Patron Saints of Meat and Tallow: Sacralizing Extractivism in the Colonial Cattle Industry of Yucatán, Mexico

Abstract

In colonial Yucatán, Mexico, the owners of plantation-like estates known as haciendas conscripted saints and cows to expropriate land from Indigenous Maya farming communities. In this paper, I trace the role of hacienda saints by framing them as an introduced or adventive species, capable of forming both mutualistic and invasive interspecies relationships in their new habitat. I examine the introduction of saints to the region by Franciscans, early attempts by Maya people to build anticolonial coalitions with saints and cows, the participation of hacienda saints in extractivist ranching practices, and the ultimate reclaiming and possible naturalization of saints by Maya rebels. This paper extends conceptualizations of the plantation—as both a site of species extinction and a site of interspecies collaboration—to include Catholic saints, so as to interrogate the dynamic role of supernatural entities in deep and ongoing histories of extractivism.

1. The Burning Bullring

On the afternoon of Sunday, 12 May 2024, a bullring in the town of Panabá, Yucatán caught fire. The ring had been built in the traditional style, a teetering three-story stadium of palm fronds and timbers lashed together with ropes. Some said later they thought they saw embers from a firework fly into the thatched roof, but no one knows for sure how the blaze began. Whatever the cause, the flames spread quickly. All two thousand spectators gathered inside the ring escaped to safety, but in less than ten minutes, the entire structure had been reduced to ashes (Rodríguez Galaz 2024).

The bullfight was planned and the bullring built for the celebrations of Panabá’s patron saint, San Isidro Labrador (often translated as Saint Isidore the Laborer), whose feast day falls every year on May 15. Normally San Isidro’s celebrations correspond with the start of the rainy season, but in recent years these once-predictable rhythms have been upended. There had been no rain and all was absolutely dry, with apparent temperatures rising above 46 degrees Celsius (115° F) in the days just before the fire. The saint’s bullring ignited all too easily; it had become tinder. But even as the ashes were still smoking, the community of Panabá began making emergency arrangements to ensure San Isidro would have his taurine offerings—by the next day, a substitute, albeit less traditional, bullring was secured. The bullfights began Monday afternoon and continued through the following weekend (Ucán Chan 2024). The drought, meanwhile, would last for another month.

Panabá belongs to Yucatán’s leading commercial ranching region, a vast and expanding patchwork of privatized pasture centered around the city of Tizimín (Lawrence et al. 2019); this is a place where cattle and saints appear equally revered (Figure 1 and Figure 2). Yet the transition from communally-managed agricultural landholdings, or ejidos, to parcelized and deforested ranches that is happening here is also contributing to environmental justice conflicts: Indigenous Maya communities in the region are losing access to forests and traditional agricultural practices as more land is privatized for cattle, and they rarely themselves benefit from the development of ranches (Busch and Geoghegan 2010; DiGiano et al. 2013; Torres-Mazuera 2022). These troubled cords connecting cattle, deforestation, and the erosion of Indigenous land sovereignty are not unique to Yucatán—they are bound together with similar stories tied to different lands, unspooling at a planetary scale. The drought that enabled the burning of the bullring, the animals who were not spared despite escaping the conflagration, the saint who refused to send rain—these are the frayed edges of those tetherings.

2. Adventive Species

How did saints, cows, and the people of Yucatán become roped together? Neither San Isidro nor the bulls dying in the ring at Panabá were native to the region. But Catholic saints and Bos taurus have become deeply integrated into the belief systems and ecological interactions of Yucatán ever since they were first introduced by Spanish colonists some five centuries ago. Both cows and saints have likewise been conscripted into ongoing colonial practices of extraction since they first arrived. Both have been instrumental—though not necessarily agentive—in the dispossession of land from Indigenous Maya communities and its conversion into ranches and plantations, photovoltaic parks and luxury resorts.

This paper follows the tethers binding together cows and saints in Yucatán, so as to better understand the legacies of colonial extractivism that persist in the region today (see also Dedrick et al. 2023). Extractivism here references a particular sort of extraction, defined by Eduardo Gudynas (2020, p. 6) as, “a high-volume and high-intensity modality of natural resource appropriation, where resources are exported in primary commodity form with little to no processing”. Such precision is critical in asserting meaningful differences in human-environment interactions: whether in the nineteenth century or in the twenty-first, the ranch owner amassing vast herds destined for foreign markets is fundamentally different from the peasant farmer who keeps a few cows to be eaten or sold in case of emergency. Extractivisms in the Global South, Gudynas notes, are directly connected to histories of colonialism in the region (Gudynas 2020, p. 11). In this sense Yucatecan cattle ranching is a fractal expression of a larger process whereby, throughout the Americas, colonial institutions and their agents leveraged animal husbandry as a powerful instrument of extractivism (Norton 2024, p. 11). My concern here is with the ways Catholic saints have been used to sacralize ranching-based extractivism in Yucatán since the early colonial period.

Yet the tethers binding cows and saints to the work of extractivism have neither been indestructible nor entirely dependable; the relationship among humans, animals, and saints proved far too complex and dynamic to be limited only to exploitation (see also Valesey 2019). Instead, the corral and the chapel became sites for what Macarena Gómez-Barris calls “life otherwise”, meaning “the emergent and heterogenous forms of living that are not about destruction or mere survival within the extractive zone, but about the creation of emergent alternatives” (Gómez-Barris 2017, p. 4). My task here is to try to map these past coalitions of natural and supernatural species, coalitions that were sometimes yoked to the machinery of colonial extractivism but sometimes cut loose and retied into alternative knots of human-animal-saint interactions. It is also to point towards futures where these coalitions might be cut loose from extractivism once again.

The place where I trace these tethers is Yaxcabá Parish, located in the central region of the northern Yucatán Peninsula. Yaxcabá used to hold the same position that Tizimín holds now, as one of the leading cattle ranching sectors in the region (Alexander 2004). The parish boasted some twenty cattle ranching estates, or haciendas, at its peak in the 1840s. Haciendas were similar to other kinds of plantations of the colonial world, and in Yaxcabá they were dedicated to extracting value from the land through a mix of stockraising and maize farming (Farriss 1984). The parish held its position as one of the foremost Yucatecan ranching regions from the late 1700s until 1847, when a series of Maya-led uprisings broke out. Those uprisings are known today as the Caste War (or Maya Social War), and they have been characterized as among the most successful and critically important Indigenous rebellions in the history of the Americas (Diserens Morgan and Leventhal 2020; Gabbert 2019; Patch 1991; Reed 1964; Rugeley 1996, 2009; Sabau 2022). When the Caste War started, Yaxcabá’s ranching estates were either deserted by their owners, burned by Maya rebels, or both. The ruins of most of the haciendas are still standing.

