mad messiah of durango

Millennium on the Northern Marches: The Mad Messiah of Durango and Popular Rebellion inMexico, 1800-1815Author(s): Eric van YoungSource: Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 28, No. 3 (Jul., 1986), pp. 385-413Published by: Cambridge University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/178857Accessed: 07/04/2010 19:43

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available athttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unlessyou have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and youmay use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.

Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained athttp://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=cup.

Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printedpage of such transmission.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

Cambridge University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access toComparative Studies in Society and History.

http://www.jstor.org

http://www.jstor.org/stable/178857?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=cup

Millennium on the Northern Marches: The Mad Messiah of Durango and Popular Rebellion in Mexico, 1800-1815 ERIC VAN YOUNG

University of California, San Diego

In September of 1810, with a sudden flash of violent rebellion (preceded by months and years of salon conspiracies), the white native-born provincial elite of New Spain began the protracted and painful process of winning political independence from Spain. Although by about 1816 much of the country had been pacified by royal arms, pockets of rebellion continued to smolder and flare throughout the following years. The birth of modem Mexico itself finally occurred in 1821, owing as much to fortuitous political circumstances in Spain as to the military and political manipulations of Agustin Iturbide, the creole adventurer who consummated the country's independence and briefly became its emperor. Programmatic pronouncements by the creole and mestizo leadership of the independence movement abound in the form of pamphlets, constitutions, decrees, short-lived newspapers, captured correspondence, etcetera, and provide us with a reasonably clear view into the complex ideological process of political separatism from Spain. At least in the early years of the independence struggle, however, the insurrectionary armies were manned not primarily by Mexican-born whites or racially mixed groups, but by Indian

For support of the research upon which this article is based, the author gratefully acknowledges the Department of History and the Institute of Latin American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin; the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies, the Chancellor's Office, and the Academic Senate of the University of California, San Diego; and the Tinker Foundation, Inc., of New York. Christon Archer made useful comments on an earlier version of this article, as did Marjorie F. Milstein.

I On these ideologies see, among the abundant literature, Luis Villoro, El proceso ideol6gico de la revoluci6n de independencia (Mexico City, 1967); Ernesto de la Torre Villar, La constitu- ci6n de Apatzingdn y los creadores del estado mexicano (Mexico City, 1978); idem, La independencia mexicana, 3 vols. (Mexico City, 1982); Ana Macias, Genesis del gobierno constitucional en Mexico, 1808-1820 (Mexico City, 1973); David A. Brading, Los origenes del nacionalismo mexicano (Mexico City, 1973); Jorge I. Dominguez, Insurrection or Loyalty: The Breakdown of the Spanish American Empire (Cambridge, Mass., 1980); and Jacques Lafaye, Quetzalc6atl and Guadalupe: The Formation of Mexican National Consciousness, 1531-1813 (Chicago, 1976). 0010-4175/86/3115-2317 $2.50 ? 1986 Society for Comparative Study of Society and History

385

386 ERIC VAN YOUNG

peasants from rural villages all over the central parts of the country.2 Parallel to the mobilization of large, substantially Indian armies, and overlapping it in many instances, was a series of village riots and uprisings throughout most regions of New Spain, save the far north and south, that reached a crescendo during 1811-12, and continued, albeit with lessening frequency, through the end of the decade.

In the plentiful primary documentation of the era there is virtually no evidence to suggest that Indian soldiers, rebels, and rioters subscribed, except in the vaguest and most passive fashion, to the tenets of protoliberal elite ideology, and indeed there is abundant indication that they held very different beliefs and goals from those of the elite creole directorate of the movement. Thus, while key symbolic elements, such as the Virgin of Guadalupe and Spanish monarchical legitimacy, may have attracted the loyalty of both village rioters and creole ideologues, such symbols meant very different things to different people. But how are we to determine what massive and violent rebellion meant to the thousands of Indian peasants who took up arms-their bows, slings, clubs, hoes, stones, and rusty guns-against the constituted authorities between 1810 and 1821? After all, these people were over- whelmingly illiterate, and often spoke only an Indian language. Living within a matrix of substantially oral village culture, they left almost nothing behind them of a formally ideological nature except the record of their actions as filtered through judicial and military documents. The latter part of this essay analyzes such materials in an attempt to reconstruct, at least in part, the world view and ideology of popular rebels in the years after 1810. Yet, as an alternative or complement to this sort of collective or sociological inquiry, individual biography is also a valuable aid in reconstructing vanished systems of thought and action. Thus, the first part of the article treats in detail the history and beliefs of one individual, a disturbed Indian pseudo-messiah, active in the years 1800-1801. While the career of this individual, Jose Bernardo Herrada, is in itself of limited significance (though fascinating in detail), certain of the psychosocial themes that emerge from it clearly resonate in a striking manner with similar themes present in the collective action of Indian village rebels and rioters a decade and more later. Although the etiology of Herrada's deranged ideas lies substantially in his own disturbed emotional background, such as it can be reconstructed, there are nonetheless enough points of contact with the actions of Indian rebels to allow us to infer some of their ideation from his and, conversely, to illuminate his behavior

2 The importance of Indian peasant participation in the independence struggle has been ob- scured to some degree not only by a lack of fundamental research on the social origins and composition of the movements, but also by the fact that the insurrection initially broke out in 1810, under the leadership of Father Miguel Hidalgo, in the region of the country known as the Bajfo, which was not heavily Indian in its racial composition. For a brief discussion of the ethnic composition of New Spain at the end of the colonial period, see text at note 48 below.

MESSIANISM, MILLENNIUM, AND REBELLION IN MEXICO 387

with reference to broader, collective phenomena. The appropriate metaphor here is that of a funhouse mirror, in which Herrada's activities represent a fragmented, distorted image in the glass, having the essential elements nonetheless intact. While the framework of analysis is comparative, the comparison is cross-temporal rather than the more usual cross-national or cross-cultural.

INTRODUCTION

Jose Berardo Herrada, or Jose Silvestre Sariiana as he came briefly to be known, did not overtly claim to be an Indian messiah, nor did he assume the trappings of the semidivine as he wandered the dusty back-country roads of northern New Spain in 1800 and early 1801. Although his ostensible mission was to summon the Indians of the north to the imminent coronation of his father, the governor of Tlaxcala as king of New Spain in March 1801, he seems also to have been interested in collecting as much money as possible from village communal and pious funds. In fact, it is difficult to tell from the records whether he was a cryptochiliast, a con artist, a crazyman, or all in combination.3 While it is true that the twin threads of madness and messianism tangle themselves inextricably in Herrada's lengthy statements and confession, his view of his own destiny is nowhere stated explicitly. What follows is an attempt at historical reconstruction on a number of levels simultaneously, all conflated in the tragicomic history of Jos6 Bernardo Herrada, alias Jose Silvestre Sarifiana. On the first level, we will explore the personal drama of the mad messiah himself. From the fragmentary testimony of Her- rada and others one can sense the presence of a troubled personality and begin to make some guesses about the etiology of his particular disturbance, about the dark shapes of the phantoms that swirled about him as he spoke of his wanderings. Here the relief of his character and history, and especially the nature of his central preoccupation about his father and figures of authority in general, is deepened if we have recourse to some ideas about personality development.

On the second level, Herrada's story tells us a good deal about contempo- rary social and political conditions in New Spain on the eve of Father Miguel Hidalgo's rebellion in the fall of 1810, and about official and popular reac- tions to the initial phase of the independence wars.4 The specter of Indian

3 The documentation of Herrada's case, comprising about 235 folio pages of confessions, witnesses' testimony, investigative reports, judicial opinions, letters of transmission by colonial authorities, etcetera, is to be found in the Fondos Especiales collection of the Biblioteca Puiblica del Estado (Jalisco), Archivo Judicial de la Audiencia de Guadalajara, section Criminal (hereafter cited as AJAC), paquete 34, expediente 9, document serial number 763 (hereafter cited as 34-9- 763). All citations and quotations concerning the Herrada case are taken from this source, unless otherwise noted, and subsequent references to this document are therefore not footnoted.

4 The basic modern English-language treatment of the early phase of the Mexican independence movement, initiated in September 1810 by Father Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, is that of Hugh Hamill, Jr., The Hidalgo Revolt: Prelude to Mexican Independence (1966; Westport,

388 ERIC VAN YOUNG

rebellion in particular haunted colonial officials at all levels of government, and such fears were not unjustified. Indian rebellion, some of it on a fairly large scale, was endemic in Mesoamerica after the Spanish conquest.5 Fur- thermore, in the same years when Herrada was spreading his seditious doc- trines in the northern countryside, a number of conspiracies were discovered among the Indian villagers of western Mexico, particularly in the Tepic area.6 Finally, the 1810 rebellion, as mentioned above, was markedly Indian in its composition in certain parts of the viceroyalty.7 Aggravating fears of massive

Conn., 1981). The literature on the Mexican independence struggle is large, though not much of it concentrates on the nature of the rebellions as social movements. Two of the classic historical accounts are Lucas Alaman, Historia de Mejico, 5 vols. (Mexico City, 1968); and Carlos Maria Bustamante, Cuadro historico de la revolucion mexicana, 3 vols. (Mexico City, 1961). Among moder treatments, see the seminal essay of Eric Wolf on the region where Hidalgo's movement broke out, "El Bajio en el siglo XVIII: un analisis de integraci6n cultural," in Los beneficiarios del desarrollo regional, David Barkin, comp. (Mexico City, 1972), 63-95; and, among others, Domfnguez, Insurrection or Loyalty; Torcuato S. DiTella, "Las clases peligrosas en la independencia de Mexico," in El ocaso del orden colonial en Hispanoamerica, Tulio Halperin-Donghi, comp. (Buenos Aires, 1978), 201-47; Enrique Florescano, "Antecedents of the Mexican Inde-

pendence Movement: Social Instability and Political Discord," in Liberation in the Americas:

Comparative Aspects of the Independence Movements in Mexico and the United States, Robert Detweiler and Ram6n Ruiz, eds. (San Diego, 1978), 69-86; William B. Taylor, "Rural Unrest in Central Jalisco, 1790-1816" (Paper delivered at the Conference on Peasant Uprisings in Mexico, Social Science Research Council, New York, April 1982); Bryan R. Hamnett, "The Economic and Social Dimension of the Revolution for Independence in Mexico, 1800-1824," Ibero-AmerikanischesArchiv, n.s., 6:1 (1980), 1-27; John Tutino, "Agrarian Insurgency: Social Origins of the Hidalgo Movement," manuscript (1980); Christon I. Archer, "Banditry and Revolution in New Spain, 1790-1821," Bibliotheca Americana, 1:2 (1982), 58-89; and Eric Van Young, "Moving toward Revolt: Agrarian Origins of the Hidalgo Rebellion in Central Jalisco" (Paper delivered at the Conference on Peasant Uprisings in Mexico, Social Science Research Council, New York, April 1982).

