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Imagining socialisms in southeastern Mexico: Felipe Carrillo Puerto, Bartolomé García Correa and Yucatán’s Maya majority, 1915–1923

Author
  • Ben Fallaw (Colby College, Waterville, MA, USA)

Abstract

Mexico’s first significant socialist party was founded in the southeastern state of Yucatán in 1916. Most of its members were Indigenous, but few of its leaders were. This article explores the careers of Felipe Carrillo Puerto (1874–1924), the most influential governor elected by the party, and his protégé and eventual successor, Bartolomé García Correa (1893–1978). It focuses on how Indigeneity shaped their distinct ideas of socialism and how this helps us understand why Carrillo Puerto is still celebrated today but García Correa is forgotten.

Keywords: socialism, Indigeneity, Partido Socialista del Sureste, twentieth-century Maya history, postrevolutionary state formation in Mexico, Mexican Revolution

How to Cite: Fallaw, B. ‘Imagining socialisms in southeastern Mexico: Felipe Carrillo Puerto, Bartolomé García Correa and Yucatán’s Maya majority, 1915–1923’. Radical Americas 10, 1 (2025): 3. DOI: https://doi.org/10.14324/111.444.ra.2025.v10.1.003.

Rights: 2025, Ben Fallaw.

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Published on
02 Jun 2025
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Introduction

Felipe Carrillo Puerto is rightly remembered as one of the most important regional revolutionary leaders in Mexico. His socialist gubernatorial administration (1922–4) and championing of the Yucatán Indigenous majority inspired subsequent leftist presidents in Mexico, from Lázaro Cárdenas to Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who proclaimed 2024 the year of Carrillo Puerto. As Sarah Osten has pointed out, the Partido Socialista del Sureste (PPS or Socialist Party of the Southeast) under Carrillo Puerto’s leadership (1918–24) mobilised a Maya mass base, making it a model for socialist parties across the southeast of Mexico and eventually for the long-ruling Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI or the Party of the Institutionalised Revolution).1

While Carrillo Puerto needs no introduction, García Correa is virtually unknown. His name has been largely erased from public memory in his native Yucatán by the conservative managing editor of the Diario de Yucatán, Carlos R. Menéndez González, and his descendants, who still run the newspaper. The Diario continues to be Yucatán’s newspaper of record, with an outsized influence in the state, and it has carefully curated a conservative version of Yucatecan history.2 Unsurprisingly, the Menéndez clan never forgot that García Correa forcibly closed the Diario de Yucatán for 16 months, from October 1931 to March 1933.3 García Correa, if he is remembered at all, is depicted as a tyrant. The fact that President Lázaro Cárdenas banished García Correa from the ruling party because of his alleged loyalty to Plutarco Elías Calles and his opposition to land reform in defence of the old hacendado class discredited him further. Together, the regional right and national left crafted a leyenda negra (Black Legend) of Garcia Correa as a venal, drunken lackey of Calles, who betrayed his mentor Carrillo Puerto. This leyenda negra has rarely been challenged in the scholarly literature.4

Drawing primarily on the abundant historiography of Felipe Carrillo Puerto and the archival research and oral history compiled on García Correa, this article compares and contrasts how the two men imagined Yucatecan socialism and their relationship to Indigeneity.5 Both men agreed that Yucatecan socialism should politically empower Yucatán’s Maya majority and distribute the wealth from Yucatán’s henequen monocrop economy more equitably. By the time Carrillo Puerto died, on 3 January 1924, he had made Yucatecan socialism virtually synonymous with agrarian reform. Carrillo Puerto’s focus on restoring ejidos (common lands) to villages overshadowed cooperativism, an alternative path to creating a socialist Yucatán favoured by García Correa.

This article begins by examining Carrillo Puerto’s and García Correa’s ideological formation, social location and political careers before 1915. The next section explores how Governor Salvador Alvarado’s revolutionary reforms and the birth of Yucatán’s Socialist Party brought the two men together, with both serving as rural operatives between 1915 and 1917. It then turns to the convergence of Carrillo Puerto and García Correa’s political careers in Yucatán’s first socialist state legislature (1918–19). Over the next four years, the two men drifted apart. In Yucatán, in Mexico City and in exile in the United States, Carrillo Puerto spent two years (1920–1) locked in what was an often violent political conflict with conservative foes, championing a socialism defined largely by the immediate empowerment of Yucatán’s Maya working people and an ambitious land reform programme. This culminated in his brief, but consequential, gubernatorial administration (1922–4). At the same time (1920–3), García Correa’s political activity was confined to the purely local level. The penultimate section explores how and why the two men’s stances on agrarian reform and cooperativism diverged in the early 1920s and how this affected Yucatecan socialism after Carrillo Puerto’s death.

García Correa and Carrillo Puerto before the Revolution: social location, politics and Indigeneity

Although born almost two decades apart, the two men had much in common before 1915. Both hailed from the provincial middle class and from families that owned general stores, their livelihoods depended indirectly on the profits of the henequen boom generated by the regional oligarchy’s haciendas. Culturally, Carrillo Puerto and García Correa were comfortable operating in the Spanish-speaking, individualistic and largely secular (if conservative) world. At the same time, both men shared a deep knowledge and a genuine love of the Yucatec Maya language and both appreciated the jarana folk dance and provincial cuisine considered vulgar by the Europhile casta divina.6

Neither Carrillo Puerto nor García Correa self-identified as Maya, but they spoke fluent Yucatec Maya and were also intimately familiar with elements of Maya material culture and syncretic Catholic–Maya rituals. Because of this social and linguistic proximity, both García Correa and Felipe Carrillo Puerto could be described as ‘Maya adjacent’.7 García Correa’s relationship with Indigeneity is especially complex. He and his family were identified as non-Indigenous in his hometown of Umán, but his origins and ‘Indian’ phenotype led elites in Mérida and Mexico City to describe him as an indio in some contexts.8 At times, Carrillo Puerto and García Correa emphasised their social distance from Indigenous people: Carrillo Puerto often saw them paternalistically and romanticised Mayaness, while García Correa probably harboured anti-Indigenous attitudes.9

In spite of these contradictions, both Yucatecans practised a more humane socialism than other southern socialist leaders because of their Maya adjacency. This is in stark contrast to Tomás Garrido Canabal of Tabasco, who deployed coercive techniques like iconoclasm and banning the Chontal Maya language to eradicate Maya ‘fanaticism’.10 Another sureño socialist, Veracruz’s Adalberto Tejeda Olivares passed a law to enforce sterilisation among Indigenous women.11 In neighbouring Chiapas, Governor Victor Grajales enforced an infamous ‘pants law’ through shaming, intimidation and public burning of traditional garments to force Maya peoples to don Western clothes.12 Yucatecan socialism certainly ‘modernised’ Indigenous culture through the spread of Spanish language, market participation and secularisation, but with neither brutality nor contempt for Indigeneity.

When it came to formal education, García Correa was quite privileged, having earned a two-year professional teaching degree from the prestigious Literary Institute and an accounting degree to boot.13 In spite of teaching for only a year or two, this formal education ensured that García Correa saw himself as part of an enlightened cadre who would carry out the great task of ‘civilising’ Indigenous people with schooling, above all by teaching Spanish.14 Before the Mexican Revolution, there is no evidence that he was exposed to anything like socialism. However, Carrillo Puerto never finished more than a few years of formal schooling at Motul’s primary school, but he read works by Enlightenment thinkers and probably some nineteenth-century socialists.15 Later, friends he made working on the railroad would expose Carrillo Puerto to anarchist ideas, and most likely spiritism and theosophy.16 If not yet a Freemason, he soon would be.

