(A continuation of The Caste War of Yucatan, by Nelson Reed)
Colonel Novelo had been busy to the south. After his early tour near Lake Bacalar, he had established himself at the crosstrails of Pachmul, surprising Maya supply columns of mules and porters coming from the English depots on the Hondo, columns which had thought themselves safe after skirting the Bacalar garrison. He also followed the established routine, collecting prisoners and raiding for corn. With the larger force and the more strategic position, he attracted his full share of Indios, who assembled against him from the most distant points. Learning of this through prisoners, Novelo sent messengers through the jungle to González camp, about twenty-five miles to the northeast, where they asked for help and a concentration of forces. But there was bad blood between the commanders, and González answered that he had trouble enough of his own. Novelo then recalled his raiders and opened the battle against the massing enemy, attacking their camp on February 22, 1855. The attack went forward too quickly; it was cut off, hacked up, and got back to base with heavy losses. The Maya immediately tightened the siege, and there was heavy fighting for the next two days. On February 25 the Colonel made his final effort, throwing 250 men into a single assault against the barricades. It failed. Obviously, the season was over, and two days later he started his units north.
As always, no matter how close their siege, the Maya let the soldiers break out when they wanted to, preferring to shadow the retreat along the trail, waiting until the column relaxed as it neared security. Then they struck. Novelo’s rear guard was surprised and overrun, and some 200 sick and wounded were abandoned; the survivors reached Peto on March 4. Colonel González, inactive during all of this, with little pressure on his line from the otherwise engaged Indios, retired ten days later, without casualties except for many of his prisoners who, it was said, died of hunger and thirst.
It was an expensive year for the army of Yucatan. In 1855 about 1,000 men, perhaps fifty percent of those in the field, were killed in action, and hundreds more died of cholera or were wounded. Yet for all this, the ultimate solution to the war, once apparently so close, had slipped through their hands again. And so it was simply decided that the rebellion called the Caste War had come to an end. This is the point where its major historians, Serapio Baqueiro and Eligio Ancona, both men of the next generation, turn their attention away from the eastern forest to concentrate on the political squabbles of the Ladino west. There had been no victory, and there would be fighting for years to come. But after 1855 it was considered a new thing: not a rebellion or Caste War, but rather a struggle between two sovereign powers, Mexico and Chan Santa Cruz. Of all the native revolts in America since the Arawaks used their wooden spears against the sailors of Columbus, this one alone had succeeded. If it could not be suppressed, Yucatecan pride decreed that it should be ignored.
THE MAZEHUALOB OF Chan Santa Cruz had drained the cup of suffering, and that suffering had transformed them into a new people, the Cruzob (the Maya plural suffix added to the Spanish word for Cross). José María Barrera’s Cross was a symbol so responsive to their need that it survived its creator’s obscure death (at Yokdzonot on December 31, 1852) without difficulty.
The message, not the prophet, had social life, and it was well nourished with martyrs’ blood: Florentino Chan was dead; Cosme Damián Pech, killed suppressing the Chichenha treaty; Juan Justo Yam, dead; Venancio Pec, dead (not Venancio Puc, who had a long career to come); and countless thousands of their followers, killed by bullet, machete, starvation, cholera, and despair. And yet the Cruzob survived. For eight years they had fought against a superior enemy, using pits, poisoned wells, poisoned snares, and clay bullets, accepting deadly volleys for a chance to get within machete range, planting corn only to see it stolen, running, then running again when there was no way to fight, hiding in the swamps, starving in the forest when surrender seemed the obvious answer.
The test was too great for many: for those who sought refuge at Chichenha, for the bands at Ixcanha, Locha, and Mesapich, for those who fled into Guatemala or Belize, for the isolated bands that lurked in the forest east of Valladolid. None of these people surrendered in fact, and they kept themselves apart from the Ladinos; but they accepted a status quo in which they were neglected and ignored, allowed to linger on at the fringe of society, eventually to be reabsorbed or die off.
Only the Cruzob, with their unique possession, the Speaking Cross, had made a positive response. The Cross supplied the higher authority necessary to every culture, an authority desperately lacking among the other tribes, causing them insecurity and leading them to hanker after priests, even white priests – a fact revealed in every treaty they made. The spiritual life of the other tribes was controlled, in large part, by foreigners: by the Bishop, an almost legendary figure, residing in far-off T-ho, and itinerant missionary priests. They knew the pain of isolation and spiritual poverty. The soldier of the Cross, on the other hand, was complete. His world centered on Chan Santa Cruz. Between his village and the shrine there was a full and harmonious relationship, giving security, authority, and religious guidance. He had no need to look beyond his territory, except for guns and ammunition; to get those, he could deal with the English on equal terms. This social integrity had enabled the soldiers of the Cross to survive the terrible years of trial; it kept them alive as a militant force, able to take advantage of the break when it came in the form of the Molas-Cepeda revolt, and it gave them the strength to endure cholera and fight off the columns of 1854 and 1855. The Cruzob had won the right to survive.
Now came the planting season, the first in eight years that would be undisturbed. The fields were burned, the rain fell, the seed was planted and grew into ripe husks of corn, with the Mazehual in peaceful attendance; and when the harvest came, he was the one to collect it rather than the Dzul raiders, and it went to feed his wife and children. A measure of normalcy returned to his life, and for this he gave thanks to the Speaking Cross.
(Up and forward with the “Citizens Organized for Liberty through Action.” Arriba y adelante con la “Organización de Cuidadanos para la Libertad a través de la Acción.” Siglas en Ingles – COLA.”
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September 15, 2010
Finca Solana
Corozal Town