I recently began archaeological research at one of these former ranching estates, Hacienda Cetelac, whose crumbling remains are now located in the ejido of the Maya community of Yaxunah (see also Alexander 1993, 2004). Over the years since I first started working in Yaxunah, I’ve facilitated community-engaged archaeological fieldwork to investigate the long-term causes and legacies of environmental justice conflicts ongoing in Yucatán. Aligning archaeology with anticolonial frameworks creates a pathway for collaborating with communities to restore suppressed, erased, or otherwise marginalized histories to contested lands. Previously I used archaeological fieldwork to examine the troubled entanglements among farmers, celebrity chefs, sustainable development, and land dispossession in the region (Fisher 2023). While doing that research, I heard from many Yaxunah community members who wanted to use archaeology to learn more about Hacienda Cetelac, which remains an important part of the community’s agricultural landholding and is still used as a hub for animal husbandry (Figure 3). In 2024 I started working with Yaxunah authorities, community members, and archaeologist colleagues to launch a new project focused on the hacienda and the ongoing legacies of the colonial Yucatecan cattle industry. The discussion I offer here represents an early foray into that new research, and is admittedly also shaped by my uneasy identification as a Catholic and my desire to see the modern church make reparations for its role in both enabling and sacralizing colonial extractivism (see also Augustine 2021; Charles and Rah 2019).

Cattle haciendas were entrenched in colonial race-making practices (see Sabau 2022). Most of the Yucatecans living on and around the ranches were Maya, a term that is somewhat anachronistic for the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; indio or macehual would have been more common identifiers for the era (Rugeley 2009, p. 8). Most landowners, however, were criollos, one of several terms used to describe the Yucatecan social group whose members tended to be white, speak Spanish, and allege European descent (Alexander 2004; Gabbert 2019, p. 1; Rugeley 2009, pp. 8–9; Sabau 2022). However, a select few Maya people—particularly of the native elite class—could and did own ranches (Rugeley 2009, p. 12). Many landowners apparently only rarely visited their haciendas (see, for instance Stephens 1843, p. 238), and so much of the day-to-day management was left in the hands of resident salaried workers. These typically consisted of a foreman (mayoral) and a couple of cowboys (vaqueros), who worked full-time with the cattle; the men who held these salaried positions and their families could be criollo, Maya, Afro-Yucatecan, or of other mixed race ethnicities (Bracamonte y Sosa 1988; Lentz 2017; Restall 2009). Most laborers who lived on haciendas, however, were non-salaried tenant farmers (luneros; see Patch 1985), almost always Maya, who were compelled to rent land on the estate to farm in exchange for a portion of their crops or labor (Farriss 1980, 1984; García Bernal 1994). Tenant farmers dealt with the constant threat that free-ranging hacienda cows would get into their fields and destroy their crops, something neither landowners nor salaried workers appear to have even attempted to prevent. During Yaxcabá’s rise and fall as the region’s foremost ranching parish, all of these inhabitants were at least nominally Catholic (Rugeley 2009, p. 17).

Every cattle hacienda in Yaxcabá Parish had a patron saint. But figuring out who those saints were two centuries later can be complicated: we know that patron saints could change, and a lot of information was lost during the Caste War as places were abandoned and then later resettled by refugees (Alexander 2004). Some haciendas were named for their patrons. The wealthiest haciendas gave their patrons standalone chapels, but most simply included one or more niches in the landowner’s mansion where the saint’s imagen—a carved wooden likeness—could be placed. While extensive studies have been done on patron saints and Catholicism more generally in Yucatán (e.g., Bricker 1981; Christensen 2013; Christenson 2016; Early 2006, 2012; Gutiérrez Estévez 1993; Kapusta 2018; Rugeley 2001; Solari 2019; Watanabe 1992), in this paper I am specifically interested in the emergence and evolution of this lesser-understood category of saints, the hacienda saints who, along with the cattle they protected, were conscripted into campaigns of extractivism.

There are two choices I’ve made about how to write about hacienda saints, and saints more generally, here. First, I’m treating them as if they were living beings with material agency because that’s how Yucatecans treated them—whether or not people truly believed the saints were alive and physically present in images, they certainly acted as if they believed this to be true.

This belief cut across racial and class differences: while criollo and Maya Catholics maintained distinct ritual practices and preferences, in the rural extraction zone of cattle haciendas, such boundaries became porous Rugeley (2009, pp. 15, 28; 2001, p. 112). Maya people, for their part, possessed a deep preconquest tradition of attributing supernatural powers to sacred images, a tradition that they quite successfully preserved by embracing the material culture of Iberian Catholic religious iconography (Gutiérrez Estévez 1993; Rugeley 2001). Rural criollos, meanwhile, participated in and were influenced by the folk Catholicism of their Maya neighbors (Rugeley 2001, p. 131), just as many of them were more comfortable speaking Maya than Spanish (Lentz 2017; Rugeley 2009). That this belief seems to have existed is not to suggest that its adherents were somehow naïve; rather, both Maya and criollo Catholics were ready to use saints as powerful instruments for political ends. For instance, in 1843 a mob of Maya women abducted San Antonio from Hacienda Xocneceh to punish a criollo church official who was abusing his position (Rugeley 2001, p. 159). Years earlier, in 1827, Maya hacienda workers living in Tabí withheld their patron, the Virgin of Tabí, from her annual pilgrimage to the criollo elites in Sotuta as a way of protesting unfair labor practices (Rugeley 2001, p. 135). Criollo elites were known to take the patron saints of their rivals hostage to legitimate their own political authority (Rugeley 2001, p. 122), and owners of saints’ images—regardless of ethnicity—were known to rent the images out to raise money in desperate times (Rugeley 2001, p. 119). Maya and criollo Catholics had their preferred saints and particular ways of venerating those saints, but the belief that saints were active, living agents was neither confined to a single group nor to a single sphere of life.

Saints were understood to be physically embodied, then, in the painted cedar and cork statues that bore their likenesses (for contemporary examples, see Figure 4). Their corporality made them both more real and more vulnerable. This meant that when insects devoured the insides of the patron of the town of Nolo, Our Lord of the Transfiguration, the priest who discovered the damage knew it could dismantle the faith of his parishioners and so commissioned, in secret, a new cork body for the Lord—effecting another miracle of transfiguration (Rugeley 2001, p. 114). It meant that when the patron of Sinanché, San Buenaventura, lost his arm one day, his parishioners organized an emergency to drive to raise the funds for a transplant (Rugeley 2001, p. 114). Saints were active, corporeal beings, and part of their power resided precisely in the ambiguity of the physical images themselves (Rugeley 2001, p. 131).

My second choice builds on this—if saints are alive, then we might benefit from considering them using the same frameworks we use to make sense of what happens ecologically when any non-native species is brought into an unfamiliar habitat. Saints, then, might be theorized as an introduced species: a species living outside its native range that ended up there as an outcome of some kind of human activity, whether accidentally or intentionally, directly or indirectly (Richardson et al. 2000). Other similar terms for them include immigrant species, exotic species, non-native species, and adventive species. This last is especially useful for conceptualizing saints in colonial Yucatán. Adventive species are not self-sustaining in their new environment. They require the periodic arrival of newcomers from their homeland to replenish their population. They might eventually develop mutualisms—relationships of cross-species reciprocity—that allow them to become self-sustaining in their new environment. When this happens, they are said to be naturalized. But these same mutualisms sometimes also allow the adventive species to take on a destructive role in its new habitat, inhibiting or even eradicating native species as they grow and spread. When this happens, the species is called invasive. These patterns, first identified in plants and animals, are good teachers for thinking through the ecological legacies of colonial extractivism (see, for an excellent example, Kimmerer 2013).

