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Mexican Junkers and Capitalist Haciendas, 1810–1910: The Arable Estate and the Transition to Capitalism between the Insurgency and the Revolution*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 February 2009

Simon Miller
Simon Miller
Affiliation:
Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Manchester.
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Extract

According to Barrington Moore ‘the process of modernization begins with peasant revolutions that fail’.1 Most historians of Mexico would agree that the nineteenth century opened with such an agrarian insurrection – the Insurgency – and yet it is indisputable that modernisation was a long time coming. Indeed, for many years the conventional view was that it took another such agrarian rising, the Mexican Revolution of 1910–20, to finally break the ‘feudal’ hold on the countryside and usher in a belated phase of modernisation.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Latin American Studies , Volume 22 , Issue 1-2 , March 1990 , pp. 229 - 263
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1990

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References

1 Moore, B., Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (Harmondsworth, 1966), p. 453.Google Scholar

2 Orozco, Wistano Luis, Legislación y Jurisprudencia sobre Terrenos Baldíos (Mexico, 1985)Google Scholar; Enríquez, A. Molina, Los Grandes Problemas Nacionales (Mexico, 1978)Google Scholar; Tannenbaum, F., The Mexican Agrarian Revolution (Washington, 1930)Google Scholar; Chevalier, F., La Formación de los Grandes Latifundios en México (Mexico, 1956).Google Scholar

3 Gibson, C., The Aztecs under Spanish Rule (Stanford, 1964)Google Scholar; Taylor, W. B., Landlord and Peasant in Colonial Oaxaca (Stanford, 1972)Google Scholar; Bauer, A., ‘Rural Workers in Spanish America; Problems of Peonage & Oppression’, Hispanic American Historical Review, vol. 59 (1979), pp. 34–63.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 Florescano, E., Estructuras y Problemas Agrarios de México 1500–1821 (Mexico, 1971)Google Scholar; Brading, D. A., Haciendas and Ranchos in the Mexican Bajío (Cambridge, 1978).Google Scholar

5 Womack, J., Zapata and the Mexican Revolution (New York 1968), pp. 42–3.Google Scholar

6 Bazant, J., ‘Feudalismo y capitalismo en la historia económica de México’, El Trimestre Económico, vol. 18, no. 1 (1950), pp. 81–98Google Scholar, and Cinco Haciendas Mexicanas (Mexico, 1975)Google Scholar; Brading, Haciendas and Ranchos, in the Mexican Bajío; Morín, C., Michoacán en la Nueva Espanńa del Siglo XVIII (Mexico, 1979)Google Scholar; Van Young, E., Hacienda and Market in Eighteenth Century Mexico (Berkeley, 1981)Google Scholar; Florescano, Estructuras y Problemas Agrarios de México 1500–1821; Tutino, J., ‘Hacienda Social Relations in Mexico: the Chalco Region in the Era of Independence’, Hispanic American Historical Review, vol. 55, no. 3 (1975), pp. 496–528CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Warman, A., Y Venimos Contradecir (Mexico, 1976).Google Scholar

7 Guerra, F. X., México: del Antiguo Régimen a la Revolución, vol. 1 (Mexico, 1988), pp. 134, 136.Google Scholar

8 Ibid., p. 138.

9 Knight, A., The Mexican Revolution, vol. 1. (Cambridge, 1986), pp. 84–5.Google Scholar Italics added.

10 Ibid., pp. 84–5, italics added. See also Knight, A., ‘Mexican Peonage: What was it & Why was it?’, Journal of Latin American Studies, vol. 18 (1986), pp. 41–74.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11 Tutino, J., From Insurrection to Revolution in Mexico (Princeton, 1986), pp. 364–7.Google Scholar See also Tutino, , ‘Life and labour on North Mexican Haciendas: the Querétaro–San Luis Potosí Region 1775–1810’, in Frost, E. C., Meyer, M. C., and Vázquez, J. Zoraida (eds.), El Trabajo y Los Trabajadores en la Historia de México (Mexico, 1979).Google Scholar

