The River People in Flood Time: The Civil Wars in Tabasco, Spoiler of Empires

By Terry Rugeley

The River People in Flood Time tells the astonishing story of how the people of nineteenth-century Tabasco, Mexico, overcame impossible odds to expel foreign interventions. Tabascans resisted control by Mexico City, overcame the grip of a Cuban adventurer who seized the region for two years, turned back the United States Navy, and defeated the French Intervention of the early 1860s, thus remaining free territory while the rest of the nation struggled for four painful years under the imposed monarchy of Maximilian.
With colorful anecdotes and biographical sketches, this deeply researched and masterfully written history reconstructs the lives and culture of the Tabascans, as well as their pre-Columbian and colonial past. Rugeley reveals how over the centuries, one colorful character after another sets foot on the Tabascan stage, only to be undone by climate, disease, and more than anything else, tenacious Tabascan resistance. Virtually the only English-language study of this little-known province, River People in Flood Time explores the ways in which geography, climate, and social relationships contributed to an extraordinarily successful defense against unwelcome meddling from the outside world.
River People in Flood Time demonstrates the complex relationship between imperial forces in relation to remote parts of Latin America, and the way that resistance to external pressure helped mold the thoughts, attitudes, and actions of those remote peoples. Nineteenth-century Mexico was more a land of localities than a unified nation, and Rugeley's narrative paints an indelible portrait of one of its least known and most unique provinces.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Release date: Sep 10, 2014
• ISBN: 9780804793124

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Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

© 2014 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University.

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press.

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Rugeley, Terry, 1956– author.

The river people in flood time : the civil wars in Tabasco, spoiler of empires / Terry Rugeley.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8047-9152-6 (cloth : alk. paper)

1. Tabasco (Mexico : State)—History—19th century.   2. Mexico—History—19th century.   I. Title.

F1351.R874 2014

972'.04—dc23

2014004484

ISBN 978-0-8047-9312-4 (electronic)

The River People in Flood Time

THE CIVIL WARS IN TABASCO, SPOILER OF EMPIRES

Terry Rugeley

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

STANFORD, CALIFORNIA

For outsiders everywhere

Contents

List of Illustrations

Introduction: Imperial Spoilers

1. Origin Time

2. The Last Empire

3. Unruly Behavior at the Water’s Edge

4. The Outsider

5. The Invaders

6. The Unreformed

7. The Resistance

8. The Ax

Conclusion: The Death of a Fakir and the Agony of Old Tabasco

List of Abbreviations

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

1. Map of Tabasco

2. Pomoná

3. Street scene, San Juan Bautista

4. Fishermen in canoe

5. Cacao tree

6. José María Alpuche e Infante

7. Fernando Nicolás Maldonado

8. Juan Pablo Anaya

9. Francisco de Sentmanat y Zayas

10. Sentmanat’s grave in New Orleans

11. Pedro de Ampudia y Grimarest

12. Miguel Bruno Dazo

13. Juan Bautista Traconis

14. Manuel María Escobar Rivera

15. Victorio Victorino Dueñas

16. Eduardo González Arévalo

17. Rural Tabascan women

18. Gregorio Méndez Magaña

19. Floating mahogany downstream

20. Manuel Gil y Sáenz

21. Flooding, Villahermosa

Introduction: Imperial Spoilers

Why do certain places, so seemingly weak and so hopelessly fragmented, become the quagmires of great empires? Rome whipped the Greeks, the Carthagenians, the Egyptians, and the Gauls, but struggled against more primitive adversaries, peoples such as the Germanics who lived beyond the Rhine and the Picts of northern Scotland.¹ After centuries of external pressure, Afghanistan still defies attempts to impose some sort of institutional control above the level of tribal elders.² Allied forces defeated industrial juggernauts like Germany and Japan in the Second World War, only to stumble in the rice paddies of Vietnam.³ Scanning the list of history’s failed interventions, it sometimes seems like the scrawnier the target, the harder the fall.

Tabasco, a Mexican province located on the southern Gulf coast and shot through with a labyrinth of rivers and wetlands, is one such place. For all its poverty and instability, Tabascans resisted the short-lived monarchy of independent Mexico’s first ruler, Agustín de Iturbide (1822–23), fought off Mexican attempts to forge a centralized government, invited and then endured the campaigns of a megalomaniac Cuban adventurer, held the US Navy to a standstill, and most brilliantly of all, defeated and expelled a French military intervention in 1863, reestablishing control of their own province before the imported emperor Maximilian ever set foot on Mexican soil. How did this backward place somehow rise to challenges that flummoxed people and provinces far greater than themselves?

