embracing most of Latin America, but
based on somewhat broader criteria (including slave rebellions, for example), see John
H. Coatsworth, "Pattems of Rural Rebellion in Latin America: Mexico in Comparative
Perspective," in Friedrich Katz, ed., Riot, Rebellion, and Revoluiion: Rural Social Corzflict in
Mexico (Princeton,1988), 2142. On periodicity of various sorts in eighteenth-century
subsistence crises, see Enrique Florescano, Precios del mafz y crisis agrgcol4> en Mexico
( I 708-1 81 0) (Mexico City, 1969).
25. This often goes unacknowledged by modern scholars in favor of neat explanatory
schemes that stress class or other theoretical constructions of popular behavior. In his
pathbreaking book From Insurreciion to Rewluiion in Mexico, for example, John Tutino is
at some pains to prove that the central valleys of Mexico remained substantially passive
during the early independence struggle because most villagers there retained a large degree
of material security, and economic and social autonomy, as the result of a longstanding
"symbiotic" relationship with neighboring haciendas. Tutino's formulation of a socioe-
conomic symbiosis is useful, I think I do not dispute its existence, but rather its specific
applicability at certain times and places. In fact, as the Atlacomulco incident and dozens
of other village riots of the period make abundantly clear, there was considerable rural
unrest in the central valley regions of the country, but it took a peculiarly constrained
form molded by the cultural tone and political history of village life.
26. In this connection, by the way, it may be mentioned that being both a substantial
landholder and a representative of the Spanish state, as in Romualdo Magdaleno Diez's
case (he was a sometime minor local official), increased the likelihood of victimization.
27. To cite but three examples of regional monographs which paint this picture for
various parts of New Spain, there are the works of William B. Taylor, Landkrrdand Peasant
in Colonial Oaxaca (Stanford, 1972), Cheryl E. Martin, Rural Society in Colonicil Morelos
(Albuquerque, 1985); and Van Young, Hacienda arul Mar1cet. A theoretical model for
such endemic conflict is put forth in my article "Conflict and Solidarity in Indian Village
Life: The Guadalajara Region in the Late Colonial Period," Hispanic American Historical
Review 64 (1984): 55-79. Land conflict at the village level is seen as a major etiological
factor of the insurgency by Tutino, From Insurreciion to Revolution, and by Hamnett, Roots
of Insurgency, among other authors.
Z8. Documentation on Jilotepec is to be found in AGN, Historia, vol. 411 , exp. 6, fols.
36rS1r, 1811; AGN, Criminal, vol. 26, exps. 9-10, no page nos., 1818; AGN, Tlerras,
vol. 2176, exp. 1, no page nos., 1782; and exp. 3, no page nos., 1808; and vol. 2191, exp.
3, no page nos., 1806.
29. AGN, Historia, vol. 103, exp. 1, fols. lr-6v, 1811. For a similar attack on the pueblo
of Cempoala and a nearby hacienda about the same time, see AGN, Historia, vol. 105,
exp. 35, fols. 122r-v, 1811.
30. For a few representative examples (among hundreds) of the extensive sacking or
outright destruction of rural estates, see the cases of the Hacienda de San Clemente, to the
west of Lake Chapala- Biblioteca Publica del Estado de Jalisco, Guadalajara (hereafter
BPE), Criminal, leg. 6, exp. 36, 1811; at least two haciendas in the area of Ixtlan BPE
Criminal, paquete 23, exp. 5, ser. 505, 1811* severalhaciendas in the area of Cuautitlan, to
the north of Mexico City AGN, Operaciones de Guerra (hereafter, OG), vol. 16, fols.
18r-22r, 1812; the haciendas of Miacatlan, el Puente, and Mazatepec in the Cuernavaca
area AGN, Infidencias, vol. 32, exp. 5, fols. 192r-226r, 1817; Tayagua and other estates
in the Jalpa area near Zacateca& AGN-OG, vol. 151, fols. 106r-108r Gayangos tO
Cruz, 18 April 1816; the famous Hacienda de la Gavia, near Piedragorda in the Bajio-
AGN-OG, vol. 155, fol. 287r, 1818; and the haciendas Ojuelos and Cienega de Mata in
the Altos de Jalisco-AGN-OG, vol. 158, fols. 312r, 1819. Romualdo Magdaleno Diez's
AGRARIAN REBELLION AND DEFENSE OF COMMUNlTY 267
Hacienda de Xomeje, just to the west of Atlacomulco, was sacked down to the door locks
by a predominantly Indian crowd following the killings of 2 November 1810.
31. AGN, Infidencias, vol.2, exp.7, fols.145r-153v,1811. It should be noted in passing

