524 UNIT 4 MESOAMERICAN CULTURAL FEATURES
city underclasses, newly acculturated Indians have proven to be particularly attractive
and willing subjects for Protestant evangelical and Roman Catholic lay missionary
activity in our time. These recent urban immigrant populations, together with the
rural proletariat, have also emerged as an important constituency of the reform-
oriented Theology of Liberation, a radical Roman Catholic movement that developed
in Latin America in the wake of the Vatican II reforms of the 1960s.Nativism, Revitalization, and Separatism
Another internal force that has led to an increasingly complex mosaic of religious be-
lief and practice in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has been local Indian na-
tivistic or revitalization activity. As liberal, secular governments came to power and
(sometimes inadvertently) forced acute economic hardship upon Indian communi-
ties, there were several types of local response. One, already noted, was massive mi-
gration to ranches, plantations, and cities to find employment in the wake of the
alienation of their communal and private landholdings that had been their subsis-
tence base. This typically led to assimilation and “development” (modernization).
The counterface, one that occurred with some frequency, was a reactionary force in
the remaining, increasingly marginalized Indian communities.
It will be recalled from previous discussions in this and other chapters that Crown
authority and also the postindependence secular governments had deliberately cre-
ated and encouraged socially and ethnically separate Indian townships with strong
local religious and civil hierarchies (the so-called “closed corporate communities”).
The social infrastructure and demographic mass of people who shared an Indian
identity were therefore present in such force as to allow Indian towns to seal them-
selves off socially and spiritually from those whom they regarded as their oppressors.
For these reasons, among others, the nineteenth and twentieth centuries saw hun-
dreds of articulate and violent religious movements that focused on Indian nativism
and autonomy.
Perhaps the best known of these movements was the “Caste War” of 1848 in Yu-
catán, Mexico (see the discussion of this war in Chapter 7). The uprising created na-
tional panic as Mayan Indian communities—which clearly comprised the majority
population of Yucatán—mobilized syncretized Mayan Christian and pre-Columbian
religious symbols and underground books of prophecy, together with an impressive
military force, to assert their identity as sovereign people in the region. This move-
ment is widely recognized as the most successful native-controlled, quasi-Christian,
separatist alternative religion ever invented by Mesoamericans. Indeed, they came re-
markably close to driving the mestizos out of the region altogether.
Another such movement, loosely related to the Caste War, was the so-called War
of Saint Rose (1867–1870) of highland Chiapas, Mexico. Tzotzil Mayan Indians of the
area laid siege to San Cristóbal (the mestizo trade and administrative center of the
region) in the name of a cult dedicated to Indian religious separatism. In addition
to worshipping a set of sacred images that had been acquired by a woman who de-
clared herself to be the “Mother of God,” the cult focused symbolically on the com-
ing of a new Indian Christ. Both Mexican and Indian accounts of the movement