ouweneel 1997 - rh - eighteenth-century mexican peonage and the problem hacienda labor

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Eighteenth-Century Mexican Peonage and the Problemof Credits to Hacienda Labourers

Arij Ouweneel

Rural History / Volume 8 / Issue 01 / April 1997, pp 21 - 54DOI: 10.1017/S0956793300001126, Published online: 31 October 2008

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0956793300001126

How to cite this article:Arij Ouweneel (1997). Eighteenth-Century Mexican Peonage and the Problem of Credits toHacienda Labourers. Rural History, 8, pp 21-54 doi:10.1017/S0956793300001126

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Rural History (1997) 8, 1, 21-54. Copyright 7997 Cambridge University Press 21

Eighteenth-Century Mexican Peonage andthe Problem of Credits to HaciendaLabourers

ARIJ OUWENEEL

IntroductionThe transition to modern, capitalist agriculture is usually marked by the replacementof traditional forms of farm service by a free labour market based on short-term contractsand cash payments. This process is often described in terms like 'pauperisation' and'proletarianisation'. But, of course, proletarianisation is not an inevitable consequenceof the rise of day-labouring in capitalist agriculture; a point emphasized, for example,with particular reference to eighteenth-century Scotland by Alex Gibson and AlastairOrr.' Contrary to much of southern England, where the forces of production developedrather fast, in Scotland traditional forms of farm service survived largely intact well intothe nineteenth century despite the development of capitalist agriculture. As late as 1861over 60 per cent of the total agricultural work-force in some Scottish regions wereservants on long hires as opposed to day-labourers. Hired by the term or year, theagricultural servants were not subject to the seasonal unemployment which characterisedday-labouring. Paid largely in kind, they were protected from the worst excesses of avolatile grain market; and, being provided with at least some land on which to growsubsistence crops, they were able to enjoy a relatively good standard of living.

The amount of work being undertaken by day-labourers on the Scottish estate ofBuchanan did not involve the central tasks of agriculture. Sowing, ploughing, threshingand so on were carried out by resident servants, who were specialists in husbandry,perhaps more akin to craftsmen in their skill than to labourers. Each servant, contractedby the year, had his cottage rent-free, granted by the estate in exchange for his or his


22 Arij Ouweneel

wife's labour, and received a yearly wage. But, although a large part of this wage wasaccounted for in money by the year, it was actually paid over in kind weekly. Whateverseasonal labour was needed was also drawn from a pool of resident cottagers, whichmaintained itself in ways other than by labouring for the estate. The day-labourers didsimple work: ditching, dyking and draining. The general turnover of these day-labourersfrom one year to the next was bound to be great on the estate of Buchanan. In the earlyeighteenth century, for example, a total of 118 different men were employed asday-labourers. The Scottish historical geographer Alex Gibson calculated that eachday-labourer would have been able to find work for only 79 days; a few days each year.By the last quarter of the eighteenth century a quite fundamental change in the characterof the unskilled labour market occurred. Now most of this work on the estate was beingdirected towards a relatively small group of men. During the period 1772-83 only 13men appeared in each years' wage-accounts; work for an average of 276 days per man!These wage-earners came to be totally dependent on this work. The opportunities forthe day-labourers had improved from seasonal to permanent employment; a new labourdemand originating from infrastructural improvements which simply meant moreditching, draining and dyking. Notwithstanding this, sowing, ploughing, threshing andso on continued to be carried out by resident servants.

Any Mexicanist who is at home in modern hacienda research would recognise thecolonial agricultural servants in this short description and despite some importantdifferences with southern England, which are left aside, the process is clear. What hadhappened in day-labouring in Scotland was, first, the separation of employers fromemployed by the gradual abolition of farm service, second, the substitution of moneywages for payment in kind, and, third, the replacement of annual labour contracts byshort-term weekly or daily engagements. But, recognising this, the new, smaller groupof day-labourers was nevertheless paid substantially in kind as well, had a regular, almost'guaranteed', annual working year of about 280 days, and cultivated some, rented,subsistence plots. 'If it was proletarianization', writes Gibson, 'it was not, at least atBuchanan, accompanied by any obvious or immediate deterioration in living standards'.2

In contrast to the rest of England, the improvement for a small group of day-labourersled, paradoxically, to a much reduced demand for day-labourers in general. There wasno longer any need to rely on the occasional labour of cottagers who had lived incommunities near the estate and their position must have become very precarious indeed.And these deprived cottagers, I repeat, are not to be confused with the resident servants.

Capitalism thus could leave a traditional mechanism in tact while transforming it atthe same time. More than half a century ago the French historian Marc Bloch wrote afew sentences which could be applied directly to this problem. With reference to theFrench medieval manoir he concluded in the first place: 'The manor in itself has noclaim to a place among the institutions which we call feudal'.3 A little further on headded: 'When the relationships truly characteristic of feudalism fell into decay the manorlived on, but with different characteristics; it became more territorial, more purelyeconomic'. For decades, Latin American historiography lacked the finesse which Blochdisplayed in his analysis of France, or Gibson recently in his analysis of Scotland. TheLatin American service tenants like inquilinos (Chile), yanaconas (Peru), or gananes


Eighteenth-century Mexican Peonage 23

(Mexico) would have provided virtually free labour for the landlord in return for a plotof land for subsistence farming; the main characteristic of labour conditions being 'theextra-economic extraction of the surplus from the producers by the feudal lords'.4 Andindeed, on Mexican peon life, such stories abound. One was told by the Americanjournalist Harry Carr in the early 1930s. The word hacienda, he wants us to believe, isa word that with great gusto has been ushered into the English language.5 Somewherein Western Mexico he met a certain Nicolas and asked him about the history of this oldinstitution. Nicolas just snickered. Real estate agents announced haciendas with tiledbathrooms and breakfast nooks and Nicolas thought this was very funny. Then the humbleMexican explained that an hacienda was not a house. It was an estate, more especiallya great farm in active operation. It must be working to be an hacienda. In the 1930s aMexican like Nicolas would even have protested when one called cattle-ranches haciendas.The meaning of the word implied activity, doing, working. An hacienda was an enterprise.

But entering hacienda country Carr felt like slipping back into the Middle Ages. Heobserved that the hacendados - as the owners of haciendas were called - ruled like ancientbarons in their castles. Carr asked one of them how many acres were on his estate. Thecharming and courteous old gentleman seemed embarrassed: he really did not know.He had a lot of workers, the peones, but did not know how many. They had been longon the estate. It was not uncommon, he affirmed, to find a cowboy spurring his broncowith rowels of embossed silver which his father and his grandfather and his grandfather'sfather wore as vaqueros before him. All the peons lived with their families together ina little village on the estate. It must have been this little farm town, Carr supposed, withits sleepy streets and adobe houses, that made Nicolas a little homesick, for he had livedin just such a place in the mountains. But he told his American friend also of an haciendawhich employed more than five thousand peons. So those villages were not always little,Carr concluded.

The hacienda was not a paradise. Mexico was to Carr a land of tragedy and tears aswell as gaiety and song. Around every peon hut hung the suggestion of dark memories,of battle against the harassments of rural life and of death. Infant mortality among thepeons was dreadful. The children of the poor faded away like little flowers. They werecalled angels. Carr knew why. It was a reflection upon the sorrow and hardship of thecruel life of the peons that the death of a child was always made the occasion of at leastpretended rejoicing - the little soul was admitted to heaven without having to endurethe sufferings of life. It was so sombre that even the oxen suffered the cruelty of life,with the yokes fixed on a painsome way. Instead of the heavy yoke that should havegone over the necks of the animals, the Mexicans fastened the pole of the wagon to astraight wooden pole, to which the horns of the oxen were tightly lashed with thongsof rawhide: neither ox could move his head and the whole weight of the load came tothe two animals' heads. There are other stories in Carr's book. Mexican mule-driverswere proud to urge their animals by picturesque and colorful language. They thoughtthat mules were especially sensitive to the inspiration that came from swear words. Theox-drivers twisted the tails of their teams. Carr came across one ox-driver who inducedhis beasts to impossible feats of strength by biting their tails with his teeth. 'To an oxthere seems to be something especially inspiring about being bitten on the tail'.


24 Arij Ouweneel

A British civil and mining engineer, Reginald Enock, had written about the haciendaand the peon in much the same way. His book on Mexico was first published in 1909and contains the pre-revolutionary image.6 The peon was not necessarily a forcedlabourer, he thought, although the conditions of his life were such that the peon wasnot a free agent as the working men in England or the United States were. The peonwas paid in goods which he was obliged to purchase in the general store of the hacienda,belonging to the proprietor or by someone licensed by him. It was a species of 'truck'system. High prices and short weight in accordance with the business principlesunderlying such systems - generally accompanied these dealings. Moreover, as the peonwas often granted supplies in advance, against future wages, he was generally in debtto the store, a condition which was, stated Enock, purposely not discouraged. But thepeon was not unhappy, Enock believed. 'Men who know no other state are contentedwith their lot, and the poor Mexican creates matters of pastime in his simple life.' Theengineer referred to bull-fights, horse-racing, cock-fighting, together with dancing andthe consumption of impressive amounts of liquor.

