The The Caste War and its agrarian impact on the eastern villages of Yucatán, 1847-1870

Abstract

The agrarian landscape of an area or region in a given period can be the result of a local agrarian process or its amalgamation with political, economic, social and agrarian processes. It can also be a consequence of the conditioning of conjunctural historical events. Taking as a framework this premise, the objective of this article is to show the agrarian landscape that the caste war forged in the east of Yucatan between 1847 and 1870. With the analysis of the demographic consequences and the material devastation that caused the caste war, Based on published and primary sources, it was possible to identify the traits that defined the agrarian landscape of the Yucatan east. These features consisted of the surplus land owned by the towns and the control they had over them, the uninhabited settlements as well as their lands, the predominance of the milpa as the only means of subsistence and the decadent state of the farms, which only they dedicated themselves to the cultivation of corn for the subsistence of their owners. Thus, the armed movement of the Yucatec Maya was responsible for drawing the agrarian landscape of eastern Yucatan during this period. It was, then, an agrarian landscape with its own identity and that contrasted with the one that was set in northwest Yucatan.