Tabasco and other, similar places might be called spoilers of empire: not necessarily bringing down powerful transnational political systems, but certainly gumming up their plans. In most instances—say, the United States in Vietnam—spoilers generate unanticipated costs, send troop morale plummeting, and sow political controversy among the aggressors. But in the more extreme cases, what begins as an opportunistic adventure ends up depleting so many men and so much treasure that the imperial order actually does collapse. Heady from its successful wars against surrounding city-states, fifth-century Athens took on an intervention in the faraway island of Sicily, an endeavor that ultimately proved so costly that Athens’s vaunted democracy collapsed, and rival Sparta prevailed in the long and grinding Peloponnesian War.⁴ Whether for consequences great or small, places like Tabasco can be the dime on which history turns.

Imperial spoilers are certainly unique in terms of culture and development, but they do share some common historical threads. First, a forbidding geography helps, be it the rivers and swamps of Tabasco, or, in other cases, mountains, deserts, or extremely dense jungle. Second, the places of the earth that best resist outside control are those that lie somewhere between great powers or at the edge of an inaccessible wasteland. Third, small places that have thwarted foreign meddling often lack valuable resources, causing would-be conquerors to deprioritize them and consequently withhold the necessary manpower and resources from the project. Fourth, the lack of some government of overarching institutions actually helps, since enemies cannot simply strike at the top, like Hernán Cortés seizing the Mexica monarch Moctezuma. Tribes, villages, and even individual families have to be subdued one by one. Fifth and last, the poverty and inaccessibility of spoilers means a dearth of imperial knowledge about them, their people, and their conditions; would-be invaders must thus operate in an ignorance as impenetrable as the geography. All these factors have unexpectedly made the weak strong, and the strong weak.

They make for terrific reading, these underdogs who put mighty aggressors in their place. Still, any history that looks at imperial spoilers also must confront the other side of the coin, namely, the fact that life under the conditions of an ornery independence was in some ways as bad as the interventions themselves. Tabasco poses no exception. It was and remains nature’s cornucopia: hot, florid, intensely scenic, and richly endowed with natural gifts. But its impressive record against outsiders went hand-in-hand with widespread illiteracy, poor sanitation, endemic disease, profound political instability, chronic high levels of public violence unregulated by laws or state institutions, and a marked inequality that informed class, gender, and ethnic relations. In fact, provincial factions went after each other at least as much as they fought with outsiders, and much of the worst destruction of the state came at their own hands. And like so much of Latin America, the terms under which Tabascan wars were conducted contributed little to molding an efficient state, improving revenues, or forging the institutions that would allow for the orderly management of society.⁵ The story of nineteenth-century Tabasco involves triumph, but necessarily includes these darker aspects and pyrrhic victories as well.

Rivers are supposed to end at the coast, but that is not the case here. Rather, Tabascan waterways take us to places far, far away, past shores lined by the evolving faces of human greed and aggression. They came for many reasons, these interlopers and imperialists, each with his own justification. Those acquainted with US corporate expansion at the end of the nineteenth century will be surprised to find none of the talk about bringing technology, efficiency, opportunity, and the fruits of the marketplace to lesser developed nations.⁶ Instead, the victors of Mexican independence, seated in their parlors high in the mountains, equated religion with the natural unity of what had been New Spain, and that meant a God-given duty to clobber lowland provincials into submission. Shortly thereafter, foreign filibusters preached abstract liberty achieved through their own radical persona. When Commodore Matthew Perry invaded Tabasco in 1847, he never even pretended to be improving the state in any way. If anything, Perry and his officers hated the place and instead spoke repeatedly of the need to demonstrate the gallantry of their own men. Only by the time of the French Intervention of the 1860s do we see any hint of rational reordering and wiser governance: usually as an afterthought and seldom convincing. Whatever the pitch, Tabascans had to confront the business end of these dubious visions, and the history of the nineteenth century is the story of how the river people surprised both themselves and their antagonists . . . by succeeding.

Finally, the Mexican past looks different when seen through the Tabascan prism. Much recent interpretation of the period has focused on popular versions of well-known ideologies like liberalism, a faith in progress, individual initiative, judicial equality, and secular governance.⁷ Skeptics, conversely, stress the stubbornly conservative, backward-looking nature of the society’s broad band.⁸ The Tabascan case had elements of both of these, but perhaps more important than either, highlights the importance of defense against outsiders as a defining dynamic. Cultural legacies (indigenous, Spanish, Catholic) coupled with environmental factors like the maze of rivers and swamps, first made the Tabascans who they were. Trade ties and questions of who owned what predetermined many of their interests. Factors of the moment, currents such as the broad fascination with liberty that swept the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century western world, set the terms of coming provincial actions. But it was the need to expel some unwanted intruder that ultimately drove provincial history and helped mold a people’s character.