In phenotypical terms – roughly put, what the two men ‘looked like’, given contemporary ideas about race – the two were profoundly different. In spite of claiming to be a descendant of Nachi Cocom who fought against the conquistadors, Carrillo Puerto, like other people of predominantly European descent intimately familiar with the dominant, Spanish-speaking culture of Mexico, was in a category termed here as ‘cosmopolitan white’. Cosmopolitan white Yucatecans were accepted as white be it in Mérida, Mexico City or New Orleans.17 Carrillo Puerto would never be called indio. García Correa, by contrast, was accepted as white in his hometown of Umán, but his dark complexion, among other features, as well as his modest origins in a provincial town meant that he was mocked with anti-Indigenous (and even anti-Black) terms in the state’s capital and in the national press.18 García Correa’s social and ethnic location was much more ambiguous and contested in comparison to Carrillo Puerto’s. Unlike Carrillo Puerto, García Correa never wore the mestizo garb (a loose white shirt and sandals) favoured by Maya peasants. Instead, he usually wore a suit, tie and sporty hat, thereby increasing the social distance between himself and those considered Indigenous. In his speeches and writing, García Correa advocated for the assimilation and acculturation of Indigenous people, which might well have reflected his own anxieties as well as his understanding of socialist ideology. Nevertheless, in historiography and popular memory, such nuance is rare, and instead García Correa is depicted as being of Indigenous heritage. Indeed, one contemporary considers García Correa to have betrayed ‘his’ race, writing that he ‘had very little loyalty to his Maya origins’.19 These kinds of monolithic notions of Indigeneity do not correspond to the fluid, contextual assessments I encountered in primary sources, much less the fact that García Correa never identified as Maya. Carrillo Puerto, however, could attack the regional oligarchy whose privilege was defined in part by its cosmopolitan whiteness, without risking being denounced as an indio himself. The two men’s ideas of socialism, then, were shaped in part by their distance from Indigeneity.

Politics was something of a family business for both Carrillo Puerto and García Correa. The Correas were leading local followers of Benito Juárez.20 Carrillo’s father was jefe político (Porfirian prefect) and an important client of Governor Francisco Cantón. Both Carrillo Puerto and García Correa became important local leaders in Delio Moreno Cantón’s 1909 and 1911 gubernatorial campaigns, and remained very proud of their Morenista roots.21 In spite of claims that it was somehow proto-revolutionary, Morenismo was led by a disaffected faction of the oligarchy (although it was quite ideologically heterogeneous).

Morenistas in Umán were headed by García Correa’s father-in-law and other small merchants, artisans and yeomen farmers. Although they were Maya adjacent, few probably identified as Indigenous. Umán’s Morenistas appealed to Maya peons on nearby haciendas by advancing a moderate plan of incremental progress through assimilation and individual upward mobility.22 In Umán, as in most of Yucatán, Morenismo’s specific solutions to the ‘Indian problem’ were borrowed from progressive hacendados and social Catholicism: formal education (Spanish only), savings banks, medical care, cooperativism and sobriety.23

From at least 1911 until the mid-1930s, García Correa’s faction electorally competed in the municipio (county) of Umán against Pedro Canul’s group. Canul was a genuinely popular Maya leader known for his modesty and honesty. The former peon and small farmer was familiar with anarchism as espoused by an early collaborator, the schoolteacher Julian Garma. Although he idealised Francisco Madero, the first revolutionary president, Canul was largely unaware of politicking in Mérida or national events after 1913. Instead, Canul focused on grassroots democracy and regaining Umán’s ejidal lands lost to surrounding haciendas.24

To try and overcome Canul’s string of electoral victories in Umán, García Correa and key allies among the Umán petty bourgeoisie founded the Mutualist Union to serve as Umán’s first true political party.25 The Union’s project echoed the Morenista project: formal education in Spanish, cooperativism to encourage market participation and the acquisition of private property, and the assimilation of Maya people into the dominant culture.26 After revolutionary change began in 1915, this approach might well seem conservative, but it nevertheless formed the foundation of García Correa’s idea of socialism. Canul’s faction attacked García Correa’s faction in February 1915 as ‘bourgeois’ and the hacendado’s lackeys.27 There is no evidence that hacendados in fact supported them, but the charge resurfaced in the 1930s and has become a key part of the leyenda negra. García Correa’s faction’s relationship with Indigeneity was complex and it cannot be easily dismissed as simply anti-Indigenous. García Correa’s core followers were Maya adjacent but self-identified as white, yet his supporters included some who were one or two generations removed from Umán’s Maya community. More importantly, the idea of cooperativism as a way to acquire small plots of land and cattle resonated with Maya rural working people.

Like García Correa, Carrillo Puerto’s time as a Morenista leader in Motul would serve as a foundation for his understanding of socialism after 1915. His experience as a Morenista, however, was quite different. Carrillo Puerto joined Delio Moreno Cantón’s campaign primarily as a way to continue his struggle to help small Maya settlements surrounding his home town – places like Kaxatah and Muxupip – recover their ejidos stolen during the Porfiriato.28 This provoked clashes with Porfirian authorities and hacendados in Motul.29 During this time, Carrillo Puerto was mentored by two moderate reformers closely associated with Morenismo: Carlos R. Menéndez González, an independent journalist with classical liberal beliefs (in spite of Catholicism) who hired Carrillo Puerto as a reporter, and reformist hacendado Alonso Patrón Espadas, who described himself as a Tolstoy because he sought to care for ‘his’ Maya peons with schools, brass bands and a living wage.30 At the same time, Carrillo Puerto was imbibing more radical belief systems that rejected Catholicism, liberal democracy and capitalism.31

Before 1915, Carrillo Puerto’s ideas of how to help Maya people were to the left of García Correa’s and his ideological horizons were broader.32 This was not only a question of agrarian reform and views on Indigeneity, but also of Carrillo Puerto’s determination to drastically change culture and society. Around 1915, Carrillo Puerto would embrace the prohibition of alcohol and anticlerical reform as necessary to lift the Maya out of poverty and marginalisation. Here, too, the contrast with García Correa was significant. García Correa, although not a practising Catholic as an adult, was never a Freemason and his attacks on the Catholic Church were limited to occasional rhetorical flourishes dictated by national political circumstances.33 The two men took diametrically opposed stances on alcohol: Carrillo Puerto made prohibition a fundamental part of socialism, blaming it for stultifying and impoverishing Maya men; García Correa’s family store sold alcohol and, from the mid-1920s to the mid-1930s, ran a large ring clandestinely distributing alcohol.34

In spite of these profound differences, Morenismo gave the two a common political heritage, including rituals that became central to the life of the PSS: shooting off fireworks to call Maya working people to rallies, the colour red and raucous popular assemblies featuring Maya-language oratory.35 Years after Carrillo Puerto’s death, García Correa fondly recalled their days together during the Morenista campaign, fighting side by side to redeem the ‘sad race’.36 This nostalgia for Delio Moreno Cantón was common in Yucatán in the 1920s and 1930s, but it erases the fact that Morenista elite leaders feared abolishing debt servitude for 80,000 Maya peons in the immediate future because it might have triggered a guerra de castas (race war). There was also the embarrassing connection between Morenismo and the counter-revolutionary coup led by Victoriano Huerta that killed President Francisco Madero and imposed a brutal military dictatorship in 1913.37 Like many Morenistas, Carrillo Puerto and García Correa stuck with Moreno Cantón after he broke with Madero, and then endorsed Huerta’s coup.38 After that, the two men’s paths diverged. García Correa stayed in Yucatán and became military commander of Umán under Yucatán’s Huertista military regime, but Carrillo Puerto, after a long peregrination, ended up in the Zapatista camp, where he honed his ideas about socialism, centring them on restoring land seized from Mexico’s Indigenous villages. 39 Given their choices after Madero’s death, both García Correa and Carrillo Puerto ran afoul of the ascendant Constitutionalist faction and were briefly jailed.40 General Salvador Alvarado’s 1915–17 Revolution from above gave both men the chance to help build Yucatán’s PSS from the ground up.

