AGRICULTURE

The hacienda evolved gradually from the first estates, which were based on grazing permits, not land ownership. These initial grants did not permit the owner of the herd to deny others access. Slowly, the old view of land as a common resource changed, and to guarantee a marketable surplus individuals began to prevent others from using pastures. By the mid-1600s, hacienda boundaries were becoming fixed. Owners invested heavily in buildings, machinery, storage facilities, and irrigation works. The capital for the initial development of the hacienda came from the encomienda, public office, mining, and commerce.54

In central Mexico, the birth of the hacienda responded to the decline of the Indian population. The food the hacienda supplied the city on a commercial basis replaced what the Indian had supplied on a tributary basis. To the north, haciendas initially supplied mines and then became institutions in their own right, especially when the mines they had supplied ceased operation.55

These estates initially relied on workers coming from nearby villages. Later, the hacienda began to appropriate Indian lands, forcing Indians to live and work on the hacienda. In the early colonial period, workers were in shorter supply than land, and hacendados were loath to offer attractive wages. Appropriating Indian land cost less than increasing wages. Haciendas further undermined Indian agriculture by monopolizing water supplies to irrigate wheat and sugar cane. As time passed, more and more hacienda workers lived on the hacienda, rather than in independent villages. Hacienda employment, on either a temporary or a permanent basis, served as the chief engine of Indian acculturation.56

In the 1630s, a member of the Mexico City municipal council observed that whereas fifty years earlier the city had been supplied by Indians, wealthy Spaniards had replaced them as food suppliers, and Indian cultivation had been reduced to local subsistence. As agriculture shifted from Indian to Spanish control, wheat cultivation replaced that of corn.57

Hacendados appropriated Indian grazing land, took land left ownerless when the Indian population declined, and occasionally resorted to brute force to expand their holdings. In other cases, they bought land from individual Indians or rented it from Indian nobles and later laid claim to it. Most hacienda land acquisition occurred before 1750. Although a few encomienda families acquired haciendas, generally no direct connection linked the encomienda and the hacienda.58

Although the great estate remained a fixture on the colonial landscape, individual estates constantly shifted in terms of their size, composition, ownership, and profitability. The pace of land turnover increased in the eighteenth century as swelling mercantile profits found their way into landholding.59

The hacienda’s diversity allowed its survival. A typical hacienda produced corn, wheat, barley, beans, fruit, livestock, and the agave. This enabled it to be largely self-sufficient and minimized the effect blight, draught, or frost might have on any one crop. Large haciendas also minimized damage from a localized source, such as hail, by working non-contiguous holdings.60

Hacendados generally made rational responses to demographic, environmental, and economic change, effectively juggling variables to maximize profits. They would attempt to maximize income from crop sales and minimize cash outlay by operating sawmills and tanneries and producing food, building materials, and other supplies for their workers. Historian John Coatsworth described some of the reasons large estates were profitable:

Estate agriculture enjoyed advantages not available to Indian villagers, small landowners, or tenant

Farmers: economies of scale, access to outside credit, information about new technology and

Distant markets, a measure of protection from predatory officials, and greater security of

Tenure.61

Records from one large hacienda, the Jaral, which employed 598 people, indicate the degree of internal stratification. Salaried resident administrators, a chaplain, a cashier, and storekeepers worked there. The Jaral also employed skilled workers such as bricklayers, weavers, millers, distillers, hatters, and tailors. The permanent labor force consisted of tenant farmers, wage laborers, and debt-peons.62

Haciendas, which sometimes had a resident population of as many as 1,000, played a commercial role, operating a commissary store (tienda de raya) which served both hacienda workers and other nearby residents. Hacienda residents also formed an alternative community, bound together by informal ties of loyalty and solidarity. The labor force resident on the hacienda sometimes received a guaranteed ration, even in years of bad harvests—a frequent occurrence in Mexico’s semi-arid expanses. Residents would worship together in the hacienda chapel. The hacendado exercised a mediating role between his domain and the outside world. Within the confines of the hacienda, the colonial state allowed the hacendado to dispense justice, ordering corporal punishment or confinement in the hacienda jail.63

Taxes and the tithe and mortgage income paid to the Church often left hacendados strapped for cash. The increasingly strong position of merchants also drained cash from the hacienda. Merchants profited from selling locally produced goods in urban markets, by importing goods from Spain, and by exporting produce to Spain, leaving relatively little profit for the hacendado.64

