Ranching Elites, Social Networks and Everyday Disobedience in Southern Veracruz at the End of the 18th Century

This text centers on the interaction between kinship networks and the subaltern attitudes of everyday disobedience expressed in a pluriethnic fabric of dissidence. Based on the disputes between the Indians of Acayucan and a large rancher and landholder, Don Joseph Quintero, this text reveals the history of a family of great importance in southern Veracruz: the Franyutti family. Making his fortune through marriage alliances, Juan Francisco Franyutti maintained control over such administrative and judicial posts as mayor, tithe collector, tax collector, militia captain and notary. In his time, he established an ironclad system of control over the region’s agricultural and livestock production, monopolizing land and control over trade and credit. Resistance to the power of the Franyutti family included strategies employed by Indians, pardos and mulattoes that ranged from tax fraud to smuggling, from legal defenses to gossiping and rioting, as well as through ritualized forms of dissidence, such as fandangos and saraos. These conflicting networks not only expressed different modes of sociability, but also strategies of social cohesion and friction