Labor Conditions on Haciendas in Porfirian Mexico

Labor Conditions on Haciendas in Porfirian Mexico: Some Trends and Tendencies
Author(s): Friedrich Katz
Reviewed work(s):
Source: The Hispanic American Historical Review, Vol. 54, No. 1 (Feb., 1974), pp. 1-47
Published by: Duke University Press
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Labor Conditions on Haciendas
in Porfirian Mexico:
Some Trends and Tendencies
FRIEDRICH
KATZ
F THE MANY PROFOUND TRANSFORMATIONS which took
place in the Mexican countryside in the period between 1876 and 191o, two have been emphasized:
the expropriation of the lands of communal villages, and the decrease
in real wages paid to laborers on haciendas. By the end of the Porfiriato over 95 percent of the communal villages had lost their lands,
according to available data.' The buying power of wages paid to
agricultural laborers on haciendas sharply declined between 1876
and LgLO.2
These statistics give only a partial and limited view of the situation in the countryside. What happened to the expropriated peasants?
Did they become peones acasillados on the haciendas, industrial workers or free agricultural laborers?
To state that the value of real wages paid to laborers on haciendas
o
*The author is Professor of History at the University of Chicago.
1. Frank Tannenbaum, The Mexican Agrarian Revolution (New York, 1929),
p. 151 ff. While a consensus of opinions exists that the majority of communal village lands were expropriated during the Diaz period there is no agreement among
scholars as to the exact extent of these confiscations. See George McCutchen
McBride, The Land System of Mexico (New York, 1923); Fernando Gonzalez
Roa, El aspecto agrario de la revolucion mexicana (Mexico, 1919); Moises Gonzalez Navarro, El Porfiriato: La vida social in Daniel Cosio Villegas, ed. Historia
moderna de Mexico, 10 vols. (Mexico, 1955-1971),
V, i87-212.
Moises Gonz'alez
Navarro, El capitalismo nacionalista (Me6xico, n.d.), pp. 227-253. Francisco Bulnes
who was closely linked to the Diaz regime wrote in 1916 that 15 percent of all
communal villages had managed to retain their lands, The Whole Truth about
Mexico: President Wilson's Responsibility (New York, 1916), p. 85.
2. Gonzalez Roa and Tannenbaum believed real wages to have declined by
30 percent in the Porfirian era. Tannenbaum, Agrarian Revolution, p. 149 and
Gonzalez Roa, Aspecto agrario, p. i8o-i8i.
Seminario de la historia moderna de
Mexico, El Colegio de Mexico, Estadtsticas economicas del Porfiriato;Fuerza de
trabajo y actividad economica por sectores (Mexico, 1964), pp. 147-148, estimates
the average decline in minimum real wages for Mexico as a whole to have been
about 20 percent from 1877 to 1911. This decline did not take place continuously.
Wages tended to rise until 1898-1899. From then on they fell gradually until 1908
and very sharply between 1908 and 1911.
2
HAHR
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decreased is also of limited value. Wages constituted only a part of an
hacienda peon's income. To determine his living standard, a number
of other factors besides wages must be considered. Did the peon have
access to hacienda lands, and on what terms? Was he a debt peon or
a free laborer?3If he was in debt, how strongly enforced and enforceable was the peonage system? If the rural worker was a sharecropper,
what part of his crop could he keep and how secure was his status?
If he was a tenant, under what conditions was the land granted and
what services did he have to perform for the hacienda? What possibility of vertical mobility did he have? To what degree were hacienda
laborers employed full-time and to what degree part-time?
This essay discusses regional variations in these various aspects
of labor conditions. It seeks to determine how widespread and how
important debt peonage was in Porfirian Mexico and to analyze the
circumstances in which debt peonage was employed or in which some
alternative form of labor discipline might be used.
Such questions are difficult to answer not only because of the
lack of quantitative data but also because of very contradictory tendencies in the Mexican agricultural system during the Di'az period.