5 On general fears of a race war by the dark-skinned against the light-skinned, particularly after the famous massacre of whites by Hidalgo's largely Indian and mestizo army at Guana- juato's alhondiga, see Hamill, Hidalgo Revolt. The conventional wisdom regarding this point is that the slaughter at the alh6ndiga, and others that followed it in rebel-held areas, alienated creoles who might otherwise have supported Hidalgo's movement in order to achieve the political independence of the colony. On Indian rebellion in Mesoamerica during the colonial period, see, for example, Maria Elena Galaviz de Capdevielle, Rebeliones indigenas en el norte del Reino de la Nueva Espana, siglos XVI-XVII (Mexico City, 1967); Maria Teresa Huerta and Patricia Palacios, eds., Rebeliones indigenas de la dpoca colonial (Mexico City, 1976); Robert Wasserstrom, Class and Society in Central Chiapas (Berkeley, 1983), esp. ch. 3; William B. Taylor, Drinking, Homicide, and Rebellion in Colonial Mexican Villages (Stanford, 1979), ch. 4; and Friedrich Katz, "Peasant Revolts in Mexico" (Paper given at the Conference on Peasant Uprisings in Mexico, Social Science Research Council, New York, April 1982).

6 One of these centered on a mysterious Indian prophet named Mariano, and another on the planned destruction of the sanctuary of the Virgin of Guadalupe and the viceregal palace in Mexico City in 1800. The Mariano incident is treated in the Herrada documents in AJAC 34-9- 763, and also in considerable detail by Christon I. Archer, El ejercito en el Mexico borb6nico, 1760-1810 (Mexico City, 1983), 132-135. For the other Tepic conspiracy, see Archivo General de la Naci6n (Mexico) (hereafter cited as AGN), Historia, vol. 428, fols. 37r-76r (1801).

7 On Indian participation in the early phase of the independence rebellions, through 1812 or so, particularly in the form of local uprisings or village tumultos, see my paper, "Who Was That Masked Man, Anyway? Popular Symbols and Ideology in the Mexican Wars of Independence," Rocky Mountain Conference on Latin American Studies, Annual Meeting, Proceedings (Las Cruces, N.M., 1984), I, 18-35.


Indian rebellion and race war were the somewhat paranoid (though, again, not completely unjustified) preoccupations with foreign (particularly English) conspiracies to join with Indian rebels in the overthrow of the legitimate colonial order.8 Whatever Herrada's personal obsessions or the degree to which they reflected deeply running social cleavages and symbols among the Indian population at large, they would not have assumed such visibility or interest had they not fallen into a specific conjunction of circumstances associated with international and imperial politics.

On the third level, Herrada's history displays symptoms of a set of psychosocial formulations that suffused relations between Indians and Spaniards by the close of the colonial period, though these elements must have originated much earlier in the cultural history of Mexico.9 Despite the delusional and inconsistent nature of Herrada's testimony, the openly seditious character of his program was clear enough: he foretold a kind of Indian millennium in which effective sovereignty was to pass from the hands of white colonial authorities to those of the Indians of New Spain, in the person of an Indian monarch. If the program emerged clearly, however, Herrada's reported behavior-the affect attached to the program, as it were-demonstrated a fundamental contradiction, like a fissure deep beneath an apparently plane surface. This contradiction was his profoundly ambivalent attitude toward whites in general and white authority figures in particular, ranging from the Spanish king all the way down to petty provincial officials. Related to this was a strongly marked hostility, even hatred, toward whites of European birth, or gachupines in the pejorative slang of the day. Filled as his pronouncements were with racist, antiwhite denunciation, Herrada nonetheless sought out, in a confused way, the approval and society of whites and even their imprimatur upon his Indian monarchist program. Aside from its quirkiness, this is of interest because it echoes in an idiosyncratic way a widespread ambivalence toward whites, focussed strongly on the distinction between European- and American-born Spaniards, that was to emerge in many instances of Indian rebellion during 1810 and after. The basic scenario here is one of increasing racial tension, linked in its turn to socioeconomic conflicts of long standing, which, in the peculiar alchemy of popular action and ideology, transformed a generalized hostility toward whites into a virulent hatred of gachupines. The fragmented and confused elements of Herrada's program and his reasoning reflect this ambivalence and the accompanying process of "splitting"-the

8 Similar allegations of English involvement were made in the investigation of the Tepic plot of 1800 detailed in AGN, Historia, vol. 428, fols. 37r-76r (1801); and in Archer, El ejercito en el Mexico borbdnico, esp. ch. 4. On the general question of foreign involvement in the independence of New Spain, see John Rydjord, Foreign Interest in the Independence of New Spain: An Introduction to the War for Independence (New York, 1972).

9 The term Spaniard is used here as synonymous for white, regardless of social status or place of birth. The distinction between Spaniards of European and American birth (peninsulars or gachupines, and creoles, respectively) was an important one, however, and will be developed somewhat more below.

390 ERIC VAN YOUNG

psychic sleight-of-hand that idealizes whites on the one hand while vilifying them on the other. Mad as Herrada may have been, his story is significant on this level of analysis because of the vehicles he used to express his particular inner conflicts. His ramblings and ravings are thus an overamplified version of the feeling and subjective reality common to large groups of Indians at that time-the funhouse-mirror distortion that nonetheless shows the essential image intact. The representations he chose, consciously and unconsciously, were in some degree historically and culturally determined. A study of this delicate conjunction-of a life history and historical moment, in Erik Erik- son's phrase-can illumine both the man and his time. Indeed, Erikson's words, written in another context, help to focus on this illusive relationship:

. deeply and pathologically upset, but possessed both by the vision of a new (or renewed) world order and by the need . . . to transform masses of men, such a man makes his individual "patienthood" representative of a universal one, and promises "to solve for all what he could not solve for himself alone."10

APPEARANCE, ARREST, AND TRIAL

On 25 January 1801, Don Francisco Antonio de la Bastida y Araziel, chief magistrate of the Villa de San Juan Bautista del Rio, in the province of Nueva Vizcaya, had an odd interview with an Indian just arrived in the town.11 Although at the time he must have been struck with the man and the conversa-

10 Erik H. Erikson, Life History and the Historical Moment: Diverse Presentations (New York, 1975), 47; and see in particular the chapters entitled "'Identity Crisis' in Autobiographical Perspective" and "On the Nature of Psycho-Historical Evidence."

i I San Juan Bautista del Rio (not to be confused with the town of the same name much further to the south, near Queretaro) lies about sixty-five miles north of the city of Durango. Around 1800 the total population of the town and its district was approximately 10,300; Bemardo Bonavia, "Lista o noticia de las jurisdicciones o partidos de la comprensi6n de la provincia de Nueva Vizcaya. . ," in Descripciones econ6micas regionales de Nueva Espaina. Provincias del Norte, 1790-1814, Enrique Florescano and Isabel Gil, eds. (Mexico City, 1976), 88. Three caveats of a methodological nature should be made here briefly with regard to the interpretation of Herrada's story on the basis of the evidence. First, the records of his interrogation and confession do not lend themselves as readily as might be hoped to close textual reading, since it is doubtful that they all represent verbatim transcriptions of his statements. Second, the colonial authorities who tried Herrada were interested in determinations of fact bearing upon what was essentially a crime of lese majest6, and not in his beliefs or subjective states, as might have been the case had he fallen under the jurisdiction of the Inquisition. This means that a precise reconstruction of Herrada's beliefs and mental condition, based upon an analysis of his words and the nuances of expression, is substantially barred to us. On the fastidiousness of Inquisition legal procedures in this regard, see, for example, two articles of John Tedeschi, "Preliminary Observations on Writing a History of the Roman Inquisition," in Continuity and Discontinuity in Church History, F. Church and T. George, eds. (Leiden, 1979), 232-49; and "The Roman Inquisition and Witchcraft: An Early Seventeenth-Century 'Instruction' on Correct Trial Procedure," Revue de l'histoire des Religions, 200:1 (1983), 163-88; and also John P. Demos, Entertaining Satan: Witchcraft and the Culture of Early New England (Oxford, 1982). I am grateful to my colleague John Marino for bringing Tedeschi's work to my attention. For an outstanding example of what such detailed and intimate Inquisition records can do in reconstructing the subjective states and mental universe of a single individual, see Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller (Baltimore, 1980). Finally, the application of psychoanalytic concepts to collective action, and to the links between such action on the part of Indian


tion, only subsequent events brought them into sharp relief. The man looked much like other Indians of the area-certainly there was nothing to remark him as unusual. He was of stocky build, average height, dark in color, flat- nosed, sparse of beard, about thirty-five years old, and had a scar on his left forearm. He claimed his name was Captain Green Horn-"capitan Cuerno verde"-that he had served as interpreter with a certain Captain Carrasco, and that he was now dedicated to bullfighting. He asked license to participate as a toreador on foot in the upcoming celebrations in the town.12 When asked by la Bastida if he had some kind of valid passport, he said that he did, but that a group of his friends who had lagged behind him on the road were bringing it. Green Horn assured the magistrate that he would cause no public disturbance or nuisance, and was granted permission to stay in the town.

Four days later the governor of the town's Indians informed la Bastida that Green Horn was disturbing the local people with certain seditious expressions, to which the magistrate responded by throwing the stranger in the public jail. A group of those same local Indians intervened, however, and asked that Green Horn be transferred to their direct custody in the civic buildings of the Indian community, to which la Bastida assented. After another three days the magistrate received from Captain Green Horn a paper bearing two signatures, which the jailed man claimed was his missing passport. The Spanish official found the contents of the document alarming, wrote in his report that "they can serve as a cause of misunderstanding (engatio) and restlessness (inquietudes) among these Indians," and had the man returned to the public jail to clear up the matter.

