Armed struggle of captaincy of bow and arrow dances during the Porfiriato

Abstract

The overall goal of this investigation is to recuperate the experience of two indigenous movements ignored and made invisible by official historiography up to the present that took place at the beginning of the Porfirian period in the states of Guanajuato and Querétaro, within the context of the international expansion of struggles by subaltern European groups tied to anarcocommunalism and the Comune of Paris of 1871. One was called the War of Conquest and the other the Social War. This “other” history reveals how the participants: 1) constructed a political identity based on their self recognition and autodefinition as Indians; 2) resignified European socialism based on their own cultural and political patterns and the experience acquired during the struggle, to form a native version of socialism; and 3) recreated their own memory and political imaginary. This movement developed within an “other” geography –divergent from the official one– configured from a Prehispanic worldview and built on the support of longstanding religious and cultural networks, that included the organizations established for the realization of patron saint celebrations (mayordomías), and the brotherhoods of the dances of conquest. The analysis of the movement’s programs and plans show how it became radicalized, moving from an anticolonialist program to an anticapitalist and anti-imperialist one, whose central demands were: communal land tenure, autonomous municipalities, and a socialist Republic; demands that prefigured the social program of the Mexican Revolution, in its more radical forms: Zapatism, Villism and Magonism. For the purpose of providing the actors with a voice, primary sources were prioritized, among which the legal proceedings presented against those implicated and the documents that were confiscated from them were fundamental. In this way, we were able to dismantle the ideologizing discourse of Power or the voice of the State, by means of a hermeneutic analysis. The consultation of secondary sources demonstrated the absence of substantive research on the topic, and thus this thesis will fulfill a vacuum in regional history.