Trail Of Tears And Henequen Leaves Analysis

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Trails of Tears and Henequen Leaves: A Gringo Journalist among Maya Slaves and Displaced Indians “Article 2. In the Republic all are born free. Slaves who set foot in the national territory shall, by this act alone, recover their freedom and enjoy the protection afforded by the laws.” “Article 5. No one shall be obliged to render personal service without just compensation, and without his full consent. The law shall not authorize any contract which has for its object the loss, or the irrevocable sacrifice of personal liberty, whether it be for the purpose of labor, of education, or religious vow. Neither shall there be authorized agreements by which an individual consents to his own banishment or disfranchisement.” The Federal Constitution of the United Mexican States of 1857, repealed in the midst of revolutionary turmoil, guaranteed certain inalienable rights that lie at…show more content…
The preferred tools were the whip and the cane, and instances of flogging were commonplace to the point of becoming an integral part of the morning roll call in some plantations; to a large extent, they were motivated by insubordination on the part of a jornalero or his failure to gather a satisfactory number of leaves (Turner 2007: 23). To exacerbate the situation, political authorities, plantation owners and individual mayordomos alike frequently coincided in the irrational assumption that corporal punishment was an essential and deeply-rooted part of the natives’ culture, and that subordination was in their case a natural state which involved docile resignation to any superior power. Santiago Méndez, Yucatán’s longtime governor who served five terms between 1840 and 1857, gave one prominent example of this flawed
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