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Citizen-Breadwinners and Vagabond-Soldiers: Military Recruitment in Early Republican Southern Mexico

This article is about the village-internal politics of military recruitment in the largely indigenous Mixteca mountains in Oaxaca, in the southwest of Mexico, in the first decades after independence. While Indians had not been allowed to serve in New Spain's armed forces in the late colony, in the new republic the requirement that communities send some of their members for armed service became one of the principal demands by which the state inserted itself in local life. The article argues that the politics of recruitment played a crucial role in local forms of Mexican state formation. On the one hand, in petitions protesting their recruitment it forced indigenous commoners and their families to adopt a language of citizenship that abstracted notions of male individuality as expressed through hard labor and patriarchal responsibility from the communal contexts that had embedded the political self-representation of indigenous villagers in the colonial period. On the other hand, it gave rise to a discourse of exclusion that equated recruitment and, by extension, the military with wrong-doing, vagabondage, and crime. This discourse powerfully contributed to the categorical division between civilian and military life that became so pronounced a feature of postcolonialMexican society, while at the same time giving army deserters, prevented from returning to their home towns by the stigma of soldiery, little chance but to really join the ranks of vagabonds or bandits that became such an acutely felt threat to the legal sovereignty of the new nation.