The Maya Forest and Indigenous Resistance during the Caste War

This article provides an environmental history of indigenous resistance during the Caste War, a major Indian revolt that took place in the Yucata?n peninsula between 1847 and 1901. It argues that the evolution of the war was bound to the material conditions of the vast Maya rainforest and the expanding built environment at this area?s commodity frontiers. In this regard, the article advances two main theses. First, that the Maya rainforest was an ideal battleground for the insurgents? guerrilla warfare but extremely challenging for regular military columns. Second, that indigenous subversion and survival rested on both commodity extraction and everyday agricultural practices carried out in the forest. In short, indigenous resistance was built on the ecology and geography of the rainforest at the contested interstices of empires and nations.

Medicine, Midwifery, and the Law

A body of nearly ninety criminal trials for abortion and infanticide in nineteenth-century Yucatán reveal some contradictory traits. On one hand, the testimony that licensed physicians provided to courts about the nature of the medicines that midwives and boticarios supplied to pregnant Mayan women was surprisingly respectful and supportive of these unlicensed health practitioners. The cases reveal both the ongoing practice of Mayan medicinal and botanical knowledge in obstetrical health at the close of the nineteenth century and, despite public rhetoric to the contrary, individual doctors’ tolerance of, or accommodation to, such practices. On the other hand, the local judges who tried these cases displayed much less accommodation to Mayan defendants, reflecting the pronounced Mayan and non-Mayan social and political tensions that characterized the era of the peninsula’s Caste War.

COURT MARTIAL AND CONTRABAND IN 19TH CENTURY YUCATÁN. THE CASE OF BOAT “FOUR SISTERS”

This article deals with an issue of the court-martial functioning in Mexican state of Yucatán in the middle of the 19th century. The political violence, a very characteristic of the epoch, in Yucatán scaled up with a start of the ethno-social conflict between the government and predominantly Indian population of southeastern part of the state – the Caste War (1847–1901). For the juridical practices the constant political conflicts, domination of the Army and military men in public life meant broad simplification of judicial procedures, often executed by officer corps. One special place for the middle of the 19th century was the fortress of Bacalar, which controlled the border with British dominions in Belize. It was one of the crucial points for importation of contraband into Yucatán peninsula, and if before 1847 it had been mostly civil goods, with the start of the Caste War, Belizean entrepreneurs actively participated in supply of rebels with armament and munitions. They were contrabandists of such kind who were captured on September 13 of 1849 in the border outpost in Chaac upon the Río Hondo.They left behind themselves the “Four Sisters” boat case – the document that shed light not only on the details of simplified court procedures in the 19th century Mexico but also on various details of wartime daily life in that remote fortress.