In keeping with Enlightenment ideals, Indians (but not the military or priests) were declared legally equal to other citizens. Official documents referred to residents of the abolished communities as “those previously called Indians.”157
Not only were indigenous people denied separate status, but their communal land-holding system came under legislative attack. An 1826 Veracruz law decreed that “all the land of indigenous communities, forested or not, will be reduced to private property, divided with equality to each person. . . who belongs to the community.” Veracruz hacendados attempted to accelerate land privatization by releasing cattle to forage on Indian cornfields and by laying claim to land occupied by Indians for countless generations but for which they had no legal title. By the late 1820s, twelve Mexican states, including the central highland states of Mexico, Puebla, and Michoacan, had passed laws mandating the division of communal holdings into private plots.
This legislation sought to replace Indian owners, who had adapted to their environment and coevolved with it, with owners who attempted to control nature and reshape it for their own purposes. In northern Veracruz, the elite sought to remove a biologically diverse tropical forest where Indians engaged in slash-and-burn agriculture and replace it with grasslands that fed one species—cattle.158
Despite the enactment of privatization legislation, states were politically divided, so they could not implement the radical changes in land tenure they had mandated. The fact that states were legislating for changes in land tenure rather than the federal government indicates the active role played by state governments of the period. These states saw no reason why they should wait for officials in Mexico City to formulate agrarian policy.159
Economics provided one of the rationales for the compulsory division of Indian communal lands. Legislators felt that the nation would benefit from having communal land with Indian labor becoming subject to market forces. Those smugly accepting this notion declared that such land would remain in the hands of individual Indians.
Others viewed ending the special status enjoyed by Indians as the elimination of a pernicious colonial legacy. Benito Juarez, as governor of Oaxaca, claimed that the Indian community must be broken at all costs, so that individual initiative and modern forms of representative government could prevail. Liberal Gomez Farias viewed the existence of different races in the same society as an eternal cause of conflict. Not only did he refuse to recognize distinctions between races but he sought to hasten the fusion of Indians with the rest of Mexican society.160
Fear of the Indian and outright racism also motivated legislative changes. Conservative Lucas Alaman claimed that teaching Indians to read was dangerous, since if they knew how to read, subversive material might fall into their hands and increase their discontent and rebelliousness. In 1824, a clerical member of the Veracruz Congress described Indians as “downright savages, who had successfully resisted every attempt to educate them.”161
Changes in the status of the Indian were significant not only because of the radical change demanded in the lives of these affected but because, as late as 1850, Indians constituted roughly half of Mexico’s population. As municipal governments replaced Indian community governments, Indians had less direct control over their everyday affairs and had to share administration with others who were more powerful and more knowledgeable in the mechanisms of formal electoral government. In many cases, Indians had to pay taxes not formerly levied on them—taxes whose amount could exceed that of the abolished tribute. Finally, after independence, as a result of their being declared legally equal to their fellow citizens, Indians were subject to compulsory military service for the first time.162
Dividing Indian lands into individually owned plots inevitably resulted in much of the divided land falling into the hands of non-Indians. Those acquiring such lands enjoyed far greater economic power and had closer ties to the judiciary, which would rule on disputed land claims. In some cases, Indians were required to submit land titles to authorities who failed to return the documents. After independence, the government failed to accept as a responsibility the Crown’s practice of providing legal assistance to Indians.163
Although legislators rationalized legal equality as a step to benefit the Indians, the reality was far from that. In general terms, the nation preserved the social structure built up over the three previous centuries, and Indians remained a dominated group. In 1841, Fanny Calderon de la Barca, the wife of the first Spanish ambassador to Mexico, wrote: “Certainly no visible improvement has taken place in their condition since independence. They are quite as poor and quite as ignorant and quite as degraded as they were in 1808 . . .”164
World History
