The Caste War of Yucatan (Latin American Studies)

Introduction

On 30 July 1847 an armed group of Maya peasants under the leadership of one Cecilio Chi entered the eastern Yucatecan village of Chichimilá; seeking revenge for brutalities visited upon friends and family, they killed the Hispanic inhabitants and then retreated to the dense forests nearby. Far from settling scores, the attack on Tepich marked the beginning of a decades-long struggle that involved virtually every form of violence imaginable. The Caste War stands as the central event of Yucatecan history, and its contours are the stuff of legend. Infuriated by tax burdens, land expropriations, and increasing political violence, Maya peasants of the eastern region launched an offensive that overran numerous cities and towns on the roads leading to Mérida. But the insurgents suffered from inadequate resources, uncertain aims, and divided leadership, and in late spring of 1848 retreated to the southeastern forests. Rather than disintegrating as so many peasant rebellions before them had done, the insurgents rallied under an oracle that has come to be known as “the Speaking Cross.” They created a new society by cobbling together practices of the Catholic parish system, the municipal government, and above all, the prewar militias that had drafted so many peasants into their ranks. Aided by arms from British Honduras and by the profound state instability that characterized both Mexico in general and Yucatán in particular, the insurgents held on into the early 20th century, when they finally accepted land titles from the Mexican revolutionary government. Remnants of their unique religious culture continue to be found in the modern-day state of Quintana Roo. Prior to the 1970s, most research tended toward the popular narrative, first characterized by positivist rage over Indian savageries and then by an opposite tendency to romanticize the insurgents as a reassertion of pre-conquest Maya civilization. Since 1970 more exacting academic scholarship has since replaced these views with a narrative of how a complex colonial system (never fair, or static, or even particularly efficient) disintegrated under pressure from the problems associated with decolonization, and how disparate and parochially oriented actors’ attempts to influence events often bore unintended consequences. The Caste War is thus a story of a particular place and time. It is also one version of a drama that played itself out in many parts of early national Mexico. Above all, the Caste War is a parable of the depths and extremes to which humanity can descend, and, mercifully, from which it is capable of returning.

General Overviews of the Period

There have been numerous attempts to capture the entirety of peninsular history in a single work. These range from early patrician works motivated by regional pride to more contemporary scholarly works that attempt to synthesize new generations of scholarship. The works listed in this section comprise some of the more notable attempts to take in Yucatecan history as a whole, with the Caste War forming a critical part of that totality. Ancona 1917 and Molina Solís 1904–1913 represent the patrician tradition, in which authors freely rewrote existing chronicles but also injected material based on personal experience and contemporary lore (inevitably with no mention of sources). Despite its relatively late publication date, Acereto 1947 constitutes something of a last gasp of that tradition. Both Joseph 1986 and Quezada 2001 offer newer perspectives based on synthesis of scholarly historical studies.

Acereto, Albino. “Historia política desde el descubrimiento europeo hasta 1920.” In Enciclopedia Yucatanense. Vol. 3. Edited by Carlos A. Trujillo, 1–388. Mexico City: Gobierno de Yucatán, 1947.
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A comprehensive synthesis of peninsular history, written by the descendent of one of the families most deeply involved in Caste War history. As per the custom of Acereto’s day, there are no notes and no sources.
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Ancona, Eligio. Historia de Yucatán desde la época más remota hasta nuestros díás. 4 vols. Mérida, Mexico: Gobierno del Estado de Yucatán, 1917.
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Yucatán’s novelist and former Yucatecan governor synthesized old chronicles, fellow patrician authors, and his own experiences to create this grand-scale account. Like all patrician writings, this is steeped in now-discredited racial attitudes.
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Joseph, Gilbert M. Rediscovering the Past at Mexico’s Periphery: Essays on the History of Modern Yucatán. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1986.
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Offers perspectives on changing interpretations of peninsular history. Wheras the emphasis tends to remain close to Porifirian and revolutionary times, the author uses his broad knowledge of Yucatecan historical literature to offer a summation of the scholarly panorama as of the mid-1980s.
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Molina Solís, Francisco. Historia de Yucatán durante la dominación Española. Mérida, Mexico: Imprenta de la Lotería del Estado, 1904–1913.
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Updated version of Ancona, but it carries the story to the cusp of the Mexican Revolution.
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Quezada, Sergio. Breve historia de Yucatán. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2001.
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Succinct new retelling as part of a series of state histories of Mexico.
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The Caste War Conflict

The Caste War itself has always inspired dramatic narrative. Beginning with the pen of Serapio Baqueiro, authors have attempted to capture the extraordinary drama of the decades of warfare. Baqueiro 1879 was so comprehensive that subsequent authors have tended to retrace this work but often reversing the hero/villain roles that he respectively assigned to Hispanics and Mayas. The exotic Speaking Cross oracle of Quintana Roo has probably drawn the most authors to this history. This was particularly true of the highly influential Reed 1964. But in reality the Caste War persisted for so long and generated so many unusual twists and surprises that there will never be one single narrative that captures its totality. González Navarro 1970 reexamined the war as the birthplace of the henequen economy. Two other works, Bricker 1981 and Dumond 1997, approached the war through documentation and perspectives unavailable to Reed: the former argues for recurring patterns of religious symbolism in Maya uprisings, whereas the latter goes into great detail on the fragmented Maya chieftainships of the rebel world. Both Sweeney 2006 and Villalobos González 2006 keep faith with Reed 1964 and Dumond 1997 in looking at different aspects of rebel society. Rugeley 1996 (cited under Independence) and Rugeley 2009 explicitly reject the idea of the Caste War as a reassertion of pre-Columbian Maya society and religion; instead, these works emphasize how material and political stresses tore apart a relatively peaceful colonial order.