that rural social conflict in the Pachuca zone was quite consistently fed, well into the late
eighteenth century, by forced labor recruitment among Indian villagers to meet the needs
of the famous silver mines in the area; Doris M. Ladd, The Makirlg of a Stri1ce: Menczcan
Silver Workers' Struggles in Real del Monte, 1 76S1775 (Lincoln, NE, 1988), 29 44.
32. AGN, Criminal, vol.13, exp. 9,1810, it will be remembered that this is roughly the
same area where Atlacomulco is located. For another example of the complete sack of a
rural estate by villagers and rebel invaders, see the case of the unnamed hacienda in the
Tulancingo area, in AGN, Infidencias, vol. 41, exp. 5, fols. 285r-289v, 1812.
33. AGN, Infidencias, vol. 16, exp. 3, fols. 16r-23v, 1811. On the other hand, local
landowners occasionally found in insurgent activity a pretext for arresting troublesome
villagers with whom they were embroiled in conflicts over land.
34. AGN, Criminal, vol. 53, exps. 1S17, fols. 196r-224r, 1810.
35. AGN, Historia, vol. 104, exp. 6, fols. 12r-18v, 1812.
36. For a sweeping interpretation of the Revolution of 1910-1920 emphasizing the

agrarian origins of rural rebellion and detailing popular peasant aspirations for land redis-
tribution, see Alan Knight, The Mexican Revoluiton, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1986); and also
Tutino, From Insurreciiorl to Revoluiion; and for a discussion of some points of contrast be-
tween the two popular insurgencies relating to the presence or absence of explicit agrarian
grievances and land seizures by peasants, see my review article, "'To See Someone Not
Seeing': Historical Studies of Peasants and Politics in Mexico," Mexican Studies/Estudios
Mexicanos 6 (1990): 133-159.
31. There is some considerable irony, therefore, in the occasional popular veneration
of Allende during 1810-1811 as a messianic surrogate for King Ferdinand VII, and in
the label of land reformer attached to his figure, even though he himself was appalled at
popular retributive violence and shunned any reforms of Mexican society other than in
the political sphere. For a detailed treatment of this theme, see my essay "Quetzalcoatl,
King Ferdinand, and Ignacio Allende Go to the Seashore; or, Messianism and Mystical
Kingship in Mexico, 1800-1821," in Rodriguez, ed., The InSpentrlce of Mexico, 109-
128. A mild physiocratic critique of the colonial landholding system, focused on the
supposedly retrograde effects of large estates and practices of entail, did develop among
an enlightened segment of the colonial elite in the late eighteenth century, paralleling
similar developments in Spain (the tratadistas come to mind here) and elsewhere in
Europe; on New Spain, see Enrique Florescano, "El problema agrario en los ultimos anos
del virreinato," Historia Mexicana 20 (1971): 477-510; and on Spain, Richard Herr, Rural
Change and Royal Finances irl Spain at the End of the Old Regime (Berkeley, 1989).
38. These are the conclusions arrived at by Romana Falcon in her extended studies of
the north-central state of San Luis Potosi, for example. Falcon's conclusions are worth
quoting, in fact, for their resonances with the 1810-20 period:
One decisive fact demonstrated the longing and limits of the Potosino popular
revolution: despite its historical roots and ag?a7ian tone, very little kmzl came to be
distributed. There were more than enough reasons: the prevailing insecurity, the
military failure suffered by the most popular factions . . . the fear that carrying out
agrarian distribution would immobilize and disband the soldiers; and that, without
the confiscated haciendas, there would no longer be resources for the war. As
important as the reasons cited above were the many psychological barriers and
traditional political culture .... The contrast with the Zapatista approach was
268 journal of social history winter 1993
clear: the central objective of the confiscations in San Luis Potosi was not the
distribution of land for campesinos.... [This is] impressive proof of the relative
social superficiality that these seizures sometimes possessed . . .;
Romana Falcon, "San Luis Potosi: Confiscated Estates Revolutionary Conquest or

