Redemption's archive: Revolutionary figures and Indian work in Yucatan, Mexico.

Abstract

This dissertation is an archival and ethnographic study of the social and cultural politics of redemption on haciendas and pueblos in the henequen zone of Yucatan, Mexico, from the revolutionary period (1910--24) to the present. While Constitutionalist revolutionary leaders like General Salvador Alvarado aimed to abolish indigenous debt servitude and to transform radically the hacienda labor regime, the revolutionary state depended on abundant revenues generated by the export of cheaply produced henequen fiber. Even in an era of liberation Yucatan's revolutionary government thus remained dependent on the exploitation of Indian work to ensure the continued production of henequen. While the liberatory and conservative aspects of the project of the revolutionary state seem to stand in sharp contrast with each other, both tendencies were united in <italic>redemption</italic>, the paradigm through which the revolutionary government proposed to initiate and direct a dramatic, but controlled, transformation. At the orders of the government and through wide ranging reforms of labor, land and education, a past of indigenous slavery would be abolished and a revolutionary future of liberty inaugurated. Traditional and backward indigenous Yucatecans would be redeemed, transformed into obedient and laborious citizens of the modern Mexican <italic> Patria</italic>. However, as governmental officials intervened into the conditions of labor and land tenure in the countryside, they came into increasing conflict with workers and subsistence farmers who had different notions of what constituted slavery and what liberty might mean. Alongside their efforts to redeem indigenous workers and pueblo residents, the Constitutionalist revolutionaries aimed at developing a public record of the enactment of the event of liberation and the realization of its social consequences---an archive and historiography that would memorialize the redemption of Yucatecan society by revolutionary figures like Alvarado. This dissertation explores how redemption operated as a paradigm of governance and official memory, and locates an alternative politics of redemption and memory in popular religious practice in contemporary Yucatan.