The third Bancroft Round Table of the Spring Semester will take place on Thursday, April 19th at noon in the Lewis-Latimer Room of the Faculty Club. Diana Negrin da Silva, Ph. D. Candidate in the Dept. of Geography at UC Berkeley and Bancroft Study Award Recipient will give a talk entitled “Manuel Lozada’s Indigenous Rebellion: A 19th Century Tale of Capital, Race, and the Struggle over Territory in Mexico.”
On January 23, 1873, rebel leader Manuel Lozada was captured by the forces of General Ramón Corona in a battle on the outskirts of Guadalajara. Shortly thereafter he was taken to Tepic and publicly executed. Lozada had led a prolonged agrarian revolt that shook the western territories of the current states of Jalisco and Nayarit. His forces were largely comprised of indigenous and mestizo fighters whose lands had been taken by large plantation owners in the wake of the liberal reforms begun by President Benito Juárez in 1857. This revolt preceded Emiliano Zapata’s famous call for “Land and Liberty” but it also epitomizes power struggles going on in the cities of Guadalajara and Tepic during key moments of their urban development.
The tale of the rivalry between a rural mestizo bandit-turned-rebel leader and a Creole liberal general that culminated in the 1873 battle illuminates the complex political economic and ethnic transformations that were taking place in the 19th century Mexican west. Marbled into the story one discovers the machinations of British and Panamanian capitalists and several generations worth of Nayari (Cora) and Wixárika (Huichol) indigenous rebels. The tangled relationship between the cities of Guadalajara and Tepic further complicates this dramatic story.
The Campus community is welcome to join us at what should be an entertaining account of an important precursor to the Mexican Revolution. Bancroft Round Tables aim to showcase the rich collections of our library, in this case, our enormous resources for students of Mexican history.
