Caste War Now and Never: Unreading Gender, Race, and Land in Yucatán

In Caste War Now and Never scholar S. B. West considers Yucatán's nineteenth-century Caste War, the longest and most violent Indigenous uprising of the Western Hemisphere, to argue that it actually never occurred. Instead, West writes that the violent events grouped under the "Caste War" label must be understood through alternative frameworks that resist the emergent logics of race war and include related regulatory matrices like gender and land.Through this lens, the Caste War emerges as a discursive construct rooted in an anti-Indigenous archive that served the political interests of a frustrated regional elite during the rise of liberalism and nationhood.West argues that Caste War discourse unfolds as a technology that mobilized and legitimized genocidal actions against racialized rebels and inspired assimilation into hegemonic political and social structures. In the second half of the book, West looks at the Caste War to engage its contemporary polysemic nature through close readin