Salvador Alvarado and the creation of Yucatán’s socialist party

Alvarado conceived of the PSS as a vertically organised political and social extension of the revolutionary state. Its hundreds of subordinate ligas de resistencia in workplaces, haciendas, neighbourhoods and villages would create a revolutionary civil society to shatter the power of the old oligarchy and Catholic Church. The result would be a modern, secular and egalitarian Yucatán.

The revolution Alvarado directed was not a popular one. Change was to be top down, with democracy not fully restored until 1918. Moreover, as Gilbert Joseph aptly put it, this was a bourgeois revolution. The economy would remain essentially capitalist. Socialism to Alvarado meant balancing different social classes’ political power and perfecting the markets with an activist state. The great henequen haciendas would remain privately owned until market forces and state policies helped a new class of yeomen farmers – many upwardly mobile kulaks of Maya origin – to emerge and displace them. In the short run, Alvarado sought to dismantle the old Porfirian repressive apparatus and immediately free Maya peons kept in harsh debt servitude, which was rightly compared to chattel slavery. He invested massively in (Spanish-only) education, subsidised producer and consumer cooperatives and supported organised labour under the aegis of a corporatist state.

To be sure Alvarado rejected the idea that Maya people were inherently inferior, but instead were ‘diamonds in the rough’.41 While inherently characterised by ‘bravery, abnegation and resilience’, Alvarado saw Maya people suffering from ‘docility arising from a long servitude and the pessimistic condition of the life they lead’ which instilled ‘apathy, laziness and a fondness for alcohol’.42 Formal education, in Alvarado’s words, would be needed to implant in them ‘a clear and definite idea of their rights and responsibilities as citizens’.43 Hacienda schools would ‘civilise the servants of old’, instilling the self-discipline and responsibility that Indigenous people allegedly lacked.

Alvarado – and many of his collaborators hailing from Yucatán’s upper, middle and urban working classes – deemed Maya peasants and peons unready to fully exercise citizenship. Álvaro Torre Díaz, a key aid to Alvarado and later governor (1926–30), explained in 1918 that the PSS’s rural rank and file would be incapable of holding office until they had been thoroughly educated.44 Many non-Indigenous PSS leaders believed Maya peasants and peons were vulnerable to manipulation by unscrupulous politicos within the PSS. For instance, a prefect appointed by Alvarado in 1916 accused the local PSS organiser in Cansahcab of dominating the town council through three ‘ignorant near-illiterates’ elected on the party’s slate.45 Alvarado and other PSS leaders hailing from urban areas wrote laws and issued directives to prevent the Maya majority from voting ‘irresponsibly’. In 1916, Alvarado tried but failed to impose a literacy requirement on Maya peons elected to the directorate of PSS ligas on haciendas.46 Alvarado’s 1918 electoral law explicitly prohibited the formation of any party of ‘racial character’.47 In other words, Maya people would not be able to form their own party. Instead, the PSS’s overwhelmingly non-Maya leadership cadre would speak for them. Fears that Indigenous peasants and peons were unprepared for true democracy and might turn to violent racial revindication helps explain the PSS’s highly centralised structure controlled from Mérida by predominantly non-Indigenous leaders.48

Outside Spanish-speaking Mérida and its port of Progreso, the PSS had to rely on a relatively small cadre of Yucatecan intermediaries, people like Carrillo Puerto and García Correa, who were capable of operating in both the Spanish- and Yucatecan Maya-speaking worlds. In spite of Alvarado’s pretensions to construct a vertically organised, highly disciplined party governed by rigid rules, the PSS operatives on the ground in fact enjoyed considerable latitude in interpreting the dictates of Yucatecan socialism.

Both Carrillo Puerto and García Correa played crucial roles as the primary representatives of the PSS in their hometowns of Motul and Umán respectively. Like most PSS notables, their visions of socialism were eclectic and moulded by their political and intellectual formation before 1915. Similarly, their relationships with Maya people in their respective bailiwicks reflected their specific social location.

Throughout Alvarado’s administration, García Correa and his followers battled Canul’s more popular faction for control of the town hall and for Alvarado’s favour.49 In head-to-head electoral competitions for the 1916–17 and 1918 elections, Canul’s faction prevailed and the outcome helped Alvarado to prevent García Correa from serving as mayor after 1915.50

While Canul sought to organise peons on Umán-area haciendas to strike for higher wages and prepare for agrarian reform, García Correa understood Alvarado’s determination to preserve the hacienda’s profitability at a time of rising labour costs and the (alleged) breakdown of workplace discipline. This presented an opportunity for him to claim an advantage in the factional struggle. García Correa and his allies sought to prevent Maya peons from walking off the job or moving off the estates.51 Carrillo Puerto took a very different position on the rights of Indigenous workers. While acting as a roving agent for the PSS, he visited Umán in early June 1916. There, he delivered a fiery speech to the assembled Maya peasants urging them to go to Mérida and demand a rifle to defend the land that the revolution and General Alvarado would give them.52

In dealing with the Alvarado administration, García Correa played on paternalistic, subtly racist views of Indigenous peoples as requiring guidance, biases that were common in the upper ranks of the PSS. For example, in 1917, García Correa’s faction stated that Maya peons and peasants had been brutalised by peonage and were incapable of exercising all the rights and responsibilities of citizenship.53 In January 1917, García Correa charged that longtime rival Canul was being manipulated by landowners, rum-runners and an old cacique.54 García Correa’s faction also blamed Canul’s ‘rebellious and intransigent behaviour’ on a wily anarchist schoolteacher.55 García Correa presented himself to party superiors as a knowledgeable, non-Indigenous intermediary. In other words, he would be the ideal spokesman and guide for Umán’s Maya peasantry. His status as a titled normal school graduate (profesor) reinforced his appeal.56 In spite of these efforts to define socialism in Umán in a way that privileged himself as a leader of Maya people who was nevertheless not Maya himself, García Correa failed to electorally defeat Canul during Alvarado’s regime.

This was in sharp contrast to Felipe Carrillo Puerto’s creation of a strong, unified Socialist Party in his hometown of Motul, achieved by mobilising an overwhelming majority of Maya peasants and Maya peons on local henequen haciendas. Before 1915, Carrillo Puerto had already built a strong following by identifying Morenismo in Motul with the struggle of several small Maya communities to regain their land stolen during the Porfiriato.