The large-scale expropriation of Indian lands had created a new reservoir of available labor. Newly-developed plantations, mines, !nd to
a lesser degree, industries created a demand for labor. But demand
3. Debt peonage is a form of forced labor which develops when a number of
social and economic prerequisites for bondage in agriculture (such as a powerful
group of large landowners, a shortage of labor, etc.) exist but the state officially
refuses to implement bondage while tacitly tolerating and acknowledging it under
another name. This was the case in most Spanish colonies when the Spanish state
abolished or restricted Indian slavery and forced labor for Indians, such as the
encomienda and repartimiento, and proclaimed the freedom of the Indians. Debt
peonage was a device which officially recognized the Indians as free men but in
practice tied many Indian laborers to the estate they were working on. For the
Qrigin of this system see: Silvio Zavala, Los ortgines coloniales del peonaje en
Mexico (Madrid, 1935). The existence of debt peonage was not limited to Latin
America. See: Pete Daniel, The Shadow of Slavery: Peonage in the South (Chicago, 1972.)
There is a great amount of confusion concerning the term peon. Frequently
it is used as the'equivalent of debt peon. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Mexico the term peon was used simply to designate laborers, generally in
agriculture but sometimes also in mining; it did not by itself mean either a debt
peon or a resident laborer on an hacienda. Resident peons were designated by a
wide variety of names. The most frequently utilized was pe6n acasillado. In the
colonial period the terms naboria and g'ian were frequently used for such laborers.
In this paper the term debt peonage is used to designate resident peons tied to the
hacienda by debts. It does not include seasonal laborers also frequently tied to
the hacienda by debts, nor permanent resident workers who were not indebted to
the hacienda or whose debts to the hacienda were so minimal that they were not
tied to the hacienda.
LABOR CONDITIONS
ON HACIENDAS
3
and supply were not concentrated in the same areas. The largest expropriations took place in the most densely-populated region in the
center of Mexico. Plantations developed largely in the sparsely-settled
tropical lowlands of the South, while mining was concentrated in the
equally sparsely-populated northern states of the country. The development of the United States' Southwest after the Civil War, the
establishment of the railroad links between the United States and
Mexico, and the communications revolution inside Mexico itself had
a profound effect on the demand and supply of labor.
This paper aims to examine some of the effects of these developments on labor conditions on Porfirian haciendas. It does not pretend
to be a synthesis of conditions on Mexican haciendas during *the
Porfirian period. Very little research has been done up to now about
conditions prevailing on individual haciendas to allow for any kind
of serious synthesis. Here I will try simply to point out certain trends
existing in many areas of Mexico from 1876 to LgLo.
Labor Conditions Preceding the Porfiriato
Using available studies, certain trends and tendencies in hacienda
conditions of v-helate eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries can be
noted.4 Broadly speaking, four categories of workers labored on Mexi4. Bohumil Badura, "Biografia de la Hacienda de San Nicolas de Ulapa," IberoAmericana Pragensis, afio IV (1970). Ward Barrett, The Sugar Hacienda of the
Marqueses del Valle (Minneapolis, 1970). Jan Bazant, "Peones, Arrendatarios y
Medieros en Mexico. La Hacienda de Bocas hasta 1867" (paper presented at the
XL International Congress of Americanists, Rome, 1972). D. A. Brading, "The
Structure of Agricultural Production in the Mexican Bajlo during the Eighteenth
Century" (paper presented at the XL International Congress of Americanists,
Rome, 1972). Frangois Chevalier, La formation des grands domaines au Mexique;
terre et socie'te' au XVI-XVIIeme siecles (Paris, 1952). Ursula Ewald, "Das
Poblaner Jesuitenkollegium San Francisco Javier und sein Landwirtschaftlicher
Grossbesitz," Jahrbuch fuir Geschichte von Staat, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft
Lateinametikas, Bd. 8 (Koln, 1971). Ursula Ewald, "Versuche zur Anderung der
Besitzverhaltnisse in den letzten Jahrzehnten der Kolonialzeit; Bestrebungen im
Hochbecken von Puebla-Tlaxcala und seiner Umgebung sur Riickfiihrung von
Hacienda Land an Gutsarbeiter und Indianische Dorfgemeinschaften," Jahrbuch
fiir Geschichte von Staat, Wirtschaftund Gesellschaft Lateinamerikas,Bd. 7 (K6ln,
1970).
Enrique Florescano, Estructuras y Problemas Agrarios de Me'xico 1500-1821
(Mexico, 197]).
Charles Gibson, The Aztecs under Spanish Rule (Stanford, 1964).