Baqueiro, Serapio. Ensayo histórico sobre las revoluciones de Yucatán desde el ano de 1840 hasta 1864. 2 vols. Mérida, Mexico: Manuel Heredia Arguelles, 1879.
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The mother history of all Caste War studies, written by the son of a Yucatecan army colonel. This is a sweeping narrative with a treasure trove of information, but it is marred by the author’s own prejudices and racial hysteria. Everyone who has ever worked on the Caste War has mined Ensayo histórico. The Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán recently republished the Ensayo in a new five-volume edition.
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Bricker, Victoria. The Indian Christ, the Indian King: The Historic Substrate of Maya Myth and Ritual. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981.
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Comparison of indigenous uprisings throughout the Maya region, with strong reliance on Maya-language documents to help reconstruct the mentality of the participants.
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Careaga Viliesid, Lorena. Hierofanía combatiente: Lucha, simbolismo y religiosidad en la Guerra de Castas. Chetumal, Mexico: Universidad Autónoma de Quintana Roo, 1998.
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Careful examination of the rebel society that emerged in Chan Santa Cruz, which subsequently became Felipe Carrillo Puerto.
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Dumond, Don E. The Machete and the Cross: Campesion Rebellion in Yucatán. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997.
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A Caste War master narrative that fundamentally updates Reed 1964. It has a strong focus on the rebel chieftainships of the deep south and southeast, with considerable reliance on documents from the Belize archives.
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González Navarro, Moisés. Raza y tierra: La guerra de castas y el henequén. Mexico City: Colegio de México, 1970.
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Explores the ways in which the Caste War conflict affected the henequen economy, with emphasis on economic and social structures.
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Reed, Nelson. The Caste War of Yucatan. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1964.
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For many years this was the dominant source on the topic. It is a popular romantic telling that argues for the Caste War as the eruption of a centuries-long racial animosity and sees the rebel society of Chan Santa Cruz as the re-creation of pre-contact Maya civilization.
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Rugeley, Terry. Rebellion Now and Forever: Mayas, Hispanics, and Caste War Violence in Yucatán, 1800–1880. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009.
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A reappraisal of the Caste War period, building on neglected archival materials. Explores the way that violence became a part of daily life. Also concentrates on the evolution of the larger Yucatecan society and reconstructs the evolution of militias, municipal politics, indigenous self-government, and the parish church system. Pays special attention to the role of Yucatán’s civil wars in perpetuating the Caste War.
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Sweeney, Lean. La supervivencia de los bandidos: Los Mayas icaichés y la política fronteriza del sureste de la península de Yucatán, 1847–1904. Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2006.
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A new study of the fractious and elusive pacífico communities of former Maya combatants that formed in the southern parts of what is today Campeche and Quintana Roo.
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Villalobos González, Martha Herminia. El bosque sitiado: Asaltos armados, concesiones forestales y estrategias de resistancia durante la Guerra de Castas. Mexico City: CIESAS, CONACULTA, 2006.
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A study of the ever-changing social and political landscapes of the rebel Mayas, including their organization, military strategies, and alliances with lumber companies operating out of British Honduras.
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Edited Collections

Nineteenth-century Yucatán has certainly inspired its share of edited collections. Heterogeneous by their very nature, edited collections nevertheless allow brief examination of specific subthemes that might not have generated full-length studies but still merit historical attention. Jones 1977 brings together works of a largely anthropological nature, whereas Bannon and Joseph 1991 concentrates on matters of land, labor, and political economy. Antochiw produced two seminal contributions, the first (Antochiw 1998a) a bound edition of the first three (and only) volumes of what was intended to be an ongoing journal of Caste War studies; equally important is his three-volume encyclopedia of peninsular history (Antochiw 1998b), extremely useful for its thumbnail sketches of historical actors of the southeast. For an idea of how scholarly interests have evolved since Bannon and Joseph 1991, compare that latter work with Terry, et al. 2010. Finally, Quezada 2005, Quezada and Yam 2008, and Zabala Aguirre, et al. 2007 showcase the recent explosion in historical research in Mérida-based institutions.

Antochiw, Michel, ed. Guerra de Castas en Yucatán: Collected essays from Saastun: Revista de Cultura Maya. Mérida, Mexico: Instituto de Cultura Maya, Universidad del Mayab, 1998a.
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The complete collected essays of all three numbers of a short-lived but important historical journal. The twelve entries deal exclusively with Caste War–related topics.
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Antochiw, Michel, ed. Yucatán en el tiempo: Enciclopedia alfabética. 6 vols. México: Inversiones Cares, 1998b.
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A historical encyclopedia with innumerable entries relative to the Caste War people, places, and practices.
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Bannon, Jeffrey T., and Gilbert M. Joseph, eds. Land, Labor, and Capital in Modern Yucatán: Essays in Regional History and Political Economy. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1991.
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A series of articles that explore how matters of political economy have shaped Yucatecan history, from the early national period to the time of the revolution. Among other gems, this includes the late Herman Konrad’s study of the Quintana Roo chicle industry and Angel Cal’s reconstruction of labor relations along the Belize border.
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Jones, Grant. Anthropology and History in Yucatan. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1977.
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A series of anthropological essays dealing with various components of Maya experience from Yucatán to British Honduras. Many of the chapters eventually emerged as independent studies cited elsewhere in this bibliography.
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Quezada, Sergio, ed. Encrucijadas de la ciudadanía y la democracía: Yucatán, 1812–2004. Mérida, Mexico: Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán, 2005.
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A series of essays exploring the changing nature of citizenship, from the first glimmerings of independence until the 21st century. Includes a number of essays relative to the status of Maya peasants before and after the war.
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Quezada, Sergio, and Inés Ortiz Yam, eds. Yucatán en la ruta del liberalismo Mexicano, siglo XIX. Mérida, Mexico: Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán, 2008.
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The book’s nine essays reconstruct the often-conflicted growth of 19th-century liberalism in southeast Mexico. Explores the growth of politics, changes in religious orientation, the emergence of a literary culture, and the first glimmerings of a sense of posterity.
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Terry, Edward, Ben W. Fallaw, Gilbert M. Joseph, and Edward H. Moseley. Peripheral Visions: Politics, Society, and the Challenges of Modernity in Yucatan. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2010.
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Contains twelve essays that encapsulate recent scholarship on Yucatecan history, with particular emphasis on culture and society.
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Zabala Aguirre, Pilar, Pedro Miranda Ojeda, and José E. Serrano Catzim, eds. Poder político y control social en Yucatán, siglos XVI–XIX. Mérida, Mexico: Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán, 2007.
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Although the chronological scope of these essays far exceeds the Caste War period, Poder político nevertheless contains important material on how key social institutions such as the Catholic Church and the Yucatecan state evolved before, during, and after the uprising.
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Primary Sources and Translations