The classical picture of the peon's life seems to be clear: harsh labour conditions,labourers imported to the premises by force, restriction of the labourers' mobility, anddebts providing a legal basis for coercion. For almost the entire past century, the peonswere seen as chattel slaves. It was thought that such slavery belonged to the colonialheritage of Mexico and could be modelled as typical for colonialism in general. But inthe 1960s reinterpretation occurred. Since then, peonage has been seen as an improvementcompared to earlier colonial forms of labour systems.7 According to one recent observer,Mexican peonage embraced two forms: one coercive, according to the conventionalleyenda negra, the other voluntary, in that market pressures rather than 'extra-economiccoercion' underpinned it. The second form appears to have been the more common incolonial Mexico, hence the designation of 'traditional' peonage. In fact, the 'colonialheritage' includes modest levels of debts and this for only about half of the peonpopulation.8 One North American historian, the late Charles Gibson, even noted relativefreedom among the workers, whose object was not to escape but to enlarge indebtednessby soliciting cash advances when they negotiated with future employers.9 John Tutinoconvincingly argued that during the 1810 Hidalgo Revolt - supposedly directed againstSpanish rule in Mexico - peons were predisposed to back the hacienda against therevolutionaries.10 It follows as well that this form rested upon non-coercive foundations.But the background of it remains still relatively under-researched. It is clear thattraditional peonage rested upon cash advances that were given to attract labour voluntarilyfrom the indigenous sector to the Spanish. These workers were not enslaved - as theBlack Legend authors would like us to believe - but induced. This suggests thatexploitation was economic, as in industrial capitalism. However, due to the reliance onhacienda accounts, investigators have shed more light on hacienda marketing andprofit-maximizing than on the hacienda's internal workings and its relations of produc-tion.

It is this lack of insight that leaves room for a microscopic view of the internal workingsof the hacienda. The lack is obvious'and understandable: the data are scarce. At first,the picture seems to have been set some years ago when North American historian Eric



Van Young introduced his overview on Mexican rural history with the remark that itwas no accident that his review dealt so heavily with studies of the hacienda, for thatwas the subject to which most researchers in the field seemed to have devoted theirefforts." But nowadays Mexican rural historiography is in a phase of in-depth study ofindigenous life and culture in native units called pueblos, even using native languagesources. It is as if historians, standing in front of the hacienda gate on the edge ofentering the peons' huts, turned their backs and went to the nearby Indian villages.This contribution seeks to reconstruct the participation of eighteenth-century peones inthe labour cycle of the altiplano of central Mexico. It does so by reviewing the workdone by one group of labourers employed by one estate in one single year. This seemsmicrohistory to the extreme. However, because of the state of research in Mexican ruralhistory, few alternatives could be found. I realise how difficult it is to enter the peons'huts, but it should be done from the same perspective as much recent research, for aboutfifteen per cent of colonial Mexican Indians lived in peon communities on haciendaterritory.

The RegionThe region of central Mexico was one of four regional economies of New Spain. These

Michoacan

Guadalajara

regional economies main cities

"/ road systems

Map 1. Four Regional Economies of Eighteen-Century Mexico


26 Arij Ouweneel

1. Central-Mexico, the hinterland of the cities of Mexico, Puebla, Toluca, Cholula,Tepeaca, Cuernavaca, and Tlaxcala on the central altiplano;

2. Michoacan, the mining region of New Spain including the cities of Valladolid,Guanajuato, San Miguel el Grande, San Luis Potos, Acambaro, and Queretaro;

3. Oaxaca, including the Mixteca highlands;4. Guadalajara and its hinterland, including the northern mining enclaves of Parral

and Zacatecas.

Every regional economy (or region) was characterised by concentric circles, in whichthe inner circles were marked by high levels of population concentration, intensiveagriculture, intensive religious and architectural activity, and the like. If one moved outtowards the periphery, population levels and economic activities declined. These fourregional economic entities thus had variegated internal economies, and were separatedby a dry and mountainous landscape that was difficult to traverse. Luxury products andhigh-valued goods were intensively transported and sold colony wide, but foodstuffs ingeneral were not because of the high transport costs involved. A true colony-wide marketfor basic commodity products would not develop because of this. Any detailed, in-depthstudy of colonial Mexico must limit itself to one of these four regions, because thedifferences in time, scope, and character were too great to permit any meaningful analysisof general themes.

Central-Mexico - I prefer to call it Anahuac'3 - and Oaxaca were ancient indigenousregions, with many small villages and intensive local market systems. These villageswere geographically and economically complemented by relatively small haciendas thatproduced - with the use of intensive methods - basic nutriments and industrial rawmaterials (wood, tallow, fat, wool) for the cities. Anahuac was the most populated regionand contained a high number of non-Indians as well. Michoacan and Guadalajara weregenerally much more Hispanicised and did not truly develop until the mid eighteenthcentury. In both regions, there were few pueblos de indios or indigenous municipalities,but many rancheros or small farmers. The haciendas were generally larger and producedcattle, food, and industrial raw materials for the cities as well as for the nearby miningenclaves. The integrating element of the economy of New Spain, cutting across all fourmajor regions, was the long-distance trade of silver, sheep, cattle, and repartimientoproducts (basically textiles like cotton cloth, cochineal, and cattle and mules for theIndians). This trade system involved finished manufactured goods rather than luxuryarticles imported from Europe. In short, food markets were highly localised; it cost onereal a day for a mule to carry a fanega of maize about twenty-two kilometers.

For the case-study that follows, I will limit my scope to Anahuac, a complex of 51provinces, which had the highest population density, the largest cities, and a livelyinternal basic commodity trade. The region was formed by the three valleys of the centralhighlands, 2000-2600 metres above sea level. It extends 180 kilometres in an east-westdirection and 160 kilometres in a north-south direction on the Central Mexican highlands.The valleys of Toluca in the West, Mexico in the Center and Puebla in the East wereenclosed by rugged and impenetrable mountains which created a degree of isolation withrespect to the other regions in the viceroyalty of New Spain. The mountain area is



Valleys:1. Toluca2. Mexico3. Puebla

faldas

highland areasbetween2000-1500 metres

Map 2. The Anahuac region

generally referred to as faldas or sierra and although considerably fewer people livedthere than in the highlands, this mountain area was economically and socially integratedin the life of the highlands. It was a densely populated area accommodating some sixtyper cent of the population of New Spain.

This introduces the question of how many haciendas there were in colonial Anahuac.The answer is very difficult to find because of the lack of research. Nevertheless thestatistics on the diffusion of the population in the intendencies of New Spain in 1820,published by Fernando Navarro y Noriega, are informative. These intendencies werethe larger administrative units of the viceroyalty which combined various provinces (firstknown as alcaldtas mayores, later as subdelegaciones). These statistics, taken fromapproximately 1810 to 1815, were the most up-to-date which Navarro could obtain.14Following Navarro, I include the haciendas and the ranchos as well as the villas andpueblos among the settlements (see table I).15 In using Navarro's statistics it should be


28 Arij Ouweneel

Table 1Haciendas, ranchos, cities and villages in New Spain, 1815 - estimates made by Fernando Navarro y Noriega.

regionAnahuacMichoacanOaxacaGuadalajaratotals

Cities and Villagesno.2270429933363

3995

%56.810.723.39.2

100

%38.814.272.312.4

Haciendasno.15721042

88612

3314

%47.231.52.6

18.5100

%26.934.46.8

21.0

no.20071555269

19435774

Ranchos%34.926.94.6

33.6100

%34512066

.3

.4

.8

.6

no.5849302612902918

13083

totals%44.723.19.9

22.3100

%100100100100

Source: A. Ouweneel, Onderbroken groei in Anahuac. De ecologische achtergrond van ontwikkeling en armoedeop het platteland van Centraal-Mexico (1730-1810) Amsterdam, 1989), p. 25.

number: Chalco, Tepeaca, Tlaxcala, Ixtlahuaca

- 35000

- 33000

provinces

Cyoacan

Mexicalcingo

Otumba

Texcoco

Atlixco

HuejotzingoChalco

Tepeaca

Tlaxcala

Ixtahuaca

1720 1790 1740 1750 1760 1770 1780 1790 1800

Figure 1. Number of tributarios in ten provinces dominated by haciendas (Anahuac, 1720-1800)

borne in mind that the characterisations of the 'form of settlement' were constantlychanging and that the statistics are therefore not very reliable for other periods. All thesame, Navarro y Noriega calculated 1572 haciendas in Anahuac and some two thousandranchos. The haciendas counted for about 27 per cent of settlements in the region.Michoacan, a much larger region, had about one thousand haciendas, and the two otherregions had significantly less. Elsewhere I have argued that a lot of ranchos in Anahuacwere legalised parts of Indian cacicazgos - demesnes of indigenous lords - and that thesecompeted with Indian villages.16