Here as much as anywhere, Tabasco’s environmental factors influenced the course of events. Mexican environmental studies typically fall into one of several familiar categories. The first sees the country through the prism of the arid north: the land of a thousand deserts, the place where only a rattlesnake finds true contentment. Such histories speak of sparse settlements huddled around water sources; of seminomadic Indians and their predictably troubled relationships with Spanish settlers; of ascetic missionaries; of railroads and grim mining enclaves; and of hard-bitten cowboy revolutionaries who saw violent death as an inevitability.⁹ A second common approach emphasizes the annual wet/dry agricultural cycle that informs southern Mesoamerica and which forged a peasant culture of religion, land tenure, and folk knowledge so strong that it has resisted centuries of outside pressure.¹⁰ Still a third looks at the way export booms enter and transform a region, only to perish when demand for the resource runs its ordained course; examples include works dealing with cotton, henequen, precious woods, rubber, and the colonial cultigen par excellence, sugar.¹¹ The story of Tabasco and its terrible civil wars departs from all of these. Occupying only slightly more than 1 percent of national territory, it contains one-third of Mexico’s hydraulic resources.¹² Water, and too much of it, informs every moment of the Tabascan story.

Back of all this lies something larger, a timeless story of how a people who were outgunned, outfunded, and outorganized somehow managed to come away winners. That story is all the more timeless for the fact that the Tabascans were simply ordinary people thrust into circumstances that would have challenged the most skilled generals and statesmen. Sadly, we may never be able to do them full justice. Virtually any paper that did not find its way out of Tabasco before the 1880s has been destroyed. The petitions of peasant outrage, the patriarch’s last will and testament, the newspaper, the hacienda’s primitive ledger books, the by-laws of pious ladies of the church club, the lofty debates of the village council: gone, all gone. A handful of exceptions aside, the only papers of Tabascan history accessible today are those that somehow came to rest in Mexico City or Mérida, or even in foreign countries, or were printed in a compilation by some long-dead antiquarian, then lost forever in their original form. Consequently, this book tells what may well be the only narrative that can be told. Perhaps it’s better that way; Tabasco’s unusual characters still merit retelling after more than a hundred years of oblivion, and with a fuller palate of sources, we might well have overlooked them. But regardless of who or what impelled events, nineteenth-century Tabascan history remains the tale of how a terrible flood time rose up and engulfed a river people who might have lived on the banks in peace—had those people, and those banks, and the human race itself, been otherwise.

ONE

Origin Time

Perhaps more than any other geographical element, rivers have a way of provoking the imagination. Their constant motion suggests a living being; their distant origins spark the romantic itch for discovery; and their dual roles as benefactors and destroyers provide a metaphor for the gods’ fickle friendship with humanity. Just as the ancient Egyptians looked on the Nile as the source of both life and suffering, so too, the rough-hewn people of Tabasco could read in their rivers a lesson regarding the enigmas of their worldly existence.¹ Those same meandering bodies also offer something more mundane, some fiber common to the social world that emerges along their banks. Riverscapes provide national metaphors, with the august Hudson Valley symbolizing a providential role for the United States, the winding Volga summoning up the peasant essence of Russia, or the bustling Thames reflecting London’s imperial economic status.² But the myth power of riverscapes holds doubly true for Tabasco. Unlike all other parts of Mexico, the province is shot through with a bewildering network of streams and swampland that makes water excess, not aridity, the principal geographical challenge to human settlement. The southern Gulf coastal waterways define their surroundings, and those who choose to live and die by their caprice have always been, and will always be, river people.

Most Tabascan waters originate along the northern and western ridges of the Chiapan-Guatemalan highlands. Even today, the headlands of these rivers constitute a unique area for Mesoamerica: mountainous, well watered, lushly vegetated, and thinly populated next to the dense concentrations of Mexico City or the coastal capitals of the Yucatán peninsula. Few people not born in this region ever visit it in any serious way, save to see the magnificent archaeological sites . . . most of them discovered by peasants in search of land for the slash-and-burn agriculture that has been the basis of life here from time beyond memory. They were higher once, these mountains pushed up from the sea by the collision of tectonic plates deep within the earth. In fact, Tabasco itself only exists because eons of erosion have carried down uncountable millions of tons of soil and mineral from the uplands and deposited them on an alluvial plain.