Compilations of primary sources on the Caste War and its time period remain curiously rare. The following provide virtually the only printed compilations of period documentation. That being said, it is important to mention that many of the patrician authors included lengthy appendices that explain the origin of their material. For that reason publications from the 19th and early 20th centuries should also be consulted. Scholarly publications dedicated exclusively to the reproduction of Caste War–era documents only began to appear in the 1980s, with such works as Reina 1980 (a collection of letters and reports from the secretary of defense), Dumond and Dumond 1982 (parish demographic material), and Rodríguez Losa 1985 (census material). For a collection of Maya-language war correspondence (with accompanying translations), see Quintal Martín 1992. Sierra O’Reilly and Suárez y Navarro 1993 assembles two extensive contemporary reports on Yucatecan politics in the volatile 1860s. Both of these reports contain valuable information, particularly on the way the potential sale of captured Mayas conditioned much of Yucatán’s politics during the reform era. Campos García 1997 presents the anonymous memoir of an imperial-era military officer. For a collection of ethnographic material on 19th-century Yucatec Maya, see Rugeley 2001.

Campos García, Melchor, ed. Guerra de castas en Yucatán: Su origen, sus consecuencias y su estado actual, 1866. Mérida, Mexico: Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán, 1997.
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An annotated edition of an anonymous account of Caste War history, written by one of the military officers who participated. Unique for its account of the war’s eruption in the remote town of Tihosuco. Unfortunately, the memoir’s blending of reliable information and sheer nonsense limits its usefulness.
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Dumond, Carol Steichen, and Don E. Dumond. Demography and Parish Affairs in Yucatan, 1797–1879: Documents from the Archivo de la Mitra Emeritense, Selected by Joaquín de Arrigunaga Peón. University of Oregon Anthropological Papers 27. Eugene: University of Oregon, 1982.
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Extremely useful reports on parish demography, including registers of births, matrimonies, and deaths, together with race-based census records.
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Quintal Martín, Fidelio. Correspondencia de la Guerra de Castas. Mérida, Mexico: Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán, 1992.
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An annotated translation of seventy-four letters by Maya combatants.
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Reina, Leticia. Las rebeliones campesinas en México (1819–1906). Mexico City: Siglo XXI, 1980.
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Follows 19th-century Mexican peasant rebellions through the documents of the national secretary of defense, with invaluable reproductions of those documents. Pages 363–416 concern the Caste War.
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Rodríguez Losa, Salvador. Geografíá política de Yucatán. Tomo I. Censo inédito de 1821, año de la independencia. Mérida, Mexico: Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán, 1985.
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Provides a brief but accessible account of census information for the 19th century.
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Rugeley, Terry. Maya Wars: Ethnographic Accounts from Nineteenth-Century Yucatán. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2001.
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A collection of translated and edited documents that describe the lives of 19th-century Yucatec Mayas. Includes parish reports, Maya wills, Caste War correspondence, police interrogations, and reports from 19th-century travelers and archaeologists.
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Sierra O’Reilly, Justo, and Juan Suárez y Navarro. La guerra de castas: Testimonios de Justo Sierra O’Reilly y Juan Suárez y Navarro. Mexico City: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, 1993.
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A reprinting of two key narratives of the Caste War era. Sierra O’Reilly’s memoir narrates the story of his journey to the United States in search of aid against the Maya rebels; Suárez y Navarro analyzes the highly unstable political situation of the peninsula in the early 1860s. Includes a generous selection of primary documents.
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Ethnographies

The Yucatán Peninsula’s strong Maya presence has inspired a rich body of ethnography. The first serious body of academic ethnographies came from the anthropological team that Robert Redfield assembled as part of the Carnegie Project in the 1920s. Although somewhat limited in its historical perspective, his work created an indelible portrait of Mayan culture. Yucatán has continued to inspire ethnographic studies ever since: There has been a wave of books and articles examining how Maya peasants respond to globalization and the decline of revolutionary programs for the countryside. This bibliography limits itself to earlier works. The earliest serious treatments, such as Gann 1918 and Pacheco Cruz 1947, draw from experience accumulated during some of the most chaotic years of the Mexican Revolution, and both tended to portray an almost pre-Columbian Mayan society. With the coming of the multidisciplinary Carnegie Project in the 1920s, field director Robert Redfield and his Yucatecan associate Alfonso Villa Rojas assembled an enormous body of literature that attempted to present a comprehensive picture of how peninsular Mayas confronted the forces of change that author Robert Redfield believed to move from the city to the countryside. Villa Rojas 1943, Redfield and Villa Rojas 1934, Redfield 1941, and Redfield 1950 may have made some questionable theoretical assumptions, but the sheer mass and coherence of their ethnographic work has few rivals in the world of anthropology.

Gann, Thomas W. F. The Maya Indians of Southern Yucatecan and Northern British Honduras. Smithsonian Institution Bureau of Indian Ethnology Bulletin 64. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1918.
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British archaeologist Thomas Gann crisscrossed the borderlands of Belize and Quintana Roo in search of undiscovered Maya centers. In the course of his travels he had extensive contact with Mayas of the time and penned this memorable account of their lives and customs.
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Pacheco Cruz, Santiago. Usos, costumbres, religión i supersticiones de los mayas: Apuntes históricos con un estudio psicobiológico de la raza. Mérida, Mexico: E. G. Triay, 1947.
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Pacheco Cruz spoke fluent Maya and worked as an inspector of rural schools for the revolutionary government after 1915, hence allowing him privileged access to peasant culture.
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Redfield, Robert. The Folk Culture of Yucatan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1941.
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Redfield’s grand synthetic statement on ethnicity and social change in the Yucatán Peninsula argues for a folk-urban continuum as the best prism for understanding social change; the interpretive paradigm may have worn thin, but Redfield’s works remain the Everest of Yucatecan anthropology.
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Redfield, Robert. The Village that Chose Progress. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1950.
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A somewhat rueful restudy of a village that Redfield had once seen as being on the road to social and economic modernization.
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Redfield, Robert, and Alfonso Villa Rojas. Chan Kom: A Maya Village. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1934.
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Together with The Maya of East Central Quintana Roo, this book provides the best available window into Yucatecan village life in the early 20th century. To Redfield, the village of Chan Kom represented a community in the process of abandoning its indigenous past and embracing what he saw as an urban-driven progress.
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Villa Rojas, Alfonso. The Maya of East Central Quintana Roo. Washington, DC: Carnegie Institute, 1943.
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Disguised as a peddler, Villa Rojas gained unparalleled access to communities of Caste War holdouts in the eastern part of the peninsula. He extensively documents their material, social, and religious lives, making this one of the finest Maya ethnographies ever written.
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Folklore and Oral Literature Collections

