An Army of Locusts: Race, Service, and Culture in 19th-Century Jamiltepec

The Mixtec residents of Huazolotitlán complained in 1854 that their Afro-Mexican neighbors conspired with a priest and raised an army of locusts to destroy the town’s crops. A local politician offered an economic rationale and asserted that costeños grew the pests to corner the corn market. It appears that everyone in Jamiltepec, outside of the coastal Afro-Mexican communities, assumed that they had employed the magic locusts.^[1] This incident is one of many clashes illustrating how people constructed race in an isolated region along Oaxaca’s southern coast. The caste system ended with independence and Afro-Jamiltepecanos embraced republican citizenship by downplaying race in the public sphere. However, they continued to use geography, culture, and language to construct unique identities in their private lives.

            This paper seeks to examine these new forms of expression by analyzing how people in Jamiltepec constructed race during the nineteenth century. Building on the work of colonial scholars, bottom-up historians of state formation, and anthropologists of Latin American blackness, I employ newspaper accounts, land disputes, and political records to argue that culture, geography, language, and economics created a space by which Afro-Mexicans demarcated racial boundaries. My research indicates that when faced with an expanding network of haciendas volantes and cotton production they used these developments to foster alliances that helped to preserve pueblo autonomy. For their part, Mixtecs usually employed legal arguments to protect communal land, but by mid-century, they lacked similar relationships and experienced the collapse of the cochineal trade. Thus, the socio-economic and political partnerships that formed during this time caused numerous cultural, economic, and political disputes and foreshadowed violent confrontations in the 1910 Revolution.

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[1] 2 Julio 1854, Juan Teodoro Galeste a Ursulino Parada, Gobierno de Jamiltepec, Pueblos, Legajo 7, Expediente 72, AGPEO.

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