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LATIN AMERICA/HISTORY
JULY
272 PP. ■ 5.875 X 9.25
0-8229-5944-5 ■ PAPER $24.95s
PITT LATIN AMERICAN SERIES
Paul Sullivan is an independent scholar and
anthropologist. He is the author of Unfinished
Conversations: Mayas and Foreigners Between
Two Wars.
New in Paper
Xuxub Must Die
The Lost Histories of a Murder on the Yucatan
Paul Sullivan
“An extraordinary historical reconstruction told with consummate narrative skill. A key text
for students seeking to understand the intriguing and complex history of nineteenth-century
Yucatan.”
—History
“For today’s Maya, Xuxub resonates as a memory of the potential (but also the pitfalls)
of indigenous agency. Paul Sullivan’s careful but lively account allows us to glimpse an
alternative, ‘subaltern’ history.”
—Times Literary Supplement
“Under layers of greed, lust, anger and envy, Sullivan discovers a treasure trove of Yucatan
history. Xuxub was, to borrow a metaphor from science, a butterfly that fluttered its wings
and sent a ripple of discord to far-flung places”
—Wall Street Journal
Inthe nineteenth century, Americans came to the Yucatan Peninsula in search of fortune,
taking advantage of cheap Mayan labor and abundant natural resources. Like
their other white predecessors, these foreigners inspired hatred among the indigenous
population for their arrogance and oppression. In 1875, American Robert Stephens,
along with many of his workers and their wives and children, was killed at the Xuxub sugar
plantation he managed, victims of Maya rebels. To this day, the motive remains unclear,
shrouded in mystery like the overgrowth that consumes the remains of the once-thriving
plantation. Was Xuxub a clash of culture and economics, a local power struggle, an act of
war—or simply cold-blooded murder?
Paul Sullivan first heard of this mystery while living among the Maya as an anthropologist.
Nearly a decade later, work on another story led him to archival records about the
murders. Sullivan’s research unveiled a complex maze of characters and events, seemingly
drawn from fiction, that he employs along with local storytelling to illuminate the dark
forces at work on that fateful day. The result is a fascinating blend of fact, opinion, and
myth that examines the motives and perspectives of those lives that Xuxub ensnared, and
the diplomatic and legal battles that resulted from the heinous crime that made front-page
news in New York and caused a public outcry demanding justice for an American simply
“trying to make a living.”
Sullivan masterfully weaves the intricately tangled threads of this story into a fascinating
account of human accomplishments and failings, in which good and evil are never quite
what they seem at first, and truth proves to be elusive.
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