Beyond the Hacienda: Agrarian Relations and Socioeconomic Change in Rural Mesoamerica

In an influential analysis of Mexico's political, economic, and social structure published on the eve of the Mexican Revolution, Los grandes problemas nacionales, the Mexican jurist, reformer, and revolutionary Andrés Molina Enríquez (1964 [1909]), stated categorically (and famously) that "la hacienda no es negocio" [the hacienda is not a business]. By this he meant that the large Mexican landed estates of his day (and stretching back to their origins in the era of the Spanish conquest) were for the most part not profit-oriented but "feudal" enterprises, that rural Mexico was therefore only partially capitalistic, if at all, and that the country was ipso facto only imperfectly modern. Neither before his own time nor subsequently was Molina Enríquez alone in offering this diagnosis of the country's ills, since an enlightened critique of the social power and economic lethargy of the Mexican latifundio, and attempts to reform or abolish the institution, can be found at least as early as the late eighteenth century (e.g., Florescano 1971a). A half century before Molina Enríquez wrote, nineteenth-century liberals had been on the whole less interested in land reform as such than in undermining the church, by stripping it of its rural holdings, and in "modernizing" rural peoples, by introducing principles of private property into village-based systems of communal ownership. ¹ Opinion among leaders of the Mexican Revolution (1910–21) on what, if anything, to do about the hacienda and related land tenure issues varied widely, from a left wing occupied by such figures as Molina Enríquez himself and the revolutionary chieftains Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa to, on the right, the revolutionary presidents Francisco I. Madero and Venustiano Carranza, both large northern landowners themselves and at best extremely tepid about dismantling large estates. After the revolutionary violence ebbed, agrarian radicalism reached its apogee in the sexenio (1934–40) of President Lázaro Cárdenas, who under Article 27 of the 1917 constitution distributed millions of hectares to ejidatarios, thus amplifying or creating ex nihilo communal holdings that have recently come under attack with the advent of neoliberalism in Mexico and the changes to Article 27 in the 1990s. Although there has been virtually endless debate on the theme, modern historical and social science writing has often characterized Mexican society as a whole as "feudal" or "underdeveloped" owing to the putative backwardness, paternalism, and low productivity of the hacienda as a long dominant agro-social institution. The "problem of the hacienda," therefore, particularly as standing in opposition to the "traditional" indigenous community and forms of peasant livelihood, has been at or near the center of public debates in Mexico for at least two centuries and most intensely during the last hundred years.

In much of the vast historical literature about rural Mexico across several disciplines, so powerful has the role of the hacienda become, both as explanans and explanandum, that an image of the prerevolutionary Mexican countryside has emerged in which the institution's development (as I put it in a monographic work about twenty years ago) "was seen as taking place in a historical vacuum, in a moon-like landscape without cities, provincial towns, Indian population concentrations, mining areas, external markets, or other points of economic crystallization" (Van Young 1981: 2). The great wave of historical studies of Mexican landed estates beginning with François Chevalier's pathbreaking 1952 study of colonial haciendas waned in the mid-1980s (Van Young 1983), giving way to a hiatus in this subliterature that has continued until very recently. In the last few years, however, there seems to have occurred a resurgence of interest in agrarian structures in the prerevolutionary countryside, much of it on the part of anthropologists and ethnohistorians and much of it centering on the historical interplay of class and ethnicity rather than exclusively on the conflictual relations between haciendas and indigenous communities (for some early...