Long neglected as a historical source, folklore remains one of the few means of accessing how Maya peasants of an earlier era may have thought. Folklore necessarily carries limitations. Almost by definition divorced from a particular moment in time, folk tales relate to their day and age more by general attitude than through their specific content. Yucatecan folklore resembles its counterpart in other regions of Mexico in that it reveals a strong presence of European motifs and narrative structures, elements that transferred with breathtaking rapidity throughout the Americas. Still, there is also a strong presence of precontact themes and sensibilities, making Mayan oral literature an intriguingly hybrid genre. Discounting the relatively brief works of early gentleman dabblers, such as Rejón García 1905, the first serious collection was Park Redfield 1935, a folklore counterpart to the works of Redfield and Villa Rojas. Andrade and Máas Collí 1991 was published in a somewhat later period but obtained more detailed accounts. Burns 1983 is a classic of the genre, in part because it retains the rhetorical flow and rhythm of Mayan narrative. The other works cited here, Dzul Poot 1985–1986, Góngora Pacheco 1990, Martínez Huchim 1999, and Medina Loria 1982, have the advantage of authors who are not only close to their subjects but who also have an appreciation for Mayan oral literature. Finally, Orilla 1996 consists not so much of narrative but of the folkways and traditions associated with janal pixan (or food of the dead), one of the important events in Yucatán’s annual religious year.

Andrade, Manuel J., and Hilaria Máas Collí, eds. Cuentas Mayas Yucatecas. 2 vols. Mérida, Mexico: Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán, 1991.
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University of Chicago researcher Manuel J. Andrade collected these narratives, which Hilaria Máas Collí translated into Spanish. One of the most complete collections of Yucatecan folklore in existence.
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Burns, Allan F. An Epoch of Miracles: Oral Literature of the Yucatec Maya. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983.
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An essential folk literature collection. Many of the pieces are presented in both Mayan and English versions. Includes not only folktales but also Maya versions of their own history.
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Dzul Poot, Domingo. Cuentos Mayas. 2 vols. Mérida, Mexico: Maldonado Editores, 1985–1986.
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Working with a variety of scholarly institutions, the author developed this charming collection that includes both Spanish and Mayan versions of each story. It is noteworthy for its version of “The Living Rope,” one of the most distinctively Maya of all folk narratives and one that combines pre-contact past, an uneasy present, and a troubling vision of the future.
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Góngora Pacheco, María Luisa. Cuentos de Oxkutzcab y Maní. Mérida, Mexico: Maldonado Editores, 1990.
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This small but excellent volume consists of stories collected in the center-south and is particularly memorable for its inclusion of “The Dog and the Formation of a Lagoon,” one of the more enigmatic and dreamlike of Mayan folktales.
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Martínez Huchim, Ana Patricia. Cuentos enraizados. Mérida, Mexico: Compañía Editorial de la Península, 1999.
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A collection based on the author’s personal connections to the Tizimín region and her thorough knowledge of the Mayan language.
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Medina Loria, Eduardo. Leyendas de los Mayas de Quintana Roo: Colección del taller de la lengua Maya. Mérida, Mexico: Estudios Bassó, 1982.
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An amateur labor of love that captures some of the best folk narratives of the Quintana Roo area. Notable for including “The Man Who Saw the Dead,” a parable about the necessary limitations of human power.
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Orilla, Miguel Angel. Los días de muertos en Yucatán (janal pixan). Mérida, Mexico: Maldonado Editoriales, 1996.
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Documents one of the signature elements of Yucatecan folk life: the annual celebrations of November in which the dead return to share a moment with the living.
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Park Redfield, Margaret. The Folk Literature of a Yucatecan Town. Contributions to American Archaeology 13. Washington, DC: Carnegie Institution, 1935.
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Her husband, Robert Redfield, may have reaped most of the credit, but Margaret Park Redfield’s substantial and underappreciated study entitles her to the distinction of being Yucatán’s first serious folklore collector.
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Rejón García, Manuel. Supersticiones y leyendas Mayas. Mérida, Mexico: La Revista de Merida, 1905.
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A brief publication but notable as the oldest self-described collection of Yucatecan folklore, albeit not of a scholarly nature.
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Travelers’ Accounts

The Yucatán Peninsula is blessed with some of the finest travelers’ accounts of 19th-century Latin America. The intense coverage owes largely to the vogue for Mayan ruins and the rise of gentleman archaeologists, although the region’s centrality to Mexico, Central America, and the larger Caribbean/Gulf of Mexico also assured a steady stream of inquisitive visitors, many of whom penned their recollections of things seen and places visited. The following constitute the most important of these works. Waldeck 1930 (originally published in 1837) was closely followed by the most extensive and most famous of all Yucatecan travel writings: Stephens 1963 and Stephens 1969 (originally compiled in 1841 and 1842, respectively). Norman 1843 retraced much of Stephens’s travels, albeit without the archaeological profundity. This New Orleans book dealer may not have known much about science, but he had a keen eye for folkways and culture. Karl Heller came to Campeche and Mérida more as a refugee from central Mexico, where the US invasion had interrupted his botanical expeditions (see Rugeley 2007). His work is somewhat unique in that it focuses more on what is today Campeche state, with only one side trip to the ruins of Uxmal. Ramírez had the distinction of visiting Yucatán during its short-lived embrace of the French intervention, and although Ramírez 1926 is brief, it does offer useful observations on the problems of labor during those chaotic years. Finally, Desmond 2009 reconstructs the observations of Alice Le Plongeon as the author and her husband, the eccentric visionary August Le Plongeon, excavated Chichén Itzá while fending off fallout from the mid-19th-century civil wars.

