44 



INSTITUTE OF SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY PUBLICATION NO. 13 



the towns to hide in the bairancas and most inac- 

 cessible forests." 



Nevertheless, upon two occasions, the warlike 

 spirit of the Totonac blazed again, before dying 

 out, apparently definitively, at the end of the nine- 

 teenth century. One outburst was provoked by 

 the Wars of Reform and by the French invasion ; 

 another, by the surveying commissions sent to 

 Totonacapan during the dictatorship of Porfirio 

 Diaz. A brief discussion of these events follows. 



THE REFORM LAWS 



It has been remarked above that the mere 

 achievement of Independence did not produce ma- 

 jor changes in Totonacapan with respect to social 

 structure, political organization, or property own- 

 ership. Spanish authorities simply were replaced 

 by Mexican ; and society, based largely upon com- 

 munal landholdings, to a lesser extent on private 

 ownership, continued as before. However, outside 

 Totonacapan, and along its fringes, it is possible 

 that peonage may have been intensified through 

 the land grants mentioned previously. 



Starting in 1856, the laws known as those of 

 desamortisacion, or disentailment, produced great 

 changes in Totonacapan, in the course of which 

 the greater part of its colonial heritage vanished. 

 This new era was opened by a decree of June 1856. 

 Government intent was to destroy the inalienable 

 quality of the property belonging to civil and ec- 

 clesiastical bodies and, through payment of a sum 

 by the actual occupants, to convert the latter into 

 owners. Under the law, communal lands of native 

 pueblos were included, and such properties were 

 to pass into private hands. 



For a number of reasons, the outcome was quite 

 distinct from the intent. In the first place, the 

 decree allowed a period of only 3 months, during 

 which the property was to be converted into pri- 

 vate holdings. Lands which had not been trans- 

 ferred at the end of this time became public 

 property, available to anyone upon application and 

 payment, or available for Government grants. 



In the second place, all communal lands not 

 actually occupied or cultivated were considered 

 public, and the decree provided for their sale, with- 

 out taking into account the requirements of the 

 Indians, whose system of milpa agriculture neces- 

 sitated a tract of land far greater than that actu- 

 ally under cultivation at any given time. 



In the third place, great numbers of Indians 

 filed no claim for possession of their lands — be- 

 cause of isolation, of unfamiliarity with law and 

 legal mechanism, and because there no longer ex- 

 isted officials whose responsibility was to protect 

 indigenous interests. 



The moment communal lands disappeared le- 

 gally and claim for them as private property had 

 not been filed, possession of such lands fell to the 

 mercy of unscrupulous speculators who, supported 

 by Government decrees, lost no time in despoiling 

 the Indians. Moreover, even when the natives filed 

 claim and actually received land grants, often they 

 lost them — through usury, violence, or pseudolegal 

 procedures. 79 Haciendas and speculators took it 

 upon themselves to absorb the major part of the 

 small properties created by the laws of desamorti- 

 zacion and, at the same time, they managed to seize 

 a large part of the Indian patrimony, owing to the 

 classification of many communal lands as public 

 property. 



This legal and actual situation prevailed until 

 new agrarian laws were formulated following the 

 Revolution of 1910, when an effort was made to 

 correct an old wrong and to restore their rights 

 to the Indians. The importance of the old nine- 

 teenth-century laws is evident from an estimate 

 "that in 1854 there were 5,000 villages of various 

 types . . . holding in collective ownership ejidos 

 aggregating around 45,000 square miles" (E. N. 

 Simpson, p. 25). 



DISENTAILMENT 



In Totonacapan, the liquidation of communal 

 lands was long and difficult, extending from 1856, 

 at least to the close of the century. Application 

 of the laws apparently began on the outskirts of 

 the area and rapidly became complicated by the 

 French invasion and the establishment of the 

 ephemeral empire of Maximilian. As a conse- 

 quence, the historical picture is extraordinarily 

 confused — on the one hand, because new Indian 

 leaders appeared, fighting the French and their 

 partisans ; and, on the other, because of local up- 

 risings against the republican authorities. 



79 Quevedo (p. 12) observes that ". . . en s61o media centuria 

 se palp6 que en vez de que la condicion economica de los labriegos 

 indigenas mejorara se empeoraba ; un gran nuinero enagenaron sus 

 lotes de terreno del reparto, o los abandonaron ... El reparto de 

 los Ejidos y demiis terreuos del comun de los pueblos fu6 por el 

 contrnrio una medida perjudicial para el bienestar del Indfgena." 