The leadership of the PSS in Motul came largely from friends and allies among the Maya adjacent middle class. Ideologically, Carrillo Puerto’s coterie was much more diverse and radical compared to García Correa’s in Umán. Two close allies, José Jesús Barceló and Segismundo Aviles, were trained in rational schooling during the Alvarado administration.57 Several collaborators were brother Freemasons and they would help him found Motul’s first lodge in 1921.58 Carrillo Puerto certainly developed an intense aversion to the Church before becoming governor in 1922 and increasingly infused socialism in Yucatán with anticlericalism. Carrillo Puerto believed Maya peons and peasants had been exploited for four centuries by the Catholic clergy and needed to be defanaticised.59

Carrillo Puerto also looked to the Maya past for hope for the future. Nachi Cocom, a Maya noble who had led the resistance to the Spanish invasion, was invoked by Carrillo Puerto as a symbol of resistance to postcolonial oppression. Both Motul’s PSS League and its masonic lodge were named after Nachi Cocom, of whom Carrillo Puerto fancifully claimed to be a descendant.60 Carrillo Puerto was much more willing than García Correa to praise the beauty of the Yucatec Maya language and while he was governor, the state normal school began teaching Yucatec Maya.61 Carrillo Puerto even delivered his inaugural address as governor in the language.

While García Correa collaborated with Alvarado’s policy of reinforcing the racialised social order on haciendas around Umán, Carrillo Puerto took a much more confrontational stance aimed at immediately bettering the lot of poorly paid, socially marginalised peons on Motul municipio haciendas. During the Alvarado years (1915–17), he encouraged peons to occupy haciendas, telling them they were the real owners.62 At least one of Carrillo Puerto’s close collaborators was born into debt peonage. Santiago Toraya, an Indigenous ex-peon, had founded a PSS league on his hacienda, overcoming strong hacendado resistance and earning Carrillo Puerto’s friendship in the process.63 García Correa, however, had no Indigenous protégé like Toraya among his retinue.

Carrillo Puerto’s pro-Maya policies were not free of contradictions. He believed that the socialist government had to support education that would spread the Spanish language, ‘so that the children and (adults) learn to read and above all learn Spanish and are able to claim all of your rights’.64 As admirable as Carrillo Puerto’s emancipatory socialism was, his relationship with political violence as a means of seeking justice troubled even his allies and gave his enemies a means of discrediting socialism. Carrillo Puerto was not the peaceful martyr that his hero cult would remember him as; instead, he defended the party and his personal honour forcefully. As a ‘combat journalist’, he killed a rival journalist in self-defence before the revolution and at times told Maya followers to pick up machetes and confront their enemies – a slogan that foes took literally.65 To be sure, the socialists suffered more violence than they meted out, especially during the counter-revolutionary military crackdowns of the early 1920s (the Zamarripazo) and the late 1923 to early 1924 delahuertista revolt. Moreover, charges that Carrillo Puerto instigated violence against white victims by Maya perpetrators by inciting another caste war was a trope of the right-wing press in Mérida (and at times in Mexico City). Consequently, accounts of Maya outrages were often exaggerated or even fabricated outright. Nevertheless, some public statements made by Carrillo Puerto appearing to endorse violence did allow the right wing to conflate socialism with violent racial conflict and crime.66 García Correa, unlike many local PSS operatives, never used violence against rivals in Umán; his public persona was always that of the profesor, not a pistolero.

During Alvarado’s administration, Yucatecan socialism at the grassroots level varied greatly from place to place, with Umán and Motul poles apart. In Motul, Carrillo Puerto had no rivals and a strong following among Maya peasants and peons. Confronting hacendados, bootleggers and priests, Carrillo Puerto pushed for agrarian reform, prohibition and anticlericalism. In Umán, García Correa’s PSS liga was basically an old, rebranded Morenista local party and ideologically its version of socialism was more conservative compared to Motul’s. Although the two men seemed to be taking Yucatecan socialism in diametrically opposing directions from 1915 to 1917, they both found themselves collaborating closely in state congress and in the PSS’s Liga Central in 1918–19.

Carrillo Puerto and García Correa in the first socialist state legislature, 1918–1919

After President Carranza barred Alvarado from running for governor for the 1918–22 term on a legal technicality, Alvarado used state power and the PSS’s electoral machinery to ensure the victory of railroad worker Carlos Castro Morales over a weak opposition candidate. Carrillo Puerto and García Correa would serve together during the two-year legislative session of 1918–19, becoming close allies in the PSS’s minority radical wing. During this time, national and regional events helped to unify the left wing of the PSS behind Carrillo Puerto’s more radical vision of socialism, a vision that would eventually remake the PSS. Although the PSS was politically hegemonic – controlling every town hall, state congress and the executive branch – it was increasingly divided during 1918–19 between radicals and moderates. As Carrillo Puerto’s influence grew, the federal government under President Venustiano Carranza, the regional press and the judiciary increasingly feared that Carrillo Puerto was a dangerous extremist. Governor Castro Morales and powerful constituencies within the PSS – urban labour, middle-class bureaucrats, professionals and the so-called socialist hacendados – opposed Carrillo Puerto on a number of key issues.67

During 1918–19, García Correa was quite literally at Carrillo Puerto’s side, helping him draft a state constitution in January 1918, acting as Secretary at the First Party Congress, held between 29 and 31 March 1918, and assisting him in codifying party regulations. Because García Correa also served as Treasurer of the PSS’s Liga Central and often drafted congressional legislation favoured by Carrillo Puerto, García Correa developed a deep institutional knowledge of the inner workings of the PSS and the executive branch of state government. While Carrillo Puerto forged a strong connection with Maya communities across the state through personal visits, García Correa was putting his accounting certificate to work tending the party’s books, as well as handling correspondence and marshalling the middle ranks of the party that connected the Liga Central to the party’s base. Years later, García Correa would recall that in Congress he learned loyalty to the PSS, emphasising the institutionalisation of Yucatecan socialism via the party structure.68 The two men depended on one other, but it was not a relationship of equals. García Correa looked up to the charismatic, nationally prominent man two decades his senior. Carrillo Puerto preferred speeches and conversation to writing, meaning from late 1917 until mid-1920 García Correa was Carrillo Puerto’s key aide and effectively the executive officer of the party.69 In Congress, even though he was the youngest member, García Correa gained a reputation for being a fogoso (ardent, passionate) orator as well as Carrillo Puerto’s trusted lieutenant.70

From mid-1917 until his death, it was Carrillo Puerto alone who charted the course of the PSS. Carrillo Puerto was determined to move the party to the left and closer to its Maya base in the countryside. Yucatecan socialism was increasingly identified with Indigenism, with the party’s priority being granting land and building schools for the Maya poor. Carrillo Puerto’s brand of socialism was grounded in the ideal of achieving equality between Maya and non-Maya people. While battling opponents in Mexico City and Mérida, Carrillo Puerto had to erase a colonial legacy of anti-Indigeneity. Paradoxically, the discourse of revolutionary Indigenism which sought to uplift poor Maya working people by dismantling oppression often reproduced the old ideas of Indigenous incapacity. In the press, in oratory and at times in legislation, Socialist Party leaders assumed Maya people to be apathetic and incapable of acting on their own behalf due to the lingering effects of colonialism and Porfirian peonage. Only education and careful guidance by socialist leaders over the long term would instil the civic virtues and progressive attitudes necessary to fully exercise citizenship.71 As a result – in the short term at least – democracy under Yucatecan socialism would be tutelary or guided.72