Isabel Gonzalez Sanchez: "La retencion por deudas y los traslados de trabajadores
tlaquehuales o alquilados en las haciendas, como sustitucion de los repartimientos
de indios durante el siglo XVIII," Anales del Instituto Nacional de Antropologia
e Historia (Mexico, 1968). Charles H. Harris, III, "A Mexican Latifundio: The
Economic Empire of the Sanchez Navarro Family, 1765-1821,"
Ph.D. Diss. University of Texas at Austin, 1968. Charles Harris, The Sa'nchez Navarros: A Socioeconomic Study of a Coahuilan Latifundio, 1846-1853 (Chicago, 1964). James D.
Riley, "Santa Lucia: The Development and Management of a Jesuit Hacienda in
4
HAHR
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can haciendas: (1) permanent resident peons known under different
names, sometimes as peones acasillados, other times as gananes; most
of these peons were agricultural workers but some were cowboys,
shepherds, or artisans; (2)
temporary workers who worked the
hacendado's fields for a limited time in the year; (3) tenants; and
(4) sharecroppers. Variations, principally regional but also even
within single haciendas, might occur in each category.
The peones acasillados or ganianes resided permanently on the
hacienda. Their income came mainly from four sources. These were
the small plot of crop land put at their disposal by the hacendado;
a ration generally of maize, sometimes of other goods, given to them
yearly by the haciendas; the right to graze their animals on hacienda
land; and wages paid for every day they worked the hacendado's fields.
The relative importance of these kinds of income varied from hacienda
to hacienda. Cowboys and shepherds who were acasillados did not
have the use of land but received only food, rations, and grazing rights
from the hacienda. Frequently, the peons received no rations, but
with their wages could buy corn from the hacienda at prices below
the market price.5 The situation varied even within the same hacienda.
On the Hacienda de Bocas in San Luis Potosi, some of the peones
acasillados received regular rations of maize from the hacienda while
the majority purchased it at one peso fifty per fanega from the
hacienda.6
The peons' main obligation was to work the hacendado's lands or
tend his cattle whenever called upon to do so. But sometimes they
had to perform servant's duties, and occasionally they were even required to fight for the haciendas.7
On some haciendas there was a very clear division between groups
of privileged retainers and the other permanent workers of the
hacienda. On the Hacienda de Bocas there were fifty-five such privileged servants called peones acomodados. In contrast to the other resident peons, simply called peones acasillados, the acomodados received
the XVIIIth Century" (paper presented at the XL International Congress of
Americanists, Rome, 1972). Enrique Semo and Gloria Pedrero, "La vida en una
hacienda asseradera mexicana-a principios del siglo XIX" (paper presented at the
XL International Congress of Americanists, Rome, 1972). William B. Taylor,
Landlord and Peasant in Colonial Oaxaca (Stanford, 1972.)
5. Bazant, "Peones, Arrendatarios y Medieros," pp. 9, 19.
6. Ibid, pp. i6, 19.
7. John H. Coatsworth, "The Impact of Railroads on the Economic Development of Mexico, 1877-1910," Ph.D. Diss., University of Wisconsin, 1972, pp. 178212.
LABOR CONDITIONS
5
ON HACIENDAS
a regular ration from the hacienda in addition to plots of land. The
other 265 permanent workers of the hacienda received no such rations.8
On some haciendas all permanent workers were required to work for
a certain time without receiving any payment.9
With the exception of cattle ranches and haciendas located in the
marginal areas of Mexico it seems that permanent resident peons
generally constituted a minority of the work force on most Mexican
haciendas. The main work on haciendas was carried out by temporary
workers. These temporary workers formed a complex group much
more difficult to describe and assess than the resident peons. Temporary laborers could be inhabitants of free landowning Indian villages, or they could be small landowners looking for supplementary
income. Some came from villages close to the hacienda and lived in
their own village while laboring on the hacienda by day. Others came
from villages further removed from the hacienda and thus had to live
on the hacienda for an extended period of time. Sometimes they were
paid in cash, while at other times the hacienda put land at their disposal.10 Temporary workers could be given access to grazing lands,
or payment could consist of access to maguey plants, as in the case of
the Hacienda de San Nicolas de Ulapa.1"
While this kind of temporary labor predominated in central Mexico
with its large concentrations of Indian villages, in the Bajlo, Brading
has found an entirely different type of laborer: Indians known as
indios vagos.12 They were not permanent residents of free Indian villages but migratory laborers working part of the year on the hacienda
and then drifting either to other haciendas or to mines and cities to
find other kinds of work during the rest of the year.