Lands to the south of present-day Tuxtla Gutiérrez empty into streams leading to the Pacific coast. But drainage north of that point feeds into Tabasco’s westernmost waterway, the Tonalá (place of heat), which marks the current-day boundary with the state of Veracruz. From these same points, but moving northeastward, issues the Mezcalapa (river of magueys).³ It originates in a remote southern point to which few people ever travel. There stands Malpasito, an Early Postclassical Period (roughly 900–1200) site of the Zoque peoples, built high on a mountainside and noted for its exemplary prehistoric ball court and sweat bath. From their highland vantage point, the pre-Columbian Zoques mediated overland trade passing between the Caribbean and Pacific coasts. The Mezcalapa has an unusual history that joins natural caprice with human interest and initiative. Prior to the late seventeenth century, the river ran due north, passing successively through a string of towns from Huimanguillo to Comalcalco, past fields of herons, cranes, and egrets, before emptying into the swerving shores and bending bays of the Gulf of Mexico, near the current-day town of Paraíso, at the Tupilco bar. However, the natural levees of the river were low formations of soft mud and easily given to meanderings, breaks, deluges, and redirections.⁴ One of the most important of these happened in 1675, when the east banks gave way just south of Huimanguillo (place of the great cacique), causing the entire river to shift eastward into the Grijalva. Far from being alarmed, Spanish settlers dug canals in order to accelerate the process: by turning the Mezcalapa into a Grijalva tributary, they robbed pirates of an easy entry into central Tabasco, forcing both merchants and raiders alike to traverse the more easily fortified Grijalva. The former course of the Mezcalapa still exists, mainly in the form of a low area with occasional wetland pockets, and is known, appropriately enough, as Río Seco, or dry river.⁵ Such abrupt changes in major waterways may well have played a role in the abandonment of some of the earliest pre-Columbian settlements, which depended on rivers for both drinking water and transportation.

Figure 1.   Map of Tabasco, with principal cities, towns, and rivers. By Terry Rugeley.

Due south of the capital city of San Juan Bautista de Villahermosa a series of rivers descend from the Chiapas border: originating from a broad catchment in the Guatemalan highlands, the Teapa (originally, Teapan, or river of rocks), the Tacotalpa (place of uneven surface), and the Puyacatengo (on salt water banks), all flow northward, where they combine into the Grijalva, named for the first European to explore these parts.⁶ This great waterway originates in Guatemala’s Huehuetenango district, flows northward through Chiapas, at which point multiple tributaries combine to form the Grijalva proper. It passes to the right of Villahermosa and continues north, eventually joins with the east-lying Usumacinta, and empties into the Gulf just north of modern-day Frontera. Collectively, the Grijalva-Usumacinta waterway constitutes the fifth-largest river system in Latin America.⁷

About sixty kilometers westward along the coast, at the mouth of the González River lies at the sandbar of Chiltepec (place of the chiles).⁸ Well into the nineteenth century, vast inundations often covered lands of the center north and allowed travelers to paddle from the González directly eastward into the Grijalva without having to go overland, but modern flood control (far from perfect, it turns out) has since heightened the separation of the two. From Late Postclassical times (1200–1519) onward, most human settlement has clustered in this middle Tabascan region, along the Grijalva’s banks. The area bounded by the Grijalva to the east, Río Seco to the west, and the rerouted Mezcalapa to the south form a region known as the Chontalpa: literally, region of foreigners, in all probability a reference to precontact settlement by Nahuatl-speakers from central Mexico.⁹ Hot, low, flat, and eternally watered, it has long been Mexico’s premiere greenhouse for cacao, the tree whose seed forms the basis of chocolate.

There were rivers . . . and then there was the Usumacinta. The brave people of Tabasco feared only God and this waterway, in some mysterious way manifestations of the same being. Few men traversed its lengths, or learned its secrets. Juan Galindo (originally John Gallagher, an Irishman who came to Guatemala seeking his fortune in 1827) explored much of the territory between Tabasco and Belize, and he understood well the air of impenetrable mystery that lingered around it:

The Usumacinta is peculiarly remarkable among the rivers of this part of America, not only for the length of its course, advantages of its navigation, fertility of its banks, and superiority of the climate of its district, but also for the almost total ignorance in which even the inhabitants of the surrounding country remain with respect to its relative position, its course and branches.¹⁰