Before continuing, though, I want to acknowledge a potential flaw in my adventive species metaphor: many Maya people, in the colonial era and more recently, profess that the saints were part of their sacred ecology long before the arrival of the friars and conquistadors (e.g., Christenson 2016; Redfield and Villa Rojas 1934; Rugeley 2001). Indeed, there is an extensive literature on Yucatecan religious syncretism that illustrates the diverse ways Maya people adapted their own beliefs into the forms introduced and tolerated by the Catholic church; the claiming of saints as embodiments of familiar sacred beings is an especially well-documented part of this process (e.g., Gutiérrez Estévez 1993). In my choice to conceptualize Catholic saints as an adventive species, it’s not my aim to contradict these beliefs or to impose rigid categories on sacred beings. Rather, I seek to utilize the metaphor loosely, as a sort of parable for thinking expansively about how and why the historical conditions of extractivist cattle ranching spurred Yucatecan criollo ranch owners to embrace certain saints over others. The places where the metaphor doesn’t quite work are, I believe, just as generative as the places where it does.

In imagining saints as an adventive species, some questions start to clarify: what kind of adventive species were the saints of colonial Yaxcabá Parish? Did they develop mutualisms? Were they invasive? What would it look like for them to naturalize? While I ask these questions of a particular time and place, they are really questions for our planetary age of plantations. It is the extractivist plantation, in all its former and current iterations, that remains both a technology of species extinction and erasure, and a site for interspecies coalition and resistance (Carney 2020; Haraway and Tsing 2019; Murphy and Schroering 2020; Tsing 2015; Whyte 2016; Wolford 2021). Hacienda saints are participants in a complex web of plantation ecologies that arose five hundred years ago and whose legacies we feel, eat, drink, and breathe every day. What can we learn by tracing the tethers of hacienda saints through the centuries?

3. Founders Effect

Yucatán was largely written off as an economic backwater for the first two centuries of Spanish colonial rule. The land was, at the start, resistant to extraction, if only because it first appeared to have no use to the Spaniards who came seeking the mineral wealth so famously discovered elsewhere in New Spain (Clendinnen 1987). But here the thin soils were studded only with stones, making for a ground hostile to the plows and crops most familiar to Iberian farmers. Maya populations, while decimated by the lingering violences of contact and conquest, remained mostly scattered throughout the forests and resistant to colonial rule (Farriss 1984). Some Spaniards chose to settle in this hinterland of the empire and live through the institution of encomienda, wherein the Spanish Crown awarded tribute grants to reward soldiers for their efforts in the conquest (Gibson 1964; Machuca Gallegos 2018). These grants in theory assured settlers a periodic supply of maize, fowl, salt, cloth, and labor from Maya tributaries, but offered more ambitious Spaniards no real opportunities for amassing extractivist wealth.

This same economic indifference, however, made Yucatán an ideal habitat for Franciscans, and the region essentially became the uncontested territory and mission field of the order for two hundred years (Clendinnen 1987; Hanson 1995; Morales 1998). The first Yucatecan Franciscan mission was founded in 1545 (a year before the conquest was declared complete), and by 1561 eight monasteries were in operation. Through the monasteries, the Franciscans introduced several Old World technologies, plants, and animals into Yucatán for the first time. Among these were the noria, a draft animal-powered waterwheel that would later become an indispensable fixture of cattle ranches in the region (Alexander and Williams 2019).

But the actual work of converting the Maya proved more difficult than compelling them to build churches, and the friars were not hesitant to unleash violent punishments and episodes of terror upon finding signs of “idolatry” in the communities where they proselytized (Clendinnen 1987). Maya people learned to adapt their native gods and holy beings to the acceptable vocabulary of Catholicism, with the saints proving an especially fertile ground for syncretism (Early 2006; Gutiérrez Estévez 1993; Rugeley 2001). In such transformations, the four winds of the cardinal directions, long considered sacred, could still be venerated through their patron saints: Saint Gabriel of the north, Saint Mary Magdalene of the south, Saint James of the west, and Saint Dominic of the east (Gutiérrez Estévez 1993, p. 270). Likewise the World Tree, a sacred entity in ancient Maya cosmology, became commingled with the iconography of the Christian cross, while its associated rituals of renewal coalesced with the Christian holiday of Easter (Christenson 2016, p. 60; see also Clendinnen 1987, pp. 182–83; Farriss 1984, p. 315; Early 2006).

Cows also made their initial entry into Yucatán during these first years of colonization. The introduction of cattle and other non-native animals throughout New Spain created lasting and mutual transformations in human-animal relationships and ecologies, both among Europeans and Indigenous Americans (Norton 2024). Even from the earliest days of the conquest, the question of whether cattle could be made to adapt to the Americas had been of great interest to the Spaniards (Alves 2011). Over the years, European as well as African varieties of cows were brought to the colonies of New Spain. The introduction of African cows, only recently confirmed through genetic analysis, points to the important role that African cattle herders—and transatlantic slavery—played in establishing the colonial ranching industry in the Americas (Delsol et al. 2023; see also Restall 2009). Cattle and their materials—meat, hides, tallow, and milk—were critical in the production of criollo culture. But the animals also held a mystical role in certain strains of Iberian folk Catholicism, as testified in the dozens of local legends where cows (along with other livestock and herders) discovered sacred images of the Virgin Mary (Alves 2011, p. 168).

Yucatecan Maya people would likely have first encountered cows in the monasteries. The Maya came to these initial encounters with their own complex human-animal entanglements, which they and their ancestors had cultivated through generations of diverse interactions with native fauna (Alexander and Hernández Álvarez 2018; Boileau et al. 2020). Maya people drew on their own familiarity with holy and powerful native animals, especially deer, to situate cattle into indigenous sacred ecologies (Pohl 1981). Eventually cattle were even understood to have their own guardian, a supernatural being named X-Juan-Thul (Bracamonte y Sosa 1988, p. 635; Redfield and Villa Rojas 1934, p. 118).

But cows also created significant problems for Maya farmers, whose primary agricultural practice at the time was the milpa (Farriss 1984). Milpa is a form of swidden cultivation that has been practiced by Maya farmers for millennia, following a cycle of seasonal rhythms: every spring, farmers select plots of wooded land, fell the bush on the plot, wait for it to dry, and then burn it. They wait for the late spring rains to start, and then they plant on the cleared land (Terán and Rasmussen 2009). Milpa can be made on the same plot for two years, but after that the field is left to be reclaimed by the forest and the farmer shifts cultivation to another wooded parcel to begin again.

