Historia de Welinna (1862) by Crescencio Carrillo y Ancona: A historical and allegorical novel about the Caste War in Yucatán

Abstract

This article analyses Historia de Welinna, a novel published by Crescencio Carrillo y Ancona in 1862 and reissued in 1883, as a literary intervention in the context of the Caste War and the religious conflicts of nineteenth-century Yucatán. Through a critical and comparative reading of the novel, its paratexts, and various writings by Carrillo y Ancona published between 1859 and 1895, it examines both the work’s place in the tradition of the historical novel in Yucatán, under the influence of Justo Sierra O’Reilly, and its ideological function. It argues that Carrillo y Ancona constructed an allegorical counterpoint between the Spanish conquest of Yucatán in the sixteenth century and the Caste War: the intervention of Diego de Landa and the Catholic cross in the past offered nineteenth-century readers a model through which to interpret the contemporary crisis. The article concludes that the novel sought to legitimise the restoration of the Church’s social influence and, in particular, the role of Catholic missionaries as a means of pacification, in a context shaped by anticlerical reforms, the cult of the Speaking Cross, and the expansion of Spiritism and Protestantism.