A second focus of interest is the demography of the area under study. I limit mypicture to ten provinces of Anhuac that were characterised by haciendas: Atlixco, Chalco,



Coyoacan, Huejotzingo, Ixtlahuaca-Metepec, Mexicalcingo, Otumba, Tepeaca, Tlaxcalaand Texcoco (see figure 1). Demographic development is clear: growth in the earlyeighteenth century, then stagnation and the return of the increase during the latterdecades of the century. The stagnation was caused by epidemics in the mid-1730s.Despite the fact that growth was rather impressive after the 1780s,17 population densitymust have been rather low. Around 1800, some 91,000 adult indigenous men werecounted in those ten provinces. I estimate a number of 1300 haciendas in those provinces.With only an estimate of about fifteen per cent of the indigenous population living onthe haciendas, this means an average number of 10.5 men per hacienda in that year.Any hacienda needed at least twice this figure, as I will try to show below. And this was1800, after a few decades of population growth.

The Hacienda and its PeonsIt is difficult to determine a norm for the size of the landholdings of the haciendas.There were very small haciendas, above all in the densely populated areas, and therewere very large ones in the sparsely populated areas. There were wheat and maizehaciendas (often small estates in the densely populated areas), small livestock haciendas(in the neighbourhood of the densely populated areas) and large livestock haciendas (inremote areas of colonial Mexico). But there were also sugar haciendas and coffeehaciendas; the silver mines were connected with haciendas de beneficio where the silveramalgamation process took place. There were haciendas which served as stopping places(ventas) on the large roads, and there were haciendas which were nothing more thangrazing lands for the beasts of burden or for sheep and goats during the great trek. Anagricultural hacienda did not always own the best farming land, and as a general ruleits land would be no better than that in the villages in the neighbourhood. All the same,hacienda land was often worth more than that in the villages because of the irrigationand drainage systems.

Above all, a hacienda had to be profitable, or, at least, not to cause heavy losses inthe owners' capital stock. This did not necessarily depend on the hacienda itself, becausethe functioning of a hacienda within a broader framework played an important part. Ahacienda which could not exist by itself was used to service a larger commercial enterprisein which a number of different branches of activity were represented. Almost all majorhaciendas belonged to a larger complex. The best known examples are the complexesof the Jesuits, such as that of the Colegio San Pedro y San Pablo in Mexico City, whichwas based on the combination of sheep farming and sugar production, or the ColegioEspiritu Santo in Puebla, which specialised in handicrafts depending on small livestockfarming (wool, talcum, soap) and the running of a venta. Most private entrepreneurscould not compete with the large scale of Jesuit financial operations - which gave theiroperations a multinational character - nor with their tax exemptions, but they organisedtheir complexes along more or less the same lines. There is a major difference in thefact that the Jesuits confined themselves to the production of the complex itself (purelyagricultural production), while the private entrepreneurs combined their haciendas withthe broader activities of commerce and industry. This alone explains why it is necessary


30 Arij Ouweneel

to study hacienda accounts in connection with the accounts of the larger commercialcompany of an entrepreneurial family. This has hardly been done so far, probably becausethe accounts of the merchants have not been preserved intact. At any rate, the haciendasserved a commercial interest and their place within a broader complex provided a betterway of spreading the commercial risks.

Hacendados were motivated by prestige and tradition as well as by practical economicconsiderations like avoiding losses. Indeed, some would strive for profits. As a goodentrepreneur, the hacendado was aware of the commercial potential of his estate. Hetried to exploit it as much as possible, even though the prospects of a good result wereimpeded by the unreliable climate, the high costs of transport, the shortage of financialresources and the burden of debt. The last two obstacles brought the hacendado intocontact with the church. Almost all the money he borrowed was lent to him by a religiousbody; there were no private banks in Spanish America at this time. However, recentstudies of the provision of loans in the western Mexican region of Guadalajara suggestthat the church was losing financial ground in the last decade of the eighteenth century.The rich families lent money on an increasing scale, and they were prepared to concedeattractive repayment terms. This increased the hold of the merchants on the colonialeconomy.'8 The hacienda economy seems to have expanded towards the end of thenineteenth century - an increasing influence of the large-scale agricultural estate on thenational economy although this expansion did not assume the same form everywhere.A number of haciendas in Mexico were bought up by immigrants, colonists who werefamiliar with the modern capitalist economy of Europe. They were most interested inobtaining a maximum profit per unit of invested capital. There was no need to producefor export to achieve this goal; on the contrary, the largest market for the Mexicanhaciendas was in the rapidly expanding cities. This was why the hacienda was of littleor no significance in many regions; most haciendas outside the urban regions were onlylivestock estates.

And precisely because the hacienda was operated for profit, its labour force had to beas cheap as possible. This was reached by contracting formally free but actually tiedlabourers. The peons were kept on the estate by means of debt. It is interesting to lookat the origins of the word peon. According to Lockhart and Schwartz:19 'where[this] term came from is not clear since it was not used during the colonial period, andpeon by itself means just the opposite, a temporary worker.' This statement is anexpression of the confusion which still reigns on the relation between hacienda andlabourers. For example, in the accounts of the colonial haciendas that I have consultedall the servants are referred to as peones. These are without exception farmhands orditch-diggers.

In fact, on the wheat-and-maize haciendas in Anahuac, there were two kinds of Indianpeones: gaiianes, Indians who paid their tribute to the hacendado, a kind of residentcottager, and tlaquehuales, Indians who paid their tribute to native village officials. Asfor the grazing haciendas, particularly those of the Jesuits, a minority in the region,these estates employed labourers described in the sources as sirvientes, who belonged tothe non-Indian order. Paid monthly, they were rarely deeply in debt and had littleattachment to the estates on which they worked. There are excellent accounts of labour



on sugar haciendas in the valley of Cuernavaca by Barrett, von Wobeser and Van derMeer.20 Until late in the eighteenth century a large number of the labourers here wereslaves. Slavery is a separate problem, which I am justified in leaving aside here.Incidentally, some sugar haciendas switched to contract peones gananes and peonestlaquehuales as well later in the century. Riley claims that there was a third group oflabourers besides the gananes and tlaquehuales: the indios de cuadrilla, groups of contractworkers who lived in villages and were hired in teams at peak periods. However,practically all cuadrillas consisted oi peones tlaquehuales in the documentation that I haveexamined.21

But antiquarian elements live on for a long time. In 1984, the well-known Italianhistorian Romano still defended older views. He neglected much research done duringthe 1970s including the overviews by Katz or Bauer and had the following to sayon the peones:

PEONES: these, of course, were nominally free workers paid in cash. But to stop at the name isthe last thing a historian can or should do. In fact peones were not free: once having entered intothe work cycle under a lord, they seldom escaped. The system that created their dependence wassimple: indebtedness. The lord . . . paid wages in advance: the peon was obliged to buy (or moreaccurately, to acquire) cloth, foodstuffs, and alcohol from the lord. Indebtedness was chronic andwas transferred from father to son.22

It is known that Spanish officials understood free labour to mean work withoutcompulsion, so that debt did not make a worker juridically unfree - only in practiceperhaps because it is said to impair his mobility, and therefore the economic entrapmentof indebtedness should be understood as involuntary servitude or peonage. One can findstatements that the peones were trapped into indebtedness well into our own times.

Work in the FieldsIn a previous publication I tried to encourage the reader to consider Mexican haciendalabour within its very limited scope for variation in the process of production.23 In thehighlands, the fixed schedules limited all possibilities for variation and rotation. Iillustrated this with a comparison of the data from surviving records from threeeighteenth-century highland haciendas; Santa Ana Aragon (near Mexico City, 1767 and1768); San Antonio Palula (Tlaxcala, 1765-6); and San Nicolas de los Pilares (Texcoco,17914). Figure 2 is reconstructed with these data and represents the labour requirementsof a wheat and maize hacienda in a good year on a four-weekly basis.24 The conclusionwas clear: all the good years on the three haciendas followed the same agriculturalcalendar and had the same labour requirements, despite the differences in period andarea which might be supposed to have affected the figures. It was difficult to find preciselythe same data for other haciendas in order to work out a correlation involving morehaciendas (the data had to be grouped in monthly periods and spread out over almostthe whole year). Nonetheless, the accounts of other haciendas, such as those of San JuanXaltipan (Tlaxcala, 17347) and San Nicolas Buenavista(Mexicalcingo, 1811-12) suggestthe presence of the same cycle and the same pattern. I think that the schedules ceteris


32 Arij Ouweneelnumber of labourers

550

500

450

400

350

300

250

200

150

100

50

resident labourers

day-labourers

M1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

periods of four weeksJan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec

Figure 2. Tentative picture of the average number of labourers on a Central Mexican wheat-maizehacienda - per period of four weeks, 18th century.

paribus predict the number of labourers, the number of mandays and the amount oflabour costs these haciendas would have used. The limited possibilities meant that therewas no room for extra employment because of the limits of the agricultural cycle.Obviously, the beat of the peons' life on the hacienda was fixed with its labour scheme.I will use some space to describe this relationship.