Cattle and other livestock in the colonial Americas were invariably left to range freely, which seeded all sorts of ecological and social impacts that remain with us today (Anderson 2006; Melville 1997; Norton 2024). In Yucatán, free-ranging cattle often got into milpas, where they would eat and trample over crops. The most effective way to keep cattle out of a milpa was to build a stone wall around the plot, but doing so was incompatible with an agricultural practice where the field changes location every two years (Farriss 1980). At the beginning of the colonial period, however, this destruction was mostly contained as there simply weren’t that many cows around. Some settlers began experimenting with stockraising at small rural estates, known as estancias, but before about 1750 these rarely boasted more than a few cows, pigs, goats, or horses and were not at all equipped for commercial development (Hunt 1974).

Even so, Spanish colonial authorities were unwilling to abandon the peninsula entirely to the Franciscans. Through a set of policies known as congregación (also known as reducciones), the Spanish forcibly relocated dispersed Maya populations into assigned geographic zones, and onto existing Indigenous settlements the Spanish imposed a hierarchy of municipal seats (cabeceras) and subordinate auxiliary towns (sujetos) better suited to colonial administration (Farriss 1984; Restall 1997; Roys 1939; see also Lockhart 1992). The settlements that would come to constitute Yaxcabá Parish were formed by these policies. The town of Yaxcabá itself was first established as a municipal seat in the jurisdiction of the province of Sotuta sometime between 1552 and 1562 (Alexander 2004). A Franciscan mission was then installed in Sotuta in 1576, but only five years later secular clergy took possession of the parish. Such parochial divisions and reformations empowered Church authorities to increase tribute demands and surveillance in Maya communities under the pretext of fighting idolatry (Alexander 2004, p. 41). In the wake of these splits, Yaxcabá was left with a single auxiliary town, Mopilá, at the start of the seventeenth century.

It is especially in the formation of these colonial settlements that Yucatecan saintly ecologies start to become recognizable, as each new town was assigned a patron. Early Franciscan influence clearly created a sort of founders effect: the friars’ favorite saints were the first introduced, and in fact they remain overrepresented still today. San Francisco (Saint Francis of Assisi) was brought in as the patron of Yaxcabá (Alexander 2004). Being the order’s founder, his selection is unsurprising—but it is also worth considering the other domains under this saint’s care. His role as protector of animals must have been of some importance to a region that was establishing its first tentative footholds as a ranching hub.

Yet over the first centuries of colonial rule, San Francisco was also enlisted in the ongoing campaign of exploiting Yaxcabá’s Maya parishioners. Church authorities invoked the saint’s needs as a ready pretext for extortion, as in 1723 when a legal complaint levied against the curate of Yaxcabá shows that Maya parishioners had been forced to pay excessive charges for a suspiciously exorbitant amount of chickens and candle wax allegedly needed by the saint (García Bernal 1972, p. 104). The parish dedicated a grand and ornate church to the saint in 1757, undoubtedly built by Maya parishioners working under Church-mandated labor drafts (Figure 5; Alexander 2004). Faced with these excessive ecclesiastical demands, many Maya parishioners quietly deserted Yaxcabá and the other forced, fledgling towns they had been made to live in and scattered into the forest (Farriss 1984).

4. Mutualisms

Into this ecosystem of ecclesiastical exploitation, the priests had also unknowingly introduced a means of Church-sanctioned resistance to colonial rule: coalitions of Maya, cow, and saint co-conspirators known as cofradías. A cofradía was a religious confraternity whose members dedicated themselves and their labors to the veneration of a particular patron saint (Farriss 1984, pp. 266–68). Cofradías raised money to pay for their saint’s feast day celebrations through economic enterprise, thus opening an acceptably orthodox pathway for Maya people—and particularly the suppressed Maya nobility—to generate wealth without raising alarm from colonial authorities. Yaxcabá Parish had five cofradías that were active through the early 1800s: Cofradías Sohiste, Animas, Kancabdzonot, Xiat, and Nuestra Señora del Rosario (Alexander 2004). All would have had patron saints, but the only one we can reasonably guess at is the one named for a saint, Nuestra Señora del Rosario, or Our Lady of the Rosary.

The cofradía joined a set of distinctly collective strategies for Indigenous Maya survival: historian Nancy Farriss has noted that whereas the original cofradía as it existed in Spain emphasized an atomized and individual piety, the institution as adapted by the Maya of Yucatán centered community-based practices of mutual aid (Farriss 1984, p. 266). Cofradías interceded directly with saints to procure divine protection and favor for the well-being of the larger collective, while simultaneously accruing capital that could be deployed for emergency community relief (Farriss 1980).

By about 1750, many Maya cofradías had turned to ranching as their principal revenue-generating enterprise (Rugeley 2001). And while ranching, as a rule, was regarded by the Maya as an antisocial activity for the harm cattle caused to milpas, cofradía ranches were granted an exception because of their capacity to promote community interests through both divine and economic means (Farriss 1980, p. 174). Local Maya leaders would give endowments of land or a few cattle to get a ranch started, and cofradía members would work as unpaid laborers to build corrals and dig wells (Farriss 1984, p. 267). In many ways cofradía ranches were run like their criollo-owned counterparts. They hired salaried foremen and cowboys like their secular counterparts, and some even went on to house tenant farmers (Farriss 1984, p. 267).

Cofradías were titled in the name of the patron saint and paid tithes as if they were a single person (Rugeley 2001). The cows raised on cofradía ranches were the legal property of the patron saint, with most cofradía meat destined either for sale to pay for clergy fees, candles, and festal foods for the patron saint, or eaten by cofradía members in the great banquets marking the saint’s annual fiesta Farriss (1980; 1984, pp. 321–22). But in times of drought and desperation, cofradía members would also slaughter cows to alleviate famine in their own communities, and then blame cattle rustlers for the missing animals so as to avoid accusations of stealing church assets (Farriss 1984, pp. 175, 270). The cofradía’s patron saint became, in this way, “a legal fiction for corporate ownership” otherwise inaccessible to Maya communities (Rugeley 2001, p. 144). Once somewhat hostile antagonists, saints, cows, and Maya people became co-conspirators in an ecological web of anticolonial resistance.

But in the mid-1700s, a series of economic reforms were already underway that would cut these tentative tethers of coalition. The so-called Bourbon Reforms were a desperate attempt by the Spanish Crown to extract value from its less profitable colonial outposts in an already waning empire (Brading 1971; Farriss 1984). The policies incentivized further privatization of communal lands and free trade among Spanish colonial holdings. In Yucatán, this meant that suddenly criollo landowners could enact an incipient form of extractivism in the countryside through the materials of cattle—salted beef, leather, tallow—destined for export in Havana, Veracruz, and points beyond (Patch 1985; Sweitz 2005). Not coincidentally, these incentives were launched alongside simultaneous efforts to dismantle Franciscan control across the colonies of New Spain, most notably with a decree from King Ferdinand VI in 1749 ordering bishops to expropriate Franciscan monasteries in Indigenous towns and convert them to secular parishes (Morales 1998).