The next day, 29 January 1801, the magistrate of San Juan took an initial statement from Captain Green Horn in the town jail. The prisoner said his name was Jose Silvestre Sarifiana, that he didn't know his age, that he had been born in the Indian barrio of San Juan Bautista de Analco in the city of Tlaxcala, and that he had no occupation, but was "capitdn" of 133 native pueblos in his district. 13 The first hint of Herrada's contrariness, eccentricity, or outright madness appears at this early point, in his answer to the first real

villagers and the highly individual pathology of the mad messiah of Durango, is somewhat problematical. This is so because violence in general, and collective violence in particular, seem largely outside the purview of clinically based psychoanalytic theory owing to the clinical setting itself, from which the theory is ultimately derived. On this point, see Erikson, Life History and the Historical Moment, 106; and Otto F. Kernberg, Internal World and External Reality: Object Relations Theory Applied (New York, 1980), 217. Despite these difficulties, psychoanalytic interpretations of collective action may be employed as a kind of large metaphor for psychosocial processes that seem to demand an explanation beyond the knee-jerk functionalism of traditional social and economic interpretations.

12 Such bullfights were commonly associated with civic and certain religious celebrations in provincial towns; some of the corridas would have been fought on horseback, as well. Judging by modem examples of country bullfights in Mexico, the level of the participants' skills was probably not high.

13 Ignorance of one's own age, or the stating of age in very approximate numbers (usually rounded to the nearest five years) or estimates, was fairly common among Indians.

392 ERIC VAN YOUNG

question of his interrogation. When asked to specify the names of the villages of which he was capitdn, he answered that "it didn't matter either to the magistrate or to him-it simply suited him to say so." He said he spoke not only Spanish, but Tlascalteca (which would have been the Indian lingua franca of central Mexico, Nahuatl), Otomite (Otomi), Tarasco, Lipan, Lipillan, Indio Blanco, Gileio, Tejas, Come Crudo, and Pames. 14 His father he named as Don Jose Antonio Pedro Alcantar Gonzalez Amarillo de Arellan, and his mother as simply Tomasa-he didn't know her surname. A two-year absence from Tlaxcala he claimed to have spent travelling widely. He admit- ted having told the Indian governor that he (Herrada) could order the skies to rain buckets of fire on the celebrations in the town. Asked to sign his own statement, he pled inability to write.

The Spanish magistrate next examined a number of local Indian witnesses, including the general del pueblo and its governor. 5 As to Herrada's name, ethnicity, and birthplace, they knew only what he had told them. When he entered the town with the magistrate's license, the Indian officials had wel- comed him to a place of distinction in their government buildings because he said he was a native of Tlaxcala. 16 He told them he had been arrested pre-

14 Some of the "languages" in this list are deformed, and some ridiculous. "Indio Blanco" (white indian) is a nonlanguage that may have some bearing on Herrada's own inner conflicts, while "Come Crudo" (he eats it raw) may have been intended as a taunt, an insult, or simply nonsense. On the Indian languages of this area, see Norman McQuown, vol. ed., Linguistics, Vol. V of Handbook of Middle American Indians, Robert Wauchope, gen. ed. (Austin, 1967).

15 At least three of these individuals bore the common patronymic Sarifiana, which is undoubt- edly the source of Herrada's assumed name.

16 There is no evidence in Herrada's case that he had, in fact, any direct relationship with the Indian city-state. Tlaxcala had played a key role in Cortes's conquest of the Aztecs, furnishing him with considerable logistical support and large numbers of auxiliaries; see Charles Gibson, Tlaxcala in the Sixteenth Century (Stanford, 1967); Robert C. Padden, The Hummingbird and the Hawk: Conquest and Sovereignty in the Valley of Mexico, 1503-1541 (New York, 1970); and Diego Mufioz Camargo, Historia de Tlaxcala (Mexico City, 1947-48). Because of their aid to the Spanish, Tlaxcala and its Indian aristocracy enjoyed certain privileges throughout the colonial period. Also, because of their presumed loyalty, small groups of Tlaxcalan colonists were established throughout many areas of New Spain by the conquerors, including parts of the far north, to aid in the pacification of the country. Gibson, Tlaxcala in the Sixteenth Century, 181- 89, discusses the limited but important Tlaxcalan colonization in Nueva Vizcaya in some detail. After the early 1590s few if any northern colonists actually came from Tlaxcala itself to the northern marches, but already established mother colonies there continued to send groups. Whether San Juan del Rio itself or other towns in the area had received colonists in the sixteenth century is not clear, but certainly the Indian officials of San Juan implied that Herrada's putative Tlaxcalan origin entitled him to special consideration, ". . . ddndole como dice ser de Tlascala el lugar correspondiente." Other emissaries from Tlaxcala heralded Indian revivalist movements as well, including the mysterious Mariano who appeared in the Tepic area about the same time, claiming also to be a cacique of Tlaxcala and the son of its Indian governor. Communication between the Indians of Tepic and those of Tlaxcala also figured vaguely but centrally in the other Tepic conspiracy of 1800 (AGN, Historia, vol. 428, fols. 37r-76r (1801)). In early 1811 two Indian men in the Cuernavaca area were arrested for fabricating a letter addressed to local village officials, ostensibly from the Indian governor of Tlaxcala, claiming that King Ferdinand VII was secretly coming to the town of Cuautitlan and asking (in his name) for contributions of money from cajas de comunidad (see AGN, Criminal, vol. 204, exped. 10, fols. 191r-205v (1811)).


viously in Durango for a brief time as a mysterious masked man (enmascarado), and that he had come to win them (the Indians of San Juan) by fire and blood.17 He showed them the passport, which they sent to la Bastida, as well as a longer document with a number of signatures, described by one of the officials as patent forgeries. Herrada then added that it was the duty of local Indian officials to defend him against white authorities, by force if necessary, and promised them some remarkable occurrences in the coming month of March. At this point the Indian officials decided to denounce him to the Spanish magistrate, and his arrest followed shortly. Early in February 1801, further questioning of the prisoner having produced no result, the magistrate la Bastida remanded Herrada to Bernardo Bonavia, the governor- intendant of Durango, under guard of twelve armed men. In the provincial capital he was jailed incommunicado.

On 12 February 1801, Herrada's interrogation was resumed by the intendant of Durango himself, with the Protector of Indians (a court-appointed official) and a defense attorney in attendance. The interrogation took several days and was followed by a more detailed and aggressive questioning on specific charges, and a judicial confession. The record of these statements makes fascinating reading; there is, at risk of introducing an anachronism, a certain Kafkaesque quality about them. Bursts of loquacity follow upon sullen and unresponsive silence, tremendous feats of (apparent) recollection upon stubborn forgetfulness, and coherent narrative reconstruction of past events upon disjointed fantasies of things that could never have occurred. The long and rambling lists of places and names, doubtless difficult for the notaries to transcribe even in rough note form, are prodigious and impressive in them-

Given the anomalous status of Tlaxcala it is hardly surprising to find Indian revivalist hopes focussed on it. On this point, see also Archer, El ejercito en el Mexico borb6nico.

17 It was never made clear exactly whom Herrada purported to be as the enmascarado, and in fact the municipal authorities in Durango had no records of such an individual's arrest. The preponderance of evidence indicates that this episode was a fantasy of Herrada's. There are two points of interest about this fabrication, however. First, Herrada claimed in subsequent testimony that it was actually his father, the Indian governor of Tlaxcala, who had been arrested in September 1799, as the enmascarado of Durango. This same identification with his father-or perhaps transposition would be a better word-occurred at another point in his testimony, lending support to the view that he was obsessed with this fantasied figure. Second, the enmascarado theme came to be fairly common in the political mythology of popular rebellion in 1810 and after, especially with regard to a mysterious figure in the country districts of New Spain generally rumored to be Kind Ferdinand VII, come to lead a mass uprising against the gachupines. For some examples of this, see AGN, Criminal, vol. 134, exped. 3, fols. 36r-50r (Mexico City, 1810); vol. 175, fols. 369r-392v (Cuautla, 1811); and vol. 454, no exped. number, no pag. (Orizaba, 1811 ); and, for a discussion, Van Young, "Who Was That Masked Man, Anyway?" It is not clear why the masked figure should have been selected as the symbol of these millenarian hopes. One possible interpretation suggests itself strongly, however, which is that the masking of the messianic figure provided a powerful metaphor of selective invisibility. Thus the masked man could be corporeally present, but perceptible only to the elect-especially the Indians-without violating the fundamental unities of time and space.

394 ERIC VAN YOUNG

selves. Altogether the impression is one of a glimpse into a disturbed mind, filled with unperceived contradictions and bizarre imaginings.

Herrada stated that he was married to Maria Dolores de la Luz, and had two sons who had come with him to San Juan.18 He claimed to be an Indian nobleman or cacique of Tlaxcala, a farmer by occupation, and capitdn of thirty-six pueblos. When asked about previous arrests, he replied that he had been jailed thirty-seven times within the preceding two years for making use of the papers found on him in Suan Juan del Rio. In some instances, he said, he got out of jail through the use of money (whether by paying fines or bribes is not clear from his account), in others by the intervention of powerful (white?) friends, and in still others through the good offices of local Indians because of the credentials he carried.19 On this and subsequent occasions Herrada was subjected to some very pointed and intense questioning about his possible relations with the rebellious Indians of the Tepic area and the sierra of Nayar, primarily because he said he had travelled there, but also because of similarities between his story and testimony regarding the Indian prophet Mariano, active about this time in the Tepic area. Herrada's testimony then presents a detailed narrative of his travels in New Spain in 1799-1800 and the early weeks of 1801, largely fictitious. He purported to have left Tlaxcala on 30 September 1799, reaching the viceregal capital the following day (a journey impossible to accomplish on foot in such a short time), accompanied by a contingent of family members and fourteen other Indians from villages in the Mexico City area which his father, the governor, had "given" him for the journey. This large group, under Herrada's leadership, travelled together for some time, but split up on arriving at the town of Rio Verde, near San Luis Potosi, with each person then following an individual itinerary as established in a royal decree (real cedula) given to Herrada by the former Viceroy Miguel Jose de Azanza. According to this document, never presented in evidence, Herrada's mission was to collect from all over New Spain "candlesticks, lamps, military deserters, men, and women" for purposes unspecified. At this point the testimony becomes garbled, but it appears that there was a second, covert commission conferred on Herrada by his father to collect on a petition the signatures of some 40,000 Indians, including especially village officials, in the area of Rio Verde, San Luis Potosi, and Tula, without the

18 There was no evidence to indicate that any family member had accompanied Herrada on his travels, or even that he was married. In her testimony Herrada's mother stated that he had told her he had married a woman named Concepci6n and had two small children, a boy and a girl. In view of his apparently oedipally charged relationship with his mother it is interesting that in speaking to her he should have chosen the name Concepci6n for his fantasy-wife. This may also throw some light on his pathologically strong identification with his "father." These are at best speculations, however.