This mighty force originates in the relentless precipitation of the highland rainforests. The river’s principal tributaries are the San Pedro Martirio of the Guatemalan Petén, the Salinas-Chixoy (pronounced Chi SHOY) river of Guatemala’s Alta Verapaz of Guatemala’s north-central zone, and the Lacantún of southeastern Chiapas, all in turn fed by lesser tributaries such as the San Pablo, the Pasión, and the Ocosingo. Of the region’s many waterways, it was this river—the broadest, the deepest, the most volatile, the road into jungle territories little known and never to be fully understood—which dominated both commerce and the imagination. Gentleman-archaeologist John Lloyd Stephens came this way in 1840 and reported, Amid the wildness and stillness of the majestic river, and floating in a little canoe, the effect was very extraordinary . . .¹¹ I must say, wrote the French naturalist Arthur Morelet years later, that the scenes on the Usumacinta, by their melancholy grandeur, and primitive poetry, have left the most profound and lasting impressions on my mind.¹² The modern-day explorer will readily agree. The majestic, pale-green waterway coils through the state’s eastern lowlands like the sleepy and overfed serpent-monster of some forgotten mythology. Huge trees like the macuilí and the guayacán line its banks. Further beyond stretch fertile alluvial plains. Human beings first came here to plant corn, and their numbers paled beside the wealth of deer, alligator, turtles, and innumerable tropical birds that gathered to take advantage of the river’s bounty.¹³ In the late afternoon, howler monkeys awaken from their siestas and stake out their territory through a series of frightful cries that resound for miles . . . all from a timid tree-dweller slightly smaller than a chimpanzee. British explorer John Herbert Caddy took this same journey in 1840 and reported, The noise of the large black baboon at night is awful, you would fancy a herd of wild cattle were in full combat so loud is the roaring they make.¹⁴ Apparently it has always been thus, for the name Usumacinta is a Nahuatl derivation meaning, place of the sacred monkeys.¹⁵

The Grijalva and Usumacinta merge some twenty-five kilometers south of the Gulf of Mexico. The closer they come to the coast, the more they jump their low-lying banks and break into numerous smaller flows, almost as if the water were reluctant to leave Tabasco altogether. In the process, these many bifurcations create a huge marsh stretching from the Chontalpa to Lagúna de Términos, to the east. This area, known as Centla (in the cornfield), comprises Mexico’s most extensive wetland, and is home to fish, turtles, and innumerable species of birds.¹⁶ Spaniards steered clear of the mosquito-ridden expanse, leaving it as a region of refuge for Chontal Mayas, who understood how to make their living amid the prodigally generous marshes.

Doubtless the inhabitants of Tabasco’s many ranchos and fishing huts had their own sense of awe concerning the natural world around them, even if they never had the chance or wherewithal to write down their impressions. For these people the waters also amounted to practical matters, inescapable facts to be considered for both good and ill. The Usumacinta in particular is the quintessential big two-hearted river. For most of the year, this slow and drowsy waterway treats its inhabitants with an almost grandfatherly indulgence. Canoes skirt with ease over its surface, their occupants intent on errands of commerce and farming, or of romance, or of simple itch to be somewhere else. Its normal flow of three miles per hour makes for a gentle descent if a somewhat more taxing return.¹⁷ But in the course of their lives Tabascans became accustomed to periodic floodings that scourged the land. As if enraged by the hubris of its human offspring, the Usumacinta suddenly rises to sweep away houses and roads and bridges. These events, known as crecientes or inundaciones, concentrated in June through November, when torrential rains here and deeper inland, toward the Grijalva’s and Usumacinta’s sources, sent cascades of water racing toward the Gulf of Mexico. Normally no more than twelve to fifteen feet deep, the Usumacinta could abruptly surge by as much as twenty-five yards (one of the reasons that the ancient Mayas astutely built cities such as Yaxchilán so high atop the bluffs). The surges subsided as the waters dispersed over the vast alluvial plains from Tenosique onward. In such moments there was no hope of resisting or stopping the deluge; there was only the question of survival. But less predictable flooding at other times of the year always remained a threat, and when those floods did come, they brought death and disaster. One of the worst inundations in Tabascan memory came in 1852, hard on the heels of another terrible flood the year before. Beginning on October 17, heavy rains had begun to swell the tributaries, transforming the Usumacinta into an irresistible force. Soon the river had washed away the towns of Cerro (four hundred people) and Ríos de Usumacinta (seven hundred), and killed one-third of the some fourteen hundred inhabitants of Tenosique (the weaver’s house).¹⁸ Waters reached three to four meters in height, well over the tops of the smaller homes.¹⁹ When padre Tiburcio Talango lived through one such event in Teapa in 1874, he described how all human activity had to come to a stop until the fury had spent itself.²⁰ For the inhabitants of such villages, these were disasters far more terrible than the 1847 Caste War of Yucatán, whose tremors they felt only peripherally, while the days of particularly dire catastrophes would remain in human memory decades after the event. The unanswerable power of the river is a lesson that Tabascans continue to relearn, even into the twenty-first century.