A third group of temporary workers lived permanently on the
hacienda, with their main source of income coming from land which
the hacienda put at their disposal. Their plots of lands were larger
than those of resident peons, and they had to make payments in
produce or in cash to the hacienda for use of the land. In addition
they were obliged to work for the hacienda during certain parts of
the year. There were also other tenants and sharecroppers who did
8. Bazant, "Peones, Arrendatarios y Medieros," pp. 15-19.
9. Ibid., pp. 19, 50.
1o. Brading, "Agricultural Production," p. 37; Badura, "Biografia de la Hacienda," p. LoL; Bazant, "Peones, Arrendatarios y Medieros," pp. 29-30; Ewald,
"Das Poblaner Jesuitenkollegium," pp. 66-67; Gonzalez S'anchez, "La retencion de
trabajadores," ppI 248-249; Gibson, The Aztecs, p. 254.
ii. Badura,
12.
'Biografia
de la Hacienda,"
pp. 104-105.
Brading, "Agricultural Production," p. 35.
6
HAHR
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not perform any labor services but only paid the owner a fixed sum
or a share of their harvest.13
Tenants varied, from those renting large amounts of land14 or a
whole rancho to those using only small plots. Some had land of their
own outside the hacienda in addition to the land they rented. Some
tenants or sharecroppers worked their own land, while others hired
laborers. Some hired hacienda laborers at harvest time. Some were
required to sell their produce to the hacienda, others could do so on
the open market.'5
The variety of arrangements among sharecroppers was also very
great, but perhaps not quite as large as among tenants. Some hacendados were mainly interested in the part of the harvest the sharecroppers
turned over, while others considered their labor most important. Some
sharecroppers lived permanently on the hacienda, others in neighboring villages. Among them were subsistence farmers ekeing out a bare
existence and others who had a certain surplus to dispose of. Among
smaller tenants and sharecroppers arrangements generally were for
a short time only and the hacendado felt free to revoke or change
them at any time. Neither the Spanish state nor the Mexican state
which followed it did much to regulate such arrangements.
While it is not clear why some hacendados preferred tenantry and
others sharecropping, some tendencies do emerge. Brading has shown
that in the Bajio the replacement of sharecropping by tenantry arrangements was linked to an expanding market on the one hand and
to an increase in labor supply on the other.'6 An expanding market
made it possible for tenants to pay their rents in money while the
availability of labor made it less and less important for the haciendas
to have sharecroppers whom they could use as temporary laborers
during harvest time.17
Existing evidence suggests that debt peonage was of limited importance at the end of the colonial period and the beginning of the
nineteenth century. In the Valley of Mexico, Charles Gibson has found
that "in late colonial times debt peonage affected fewer than half the
workers on haciendas and the large majority of these owed debts
13. Ibid., pp. 32-33; Bazant, "Peones, Arrendatarios y Medieros," pp. 34-40;
Badura, "Biografia de la Hacienda," pp. 104-105.
14.
Bazant, "Peones,Arrendatariosy Medieros,"42ff.
15.
Ibid., pp. 36-42.
i6. Brading,"AgriculturalProduction,"p. 34.
17. In the Bajfo this change did not represent a concession to the laborers but
was considered by them as an additional burden which they so strongly resisted
that some were removedby force from the hacienda, ibid., pp. 33-34.
LABOR CONDITIONS
ON HACIENDAS
7
equal to three weeks' wages or less."18 The situation seems to have
been similar in most parts of central Mexico. In 1792 on the Hacienda
of San Nicolas de Ulapa in the Mezquital, Bohumil Badura has found
that 125 permanent residents owed a total of 889 pesos to the hacienda,
while the hacienda owed 1,420 pesos to 147 laborers.19 In the Bajio,
Brading also has found a number of haciendas on which the owner
owed the peons more than they owed him.20 On the Hacienda de
Bocas in San Luis Potosi in 1852, 183 permanent residents owed the
hacienda an average of 7.69 pesos each. The hacienda owed 64 peons
an average of 6.42 pesos. In addition, 21 peons were neither creditors
nor indebted to the hacienda, while 72 either owed less than one peso
or had "loaned" less than one peso to the hacienda.21
Debts to the hacienda did not necessarily imply debt peonage.
