AGRICULTURE

The independence struggle resulted in extensive damage to the dams, wells, and aqueducts that had provided water for Mexico’s 1,729,000 irrigated acres. Even haciendas that remained physically intact suffered from a loss of markets as the buying power of miners and city dwellers declined. In order to repay loans, some hacendados were forced to sell their land to former tenants or administrators. A village in the Huasteca region of San Luis Potosi purchased a 40,000-acre hacienda in 1826. Each of the 187 members of the community contributed twenty pesos to acquire the land they had once rented.38

As an institution, though, the hacienda emerged unscathed after independence. Since mining and commerce were largely in the hands of foreigners, generals and politicians often invested their newly acquired wealth in haciendas. In the 1850s, liberal Ponciano Arriaga commented on the hacendado:

With some honorable exceptions, the rich landowners of Mexico. . . resemble the feudal lords of the Middle Ages. On his seigniorial lands, with more or less formalities, the landowner makes and executes laws, administers justice and exercises civil power, imposes taxes and fines, and has his own jails and irons, metes out punishments and tortures, monopolizes commerce, and forbids the conduct without his permission of any business but that of the estate.

These estates were largely self-sufficient, with resident artisans producing saddlery, furniture, tiles, and pottery. Such production further reduced the incentive to invest in industry.39

The hacienda continued to be the dominant rural institution. The well-documented hacienda El Maguey in Zacatecas, which covered 416 square miles, was only the seventh or eighth largest in the state. It centered around a cluster of stone buildings, where most of the 500 to 900 employees lived. In 1835, 89,000 sheep, 4,000 horses and mules, 12,000 goats, and a hundred head of cattle grazed on El Maguey. Workers lived on hacienda land and worshipped in its chapel. Their children attended the hacienda school. El Maguey sold wool as well as goat and sheep tallow used to make candles to illuminate mines. The hacienda attracted and kept labor by offering security in an insecure rural environment.40

Further north, where there was abundant land and few if any sedentary Indian communities, even larger estates predominated. After the Sanchez Navarro family bought out the Marquisate de Aguayo in 1840, their holdings totaled at least 25,780 square miles—an area larger than Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Rhode Island, and Delaware combined. As part of the purchase, the buyers acquired not only land, buildings, and livestock but also indebted workers. By way of comparison, the fabled King Ranch of Texas covered only 1,719 square miles. In 1846, an American army captain commented on the Sanchez Navarro ranch, whose size was extensive even for Mexico, “More than half the whole State of Coahuila belongs to the two brothers Sanchez, who also own some thirty thousand peons.”41

Many hacienda workers owed the hacendado debts. Sometimes these debts resulted from cash advanced to attract the worker. Hacendados were most reliant on debt to hold workers in the laborscarce north and in areas where people had access to land to farm on their own. Often workers never emerged from debt due to their low wages and to dishonest bookkeeping by the hacendados. Indebted workers would respond by working for short, irregular periods, knowing their wages would be reduced accordingly. However, since they were hopelessly in debt, it did not matter. In one reported instance, an indebted shepherd fled the Sanchez Navarro estate. He was forcibly brought back, soundly beaten, and, to add insult to injury, the cost of retrieving him was added to his debt.42

A number of factors limited production on the hacienda. High transport costs restricted market size. Costs prohibited shipping grain to Guanajuato if it was grown more than thirty-four miles away. Transport problems created a national mosaic of agricultural surplus and shortage with wild price fluctuations between even nearby localities. Up until 1833, the government required agricultural estates to pay a tithe to the Church. Bandits in central Mexico and Indian attacks in the north also limited agriculture.43

Mid-sized holdings, or ranchos, mostly owned or rented by mestizos, existed alongside the large estates. The rancho differed from the hacienda in that the owner lived on his land and relied on his own labor and that of his family and of seasonal employees. Unlike the hacendados, who were often seen as vain and idle, rancho owners were widely admired. Fanny Calderon de la Barca observed, “It is impossible to see anywhere a finer race of men than these rancheros—tall, strong, and well made, with their embroidered shirts, coarse sarapes, and dark blue pantaloons embroidered in Between independence and the mid-nineteenth century, the number of ranchos increased substantially. Some Mexicans, taking advantage of the instability of the period, moved into isolated uplands and established ranchos. In other cases, people bought plots from financially weak haciendas, converting them into ranchero communities. By 1854, there were 15,085 ranchos.45

Small farms recovered from the independence war relatively rapidly. As early as 1824, Poinsett noted, “The buildings are in ruins, yet the country appears to be cultivated as extensively and as carefully as ever.” Reduced demand in cities and mines did not have a significant effect on small farmers, since they mainly produced for local markets or their own use. The vitality of this sector is indicated by the degree to which multi-village peasant movements, in alliance with other actors, became a major force shaping the Mexican state in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.46