Julia Cummings, Indiana U., 1996 Scobie Award
With the support of the Scobie Prize, I spent the month of July in Mexico carrying out exploratory research on the well-documented rebellion in Tomochic, Chihuahua (1891-92). While my specific focus was on the movement of "living saints" implicated in the rebellion and on Teresa Urrea (known as the Santa de Cabora) who was perhaps the most famous of these saints, in a much broader sense my research examined the political, cultural, and religious context for the unrest among indigenous and mestizo groups alike, in late Porfirian Chihuahua and Sonora.
I began my research at the Archivo General de la Nación (AGN) in Mexico City, where I spent several days becoming familiar with the procedures for working in the archives: finding the best people to consult for help, working with reference materials to locate the collections of most interest to me, and of course getting used to the heavy presence of uniformed guards in the prison-turned-research facility. I soon discovered many useful collections. The documents in the Gobernación gallery, the collected papers of Manuel González Ramírez, and the presidential papers of Francisco Madero, for instance, provided the field reports of the "cuerpos rurales" charged with maintaining civil order and the correspondence of government officials responsible for relations with indigenous groups in the northern border region. I was also pleased to discover many documents produced by indigenous villages and their advocates. In addition, I examined a collection of late 19th-century documents from Chihuahua, Sonora, Sinaloa, and Nayarit, which seemed promising, but, because it remains uncatalogued, was unwieldy and difficult to access.
Reading these documents was enlightening in several ways. They described in great detail the events of the Tomochic rebellion and revealed the zealousness with which the Porfirian state persecuted the local religious leaders believed to be "living saints" and their Indian followers. Perhaps most important, however, they helped to illuminate subtle connections between this cultural and religious persecution and the larger political battles of the so-called "Yaqui campaign." Despite my original intentions, I decided that my limited time would not permit the long trips to Chihuahua and Sonora but would be better spent taking full advantage of the AGN's valuable collections and exploring Mexico City's other resources. I did further work in the Porfirio Diaz collection at the Universidad Iberoamericana, at CONDUMEX, and at the Lerdo de Tejada and UNAM libraries. The archives provided important materials for studying the political and economic perspectives on the conflicts in the north. They also provided direct clues to further holdings contained in state and local archives in the northern states. In the libraries--and bookstores such as Gandhi, Inframundo, and the AGN bookshop--I was able to locate several titles for my bibliography of secondary works that I had been unable to obtain in the United States.
In all, I believe the trip, though abbreviated, was successful. I not only located a number of crucial documentary sources, I discovered concrete clues for how to proceed with further research. The trip was invaluable for the experience I gained in locating and reading primary documents, and it spurred my thinking on my topic, helping me to see connections between politics, culture, and religion--and connections between peoples--in northern Mexico that I had not considered before my trip. I am very excited at the prospect of continuing to develop this preliminary research into a focused dissertation topic, and carrying out further research in order to complete the dissertation.
I would like to extend my sincere gratitude to the Committee on Latin American History for allowing me this opportunity. It was a very positive experience that would have been impossible without the support of the Scobie Prize.