Outside the Hacienda Walls: The Archaeology of Plantation Peonage in Nineteenth-Century Yucatán by Allan Meyers (review)

What was life like on a nineteenth-century Yucatecan sugar plantation before the Mexican Revolution? Should we romanticize the belle époque (1871–1914) and admire the power and influence of Yucatan’s oligarchs? Or, should we concur with the national narrative that portrays the revolution as a grassroots solution to the era’s social ills? Allan Meyers’ account of debt peonage at Hacienda Tabi interweaves evidence from archaeology, history, ethnography, and Yucatan’s heritage management industry to satisfy these questions in a big way.

The book describes the results of a 12-year archaeological investigation undertaken to study the social conditions at Hacienda Tabi, Yucatán, Mexico, a sugar plantation that reached its height under president Porfirio Díaz (1876–1910) and during the time industrial capitalism took hold across the nation. The volume delves into the inner workings of a settlement of Maya-speaking resident workers located outside the hacienda’s walls to uncover the material signatures of debt slavery and acasillamiento, a system of domination characterized by money advances, patronage, task-based pay, prohibited movement, surveillance, and physical coercion. Little is known about the material conditions of inequality, labor management, and daily life in workers’ villages, even though scores of similar settlements still exist on the outskirts of large estates beneath the overgrown tropical vegetation. Meyers explores the control and interpretation of space from the ground up in this now-vanished cultural landscape. He considers how control of architectural and spatial features give some people power over others. He questions why some spatial meanings are constantly brought to the forefront, whereas others are subordinated. Yet, the author’s answers unfold in a narrative informed by the history of investigation and discovery at Tabi so that the book also responds to the kinds of questions public audiences find most appealing: How did you know where to dig? What was the coolest thing you found?

Meyers is an evocative storyteller, and his introduction to everyday life at Hacienda Tabi opens with a mystery—the death of Pablo Chan. The story interweaves primary written sources with a sense of place to establish the book’s central questions, which are later resolved through archaeological research. The next three chapters are based on documentary evidence and lay out the cultural landscape of the late nineteenth century. They contextualize Hacienda Tabi’s geography, economy, politics, and demography in space and time, and discuss Meyers’s research design. The next four chapters explore the archaeology, as Meyers guides his readers through the spatial anatomy of the estate and the layout of the worker’s village. He describes the configuration of individual house lots, the soil-chemical patterns of structure floors, and the distributions of artifacts across the yards. He discusses how archaeological evidence reveals the social conditions on the hacienda at a human scale, often drawing from contemporary ethnography and ethno-archaeology. These chapters also highlight the value of collaboration with descendant community members. In the final chapter, Meyers tells the reader about the coolest thing he found—a Chinese coin—and reflects on the connections between his interpretations and the future of heritage management, public history, and archaeology at Tabi and other haciendas in Yucatán.

This book has many strengths. It is beautifully written and a great read. The author draws broadly on journalism, travel writing, popular culture, and contemporary political debates to situate the social conditions and inequalities at the hacienda within the intellectual milieu of its time. The reader learns how to look beneath the surface of Mexico’s master historical narratives and connect the present to the past. The book will appeal to both academic and public audiences, in Mexico and the United States. I wholeheartedly recommend it as a course adoption for undergraduate or graduate students in history, archaeology, anthropology, and Latin American Studies.