The main crops were wheat (for commercial reasons: it was sold in the urban markets,like Mexico City, Puebla, Pachuca, Veracruz, and for some time even Havana) and maize(for social reasons: it was given to the workers as extra wages in the form of rations).The agricultural year of wheat culture usually began with the preliminary ploughing ofthe fields where the new wheat crop was to be sown. The ploughing of adjoining fieldsmust have been an impressive spectacle, as numbers of ox teams ploughed the fields,each with a ploughman and a boy who followed to remove stones. The haciendas hadvarious fields which were each prepared in a deliberate order according to a fixed pattern.Tilling was done by oxen. There are reports of hacienda managers and even peasantsfrom the pueblos who used mules for ploughing, but these must have been exceptions.The use of oxen has an important economic advantage: it does not cost much to feedthem. The production of large quantities of fodder for mules or horses was an expensivebusiness in New Spain. The tempo of the oxen helped to determine the number oflabourers required. A carga de sembradura (a good 3j has.), the usual sowing unit for awheat field, usually meant one day's work for 15 to 20 yokes of oxen, i.e. an average of0.2 has. per yoke per day. The energy of the animals declined in the course of theploughing period. At the start of the period, when the oxen had been given fodder



intensively, they could work 0.4 has. per day with ease, but after two or three weekstheir performance dropped to less than half. It was sometimes necessary to compensatefor this by putting more ox teams to work.25

Almost without exception the wheat was sown in the winter. This meant thatpreparations for irrigation had to be made during ploughing. The fields were irrigatedwhen necessary: when there was a risk of night frost, drought, and during the periodof budding and maturation of the ears. The number of servants who could be set towork on the land depended on the type of soil. Heavy soils were ploughed more thanonce, while once was enough for light soils. Since the haciendas usually had damp soilsand were situated near the banks of lakes and rivers, this was an extra disadvantage inaddition to the work of having to make drainage channels. The fields on these haciendashad to be ploughed more than once, both lengthwise and crosswise (called fierros in theaccounts). This took up more man-days than on the few haciendas which were not soclose to the river banks. Ploughing on the various plots of land could go on untilDecember, but by then the time had come for sowing. Sometimes sowing started in onecorner of the fields while another corner was still being ploughed. The wheat wasploughed in with a harrow soon after sowing. Once this process had been finished, thewheat fields were left alone for months. Sometimes a manager would order a few servantsto weed the plots, but this was not common.26

Soon after the rainy season was over in October or November, preparative works forirrigation began. Two to three peons performed this task until the rainy season returnedin the first days of May. Irrigation was stopped barely two weeks before reaping wasdue to begin so that the crop could dry. (May is the hottest month of the year.) Thiswas a critical period for the hacienda management, which determined whether the earsof wheat would be properly dry or of inferior quality because of a premature onset ofthe rainy season. Once the sign for harvesting had been given, available day-labourerswere rapidly contracted in the surrounding Indian townships to carry out the harvestas quickly as possible. The migrant labourers and a foreman jointly decided on howmuch each labourer would reap. The work was agreed upon for a specific sum, and thecontractor - a cacique from a pueblo (a cacique was an indigenous chief, recognized bythe Spanish Crown as a noble) - often decided how many days the job would take. Therewere 88 reapers at work on the Hacienda San Antonio Palula on 4 June 1766, allday-labourers or so-called tlaquehuales.27 Threshing was not done until the ensuingwinter, when the rainy season was over and the north winds caused a brief disruptionto the calm weather in February and March. The time of the wheat harvest was the onlytime when day-labourers were used. The servants who lived on the hacienda were usedat all other times. My investigations lead to the conclusion that each hacienda had anaverage of 15 to 20 permanent servants, plus their wives and children, who providedadditional labour. In fact, the number of permanent servants remained constant on eachhacienda throughout the year. In this respect, the only exception was the wheat harvest.

The method used in the ploughing of the maize-field, called milpas, was similar tothat of wheat. However, the milpas required more labour power than the wheat fieldsdid. The servants worked on the various milpas of the hacienda in accordance with afixed schedule. Maize production was an expensive business for the hacendado: the


34 Arij Ouweneel

profit was less than that from wheat, while the costs were higher. For example, therevenue from maize in cash terms was 31 per cent of the total income of the HaciendaSan Antonio Palula in the year 1765-6, while the income from wheat was 59^ per centof the total. Maize accounted for 29 per cent of the costs of production, as against 25per cent for wheat.28 Rural sociologist Simon Miller has demonstrated that it was preferredpractice to leave maize cultivation up to sharecroppers in the nineteenth century,29 butthis practice had not set in yet in the eighteenth century. In general the haciendasproduced their own maize, although there are examples of production by sharecroppers.30

The first ploughing or barbecho of the milpas was carried out in December and January,sometimes after a single preliminary ploughing in September. The fields were irrigatedduring the barbecho. The sowing must not have been carried out too soon. Prematuresowing entailed the risk that weeds, which immediately started growing after lightshowers, would spread to such an extent that the land would have to be weeded duringsowing. Besides, it might be too cold in February or March. Maize needs 'the warm,moist conditions of summer', as Wilken puts it.31 The sowers were servants who madeholes in the furrows at regular intervals with the digging sticks (coas). Four or five seedswere put in each hole. Most haciendas had selected the seed, and they sold some of itto other hacendados at a price approximately fifty per cent above the usual price formaize in the region. The sowers were usually followed by a yoke of oxen, which madea furrow alongside the seed drills for drainage purposes. Sowing usually occurred inMarch; with ox-herds, managed by men and assisted by boys.

Milpa planting was rather intensive, but the really intensive part began after the sowingwas over. Under favourable weather conditions the seed started to sprout after three orfour days, along with the weeds. Ground had to be piled up around the rapidly growingstalks of the plants to ensure a good harvest, since this gave them enough stability towithstand strong gusts of wind in the rainy season. Weeds, particularly grasses, had tobe eradicated. This was done a few weeks later to avoid damaging the young maizeplants and because there was some work to be done in sowing the other plots of land.Yokes of oxen were led past the drills in the milpas during the works to raise the soilrapidly and efficiently. By comparison with the milpas of the villagers,32 this kind ofcultivation in drills, with yokes of oxen walking between the plants, did not make full useof the area available. Individual labourers walked behind these yokes of oxen to stampthe ground down around the stalks and to remove the weeds. The piling up of earth tookplace in April, May and June, starting with those milpas which had been sown first.

Once again, all the activities carried out during this busy period were the exclusivetasks of men and boys who lived on the hacienda. The situation was different during aspecial task in June and July, for which hardly any of the resident farmhands were used.This was a job for some ten to fifteen day-labourers. When the maize started to flowerjust before the first summer rains, it was time to pile up the earth firmly round the stalksagain, remove the weeds, get rid of caterpillars and insects, and to bind the stalks togetherto prevent them from breaking and to prevent the ears of corn from falling on the ground.The binding was done by three or four resident hands on the hacienda. They also keptan eye on the migrant labourers. By now the maize plants stood in a firm ridge of earth.There was a deep furrow between the rows of plants to drain the large quantities of rain



water which fell on the milpas. As mentioned earlier, this was the most critical period,because the plants did not reach full maturity if the rains were slow in coming. TheJune-July tasks were done by seasonal workers and more or less coincided with thewheat harvest. Afterwards there was no more work for migrant labourers on the haciendas.As soon as the last task was done, a few milperos or milpa-guards were appointed towatch the field against roaming cattle, passing mule trains and robbers. In fact, themilperos kept up their watch over the fields until the last corn cobs had been pluckedin January or February. I have found no migrant labourers during the maize harvest.Once the maize had dried properly after a few months in the warm winter sun and themarket price was favourable, the hacienda servants were given the signal to begin theharvest. There was no need to do the job as quickly as in the case of the wheat harvest,for the latter had to be completed just before the outbreak of the rainy season.

