The Machete and the Cross: Campesino Rebellion in Yucatán . By Don E. Dumond. (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1997. Pp. 591. $57.50.)
THOMAS BENJAMIN This is the arst comprehensive history of the “Caste War” of Yucatan (1847–1903). Several scholars in recent years, including Patch, Remmers, González Navarro, Bricker, and Rugeley—have examined signiacant aspects, causes, or consequences of this event, the largest and most successful peasant uprising in nineteenth-century Latin American history.1 Dumond, with an investment of four decades of study, travel, and research, has produced a monumental work of historical scholarship. Dumond provides a detailed political, social, and economic history of the Yucatan peninsula and its peoples from the beginning to the end of the nineteenth century—his focus upon the massive rebellion of eastern Yucatecan campesinos of mid-century. Whereas recent scholars have generally depended upon Yucatecan manuscript sources, Dumond is the arst historian to have exploited thoroughly the archives of neighboring British Honduras, today known as Belize. Because the British ofacials, traders, and loggers of Belize were closely and continually involved with generations of rebels, these public records allow Dumond to unravel and fully narrate complicated political developments, military operations, and negotiations. Dumond, going against the grain of the recent historiography, argues with considerable authority that the Caste War was not a purely Indian movement; nor was it fundamentally agrarian in origin. According to Dumond, the social and legal fuzziness between Indians and non-Indians was substantial by the mid-nineteenth century, thus making this rebellion a campesino one. Most rebels were Maya in origin and speech, but they identiaed themselves as underdogs more than as “Indians.” These underdogs were more disturbed by civil taxation, church fees, and similar exactions than the spread of debt peonage or the alienation of public lands. Dumond bases this argument on several rebel statements of grievance and related peace proposals. He demonstrates the deep-seated hatred felt by campesinos in the eastern frontier against elite Yucatecans (they called them “Spaniards”) and tells the story about how they established and, in effect, maintained their own free nation for afty years. As the rebel chiefs put it in 1888, “[A]bout 50 years ago we successfully struggled for our independence and drove the Spaniards from our country. At various times since then they have invaded us, but under God’s protection we have not yet been beaten. We are now