Desmond, Lawrence Gustave. Yucatán Through Her Eyes: Alice Dixon le Plongeon, Writer & Expeditionary Photographer. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2009.
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Desmond tells the story of the Le Plongeon archaeological expedition through the perspective of wife Alice, who left her own extensive memoir of their 1873–1876 work in Chichén Itzá, including her discerning observations on Yucatecan society during the tumultuous years of the restored republic.
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Norman, B. A. Rambles in Yucatan; or, Notes of Travel Through the Peninsula, Including a Visit to the Remarkable Ruins of Chi Chen, Kabah, Zayi, and Uxmal. New York: J. & H. G. Langley, 1843.
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This New Orleans book dealer came to Yucatán in search of the lost cities that John Lloyd Stephens so vividly described. What he found was a land bordering on ethnic warfare and a system of labor that resembled slavery—but without the harsh legal bondage of his own antebellum South.
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Ramírez, José Fernando. Viaje a Yucatán del Lic. José Fernando Ramírez, 1865. Edited by Carlos R. Menéndez. Mérida, Mexico: Compañía Tipográfica Yucateca, 1926.
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An account of the Yucatecan branch of the empire, written at the height of that short-lived government’s power.
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Rugeley, Terry, ed. Alone in Mexico: The Astonishing Travels of Karl Heller, 1845–1848. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2007.
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A resourceful twenty-year-old sent on a scientific mission by Austria’s Royal Botanical Society, Karl Bartholomeus Heller came to the peninsula in November 1846 and remained there for one year. Based principally in the city of Campeche, he also explored the Champotón River, the dyewood forests of Campeche state, the ruins of Uxmal, and the city of Mérida.
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Stephens, John Lloyd. Incidents of Travel in Yucatan. 2 vols. New York: Dover, 1963.
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A classic traveler’s account in which Stephens and his associate, English landscape artist Frederick Catherwood, explore the “lost cities” of Yucatán. Beyond its archaeological importance, these writings provide extensive information on the society and the times. Catherwood’s many illustrations have assumed iconic status. This edition is a facsimile of the original 1843 edition.
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Stephens, John Lloyd. Incidents of Travel in Central America: Chiapas and Yucatan. 2 vols. New York: Dover, 1969.
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Though devoted largely to his Central American and Chiapan travels, Stephens concludes these two volumes with his first trip through Yucatán, including Mérida and the ruins of Uxmal. His quick excursion was enough to tempt him into a more prolonged trip two years later. A facsimile of the original 1841 edition.
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Waldeck, Federico de. Viaje pintoresco y arqueológico a lo provincia de Yucatán (América central) durante los años 1834 y 1836. Mérida, Mexico: Compañía Tipográfica Yucateca, 1930.
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This highly eccentric French traveler visited Mérida and Campeche in the mid-1830s, just as the Yucatecan revolt against centralism was taking shape. The book primarily concerns archaeology, but the author managed to observe many folk customs and daily practices. Originally published in 1837.
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General Anthologies and Bibliographies

Cline 1943 emerged from the author’s doctoral research and had virtually nothing to say about primary sources, because most of these lay in a state of chaos: meanwhile, the task of extracting a basic narrative from the often highly prejudiced patrician authors still took precedent over archival sifting. Quezada, et al. 1986 introduces the reader to some of the higher-profile documentation, with a strong emphasis on legislation. Rugeley 2001 primarily focuses on work that emerged after the time of Cline’s writing.

Cline, Howard F. Remarks on a Selected Bibliography of the Caste War and Allied Topics, in Alfonso Villa Rojas, The Maya of East Central Quintana Roo. Washington, DC: Carnegie Institute, 1943.
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Now somewhat dated as a source, this work provides a rundown of some of the basic printed materials available at the time of Cline’s own studies.
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Quezada, Sergio, Arturo Güemez Pineda, and Carlos E. Tapia. Bibliografía comentada sobre la cuestión étnica y la guerra de castas de Yucatán, 1821–1910. Mérida, Mexico: Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán, Secretaría de Educación Pública, 1986.
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A review of 395 sources and documents relating to the Caste War.
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Rugeley, Terry. “Bibliographical Essay.” In Maya Wars: Ethnographic Accounts of Nineteenth-Century Yucatán. Edited by Terry Rugeley, 211–220. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2001.
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A brief exploration of sources that have emerged since the time of Cline 1943.
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18th-Century Background

Much of what happened in 19th-century Yucatán remains incomprehensible without some knowledge of the changes that swept the society in the previous hundred years. Spain’s modernization campaign, commonly known as the “Bourbon Reforms,” together with growing populations and increased trade and travel, “rousted this drowsy world from its hammock.” Key themes of the period include the slow but steady growth of haciendas that specialized in supplying corn and cattle for the urban markets. Bourbon reformers also began to take apart the rural cofradía system in which Maya peasants won prestige and forged community bonds by sponsoring fiestas. Another central issue of the 18th century is the 1761 uprising of a Maya mystic who assumed the name Jacinto Canek. To one degree or another, all of these events have been linked to the later insurgency of 1847. Whether the line of causation is really all that direct can be debated, but there can be little doubt that the Bourbon era helped lay the groundwork of 19th-century society. Farriss 1984 stresses a centuries-old Mayan culture that found itself under siege in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. More limited in temporal scope but of greater social and economic detail, Patch 1993 traces the gradual rise of the hacienda culture and its uneasy coexistence with Mayan villages. Most 18th-century studies pass in one way or another through the enigmatic rebellion of Jacinto Canek in 1761, and now there exist two first-rate examinations of that event: Patch 2002 and Bracamonte y Sosa 2004. Campos García 2005 reminds us of the importance of Afro-Mexicans in the peninsular militias of the late colonial period, while Restall 1997 invokes a philological method for using Maya-language documents as a tool to reconstruct changing village life for the entire colonial period. Finally, Restall 2009 focuses our attention on a previously neglected component of colonial life: the presence of African peoples sandwiched between the more visible Mayan and Hispanic worlds.