In the early colonial period, the encomienda and the repartimiento served to exploit Indian labor. Then, after Indians lost most of their land, they came to work on haciendas. However, the Indians continued to work for, and enrich, non-Indians. By the eighteenth century, the hacendado-hacienda worker dichotomy had largely replaced the Spanish community-Indian community dichotomy as the major social divide.65

Haciendas played an especially important role in northern Mexico since they provided vital supplies to miners and few settled Indian communities existed to dispute the hacendados’ land claims. Also, given the aridity of the area, estates needed to be larger to generate as much income as their central Mexican counterparts. Rather than being imposed on indigenous communities, as had occurred in central Mexico, northern haciendas started on land lacking a settled population. As a result of aridity and the absence of a sedentary population nearby to plant crops, northern haciendas concentrated on raising livestock.66

Compared to central Mexico, in northern Mexico a freer and more modern society evolved around haciendas. This unique character had limited impact during the colonial period. However, by the early twentieth century the north not only remained a center of modernization but became the locus of social revolution, overwhelming all of Mexico and having a profound impact.67

In 1810, 4,945 haciendas belonged to fewer than 4,000 families. As Humboldt noted, “The property of New Spain, like that of Old Spain, is in a great measure in the hands of a few powerful families, who have gradually absorbed the smaller estates.” The hacienda supplied cities with grain and mines with animals for motive power, hides, leather, and tallow for illumination. By producing virtually everything it needed, the hacienda retarded monetization of the economy, kept markets small, and led to a low level of specialization. In contrast to capitalist societies in which production was overwhelmingly geared to market demand, only part of hacienda production entered the market, while the rest was consumed on the premises. The hacienda’s control of the labor supply enabled it to pay less than the market price for labor and permitted the survival of an inefficient, technologically backward agricultural regime.68

Throughout the colonial period, Indian agriculture remained vigorous. Most Indians farmed on an individual basis. In addition, some village lands were communally farmed, thus giving the community cohesion and providing income for lay brotherhoods (cojradias).

Despite the dominance of the large estate, many smaller mestizo-owned holdings sprang up. These mid-sized holdings, known as ranchos, existed along aside the hacienda. By the middle of the sixteenth century, wheat was almost entirely produced on ranchos with Indian labor under European guidance. In northern Mexico, ranchos specialized in livestock.69

The sugar plantation stood in contrast to the hacienda in that it produced only one crop for sale. If the climate and availability of water permitted, landowners produced sugar rather than wheat since the value per acre of the sugar produced was more than four times that of wheat. Producers could sell sugar on the open market as a luxury, while wheat, considered a vital commodity, was subject to price ceilings and requisitions. During the sixteenth century, some sugar was exported to Seville and Peru, although most of it was consumed in Mexico. By the early seventeenth century, fifty or sixty large sugar mills produced between 7.7 and 11 million pounds of sugar a year, while additional sugar was produced by many small mills.70

Sugar plantations centered around sugar mills (ingenios), which were capital-intensive agroindustrial complexes requiring boilers, presses, and other refining machinery, as well as African slaves. Often seasonal wage laborers, Indians working to pay tribute, and African slaves, many of whom were highly skilled, formed the labor force. While the sugar plantations marketed only one product, they did maintain pastures for draft animals, large herds of cattle and sheep to provide meat and wool for their laborers, corn fields to feed animals and laborers, and woodlands and sawmills for fuel. Growers cleared extensive stands of highland tropical forests to permit cane planting and to provide fuel for heating the caldrons in which the cane sap was boiled. The mill at Tlaltenango, Morelos, consumed between 1,250 and 2,500 tons of wood a year for more than three centuries.71

Beginning in the 1540s, cattle spread like waves of a rising tide over the prairies of the north and the warm coastal lowlands. The number of grazing animals soared due to abundant vegetation and the lack of competition from indigenous species. As their numbers grew, cattle altered the vegetation mix, destroying plants they preferred and leaving plants such as cactus and palm. In 1563, a report informed the king that the herds had became so numerous that colonials ate more meat and spent more money on it in one city in the Indies than Spaniards did in ten on the peninsula.72