Some AccountsThe shortage of labour was the major problem facing the hacendados. In the first place,it was the result of the success of the indigenous economy, which had ensured plentyof work in the villages for a long time.33 In the second place, and this was above all trueof the valley of Puebla, the shortage was the result of the migration of the small farmersfrom the pueblos to the villages and towns in the western areas of Anahuac and in thefaldas.34 The hacendados tried above all to hold on to the gafianes on their haciendas,although Spanish legislation stood in their way. It was not debt but assets which werethe main instrument at their disposal: labourers who still had wages due to them wouldnot leave a hacienda so quickly. So, to answer Romano provisionally, peonage did notentail economic entrapment by debts, but by assets and then only if the workers preferredto stay at the estate to await their payment.

The precision of the business administration of the hacendados offers insight into thequestions of how much each labourer had worked, what his wages had been, and howmany items he had asked for in kind. These details were recorded both in the haciendaaccounts and in separate labour records (libros de rayas). The latter operated like a labourcontract. The books were balanced once a year, at Easter, to arrive at a final credit ordebit figure. If there was a credit, the peon had the right to back pay of his wages; ifthere was a debit, it had to be paid off. The peones were bound to their labour contract,although they could leave before expiry if they did not have any debts. In the event ofrunaways search parties were organised. Servants were not sold; the debt could betransferred to another hacienda, but only at the request of the peones themselves. Thesepractices resemble the contracts and transfers of modern European soccer players, whodespite their wealth are not allowed to leave a club during their contract period; eventhough they may be involved with major conflicts with the manager and all the otherplayers in the team. This comparison between an Indian peon and a European soccerplayer is not as absurd as it may seem: the peones too had a relatively higher standardof living than the indios in the pueblos.33

Some examples of the peones accounts have been published. With a few exceptions,examination of these sources indicates that the debts of the gananes were not high. Buta closer look at some of the exceptions provides a good way of understanding the working


36 Arij Ouweneel

of the system. Examples of peculiar indebedness include:

1. A young ganan who had started a family not long before and had incurred largeexpenses in setting up his cottage, paying for the wedding, etc; he had receivedmainly household items on credit.

2. A ganan with an important position in the social hierarchy of the community ofpeones (for example, there were members of sodalities like cofradios and hermandadeson the haciendas), had received mainly sheep, goats, drink and large quantities ofmaize for celebrations. In many cases a high debt on the hacienda was a sign of thehigher social prestige of the peon concerned.

This distinction emerges clearly from the following two accounts. The first concernsthe ganan Salvador Santiago, and was published by Gonzalez Sanchez.3(1 The accountconsisted of the following items (the figures have been rounded off in whole reales):

Debt from the previous account: 338Credit: -222- loan from the hacienda 11

to hold a party 131meat 4

- reales for the Festival of the Dead 10- ditto for Easter 5- ditto for carnival 12- ditto for Christmas 30- ditto for confession 4

church tithe (advance payment) 3- tribute (advance payment) 12Wages: 9 months @ 3p4 per month +252

Debt: -308

This labourer thus had a debt amounting to eleven months' wages. He asked credits forholding some parties. The account of the ganan Marcos Antonio, taken from the samesource, was as follows:

Debt from the previous account 57Credit: -176

- reales for the hacienda party 55-



reales5 5 -5 0 -4 5 -403 5 -

I 30-! 25 -

20 -15-10-5 -

- 0 -

i -10-

s --20 --25

Hacienda Quimichucan

22 gananes

credits: 24p1 average: 4p2debts: 216p2 average: 13p4

r

reales75 "70 -6 5 "6 0 "55 "5 0 "4 5 "

4 0 - 35 - 30"

2 5 -2 0 -15 -10-5 -0 -

x5 ' 1 0 "0) -15 -

-20 --25

o

Hacienda Santiago

31 gananes

credits: 22p5 average: 4p4debts: 485p2 average: 18p4

13 tu

Figure 3. Debt profiles of the labourers of the Haciendas Quimichucan (1762) and Santiago(1778) in the province of Tlaxcala - in pesos.

This servant could ask the hacendado for these 19 reales at the Easter accounting or tobegin the new agricultural year with a credit. The accounts well illustrate which expensesthe servants allowed themselves. The family expenses of Marcos Antonio consistedmainly of the costs of church services, a baptism celebration and clothing.

Two hacienda debt profiles have been drawn up in figures 3 and 4 in order to set suchindividual cases within a context. Each column stands for the extent of a credit or debtin pesos per ganan of the hacienda concerned (1 peso = 8 reales). I agree with Herbert


38 Arij Ouweneel

Hacienda Temalacayuca

37 gafianes

credits: 2094p7 aver: 4p2debts: 8p1 aver.: 4p

reales3 0 -

2 20-

o --10-

-20 -

-30 -

-40 -

-50 -

-60 -

-70-

-80 -

-90-

-100-

Hacienda Ocotzocuautla

u

18 gafianes

credits: 546p6 average: 16p1debts: 3p

Figure 4. Debtprofilesof the labourers of the Haciendas Temalacayuca (1770) and Ocotzocuautla(1752) in the province of Tlaxcala - in pesos.

Nickel's assumption that the debts of the labourers were low on the whole and that theycould be paid off within a few months. The examples that I have presented were chosenat random and many more similar cases could be added. They are taken from fourhaciendas in the province of Tlaxcala. Two are examples of haciendas where most ofthe labourers were in debt, while the other two are examples of haciendas where mostof the labourers had money owing to them.37

More than 75 per cent of the labourers on the Haciendas San Miguel Quimichucan(1762) and Santiago (1778) were in debt to the hacienda, but in most cases the debt was



not high, see figure 3. The average debt was 13p4 on the former and 18p4 on the latter,the rough equivalent of four months' work. On Quimichucan there were 16 peones indebt and 6 with back pay due to them. The highest debt was that of the capitan: 40p7j(327j reales). His status obliged him to organise various celebrations for the hermandadof the workers. He was followed by a labourer called Sebastian, who lived nearby inTopoyanco. He had received 338j reales in wages (225 days' work), but he had borrowed

.to the value of 633 reales. The largest debt owing to a peon was the 89j reales due toDiego, who had not yet reached the age of adulthood. Diego had worked for 1 real aday for 186 days, but he had only received 96\ reales. Out of the total of 21 adults and10 boys on the Hacienda Santiago, there were 26 gananes who were in debt and 5 whohad money owing to them. The largest debt - 481 reales - had been run up by JuanJose. His monthly wage was 32 reales, and he received 81 reales for 2j months' work.His large debt was due to a series of loans amounting to 562 reales. I do not have abreakdown of these loans. The gafian who had the most money owing to him was Nicolas,who had only received 2185 reales, while he had the right to 298 reales. It is strikingthat a few dead gananes also had debts. They are not included in the debt profile becausethey were written off by the haciendas (deuda perdida).

The situation on the Haciendas San Jose Temalacayuca (1770) and San PabloOcotzocuautla (1752) was the opposite. In these cases the amounts owing to the servantswere considerably higher than their debts, see Figure 4. Bartholo, a gafian onTemalacayuca, was owed a sum of 1440 reales in wages, the equivalent of a good 4 years'work ! The gafian Juan had 964j reales owing to him, the equivalent of 34 months' work.The average sum owed to a ganan on this hacienda was 479 reales (the rough equivalentof 17 months' work). There were only two labourers who were in debt (average debt:32j reales). The average sum owing to the 17 gananes on Ocotzocuautla was 129 reales,almost 5 months' work. The largest amount was owed to Lucas: 787 reales, or twoyears' work. One gafian, Juan Dionicio, who had not yet reached the age of adulthood,had a debt of 24i reales.

Explaining the BacklogIt is not difficult to account for the backlog in the payment of wages. It is known thatall entrepreneurs at this time, including hacendados, had a serious shortage of coin.They therefore encouraged the labourers to buy on credit so that they could settleaccounts with them later on. According to the information in the documents, this includedshops owned by people who were not bound by any relationship of intimacy, such asritual kinship, with the hacendados concerned. It is furthermore striking that the priceswere simply based on current market prices; it was only the - few - hacienda shopswhich worked with traditionally fixed prices on average level. Before going into detail,it is necessary to get rid of a deeply rooted misunderstanding: the hacendados did notuse the hacienda shop {tienda de raya) to drive the workers deeper into debt. I havecome across very few shops in the accounts, whether owned by the hacienda or rented,which used methods of this kind. Nor have I come across much compulsory shoppingelsewhere, a system in which farmhands were obliged to spend a part of their wages in


40 Arij Ouweneel,reales

1200-

1000-

500

100

less paidthanagreed

Njwage inI reales

wage not yetpaid in cash

wage paidin cash

A S O N D J F M A M J J A

Number of weeks from August 1811 to August 1812

Figure 5. Wages and credits of the 348 labourers of the Hacienda Buenavista, province ofMexicalcingo, August 1811 -August 1812 [Wages according to contract (line) and paid (columns)]- in reales.