19 Inquiries made by the intendant to authorities in the towns where Herrada claimed to have been jailed produced few recorded replies, all negative.


knowledge of the local Spanish officials ("y que no lo entiendiesen [sic] los espaholes y jueces reales"). He affirmed that he did manage to collect the 40,000 signatures and sent them off to his father in Tlaxcala. In his testimony on the following day he maintained that he had collected only some sixty signatures, but by the end of his statement the number was again 40,000.

The list that Herrada spun off in his testimony included the localities he had travelled to and the names of those he claimed had signed his petition; it covers some seven folio pages. It must have required a long time to recite and transcribe, and apparently Herrada managed this from memory (that is, from fantasy) without the aid of notes. The recitation is almost frightening in its length and detail, and in its compulsive, crazed tone. In its written form it has an automatic, unnuanced, flat quality that can be imagined as not far from its actual manner of delivery. By count, the list includes well over 200 names. He claimed to have been all over northern New Spain, and his itinerary included Monterrey, Saltillo, the province of Texas, Nacogdoches, and New Orleans. Many of the places he cited are nonexistent, or are garbled versions of real locations. In addition to major cities the list includes dozens of mining camps, villages, haciendas, and ranchos. As to the purpose of collecting the signatures, Herrada recounted at least three different versions. Explicitly the signatures were in support of his father's rule as Indian king of New Spain, and served to acknowledge receipt by the signatories of the summons to attend the coronation on 29 March 1801. At one point, however, Herrada declared that the collection of signatures was merely a pretext to determine the number of Spanish inhabitants in each town and rural area (a kind of pharaonic census in reverse). This information was needed because the Spaniards had oppressed and enslaved the Indians, and his father had a crown and power; it was a matter of expatriating all [Spaniards] at his command as was done with the Jesuits at the same date and hour.20

The passports he carried were addressed to Indians and village officials only, and his real mission was not to be divulged to any white on pain of death. However, the list contained just as many, or more, obviously Spanish names as Indian ones. In fact, as the afternoon's interrogation went on and the list grew ever longer, Spanish names and titles occurred with increasing frequency, and obviously Indian names dropped out entirely. Some of the Spanish names, most of which we assume to be fantasized, are variants on the prisoner's own surname, Herrada.

Herrada stated, in answer to direct questions, that his father's claim to the throne of New Spain was based upon another royal decree issued in his father's favor by King Charles IV in 1786, "so that he be crowned, and with

20 The Jesuit order was expelled from Spain and its American dominions by royal decree in 1767.

396 ERIC VAN YOUNG

absolute faculties to command, do, and dispose."21 Furthermore (and to the obvious alarm of the examining officials), he said that his father's plans were supported and protected by a force of 500 English and 300 French soldiers poised somewhere off the coast of New Spain-their exact location never specified-with whom his father was in constant communication. In his final extensive statement of 26 February, Herrada became increasingly unresponsive and evasive, finally refusing to answer further questions. For the next four years, during which, with long hiatuses, the legal case was developed around him, his voice was silent.

If Herrada's own words provide us with the primary material and some inchoate fundamentals-for example, his ambivalence toward whites, his father obsession, etcetera-for the partial reconstruction of his personal history, the testimony of witnesses in the case, albeit tantalizingly brief, serves as a lens that focuses the blurred forms of his inner maelstrom into clearer shapes. A number of witnesses, mostly from Herrada's native village, were interrogated during late February 1801. From their substantially consistent statements a partial picture of the mad messiah's background and character can be pieced together. A boyhood companion of "Sarifiana's" identified him as Jose Berardo Herrada, the son of Jose Tadeo Herrada and Maria M6nica Leon, both Indians of Analco. The same witness said that Herrada's behavior since childhood had been bad, that he was unmarried, and that he had no occupation, but was a "vagabond by profession" ("bagamundo de profe- sion"). Herrada, he testified, had left his parents' home as an adolescent and had been absent for some eighteen years, returning only the previous May (1800), when he stayed in the witness' house for a few days. After a brief trip to the north, Herrada eventually ended up in San Juan del Rio. Face to face with his old companion at the conclusion of his testimony, Herrada denied knowing the man. A string of other witnesses, mostly Indians of Analco and Durango, all identified Sarifiana as Herrada, but little more.

The most interesting testimony regarding Herrada's background came from his parents. His mother, Maria Monica Le6n, was an Indian woman born in the village of Tunal, contiguous to the city of Durango, married, and more than forty years old. She identified Sarifiana as her son, born out of wedlock,

21 Charles IV, of course, did not succeed to the crown until 1788. In this passage Herrada said his father's name was Felipe Alcantara Gonzalez, Marqu6s de Santiago, whereas earlier the name given was Pedro or Jose Antonio. Questioned during his confession of 26 February as to this inconsistency, as well as about the fact that he himself was named at the head of the forged decree as the authority commanding compliance from Indian officials, though the decree was signed by his father, he replied, ".... por que asi viene escrito su padre, y que siendo el, la misma persona que su padre, lo mismo es que lo mande uno que otro," i.e., that he and his father were one and the same person, not juridically, but physically. See note 17 for another instance of this boundary collapse in Herrada's personality. It is also interesting that Herrada consistently claimed that his name was Sariiana, though his father's was Gonzalez-this point was pursued in interrogation, but was evaded and never resolved.


and noted that his surname, Herrada, had been adopted from her husband, Jose Tadeo Herrada, the boy's stepfather. The natural father had been Jose Manuel de Sierra, now dead. Her son had left home, she stated, at about the age of twelve. She had never known him to have an occupation, though when he returned home briefly the previous May, he told her he knew something of smithing. She believed him still to be single, though the previous year he had told her he was married to a woman named Concepci6n, who lived with their two infants on a nearby hacienda where he had been working for some years past. (The owner of the hacienda testified that he had never heard of Herrada.) On the brief visit of the previous spring she had called him an ingrate (in- grato), though he claimed to have written four letters to her over the years, none of which had arrived. She concluded by saying that at that time he had tried to convince her to go off with him, claiming that she was a widow ("que entonces trataba de llevarla consigo, reputdndola viuda").

The stepfather, Jose Tadeo Herrada, a man of more than forty years in age, of unspecified race, and a mason by profession, agreed that Sarifiana was his stepson, and that he was probably a bachelor.22 He knew neither his stepson's profession nor what he had been doing during his eighteen-year absence from the village. He had nothing else substantive to say about his stepson, except that on the occasion of the previous year's visit they had not spoken to each other at all, except to say hello, while Herrada was staying in the couple's house.23

The final witness in this stage of the case was a former Indian governor of Analco, Pedro Alcantara Gonzalez, who testified to a fairly inconsequential matter regarding Herrada's brief northern sojourn of the previous year. The important thing about this witness is his name, since the record shows little else: his was the name that Herrada adopted for his mythical father, the Indian governor of Tlaxcala. Why Herrada should have selected this man's name for the central fantasy-figure in his imagined world of power and rebellion, beyond the fact that he was obviously a local authority figure, we do not know. Had he at some point befriended the runaway adolescent, or become in the troubled boy's mind a surrogate father?

PERSONAL HISTORY AND SOCIAL HISTORY

We have presented the basic outlines of the mad messiah's case. Given the sketchiness and necessarily inconclusive nature of the evidence, it is nonetheless possible to make some credible statements concerning Herrada himself

22 When asked about the recent conduct of his son (hijo), Herrada pointedly answered that he knew nothing about his stepson (hijastro).

23 Of Herrada's visit in 1800, his stepfather said that "he conversed with him no more than to say hello on the occasion of visiting his mother"; the record adds: ". . although the said Bernardo was in the house to visit his mother, wife of the witness, in his presence [Sarifiana/ Herrada] said nothing."

398 ERIC VAN YOUNG

and the significance of his garbled ideas for a general hypothesis about in- terethnic social relations and rebellion in late colonial Mexico.

Herrada's eccentric history lends itself to an explanation in terms of psychoanalytic theory, albeit in nontechnical terms. The basic tenet here is that the child is father to the man, or even, in this case, that the man was father to himself. Born a bastard, Herrada apparently never formed a close relationship with his mother's husband, and in fact the coldness between them evidenced by the stepfather's testimony suggests a certain degree of mutual hostility. The date at which this second liaison of his mother's was formed is not clear from the record, but certainly the fact that Herrada professed to consider her a widow bespoke his search for a legitimacy related to his natural father, his possible loyalty to, or even idealization of, the dead man, and his desire to negate the existence of the interloping stepfather entirely.24 Herrada's oedipally charged relationship with his mother takes on positively Hamletian proportions if one remembers that on his brief visit in the spring of 1800 he had tried to convince her to go away with him. Nor is a note of ambivalence toward his mother within the quadrangular relationship missing. When an- swering a question in one of the early interrogations regarding his parentage, he had given a long string of names for his fantasy-father (Don Jose Antonio Pedro Alcantar Gonzalez Amarillo de Arellan) but only a single given name for his mother-Tomasa-and claimed not to know her surname, which contrasts markedly with the overamplified image of his father. Furthermore, the fact that Herrada left his mother and stepfather's house at such an early age, when he might instead have been expected to stay at home until he married or attained his legal majority, suggests a certain amount of strain or conflict within the household.25

How did the conflict within the boy translate itself into the disturbed behavior of the adult? Unfortunately, the testimony never brought to light what had occupied Herrada during the eighteen-year absence, nor even why he decided to return when he did for his brief visit. What are discernible in his own statements are several characteristics not implausibly related to his personal history as a child. His deep yearning after a powerful and publicly visible father is all too apparent in the personal fantasy he created for himself. Not only did he make his father into arguably the most powerful figure within the Indian community of New Spain-the paramount governor of Tlaxcala-but also into the annointed monarch of the colony as a whole, Indian and Spanish.

24 That Herrada's stepfather was on the scene well before the boy left home seems almost certain, though it is nowhere explicitly stated. Not only did the stepfather identify him from personal familiarity, but also the illegitimate boy carried the stepfather's surname.

