On this date in 1847, the execution of Maya leader Manuel Antonio Ay in Valladolid kicked off the Yucatan’s decades-long Caste War.
Under Spanish administration, Mexico had a dizzying 16-tiered racial caste hierarchy.
The casta system was officially abolished when Mexico attained independence in 1821, but for Amerindians the newfound equality was more aspirational than real. It’s just that now they were looking up at Mexican-born criollo elites instead of Iberia-born peninsulares.
Either caste’s powers that be had long found found the Maya especially contumacious subjects; a Yucatan Mayan stronghold had, indeed, been the very last unconquered indigenous realm of the Americas to fall to Europeans — as late as 1697.
In 1846, a heavily Maya Yucatecan peasantry, strained by the economic extractions the Mexican state was imposing for its disastrous war with the United States, began rising against the overweening local gentry.
The progress and organization of these disturbances varied, but it’s the execution of our man, the 27-year-old chief of the village Chichimila, that traditionally marks turning-point galvanizing a full-scale rebellion. On July 18, as armed Maya regiments gathered in nearby Tihosuco, Valladolid’s authorities seized Miguel Antonio Ay for planning a rebellion. He had in his possession a letter from Bonifacio Novelo, a major Maya chief who would become one of the Caste War’s leading figures in the years to come — indeed, Terry Rugeley says in Yucatan’s Maya Peasantry and the Origins of the Caste War that Ay served for his persecutors as “a temporary substitute for Novelo, whom officials feared and hated more than any Maya.”
They’d never lay hands on Novelo, but his substitute was executed in the town square of Valladolid, and the body returned to exhibit in Chichimila in a futile attempt to cow resistance: Ay had, instead, become the first martyr of the coming war. Three days later, the gathering Maya army sacked the village of Tepich, beheading the colonel who commanded its defenses — the onset of generations of general war that persisted into the 20th century.
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On this day..
- 1644: Andrew of Phu Yen, Christian protomartyr of Vietnam
- 1955: Frederick Arthur Cross, "not a bit sorry for myself"
- 1961: Rokotov and Faibishenko, black marketeers
- 1817: Eleanor Gillespie
- 1912: George Shelton and John Bailey
- 1815: Eliza Fenning, for the dumplings
- 1578: Thee Bruges Minnenbroder
- 1768: Seven coal-heavers to crush the London port strike
- 1992: 42 Iraqi merchants
- 1872: Jose Balta, former President of Peru
- 1941: Paul Ogorzow, the S-Bahn Murderer
- 1794: Loizerolles and others for the Conspiracy of the Prisons