Evidence from the Hacienda de Bocas and from a number of confiscated Jesuit haciendas suggests that debt peonage was not always
strongly enforced. Peons, even indebted, who left haciendas in central
Mexico were frequently not brought back by force.22 In many parts
of the central Mexican plateau, therefore, debt and debt peonage may
have been less important up to the middle of the nineteenth century
than has generally been assumed.
The condition of indebted peons changes, however, the further one
moves from the central plateau. On the haciendas of the Sanchez
Navarros in Coahuila, Charles Harris found that practically all laborers
working on the hacienda were indebted to it. This indebtedness extended even to residents of the adjacent free villages of Tlaxcalan
Indians who provided only temporary labor. The Sanchez Navarros
had established a very effective police system for returning fugitive
peons to the hacienda.23
On Spanish estates in Oaxaca, where conditions were far less drastic than in the North, debts played a larger role than in central Mexico.
Average indebtedness was far larger. Of a sample of 475 peons owing
debts to Spanish haciendas in Oaxaca in 1790, Taylor found that 79.6
percent exceeded the legal limit of 6 pesos set by the Spanish Crown.
This limit presumably represented the maximum sum which an Indian
laborer could repay. He also found that in his sample of 475 debts
i8. Gibson, The Aztecs, p. 255.
19. Badura,"Biografiade la Hacienda,"p. 106.
20. Brading, "AgriculturalProduction,"p. ii, calls this a "reverseform of debt
peonage.
21. Bazant, "Peones,Arrendatariosy Medieros,"p. 26.
22. Ibid., pp. 28-29; Riley, "SantaLucia," pp. 28-29.
23. Harris,"MexicanLatifundio,"pp. 166-i68, 171-172.
8
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on fourteen Valley estates the average debt was 35.5 pesos. With
monthly wages generally set at 3.2 pesos, this represents roughly
eleven months work.24 While in the North the size of the debt was
automatically linked to coercive measures by the hacienda, Taylor sees
the problem as more complex in Oaxaca.
Although debt peonage in Oaxaca clearly had coercive overtones, the large debts may actually indicate that Oaxaca rural
laborers had a strong bargaining position. Certainly, 35.5 pesos
was much more than was necessary to perpetuate a laborer's
indebtedness.25
In Yucatan a clearly coercive system prevailed. Most of the laborers on the haciendas were permanent resident peons called luneros. In
return for a piece of land, and above all, for water flowing from sources
the hacienda controlled, peons were required to work without compensation every Monday. These laborers were generally bound by
debts to the hacienda.26 While during the struggle for Mexican independence some efforts were made to abolish debt peonage, this institution was reinforced by a law promulgated in Yucatan in 1843. This
law made it illegal to hire laborers who had left an hacienda without
paying their debts and required local authorities to return indebted
peons to their haciendas.27
What were the causes of these regional differences? In the case of
the North, there is every indication that low population density led
to a scarcity of labor which made the hacendados utilize all means
at their disposal to force laborers to remain on their haciendas. In
the cases of Oaxaca and Yucatan population density was much higher
than in the North. Not the absolute lack of laborers, but a greater
scarcity of free labor than in central Mexico might have played a key
role here. Why the scarcity? While this problem requires more research, two factors should be considered: a relatively larger number
of landowning Indian villages than in the central plateau, and more
powerful Indian caciques competing with the Spanish hacendados
for Indian laborers.28
Taylor, Landlordand Peasant, p. 149.
Ibid.
26. John L. Stephens, Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas and
Yucatan (New York, 1847), pp. 414ff.
27. Moises Gonzalez Navarro, Raza y tierra, la Guerrade Castas y el heneque'n
(Mexico, 1970), pp. 60-62.
28. Taylor, Landlordand Peasant, pp. 67-110. In few other Mexican states have
powerful Indian caciques played such a role as in Yucatan, see Moises Gonzalez
Navarro, Raza y tierra (Mexico, 1970). Nelson Reed, The Caste War in Yucatan
(Stanford, 1964).
24.
25.