25 Rural people in general, and Indians in particular, seem to have moved around the countryside a good deal more than we had once thought, on both temporary and permanent bases; for a general discussion on this point, see Eric Van Young, Hacienda and Market in Eighteenth- Century Mexico: The Rural Economy of the Guadalajara Region, 1675-1820 (Berkeley, 1981), 245-64. What was unusual in Herrada's case was not the fact that he left, but his age at leaving.


What is more, he identified his father-monarch at one point with the Mexican- Spanish nobleman, the Conde de Santiago, one of the supposed signatories of the original decree that Herrada presented to the Spanish authorities of Du- rango, by calling him the Marques de Santiago.26

Herrada's complex fantasy also displayed a grandiosity with regard to himself that can only have been a compensation for feelings of insignificance, powerlessness, rejection, and of having effectively been orphaned. One of the prosecutors in the case pointed to his grandiose manner, saying that by his actions and words Herrada had sought to paint himself "a man of mystery, power, and authority."27 His repeated claim to be captain of scores of Indian villages in the Tlaxcala area amounted to much the same thing, as did also, in a perverse kind of way, his insistence that he had been arrested thirty-seven times in 1800 and 1801. Related to this grandiosity in Herrada was a subtle strain of autoidentification with Christ, whence, presumably, came the description of him as a self-proclaimed messiah to the Indians. His description of himself in the fabricated decree he had presented to the Indian and Spanish officials of San Juan del Rio certainly bears this stamp: . . . because he is the one who is to command and govern you, the Indians, and defend you so that you enjoy many benefits, since for you he has been despised and scorned, in order to win you.28

Seen in this light, we may wonder whether the occasional collapsing of Herrada's personality with his father's partook a bit of the mystical identity between Christ and His Father.

If Herrada was a madman, and if almost every one of his allegations was systematically proven false in the course of interrogations and other investiga- tions, why did the authorities in Durango and Guadalajara (and in Mexico City as well, one imagines) take him so seriously? Furthermore, what does their concern tell us of the state of New Spain at the end of the colonial period and of official and white imaginings about the possibilities of widespread Indian rebellion?

To begin with, there was considerable question among the Spanish officials and lawyers prosecuting and defending the case as to whether the accused was actually mad or not. Three positions were clearly outlined in their lengthy and articulate written opinions: that he was sane and therefore legally culpable;

26 On the real Conde de Santiago, whose name was occasionally associated with the rebel cause after 1810, see Doris Ladd, The Mexican Nobility at Independence, 1780-1826 (Austin, 1976). In making this identification, by the way, however foggy the nature of it may have been in his own mind, Herrada gave clear expression to his own ambivalent feelings about whites and simultaneously bridged the gulf of his ambivalence.

27 ". . . fingiendose una especie de hombre inc6gnito, de poder, y autoridad." 28 For an interesting treatment of the association of Indian Christ figures with rebellion, which

she calls the passion theme, see Victoria Reifler Bricker, The Indian Christ, The Indian King: The Historical Substrate of Maya Myth and Ritual (Austin, 1981), esp. ch. 11.

400 ERIC VAN YOUNG

that he was probably mad, but that this ultimately made little difference in the gravity of his crimes; and that he was quite clearly insane and therefore legally innocent. All three positions share the recognition that Herrada was in some degree disturbed, and that his behavior represented a possibly grave threat to social order and to the state.

The paranoid tone prominent in much of the official view of the case had at least a partial foundation, as noted earlier, in the endemic Indian rebellion characteristic of the colonial period and in the fears this naturally provoked in many whites. Following as closely as it did, moreover, upon the discovery of the conspiracies in Tepic, the Herrada matter was bound to be painted in lurid colors. Fueling this understandable tendency was a notable similarity between the Herrada and Mariano cases, which fed official fears that the two men might be one and the same person. Mariano, too, had claimed that he was by birth a cacique of Tlaxcala and that his father was governor of the province. Mariano asserted that he had actually travelled to Spain and spoken with the king, who had issued a royal decree in his favor so that he could return to New Spain and be recognized and obeyed as king. His coronation was to have taken place in early January of 1800, complete with banners of the Virgin of Guadalupe, mounted guards, civil display of various kinds, etcetera. Mariano was even said to have remarked that he did not want to be crowned with a gold or silver crown, but with that of the holy image of Jesus Nazareno in a local church "since he came to suffer in order to liberate his sons."29

But if, from the Spanish point of view, there was some justification for the dread of Indian rebellion and the arrival of an Indian millennium, there was also in the Spanish attitude a subtle mixture of projected aggression and fear based on longstanding racial and social stereotypes. Indians were much char- acterized at the end of the colonial period as ignorant, lazy, drunken, vicious sodomites, naturally prone to violence, barbarism, and rebellion.30 On the other hand, however, they were also seen as being highly suggestible and, in a certain sense, passive. For example, in 1800 the parish priest of Tem- ascaltepec in central New Spain described the Indians of the area as naturally prone to vice, irregular conduct, and theft, while their "fragility" and "im- becility" were also often remarked.31 A court official in the trial of some accused rebels in 1810 declared:

If we take into consideration their race, we see, as experience daily shows us, that the Indians are of such a malleable condition that they easily deny today what they

29 Mariano had something of a program for his movement, however, involving the restitution of Indian lands and elimination of Indian tributes, whereas Herrada made only vague suggestions as to changes that might follow his father's coronation. See also Archer, El ejercito en el Mexico borbdnico, 132-35.

30 This was taken up by postcolonial writers on Mexico, as well; see, for example, Alaman, Historia de Mejico, I, ch. 1.

31 AGN, Criminal, vol. 250, exped. 1, fols. lr-36r (1800); vol. 47, exped. 15, fols. 443r- 574v (1810); vol. 240, exped. 3, fols. lr-47v (1814).


affirmed yesterday, and they embrace the faction which first offers itself to them without thinking if it is good or bad.32

This attitude ran very deep among whites at all levels of Mexican society, and although in the records of the Herrada case it is nowhere openly expressed, it must have lurked just beneath the surface of the authorities' perceptions of Herrada as a danger to the state. Surely this idea is implicit in the Spaniards' view that although they could easily tell that Herrada was mad and his doc- trines absurd, the Indians could not. The irony is, of course, that Herrada found no ready response to his fantastic ideas among the Indians of San Juan del Rio, nor, judging by the case record, among Indians elsewhere in the north of New Spain.

If the mad messiah of Durango failed to raise an Indian rebellion, or even to evoke any notable response among his compatriots, in what way may his disorganized and contradictory ideas be said to have been a refraction of anything at all of Indian ideological reality? There were two modes, or levels of meaning, in which Herrada's pronouncements functioned to articulate un- derlying Indian psychosocial formulations. In a general and fairly explicit way, what he said and what he did expressed a widespread discontent among the Indians of New Spain which was to develop, at least in certain parts of the country, into substantial support by native villagers for the independence movement a few years later. The origins of this discontent were exceedingly complex and reached far back into the colonial period, indeed, to the era of the conquest itself. These factors were compounded at the end of the colonial period, at least in some areas of New Spain, by economic reversals, land hunger, and falling living standards.33 Here the traditional analytical distinc-

32 AGN, Criminal, vol. 57, exped. 6, fols. 101r- 16r (Ixmiquilpan, 1810). Another asesor in a trial of accused Indian insurgents from Amecameca said of Indians in general that "where some jump, all follow blindly without noticing the precipice" (AGN, Criminal, vol. 156, no exped. number, fols. 20r-167v (1810)). The subdelegado of Etla described the natural character of the Indians as being "easily seduced" (AGN, Criminal, vol. 400, no exped. number, no pag. (1800)). For more on this point, see Van Young, Hacienda and Market, 318-19. For a somewhat different view-that villagers in some parts of New Spain were actually willing to put up with a good deal of exploitation as long as it did not violate the principles of their particular moral economy-see Taylor, Drinking, Homicide, and Rebellion, esp. ch. 4.

33 I have attempted to sketch these trends in my essay, "The Age of Paradox: Mexican Agriculture at the End of the Colonial Period, 1750-1810," in The Economies of Mexico and Peru in the Late Colonial Period, 1760-1820, Nils Jacobsen and Hans-Jurgen Puhle, eds. (Berlin, 1985). For the development of a hypothesis on how these complex pressures affected the internal social dynamics of peasant villages and their relationships to outsiders in one region of Mexico, see Eric Van Young, "Conflict and Solidarity in Indian Village Life: The Guadalajara Region in the Late Colonial Period," Hispanic American Historical Review, 64:1 (February 1984), 55-79; Van Young, "Moving toward Revolt"; and, for a full-scale study of late colonial agrarian change in one important region of the colony, see idem, Hacienda and Market, esp. the conclusion. Among the best of recent regional studies that tend to substantiate the views outlined here are David A. Brading, Haciendas and Ranchos in the Mexican Bajio: Le6n, 1700-1860 (Cambridge, 1978); and Cheryl E. Martin, Rural Society in Colonial Morelos (Albuquerque, 1984).

402 ERIC VAN YOUNG

tion between long-term and short-term causes for the outbreak of the independence rebellions in 1810 has a great deal of explanatory power, since in the latter category one can point to a moderate subsistence crisis in 1809 and an

ongoing crisis of imperial political legitimacy dating from at least 1808. Putting questions of first causes and chronology aside, it is clear that Herrada drew upon a lexicon of familiar Indian symbols in his attempt to mobilize the village peasants of the north, however idiosyncratic his representation of them may have been. The ideas of the coronation of an Indian king; of the expulsion or murder of European-born Spaniards in particular or whites in general; of a kind of conspiratorial, secret Indian shadow-state hidden from but parallel to that of the Spanish colonial government; and even the notion that the font of political legitimacy for an Indian state redivivus was the Spanish monarch himself-all were common to rebellions during the independence period in Mexico, and to colonial Spanish America generally. These features of Herrada's erratic thought may be seen, then, as symbols of Indian resistance, and as symptoms of basic conflict between major socioethnic groups within Mexican society.34 The symbol of an Indian king and its related features functioned within the public domain, as it were, though they only broke through to the surface in the form of rebellion and possibly in those fantasies and inversions characteristic of ritual dramas.35

34 I have used an admittedly evasive terminology here-socioethnic-in labelling large-scale intergroup conflict in late colonial Mexico because of the formidable difficulty in applying the concept of class, except in the most nontechnical sense, as a structuring principle in explaining collective political violence. This is so because, although there was a great degree of overlap between economic status and ethnicity in the colony, they were never perfectly congruent, and the degree of congruence seems to have lessened perceptibly in the late colonial period as the economy of New Spain developed and ethnic endogamy declined. Nonetheless, Indian political and cultural autonomy, based on the communal landholding village, survived to a surprisingly great degree. This meant that insofar as conflict with non-Indians was concerned, the locus of the Indian peasant's economic identity was the same as the locus of his ethnic and cultural identity- the village. Peasant proletarianization and the replacement of social relations based upon ethnicity by those based upon class took place within this context. For a more detailed discussion of this view, see Van Young, Hacienda and Market, 352-53, et passim; and for a stimulating comparative treatment of the historical process of proletarianization, see David Goodman and Michael Redclift, From Peasant to Proletarian: Capitalist Development and Agrarian Transfor- mations (New York, 1982). The degree of congruence between race and class has been the subject of an interesting debate in recent years, beginning with the book by John K. Chance, Race and Class in Colonial Oaxaca (Stanford, 1978), and continuing with various articles and rejoin- ders about colonial Oaxaca in the pages of Comparative Studies in Society and History by Chance and William B. Taylor (1977, 1979); Stuart Schwartz, Robert McCaa, and Arturo Grubessich (1979); and Patricia Seed, Philip F. Rust, Robert McCaa, and Stuart Schwartz (1983).

