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chapter 6 Servant or Son? The Negotiation of Labor Relations in Sonora’s Local Courts The following appeal comes from a conservative, religious magazine that found its way into the home of a local notable family in the city of Alamos at the middle of the nineteenth century. It aptly describes the ideals Sonora’s leaders—liberal and conservative—came to embrace for the republican family, and the servant’s place within that family: “The primary purpose of the family is to place the weak under the protection of the strong. What would become of a woman without a husband to meet her needs? What would become of a child? What, finally, would become of a servant who contracts his labor for fair pay? The existence of all these individuals would be unbearable.”1 Employers, or amos, were father figures, dispensing justice, punishment, moral teachings, and gifts. The term amo refers to an employer, but the role was more akin to a household head or patriarch, someone responsible for guiding and disciplining subordinates, including wives, children, and servants.2 The early republican era marks a critical juncture in the history of labor relations in Sonora. During these years, ties between amos and sirvientes grew more coercive against a backdrop of ethnic conflict and frustration among the region’s notables, who grew increasingly impatient with the difficulties of recruiting sufficient labor for liberal commercial expansion in the nineteenth century. Amid these tensions, notables embraced an ideal of the worker-servant as part a protective, extended family. In this chapter I explore how these ideals became codified into laws that bolstered an amo’s authority to provide religious and moral instruction to workers, blurring the legal and practical boundaries between worker and subordinate family member. Labor Shortages: A Colonial Legacy The emergence of multiple strategies to recruit and coerce labor is best understood within the context of long-standing struggles with labor 136 chapter 6 shortages on haciendas and in mines in colonial northern New Spain. Official correspondence from the late eighteenth century shows us that notables had long used coercive tactics to recruit labor, particularly among neighboring indigenous communities. In a statement on the status of his jurisdiction in 1790, for example, Gobernador Pedro Garrido y Durán wrote disparagingly of house servants and manual laborers, who in his view, lived only to engage in drinking and other vices. And although he opposed the practice and ordered its cessation, Garrido y Durán reported that mine owners and land owners, both large and small, forced Indians to work in agriculture and mining, leaving indigenous farmers no time to tend their own land.3 Clearly, labor coercion was not a new phenomenon in republican Sonora, nor was paternalist rhetoric about the failures of house servants and workers to fulfill a moral, productive lifestyle without the “guidance” of an amo. Over the course of the nineteenth century, however, notables fashioned a relationship between labor shortages and rebellion. The breakdown of the presidio system and the successful armed revolts of the Yaquis were frustrating the designs for republican progress.4 Further, with accelerating commercialization of property and consolidations of mines and land and water holdings, entrepreneurs were eager to find a large and dependable labor force to sustain economic expansion, particularly in regions experiencing growth, such as the lowland desert communities in the districts of Hermosillo and Guaymas.5 Older strategies of labor coercion and paternalist rhetoric about servants persisted in a new climate of liberal, commercial expansion. The relationships among rhetoric, state building, and labor coercion were most evident in the repeated codification of servant and vagrancy laws, as well as in the tendency among judges to favor amos over servants in court rulings.6 In practice, it was Yaquis, Mayos, and Opatas who found their autonomy compromised by the commercial designs of Sonora’s notables. Indigenous people, along with poor and middling mestizos, were to serve as needed workers in mines and on haciendas. Sonora’s Dilemma with Defining Citizenship amid Indian Rebellion Richard Warren has identified Mexico’s early republican era as a period when definitions of citizenship and participation in electoral politics labor relations 137 were most inclusive and intensely debated. Mexico’s Constitution of 1812 established a precedent of suffrage among Mexico’s landless masses, and with Mexico’s independence from Spain in 1821, the caste system that had protected the privileges of Mexico’s Creole and peninsular minority was abolished.7 During the 1820s and 1830s, local elites...

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