At first it had seemed that mutualistic coalitions among saints, cows, and Maya would be tolerated by colonial authorities, but it soon became clear that there were brutal limits to this tolerance. In November of 1761, a Maya man named Jacinto Canek attempted to wage a war of Indigenous liberation (Tun 2017). Some accounts suggest that Canek, born Jacinto Uc, had been educated as a youth in the Franciscan monastery of Mérida but had been expelled for antiauthoritarian behavior (Bracamonte y Sosa 2004, p. 76). Accounts say he then left Yucatán and traveled to the Petén, a refuge for Maya rebels in Guatemala that had been established by the Itza, a group of Maya fugitives that the conquistadors had never managed to subjugate (Reed 1964, p. 51). He took on the name Canek, after the last governor of the independent Itza (Patch 2003, p. 52). In 1761 at thirty years old, Canek returned to Yucatán and began preaching a message of impending liberation for the Maya. By early November of that year, Canek had selected Cisteil—a town in Tixcacaltuyú, the parish neighboring Yaxcabá—as the base for his rebellion.

Canek announced to his followers in Cisteil that he was Montezuma and the true Christ, a king whose reign had been prophesied in the Bible (Patch 2003). He ordered all the pigs in Cisteil to be killed, saying the animals had Spanish souls; the equally non-native cows, horses, and chickens of Cisteil, however, were spared. On 19 November, Canek ordered his followers to kill a criollo merchant who had come to Cisteil to collect debts. Later that same day, Canek entered the church of Cisteil and took the crown and blue mantle from its patron, the Virgin Mary, and put them on himself. By armoring his message and his body with the name of Christ and the regalia of the Virgin, Canek was calling on the saints as accomplices in the fight for Maya liberation, even as his revolutionary message sought to restore a heritage that pre-dated their arrival to the peninsula (Farriss 1984, p. 314).

When the news reached the colonial authorities, they sent twenty soldiers to Cisteil under the command of Captain Tiburcio de Cosgaya. Cosgaya underestimated Canek: the Maya rebels killed all but four of the soldiers and parceled out Captain Cosgaya’s dismembered body parts among themselves (Alexander 2004, p. 46). The authorities countered by sending a second militia, this time with advanced artillery, to suppress the rebellion on 26 November. The militia killed more than 500 Maya people and captured the rebel leaders. At trial all the leaders received severe punishments, with Canek himself sentenced to public execution and mutilation in the capital. In Mérida’s central plaza on 14 December—less than a month after the rebellion had started—Canek was tortured, his body quartered, and his remains burned and scattered. Captain Cosgaya’s remains, meanwhile, were gathered and given a hero’s burial in the church of San Francisco in Yaxcabá.

The Cisteil revolt was a harbinger of growing friction among Maya farmers and criollo landowners caused by the acceleration of commercial ranching (Alexander 2004, p. 47). Cows, saints, and Maya farmers were not inherently in conflict: the popularity of Maya-owned cofradía ranches showed that ranching could be managed with the goal of serving the collective well-being. But the owners of the new ranches were establishing haciendas—estates dedicated to extractivist modes of ranching meant to enrich individual owners, with little regard for the damages the free-ranging animals could inflict on neighboring Maya communities.

Turbulent transitions followed. Colonial authorities imposed new systems of extracting taxes and tithes, and established new mechanisms for keeping Maya communities out of the forests and corralled in permanent towns. And as cattle ranching became more lucrative, the population in Yaxcabá and in the peninsula’s interior more broadly swelled with migrants drawn into the frontier from the cities. Yaxcabá Parish grew from 4332 inhabitants in 1784 to 10,832 in 1828 (Alexander 2004). Three new towns were established in the parish, each with its own church, at Yaxunah, Kancabdzonot, and Santa María. And amid all these transitions, the bishop of Yucatán formally began to expropriate and sell the cofradía estates, thus severing the strongest coalition among Maya people, cows, and saints that would ever exist in colonial Yucatán (Farriss 1984).

5. Invasions

With the Cisteil revolt suppressed, the cofradía system dismantled, and new trade policies incentivizing the production of meat and tallow, criollo landowners unleashed a wave of new haciendas into Yaxcabá Parish. Cows, of course, came with these estates—but so did saints. Why did hacienda owners choose the saints that they did to sacralize their extractivist ranching operations?

To understand these decisions for hacienda owners, I want to first step out of my timeline and ask, why did and do Maya farmers choose the saints they did to protect and bless their milpas? What mutualisms did and do Maya farmers look for in their saints? By leading with these questions, it becomes easier to see in contrast how the patronage decisions hacienda owners were making were different from those of their fellow parishioners.

Since saints were first introduced to Yucatán, Maya farmers have sought coalitions with those saints whose dominions aligned with the milpa. This pattern caught the attention of the anthropologists Robert Redfield and Alfonso Villa Rojas, whose 1934 ethnographic account of the Maya town of Chan Kom (40 km east of Yaxcabá) is one of the earliest studies of contemporary Maya agriculture and religion. Redfield and Villa Rojas (1934) observed that every year there were two critical bouts of tension in Chan Kom. Both bouts were entangled with the labor rhythms of milpa agriculture. The first anxieties came in the winter and early spring, when each farmer had to contemplate the particular textures of the felled vegetation in his milpa plot and judge the tempo of its drying so as to know when it was his time to burn. This was a tension to be shouldered privately: each field was different, and each farmer “struggle(d) in the conflict between two contrary impulses, to wait for the felled bush to thoroughly dry or to risk rains coming and making it impossible to burn” (Redfield and Villa Rojas 1934, p. 82). Farmers met these struggles alone, sanctifying their individual decisions about when to burn with private prayer and offerings at their fields.

But the second and greater bout of anxieties came when the burning was finished, when farmers in the hot months of April and May found themselves collectively idle and watching the skies for signs of rain. Delayed rains brought desperation: drought was a totalizing threat that affected all and demanded rituals of solidarity. So in this anxious lull, in the liminal hesitation between the dry and the wet, Chan Kom celebrated its most sacred feast days. The saint most active in the communal ritual life of Chan Kom and the surrounding towns was the Santa Cruz, the Holy Cross whose day formally fell on 3 May but whose fiestas began in the desperate dry heats of April and continued throughout May. The feast of the holy cross was the most important in Chan Kom’s calendar—even as the cross was not officially the patron saint of the town. That role belonged to San Diego (Saint James), whose late summer feast day of 24 August was often met with only mild recognition as “the dignity and importance given to its celebration var(ied) with the amount of ready money on hand and with the amount of concern felt for the safety of the crop” (Redfield and Villa Rojas 1934, p. 85). While San Diego was venerated year-round, the true peak of communal religious life in Chan Kom was undeniably oriented around the feast of the Santa Cruz.