35 On this point see, again, the extensive treatment by Bricker, Indian Christ, Indian King; for an interesting comparative analysis of inversions and historical re-enactment rituals in Mexico and the Andean area, see Nathan Wachtel, The Vision of the Vanquished: The Spanish Conquest of Peru through Indian Eyes (New York, 1977), esp. pt. 1. For some general comments on symbol and inversion in ritual dramas, see Victor Turner's "Comments and Conclusions," in The Reversible World: Symbolic Inversion in Art and Society, Barbara A. Babcock, ed. (Ithaca, 1978), 276-96; for a provocative but less than convincing interpretation of the Hidalgo revolt of 1810 in terms of psychoanalytic theory, see Victor Turner, "Hidalgo: History as Social Drama," in his Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society (New York, 1974), 98-155.


On a second level of meaning, however, one encounters in Herrada's ideas, and in the behavior of Indian rebels and rioters in Mexico as a whole, not the overt expression of conflict, but an encoded attempt at accommodation to an oppressive structure. This is the meaning, in a broader social sense, of Her- rada's attraction toward whites despite his equally clearly expressed hostility and Indian irredentism. One need not look far into Herrada's statements to find evidence of this deep-seated contradiction. It is true that the anti-Spanish expressions are more plentiful and explicit. In his forged passport-decree he strongly enjoined all Indians and Indian officials, on pain of death for themselves and the whites involved, to keep secret his mission from all "gachupines or Castilians or those who take themselves for Spaniards or those who are mulatto Indians who hold themselves as gentlemen, and troublemakers . . . and gachupin intendants." To the Indian general of San Juan del Rio

Herrada declared that if necessary all the villages under the jurisdiction of the general should be convoked in his defense against the white authorities. He constructed a grandiose fantasy in which he got the better of a wealthy and influential Spaniard of San Luis Potosi and a city magistrate as well, humiliat- ing them both in the process. Other instances abound in his testimony. The closest he ever came to giving a historical justification for his schematic political program was his insistence that the Spanish had oppressed and en- serfed the Indians and that the gachupines should all be expelled simultaneously from New Spain.

On the other hand, whether consciously or unconsciously, Herrada repeat- edly evidenced a desire to be associated with whites. In the very same document in which he enjoined Indian village officials not to divulge the nature of his mission, he commanded, or his father commanded, that Spanish chief magistrates "render him the justice due him because they are esteemed by his Lofty Highness. ..." He craved and realized, at least in his fantasy, the society of Spanish officials and military men. Many of the signatories to his petition were Spaniards, though of what derivation it is impossible to determine. Among these were the officials of many northern settlements, pre- sidios, and missions, as well as several intendants and a host of owners, administrators, and overseers of rural estates. Moreover, he claimed to have undertaken his secret mission under dispensation of a proclamation from Viceroy Azanza. Perhaps most interesting of all, Herrada asserted twice that his father's impending coronation was to be carried out by authority of a royal decree issued by King Charles IV in 1786 because the Spanish in Mexico had oppressed the Indians and were "rebels against the law."

Herrada's ambivalent attitude toward whites was not unique to him, but brought him onto common ground, disturbed as he was, with Indian villagers throughout central Mexico. In this way he tapped into, as it were, an already strongly running current of animosity. In a psychic sense he unconsciously took up and utilized these ideas, fabricating a garbled but vivid fantasy of trial and triumph to compensate for an apparently emotionally impoverished child-

404 ERIC VAN YOUNG

hood. It is not entirely clear how his ambivalence toward whites actually played into his disturbance-what role it assumed in his own internal drama. Perhaps the Spanish authority figures he partially identified with represented for him father surrogates. Certainly the person of the father-king, with whom he identified to the point of assuming the kingly persona himself at times, functioned for him in some complex mediating role to reconcile his feelings of

grandeur and powerlessness. Whatever the case, the information on the origin of his disturbance, vague as it is, is more convincing than that on his adapta- tion. What must concern us here is not the tracing of those links, but the

relationship of Herrada's ideas to the symbolic and ideational substrate of Indian collective violence in the chaotic period beginning in 1810.

POPULAR IDEOLOGY, VIOLENCE, AND REBELLION

Compared to the actual violence directed against whites, most particularly European-bor Spaniards, in parts of New Spain in the period 1810-12 and even after, Herrada's vague threats of death and expulsion were child's play. For the present, it will serve to detail but one incident of many, that at the village of Atlacomulco, near Toluca in central Mexico, in late 1810. On All Saints' Day 1810, Hidalgo's rebellion having broken out to the north some six weeks earlier, a mob of Indian villagers suddenly attacked the house and shop of Don Romualdo Magdaleno Diaz, a European-born Spanish merchant of the town. The mob, said witnesses including Diaz's widow and daughter, launched a furious assault on the building with stones, smashed the doors, brutally murdered Diaz with knives and clubs, and sacked the store. He was so mutilated as to be virtually unrecognizable, testified his wife, and was left

by his assassins "a misery, covered with stones." The crowd was variously estimated at containing from a few score to some hundreds of people. During the following two days three other European Spaniards were publicly ex- ecuted in the village plaza after being reviled and abused by the mob of

villagers. One of the local Indians alleged to have taken a hand in Diaz's murder testified that the gachupin "had a very hard head, that he had hit him with a club and with stones and he still hadn't died."36 In another incident, Indians murdered a gachupin on a country road by an initially mortal lance- thrust, and then they bashed in his head with stones and stabbed him several times for good measure.37 Such murders, in the form both of individual

36 AGN, Criminal, vol. 229, no exped. number, fols. 263r-413v (1811); vol. 231, exped. 1, fols. lr-59r (1811). For some other instances of mob violence by Indian villagers against gachupines, see the cases, among others, of Amecameca in AGN, Criminal, vol. 156, no exped. number, fols. 20r-167v, 175r-416v, 432r-450v, 521r-530v (1810); and of Cuernavaca in vol. 147, exped. 15, fols. 443r-574v (1810). For a relatively late instance of such a riot, see the case of Jilotepec in AGN, Criminal, vol. 26, exped. 9, no pag. (1818).

37 AGN, Criminal, vol. 45, exped. 6, fols. 150r-181r (1811); vol. 279, exped. 1, fols. Ir-4v (1811).


killings and mob actions in village riots (tumultos), while not numerous in the years after 1810, nonetheless occurred with some frequency.38

One need not dwell on such sensational incidents to realize that something more was happening than simple political assassination. The killings of European-born Spaniards in the insurrectionary context ordinarily shared certain characteristics. First, the victims were almost exclusively gachupines, as opposed to American-born Spaniards-this should be stressed. Second, the victims were often low-status clerks or minor functionaries who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, but could hardly be classed as "oppressors," though they may have been associated with wealthy and powerful European Spaniards in the popular mind. And, third, many of the assassinations had about them a quality of excessive, almost ritual, violence, as though the acting out of the aggression were as important as the elimination of the object. The brutality described by the witnesses to the Atlacomulco murders was perhaps unusual in degree, but hardly in kind, and betrays a compulsive and sacrificial aspect that we have come to associate with ax- murderers and ice-pick killers.39

Despite the almost preternatural violence they inflicted on their gachupin victims, the Indian villagers of central New Spain demonstrated an ambivalence toward European-born Spaniards and whites similar in many re- spects to that of the mad messiah himself. This was particularly expressed in the veneration, almost as for a messiah, in which many rebellious rural people, especially Indian peasants, held the Spanish king. In one striking instance, for example, a group of young Indian rebel soldiers from an area in the Bajio who had followed the banner of Father Hidalgo to the climactic battle of Las Cruces, near Mexico City, were arrested and interrogated in early November 1810. The king of Spain, they testified, had commanded them to follow the priest and to kill the viceroy and all other gachupines, dividing their property up among the poor.40 The deposed King Ferdinand VII

38 Literally dozens of village riots occurred in central Mexico, broadly defined, in the early stages of the independence period, particularly around 1810-12, though of course they over- lapped with other forms of popular rebellion as well. Sometimes linked with the activities of local guerrilla bands, most such tumultos shared the characteristics of classic peasant jacqueries: they flared suddenly, were quite violent, had broad local participation, and died down as quickly as they had begun, often apparently as much because of loss of momentum as of effective military repression. These local, short-lived uprisings were endemic to certain parts of New Spain before 1810 and often involved resistance to outside authority or conflict with neighboring villages. For a detailed treatment, see Taylor, Drinking, Homicide, and Rebellion.

39 On the cathartic effects of violence in anticolonial wars, see the suggestive comments of Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York, 1966); and for a chilling reconstruction of the crime of a "psychotic" killer, see Robert Lindner, The Fifty-Minute Hour: A Collection of True Psychoanalytic Tales (New York, 1954).

40 AGN. Criminal, vol. 134, exped. 3, no pag. (1810). Michael Burke cites the same document in his provocative "Peasant Responses to the Hidalgo Revolt in Central Mexico, 1810- 1813," manuscript (1980).

