Unmasking the Bandit: Banditry and the Politics of Belonging in Zapotec Pueblos

Mexican intellectuals and the state were both preoccupied with banditry during the second half of the nineteenth century. Literary works, such as Ignacio Manuel Altamirano’s El Zarco, painted vivid images of defenseless pueblos terrorized by ruthless mobs of men whose anonymity was protected by the crowd. Government officials, on the other hand, expressed nervousness when pursuing bandits who knew the Mexican countryside better than they did and who challenged state power by exacting physical violence on citizens’ bodies—a practice that the Mexican state tried to monopolize as part of the process of state formation. Although recent studies of banditry during the nineteenth century have explored how banditry threatened the process of state formation in Mexico, and Latin America in general, we know little about how banditry impacted the politics of indigenous pueblos.

This paper merges these two areas of inquiry, indigenous politics and banditry, in an attempt to paint a more nuanced picture of popular politics during the 19^th century. Drawing on criminal records from the Tlacolula District in Oaxaca’s Central Valley, this presentation attempts to “unmask” the bandit by linking banditry to the criminalization of Zapotec men by municipal authorities during the second half of the nineteenth century. These authorities utilized vagrancy laws to criminalize men who transgressed local customs and punished them with jail time or military conscription. I find that men who fled or were expelled from their pueblo often resorted to banditry, robbing and kidnapping men, women, and sometimes children, who traveled along the trade routes that connected the Tlacolula Valley to the Isthmus of Tehuantepec and the Sierra Norte.