Flood Time: Reform, Piety, and Popular Uprising in Nineteenth-Century Tabasco

This paper explores the complex relationship between religion and political conflict during Reform-era Tabasco.  While southeast Mexico’s historical landscape is often overshadowed by the Caste War of Yucatán, intense political struggles played themselves out in Tabasco as well.  Here, the Liberal Reform project of 1855 onward meshed with long-standing struggles of provincial autonomists against the centralizing tendencies of Mexico City.  As in Yucatán, a popular anti-clericalism had emerged by the 1830s, partly the result of an idealogical predisposition among Bourbon adminstrators and militia officers, partly because priests were so closely associated with the bishopric of Yucatán, and hence perceived as outsiders.  Despite these tendencies, however, Reform struggles often divided the Tabascan clergy, with priests stationed in small villages siding with Reformers as a way of manifesting their resentment against domination by the more metropolitan centers of ecclesiastical power, namely Mérida and Villahermosa.  At the provincial level, then, the Catholic institution was by no means monolithic.  Priests such as Manuel Gil y Saenz articulated a vision of progress rather similar to that of Liberal Reformers themselves.  The complicated set of alliances and malleable ideologies meant that the southeastern Reform was a messy process yielding no clear victors or losers.  Popular anticlericalism subsided with the passing of the civil wars, but remained hidden within the substrata of Tabascan culture, only to re-emerge with force during the Mexican Revolution.