No other Yucatecan socialist trusted Maya citizens to act on their own more than Carrillo Puerto, but at times his own language reproduced paternalistic attitudes. His American lover, journalist Alma Reed, recalled that Carrillo Puerto invariably called the Maya majority ‘inditos’ (little Indians) or ‘pobrecitos’ (poor little ones) but notes that he dealt with all – not just Indigenous – Yucatecans with ‘gentle paternalism’. Notably, Carrillo Puerto also challenged the widespread idea that the Maya were a dead or sleeping race, telling Reed she would ‘find the living Maya and their progress as deserving of your study as their ancient monuments’.73 As to why and how Carrillo Puerto was able to transcend the anti-Indigenous attitudes so deeply ingrained in Yucatecan society in a way that García Correa never fully did, two factors stand out. First, Indigenous communities in and around Motul, unlike Umán, had lost their land relatively recently, meaning that Carrillo Puerto could draw on Maya people’s living memories of what they had lost to inspire a vision of the future. Second, Carrillo Puerto was exposed to broader intellectual horizons compared to García Correa. Carrillo Puerto spent time in exile in the United States and – most importantly – during his stint with the Zapatistas he saw peasant communities successfully reclaiming their land and liberty.

While Indigenism permeated Carrillo Puerto’s socialism, international influence on it was limited. Carrillo Puerto did briefly join the Third International’s Latin American Bureau, where he gleaned ‘ideas about the Bolshevik revolution and Lenin’s organising principles’ that he implemented in the PSS. His decision not to affiliate the PSS with the Third International and instead ally with Luis Morones’s Confederación Regional Obrera Mexicana (CROM), a purely Mexican labour federation disdained as yellow (or pro-owner) by communists, indicates that he clearly turned away from the Russian Revolution as his North Star.74 In the 1915–18 period, Romanian-American leftist journalist Robert Haberman exerted a strong influence on Carrillo Puerto, helping to inspire the idea for a first party congress eventually held in Motul in 1918.75 Haberman was not only averse to the Comintern, but he was also opposed to cooperating with the anarcho-syndicalist International Workers of the World.76 Ideologically, Carrillo Puerto’s own definition of socialism was nationalistic and heterodox – and heretical in Moscow’s eyes.

In the state congress, Carrillo Puerto’s legislation was shepherded by García Correa, who nevertheless did introduce two legislative initiatives of his own. Although they were never implemented, both reflected García Correa’s attempts to complement his mentor’s focus on agrarian reform and empowerment of the Maya majority with initiatives to benefit smallholders, petty merchants and artisans – a kind of shopkeeper socialism. First, García Correa proposed a much steeper progressive tax on henequen to fund road building and education.77 A second proposal modified Carrillo Puerto’s initiative to dramatically increase the size of the state police force to crack down on rustling, an endemic problem that affected even modest ranchers, and replace often poorly trained and armed local police with a professional Yucatecan law enforcement agency.78

In Umán, García Correa used his mastery of the PSS institutional framework and state law, his friendship with Carrillo Puerto and his own considerable cultural capital to successfully counter Pedro Canul’s Maya electoral clout in 1918–19. Although Canul’s goals of grassroots democracy and agrarian reform were closer to Carrillo Puerto’s than García Correa’s, Canul lacked a personal conduit to Carrillo Puerto and did not become a card-carrying member of the PSS until 1918 or even 1919.79 Moreover, Canul was self-conscious about his limited Spanish literacy and lack of social graces. Again and again, García Correa counted on connections with the PSS and congress in Mérida to defeat his rival. For example, in March 1918 García Correa convinced his fellow congressman to use the state constitution he helped write to remove Canul’s faction from power in Umán for alleged misgovernance and to delay elections in late 1919 to force Canul to share local power with his own supporters.80 During the same time, the PSS Liga Central on which García Correa sat gave him control over the affiliate leagues on Umán’s municipio henequen haciendas, displacing Canul’s allies.81 Canul’s faction simply could not match García Correa’s ability to use the machinery of the socialist state to his advantage.

Drifting apart: Carrillo Puerto’s apogee and García Correa’s eclipse, 1920–23

In late 1919, President Carranza unleashed the federal army in the state to disarm Yucatecan socialists. The president rightly feared that Carrillo Puerto would support Álvaro Obregón’s opposition to Carranza’s imposition of a hand-picked successor over Obregón in the upcoming presidential election. If García Correa flirted with the Socialist Party’s bitter foes it didn’t last: when federal troops stormed party headquarters García Correa had to climb over a fence to escape with his life.82 In the five months the PSS was persecuted, during the so-called Zamarripazo, Carrillo Puerto went into exile and joined Obregón and Plutarco Elías Calles in plotting the Agua Prieta revolt to overthrow Carranza and set the stage for Obregón’s election as president.

When Carrillo Puerto returned to Yucatán in triumph, García Correa was not restored to his inner circle. There is no evidence of a rupture, as foes would claim, over García Correa’s well-documented involvement in illegal alcohol sales. Carrillo Puerto routinely pardoned his local party bosses for their faults.83 Out of Congress and the PSS’s Liga Central, García Correa was apparently content to expand the family’s general store.84

The relationship between the two men changed because Carrillo Puerto’s socialism evolved during the Zamarripazo and Obregón’s Agua Prieta revolt, and his idea of socialism increasingly focused on sweeping and quick agrarian reform and the creation of Maya paramilitaries to counter reactionary violence. Between 1920 and 1921, Carrillo Puerto spent more time in Mexico City and he increasingly relied on a different, expanded inner circle (including family members) to handle a variety of tasks. García Correa’s skills were less needed by Carrillo Puerto. Some of Carrillo Puerto’s associates now came from Mexico City and even abroad. Carrillo Puerto hosted José Vasconcelos and collaborated with labour tsar Luis Morones of the left-wing national trade union federation, the CROM. Internationally, Carrillo Puerto’s contacts included Margaret Sanger and Argentine leftist and anti-imperialist José Ingenieros.85

Carrillo Puerto’s long struggle culminated in his election as governor for the 1922–6 term. His focus was squarely on the rural Maya poor; Yucatecan socialism was indigenista and agrarista. The PSS state congress seated for the 1922–3 session reflected this goal of Maya empowerment. Three of the eighteen members were identified as Maya leaders: Braulio Euán, Demetrio Yama and Elías Rivero.86 García Correa, now back in the state legislature, was never considered part of this Maya bloc. Shortly before his death, Carrillo Puerto moved to overcome legal impediments and the Socialist Party’s structure diluting Maya political power. On 6 December 1923, the state congress passed Carrillo Puerto’s initiative to allow recall elections of the state congressmen, town councils and even the state supreme court.87

The delahuertista coup ended Carrillo Puerto’s socialist experiment before its outcomes were manifest. Even before his assassination, his project was being undermined by internal crises. Carrillo Puerto’s reliance on his family was problematic. On the one hand, Felipe’s sister Elvia was a remarkable socialist in her own right and an important revolutionary feminist of national note.88 It was largely thanks to her that Felipe forced male socialists to accept women assuming many jobs and women holding office.89 On the other hand, his brothers lacked Elvia’s sincere commitment to social change. Worse still, his son-in-law Javier Erosa was involved in a corruption scandal and linked to the assassination of a former Socialist Party senator, and his brother Benjamín headed a police death squad.90

Carrillo Puerto was also alienated from a group that should have been a natural constituency: organised labour. Historically, Mérida and Progreso’s railroad workers and stevedores had been politically conscious, unified and assertive even before the Revolution. A cadre of urban labour activists played key roles in Alvarado’s PSS from 1915 to 1917. Carrillo Puerto’s socialism was focused on the country, and as governor he resisted demands for higher wages on the state-run railroads and docks because it would drain state resources away from his priority, the rural Maya communities.91

During this time, García Correa was largely relegated to the second tier of PSS leadership. In the long run, this boosted his prospects as he was not implicated in any of the scandals marring Carrillo Puerto’s administration. García Correa also learned important lessons from his mentor’s failures, as Governor he would try to revive the PSS’s ties to urban labour and women. García Correa’s drift away from Carrillo Puerto during the latter’s governorship was probably due in no small part to the fact that the two men had very different ideas about how Yucatecan socialism should transform the economy.

