Article
Yucatán's Pirate Novels and the Discursive Mayan Rebel in the Nineteenth-Century Criollo Imaginary
Revista de estudios hispánicos
(2019)
Abstract
During Yucatán’s Caste War, described in the nineteenth century as the Mayan
rebel uprising against criollo (European-identified) hegemony, more than half
the Yucatán Peninsula’s population either perished or fled, fearing for their lives.
As one of the most violent indigenous uprisings in the Americas, it was also one
of the longest: the Caste Wars tormented the Mexican Southeast for over 50 years.
While historical scholarship has examined the Caste War at length, the study of
the peninsula’s literary production has yet to be considered for the contribution it
makes to fully understanding the sociohistorical context of the war. In this article,
I examine the pirate novels of two of Yucatán’s most prolific nineteenth-century
letrados—Eligio Ancona and Justo Sierra O’Reilly—as they delve into the
anxieties that the Caste War provoked in the elite population. Through analysis
of the well-established genre of the pirate novel, I demonstrate the way literature
served as a space to test new configurations of racial discourses that emerged from
the criollo construction of a race war. When paired with historical monographs
by the same authors, it becomes evident that the pirate took on new meaning
in the context of the Caste War, allowing criollo intellectuals to substitute their
increasingly threatened mastery of the land (under attack by rural uprisings) for
an imagined mastery of the sea.
Keywords
- Literary Studies,
- Cultural Studies,
- Nineteenth-Century literature,
- pirate novels,
- historical novels,
- Mexican literature,
- Yucatán literature,
- Yucatec Maya,
- Caste War,
- Justo Sierra O’Reilly,
- Eligio Ancona,
- race,
- estudios culturales,
- literatura decimonónica,
- novelas de piratería,
- novelas históricas,
- literatura mexicana,
- literatura yucateca,
- maya yucateco,
- guerra de castas,
- raza,
- etnia.
Disciplines
Publication Date
Summer June, 2019
Citation Information
Sarah West. "Yucatán's Pirate Novels and the Discursive Mayan Rebel in the Nineteenth-Century Criollo Imaginary" Revista de estudios hispánicos Vol. 53 (2019) p. 753 - 776 Available at: http://works.bepress.com/sarah-west/3/