First and foremost, cacique is “the governor or chief of an indigenous community or town.” The other definitions replace “indigenous” with concerns about misuses of power, defining the cacique as “a person who wields an abusive power within a community or a group,” or as “a person that in a town or in a region exerts an excessive influence in political affairs.”Įtymology helps tell the story: the word first came from kassiquan, used by the Arahuaco indigenous people in the Caribbean Antilles to mean having or sustaining a household. The Diccionario de la Real Academia, the official Spanish-language dictionary, gives three definitions for cacique. I will cross my arms, Páramo declares, and Comala will starve. When she descends into madness and dies-while Comala happens to be celebrating its yearly festivities-he takes celebrations as a personal offense, and swears revenge against the town. Pedro Páramo has power over the lives and deaths of the impoverished inhabitants of Comala, the small town where Juan Rulfo’s novel takes place described as “a living rancor” and “pure evil,” he is both mysterious and cruel, ordering the murder of the father of the woman he has fallen in love so that he can have her for himself, immediately. It’s not a coincidence that the great Mexican novel, Pedro Páramo, is about a cacique.
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