Land, Livelihood, and Civility in Southern Mexico: Oaxaca Valley Communities in History

5. San Lorenzo Albarradas, Xaagá, and the Hacienda Regime

san Lorenzo aLbarradas and xaagá 123 chaPTer 5 San Lorenzo Albarradas, Xaagá, and the Hacienda Regime The consolidation of Hacienda Xaagá was critical to the formation of the communities of San Lorenzo Albarradas and Xaagá. Local discourse identified the residents of Xaagá, together with those of San Lorenzo and Unión Zapata, as castellanos in a Zapotec region. This implied their common origin but provided no explanation of it. It has been speculated that the Spanish-speaking populations in Mitla’s neighborhood, including Xaagá and San Lorenzo Albarradas, were descendants of non-Zapotec speakers from the Mixteca or from another region of Mexico. According to this thesis, non-Zapotec speakers were imported into the greater Mitla region in the early 1520s by the Spaniards to weave palm or to provide military support in a campaign against the Mixe (Schmieder 1930, 23–24; Olivera and Romero 1973, 233–234). One fact is certain: during the colonial period, the ancestors of twentiethcentury castellanos in San Lorenzo and Xaagá became sharecropping tenants of a Spanish estate as it evolved from a sitio de ganado to estancia to hacienda. Documents in the Agrarian Reform archives (ASRA) show that tenants from Xaagá served the hacendado as armed wardens (guardamontes) who patrolled hacienda lands in its mountainous expanses surrounding San Lorenzo, whose inhabitants were also tenants.1 This chapter will focus on late nineteenth-century and early twentiethcentury experiences of San Lorenzans (or “Lenchanos,” as they refer to themselves and are referred to regionally) under the hacienda regime. They toiled as renters in agriculture and animal husbandry; and they were subjected to a surcharge system for the utilization of forest resources, including , most prominently, native stands of palm suitable for plaiting baskets (tenates) and mats (petates). Many San Lorenzans lost their lives during 124 Land, LiveLihood, and civiLiTy in souThern mexico this period from aggressive actions by hacienda agents. Acts of retaliation and open resistance to hacienda rule did occur, but organized movement for change did not take hold until the 1910s under the impact of the revolutionary agrarian reform program. Formal petitions launched by 1918 culminated in the 1934 establishment of an ejido by dotación in accordance with the Agrarian Code (Código Agrario). In the last century of Hacienda Xaagá’s existence, the hacendados (the Guergué and Iñárritu families) used terrazgueros settled near the hacienda to police, intimidate, and terrorize San Lorenzans; they also cynically exploited and fomented divisions among San Lorenzans as an effective extrajudicial tactic to stall and sabotage agrarian reform. The movement toward agrarian reform initiated by San Lorenzo triggered a process that would ultimately liberate the landless terrazgueros in Xaagá. In the 1950s and 1960s, the people of Xaagá, as ejidatarios, developed a treadle-loom weaving industry to stimulate material progress and release them from dependency on subsistence agriculture and animal husbandry . San Lorenzo’s Origins and the Development of the Hacienda Regime Since 1936, the pueblo of San Lorenzo possessed 10,356 hectares of mostly mountainous terrain, some 10 percent of which was estimated by government officials to be arable. Considering its entry into the twentieth century with a meager 190 hectares of land (fundo legal + zona urbanizada + pequeñas propiedades), the question may be raised as to how a meager land base in 1900 expanded by a factor of 55 in three decades. The answer lies in a tangled history of colonial and postcolonial relationships between San Lorenzo and two neighboring nonentailed estates, Xaagá and San Bartolo.2 Manuel Martínez Gracida (1883) placed the founding date of San Lorenzo as 1518. This appears unlikely, considering that it preceded the 1529 date for the founding of Antequera, which became the main base of Spain’s colonial enterprise in the Oaxaca Valley and part of Hernán Cortés’s marquesado (Chance 1978, 32–36). We know that San Lorenzo Albarradas Lachibixe in 1580 was one of eleven sujetos of the cabecera of Mitla, which had a secular priest dating from the 1550s (Gerhard 1993, 191). Spanish missionaries initiated their proselytizing activities in major native communities like Mitla and then incorporated outlying subordinate settlements into the cabecera-based parish (Gerhard 1993, 26–27). Outlying subordinate settlements incorporated into the Mitla parish, apart from San Lorenzo, included San Juan del Río Quelaa and San Miguel Albarradas Cunzeche. In the first list of corregi- san Lorenzo aLbarradas and xaagá 125 dores for Oaxaca dating from the...