12 Tutino, , From Insurrection to Revolution, p. 308.Google Scholar

13 Young, Van, Hacienda and Market, pp. 218–35.Google Scholar

14 Tutino, , From Insurrection to Revolution, pp. 41–98.Google Scholar

15 Brading, , Haciendas and Ranchos in the Mexican Bajío, pp. 97–104.Google Scholar

16 I am indebted to Margaret Rankine for this information – discovered among Foreign Office papers, PRO no. 50/156.

17 Following data drawn from Raso, J. A. del, Notas Estadísticas del Departamento de Querétaro (Mexico, 1848), pp. 34, 55, 97–8, 104–5, 114–15.Google Scholar

18 Morín, , Michoacán en la Nueva España del Siglo XVIII, pp. 249–51.Google Scholar

19 Brading, , Haciendas and Ranchos in the Mexican Bajío, p. 113.Google Scholar

20 There were exceptions to this, primarily the class of rancheros, of which more will be said later. Brading, , Haciendas and Ranchos in the Mexican Bajío, pp. 149–73Google Scholar; Schryer, F. J., The Rancheros of Pisaflores (Toronto, 1980), pp. 23–47Google Scholar; González, L., Pueblo en Vilo (Mexico, 1968), pp. 49–73Google Scholar; Jacobs, I., Ranchero Revolt (Austin, Texas, 1982), pp. 41–59Google Scholar; and Meyer, J., ‘Haciendas y Ranchos, Peones y Campesinos en el Porfiriato’, Historia Méxicana, vol. 35 (1986), pp. 477–509.Google Scholar

21 Florescano, Estructuras y Problemas Agrarios de México 1500–1821, and Brading, Haciendas and Ranchos in the Mexican Bajío.

22 Humboldt, A. von, Ensayo Político sobre el Reino de la Nueva España (Mexico, 1966), pp. 250–8.Google Scholar

23 van Bath, B. H. Slicher, The Agrarian History of Western Europe (London, 1963), pp. 332–33.Google Scholar

24 Ibid., p. 280.

25 ASJ, Cartas 1859, 1863.

26 ASJ, Cartas 1863, 1864.

27 ASJ, Cartas 1864.

28 Following data taken from ASJ, Diarios y Mayores, 1856–64.

29 Duby, G., Rural Economy and Country Life in the Medieval West (London, 1968), p. 171Google Scholar, cited by Brading, D. A., Duncan, K. and Rutledge, I. (eds.), Land and Labour in Latin America (Cambridge, 1977), p. 23.Google Scholar

30 AJ, Diarios y Mayores 1856–64.

31 AJ, Cartas 1868.

32 ASJ, Cartas 1859–65.

33 La Sombra de Arteaga, 07 1880, pp. 256–8.Google Scholar

34 See Price, R., The Modernization of Rural France (London, 1983)Google Scholar, and Gates, P. W., The Farmer's Age (New York, 1960).Google Scholar

35 ASM, Diarios y Mayores 1851–7.

36 AJ, Diarios y Mayores 1882–95.

37 AG, Diarios y Mayores 1889–1906.

38 Miller, S. ‘The Mexican Hacienda between the Insurgency and the Revolution: Maize Production and Commercial Triumph on the temporal’, Journal of Latin American Studies, vol 16, no. 2 (1984).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

39 Brading, Haciendas and Ranchos in the Mexican Bajío.

40 I use the notion of ‘newcomer’ here to imply both a quantitative and qualitative innovation: sharecroppers had appeared on the Mexican landscape in earlier times, as shown in del Raso, Notas Estadísticas; Tutino, , From Insurrection to Revolution, pp. 237–40Google Scholar; Morín, , Michoacán en la Nueva España del Siglo XVIII, pp. 224–28Google Scholar; Brading, Haciendas and Ranchos in the Mexican Bajío, pp. 12, 38, 74Google Scholar; and Young, Van, Hacienda and Market, pp. 233–4Google Scholar; but this had occurred under a grundherrschaft strategy of a hacienda in retreat (or in marginal land clearance at the end of the eighteenth century); what this later phase represents is part of a gutsherrschaft trend which places increasing area and labour within the demesne and direct administration of the landlord, especially in the case of the quinteros. In this sense it is a quite different trend and warrants the significance of innovation.

