Biography of a Hacienda: Work and Revolution in Rural Mexico

1. One Hundred Years: From Independence to Revolution in Mexico

10 chapter one One Hundred Years From Independence to Revolution in Mexico The general stifled a groan as he climbed stiffly off his horse. He would be forty in another year, too old for the strenuous life of a soldier at war, not that he was prepared to admit it to anybody but himself. General Fortino Ayaquica looked around as his men, following his lead, dismounted. Some of them were already glancing about with an appraising eye, looking for whatever each thought he needed most: food, valuables, women. He sharply ordered them to refrain from plundering, reminding them that that sort of behavior would not be acceptable today. He ignored the grumbling behind him as he turned back to look at the casco. This meeting was important; they couldn’t afford any distractions. Clearly, nobody had told the hacienda’s peones about today’s conference. He had watched them flee for the safety of Acocotla’s walls as he and his soldiers approached. They had abandoned their belongings, leaving everything unguarded in the field fronting the calpanería. They were worried more about their personal safety than that of their possessions. Given the way things had been going in the Valley of Atlixco lately, it was understandable. He looked around at the living space, guessing it was occupied by thirtyfive or forty families. He stood clenching his jaw, fighting the anger he felt when he observed the conditions in which people were forced to live. General Fortino Ayaquica had spent his childhood in nearby Tochimilco, and it was haciendas such as this one he had been thinking of when he signed the amended Plan de Ayala three years earlier. He had chosen this meeting spot intentionally, convinced that Colonel Reyes couldn’t possibly remain a Constitutionalist in such surroundings. Reyes would walk through this field, this One Hundred Years • 11 so-called living space, passing between the rooms of the calpanería to enter the hacienda, and he would understand the position held by the Zapatistas. Fortino Ayaquica was convinced it was impossible to remain unmoved in the face of the poverty, hunger, and suffering seen in this field in front of the Hacienda San Miguel Acocotla. The general turned as the approaching horses interrupted his thoughts. At ten in the morning on April 17, 1917, the Zapatista General Fortino Ayaquica met with the Constitutionalist Colonel Eduardo Reyes at the Hacienda San Miguel Acocotla. According to an exchange of letters between the two, each man brought two officers, one assistant, and ten soldiers with him, although a letter sent by Fortino Ayaquica to his commander , the famous Emiliano Zapata, tells us that the Zapatistas had hidden over four hundred men in a nearby gully. Each met in hopes of convincing the other, through both discussion and manipulation, to switch sides; each believed that such a switch would bring peace to the Valley of Atlixco.1 Both were unsuccessful in their mission, but the effort is understandable . By April of 1917, Mexico had endured six-and-a-half years of civil war known today as the Mexican Revolution. Soldiers in the employ of competing factions roamed the countryside, battling each other and laying waste to villages and farmland. People were exhausted, frightened, and hungry. Many perhaps wondered what had brought about the years of unrest. The Hacienda in Colonial Mexico, 1519–1810 Fortino Ayaquica’s choice of meeting place that April morning was likely deliberate. Haciendas were omnipresent across Mexico’s postconquest landscape, and during the Mexican Revolution they would become a central part of Zapata’s reform program, factors that have made haciendas the focus of extensive historical research.2 They were most famously defined as businesses that were “operated by a dominant landowner and a dependent labor force, organized to supply a small-scale market by means of scarce capital accumulation but also to support the status aspirations of the owner.”3 More recently, historians have recognized that a hacienda is best understood through its relationships. Eric Van Young writes, “The great rural estate of the late colonial period was . . . more a set of interlocking relationships, or systems, than an entity with fixed and exclusive characteristics.”4 12 • Chapter One Haciendas have proven difficult to define in part because of their variability through time and across the landscape. Studies of haciendas during the last fifty years have been profoundly shaped by François Chevalier’s Land and...