Despite its ambiguity and malleability, ideology can become a strong motivational force, mobilizing both rational and emotional energy for a specific cause. Yucatecan politicians cultivated the deep-rooted fear of a mass Indian uprising to attract followers to fight against the Caste War rebels. In their desperate situation during the first years of the war, the latter found moral support in the Cult of the Speaking Cross.The Yucatecan and Mexican elites coincided in their interpretation of the Caste War as a racial or ethnic conflict, a struggle between civilization and barbarism. This official discourse tied in with established images of Indians as savages, created at the time of the conquest to legitimize colonialism.While the Caste War rebels did not have an elaborated political program, their major concerns emerged from the sources, the most prominent of which were reduction of taxes and religious fees, free access to land for cultivation and equal rights. In contrast to the interpretation of the war as a racial conflict that pervaded official Yucatecan discourse, rebel statements demanded equality for all groups and were generally phrased in economic and political terms.

The armed forces that fought against the Caste War rebels were a heterogeneous mix, including regular government units. The majority of those who fought against Caste War rebels, however, were drafted to the militia (or National Guard) battalions established in major Yucatecan towns. Furthermore, local vecino or Indian men waged their own war against the rebels. The coexistence of a variety of armed forces, the strong reliance on draftees, the presence of volunteers in military units and the participation of people who fought the rebels on their own led to several problems and became an obstacle to central strategic planning and the enforcement of military discipline. The role of Indians in the struggle against Caste War rebels has been consistently neglected or played down in much of the literature, possibly for its potential to question interpretations of the conflict as a racial or ethnic struggle. However, as the chapter shows, Indians, identified by their Maya surname, made up a substantial part of the army and National Guard units. Indian participation in the war was not limited to individual regions or a specific point in time.

Warfare is not only about exerting military force but also about logistics. Men need arms to fight efficiently and, above all, they have to eat. Thus to a significant degree the struggle for survival and foodstuffs determined the Caste War during its first two decades. Although government forces often suffered as a result of insufficient supplies, they could at least rely on existing structures of production, distribution and transport, such as haciendas, trades and roads. The Caste War rebels, on the other hand, had to create their own economic system from scratch. While insurgents were mostly in a position to live “off the country,” commandeering or plundering the required resources in the areas under their control during the first year of the conflict, provisioning combatants and their families became more trying after their withdrawal to the eastern and southeastern parts of the peninsula. Firearms, powder, lead and other desired items had to be procured either by looting in the government-controlled area or purchasing them in Belize.

The Caste War stands out from the numerous other rebellions and civil wars in Mexico in the nineteenth century due to its duration, its magnitude and its consequences. While war-related casualties added up to hundreds or even several thousands in most other conflicts, they probably amounted to tens of thousands in the Caste War. Apart from the Yaqui rebellions, the Caste War was the only rural uprising that led to the establishment of independent rebel polities lasting more than a few months or years. Leaving these particularities aside for the moment, it is evident that many features of the Caste War were far from unique but mirrored widespread patterns of violence, politics and state-building in Latin America.Political instability, gross inequality, a lingering racist ideology and rivalry for power, not least to access revenues in the context of an economy slow to recover, shaped the background against which the Caste War and other revolts and civil strifes evolved. Given the weakness of formal institutions, caudillism became the dominant pattern of politics and rule for decades after Independence, not only among Yucatecan factions and kruso’b but all over Mexico and beyond.

Internal violence played a crucial role when it came to enforcing order and military discipline and as a deterrent against desertion. For many men in the armed forces violence began with their enlistment. Each Mexican state was obliged to deliver a contingent of soldiers to the federal army. Since recruitment practices were never precisely regulated, some soldiers were enlisted by bounty, while others were forced to serve for several years, as in the case of wrongdoers or vagabonds. Soldiers not only experienced ill-treatment during recruitment but were also subjected to various forms of hardship and abuse as members of military units.

Although Caste War rebels were frequently despised as “barbarians” or “savages”, their culture, their society and their military organization were strongly reminiscent of rural Yucatán. Kruso’b and soldiers were both victims and perpetrators of internal and external violence. They employed force to attack the enemy, defend themselves, appropriate valuable commodities (food, booty) and take prisoners. Soldiers and rebels used similar tactics on their thrusts into enemy territory, mostly assaulting settlements with surprise attacks. Looting was a key incentive for both soldiers and kruso’b when it came to combat. Both rebels and government forces rarely distinguished clearly between combatants and non-combatants and both employed strategies of terror to induce inhabitants of frontier settlements to abandon their homes, thereby expanding the no man’s land between rebel territory and areas under government control. Internal violence occurred in both groups, although the underlying causes differed. Force served to maintain obedience of subalterns to superiors in army and militia units; violence was vital among the rebels to establishing and upholding the political hierarchy.

While Yucatecan elites consistently characterized the Caste War as a racial conflict and labelled the rebels as Indians, the insurgents were in fact a fairly mixed population. Ample evidence from contemporary observers shows that many non-Indians were found in the rebel ranks. The rebels employed terms of self-identification that reflect their mixed social and ethnic composition and religious affiliation, generally referring to themselves as cristiano’b (Christians), otsilo’b (poor), masewalo’b (commoner) or kruso’b (the crosses) and not as Indians or Maya. It comes as no surprise that legally most rank and file rebels were Indians, as revealed by their Maya surnames. Legal Indians were overrepresented among the rural lower classes, the insurgents’ main social base. In addition, the preponderance of Indians simply mirrors Yucatán’s demographic structure, since the bulk of the rebels came from areas where this group outnumbered vecinos by three or four to one.

Battles between large combat units characterized the first phase of the war from July 1847 to the end of 1848, when rebel forces attempted to conquer the area controlled by the government. The insurgents mobilized large detachments, at times amounting to several thousand combatants. Late 1848, however, saw a shift in the nature of the war. According to a contemporary observer, it transmuted into “an eternal war with no quarter,” assuming “a more bloody and fierce character.” This second phase no longer saw large battles but a “guerrilla war in which engagements were daily and everywhere but with no conclusive result.” For the divided and almost routed rebels, the new Cult of the Speaking Cross became a vital cohesive element. The proclamations of the cross offered an interpretation of their destiny and presented past defeats as sanctions for having offended God’s orders, but they also inspired hope for a better future. Beyond this, veneration of the crosses provided inhabitants of different villages and followers of different leaders with a common ideological point of identification.