shops owned by the hacienda. The situation was that some hacendados had a shop onthe premises where the labourers were free to buy as they wanted on credit, while othershad a shop of this kind in a neighbouring village or town, or had a contract with ashopkeeper to sell to the peones from their hacienda. The prices often remained stablein these shops for months at a time so as not to lose custom. In view of the considerablefluctuations in market prices, the goods for sale were sometimes more expensive andsometimes cheaper by comparison with the market prices. Crown investigationsdiscovered that the hacendados sold their wares in the shops at cost price. Complaintswere often heard about the shops if the quality of the goods was not satisfactory.Nonetheless, hacendados did not have contacts with shopkeepers all over Anhuac; infact, perhaps the majority did not.38

The high wage backlogs indicate that the gananes did not always manage to collecttheir wages. Some haciendas owed huge sums to their labourers; for example, in 1740the Hacienda Ojo de Agua (San Juan de los Llanos) owed the peones a sum amountingto almost 8,000 pesos (64,000 reales, equivalent to 19 years' work by 10 adult labourers).The remarkable explanation by historical-geographer Ursula Ewald is that this shouldbe seen as a form of saving: the gananes could live off their raciones and the produce oftheir pegujales, and were prepared to save their wages. However, Herbert Nickel claimsthat these backlogs had virtually disappeared on the highland haciendas after 1850. Thismight indicate an improved liquidity on the haciendas, but the debts of the peones were


Tabl

e 2

Wag

es, ad

vanc

es an

d cr

edits

of

th

e 34

6 lab

oure

rs of

th

e H

acien

da Bu

enav

ista,

prov

ince

of

M

exica

lcing

o, A

ugus

t 18

11

A

ugus

t18

12

in

re

ales

.

wage

paid

advance

credit

wage

paid

advance

credit

wage

paid

advance

credit

wage

paid

advance

credit

1811

Aug 12 774

598

200 24

Nov 4

903

226

663

-14

Feb 3 854

278

579 3

May 4

739

387

361 9

19 312

187

128 3 11 899

166

733 0 10 606

207

397

-1 11 865

424

442 1

26 796

657

261

122 18 618 92 526 0 17 643

168

475 0 18 728

456

304 32

Sept 2

1185 797

396 8

25 668

208

460 0 24 534

270

313 49 25 904

559

382 37

9826

594

241 9

Dec 1

673

181

498 6

Mar 2

659

325

356 22

Jun1

1087 552

539 4

16 614

442

179 7 8

566

121

445 0 9

783

380

418 15 8 962

535

442 15

23 696

370

247

-79 15

607

120

495 8 16 722

392

338 8 15 535

407

229

101

30 708

436

278 6 23 319

139

181 1 23 775

304

282

189 22 773

492

310 29

Oct 7

748

435

313 0

Jan 31 396

227

572

403

Apr 30 763

368

397 2

Jul 29 896

603

305 12

14 750

388

364 2

1812 7

1096 264

835 3 6

852

381

471 0 6

935

502

445 14

21 734

337

397 0 13

1036 242

794 0 13 872

394

478 0 13 924

542

417 35

28 711

146

333

-23

2 20 972

251

321

-40

0 20 732

306

428 2 20 658

399

271

-15

271156 305

851 0 27 685

335

352 2 27 111

419

364 6

Aug 3

857

496

331

-30

wag

e :

tota

l am

ou

nt

of re

ales

that

ha

d to

be

pa

id ac

cord

ing

to co

ntr

acts

,

paid

:

amount

of re

ales

actu

ally

paid

to

th

e la

bour

ers,

adva

nce:

am

ount

of re

ales

not

paid

in

ca

sh bu

t pu

t on

ac

count.

cred

it :

diffe

renc

e be

twee

n co

ntr

act

and

paid

an

d ad

vanc

ed, ca

n als

o be

se

en as

'd

ebt'.

Sour

ce:

AG

NM

, Ti

erra

s 25

45, Ex

p. 1.

o I


42 Arij Ouweneel

generally much higher then. It is possible that a transition took place from the generationof wage backlogs to the creation of debts, but several historians report that there wasno question of debt slavery at that time either.39

Ewald's suggestion, which, of course, contradicts the traditional idea of economicentrapment, seems to be confirmed by the material from the Hacienda San NicolasBuenavista (Mexicalcingo) for the agricultural year 1811-12.40 The servants on thishacienda were paid at regular intervals during the year (see figure 5 and table 2). A totalof 348 different peones worked on Buenavista during that year. A small group, comprisingsome 25 individuals, worked for the largest part of the year. The others were recruitedtemporarily for periods of no more than one or two weeks. The accounts record howmuch was paid to each labourer each week, what he should have received, and what wasput on his 'savings account'. The continuous line in figure 5 indicates what the labourersshould have received according to their wage reviews, the columns indicate what theyactually received (the dotted part of the columns), and the weekly accumulation of theirwage backlog (the upper section of the columns).

With the exception of a few periods, the behaviour of the length of the columnsmatches that of the labour costs in terms of wage levels. The exceptional periods arethose preceding major events such as the Festival of the Dead (1 and 2 November),Christmas, New Year's Eve, Easter (in March) and Corpus Christi (in June). Thesewere the periods when the peones on Buenavista received a large part of what was owingto them. I do not know whether these payments were made in cash or in kind; the lattermight point towards compulsory shopping, but this is not necessarily the case and wouldcertainly be strange in regard to other evidence. However, although it is not very clear,the method of annotation used in the accounts suggests that only a limited payment wasactually made in reales. The peones received remarkably little cash in the periodimmediately after the festivals. It seems that weekly negotiations took place between thehacendado and his personnel as to how much of their wages should be noted in the librosde ray as, for some peones obviously agreed to put a larger proportion of their wages ontheir 'savings account' than others. This might be seen as a way of saving for the nextfestival. The most striking feature is the drop in reales paid to the peones betweenOctober and the beginning of May. It looks as though the peones had to make do, orwanted to, with their rations and the produce of their own pegujales during the drywinter. In the summer, on the other hand, the liquidity of the hacienda was markedlyimproved after the sale of the wheat harvest, and the sums owing to them could be paidin cash. The rise in the wage backlog is due to the lack of coin. No doubt, an improvementin the liquidity of the hacienda around 1800 may have encouraged the hacendado toreplace the gananes by tlaquehuales.

The labourers on the Hacienda Buenavista were usually paid in advance every Saturday,the common practice at this time. Otherwise, they did not turn up to work on the land.It may not have been characteristic of the situation on Buenavista alone that wages didnot have to be paid back if the week's work could not be completed for some unexpectedreason. For example, no work could be carried out on Buenavista during the two weeksfrom 15 to 28 June 1812 because of heavy rains. Most of the peones agreed to have thewages for these weeks put on their 'savings accounts', but a few of them returned their



advance wages to the hacienda manager. This caused a lot of deletions in the accounts.The manager tried to present a clear picture by noting whether the surplus wage wasput on the 'savings account' or returned. The same procedure applied when the peoneswere ill, although in cases of illness they were more reluctant to return parts of theadvanced wages. Gregorio Francisco, for example, a labourer from San Lorenzo Tezonco(a village near the hacienda), was taken ill on 21 January 1812 and was unable to resumework until 3 February. The wages promised for the three days on which he had intendedto work were put on his 'savings account'. The milpero Cirilo Jose went home ill onFriday 26 October 1811 after working on his little tower of three ladders placed in themilpas. He spent a week at home without wanting to receive any payment. All the same,he retained his right to the weekly radon of maize, which was some consolation for asick peon.

The money spent during the festivals on Buenavista was not consumed on food anddrink. Various church services were held during each festival: Christmas, Easter andCorpus Christi. These were attended by the peones, who paid the priest in cash. Nowork was done on the hacienda during these festivals. No work took place either duringthe week from 19 to 25 August. Was this a festival too? Two masses were held on thehacienda, for which the hacendado himself had bought a bottle of wine for the exorbitantprice of 9 reales. However, the holding of two church services in one week was the rulerather than an exception on this hacienda, and the same applied to many other haciendasat this time. Holy Mass was said on Buenavista on Saturday and on one of the days inthe week (usually Tuesday or Wednesday). I suspect that the week from 19 to 25 Augustwas made a holiday because heavy rains put a stop to work. Notes in the hacienda recordsindicate that there were particularly heavy rains at the time: peones were repeatedly setto work (some 23 a week) to dredge the drainage ditches. The situation recurred in May1812.

The peones went to church a number of times each week during the festival weeks;they went five times during Christmas in 1811. The hacendado bought candles and winefor the services on a regular basis and the priest received 2 pesos a week for each mass.This sum was the tax payment which the peones were obliged to pay as tributarios, andlike the tribute, it was advanced by the hacienda and deducted from their accounts.Some ninety church services were held during the 52 weeks of the agricultural year1811-12 on Buenavista, costing a total of 176 pesos (1408 reales). This amount wasprobably raised by some thirty families who lived on the hacienda and in the neighbouringvillages. Each of them paid the priest approximately one real a week, the equivalent tothe wage for one morning's or afternoon's work. The only drink which the hacendadobought for his labourers was the bottle of wine and the pulque. He bought aguardientea few times a year, but this was used to cure sick mules.

