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Casta Capitalism, Recast Liberalism: Yucatán’s Improvised 1848

Thu, November 6, 4:00 to 5:45pm, Westin Bonaventure, Floor: Level 1, San Gabriel B (L1)

Abstract

I argue that the Caste War of Yucatán (1847-1901)—one of the largest and longest indigenous uprisings in the history of the Americas—was not just a local conflict, but rather a global one, not only in its effects, but also in that its participants drew on surprisingly long histories of race in order to invest the conflict with meaning. I show how these histories stretch more widely across the globe than scholars of the war have generally acknowledged. By struggling for something they persistently call libertad or freedom, Maya rebels exposed the workings of a particularly Yucatecan form of the global phenomenon of racial capitalism—which I call casta capitalism—in their efforts to dispossess indigenous lands they called baldíos (literally, “wastelands”). In response, Maya improvised with the liberal, universalist conceptions of freedom that reigned supreme in the 19th-century Atlantic world. I focus in particular on a written war that raged alongside the Caste War conflict, in which Creoles articulated the logic of dispossession in periodicals and folletines (popular fiction), while Maya appropriated and recast that logic in letters they wrote to their antagonists.

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