406 ERIC VAN YOUNG

was said to be travelling with and under the protection of Father Hidalgo (or his sometime lieutenant Ignacio Allende), and was reportedly wearing a silver mask to conceal his identity.41 In another instance, it was widely rumored that during the same battle of Las Cruces a mysterious person appeared in a curtained carriage: "when people come to see him, they humble themselves and go away very happy."42 The king's name was also associated in some instances with that of the Virgin of Guadalupe, a popular rebel symbol par excellence.43

The most interesting aspect of this ambivalence is the logical contradiction lying at its heart. The contradiction consists in the fact that the king should have been seen, in the eyes of common people, as the archetypal gachupin, the intrusive, alien figure of oppressive white authority. After all, it was in the king's name that justice was administered and tributes collected, and his name was constantly invoked to legitimate a social and political hierarchy in which Indian village dwellers occupied the lowest niche. Furthermore, it was in the monarch's name and under his banners that the royalist armies marched in 1810 and later, sometimes wreaking terrible vengeance in the countryside of New Spain. Occasionally this contradiction in popular ideology was even expressed by the same person at the same time. For example, during a public ceremony acclaiming King Ferdinand VII in the pueblo of Epazoyuca, near Zempoala, in late October 1808, the Indian Pablo Hilario, carrying a standard with an image of the Virgin of Guadalupe and standing next to the local Indian governor who was carrying a similar standard with the picture of Ferdinand on it, was heard to shout "Viva Fernando Septimo y mueran todos los gachupines !"44 Yet the quasi-messianic hopes attached to the Spanish king, at least in central Mexico, are unmistakable in such popular manifestations. To the degree that the king was identified as a gachupin, he should have been considered an enemy of the most down-trodden sector of the Mexican population. On the other hand, if he was converted in popular ideology into a messianic figure, to that degree he must have ceased to be a gachupin. And if other whites in the countryside were reviled and assassinated by Indian vil-

lagers and others ostensibly because of an accident of birth they shared with the king, why should he be venerated and they annihilated? Furthermore, as far as I have been able to determine, the speculations about, and acclamations of, the king were not associated with any explicit programmatic elements. The simplest form these might have taken would have been the traditional

slogan "Long live the king-Death to bad government!" but in fact not even

41 AGN, Criminal, vol. 175, no exped. number, fols. 369r-392v (1811); vol. 204, exped. 10, fols. 191r-205v (1811); vol. 194, exped. 1, fols. lr-13r (1811).

42 AGN, Criminal, vol. 454, no exped. number, no pag. (1811). 43 AGN, Criminal, vol. 147, exped. 15, fols. 443r-574v (Cueravaca, 1810); vol. 454, no

exped. number, no pag. (1811). 44 AGN, Criminal, vol. 226, exped. 5, fols. 267r-361r (1808).


such a primitive political program appears among the Indian village rebels.45 The pronouncements one does encounter represent not only the use of the king's name as an umbrella of legitimacy for rebellion, but a projection of the image of the king himself as a rebel, and an attempt to identify him with popular forms of rebellion.

None of the conventional schemes regarding the etiology of these contradictory elements in popular action and ideology in 1810 and after takes us very far in providing explanations. The notion that New Spain and other parts of the empire were pushed into rebellion by the rupture of a colonial compact has little credibility in explaining why the emotional energies of Indian villagers were engaged by the idea of rebellion. Nor is the loss of legitimacy of the Spanish ruling dynasty sufficient to explain the villagers' collective violence against the colonial regime, even if the regime could be dissociated from the invocation of the king's name in the act of rebellion itself. Insofar as violence directed against gachupines is concerned, the theories that Indians actually cared about the perceived political disfranchisement of the colonial creole elite, that they were somehow incited to do the political dirty work of discontented creoles, that they were moved to rebellion by their own natural barbarousness, or that the victimization of European-born Spaniards was essentially a protest against symbols of an oppressive order-none of these explanations convincingly accounts for the Indian rebellion or the contradictory elements it embraced.46

In the face of the implausibility or inadequacy of these partial explanations, an hypothesis may be developed which resolves the apparent contradiction in popular action and ideology and at the same time points toward larger social meanings: the violence directed against gachupines by rural people in general and Indians in particular may be seen as a process of scapegoating. In this process, the relatively few and undefended gachupines became the highly cathected objects of an hostility and aggression whose appropriate target should have been the whites as a whole, including Mexican creoles. In this scheme, the king became the object of veneration and of messianic hopes rather than of violence for various reasons, chief among them the patriarchal and protectionist stance traditionally assumed by the Spanish sovereign vis-a- vis his Indian vassals.47 Other whites in the countryside mostly escaped the

45 On the use and significance of this slogan in the comunero revolt in New Granada (Colom- bia) in the early 1780s, see the suggestive treatment of John L. Phelan, The People and the King: The Comunero Revolution in Colombia, 1781 (Madison, 1978).

46 For detailed discussion of these traditional explanations, see Van Young, "Who Was That Masked Man, Anyway?" 21-24.

47 Much of the Indian protectionist legislation, it is undeniable, was violated in both spirit and letter: the laws against the free and unconsidered alienation of Indian lands provide an example. For a fuller discussion of this point for one region, see Van Young, Hacienda and Market, 271- 342, et passim. Nonetheless, other royal institutions provided protection in fact as well as in symbol; one of the most important was the General Indian Court, established in the sixteenth

408 ERIC VAN YOUNG

kind of violence meted out to gachupin victims by Indian rebels and rioters. A number of possible explanations suggest themselves for this, though they can be discussed only briefly here. In the first place, there were many more creoles, however narrowly or broadly one wishes to define the term, than there were gachupines. A war of extermination against them by Indian peasants-which, in fact, many creoles came to fear after 1810-would have offered concomitant military difficulties for the dark and poor rural masses.48 In the second place, it was probably difficult to identify creoles at the local level in many instances. Numbers of them, especially in rural areas, were by lifestyle and social status indistinguishable from people of mixed blood, and were heavily intermarried with them.49 Third, and central to the argument outlined here, it is not unreasonable to assume that the Indians' intense antiwhite sentiments were to some degree counterbalanced by positive affective bonds. That is, their feelings were probably ambivalent, a not uncharacteristic emotion in symbiotic situations.50 Finally, after the outbreak of the 1810 rebellion, a quickly forged though problematical alliance between white creole rebels and village Indians, among others, in the face of royalist counterin-

century, which insured privileged access for Indians to the colonial legal system. See Woodrow Borah, Justice by Insurance: The General Indian Court and the Legal Aides of the Half-Real (Berkeley, 1983).

48 On the racial composition of New Spain at the end of the colonial period, see Alexander von Humboldt, Ensayo politico sobre el Reino de la Nueva Espana (Mexico City, 1966), 35ff; and, among others, David A. Brading, Miners and Merchants in Bourbon Mexico, 1763-1810 (Cambridge, 1971), 13-14; Colin M. MacLachlan and Jaime E. Rodriguez, The Forging of the Cosmic Race: A Reinterpretation of Colonial Mexico (Berkeley, 1980), 197, et passim; and Nicolas Sanchez-Albornoz, The Population of Latin America: A History (Berkeley, 1974), 135- 38. Humboldt's figures have been much criticized, but for present purposes they are sufficient to indicate orders of magnitude. Out of a total Mexican population exceeding 6 million people, whites made up slightly more than a million, or about 18 percent, and Indians more than 3.5 million, or about 60 percent. European-born Spaniards amounted only to about fifteen or twenty thousand, much less than 1 percent of the total. On fears of caste war, see Hamill, Hidalgo Revolt, and DiTella, "Las clases peligrosas."

49 On the relatively high rates of intermarriage between Mexican-born whites and nonwhites in general, but especially among ethnically proximate groups in the population, see Sherburne F. Cook and Woodrow Borah, Essays in Population History: Mexico and the Caribbean (Berkeley, 1974), II, 180-269; David A. Brading and Celia Wu, "Population Growth and Crisis: Le6n, 1720-1860," Journal of Latin American Studies, 5:1 (1973), 1-36; Chance, Race and Class in Colonial Oaxaca. All these authors point, however, to the considerable regional variations in marriage patterns and racial mixing.

50 Such ambivalence, in fact, is an essential element of the symbiotic mother-child relationship of early childhood, and gives rise to the splitting alluded to above. Before the child learns that its negative and positive feelings may be both received and reciprocated by its primary object, the mother, it defends itself from the implications of its own occasionally destructive rage against that object by splitting the mother into separate personae, one good, the other bad. This psychic defense, while adaptive in the infant and appropriate to an early developmental stage, is inappropriate and even pathological at other stages, and is considered a regression later on. On this point see, among others, Margaret S. Mahler, "Rapprochement Subphase of the Separation- Individuation Process," Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 41:3 (1972), 487-506; and P. Giovacchini, Treatment of Primitive Mental States (New York, 1979), 20-39.


surgent military activity, tended to reinforce hostile attitudes toward gachupines at the village level in many areas. In fact, some local eruptions of rebellion were preceded or accompanied by rumors that armies of gachupines were coming to behead entire populations without distinction of age or sex.51

One requirement of this hypothesis is evidence of a generalized and strong antiwhite feeling on the part of Indian peasants, so that gachupines became the proximate objects in a kind of collective displacement process. While love may go unrequited, hate ordinarily cannot. In view of ample evidence that whites at all levels of Mexican society feared and despised Indians, despite a symbiotic dependence on them, it is difficult to believe that the feeling was not reciprocated. Substantial evidence of such ill will appears in the colonial documentation, and indicates that this situation antedated the era of the independence struggle.52 Although gachupines were victimized very consistently by village rioters and rebels, and whites as a group were not, there is also evidence from incidents after 1810 demonstrating a general stance of hostility and aggression toward all whites. For example, an 1817 judicial review of the evidence in the Amecameca riot of 1810 noted that many of the Indian rioters had wanted to imprison all Spaniards, whether creole or gachupin.53 A good deal of testimony confirmed that an 1811 Indian conspiracy in the Chalco area near Mexico City was awaiting only the arrival of the insurgents "to take the heads of all the white residents."54 But the scapegoating or displacement process hypothesized here focussed this hostility against only a small part of the white group.

