The Caste War of Yucatán was a long and complex social and political upheaval that involved Indigenous Maya people and mestizos rebelling against the oppressive economic and social system that favored the European-descendant elite that took place in the Yucatán Peninsula of Mexico between 1847 and 1901. Historical accounts of the conflict are invariably messy and populated by numerous actors, marginalized Maya, a dying empire, fledgling governments, and shifting alliances. Highlighting issues of race, social inequality, and land rights, the events of the Caste War continue to have cultural and historical significance in the Yucatán Peninsula and remain an important topic of study in the region's history and anthropology.
Christine Kray's book reminds us that the Caste War, or the Social War as she calls it in the text but not in the title, engulfed the entire region, spilling beyond the borders of what is today Mexico. Kray's contribution to the literature on the subject is a detailed examination of the experience of people on the southern side of the Hondo River in what is today Belize during the first half of the war from about 1847 to 1872, the end date culminating with the last Maya attack on the British. Kray lays out her approach in the introduction, an unnumbered chapter that precedes the narrative of events. As an anthropologist, Kray employs “historical ethnography” (16) as her methodology, utilizing historical documents and interviews with elders who lived in the San Pedro region of what is today western Belize. Kray aims “to capture Indigenous perspectives and experiences as much as possible” (13) in her work by prioritizing documents written by Maya actors.
Although it includes a necessary summary of the events and processes leading up to the Yucatecan Caste War in chapter 1, the book is centered in Belize. Kray explores issues of land, borders, labor, leadership, and trade to pull at the myriad threads in the fabric of the Caste War and order them in an absorbing narrative by building a chronology of events in chapters 2 through 6. Often in the foreground of the story, but still haunting the narrative when not on the page, is the British Honduras Company in its various incarnations. More so than the government of the settlement-turned-colony, the company and its lawyers, agents, managers, and shareholders steered the British response to the local and regional events of the Caste War, seemingly always to the detriment of the Indigenous Maya.
Kray's writing style is engaging and often humorous. Her narrative ties together complicated events and people into an understandable story. She playfully breaks each chapter into sections with titles that pay homage to the travelogues that were so popular at the time of the events in question. Kray also manages to imbue many of the people in her book with a degree of humanity that is missing from the (often) dry historical documents by analyzing their motives and intentions in context of the events compelling them to act.
As “an experiment in anthropological writing,” (13) Kray's work is largely successful, but, curiously, she ignores archaeological data from British and Maya sites mentioned in her narrative. These data could have added another level of richness to her account and helped tie places mentioned in historical documents to physical locations on the ground.
That critique aside, this book is an excellent addition to the scholarship of the Caste War, the San Pedro Maya, and the history of Belize. The ethnographic accounts sprinkled in the text are a refreshing departure from other books on the subject and they humanize the Maya caught up in the regional social upheaval of the time. This may be the book's largest contribution, as Kray reminds the reader of the many ways the British attempted to ignore (at best) and control, subject, and repress (at worst) the Maya on the southern margins of the Caste War.
