ABSTRACT
In the ensuing “Caste War”, Maya leaders Jacinto Pat, Cecilio Chi, and Venancio Pec led roughly 100,000 Mayas and significant numbers of poor non-Indians in a series of spectacular and shocking victories and came within thirty miles of invading the state capital of Merida. This chapter is a diplomatic letter from 1850 in which the Maya leaders address Governor Miguel Barbachano and the Catholic Church and lay out their demands for peace. Many of the poor Mayas who fought had suffered from the rapid expansion of export-oriented henequen and sugar haciendas whose owners tried to ensnare their labor through debt peonage. Victorious Liberals even declared Yucatec independence in 1845, but when the Mayas almost overran their haciendas in 1847, they pleaded with the United States of America to annex the state. In 1850 stone crosses positioned in front of the town’s cenote, a natural limestone well, and dressed in native women’s shirts miraculously began speaking to the Mayas.
