Traditions of Struggle: The Copala and Putla Insurrections in Post-independence Oaxaca

In the early to mid nineteenth-century western Oaxaca’s Mixteca region experienced insurrections by the indigenous Triquis of Copala and the Mixtec peasants of Putla. The insurrections were shaped by the threat of centralist politics and the encroachment of community lands in post-independence Mexico. During the 1830s Copala and Putla’s fertile valleys attracted regional elites who attempted to expropriate community lands. This paper analyzes how the insurrections were a manifestation of traditional strategies of defense. The actions taken reaffirmed the pueblos as the center of community and political life, though transformed in the face of new political realities. At the same time, the insurrections led to the production of Triqui discourse as barbaric and backwards people. Thus, the intrusions of the fertile valleys by regional elites not only incited an insurgent population, but it became a force that reshaped how the meaning of community, both by its inhabitants and by those outside of it, would be defined in post-independence Oaxaca.