41 Coatsworth, J. H., ‘Anotaciones sobre la producción de alimentos durante el Porfiriato’, Historia Mexicana, vol 26 (1976), pp. 167–87.Google Scholar

42 Katz, F., ‘Labour conditions on Haciendas in Porfirian Mexico: Some Trends and Tendencies’, Hispanic American Historical Review, vol. 54, no. 1 (1974), pp. 1–47.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

43 ANQ, Santiago Torres 1882, p. 16. This action runs contrary to the common assumption that the sharecropper, like the rest of the hacienda workforce, was subject to ‘feudal’ dominion and would be obliged to accept whatever conditions imposed from above. It provides us with a further example of the danger of reading off the daily functioning of the hacienda economy from the orthodox designation ‘feudal’. It is worth noting that the case recorded here involved a new owner, a Chilean immigrant: perhaps far from being the Mexican custom, this high-handedness had been developed in dealings with the inquilinos of the southern hacienda system – where rural labour was less autonomous.

44 See Vanderwood, P., Disorder and Progress: Bandits, Police and Mexican Development (Lincoln, 1981).Google Scholar

45 As suggested in Katz, , ‘Labour conditions on Haciendas in Porfirian Mexico’, pp. 24–5.Google Scholar

46 Marx, K., Capital, vol. 1 (Harmondsworth, 1976), p. 1021.Google Scholar

47 AJ, Cartas 1894.

48 AAA, Mayores 1885–7.

49 ASJ & AJ, Diarios y Mayores 1887–1911.

50 AOC (Bledos), Mayores 1883–5.

51 AG, Cartas y Mayores 1901–6.

52 ARM, Cartas y Mayores 1887.

53 ANQ, Celso Arévalo 1892–8; Van Young, Hacienda and Market; and Schryer, The Rancheros of Pisaflores.

54 Both Guerra, México, and Meyer, ‘Haciendas y Ranchos, Peones y Campesinos’, suggest that this trend has been exaggerated in the literature and that too much credence has been given to the national statistics of the time. Such doubts are a healthy development, indeed: case material on the village economy is even weaker than that on the hacienda – both require urgent research.

55 For Morelos see Womack, Zapata and the Mexican Revolution and Warman, Y Venimos Contradecir.

56 See B. Moore, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy and Skocpol, T., States and Social Revolutions (Cambridge, 1979).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

57 See Bauer, ‘Rural Workers in Spanish America’.

58 See Guerra, México and Meyer, ‘Haciendas y Ranchos, Peones y Campesinos’, for much lower estimates than previously thought. Irrespective of residence I would argue that this trend of hacienda expansion converged with population increases to tie the majority of Mesa Central campesinos to the great estate – though clearly in greater numbers in the centre-north than elsewhere.

59 Bazant in D. A. Brading, K. Duncan and I. Rutledge (eds.), Land and Labour in Latin America.

60 Data for this section have been drawn from ASJ, Rayadoras.

61 Riches, N., The Agricultural Revolution in Norfolk (Durham, NC, 1937), p. 142.Google Scholar

62 Brading, , Haciendas and Ranchos in the Mexican Bajío, p. 97.Google Scholar

63 ASJ, AOC (Bledos), and ARM, Cartas 1910–15.

64 Kay, C., ‘Comparative Development of the European Manorial System and the Latin American Hacienda System’, Journal of Peasant Studies, vol. 2 (1974), p. 78.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

65 Martin, P., Mexico of the Twentieth Century, Vol. 2 (London, 1907), pp. 156–7Google Scholar and Katz, F., La Servidumbre Agraria en México en la Epoca Porfiriana (Mexico, 1980), pp. 104–8.Google Scholar Of course labour shortages normally act as an incentive to mechanise rather than hold it back – see below.

66 Del Raso, Notas Estadísticas.

67 ANQ, Santiago Torres 1881.

68 ASJ, Cartas 1863.

69 Marshall, W., The Rural Economy of Norfolk (London, 1783), p. 184.Google Scholar While we might wonder with Marshall at the lack of class consciousness amongst the Norfolk labourers, it is worth emphasising how little we know about the attitudes of the hacienda workforce. Fragments of data from landlord sources suggest a recalcitrance perhaps after all reflecting the violent origins of the hacienda and an unresolved cultural antagonism. On the other hand, Guerra depicts the traditional hacienda as cohesive and harmonious. Most sources would agree with Tutino's analysis (drawn from Barrington Moore) that attitudes changed with the perception of the roots of rural suffering – crucially shifting from natural causes to social. But where, when and why such critical shifts occurred remain pressing open questions.

70 ANQ, Santiago Torres and Celso Arévalo 1893–1905.

71 AOC (Bledos), Cartas.