Biography of a Hacienda: Work and Revolution in Rural Mexico

4. The Legacy of Revolution

56 chapter four The Legacy of Revolution * * * I picked my way through the muddy, partially flooded main street, greeting young men as they rode by on their horses. They had assisted with my excavations at the hacienda, and they smiled, friendly and seeming happy to see me. My students trailed behind me, looking shocked at the conditions in which the villagers lived. This was the town’s main street? I could see the question in their eyes as they looked around, whispering. I expected the exchange students from the United States to feel out of their element, but the astonishment evident on the faces of the Mexican students I found, in turn, astonishing. The poverty in La Soledad Morelos is out of the ordinary to many, but Mexico is full of such villages. Why the surprise and discomfort? I considered the question as I hugged an electrical pole, trying to skirt a large puddle without flooding my boots. Starting a long day in the field with cold, wet feet is unpleasant—best to keep them dry until the sun was a bit higher and the air a bit warmer. I slipped away from the pole and my cause was lost. I sighed and shrugged. It was our first day in the field. I knew the month held many days of cold, wet feet. It was hard to complain as I looked down the main street, named Independencia, toward the elementary school. The sight made me ashamed of my irritation. We would be collecting oral historical, ethnographic, and ethnoarchaeological data in La Soledad Morelos for the next four weeks. I turned to my assistant, MaryCarmen, and consulted her about where to start. She told me it was her compadre Juan Antonio’s birthday. Lunch at his house The Legacy of Revolution • 57 would be a good way to introduce the students to members of the village, and thanks to MaryCarmen’s relationship with the family, we would all be warmly welcomed. But first, we would take the students to meet the elementary school principal, teachers, and children. Word that we were in town would spread quickly after the visit. * * * Looking around, my students saw a tiny, poor village, but had any of the 612 individuals who lived in La Soledad Morelos in 1903 walked into the village with us, they would have found it surprisingly, perhaps overwhelmingly , large. The population has more than doubled in the last one hundred years; the village has expanded dramatically in just three generations. One elderly man told us that during the Mexican Revolution the village had only seven adobe houses. The rest of the houses were made primarily out of chinamite (dried cornstalks) and palm leaves. Few people, he told us, had lived in the village, and all worked on the nearby haciendas. The population swelled during the second quarter of the twentieth century when the post-Revolutionary agrarian reforms caused the dissolution of those same haciendas. Peones who had been living at the haciendas moved to villages, including La Soledad, as the hacienda buildings fell into ruins and the lands were expropriated. According to the 2005 National Census, La Soledad Morelos has a population of 1,916 people and 364 individual homes or house compounds .1 While conducting a survey during the first two research seasons in the summers of 2003 and 2004, we identified 444 lots including 381 house compounds, noting two under construction and twelve clearly abandoned, which suggested the census is accurate. The village’s main street, Independencia, runs for just under a kilometer from the northeast to the southwest. There are no paved streets in La Soledad (fig. 4.1), and with the exception of delivery trucks and police patrols, very few vehicles are seen. The majority of the village’s inhabitants rely on horses for their primary transport, and a nice saddle is seen as a mark of status. It is also common to see young men on bicycles. For longer trips, a bus runs on weekdays to the nearby city Atlixco between the hours of 8 a.m. and 4 p.m. Individuals with a bit more money (largely thanks to family members working in the United States) may own pickup trucks, though these tend to be saved for special occasions. Most municipal buildings line the village’s main street. A small, government-funded medical clinic sits at the entrance to the village Figure 4.1...