The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

by David Graeber

As early as 1546, a coalition of Maya rebels rose up against Spanish settlers and, despite brutal reprisals, resistance never really died down. Prophetic movements brought a second major wave of insurrections in the eighteenth century; and in 1848, a mass rising almost drove the settlers’ descendants out of Yucatán entirely, until the siege of their capital, at Mérida, was interrupted by the planting season. The resulting ‘Caste War’, as it was called, continued for generations. There were still rebels holding out in parts of Quintana Roo at the time of the Mexican Revolution in the second decade of the twentieth century; indeed, you could argue that the same rebellion continues, in another form, with the Zapatista movement that controls large parts of Chiapas today. As the Zapatistas also show, it was in these territories, where no major state or empire had existed for centuries, that women came most prominently to the fore in anti-colonial struggles, both as organizers of armed resistance and as defenders of indigenous tradition.