The late spring days at the cusp of the rainy season are abundant with feasts for this reason: saints whose purview includes patronage over the weeks that may bring the critical advent of rains populate the ritual ecology of milpa farming communities in rural Yucatán. The colonial vestiges of modern Catholic worship in the towns of Yaxcabá Parish—the nineteenth century churches and chapels of the towns that are still in use today—have passed through a succession of patrons since their beginnings. It would be difficult, if not impossible, to figure out who the patron saints of these towns were before the Caste War. But whoever they were then, the patron saints of the towns of Yaxcabá Parish now are decidedly oriented towards the rain. So while the main colonial church in Yaxcabá still belongs to San Francisco, a colonial chapel dedicated to the Santa Cruz sits atop a prominent bedrock outcrop right alongside it. The colonial church of Kancabdzonot is proudly dedicated to the Santa Cruz (Figure 6), and even in Santa María the eponymous Virgin graciously concedes the main niche to the Holy Cross. In Yaxunah, the colonial church belongs now to San Isidro, the patron of farmers whose feast day falls, too, during the high stakes of rainy season anticipation on 15 May (Figure 7). And of course, the bullfight in Panabá had been held in honor of San Isidro and in supplication for rain.

The saints who have developed the most mutualistic relationships in rural Yucatán are those whose domains hold special meaning both for Indigenous Maya communities and for the originators and successors of ecclesiastical authority in the peninsula. This is, of course, only one fragment of the larger history of religious syncretism in the colonial Americas (e.g., Gutiérrez Estévez 1984, 1993), but it is a plot of particular importance for the ecology of saints and cattle in Yucatán. Franciscans were the first to introduce saints to Yucatán, and their favorites were declared the earliest patrons of the missions and churches.

Yet to become at home in this foreign land, the saints not only had to be Franciscan favorites, but also capable of working in the supernatural reciprocities of milpa agriculture. The Holy Cross exemplifies this capacity for adaptation. The cross was an obvious favorite of the Franciscans, but the cross was also at ease in the incarnation of materials available to Maya farmers—two cedar boards, painted green—and both legible in the timing of its celebrations as a bringer of rain and in ancient Indigenous religious iconography (Christenson 2016; Reed 1964; Rugeley 2001). Likewise San Antonio (Saint Anthony), in mortal life himself a Portuguese Franciscan, was a favorite among the friars. But San Antonio’s successful naturalization in Yucatán probably owes more to the fact that his feast, June 13, is believed by Maya farmers to be the last possible day that the rainy season can start and still produce a successful milpa planting, thus making him a particularly powerful rain saint (Rugeley 2001, p. 151). Patron saints whose feast days fall between April and June—the critical window when the rainy season begins—were thus among the first to naturalize in Yucatán during the colonial era and remain among the most abundant in the region today.

Cattle haciendas, however, presented an ecological niche for patronage that was not necessarily bound by the concerns of friars and milpa farmers. Here I don’t mean Maya-owned cofradía ranches—whose interests were still intimately connected with the rhythms of the milpa—but the extractivist criollo-owned cattle estates that proliferated in the late 1700s with the advent of free-trade agreements and privatization incentives, and which continued to amass free-ranging cows as enfleshed liquid capital up until the outbreak of the Caste War in 1847.

Most hacienda saints lived in masonry niches, either in their own standalone chapels or, more commonly, in the private mansion houses of the landowners (Figure 8 and Figure 9). These niches were often placed into the walls of private second-floor rooms that sat on top of first-floor storage areas. In many cases the saints’ room looked out onto the troughs, noria, and corral where the animals congregated. Hacienda saints quite physically presided, then, over the wealth accumulated under their patronage.

These niches are empty now. In many cases—maybe in most—the identities of the hacienda saints were lost when the estates were abandoned. But in a few instances, the names that landowners gave to their estates offer traces of past patronage. Estate names, if not estate patrons, were frequently written down in notarial documents like wills, mortgages, and land deeds, as well as in records maintained by ecclesiastical and colonial authorities such as tithe accounts and censuses. When a hacienda owner chose to name an estate after a particular saint, a reasonable inference is that the saint named was also the estate’s patron, at least at its founding (though always keeping in mind that patronage could be shared, unstable, and complex, as with the roles of San Diego and the Santa Cruz in twentieth-century Chan Kom).

Of the dozens of cattle haciendas founded in Yaxcabá Parish before the Caste War, only a scant few were named for patrons—but these few point towards the ways landowners conscripted saints into campaigns of extractivism. As the parish came to dominate the region in ranching, its haciendas eventually boasted some of the largest herds in the state and exacerbated enormously the land stress experienced by Maya farmers. For the farmers, feelings of betrayal and conflict must have accompanied these developments: hacienda saints abetted the ranches and provided for hacienda cattle, even when doing so damaged the livelihoods of Maya communities supposedly protected by their own patron saints, or even by other iterations of the hacienda saints themselves.

Hacienda owners in Yaxcabá sought to build coalitions with saints from the very beginning, when the founder of the parish’s first hacienda purchased a license to raise cattle in 1712 and named his estate Santa María Nohitzá (it is a frequent naming convention in Yucatán to combine a saint’s name with an older Yucatec Maya place name in this way). The documents are silent as to which iteration of the Virgin Mary protected Nohitzá, but a survey of 94 colonial Yucatecan towns with Marian place names found that 54 were under the protection of the Immaculate Consumption, ten under the Assumption, and the remainder about equally divided among the Rosary, Nativity, Purification, Visitation, and Dolores (López de Cogolludo 1954; see also Gutiérrez Estévez 1993, p. 267). Whoever she was, this first hacienda saint in the parish soon presided from her own elaborate standalone chapel, built by the landowner not just to house the patron but to increase the overall value of the estate (Roys 1939).

Another seven cattle haciendas joined Santa María Nohitzá in the parish by 1815 (Alexander 2004). Only one carried the name of a patron saint: the hacienda San José Yaxleulá, named for Saint Joseph. The land for this estate had been in the hands of Maya people at least as far back as 1787. In 1815 two Maya women, Leandra and Juana Kantun, sold it for 85 pesos to a criollo man, D. José Francisco del Castillo. Did this José simply transfer his own namesake to the patronage of his hacienda? It’s certainly possible—but regardless of the exact reasons, the founders of Hacienda San José Yaxleulá and the founders of Hacienda Santa María Nohitzá before them placed their estates into the hands of two of the most recognizable saints in Christianity, the mother and earthly father of Christ.

But of course, the Holy Family and the now-unknown patrons of Yaxcabá’s other early cattle haciendas weren’t working alone—the same Bourbon Reforms that had spurred Jacinto Canek to rebellion in 1761 continued to direct the extractivist practices of hacienda owners across Yaxcabá Parish into the nineteenth century. Under these policies, hacienda owners amassed personal wealth through the physical bodies of their animals, transformed into chattel and sold in the markets of the Spanish Empire. The same cows who roamed freely through Maya milpas were eventually rounded up and sold to merchants, who brought them on the hoof to cities like Mérida, where they were killed and broken down into commodities—leather, meat, tallow—that went on to be sold in Havana, Veracruz, and New Orleans (Alexander 2004, p. 54; Sweitz 2005, p. 256; see also Sabau 2022, p. 146 for discussion of how the post-Caste War Yucatecan criollo state reutilized these same trade to punish Maya rebels with exile and enslavement in Cuba). In their dismembered and commodified incarnations, the cows of Yaxcabá haciendas fueled additional chains of extractivism elsewhere in the colonial world: their flesh was preserved with salt and used to provision the transatlantic voyages powering the slave trade (Farriss 1980, p. 65), and their fat was molded into the candles that illuminated Mexican silver mines (Brading 1971).