Tabasco’s byzantine network of waterways carried implications for the traveler as well as for the healer of souls. The 1892 memoir of Porfirian archaeologist Pedro Romero gives some idea of how difficult it really was to move from one town to another.²¹ Despite the arrival of steam engines, most of Romero’s vessels depended on wind power, particularly for coastal navigation. The relative shallowness of even the larger rivers, including the Usumacinta, permitted only vessels of relatively light tonnage. Principal river traffic consisted either of canoas, shallow flatboats capable of carrying some thirty to forty tons and perhaps equipped with primitive lateen sails; or cayucos, simply mahogany dugouts that were pulled or paddled. Travelers might go for days without encountering anything other than these two basic crafts. This capricious river remained the dominant feature of life in eastern Tabasco, just as its twin, the Grijalva, dominated the southwest.²² Karl Heller, the tireless Austrian botanist who roamed through these parts in 1848, described how boatmen on the Teapa River patiently propelled their vessel, known as a pongo, by hooking long poles to branches along the coast, then pulling themselves by walking backward along a gangplank that ran the length of the ship.²³

Once beyond the coast, most of the state is a flat, low-lying plain intersected by a web of rivers. The huge Centla marshland covers much of the northeast, but from the Grijalva westward the elevation is sufficient for agriculture. This area, known as the Chontalpa, became one the most critical pockets of human settlement in the colonial and early national eras, and its landscapes are among the region’s most evocative. Cattle graze on low, broad savannas, occasionally wading deep into the marshes in search of the succulent grasses that grow in such abundance there. White egrets, or cattle-birds, follow them everywhere in search of insects. In the days before extensive habitat reduction, flocks of parrots, parakeets, and scarlet macaws, flamelike in their brilliant plumage, filled the daytime skies.²⁴ Punctuating the scene stand stately ceiba trees, along with the shorter fan palms known as xiat (SHEE aht), prized then as now for thatching roofs. High above them, tall and slender royal palms sway in the breeze. Until quite recently, humans made no more lasting construction here than the occasional hut that was assembled from natural materials and quickly subsumed back into the same.

In the popular imagination, the limitless fecundity of this land, the slashed vegetation’s startling reassertions, blurred the lines between our world and the next. When padre and man of letters Manuel Gil y Sáenz contemplated how the Tabascan flowers retained their bloom long after being cut, he concluded that, so too, human life persisted some time after the body had seemed to perish. Life is as mysterious as death, he wrote; Who can show me the point where the spirit takes leave of the material world? For this reason he had always performed the sacrament of extreme unction even after the corpse had grown cold and stiff.²⁵ Gil y Sáenz’s mysticism derived from Catholic theology, but like the elaborate and dimly understood ceremonial world of the Olmecs, it found its inspiration in Tabasco’s intense fertility.

As one moves further south, the land rises upward into the mountains of Chiapas and Guatemala. Much of the humidity declines, the temperature falls ever so slightly, and the vegetation loses some of its tropical flavor. In the early dawn, mists crowd into the valleys and lowland pockets. By midmorning these low clouds burn off to reveal small expanses of grazing land surrounded by copses of oaks and ceibas, along with the mimosa-like flamboyán trees, a Madagascar import whose gnarled roots and fiery orange-red flowers have made it one of the southeast’s botanical emblems. Thick clusters of pitaya vines cover many of the branches; in summer this climbing succulent yields its distinct white fruit, covered by a thick, candy-colored membrane, and while found throughout virtually the entirety of Mexico, it nowhere achieves such profusion as here. The seismic convulsions that forced up the Sierra also shot it through with underground lava flows, creating hot mineral baths such as El Azufre, visited by Karl Heller in 1847 and still accessible today.²⁶ Ancient Mayas knew of the area’s huge cave systems, labyrinthine caverns like the Grutas de Coconá (a Zoque name meaning deep water), with their underground pools and huge bat populations. They knew that these passages led to Xibalbá (shee bal BA), the gloomy place to which the mythical hero twins, Hunhunapú and Ixbalanqué, had banished the evil death lords in the formers’ successful campaign to make the surface world safe for human beings.²⁷ Spaniards cared nothing for these tales, or for the caves themselves, which had to await modern speleology for renewed appreciation. Two brothers, Laureano and Rómulo Calzada, rediscovered them in the nineteenth century, and great Tabascan naturalist José Narciso Rovirosa (1849–1901) systematically explored those same caves in 1892.²⁸ For many years this mountainous south, known locally as the Sierra, was the more popular point of human habitation. Its climate and geographical variety, along with its proximity to the Chiapas colony, rendered it attractive for settlers, and throughout most of the eighteenth century it was the mountain community of Tacotalpa, not Villahermosa, that served as the colonial capital.