Spoils?," in Thomas Benjamin and Mark Wasserman, eds., Provirlces of the Revoluiion:
EssaysonRegionalMexicanHistory,l910-1929(Albuquerque,1990),133-162,atp.148
( italics added). For the situation of the Morelos sugar-growing zone, to the south of Mex-
ico City, and the central place of agrarian reform in the Zapatista program, see Arturo
Warman, "The Political Project of Zapatismo," in Katz, ed., Riot, Rebellior^, anzl Revolu-
iion, 321-337; and the other essays in the same volume for the agrarian picture in the
nineteenth century more generally, especially Katz's own essay, "RuraI Rebellions after
1810," 521-560.
39. For an interesting theoretical and comparative historical discussion of the origins
of nationalist sensibility and its relation to the development of modern states, see Bene-
dict Anderson, Imagined Commurliiies: Refleciiorls on the Origirl and Spreazl of Naiionalism
(London, 1983). Peasant politics and nationalism have recently become important top-
ics in both Andean and Mexican history, as witness interesting debates among Heraclio
Bonilla, Florencia Mallon, Alan Knight, John Hart, and other scholars.
40. AGN, Criminal, vol. 191, exp. 1, fols. lr-34v, 1803; and for a similar case, at
Amecameca in 1799, see AGN, Criminal, vol. 226, no exp. no., fols. 400rQ45v, 1799.
41. AGN, Infidencias, vol. 17, exps. 7-11, fols. 137r-307r, 1811.
42. AGN, Criminal, vol. 156, fols. 20r-167v, 1810; and for another incident from the
1810 Amecameca disturbances, in which a crowd chanted in Nahuatl "iQuien? tQuien?"
("Who? Who?") for the space of half an hour, see AGN, Criminal, vol. 47, exp. 15, fols.
443r-574v, 1810.
43. Details of the Chicontepec uprising are to be found in AGN, Historia, vol. 411,
exp. 14, fols. 84r-116v,1811; and AGN, Infidencias, vol.17, exps.7-11, fols. 137r-307r,
1811.
44. For some other instances of villagers cutting roads, see the cases of Jilotepec San
Francisco Sayamiquilpan, and several other villages in the Huichapan area in late i810,
in AGN OG, vol. 159, fols.3rQr, Eusebio Simenez tO Venegas, 28 November 1810; and
Tepetlaostoc, just to the east of Mexico City, in AGN, Criminal, vol. 260, exp. 20, fols.
295r-303r, 1811.
45. AGN,Criminal,vol.251,exps. 1, 10, ll,respectivelyfols. lr-12v,309r-319v,and

320r-329v, 1812.
46. For a good general discussion of the concept of the two republics, see Woodrow W.
Borah,Jusiice by Irlsurance: The GeneralIndian Court of ColonialMexico and the LegalAides
of the Half-Real (Berkeley, 1983), 27-35, and the modern commentaries cited there.
47. It is also interesting to note other aspects of this isolationism. Village riots often oc-
curred, for example, on or around All Saints Day, a point in the liturgical calendar strongly
associated with ancestor-worship and other forms of localism. Furthermore, the patterns
of physical mobility in these incidents where rioters moved, and when suggests a pro-
cess of implosion in village disturbances, in which people moved into the center of the
pueblo, where the significant political action or violence often took place, rather than
out into the surrounding countryside or on to other settlements.
48. For a discussion of why this runs counter to the conventional wisdom regarding the
social composition of the movements for independence, see Van Young, "
Caverns of Paganism: Popular Culture, the Bourbon State, and Rebellion in Mexico,
1800-1821," in Christon I. Archer, ed., The Mexican Wars of Indeperldence, Empire, and
Early Republic (Lincoln, NE; in press).
49. By way of comparison, it is interesting to note that in the extensive rural disturbances
which occurred in right-bank Ukraine in th.e 190547 period, the average age of a small
sample of arrested village men was 33 years; Robert Edelman, Proletarian Peasants: The
Revolution of 1905 in Russia's Southwest (Ithaca, 1987), 150.

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Agrarian Rebellion and Defense of Community: Meaning and Collective Violence in Late

Colonial and Independence-Era Mexico

By Eric Van Young University of California, San Diego

On the evening of 1 November 1810 All Saints Day a riotous crowd in

The Analytical Issues

tity, and worldview in general which lent the threeSway struggle a

during "normal" times land conflict was a pretext or collectively uncon

The General Economic Context of Rural Violence

As the study of colonial Mexican rural history, and of economic history m

Agrarian Unrest, Village Rebellion, Ideolognr, Culture

The signs of mounting agrarian conflict, fuelled and aggravated by a w

broader participation of country people particularly indigenous peasants in

a theater of endemic insurgent activity well into the middle of the d

The issues of land or the distribution of wealth actually came up as explicit

differences nourished entirely distinct views of citizenship, and therefore strongly

involved. Not surprisingly, rioting Indian crowds expressed themselves reflexo

Finally patterns of popular participation in the insurgency tend to reinforce

to become clear how agrarian discontent could have bred continuing

31. AGN, Infidencias, vol.2, exp.7, fols.145r-153v,1811. It should be noted in passing

35. AGN, Historia, vol. 104, exp. 6, fols. 12r-18v, 1812.

36. For a sweeping interpretation of the Revolution of 1910-1920 emphasizing the

Romana Falcon, "San Luis Potosi: Confiscated Estates Revolutionary Conquest or

45. AGN,Criminal,vol.251,exps. 1, 10, ll,respectivelyfols. lr-12v,309r-319v,and

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