When Yucatán won its independence from Spain in 1821, the export market for its cattle commodities collapsed without the protection of the Spanish Crown’s free trade policies (Cline 1947; Farriss 1984, p. 38); as a note, I choose to use the term “colonial” to describe post-independence Yucatán to draw attention to the extractive relationships perpetuated by criollos in Maya lands well after the official end of the “Colonial period” in 1821. Cheap beef, raised on the lush grasslands of Argentina, flooded the Caribbean and Gulf markets and soon outcompeted the comparatively humble operations of Yucatecan ranchers. Yet despite this new economic reality, the hacienda owners of Yaxcabá Parish doubled down on cattle ranching. Landowners were no longer raising animals for export, but instead as a speculative strategy for increasing the valuation of their estates (Alexander 2003, 2004; Alexander and Williams 2019). The more cattle on an estate, the greater the mortgage the landowner could take out on it—essentially creating a source of liquid capital that could then be invested as strategic donations to Church or government authorities, to purchase properties in cities, or to expand into new ranches.

After 1821, then, growth in herd size accelerated—even as the actual work of raising cattle became divorced from the physical bodies of the animals themselves, and more concerned with their abstract fungibility as capital. While much of this growth was happening on new estates, even at the older haciendas, strategies shifted towards increasing herd size. Hacienda Santa María Nohitzá became the largest cattle hacienda in the parish, with 379 head of cattle recorded for 1836 (Bracamonte y Sosa 1993). Hacienda San José Yaxleulá, meanwhile, increased its appraised valuation to well over a thousand pesos not even a decade after it had been purchased for only 85 pesos. This wealth lived in the bodies of more than two hundred cows, two dozen mules, several horses, as well as in the honeycombs of some two hundred beehives (Alexander 2004, p. 53).

At the same time, the number of haciendas in the parish rose as post-independence agrarian reforms made more land available for privatization (Cline 1947). New legislation terminated earlier customs that had maintained most lands open for common use under the title of tierras realengas (crown lands), and instead imposed statues limiting towns to a formal ejido system in which boundaries had to be defined and fixed. In 1841 these boundaries were standardized at four square leagues, or 69.4 square kilometers, meant to be measured out using the door of each town’s church as the central reference point (Alexander 2004, p. 54; Rugeley 1996). In practice, delimiting these borders was much more complicated: in Yaxcabá Parish alone, measured in this way the ejidos of several towns would have overlapped, and there seems to have been little incentive for Maya farmers to carry out the labor needed to formally mark ejido boundaries. But the result was that any land outside these arbitrary ejido limits that wasn’t already private property was declared terreno baldío, or vacant land, and rendered legally alienable. Across Yaxcabá Parish, ranch owners raced to buy up claims of terrenos baldíos in the 1840s, both to expand their existing estates and to launch new stock raising ventures (Alexander 2004, p. 101).

Some of these new ventures carried the names of patron saints, even as landowners started spending far less on chapels and other physical infrastructure; wealth was no longer stored in masonry improvements, but in the abstract fungibility of heads of cattle (Alexander 2003; 2004, p. 29). Two new cattle estates, Hacienda San Antonio Yaxleulá (for Saint Anthony of Padua) and Hacienda San Lorenzo (for Saint Lawrence), first appear in documentary records in 1828 (Alexander 2004, p. 83). Unlike earlier haciendas with their elaborate mansion houses and water management infrastructure, Hacienda San Lorenzo for one consisted only of a simple well, a trough, and a corral. These trends continued with the introduction of a new class of land, the sitio, created after 1841 to characterize undeveloped private parcels (Alexander 2004, p. 58). While sitios technically lacked licenses to raise cattle, in practice they functioned as haciendas—just smaller, and stripped of most of the physical trappings, like chapels and norias, that characterized older estates (Alexander 2004, p. 98). Yaxcabá Parish had four sitios by 1841, though only Sitio Santa Cruz bears the name of a patron. An additional mention of two ranching ventures named for saints appears in a ledger of terrenos baldíos claims from 1845, though little else is known about these places beyond their names: Hacienda Santa Rosa (for Saint Rose of Lima) and Sitio San Miguel (for Saint Michael the Archangel) (Alexander 2004, p. 110). Just two years later, the first battles of the Caste War would erupt and the owners of Yaxcabá Parish’s twenty-plus cattle estates would abandon their ranches—and presumably their herds—to the advancing rebel army.

While the known patrons of Yaxcabá’s pre-1821 haciendas, Santa María and San José, are among the most recognizable and popular figures in Christianity, post-independence agrarian reforms introduced more hacienda saints into the parish. In some ways, there was continuity with pre-existing saintly ecologies. Sitio Santa Cruz (Holy Cross) aligned itself with a saint that was and remains beloved in the region as the bringer of rain. And as mentioned earlier, San Antonio had always been a favorite of both the Franciscans and Maya farmers who looked to his June 13 feast day as the last chance for a fruitful planting season. But it’s worth noting, too, that San Antonio’s patronage also extended into matters of grave concern to hacienda productivity. He was the patron of lost items; the free-range grazing practices of the cattle haciendas meant that cowboys were always out looking for lost animals, especially during the summer rains. He was the patron of mules and muleteers; on cattle haciendas, mules were essential for transport, hauling water, and powering the norias that kept cattle watered (Figure 10). The patronage of San Lorenzo, meanwhile, notably includes tanners. Santa Rosa was the first person born in the Americas to be canonized, and her veneration in post-independence Yaxcabá Parish may reflect an emerging orientation towards saints that likewise were more grounded in the New World. San Miguel was the protector of soldiers, a notably martial saint whose enlistment into a ranching sitio just before the Caste War uprisings seems to betray a growing but largely unacknowledged unease among the parish’s landowning class (see Butler 1845 for nineteenth-century patronage associations of saints and feast days).

The feast days of these new hacienda saints likewise suggest a new set of material and spiritual concerns. Recall that before, during, and after the era of cattle haciendas in Yucatán, the principal period of communal ritual activity in Maya farming towns coincided with the advent of late spring rains, when some of the most popular saints celebrated their feast days; the collective focus was on averting drought and ensuring a successful maize crop. While milpa agriculture and rain continued to be important to hacienda owners, the feast days of San Lorenzo (10 August), Santa Rosa (30 August), and San Miguel (29 September) fall not at the start of spring rains but at the late summer end of the rainy season. What might explain this?

Like the seasonal tempos of the milpa, cattle ranching had its own annual rhythms of anxiety. A handbook for hacienda foremen published in Mérida in 1860 outlines the month-by-month tasks involved in raising cattle, providing some insight into the concerns that most plagued landowners (Espinosa 1860). For most of the year, cows were left to their own devices and so in most months the labor instructions directly dealing with cattle are light. For instance, in April foremen were advised to shoe and count the cattle, as well as to select the animals that would be sold. In May gelding was recommended, but in the 1840s any form of population control would have been rare—hacienda owners wanted their herds to grow (Alexander 2003; Farriss 1984). But from July through September, foremen are warned that this is a deadly season for lobado.

