In the Name of El Pueblo

In this book, anthropologist Paul K. Eiss writes against the grain in several productive ways about the Hunucmá region of far northwestern Yucatán. Concerned with neither the nineteenth-century Caste War that captivates so many anthropologists, nor the capitalist transformations and revolutionary (or counterrevolutionary) politics of henequen that attract historians, Eiss explores the notion of el pueblo — that allusive Spanish word for a place, a people, a national public — in Hunucmá towns over the last two hundred years. Further against the grain, he attributes el pueblo not to class or ethnicity but to the historical awareness that people in Hunucmá have of their past as abiding dispossession yet inalienable repossession. The resulting historical ethnography transcends timeless cultures or always political and therefore ever presentist memories. Instead, he shows how el pueblo, and history more generally, happen as people conventionalize events in telling about them before, during, and sometimes long after the fact. That Eiss succeeds in this attests to his skills as both ethnographer and historian. That he might have made even more of his accomplishment proves its cogency.Part 1 of the book focuses on mid-nineteenth-century land disputes in Hunucmá, then growing violence after 1870 against henequen’s exactions on local lands and labor, intensified by revolutionary fervor following 1910. Eiss shows that the postindependence shift from tributary-based Maya kah (landed settlement) to residence-based común (commons, commune) legitimized the presence of non-Indian vecinos de color (residents of color) in Hunucmá towns. While racializing contrasts between Indians and lighter-skinned, upwardly aspiring mestizo “local gentry,” the común allied both against predatory plantations. Part 2 of the book recounts Hunucmá’s futile appeals for land from a postrevolutionary state that could only envision pueblos as objects of nationalist projects, even as Hunucmá communalists came to identify their struggle for land and livelihood with national revolution. Part 3 turns to three topics: contemporary accounts of failed unionization on Hunucmá egg farms in the 1980s, with all the expected associations in Spanish of huevos with manly fortitude in contesting post-henequen, neoliberal abuses; the miraculous power of the Virgin of Tetiz to transform illegally hunted and marketed deer meat into sacred funds for her fiestas; and the emancipatory histories of a local chronicler. Here we see how stories and history happen in ways only glimpsed in earlier sources.Most striking across all these stories and centuries is the steadfast refusal of elites to acknowledge Hunucmá protests as legitimately political acts. Authorities both before and after the revolution reacted to anything other than nationalist integration and progress as ignorance in need of education — and a firm paternalistic hand. Eventual violence at their indifference only exacerbated abiding fears of bloodthirsty Indians lurking in the woods. In counterpoint to such self-perpetuating delegitimization, Eiss finds in Hunucmá’s stories of dispossession a collective repossession of belonging irrevocably to a past that by its very confiscations offers the promise of redemption in one day regaining that stolen heritage. Far from hopeless romanticism, these stories inspire people to struggle on, nowhere better rewarded than in hunting deer for the Virgin of Tetiz. Despite state surveillance, hunting guilds poach deer that only the Virgin allows them to take anyway, then sell half the venison on Mérida’s black market, where they realize all that greater profit, subverting state misrule and illicit commodification into transubstantiating sanctification, just as the Virgin first did with a priest’s coin in the eighteenth century. The guilds realize banner years in which excess funds go to produce cloth standards for the Virgin’s processions. Beset but undeterred by power and markets, their careful accounting of funds obtained and spent proclaims the sacred and enduring cause of the Virgin — and el pueblo.For Eiss, this kind of telling and enacting of history works as allegory in presuming a “more encompassing story” of one day repossessing a lost patrimony that reaffirms one’s self-possession in an often daunting present. This is myth, made not of timeless structures in endless presents but of opportunistic plotting (in both narrative and political terms) in real historical time. Its truth for el pueblo resides in neither exemplary events nor the politics of memory but in the way it reminds those who already know that this is how the world is and will be, until it changes, again, but next time perhaps for the better. Only this can explain how henequen workers and partisans endured revolutionary hypocrisy, how egg farm strikers carry on after resigning on principle, or why a lifelong social activist and local intellectual joins the conservative National Action Party. One tries what comes to hand.Historians will find here the rich makings of history, anthropologists an adroit dissolving of ethnicity, culture, and community into the flow of time. Both, however, may wish for more systematic theorization of allegory in the Foucauldian genealogy of Hunucmá’s present that Eiss so persuasively recites

Archaeology · Caste · Colonialism · Commons · Economic history · Ethnology · Genealogy · Millenarianism · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Anthropology · History · Law · Politics and Society in Latin America