Payment in kind to the peones was not only a way of paying the wage backlog. A largenumber of servants requested maize, drink and poultry for their own celebrations andreligious ceremonies on the hacienda. These loans occupied a separate part of theadministration of the wage backlog, if there was one. In this way it was possible forlabourers to run up a debt to the hacienda while having money owed to them by thehacienda. The peones repaid these loans in instalments, which they preferred to have


44 Arij Ouweneel

spread out over a number of months (by deductions from their wages), or in cash withina few weeks. I came across a case of repayment in cash in the accounts of the HaciendaSanta Ana Aragon (Mexico). The peones Gaspar Antonio and Juan Santiago borrowed20 pesos on 2 August 1766 for 'the expenses of the wedding of their children to oneanother'. The loan was repaid to the hacienda in instalments: 5 pesos on 11 October, 5pesos on 18 October, 5 pesos on 25 October and 5 pesos on 8 November. A few otherpeones followed this example on 3 January 1768 when they borrowed 16 pesos for Adventon 6 January 1768, although most of the labourers on the hacienda 'borrowed on credit'from the hacienda. The sum was paid back in instalments. It is noteworthy that in thiscase the manager of the hacienda charged a 6 per cent interest on the loan: 5 pesos on9 January, 7 pesos on 16 January and 5 pesos on 23 January. During the same year anumber of peones made cash repayments by instalments of the tribute advanced by thehacienda. This policy may be influenced by the fact that the peones as residents of thepueblo Tlatelolco were also the owners of the hacienda.41

Understanding PeonageAgriculture on the haciendas was carried out in accordance with an efficient and strictlymaintained schedule. The labour on the haciendas continued year round and wasrestricted to a fixed number of mandays. Seen from the point of the view of the peons,they knew that their employer needed them six days a week, mainly for the cultivationof wheat and maize. There was a slight decline in the number of servants on the fieldsin January and a great increase of employees in the summer. In the remaining monthsthe labour force moved within certain limits. In short, the hacendados relied mainly ona relatively small permanent labour force resident on the hacienda. Day-labourers couldonly find work on the wheat haciendas in two summer months. If the yield had beenlarger, it may be surmised, there would have been more scope for migrant labourers.There was some work for them in the spring and autumn, and even during the rainyseason, as channel diggers or dredgers, it is true. The work of the resident hands wasconcentrated on ploughing, carried out by one peon and his son or nephew per yoke ofoxen. Harvest failures were very detrimental to the employment possibilities for migrantlabourers. All the same, it often happened that hacendados hired yokes of oxen withploughmen from the neighbouring pueblos during the ploughing period. This was infact the only employment prospect for the residents of the pueblos. In short, the residentpeons considered themselves inhabitants of the hacienda and had for about nine monthsnothing to do with the Indians of the neighbouring townships. All that time, the workwas done by them, the hacienda was their habitat. This explains why several labourersagreed to 'save' their earnings on their accounts instead of receiving them in hand. Thehacienda was in constant need of cash and using the accounts this way was an importantsolution.

The relationship between the hacendado and his peones can be interpreted by usingthe concept of Herrschaft or 'reciprocal dominance'. To understand Herrschaft we haveto rehearse the notion of 'customary economy', discussed in my study Shadows overAn'ahuac. There I defended the use of the concept of'ecological ethic' as the fundamental



underpinning of the 'customary economy'. It at the same time seeks to relate to E.P.Thompson's ideas as (re)developed in his recently published collection of essays Customsin Common, in which Thompson explores the ebullient and contradictory plebeian culturewhich preceded the formation of working class institutions and conciousness and itscustoms and practices. In the pre-industrial world, access to the means of productionwas potentially a cause of bitter disputes between the elite and the peasants. After twentyyears, the important concept of 'the moral economy of provision', also known as 'themoral economy of the poor', as instigator of peasant revolts ('collective bargaining byriot') and government policy at the same time, still can come to assistance. The term'provision' here refers to the character of the economic transaction, while the term 'poor'refers to the ethic of the poor. In fact, the two terms can be seen as both sides of thesame coin. It was developed to make a distinction with the 'political economy' ofcapitalism.42

This is all rather pedestrian nowadays. It is true that the ecological ethic becomesmanifest to the researcher - and the local powerholders in the past - in times ofdeprivation, dearth and changing ecological circumstances centring on the relationshipbetween population and resources, but it also enticed people in periods of calm andpeace. The ethic tells people how the economy ought to function ('normative economies').It was determined by the religious, biblical ethic, which rested upon powerful socialassumptions undergirded by God's injunction to Adam to work by the sweat of his browand not to 'swallow up the needy'.43 In general, the ecological ethic of the peasants inEurope, their view of the normative economy and the way in which they had to maintainthemselves, can be seen as to be sustained by what Rude calls the 'mother's milkideology', 'based on direct experience, oral tradition or folk memory, and not learnedby listening to sermons or speeches or reading books.' Thompson's well-knowndescription is more precise. He remarks that although views of this kind emerged duringperiods of unrest and rebellion, they formed a substantial component of popular ideology,a consensus as to what were legitimate or illegitimate practices in social and economicperformances. An outrage to these moral assumptions was the usual occasion for directaction. This is therefore a socio-cultural pattern of values which has grown historically,based on the necessity of survival in ecologically difficult circumstances, which directlyaffects the operation of the economy. It is a pattern of values which adapts to the needsof the times and may be labelled as characteristic of an agrarian economy which has notyet been penetrated by industrialisation or some proto-agrobusiness.44

One should never forget that this was a world full of uncertainties and anxiety. Byanxiety psychologists mean the unpleasant emotion characterised by terms like 'worry','apprehension', 'dread', and, of course, 'fear' that humans - and, indeed, animals -experience at times in varying degrees. Any situation that threatens the well-being ofthe organism is assumed to produce a state of anxiety and to find its way out into a'discourse of anxiety'. In my behaviourist or learning approach I focus not on internalconflicts but on ways in which anxiety became associated with certain situations vialearning. The stimulus outlined here is starvation. Recurring bad harvests did not justmean a shortage of food. In general, once established, a fear or 'anxiety discourse' isdifficult to eradicate, because it produces avoidance behavior. Consequently, the person


46 Arij Ouweneel

hardly has an opportunity to learn that the conditioned stimulus might really have lostits danger and he tends to make continuous withdrawal responses to situations that mightnot be harmful any more. Because starvation is a 'state anxiety', a transitory responseto a specific situation, people are bound to develop a collective ideology to canalise oravoid such withdrawal responses. Of course, being with others who are also fearful abouta forthcoming danger like starvation helps to alleviate fears. Therefore, the centralcollective tenet of the ecological ethic is the 'right to live'. With the trauma of starvationin the background, the main problem was how to materialise this tenet and to imposeon society a system of obtaining the basic necessities of life. The problem tended to besolved rationally, that is, by taking into account the evidence, the alternatives, and theconsequences of each of the alternatives. That is why the peasants, for instance, treatedcollective security discourse as the main 'defense mechanism' and tried to materialisethis discourse in attempting to achieve a maximal income from the household to avoidrisking the food supply. But logical decision-making was hampered by the person's ownemotions and the uncertainty of the future. There were always anxiety producingunknowns and risks that had to be taken.43

The relations of exchange, reciprocal or not, into which peasants entered on an informal,individual or collective basis, were fed by the ecological ethic: the society in which onelived was expected to support the struggle for survival. Direct support was expectedfrom the more well-to-do villagers, the landlord and the government representatives intimes of need. The power of the members of the elite in a specific region was based ontheir control of important means of production which the residents of the region needed.According to sociologist Michael Mann, their powers ' derive from their ability to mobilizethe resources of that collectivity.'46 The social balance could depend on the extent towhich this group was prepared to meet the peasants' demands. In times of shortage, itwas considered the duty of the lord - in our case: the hacendado - to implement afavourable food policy for the poor, starting with the control of market prices andculminating in free handouts of foodstuffs. Transfer of income was a form of insuranceagainst crises, and the peasants regarded it as an inevitable necessity. The relation ofexchange legitimated the rule and social prestige of the elite, but this legitimacyimmediately collapsed if the guarantee of subsistence was no longer forthcoming. Therelation of exchange was thus marked by a reciprocity of obligations.