Prior to the Spaniards’ arrival, no large herbivores existed, so crops could remain unfenced. Newly arrived cattle inflicted serious damage on the Indians’ unprotected crops. In 1550, Viceroy Mendoza, who banned cattle ranches from the valleys around Oaxaca, wrote his successor: “The Spaniards are crying that I have ruined them, and they are right. . . but I could not do otherwise. May Your Lordship realize that if cattle are allowed, the Indians will be destroyed.”73

Within a quarter of a century, the rapid expansion of the cattle population halted. This was largely due to the number of cattle exceeding the capacity of the grasslands. In addition, the slaughter of cattle increased as more humans, especially Indians, developed a taste for beef. Cattlemen, who had an interest in limiting damage to their forage base, became more effective land managers. Regulated grazing led to mosaics in the landscape that had greater plant diversity than woodlands— the other alternative for land left idle by the declining Indian population.74

Imported species had far-reaching effects. Pigs, fattened with corn that Indians paid in tribute, multiplied so quickly that, as historian Francois Chevalier noted, “The newcomers often had pork to eat while they were still going without bread.” Animals replaced human cargo carriers, greatly increasing transport capacity. They also created entirely new industries, as sheep provided wool and cattle provided hides. Some newly introduced plants crowded out native species. However, newly introduced Mediterranean crops were adapted to winter growth and were harvested as the indigenous crops were just beginning to grow, thus providing a year-round food supply.75

Miners relied heavily on livestock production. Hides hauled water and ore out of the mine. Beef fed workers, while livestock pulled carts and powered machinery. An audiencia judge wrote in 1606, “If the mines have been worked at all, it is thanks to the plentiful and cheap supply of livestock.”76

Hides became a major export, with 64,350 being shipped in 1587 alone. During the late colonial period, cattle supplied about 30 percent of the viceroyalty’s GDP. Large-scale producers with herds of cattle and sheep in excess of 100,000 head dominated production.77

Sheep often proved more damaging to the environment than cattle, since they cropped grass closer to the ground and often grazed on erosion-prone slopes. After the late 1570s, the sheep population plummeted, since their number had exceeded the land’s carrying capacity. Overgrazing permanently lowered the carrying capacity in some areas. Historian Elinor Melville described the impact overgrazing had on the Mezquital Valley north of Mexico City:

The region was transformed from a complex and densely populated agricultural mosaic into a sparsely populated mesquite desert; and the indigenous populations were economically marginalized while the land and regional production passed into the hands of large landowners who were socially (if not always ethnically) Spanish.78

By the early seventeenth century, ecological equilibrium had been reestablished in Mexico. European plants had become a fixture on the landscape. Grazing animals had passed through boom-and-bust population cycles. The cattle population stabilized between 1570 and 1590, and the sheep population a little later. Indians responded to Spanish-introduced livestock by suing their owners for damages they caused, by killing the animals, and by taking advantage of their presence and using them for meat, wool, leather, and transport.79

In the late colonial period, as the prices for livestock and agricultural products rose, large estates appropriated more land to service growing urban markets. A substantial increase in the rural population provided more than enough labor for these estates. Historian Eric Van Young described the result:

Increasing

Gross indicators of agricultural prosperity—rising prices, rising tithe collections, stability of ownership of large estates, rising levels of profits and investment in large-scale agriculture—pointed to economic growth, but signs of rural impoverishment and a fall in living standards for the rural masses in many parts of New Spain attested to how that growth was achieved.80

Just as had happened in the mining sector, at the end of the colonial period Mexican agricultural technology had fallen behind that of Europe. Low wages and the abundance of land, seven persons per square mile, as compared to 127 per square mile in France, reduced the pressure to introduce new technology. As a result of this technological backwardness, expanding agricultural production required cultivating larger areas.81

Despite its technological limits, agriculture remained the major economic sector. In 1800, agriculture accounted for 44.4 percent of the colony’s production, compared to 22.3 percent for manufacturing and 8.2 percent for mining. In 1810, 75 percent of the population continued to work in agriculture.82

Several obstacles prevented agriculture from expanding further. Land held by the Church and entailed estates was inalienable. Courts were inefficient, and it was impossible to foreclose on land for debts. The widespread access to public and communally held lands made it difficult to attract labor to commercial agricultural enterprises.83