Rivers are not the only waters here. A few miles inland from the coast lie bodies of fresh water known as lagos or lagunas. Although often quite large, most of these are no deeper the four or five meters. Bodies such as the El Carmen, Pajonal, and Machona have never been centers of human settlement, but they harbor innumerable forms of plant and animal life. Snails, turtles, alligators, crabs without number, snakes, and water birds all made their home here, while the wetlands drew populations of deer, jaguars, tapirs, anteaters, and javelinas. But above all, the rivers play home to a multitude of fish, such as the castarrica and the tenguayaca, the ubiquitous yellow-finned mojarra, the blue-bellied catfish known as the bobo.²⁹ One particular species—an aggressive freshwater needlefish reaching some three feet in length and known as the pejelagarto, or catán—thrives in both rivers and lagunas. In fact, grilled pejelagarto has come to be the signature Tabascan dish. Men fished for these delicacies by line, by net, or in marshy areas, by wading into the water, reed-woven basket in hand.³⁰

Its low elevations, abundant water, and extreme southern location give Tabasco one of the hottest and stickiest climates in all of Mexico. The average temperature of the Chontalpa region is 80° Fahrenheit, which translated into experience means extremely hot periods stretching from March through November. As with Yucatán, the rainy season begins around June, but rather than ending in October or November stretches on until February. Rainfall in the southern highlands, the source of the rivers, can exceed an astonishing twelve feet per year, among the highest levels on earth.³¹ Even today these harsh conditions help to discourage visitors, and despite its many astonishing features of both nature and culture, the state receives relatively little in the way of tourism, national or otherwise. But while heat and precipitation remained constants, that other peculiar feature of southeastern and Caribbean meteorology, the hurricane, rarely struck here. The Yucatecan-Central American land mass served as a buffer, while those hurricanes that made their way into the Gulf tended to swing northward, or else slammed directly into the Veracruz coastline. For these reasons, Tabasco experienced only seven cases of hurricanes proper between 1871 and 1963.³²

Tabasco’s fertility is the stuff of legend. As with the Nile or Tigris-Euphrates, periodic overflows left rich alluvial deposits that restored fertility to the land, and for as long as the rivers rose and brought the overflowing waters, humanity was safe. In places where flooding was less common, pre-Columbian agriculture depended on the decay of preexisting vegetation; once clear-cut, the soil necessarily lost much of its vitality within a year or so and had to return to fallow for an undetermined period. Modern scientifically derived agriculture solves the problem by massive infusions of chemical nitrates, but at the cost of long-term soil degradation.

This was Tabasco. Its remote mountains and rivers, its lazy palm-shaded pastures and shimmering wetlands present some of the most spectacular natural tableaus in all of the continent, while the Usumacinta-Grijalva complex constitutes the fourth-largest drainage system in all of Latin America. Yet this same spectacular geography provides the first and in many ways most important key to the province’s later role as spoiler to empire projects. As a rule, Spaniards tended to shy away from colonizing hot, swampy regions for the precise reason that they were hot and swampy, leaving these same places to less finicky settlers. That is why the Caribbean coastal area south of the Río Hondo became British Honduras, and not eastern Guatemala.³³ The byzantine network of rivers and creeks, together with mountains to the south, discouraged large-scale Tabascan settlement. Latifundia, or the predominance of large landed estates, remained impossible for the fact that land itself was in such short supply. Just as Spanish conquistadors had a difficult time subjugating fragmented peoples (the mighty Aztec empire succumbed in a mere two years, while the detritus of a long-collapsed Yucatec Maya league took two and a half decades to mop up), early Mexican statesmen and generals found the Tabascan province a disjointed hive of troublemakers that no single blow ever seemed to subdue.

FOOTSTEPS UPON AN ANCIENT SHORE

Mexico—the ur-Mexico, the tap root of all Mesoamerican culture—originated here along the fertile, wet forests and lowlands of western Tabasco and southeastern Veracruz. Beginning sometime around 1500 BC a people now known as the Olmecs rose up out of the nothingness and unpacked a civilization based on the annual double- and triple-cropping of corn, beans, squash, and chiles. Relatively little is known about their ways and attitudes, not even what the Olmec called themselves or whether they saw their different settlements as comprising a single people. These ancient river peoples possibly spoke some early version of Mixe-Zoque, one of the country’s five major indigenous language groups, but the point remains uncertain. In fact, the name Olmec only gained currency in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, while the first serious excavations took place under Frans Blom and Oliver La Farge (1925–26) and George Valliant (1928–33 and 1939–40).³⁴ Up until the mid-twentieth century, scholars and public alike refused to believe in a culture predating the Mayas; the greatest champion for Olmec antiquity was in fact polymath artist Miguel Covarrubias, best known as an illustrator of toney New York City magazines but in reality a trained ethnographer and one of the most brilliant minds of postrevolutionary Mexico. In large part it was his vision of a pre-Maya mother culture—what he so charmingly called the ‘Olmec’ problem—that won the day. Given the many lacunas of information, though, it might best to refer to the peoples of western Tabasco and southeastern Veracruz as a complex of shared cultural attributes, and not an empire or political entity.³⁵