The ecological ethic determined the attitude of the peasants, the ' crofting 'mud farmersand the agricultural workers to what was regarded as exploitation and what was not.The peasants concluded informal patronage agreements with the local elite in order toremain within the limits of what they viewed as acceptable. It could even happen thattheir standard of living dropped while the exchange relation with the lord improved.This was the case after a bad harvest, for example, when the lord (or the state) doledout food to the hungry peasants. In view of the extremely precarious nature of theagrarian economy, with the enormous fluctuations in prices due to the unstable qualityand quantity of the harvests, the legitimacy of the social prestige and rule of the elite,the lord and the state was permanently open to discussion. It was accepted at the outsetthat the exercise of power and the accumulation of wealth were to some extent arbitraryand had only been surrendered by the peasants under the pressure of necessity. The



peasants constantly checked the rich and those in power in the abuse of their position.Precisely because so little was laid down by l aw- the normative economy was usually

based on informal agreements - there was an incessant conflict over the nature of thisexchange relation. The government, the elite and the lords defended the legitimacy ofthe relations of patronage and their rule at every available opportunity with the assistanceof patronage activities and the use of religion as an ideological basis. Changes in theagreements that had been made led to resistance, but changes were inevitable, since theneeds and desires of the lords, the elite, the state and the peasants themselves changedin the course of time. Historian David Sabean concluded: ' In the dialectic betweenarbitrariness and legitimizing lies one of the central mechanisms for the continual formingof historical consciousness. (...) Within the lord/subject relationship, new 'needs' arecontinually being generated and old 'needs' denied.'47 Needs as defined by the lordswere uninterruptedly at conflict with needs felt by subjects, so that most of the costs oflegitimacy were to be found in the continual round of redefinition of needs or theirsuppression. Therefore, one should argue that 'lords' and 'subjects' formulateddiscourses about legitimacy, rights and duties, and power relations.

This brings me to the concept of reciprocal dominance and the lordship of thehacendado in Mexico. The focus upon a changing legitimacy in time points to personalisedand concrete relationships of authority and power. This should not be confused withthe more abstract and impersonal structures of domination in a modern state. Sabeanrecalled the German term Herrschaft here, referring to specific relationships of power,rooted in customary law - or sometimes written down - and entailing reciprocalobligations. Such domination was understood concretely, that is, for instance, Herrschaftover land, over serfs, over manorial economy, or courts. In short, as Robisheaux affirms,although with each of these authorities came the right to extract certain surpluses, likerents, dues, labor services, or the right to command obedience and loyalty from thoseunder a jurisdiction, 'lords had always to provide protection {Schutz und Schirm) inexchange for these rights, or their authority could be called into question.>48 The legitimacyof Herrschaft is embodied in specific historical symbolic public forms and discourses; thusin acts as well as speech. Where legitimacy broke down, the subjects developed a discourseof resistance based on these same particular historical forms and discourses, but this timeexpressed in rumours, in unflattering folktales and stories about the lords, in 'up-side-down' festivities like carnival, and, eventually, in open, violent rebellion.

The translation of the German term Herrschaft as reciprocal dominance and lordshipbrings another, very important and elementary, feature to the surface. The offering ofprotection in the form of clientage, justice, general tranquility, order, or militaryprotection was just as central to the institution. The sum total of all forms of Herrschaftwas seen together as offering protection and guaranteeing the reproduction and survivalof the rural household units, making it unnecessary to question any one form. But,precisely because of the changing relationships through time, most forms of Herrschaftappeared very unbalanced. Subjects sometimes put one or other forms of Herrschaftinto question because it did not offer any correlative service any longer. The specificfactor of time resulted in a vision upon Herrschaft as always in part arbitrary, not alwayscorrectly balanced by an adequate return, too costly, and sometimes maintained by a


48 Arij Ouweneel

degree of violence and coercion. This necessitated a continuing process of legitimisation.Indeed, when one examines the daily practice of reciprocal dominance in colonial

Mexico, it becomes clear that legitimisation was integral to it. Villagers and estatelabourers demanded a just treatment from colonial, religious or local magistrates. It wasaccepted at the outset that the exercise of power and the accumulation of wealth bymagistrates and elite members was to some extent arbitrary and that its arbitrarinesshad either to be justified or masked: Herrschaft as the evocation of obedience, thesatisfaction of mutual interests, and the fulfilment of needs. The arbitrariness andlegitimising of wealth and power should be considered one of the central mechanismsfor the continual forming and reforming of historical consciousness. It is good to repeatthat new 'needs' were continually generated and old 'needs' denied. Needs as definedby the officials and lords were uninterruptedly at conflict with needs felt and defined bysubjects, so that the costs of Herrschaft were not just to be found in the payment scheduleof, for example, tributes and rents, but also in the continual round of redefinition ofneeds or their suppression.49

Where the maintenance of subsistence activities prevailed, the bargaining position onthe part of peons must still have been strong, especially when these peons lived in anagrarian society which was relatively sparsely populated.30 In a situation of populationgrowth or high population density, the bargaining position of the lords, elite and statewith respect to the peons is better than that of the peons with respect to the lords, etc.The peons will have to modify their demands. In a situation of low population densityor a decrease in population, in which alternative sources of income are available to thepeons, the situation is the reverse. This is an important point for the interpretation oflabour conditions in the countryside and for dealing with the question of peonage. Therelations of exchange within the normative economy changed considerably when therewere changes in the variable 'population'. The situation changed in modern times, aftera large period of population growth had altered the relationship between landlord andpeons. The modern period saw not just the ideological triumph of political economy.According to historian Alan Macfarlane, we deal with the triumph of a new culture: theethic of endless accumulation as an end, not as a means. This was gaining momentumover the subsistence ethic. In Mexico, this change was introduced in the late eighteenthcentury and the nineteenth century. It forced the peons to describe the features of theirecological ethic more precisely. Their horizontal links with each other had to be reinforcedin order to resist the increasing pressure of the elite and the state. The vertical linkswere strengthened too, for it could sometimes happen that both the landlord and thepeons saw their wishes satisfied within a system of patronage. The precise way in whichthis was regulated varied from state to state, from region to region.3'

It means that in Anahuac during most of the eighteenth century population densitywas not pressing upon the traditional system. The hacendado depended upon his peonsand their bargaining position was still very strong. This explains the mechanisms ofpeonage described in this article. It was not 'oppression' as defined by journalists, socialscientists and historians some decades ago. However, the situation in Anahuac began tochange during the nineteenth century. Population growth inspired the hacendados toabolish the system of peonage and replace it by plain wage labour. According to



researchers like Ricardo Rendon Garcini, the hacendados did not even succeed then,obviously because the 'ecological ethic1 of their peons was not altered yet and no sufficientalternative labour was at hand.32 To sum, Mexico needed a political revolution (1910)and the subsequent abolition of the hacienda-system to replace traditional forms of farmservice by a free labour market based on short-term contracts and cash payments.

NotesAGI Archivo General de Indias, Seville, SpainAGNM Archivo General de la Nacion, Mexico CityAGET Archive General del Estado de Tlaxcala, MexicoBNMa Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid, SpainFMMN Microfilm archive, Instituto Nacional de Antropologia e Historia, Mexico City

1. A. Gibson, 'Proletarianization? The transition to full-time labour on a Scottish Estate,1723-1787", Continuity and Change 5 : 3 (1990), 357-389; referring to A. Orr, ' Farm servantsand farm labour in the Forth Valley and the South-east Lowlands', T.IVI. Devine (ed.), FarmServants and Labour in Lowland Scotland, 1770-1914 (Edinburgh, 1984), pp. 29-54.

2. Gibson, 'Proletarianization?' pp. 374-5, quote from p. 387, and passim.3. M. Bloch, Feudal Society: Volume One: the Growth of the Ties of Dependence (2 Vols.;

London, 1961; transl. from the French), I, 279, also 241-54.4. See the discussion in C.E. Searle, 'Custom, class conflict and agrarian capitalism: the

Cumbrian customary economy in the eighteenth century', Past and Present 110 (1986),106-33, esp. 108-9.

5. 11. Carr, Old Mother Mexico (Boston and New York, 1931), pp. 63-71.6. R. Enock, Mexico. Its Ancient and Modern Civilisation, History and Political Conditions,

Topography and Natural Resources, Industries and General Development (London, 1909), seefor example pp. 213-14.

7. See, for example, the essays in S. Miller, Landlords and Haciendas in Modernising Mexico:Essays in Radical Reappraisal (Amsterdam, 1995). Any study of Mexican colonial haciendasshould include: I. Altman and J. Lockhart (eds.), Provinces of Early Mexico: Variants ofSpanish American Regional Evolution (Los Angeles, 1976); M.J. Amerlinck de Bontempo,'From Hacienda to Ejido: The San Diego de Rioverde Case' (Ph.D. diss., State Universityof New York, Stony Brook, 1980); B. Badura, 'Biografia de la hacienda

ouweneel 1997 - rh - eighteenth-century mexican peonage and the problem hacienda labor

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