We say to the workers: 'You will have to go through fifteen, twenty, fifty years of civil wars and international wars, not only in order to change existing conditions, but also in order to change yourselves and fit yourselves for the exercise of political power."' MARX (On the Communist Trial at Cologne, 1851). "The bourgeoisie sees in Bolshevism only one side. .. insurrection, violence, terror; it endeavors, therefore, to prepare itself especially for resistance and opposition in that direction alone. It is possible that in single cases, in single countries, for more or less short periods, they will succeed. We must reckon with such a possibility, and there is absolutely nothing dreadful to us in the fact that the bourgeoisie might succeed in this. Communism 'springs up' from Positively all sides of social life, its sprouts are everywhere, without exception-the 'contagion' (to use the favourite and 'pleasantest' comparison of the bourgeoisie and the bourgeois police) has very thoroughly penetrated into the organism and has totally impregnated it. If one of the 'vents' were to be stopped up with special care, 'contagion' would find another, sometimes most unexpected. Life will assert itself. Let the bourgeoisie rave, let it work itself into a frenzy, commit stupidities, take vengeance in advance on the Bolsheviks, and endeavour to exterminate in India, Hungary, Germany, etc., more hundreds, thousands, and hundreds of thousands of the Bolsheviks of yesterday or those of tomorrow. Acting thus, the bourgeoisie acts as did all classes condemned to death by history. The Communists must know that the future at any rate is theirs; therefore we can and must unite the intensest passion in the great revolutionary struggle with the coolest and soberest calculations of the mad ravings of the bourgeoisie.... In all cases and in all countries Communism grows; its roots are so deep that persecution neither weakens, nor debilitates, but rather strengthens it,"
On September 13, 1849, Yucatecan forces at Chac Creek, near the port city of Bacalar (in present-day Quintana Roo), stopped and searched a vessel named Four Sisters, owned by the Belizean merchant, Austin W. Cox. Inside they uncovered kegs containing 73 arrobas (25-pound kegs) of gunpowder and 16 arrobas of lead. Manned by three black men, the vessel also carried a Maya on whom the search party found incriminating evidence, in the form of a letter from Cox to Maya rebel leader Jacinto Pat. The letter made it clear that the gunpowder was meant for the Maya insurgents who were fighting against Mexican authorities in the Yucatán's raging Caste War. Historians of the Caste War period have consistently recognized that the Belizean authorities ignored the munitions trade that flourished between Mexico and Belize during the conflict. Largely unexplored has been the critical role that merchants and munitions traders played in shaping the British government's attitude, and consequently its policies, toward Maya groups during this volatile period.
This essay juxtaposes the trial of a prominent Hispanic, Manuel Jesús Castillo, in 1882 with the celebrations of the centenary of St. George's Caye in 1898 to gain a deeper understanding of the methods employed by officials in Belize to impose order on the complex post–Caste War society there in a way that was materially and politically advantageous to colonial rule at the nineteenth century's end. Colonial officials used the language and theme of loyalty to further imperial and class agendas in the context of political, social, and economic contestation. The idiom of loyalty served to simplify the complex reality of an often-discordant multiethnic society into a simple binary of loyalty versus disloyalty that determined the Britishness of the colony's subjects and provided beleaguered colonial officials with the vehicle for counteracting the dominance of the unofficial members of the colonial government.
From this book, scholars should pay closer attention to the ways that casta, calidad, and clase, all topics raised here, intersect, but are also different. We cannot conflate these in practice, because although closely related, they meant different things, and it is important to be precise about them. Otherwise, we risk reducing these, and other Latin American experiences, to processes more historically linked to US experiences. The scholarship on Afro-Mexicans, for its part, has depicted during the last decades a complex picture of the identities of negros, mulatos, moriscos, lobos, chinos, pardos, and morenos in New Spain. Gharala adds one more element to this multifaceted portrait: that of the tributary subject. Despite these contributions, however, the author is at times imprecise in her approach to the colonial-era language of difference. There is also a lack of clarity in the use of blackness and tributary status. In turn, this blurs the book's conclusions. Furthermore, the author's claims about the inflexibility and unchangeable nature of social labels linked to blackness are puzzling and run counter to the findings of a number of other studies that engage social differentiation and Afro-Mexican identity during this period. Nonetheless, the author should be praised for debunking the stereotypes about the mulatos vagos and for reconstructing the history of Afro-Mexican communities.
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