Bracamonte y Sosa, Pedro. La encarnación de la profecía: Canek en Cisteil. Mexico City: CIESAS, 2004.
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A Spanish-language examination of an extensive and highly enigmatic Mayan rebellion of 1761, drawing on newly discovered documents in the Archivo de Indias, in Seville.
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Campos García, Melchor. Castas, feligresía y ciudadanía en Yucatán: Los afromestizos bejo el régimen constitucional Español, 1750–1822. Mérida, Mexico: Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán, 2005.
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Reconstructs the presence of Afro-Mexicans in Yucatán’s late colonial militias and the factors that led them to side with Agustín de Iturbide’s successful pronouncement for Mexican independence.
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Farriss, Nancy M. Maya Society Under Colonial Rule: The Collective Enterprise of Survival. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984.
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Strongly influenced by the annal school of history that stresses the long-term interplay of human cultures with their material environment.
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Patch, Robert W. Maya and Spaniard in Colonial Yucatán, 1648–1812. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993.
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Reconstructs the emergence of a planter society and the partial displacement of Maya communities by a growing hacienda culture.
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Patch, Robert W. “The Yucatec Maya in 1761, Part I: The Origins of Revolution; Part II: The Counterrevolution.” In Maya Revolt and Revolution in the Eighteenth Century. By Robert Patch, 126–182. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2002.
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The first full, serious academic exploration of the events of this critical 18th-century rebellion through the documentation of the Archivo de Indias. Contextualizes the idiosyncratic personality of leader Jacinto Canek through the prism of mid-century Yucatecan society.
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Restall, Matthew. The Maya World: Yucatec Culture and Society, 1550–1850. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997.
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Using philological technique, Restall traces the gradual disintegration of the Maya community through land loss and the creeping entry of the Spanish.
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Restall, Matthew. The Black Middle: Africans, Mayas, and Spaniards in Colonial Yucatan. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009.
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Reconstructs the long-neglected role of African peoples in Yucatán’s three centuries of colonial rule. Explores critical issues such as marriage practices, the ways and practices of slavery, and the black role in the social and ethnic hierarchy, military service, and the world of labor.
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Independence

Independence proved a relatively easy process for Yucatán, at least when compared to the bloodlettings of central Mexico. The problems of communication and transportation kept Yucatecans considerably isolated from the larger colony, while the Maya peasants’ almost complete dependence on subsistence meant that they barely felt the economic downturns that radicalized miners and farmers in the Bajío. Still, the troubles of the times did have an effect here. The sequestering of the king of Spain and the creation of a type of Spanish parliament to govern in his absence involved mobilization and representation from the colonies, and Yucatecan elites shared in those processes. Perhaps the most important change resulted from the reforms of the short-lived Spanish Constitution (1812–1814), which abolished peasant church taxes, thereby serving as the first broad political mobilization for Yucatán’s Maya peasantry. Independence studies almost necessarily lead into explorations of the first twenty-five years of the national period, and for that reason the entries below include a number of studies of early national Yucatecan society. Sierra O’Reilly 1954 constructed the basic independence narrative, often from sources that are no longer extant, and all subsequent studies of the topic build on this work. However, professional historical concerns inform more recent works. Bracamonte y Sosa 1993 provides a definitive look at the haciendas of the era. Because the Campeche region tends to be slighted in favor of Mérida-based history, Vadillo López 1994 allows a glimpse of southeastern development based on material from the lumber-trading port of Carmen. For a review of the independence-to-Caste-War years from the peasant perspective, see Rugeley 1996. In many ways, Campos García 2002 represents a return to the political narrative. For an overview of the ill-fated Yucatecan Republic, see Rugeley 2010.

Bracamonte y Sosa, Pedro. Amos y sirvientes: Las haciendas de Yucatán, 1789–1860. Mérida, Mexico: Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán, 1993.
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A detailed reconstruction of the nuts and bolts of hacienda society in the first half of the 19th century, drawing heavily from notarial descriptions of property.
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Campos García, Melchor. Que los Yucatecos todos proclamen su independencia. Mérida, Mexico: Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán, 2002.
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An extensive new retelling of the independence process. Somewhat sprawling in approach but with extensive research, mainly in the printed source material of the time.
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Rugeley, Terry. Yucatán’s Maya Peasantry and the Origins of the Caste War, 1800–1847. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996.
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A fundamental retelling of the Caste War’s origins, with emphasis on the problem of peasant religious taxes, land alienation, and the breakdown of a complex system that intermediated between the dominant urban culture and the largely indigenous rural communities.
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Rugeley, Terry. “The Brief, Glorious History of the Yucatecan Republic: Secession and Violence in Southeast Mexico, 1836–1848.” In Secession as an International Phenomenon. Edited by Don Doyle, 214–234. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2010.
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A synthesis of how one province decided to break free from the early Mexican republic and how that decision blew up in their collective faces.
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Sierra O’Reilly, Justo. Los indios de Yucatán: Consideraciones históricos sobre la influencia del elemento indígena en la organización social del país. 2 vols. Edited by Carlos R. Menéndez. Mérida, Mexico: Tipográfica Yucateca, 1954.
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Yucatán’s great man of letters, Justo Sierra O’Reilly, lived through the tumultous years of the early republic and the Caste War. He set out to write the history of the entire period, but his penchant for detail meant that he never got beyond the complex political machinations of the independence years (1810–1821).
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Vadillo López, Claudio. La región de palo de tinte: El partido de Carmen, Campeche, 1821–1857. Campeche, Mexico: Fondo Estatal para la Cultura y las Artes, 1994.
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A useful step toward explaining the far western tip of what was once Yucatán province, namely, the port city of Ciudad del Carmen, once the capital of the Gulf Coast dyewood trade.
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19th-Century Culture and Society

Folkways, culture, and social mores have typically taken a back seat to the story of the peninsula’s grand political struggles. However, numerous useful studies help to reconstruct the people of this time and place. Religion has been a common theme of these works, and that includes both high religion of cathedral and the popular variations found in both city and country. However, Yucatán’s maturation as a crossroads of Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean guaranteed that it would develop a wealth of folkways somewhat different from those of the larger nation. These so-called uayismos, or “here-isms,” provide ample material for social and cultural study. Another persistent theme throughout is the complicated relationship between Maya and Hispanic, and the difficulty of pinning those terms to reliable ethnic markers. Perhaps the first study of southeastern folkways was Barbachano y Tarrazo 1986, a collection of humorous but also revealing essays originally published in 1851. Some decades later, Carrillo y Ancona 1895 used the author’s insider status to produce an institutional history of the Yucatecan church, one that provides much information on a key cultural institution of the century. Cline 1947 is a seminal dissertation that remains the first serious scholarly examination of the debacles of Yucatán’s early national years; although unpublished, this is one of the more interesting slivers of scholarship to appear in Cline 1948, the author’s article on a regional cotton mill. More recently, Güémez Pineda 2005 looks at the same years from the perspective of peasant land pressures. Gabbert 2004 challenges the idea of unchanging ethnic divisions, instead stressing the way ethnic identities have been reconstructed over the centuries. Finally, Rugeley 1996, Rugeley 2001, and Rugeley 2009 attempt a new look at the era by exploring the various ways that Hispanics and Mayas interacted in the field of religion.