Lobado is a disease that strikes livestock in the late summer. It attacks cattle with fever, intestinal inflammation, and swelling, gangrenous tumors. The sickness was believed to be brought on by an overabundance of heat and rain, which produced “dirty and corrupted water” (Bassols et al. 1870; Departamento de Salubridad Pública 1898). No cures were known, and while attempts were made to treat the disease with bloodletting and herbal remedies, these efforts were successful at best only a quarter of the time, and most infected cattle died within a few days (Bassols et al. 1870; López de Cogolludo 1842). For the month of July, the 1860 handbook for hacienda foremen urges precautionary measures: retrieving lost cattle, checking their health, treating any wounds, and keeping the water troughs clean. By September, the tasks become morbid: cleaning water troughs, preparing medicines, bloodletting, burying dead animals immediately so as to prevent contagion, and treating their skins with salt as soon as they are removed (Espinosa 1860, pp. 30–31). No meat could be salvaged from the dead animals, as it was too contaminated even for vultures to eat (Sánchez Moo 2022, p. 187).

A notorious lobado epidemic had decimated livestock across Yucatán in 1806. That year, the cattle population in the province was reduced from 3218 to a thousand in only five months, and there were so few mules left alive to transport goods that the epidemic must also be blamed for subsequent waves of grain speculation, hoarding, and ultimately famine (Sánchez Moo 2022, p. 188). This disaster was probably still alive in the memories of the same criollos buying up terrenos baldíos for new ranches in the 1840s, men and women whose economic fortunes were increasingly—and vulnerably—bound to the number of livestock they owned. Is it any surprise, then, that these landowners conscripted saints whose domain included the late summer, when lobado was most likely to strike and thus their assets were most at risk?

Now, the population of known hacienda saints introduced to Yaxcabá Parish during this burst of extractive activity at the eve of the Caste War is admittedly small—perhaps other patterns would be discernible if the names of more hacienda saints could be recovered. Yet from those hacienda saints whose identities have survived, there does emerge this hint of a festal cluster in the late summer. If this cluster speaks to some deeper anxiety, as its late spring counterpart does for drought-worried milpa farmers, then a strong candidate for the source of those anxieties is lobado.

At a time when hacienda owners were becoming increasingly alienated from their cows, then, their spiritual concerns seem to have been reorienting with renewed attention towards their animals as corporeal, and vulnerable, beings. The growth in sitios just before the Caste War suggests that landowners were becoming physically less present on their own ranches; mansion houses, which had been a constant in earlier haciendas, were no longer present (Alexander 2003, 2004). Absent, too, were niches for patron saints. Yet in the names of some of these haciendas and sitios, landowners reached for saints whose patronage encompassed such domains as mules and tanneries and protection against the herd-decimating power of lobado. Even as haciendas divorced themselves from the commodities of meat, leather, and tallow, they continued to affirm allegiance to cattle and saints—but as fungible abstractions, as disembodied lines on a ledger rather than as living beings.

Herds increased, cows plundered the milpas, and Maya farmers were penned into smaller and smaller areas as forest turned to ranch in the names of the hacienda saints. As Maya milpa farmers looked to saints of the spring rains, so did criollo ranchers look to saints of the late summer lobado season to sanctify and protect their herds. Hacienda owners interacted with cows and saints in ways that became increasingly disembodied from their former materiality: the hides, the tallow, the meat, the masonry chapels, and the stone niches were replaced with herd counts and patronage existing mainly in land titles. The reasons for the Maya rebellions of the Caste War are complex and can be tied to no single cause, but when the uprisings began in 1847, the haciendas were among the first places to burn.

6. Naturalization and the Empty Niche

The Caste War rebels did not reject the saints. After early advances on the criollo strongholds of Mérida and Campeche, the rebels eventually withdrew into the forests of the eastern peninsula, in modern Quintana Roo. They and their descendants formed a new society centered around their own patron saint, the Speaking Cross of Chan Santa Cruz, a cross that gave military orders, sometimes lived in trees, and demanded absolute loyalty from its faithful (Christenson 2016; Gabbert 2019, pp. 160–61; Reed 1964; Rugeley 2001, p. 111; 2009). Other saints, too, left their niches in the haciendas and churches, their wooden imágenes bundled into the packs of rebel generals, and started new lives in the eastern forests (Rugeley 2001). The niches of the hacienda saints of Yaxcabá Parish were likewise emptied. Whether these saints denounced the pasture for the rebel forests, whether their participation in the extractivism of the haciendas was forgiven—these questions remain unanswered.

Sometimes the language and legends used to describe the saints who went missing from their niches during the Caste War evoke forcible removal, utilizing metaphors of abduction, plunder, and hostage-taking (e.g., Dumond 1997; Ferrer 2020; Rugeley 2001, p. 136; 2009, pp. 120–21). I prefer a different metaphor: rustling. Careful study of criminal court records has demonstrated that in the years leading up to the Caste War, cattle rustling became a popular—and subtle—form of Maya resistance to hacienda extractivism and a critical source of emergency food (Güémez Pineda 1991). Stray cows, perhaps most often when they wandered into milpas, were killed, their bodies parceled into meat, and their bones hidden away in caves to conceal the evidence of the theft. But the relationship between Maya people and cows was never simply one of antagonism; there was a history of mutualism there, too, and even rustling required a sort of intimate cross-species familiarity. While it appeared to some like the saints had been abducted by the rebels, perhaps it is better to think of them, too, as rustled: taken in moments of desperation and righteousness and transubstantiated into something new. Perhaps the empty niche, more than anything else, is the sign that the saints had finally naturalized to Yucatán—or had, in their own way, always been there.

The plantation is a site of species extinction, but it is also a site of interspecies collaboration (Carney 2020; Haraway and Tsing 2019; Murphy and Schroering 2020). It would be easy to call the hacienda saints an invasive species and look only at the ways that pastures replaced forests and cows replaced farmers, all under the saints’ blessing. But it has always been more complex than that. Tethers of mutualism could bind Maya people, cows, and saints in symbiosis, but then be unraveled suddenly and restrung into relationships of invasion when cows and saints were yoked, instead, to the machinery of extractivism. These tethers—coalitions among human, animal, plant, and supernatural species—can be untied and retied, and in tracing how they have tangled mutualism and invasion through the centuries we can recognize more clearly where the lashes of extractivism are tied now.

Along the roads leading into Tizimín, the hub of extractivist cattle ranching’s latest incarnation in Yucatán, there are dozens of painted signs announcing the names of new ranches. So many are named for saints. San Fernando, San Juan, San Mateo, Santa Clara, San Antonio, Santa Inés, Santiago, San Gabriel, and San Isidro of the burning bullring are all there, conscripted again, invading the forest, yoked to the pasture. What would it take to liberate them?