To Whom We Now Turn

The domestic turmoil that afflicted Mexico during the late 1830s and early 1840s, together with the 1846 United States invasion, set off a far-reaching crisis that embroiled much of Mexican society. Perhaps nowhere was this truer than in the southeast, where legitimate governing institutions weakened or even collapsed. This chapter identifies five forms of leadership that operated in the regional nodes of Yucatán, Campeche, Tabasco, and Chiapas after 1848: the patriarchal, the charismatic, the proconsular, the militia-based, and the professional. In so doing the chapter explores broader questions surrounding that leadership as a way of understanding the fractured nature of societies in flux, such as the social class from which each form emerged, their ideological orientation and base of support, the personal styles of governance associated with them, and finally their long-term legacies.