Paying for Progress: School Taxes, Municipal Government, and Liberal State Building, Cuetzalan and Huehuetla, Mexico, 1876–1930

Abstract

Focusing on school funding, this article examines the relationship between the majority indigenous population of the Puebla Sierra and the Mexican state from 1876 to 1930. The article questions assumptions about peasant resistance to taxes and about the dearth of rural schooling before 1921. I find that the municipal personal taxes that funded education during the Porfiriato were raised continually in spite of the fact that they burdened the poor disproportionately. Acquiescence to taxation administered by local authorities was further demonstrated when personal taxes were abolished in 1917 and municipalities resuscitated a Porfirian-era education tax in order to maintain schools that state and federal governments would not pay for—a fact ignored by the historiography, which has focused on federal schools. This article argues that municipalities contributed to the emergent educational system and that school funding helped to construct an economically unequal liberal citizenship in which the price for inclusion could be high.

Inhabiting Identities: On the Elusive Quality of Indigenous Identity in Mexico

“…The dominant republicanism of the 19th century favored the use of categories of belonging, such as “neighbor” or “citizen,” in a quest to overcome what was then seen as a colonial yoke—the legal division into two “republics,” one for the Indians, and the other for the Spaniards and their castas . Neither the categories nor the distinctions disappeared and mounting historical evidence shows that the republican and liberal horizons were adopted and used by social actors who, due to their cultural characteristics—for example, their indigenous languages—could today be identified as indigenous peoples (see, among others, Acevedo‐Rodrigo 2019). The Mexican Revolution of the 20th century and its institutionalized political program in the 1917 Constitution did not grant a differential status to sectors of the population on an ethnic or cultural basis.…”