Two roads to a socialist economy: agrarian reform and cooperativism

Historically, since Alvarado’s day, the PSS had made the creation of state-supported producer and consumer cooperatives a key part of socialism.92 After mid-1920, Carrillo Puerto prioritised an ambitious agrarian reform that would restore land stolen from dozens of Maya pueblos during the Porfiriato. As Governor, he exploited legal loopholes to rapidly push through grants amounting to 348,000 hectares to some 23,000 peasants across the state.93

Because of the questionable constitutionality of these carrillista grants, hacendados legally stalled their execution for years. Moreover, had Carrillo Puerto lived to finish his 1922–6 term, the grants probably would have been blocked by Presidents Obregón (who mistrusted Carrillo Puerto) or Calles (who greatly esteemed Carrillo Puerto but was increasingly wary of affecting major exports like henequen). Their execution would have reduced henequen production in the short term, if not for longer, and encouraged hacendados to decapitalise their estates. As Lázaro Cárdenas found out the hard way in his 1937 Crusade of the Mayab, dismantling haciendas and reallocating land was complicated and costly. Haciendas had the advantage of economies of scale and the huge capital investments needed to maintain and modernise industrial processing equipment (defibrating trains or mills located in machine houses).94 Like the Zapatistas and the Haitian revolutionaries who tried to keep some sugar plantations running after taking power, Yucatecan socialists probably would have pulled back from large-scale land reform in the henequen zone in one fell swoop, even without federal intervention.

Because García Correa was unwilling to challenge Carrillo Puerto, it is not surprising that he had little to say about agrarian reform while his mentor was alive, although there is no evidence that García Correa colluded with hacendados to sabotage it in Umán as the leyenda negra held. In an August 1919 speech to congress, García Correa gave his clearest statement on agrarian reform before 1924. He subtly disagreed with Carrillo Puerto, who advocated for immediately carrying out sweeping land reforms without waiting for national legislation. Garcia Correa predicted accurately that such a radical measure could provoke a counter-revolutionary crackdown (Carranza would in fact order the army to do just that two months later) and that the legal confusion would be exploited by hacendados to foil agrarian reform (they did). Instead, García Correa wanted to use progressive taxation to force hacendados to sell off some land and then use the revenue generated to help the poor buy this land. What mattered, he argued, was giving the ‘worker of the field’ his own piece of land, something that was, in his words, ‘sacred’.95 The initiative died, but not before the Hunucmá Liga, a bulwark of pro-agrarian sentiment, discussed it.96

For García Correa, cooperativism offered a way to combine the sanctity of private property with socialism. It was, he believed, a more realistic way to a prosperous new future for Maya working people. Five years after Carrillo Puerto’s death, he indirectly criticised his mentor, saying Carrillo Puerto chased ‘utopias’, while he, García Correa, championed cooperativismo campesino (peasant cooperativism).97 García Correa had in fact been supporting cooperativism as a Socialist Party tenet since at least 1919. In mid-May 1922, he gave a talk displaying enthusiasm for, and expertise on, the potential of cooperatives to realise (in a reporters’ words) ‘the new social tendencies [in which] the individual has disappeared as a step to communal and collective action’.98 Years later, García Correa opposed the grants that Carrillo Puerto began in 1921–3 on economic grounds, citing the hacienda’s ability to take advantage of economies of scale, draw on private capital to invest in new technology and maintain the optimal balance of fields in production and lying fallow – not to mention the fact that haciendas in private hands paid taxes to the state.99

In practice, Carrillo Puerto pursued the utopia of agrarian reform while backing cooperativism. During the delahuertista coup, soldiers destroyed Carrillo Puerto’s detailed plans to develop peasant cooperatives producing corn, sugar and cattle.100 In September 1923, Carrillo Puerto proposed turning over the many henequen haciendas abandoned by their owners after the fall of fibre prices in 1917 to create peasant- and peon-run cooperatives. Owners would receive only half of their value.101 The coup cut short this experiment, but its potential was promising. By seizing vacant – as opposed to productive – land, Carrillo Puerto would have alleviated potential legal challenges that dogged agrarian reform impacting functioning haciendas. Haciendas would have remained intact, preserving their economic efficiencies. The plan could have served as a model for buying out hacendados to create even more cooperatives. This process, which would have allowed Maya workers at least a portion of control, was more democratic than the top-down model controlled by federal bureaucrats that came into being between 1934 and 1937. Ironically, henequen experts with more conservative views were proposing to turn haciendas into cooperatives owned jointly by hacendados and peons, suggesting that some hacendados might have been open to negotiation over this plan.102 The devil was in the details, but compared to the massive Cardenista agrarian reform affecting working haciendas and against the bitter opposition of hacendados and many Maya peons, cooperativism seemed less costly and more responsive to the concerns of Indigenous rural workers.

How did Maya peasants feel about cooperativism? History suggests many were receptive. Since the eighteenth century at least, prosperous Maya peasants had continued to be a part of Maya communities and work collective ejido land even while acquiring land privately.103 Several thousand Maya people were farming henequen at this time and most likely at least as many were cultivating other crops. A letter penned a year or so after Carrillo Puerto’s death by Mauro Ceh and other Maya peasants of Ticul is revealing. Thanks to Carrillo Puerto’s support for cooperative cattle ranches, they wrote that ‘the number of proprietors grew, especially among the working people of the fields ... So, it is not rare to see behind even the humblest homes a feeding trough and a corral, produce of hard work and hope.’ When closing the letter, he reminded the governor ‘that the feeling of ownership [is] intimately linked to mother earth’.104

After Carrillo Puerto’s execution in the delahuertista coup and a series of bitter intra-party rifts, in May 1925, Bartolomé García Correa was named PSS president. When García Correa became governor for the 1930–3 term, he hoped to revive the cooperative path to a socialist economy. He staged three party congresses (1930, 1931, 1932) that drafted elaborate blueprints for hundreds of producer and consumer cooperatives, complemented by a modern welfare state. The Depression, bitter opposition from conservatives and national political upheavals dashed his hopes.105

Conclusion

The lives of Carrillo Puerto and García Correa exemplify the complex, at times contradictory, relationship between Indigeneity and socialism in Yucatán. Because of his white phenotype and transnational political odyssey between 1914 and 1920, Carrillo Puerto could treat Yucatán’s upper class as equals, lobby Mexico City politicos and charm important foreigners like the US archaeologist Sylvanus Morley. Ironically, this very distance from Indigeneity helped him to partially transcend the social and cultural gulf between himself and Maya peasants. Carrillo Puerto’s views of Maya people were never completely free of the paternalistic and exoticising tropes so common in Mexico at the time, but he came much closer to transcending anti-Indigenous beliefs than the vast majority of revolutionary politicians of his era.