Barbachano y Tarrazo, Manuel. Vida, usos y hábitos de Yucatán al mediar el siglo XIX. Mérida, Mexico: Maldonado Editores, 1986.
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Classic costumbrista rendering of Yucatecan folkways and idiosyncracies, written by the brother of Miguel Barbachano, who was governor during much of the early Caste War. Originally published in 1851.
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Carrillo y Ancona, Crescencio. El obispado de Yucatan: Historia de su fundación y de sus obispos desde el siglo XVI hasta el XIX. Mérida, Mexico: Caballero, 1895.
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Born into a starkly racist society, Carrillo y Ancona overcame his Maya ancestry to become bishop of Yucatán. In the process he necessarily embraced and internalized many colonial notions, but he retained a deep love for the history of Yucatecan society. This book provides an extensive, if considerably censored, history of the peninsular Catholic Church.
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Cline, Howard F. “Regionalism and Society in Yucatan, 1825–1847: A Study of ‘Progressivism’ and the Origins of the Caste War.” PhD diss., Harvard University, 1947.
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Cline incorporated the printed sources available in his day to create this overview of the first twenty years of post-independence history. Still an important work for scholars in the field.
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Cline, Howard F. “The ‘Aurora Yucateca’ and the Spirit of Enterprise in Yucatan, 1821–1847.” Hispanic American Historical Review 47 (1948): 30–60.
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Cline’s endearing study of how one Yucatecan tried to create his own mechanized cotton mill and how smuggling and civil war eventually put him out of business.
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Gabbert, Wolfgang. Becoming Maya: Ethnic and Social Inequality in Yucatán since 1500. Tuscon: University of Arizona Press, 2004.
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Stresses the fluidity of racial concepts in the peninsula and the ways in which ethnic identity was constructed at differing times.
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Güémez Pineda, Arturo. Mayas: Gobierno y tierras frente a la acomedita liberal en Yucatán, 1812–1847. Zamora, Mexico: Colegio de Michoacán, 2005.
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Stresses land alienation as the leading factor behind the Caste War.
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Rugeley, Terry. Yucatán’s Maya Peasantry and the Origins of the Caste War, 1800–1847. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996.
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Chapters 1 and 2 reopen the issue of how Mexico’s independence struggles awakened peasant consciousness and helped set the stage for the Caste War. An early attempt to apply social history methods to 19th-century Yucatán.
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Rugeley, Terry. Of Wonders and Wise Men: Religion and Popular Cultures in Southeast Mexico, 1800–1876. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001.
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A reconstruction of beliefs, folkways, and popular cultures in the heady years of the early national period. Examines folklore, parish priests, urban lay piety, rural Maya religious practices, popular anticlericalism, spiritualism and seances, and the links between popular religion and early nationalism. Also contains considerable information on the process and effects of the Caste War on daily society.
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Rugeley, Terry. “The Imponderable and the Permissible: Caste Wars, Culture Wars, and Porfirian Piety in the Yucatán Peninsula.” In Building Nineteenth-Century Latin America: Re-Rooted Cultures, Identities, and Nations. Edited by William G. Acree, Jr. and Juan Carlos González Espitia, 177–201. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2009.
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Carries the themes of Rugeley 2001 into the Porfirian period.
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Consolidation of the Plantation State

After the worst of the Caste War had subsided, Yucatán entered a new phase with the coming of the henequen monoculture. In many ways, the labor conditions and pseudo-scientific racism of the period far exceeded the injustices of the early national years, but the peninsula’s exhaustion from thirty years of Caste War helped limit popular mobilization, while the enormous profits flowing in from foreign henequen purchasers helped to insulate elites from the grievances of rural peasants. The history of the henequen era naturally leads into the revolutionary years, which are still a raw sore in the political consciousness of southeasterners. Remmers’s groundbreaking but unpublished dissertation (Remmers 1981) reconstructs the 19th-century economy in extensive detail. However, two other works, Joseph 1982 and Wells 1985, are the fullest and most extensive published accounts of the henequen boom and its revolutionary consequences. Both stress an oppressive, class-bound society in which a planter elite dominates Maya workers while at the same time serves the demands of a far more powerful international capitalism. Both works saw revolutionary mobilization as essentially late and imposed from without, but Wells and Joseph 1996 reveals a growing grassroots mobilization that, if not as extensive as that of Morelos, had certainly begun to challenge the peninsular order. Menéndez Rodríguez 1995 follows those same years from the lens of institutional church politics. Evans 2007 rethinks the entire henequen industry, this time from the perspective of the way it generated international linkages in Mexico, the United States, and Canada. Finally, for a peasant-oriented view of the henequen era, see Peniche Rivero 2010.

