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  • La historia secreta da la hacienda henequenera de Yucatán: Deudas, migración y resistencia maya (1879-1915)
  • David J. Robinson
La historia secreta da la hacienda henequenera de Yucatán: Deudas, migración y resistencia maya (1879-1915). Piedad Peniche Rivero. Mérida, Yucatán: Archivo General de la Nación y Instituto de Cultura de Yucatán. Tables, maps, diagrams, photos, bibl. 2010. viii + 222 pp. $10.00 (ISBN; 978-607-9017-06-4).

This eloquent text identifies the key components of the development of the henequen hacienda development initiated in the fourth quarter of the nineteenth century and reaching its apogee in the first decades of the twentieth century. While the inventions of the Solis and McCormick machines in 1868 and 1878 signified major advance in the processing of the raw henequen, it was the hacienda labor force that bore the burden of cutting in the fields, loading and carrying the product to the factories. Yucatan's regional industry became tied inextricably to the external demands of mid-western US wheat farmers who provided an insatiable need for binding materials for their crop. While for workers the henequen boom meant hard labor, low pay and terrible working conditions, for others it resulted in major infrastructural developments, a boom in buildings for the elite, and for eighty-five municipios the development of trade links, and a rise in population: a classic case study in "growth without development."

Anthropologist Peniche, who is the director of the Yucatan State Archives, and thus has access to its many under-utilized records, here provides a succinct account of the factors that affected the development of the industry's evolution. She details the plight of the 85,000 Maya-speaking, illiterate laborers who went by the various names of peones, sirvientes and acasillados. The hacienda owners—their so-called "amos", inflicting either harsh corporal punishment, or demanding unpaid labor (la fajina) in the dawn hours before the field and factory work began, for any infraction of the rules of the estates. It was a dualistic world of owners and the owned.

While this is not the appropriate place to explicate all of the "secrets" of the history of henequen development in Yucatan that the author so expertly exposes, one of the keys was the "hacienda system" that operated throughout the region, composed of many actors: the workers and majordomos in the labor process, and the church, the state, the local traders, and the foreign financial and industrial agents in the production process. The last group, in particular the International Harvester Company, in collaboration with Governor Olegario Molina, created what has been called an "informal empire" in Yucatan between 1902 and 1915.

One of the secrets revealed in the book's introduction is the development of social control over the workers by their indebtedness to the hacienda owners; paternalism extended to "slavery by debt", and the appropriation of just not labor but of the persons themselves. And in return they were offered minimum shelter, a plot to cultivate, and the financing of their marriage costs—the parish and civil charges, and the costs of the bridal dress, adornments and the banquet that followed. A hundred pesos loan meant being tied for life to an estate, and all registered in the special account, the nohoch-cuenta, [End Page 212] carefully kept by the proprietor. Later charges for life-cycle events of the partners were also registered: for baptisms, burials, etc. The married pair thus sold their faith and fate to their "owner." Social reproduction reinforced commercial production.

Such a system needed a steady supply of young women who could be married off, and chapter three examines, by means of revealing case studies, how they were forced to marry. No 'falling in love' was needed, the master simply arrived and said 'this man is to be your husband.' The system was such that over time a reciprocal indebtedness was to develop in which the workers were indebted to the owners, and the owner to their workers, reminiscent of colonial tribute arrangements now in a modern guise. Church-supported god- and co-parenthood fortified such binding arrangements.

Chapter six outlines, for the first time in...

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