The question arises, of course, as to why such a process of psychosocial splitting into the "good father" quasi-messianic figure and the "bad gachupines" was necessary at all. Aside from the reasons suggested above, there were some more fundamental factors at play in the actions and beliefs of

51 Such rumors were associated with the 1810 tumultos at Atlacomulco, Cuernavaca, and Amecameca, mentioned above, and with other incidents at Toluca in November 1810 and in the summer of 1811-AGN, Criminal, vol. 225, exped. 3, fols. 39r-75v (1810); vol. 15, exped. 8, no pag. (1811); at Tulancingo in May 1811-AGN, Criminal, vol. 61, exped. 7, fols. 303r-323r (1811); at Ixmiquilpan in June 1811- AGN, Criminal, vol. 64, exped. 5, fols. 108r-162v (1811); and at Guadalajara, before the climactic battle of Calder6n, in early January 1811- AGN, Operaciones de Guerra (hereafter cited as OG), vol. 4A, fols. 123r-v (Cruz to Calleja, 7 January 1811).

52 See, for example, the reports relating to the general situation in the pubelo of Huautla, in the Huasteca region, in the years 1806-8, in AGN, Criminal, vol. 280, exped. 9, fols. 387r-419r (1808). Specifically with regard to ethnic and social relations on colonial haciendas in one region of New Spain, see Van Young, Hacienda and Market, 266-68. Although they were not often made explicit, such feelings must have been behind much of the Indian xenophobia towards non- Indian outsiders as described, for example, in Taylor, Drinking, Homicide, and Rebellion, ch. 4.

53 AGN, OG, vol. 9, fols. 63r-65v (1817). Earlier testimony in the Amecameca case indi- cated that the pejorative coyote was widely used by local Indians to refer to all whites (AGN, Criminal, vol. 156, no exped. number, fols. 20r-167v (1810)).

54 AGN, Criminal, vol. 274, exped. 2, fols. 3r-49v (1811): ". . que lleguen breve los insurgentes para quitarles las cabezas a todos los de raz6n."

410 ERIC VAN YOUNG

central Mexican Indian rebels and rioters. The peasants whose tumultos and other rebellious activities we have discussed were operating with an ampu- tated cosmology. That is to say, as a practical matter they were incapable of making a total assault on the colonial system in the form of denying the king's mystical authority, attacking all whites, and framing the alternate reality of a total millenarian or political program. They had lived so long in the proximity of whites that despite ambivalence or outright hostility toward them the social cost-effectiveness of a generalized race war would have been too low to justify the risks. So they preserved what they could of a sensible but flawed social universe by scapegoating the hapless gachupines and venerating the monarch. The king, in this context, represented a principle of suprapolitical moral authority in an otherwise destructured or anomic universe.55 While his positive image as a patriarchal protector of the Indians assured his candidacy for messianic status, it was only a necessary, and not a sufficient, condition. The motive force for the simultaneous fury and the messianic fantasy lay beneath the surface of Mexican society, awaiting only some fortuitous event to unleash it. At base these apparently contradictory social phenomena were really two sides of the same coin, and were both called to the service of preserving the integrity of the most important element in the Indians' cultural identity, their villages.56 This inward- and backward-looking vision also made a generalized race war unlikely, by the way-a considerable irony in view of white fears.

While this model of rebellion and psychosocial process may go some way toward explaining popular violence in central Mexico, it is not completely congruent with the facts in the case of Jose Berardo Herrada. Nonetheless, the points of difference tend rather to reinforce the basic hypothesis with

respect to both sets of data, and to emphasize the resonance between the cultural and symbolic substrate of collective action in the former case, and the locally idiosyncratic and pathological distortion of that same substrate in the latter. There are two major points to be considered here. First, one never

actually sees in the data on Indian riot explicit evidence of the kind of ambivalence toward whites that came to the surface in Herrada's statements to the colonial authorities. What one does see is the ideological polarization between king and gachupin, and its practical consequences in the form of quasi-messianism and ritualistic violence, respectively. The "splitting" hypothesis provides the missing element in this explanation, and allows us to infer from psychoanalytic theory a link between behaviors which otherwise

55 The idea of a destructured moral universe is drawn from Wachtel, Vision of the Vanquished. The Church, by the way, would have represented the same principle of authority, which accounts, at least in part, for the prominence of ecclesiastics in the early phases of the independence struggle. Whether churchmen led or followed the rebellions is not always clear, however.

56 This point is made at greater length in Van Young, Hacienda and Market, 352-53; idem, "Conflict and Solidarity"; idem, "Moving toward Revolt," 23-25.


would be irrationally contradictory. In Herrada's case the material is fairly explicit, though somewhat obliquely stated, and may be viewed as the product of a kind of luxury of expression allowed only to madmen. The fantasy to which his disturbed mind gave free rein lay buried in a kind of collective unconscious in the case of the Indian rioters, and must be rebuilt inferentially. It is as though we were looking at the two ends of a wrecked ship protruding from the sand, and had to extrapolate the rest of the structure which we believe lies beneath the surface.

The second point concerns Herrada's program, such as it was. It went one important step further than what typically appears in the evidence from central Mexico: he put forward an Indian king to replace the Spanish king. In Her- rada's fantastic construction of this event there was, admittedly, the peculiarity that the Spanish king voluntarily stripped himself of sovereignty over New Spain in favor of Herrada's father, the Indian governor of Tlaxcala. Why this element should be present in the drama is not clear-perhaps it represented a highly amplified playing out of Herrada's own delusions of grandeur. Whatever the case, the substitution of an Indian for a Spanish king seems to have been more characteristic of Indian conspiracy and rebellion in the north- erly and peripheral regions of New Spain than in the more densely populated core areas of the country. Although an Indian millennium is nowhere explicitly mentioned in the evidence, the ideas of Indian rebels outside the center of the colony were certainly more extreme and politically coherent than elsewhere. In the Tepic conspiracies the crowning of an Indian king was central. Similarly, the recurring disturbances in the Huasteca and Sierra de Metztitlan areas after 1810 specifically rejected the legitimacy of the Spanish king, in one instance in favor of the candidacy of Ignacio Allende.57 Further- more, there are at least hints of chiliastic aspects in the Mariano episode and in Herrada's case.

Both of these elements-Indian kings (or at least kings other than the Spanish), and chiliasm-are conspicuously missing from the instances of Indian rebellion examined so far for central Mexico. There, the messianic hopes were pinned on the Spanish king himself. If a full-blown Indian millennium did not appear even to the north of central Mexico, conspiracies and rebellion there may have been closer to the millennial end of the continuum than they were in the core of New Spain. In the core area, then, we have the peculiarity of a messiah without a millennium, the product of a truncated eschatological vision whose origins are to be found, surely, in the cultural history of the country as a whole. I suggest, however, that in areas where the

57 AGN, Criminal, vol. 251, exped. 10, fols. 309r-319v (Zacualtipan, 1812): "... que no creyeran en el Rey"; vol. 163, exped. 18, fols. 307r-320r (Molango, 1811): "[Allende] va a ser nuestro catolico." On an earlier plot in the Tepic area, see AGN, Historia, vol. 428, no exped. number, fols. 37r-76r (1801); and on Mariano, see the Herrada case, AJAC 34-9-763 (1801- 1806).

412 ERIC VAN YOUNG

local Indian people were in some sense less acculturated and less well inte- grated into Spanish economic and political life, as they must have been on the near northern periphery, rebellion and popular rebellious projects tended to be more programmatic, in a broad way, and to lack the messianic focus on the person of the Spanish king.58 Thus, again, the political extremism notable as an element in Herrada's deranged program may be seen as a characteristic of a certain subculture within colonial Mexico, but well suited to the expression of his particular internal conflicts.59

One final point about popular ideology and collective action during the early independence era will bring our argument full circle. To believe, as the conventional wisdom has it, that rebels at the popular level shared the same political agenda as the elite creole directorate of the movement strains reason and flies in the face of much of the evidence. Popular ideology was couched in terms more metaphorical and symbolic than explicitly political. Beyond this, the goals of elite and much of popular rebellion were not only different from each other, but incompatible. In the case of the elite creole directorate, the rebellion represented an effort at a sort of proto-statebuilding. In the case of the Indian rebels, the issue was rather one of preserving the autonomy of communities that survived outside the state or nation. In any event, these conclusions point to the necessity of disaggregating the independence movement into a number of separate movements or rebellions, conflated at points but essentially of different natures.

A SHORT CODA

As to Jose Berardo Herrada, alias Jose Silvestre Sarifiana, the mad messiah of Durango, the final irony is that, having learned so much from his words both about him and the age in which he lived, we know nothing of his fate. In late November and early December 1805 he was being conducted by stages, under armed guard, from Durango to Guadalajara, and thence to Veracruz for transportation to Havana to begin serving his six-year sentence at hard labor. On the night of 14 December he escaped from the room where he was being

58 The typology of peasant revolts in Mexico developed by Friedrich Katz in "Rural Uprisings in Mexico," manuscript (1982), recognizes the tendency for those in peripheral areas (i.e., outside the center of the country) to take on a more clearly millenarian flavor.

59 Ultimately it is inadvisable to attempt to apply a diagnostic label to Herrada's mental disturbance, for a number of reasons. Where the evidence and the expertise of the observer in clinical evaluation are stronger, however, such efforts can yield fascinating results; see, for example, the brilliant piece by Ernst Kris, "A Psychotic Artist of the Middle Ages," in Modern Perspectives in Western Art History: An Anthology of Twentieth-Century Writings on the Visual Arts, W. Eugene Kleinbauer, ed. (New York, 1971), 285-92. Kris analyzes in this short article the work and character of Opicinus de Canastris, an Italian cleric of the early fourteenth century, and credibly concludes that he was (in the clinical sense) a schizophrenic. It is interesting, in passing, that Opicinus's work, much of it containing autobiographical elements, shares certain characteristics with Herrada's testimony: grandiosity, an obsessional quality, occasional disjunc- tions of thought, etcetera. The reference to Kris's article I owe to Ann R. Milstein.


held on the Hacienda de Tlacotes, outside Zacatecas, and disappeared. The colonial authorities were still looking for him in February of the following year, but presumably never found him. What became of him? Did he continue to wander the dusty roads of New Spain in search of his father and a few pesos begged from credulous Indians? Did he live out his life as an eccentric farmer in a quiet village? One is tempted to think that he took up arms in 1810 under the banner of the Virgin and worked upon the chaotic reality of those times the equally chaotic fantasies in his head. If so, did he end face down in the mud, like many other tortured modern heroes, on some obscure Mexican bat- tlefield, at Aculco, or Las Cruces, or Calderon? Part of his story, with its power and pathos, he left us; the rest of his secrets he never surrendered.

mad messiah of durango

Documents