Social Stratification in Central Mexico, 1500-2000

Three. Haciendas and Their Workers

F or nearly four hundred years—from about 1570 to 1940—two socioeconomic institutions dominated the Central Mexican countryside: the hacienda and the agrarian village. At first, only Spaniards owned haciendas. But by the beginning of the twentieth century hacendados had become a heterogeneous group that included a few non-Spanish Europeans and U.S. citizens, in addition to the heirs of the original owners and a much larger number of aristocratized mestizo elites. Economically, the great hacienda was an entrepreneurial, market-oriented institution for the entirety of its existence; its periodic unprofitability or withdrawal inward reflected adverse circumstances—political unrest, highway banditry , deteriorated roads, market slumps, labor scarcity—rather than the “feudalism” often erroneously attributed to it. The agrarian village was exclusively Indian in the mid-sixteenth century . Over time, the rural population became mestizoized, both biologically and culturally, and from the turn of the twentieth century onward, an increasing number of mestizo villages appeared in the area (see Chaps. 2, 7). Agriculture remained the mainstay of village livelihood, but many villages also had resident artisans (e.g., potters, weavers, mat-makers) or other specialists (e.g., curers, muleteers, petty merchants). Villagers were never entirely self-sufficient, in the sense of being unconnected to the economy beyond it, but they were largely self-sustaining in terms of basic needs at the beginning of the period. From the mid-seventeenth century onward, most agrarian villages drew more heavily on the outside economy—mainly through wage labor but also through the manufacture and sale of artisan goods—to supplement their home-based production three: HACIENDAS AND THEIR WORKERS H A C I E N D A S A N D T H E I R W O R K E R S 69 system. This dependency accelerated during the twentieth century, even though most hacienda lands were confiscated and distributed to villagers during Mexico’s impressive agrarian reform, begun in earnest by President Lázaro Cárdenas (1934–1940). The Hacienda in Legend The great hacienda is shrouded in a legendary history that arose to rationalize the 1910–1920 Revolution and then endured to legitimate the postrevolutionary governments to the end of the twentieth century. Only in recent decades have scholars made significant headway toward a more objective view of the hacienda. While we gladly leave to others the scholarly battle to replace legendary with factual history, we must sketch out some of the main points of revisionist scholars (see, e.g., Buve 1984a; Jarqu ín Ortega 1990; Leal and Menegus 1995; Meyer 1986; Miller 1995; Nickel 1987, 1989a, 1989b, 1996). The legend has two important components. The first portrays the hacienda as a precapitalistic “feudal patrimony” whose owners “sought a low, safe return on their capital” and, accordingly, greatly underutilized their vast resources—”the very reverse of entrepreneurs” (Brading 1980b: 11). Because haciendas occupied a large part of the countryside, their purported feudal inefficiencies, underutilization, and ostentatious wastefulness are said to have made them a major obstacle to Mexico’s economic development. We have already pointed out that the hacienda was, to the contrary, an entrepreneurial institution from the start. The second component holds that hacienda workers were everywhere half-starved, servile peones (laborers, peons) who lived on the hacienda and were bound to it by hereditary indebtedness so great that neither they nor their descendants could ever hope to get free. The major mechanism of indebtedness, the legend holds, was the hacienda’s tienda de raya (company store), at which the food rations that were part of the workers’ compensation had to be purchased at exorbitantly high prices, enriching the hacendado while hopelessly inflating the workers’ debts. In addition, hacendados and their managers were everywhere free to imprison, flog, or even kill their workers with impunity. For southeastern Mexico (Tabasco, Chiapas, Yucatán) and the Valley of Oaxaca, these features of the legend are almost certainly factually correct, at least during the Porfiriato (the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz, H I S T O R I C A L O V E R V I E W 70 1876–1910). In Central Mexico, though, they are true for some haciendas but not for many others, even during the Porfiriato. In virtually every feature , in fact, the Mexican hacienda showed great differences not only by region (North, Center, Southeast) but also by time period (colonial, early independence, the...