CHAPTER 7 MESOAMERICANS IN THE NEOCOLONIAL ERA 275to be seen more in cultural than in racial terms. The Mexican mestizo was said to com-
bine the progressive traits of the Whites and the fighting spirit of the Indians.
In Central America a national identity based on the image of the White creole
remained strong throughout the entire neocolonial period, and even mestizos (or,
as they were generally called, “Ladinos”) found it hard to gain ethnic recognition
within the budding national cultures. Indian ethnicity was totally discounted, creat-
ing a pathetic situation in which the Mesoamericans and other native peoples of
Central America had become foreigners in their own land.
Impact of Liberal Reforms on the Mesoamerican Indians
Even before independence was achieved from Spain, beginning with the Bourbon
reforms toward the end of the Colonial period and continuing through the entire
nineteenth century and into the early twentieth century, the Mesoamerican Indians
were under pressure from the liberal faction of the creoles, and especially mestizos,
to assimilate into the wider colonial and later national society. Liberal attempts to “re-
form” the Indian communities were specifically aimed at forcing them to adopt the
Spanish language, practice orthodox Catholicism, work for wages, and generally re-
place native practices and beliefs with Western ways.
In contrast, the conservative creoles believed that they benefited from main-
taining the Indians as an inferior “caste,” and therefore they tended to oppose re-
forms that would transform the natives’ social condition. This difference helps explain
why most Mesoamerican Indians preferred conservative “centralism” to liberal “fed-
eralism.” The conservative creoles were interested in freezing the Indians in their in-
ferior castelike colonial status. As long as the Indians paid tributes in the form of
goods and services, the conservatives were largely content to let them organize their
rural communities as they pleased. As the Mexican writer Octavio Paz (1961) points
out, in postindependence Mexico the conservative caudilloswere heirs to the old
Spanish order, and they actually employed Spanish colonial law in dealing with the
Indians. Among other things this meant that the Indians would be legally distinct
from both the creoles and the Mestizos, and as a result would occupy a secure but
inferior position in society.
Liberal reform programs were stronger in nineteenth-century Mexico than in
Central America, especially during the final fifty years. The pivotal Mexican liberal
figure was Benito Juárez, a Zapotece Indian from Oaxaca (see Box 7.3 for a de-
scription of Juárez’s Indian ancestry and attitude toward the Indians of Mexico).
Juárez attempted to establish a more just society in Mexico, one based on law and
equal rights for all Mexicans. He courageously resisted the American invasion of the
national territory, spearheaded the effort to establish an enlightened national con-
stitution (1857), and led the military struggle to overthrow the conservative-backed
Maximilian monarchy.
Juárez’s successor, Porfirio Díaz (Figure 7.6), further solidified liberal rule,
brought order to Mexico, and greatly increased national integration. Nevertheless,
as Paz (1961:133) explains, the political philosophy behind the liberal reforms
negated Mexico’s Indian past, and therefore was necessarily sterile and empty: “The