Evans, Sterling. Bound in Twine: The History and Ecology of the Henequen-Wheat Complex for Mexico and the American and Canadian Plains, 1800–1950. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2007.
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Explores the ways that the henequen industry connected diverse parts of the globe: from the increasingly mechanized wheat industry of the US Great Plains and Canada, to the fields of Yucatán, to such diverse sources of weaving labor as prisons in Oklahoma. An internationally focused environmental study.
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Joseph, Gilbert M. Revolution From Without: Yucatán, Mexico, and the United States, 1880–1924. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1982.
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Analyzes the construction of an internationally connected henequen oligarchy. The real heart of the book lies in its study of repeated revolutionary attempts to change the old Yucatecan order and of those revolutionaries’ distinctly limited success.
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Menéndez Rodríguez, Hernán. Iglesia y poder: Proyectos sociales, alianzas políticas y económicas en Yucatán (1857–1917). Mexico City: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, 1995.
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The culmination of the author’s abiding fascination with the politics, intrigues, and political debates of Yucatán’s henequen-era Catholic hierarchy.
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Penich Rivero, Piedad. La historia secreta de la hacienda henequenera de Yucatán: Deudas, migración y resistencia Maya (1879–1915). Mérida, Mexico: Archivo General de la Nación, 2010.
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A new synthesis of the rise of the henequen complex, paying particular interest to questions of resistance and gender.
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Remmers, Lawrence James. “Henequen, the Caste War, and Economy of Yucatan, 1846–1883: The Roots of Dependence in a Mexican Region.” PhD diss., University of California at Los Angeles, 1981.
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An extensive and detailed study of the peninsula’s 19th-century economic transformations. A treasure trove of structural information about the pre-henequen hacienda and export sectors and their eventual reorganization for henequen monoculture.
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Wells, Allen. Yucatán’s Gilded Age: Haciendas, Henequen, and International Harvester, 1860–1915. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1985.
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The first English-language exploration of the emergence of an oligarchic planter society. A detailed examination of the henequen industry from planting to purchasing.
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Wells, Alan, and Gilbert M. Joseph. Summer of Discontent, Seasons of Upheaval: Elite Politics and Rural Insurgency in Yucatán, 1876–1915. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996.
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Connects the earlier work of both authors to the tumultuous early years of the Mexican Revolution. Argues for a nascent level of popular mobilization that involved cross-class alliance but that nevertheless failed to reach the levels of the Morelos insurgency.
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Remnants of the Caste War

The decline of open warfare from the late 1870s onward did not necessarily close the door on the Caste War. Rebel holdouts persisted in the south and southeast; these small, armed communities increasingly appeared to be relics of a bygone age, not unlike the Japanese soldiers who continued to hide out in Pacific islands long after 1945. But their concerns about the encroachment of an aggressive Mexican state were justified enough. The story of how a negotiated peace came over Quintana Roo thus remains important. Moreover, the final conclusion of the war left a residue of beliefs and prophesies that continues to color the mental world of Quintana Roo’s rural inhabitants. Of these works, Macías Richard 1997 concentrates most explicitly on the Mexican Federal Army’s campaign to occupy the Quintana Roo territory. But Sullivan 1989 tells the story of contact and incorporation from the perspective of the Maya holdouts and also provides an instructive critique of the pitfalls of anthropological research. Some years later, Sullivan published a second study (Sullivan 2004) that used the story of a rebel raid on a US-owned ranch to show how a single event affected the lives of people in Yucatán, Mexico, and the United States. Both Higuera Bonfil 1997 and Vallarta Vélez 2001 explore the construction of Quintana Roo society. Whereas the previous two works concentrate more on Hispanic society, Hostettler 2001 examines how village culture and land use has changed in the former Mayan rebel communities. The Maya prophetic tradition that has such deep roots in the Quintana Roo area is the theme of two brief but useful works: Domínguez Aké 1993 and Lizama Quijano 2000. Eiss 2010 provides a much-needed community history drawn from a town situated in the northwestern fringe of the henequen zone.

Domínguez Akéj, Santiago. Creencias, profecías y consejas Mayas. Colección Letras Mayas Contemporáneas 20. Mexico City: Instituto Nacional Indigenista, Secretaría del Desarrollo Social, 1993.
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An engaging and aphoristic collection representing the Mayan prophetic tradition.
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Eiss, Paul. In the Name of El Pueblo. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010.
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The first-ever history of a Yucatecan community, with special emphasis on the coming of the henequen industry and the later revolution. Challenges earlier notions of Maya passivity by telling the story of various local insurgencies confronting the planter class.
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Higuera Bonfil, Antonio. Quintana Roo entre tiempos: Política, poblamiento y explotación forestal, 1872–1925. Chetumal, Mexico: Universidad de Quintana Roo, Editora Norte Sur, 1997.
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Reconstructs the gradual integration of the peninsula’s extreme southeast into the nation in the form of the federal territory of Quintana Roo.
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Hostesttler, Ueli. “Milpa, Land, and Identity: A Central Quintana Roo Mayan Community in a Historical Pespective.” In Maya Survivalism. Edited by Ueli Hostettler and Matthew Restall, 239–262. Markt Schwaben, Germany: Verlag Anton Saurwein, 2001.
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Documents the travails of the Caste War rebel community of Xcacal as it struggles with the coming of revolutionary land reform and the need to interact with the Mexican state.
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Lizama Quijano, Jesús J. “Las señales del fin del mundo: Una aproximación a la tradición profética de los cruzoob.” In Religión popular de la reconstrucción histórica al análisis antropológico (aproximaciones casuísticas). Edited by Genny Negroe Sierra and Francisco Fernández Repetto, 133–162. Mérida, Mexico: Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán, 2000.
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An intriguing look at the way that apocalyptic prophecy—much of it a reflection of Caste War–era tensions—continues to inform Mayan oral culture in Quintana Roo.
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Macías Richard, Carlos. Nueva frontera Mexicana: Milicia, burocracia y ocupación territorial en Quintana Roo. Quintana Roo, Mexico: Universidad de Quintana Roo, 1997.
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A military study of the federal conquest of Quintana Roo in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
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Sullivan, Paul. Unfinished Conversations: Mayas and Foreigners Between Two Wars. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989.
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An anthropologist looks at the ways that misunderstanding and manipulation have informed contact between Mayas and foreigners in the wake of the Caste War. Documents the often deceptive practices of early anthropological research and explores the themes of contemporary Mayan prophecy.
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Sullivan, Paul. Xuxub Must Die: The Lost Histories of a Murder on the Yucatan. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004.
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Masterful reconstruction of how a murder in a remote corner of the Yucatán Peninsula resonated outward into a complicated web that linked Maya rebels, the Yucatecan state, and foreign entrepreneurs and diplomats.
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Vallarta Vélez, Luz del Carmen. Los payobispenses: Identidad, población y cultura en la frontera México-Belice. Chetumal, Mexico: Consejo Nacional de Cienca y Tecnología, Universidad de Quintana Roo, 2001.
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Reconstructs the emergence of a unique society in the Quintana Roo–Belize border; includes a wealth of social history about the inhabitants of what is now Chetumal.
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