Carrillo Puerto’s ‘posthumous career’, to borrow Samuel Brunk’s useful phrase, has been remarkably successful.106 Much of the historiography of Carrillo Puerto resembles hagiography, with his 1924 assassination equated with martyrdom. Dissenting voices are few and far between today (unlike in Carrillo Puerto’s time). Gadfly popular historian Pedro Echeverría provocatively asked if Carrillo Puerto were not assassinated in 1924, would he have sought re-election like other southeastern strongmen such as Adalberto Tejeda Olivares of Veracruz and Tomás Garrido Canabal of Tabasco? Would he have been discredited by his close alliance with Plutarco Elías Calles?107 This intentionally provocative statement raises another important question: if Carrillo Puerto had indeed survived the delahuertista coup and faced the same historical circumstances as García Correa – the creation of the direct antecedent of the PRI, the Great Depression and virulent opposition from the national left and right – would Carrillo Puerto have been remembered differently? Would Carrillo Puerto’s socialism have looked substantially different from that of García Correa’s in 1930?

García Correa’s history as the leader of Yucatecan socialism from 1925–35 was profoundly different, as was his posthumous career. His social origins and his political career before 1925 help to explain both. His family was recognised as socially white in his provincial hometown, but his dark phenotype in some ways stigmatised him in Mérida and Mexico City. García Correa had an elite education for his place and time, but he was not exposed to the radical ideologies that challenged the world view and prejudices of the Yucatecan petty bourgeoisie before 1915. García Correa’s belief that only cautious change would uplift the Maya, and that private property acquired via cooperativism, as opposed to collective ejidos, would truly help Maya people, reflects his more moderate understanding of socialism and Indigenism compared to his mentor’s.

As Carrillo Puerto was posthumously styled as a martyr of the Revolution – an image reinforced by the Diego Rivera mural depicting the Yucatecan leader as a red angel – analogies to Christ are unavoidable. The leyenda negra of García Correa depicts him as something of a Judas Iscariot.108 García Correa represented himself as a Peter, the first bishop of Rome, the rock on which Yucatecan socialism would be built after Carrillo Puerto’s death.109 In truth, García Correa was neither, and he seems more analogous to Paul of Tarsus, transforming Carrillo Puerto’s socialism into something unrecognisable by some early adherents.