It was they who first taught the Mesoamerican world how to think, and what to think about. Exactly what the Olmec beheld when they gazed up at the night sky, or peered into the teeming fecundity of the tropical forest, will never be known. Doubtless they caught some glimpse of the imponderable forces that governed their tenuous existence, and to better their own chances the Olmecs gave these forces animal or human faces, or most commonly, some blending of the two. Civilization—as defined by systematic modification of the natural environment—recurs time and again in tropical lowlands the world over and can usually be recognized by grandiose construction announcing the divinity of the ruling caste, and the Olmec were no exception.³⁶ Most visibly, the people of this primordial culture worshiped a deity symbolized by a jaguar. Perhaps the fascination owed to the fact that this was the most powerful and mysterious of jungle animals, and surviving Olmec artwork plies a recurrent theme of humans, both adult and babies, partially transformed into were-jaguars with fangs and snarling lips. One derivative of this being—a squat, popeyed water-bringer—evolved into Tlaloc, the standard rain deity throughout Mesoamerica. Ancient artists at times adorned his body with a puffy headdress, or with swirling lines like so many tattooed curlicues, in order to suggest and doubtless invite the clouds that brought showers.³⁷ Beside him ruled a divine crocodile who over the next millennium evolved into the somewhat more benevolent culture god known in central Mexico as Quetzalcóatl (Feathered Serpent), and later imported into the Maya northern lowlands in direct translation as Kukulkán, part of a larger post-900 attempt to revive Classic-Period culture.³⁸ To placate these terrible beings, the Olmecs crafted huge stone mosaics and buried them deep in the ground, where only the gods could see them.³⁹

These early Tabascans pioneered much of what came to be Mesoamerican culture, including jade carving, pyramidal ceremonial constructions, cranial deformations, glyph writing, and a calendar that consisted of wheels intermeshed with other wheels. The Olmecs built great ceremonial centers: first San Lorenzo, then La Venta, and in their final centuries, Tres Zapotes. From these points they spread their culture via trade to such regions as Chiapas, Oaxaca, Guerrero, and Guatemala.⁴⁰ They exported such coastal and lacustrine products as tortoise shells, stingray spines, and mother-of-pearl from fresh-water clams; ceramics of all sort; and the all-important cacao bean, used in making the chocolate drink that was life’s indispensable daily pleasure. From the highlands they took away precious minerals like magnetite, serpentine, obsidian, and precious jade.⁴¹ In an eerie forecast of Tabasco’s future as petroleum exporter, the Olmec also carried out primitive refining of the area’s crude oil seepage, solidifying the black, gummy liquid it into a product that could later be melted down for a variety of purposes: lighting, water-proofing, and rudimentary pavement, among other things.⁴² To protect their traders and merchants the Olmecs developed the first Mesoamerican military power, with the first professional soldiers.⁴³ But this remained small by standards of the region’s later empires, constrained as it was by problems of transportation and logistics. For this reason Olmec civilization made its presence felt not through the domination of some military fist, but rather through cultural and economic influence that promised to elevate more primitive peoples to their level. After 400 BC previously marginal highland groups developed sophisticated irrigation techniques that brought new prosperity; the Olmecs faded back into their lowland territories.⁴⁴ Their representative giant heads (possibly a rather brief fad in the larger arch of their culture) lay hidden in the ground, waiting to be discovered by peasants farming corn. By the time of Spanish arrival in Olman, the land of Olmec grandeur, this civilization was less than a memory of a memory, and all that the indigenous wise men could tell was that in a certain era which no one can reckon, which no one can remember . . . there was a kingdom for a long time.⁴⁵

Following the final Olmec collapse, new groups entered the Tabascan region. The majority of them haled from the emerging Maya peoples to the east and south, bringing with them a culture in many ways derived from their predecessor peoples: a cult of nobility, a panoply of demanding gods, and an obsession with public ceremonial construction. In Comalcalco, a site only discovered in the 1830s, the absence of stone forced them to build from bricks, much like the ancient Egyptians. In fact, the very name Comalcalco means house of comales, a reference to flat, clay griddles then used to cook tortillas, but