Notes

  1. Osten, The Mexican Revolution’s Wake. ⮭
  2. Iturriaga, Las élites, 37, 238–334; Smith, The Mexican Press, 118–21. ⮭
  3. Fallaw, ‘The limits of the independent press’. ⮭
  4. Fernández Souza and Villanueva Mukul, ‘Notas sobre el sindicalismo independiente en Yucatán’; Sierra Villareal and Paoli Bolio, Cárdenas y El Reparto, 27–9, 71, 74–5; Echeverría Varguez, Educación Pública, 87. ⮭
  5. How Indigenous people viewed Carrillo Puerto’s socialism is an important topic in its own right. See Armstrong-Fumero, Factionalism, 52–5. ⮭
  6. Bolio, De la cuna, 23; Armstrong-Fumero, Factionalism, 53–4; Mediz Bolio and Castillo Torre, La Agonía, 12. ⮭
  7. To the best of my knowledge, the term ‘Maya adjacent’ is original here. I credit Brent Metz’s ‘decolonizing approach’ to Maya identity that considers a number of different relational, contingent and historical factors that complicate the definition of the Maya. See Metz, Where Did the Eastern Mayas Go?, xxv. Metz notes that in eastern Central America, there are many who do not identify as Indigenous but have phenotypical and cultural traits deemed Indigenous. As in the case of García Correa, people with these social and cultural traits might well harbour anti-Indigenous attitudes. See Metz, Where Did the Eastern Mayas Go?, xv. ⮭
  8. La Lucha, 6 February 1926. ⮭
  9. Díaz Güemez, El arte monumento, 113; Eiss, In the Name, 87. ⮭
  10. De Giuseppe, ‘El Tabasco racionalista’; Brown, ‘The Chontal Maya’, 120. ⮭
  11. Stern, ‘“The hour of eugenics”’. ⮭
  12. Lewis, The Ambivalent Revolution, 122; Hernández Castillo, Histories and Stories from Chiapas, 21–6. ⮭
  13. Bolio Ontiveros, El P.S.S., 69; Ruz Menéndez, Historia, 72, 176; Quintal Martin, ‘El Boxpato’, 3. ⮭
  14. Vaughan, ‘Education and class’, 20. ⮭
  15. Carrillo Puerto, La familia Carrillo Puerto, 12; Irigoyen, Felipe Carrillo Puerto, 7. ⮭
  16. Irigoyen, Felipe Carrillo Puerto, 7. ⮭
  17. See, for example, Brunhouse, Sylvanus G. Morley, 175. ⮭
  18. Menéndez González, En pos, 182–3, 186–7, 254–6. ⮭
  19. Castillo Rocha, Pasado y fortaleza, 79. ⮭
  20. Ancona, Historia de Yucatán, vol. 4, 40, 44; Eiss, In the Name, 37. ⮭
  21. Bolio Ontiveros, El P.S.S., 69; Nardelli, Un hombre, 20. ⮭
  22. Bolio Ontiveros, El P.S.S., 69–70; Nardelli, Un hombre, 17. ⮭
  23. Wells and Joseph, Summer, 218–21. ⮭
  24. The only published account of Canul can be found in Eiss, In the Name, 111–12, 125, 137. In this paragraph, I draw on my own oral history and archival research on Canul, as well as documents shared by Paul Eiss. I am especially grateful for Gilberto Uitz’s help. Personal conversation with author, Umán, Mexico, 13 August 2013. ⮭
  25. Bolio Ontiveros, El. P.S.S., 69. ⮭
  26. Nardelli, Un hombre, 18. ⮭
  27. Pedro Canul to Governor Toribio de los Santos, 5 February 1915, Archivo General del Estado de Yucatán (AGEY) PE SG caja 488. ⮭
  28. Domínguez Aké, La vida; Bolio Ontiveros, De la cuna, 23; Bartra, Suku’un Felipe, 29–30. ⮭
  29. Bartra, Suku’un Felipe, 29–30. ⮭
  30. Pérez de Sarmiento and Savarino Roggero, El cultivo, 161; La Opinion, 28 July 1911; La Libertad, 12 October 1913. ⮭
  31. Joseph, Revolution, 199–200. ⮭
  32. In the early 1930s, García Correa supported communist activist Antonio Betancourt Pérez. See Fallaw, ‘Antonio Betancourt Pérez’, vol. 1, 4. ⮭
  33. Fallaw, ‘From acrimony to accommodation’, 237–41. ⮭
  34. Fallaw, ‘Dry law’, 48–60; Diario Oficial, 2 March 1922. ⮭
  35. Savarino Rogerro, Pueblos y nacionalismo, 293. ⮭
  36. Nardelli, Un hombre, 20. ⮭
  37. Wells and Joseph, Summer, 76–7, 218. ⮭
  38. Sierra Villarreal, La revolución, 283; Wells and Joseph, Summer, 240, 249; Pérez de Sarmiento and Savarino Roggero, El cultivo, 110. ⮭
  39. Sociedad Socorros Mutuos de Umán to gov., 5 February 1915, AGEY PE SG caja 488. ⮭
  40. Cardos Ruz, El drama, 181–2; Gómez Segura, Las comisiones agrarias, 80. ⮭
  41. The quote ‘diamonds in the rough’ is from Alvarado, La reconstrucción de México, vol. II, 16; see also vol. II, 20. The relationship between Alvarado’s socialism and Indigeneity is an important topic beyond the scope of this article. See Eiss, ‘Deconstructing Indians’ and ‘A measure of liberty’. ⮭
  42. Alvarado, La reconstrucción, vol. II, 7. ⮭
  43. Alvarado, Actuación revolucionaria, 51–2. ⮭
  44. Partido Socialista del Sureste, Primer Congreso Obrero Socialista, 80–2. ⮭
  45. Chacon,‘Yucatan and the Mexican Revolution’, 282. ⮭
  46. Sarkisyanz, Felipe Carrillo Puerto, 126. ⮭
  47. Savarino Roggero, Pueblos y nacionalismo, 358. ⮭
  48. Savarino Roggero, Pueblos y nacionalismo, 356. ⮭
  49. Eiss, In the Name, 125. ⮭
  50. S. Cetina Moreno to gov., 21 January 1917, AGEY PE 565; Eiss ‘Redemption’s Archive’, 76–86; Diario Oficial, 13 March 1918. ⮭
  51. Eiss, ‘Measure of liberty’, 70–1; Eiss, In the Name, 277. ⮭
  52. Joseph, Revolution, 185–6. ⮭
  53. Eiss, In the Name, 109. ⮭
  54. S. Cetina Moreno to gov., 25 January 1917, AGEY PE 565. ⮭
  55. Unsigned Informe of Ayuntamiento de Umán, n.d., AGEY PE SG 589; Pérez Ponce, Las coronas, 15. ⮭
  56. Bolio Ontiveros, El P.S.S., 70–1. ⮭
  57. Max Canché to gov., 22 September 1919, AGEY PE 689 SG 2; Carrillo Puerto, La familia Carrillo Puerto, 109; Diario Oficial, 13 January 1920 and 21 December 1923; José Jesús Barceló to gov., 21 April 1924, AGEY PE 781 SG; El Popular, 4 November 1921. ⮭
  58. Buenfil Méndez, ‘Las andanzas del abuelo’. ⮭
  59. Fallaw, ‘From acrimony to accommodation’, 231–2. Julio Tresierras defines postrevolutionary Indigenism as the paternalistic provision of social welfare benefits, education and legal defence to Indigenous peoples as part of a larger strategy to assimilate them and appropriate elements of their culture; see Tresierras, ‘Mexico’, 190. ⮭
  60. Joseph, Revolution, 224. ⮭
  61. Diario Oficial, 29 September 1923. ⮭
  62. Chacon, ‘Yucatan,’ 435–6. ⮭
  63. Juan Campos Palma to Mayor of Motul, 9 December 1918, AGEY PE 652 SG. ⮭
  64. Carrillo Puerto, La familia, 55. ⮭
  65. Castillo Torre, A la luz de relámpago, 44; Sandoval Viramontes and Mantilla Gutiérrez, Felipe Carrillo Puerto, 64–70; Muñoz, Verdad y mito, 251; Bartra, Suku’un Felipe, 29–30. On the concept of combat journalism, see Piccato, The Tyranny of Opinion, 71. ⮭
  66. Gamboa Ricalde, Yucatán desde 1910, vol. III, 88–9; El Universal, 5 November 1920, quoted in Sol, Bolchevismo Criminal, 99–100; La Opinion, 31 August 1921. ⮭
  67. The best overview of Yucatecan politics in the 1918–22 period remains Joseph, Revolution, 195–210. ⮭
  68. Nardelli, Un hombre, 21–2. ⮭
  69. Sierra Villarreal, La revolución, 107–55. ⮭
  70. Nardelli, Un hombre, 21–2; Durán Castillo, Maxcanú en la historia, 343. ⮭
  71. Eiss, In the Name, 109. ⮭
  72. Savarino Roggero, Pueblos y nacionalismo, 349. ⮭
  73. Reed, Peregrina, 108–11. ⮭
  74. Spenser, ‘La Político Económica’, 323, 331–4. ⮭
  75. Franz, ‘Bullets and Bolshevists’, 179–80 and 201–2. ⮭
  76. Andrews, ‘Robert Haberman’, 189–211; Velasco, ‘Reading Mexico’, 651. ⮭
  77. Diario Oficial, 13, 27 August 1918. ⮭
  78. Diario Oficial, 8 July 1918. ⮭
  79. La Revista de Yucatán, 2 May 1919 and 22 November 1919. ⮭
  80. F. Rodriguez Report, 19 February 1918, AGEY PE 645 SG; Diario Oficial, 13, 22 March, 5 August, 25, 28 September 1918; La Voz de la Revolución, 8 May 1919. ⮭
  81. Eiss, In the Name, 137–8; F. Rodriguez VOP informe, 9 March 1918, AGEY PE 645 SG. ⮭
  82. Quintal Martin, ‘El Boxpato’, 4. ⮭
  83. Joseph, Revolution, 211–12. ⮭
  84. Bolio Ontiveros, El P.S.S., 70–1. ⮭
  85. Joseph, Revolution, 216; Bartra, Suku’un Felipe, 181–3. ⮭
  86. Bustillos Carrillo, Los Mayas, 200. ⮭
  87. Diario Oficial Suplemento, 6 December 1923. ⮭
  88. Álvarez Cuartero, ‘Elvia Carrillo Puerto’. ⮭
  89. Peniche Rivero and Martin, Dos mujeres fuera de serie. ⮭
  90. Fallaw, ‘Los límites de la revolución’; Joseph, Revolution, 205. ⮭
  91. Spenser, ‘Workers against socialism’. ⮭
  92. Franz, ‘Bullets’, 143–4. ⮭
  93. Joseph, Revolution, 234–47. ⮭
  94. Fallaw, Cárdenas Compromised. ⮭
  95. La Revista de Yucatán, 14 August 1919. ⮭
  96. La Revista de Yucatán, 21 August 1919. ⮭
  97. Nardelli, Un hombre, 21. ⮭
  98. El Popular, 16 May 1922. ⮭
  99. Fallaw, ‘Intellectual workers’, 251; Diario del Sureste, 22 September 1935. ⮭
  100. Castillo Torre, A la luz de relámpago, 93; Bartra, Suku’un. ⮭
  101. Joseph, Revolution, 252–3; 260–1; Gamboa Ricalde, Yucatan desde 1910, vol. III, 303. See also Bartra, Suku’un Felipe, 177. ⮭
  102. Torre, Verdadero Socialismo. ⮭
  103. Patch, Maya and Spaniard, 111, 237, 260; Rugeley, Rebellion Now and Forever, 305–6. ⮭
  104. Mauro Ceh et al. to gov, 26 May 1924, AGEY PE 790. ⮭
  105. Fallaw, ‘Intellectual workers,’ 254–66. ⮭
  106. Brunk, The Posthumous Career. ⮭
  107. Echeverría Varguez, La política, 36. ⮭
  108. Castillo Rocha, Pasado, 79. ⮭
  109. Tierra, 10 May 1928. ⮭

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