LABOR CONDITIONS
ON HACIENDAS
9
In discussions of the late colonial hacienda, there is strikingly
little emphasis on exploitation through the company store (tienda de
raya), which became a source of so much complaint in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Riley finds that prices charged
by the company stores on Jesuit haciendas were no higher than prices
in surrounding stores.29 This seems to have changed radically in the
nineteenth century. The Emperor Maximilian tried to gain the support
of Indian peasants in 1865 by abolishing the tienda de raya.30 Why
this discrepancy between the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries and the second half of the nineteenth century? One can only
speculate. Perhaps the influence of Spanish merchants during the
colonial period, who did not want to give up lucrative markets, played
a role. The better bargaining position of Indian peasants in the eighteenth century, when they still held some of the land which they had
begun to lose in the nineteenth, may also explain these changes. The
tienda de raya requires a more detailed investigation.
The peones acasillados in central Mexico were not, as has frequently been assumed, the most downtrodden and oppressed of all
groups. They, along with cowboys and other non-agricultural laborers,
enjoyed a large measure of security and could always count on a
basic amount of goods and food. It has frequently been assumed that
they paid for all this with a complete loss of freedom. As has been
shown, this was not the case for all acasillados in the center of Mexico.
In the Bajio, Brading considers the acasillados a privileged elite in
comparison to other laborers on haciendas.31
This fact may explain in part the very different attitude assumed
during social struggles in Mexico by tenants and sharecroppers on the
29. Riley, "Santa Lucia," p. 22. Bazant, "Peones, Arrendatarios y Medieros," p.
leaves the issue in doubt as he found too little evidence. He states that cloth
was sold 33 percent over the wholesale price, which was below the 50 percent
commission generally charged by stores. Charles Harris, "Mexican Latifundio,"
also is not explicit about prices at the company stores. He does show that in the
case of the S'anchez Navarros the tienda de raya practically had an absolute monopoly (p. 211). In contrast to Bazant who estimates that wages on the Hacienda
de Bocas were sufficient to provide a minimum living standard (p. 23), Harris
found that on the estates of the S'anchez Navarros "even with the ration, and with
free housing in the form of a hut at one of the cascos, it was impossible for a
worker, especially a man with a family, to live on his salary" (p. i66). "The only
way a worker could make ends meet was by going into debt, which of course was
the object of the peonage system" (p. 167).
30. Ministerio de Gobernacion, Coleccion de leyes, decretos y reglamentos que
25
internamente forman el sistema pol'tico, administrativo y judicial del Imperio
(Mexico, 1865), pp. 185-187.
31. Brading, "Agricultural Production," p. 37. Moises Gonzalez Navarro also
stresses the "relative security of the indebted peons" in Yucat'an in comparison to
the "free Indians" by the end of the colonial period, Raza y tierra, pp. 20-21.
10
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one hand and by peones acasillados on the other. Most of the peasant
uprisings which took place in Mexico in the eighteenth, nineteenth,
and twentieth centuries stemmed from inhabitants of free Indian villages trying to keep or regain their lands or to protest against high
taxes. There were some movements, however, which took place on
haciendas. In the few cases in which the social origins of the participants have been traced, they were not peones acasillados but mainly
tenants. The rising on the Hacienda de Bocas in 1780, was in the main,
the work of tenants, and only one peo'n acasillado seems to have participated.32 When the inhabitants of Capura, a village near Pachuca,
rose against the government in 1869, they were joined by many of the
tenants on adjacent haciendas.33 On the other hand, in those cases
where hacendados organized retainers to fight against Indian villages,
it was peones acasillados and cowboys on whom they counted.34 In
1870 the Hacienda of San Miguel used its peones acasillados to repel
an attack by neighboring villagers who had lost their lands to the
hacienda.35 The first manifestation of the Revolution of 1g9o in the
village of Naranja in Michoacan was an attack by local villagers, not
against the federal authorities, but against the peones acasillados of a
neighboring hacienda which had taken away their lands.36
32. Bazant, "Peones, Arrendatarios y Medieros," pp. 48-49. Bazant found similar tendencies in another uprising which took place in San Luis Potosi in the
nineteenth century. "La sublevacion de la Sierra Gorda que propugno por reducir
o abolir las rentas, pero no por aumentar el jornal del peon, parece confirmar la
informacion de Bocas en el sentido de que los arrendatarios, y no los peones permanentes, se hallaban en una situacion critica, por lo menos en algunas partes del
Estado de San Luis Potosi" (Bazant, p. 42). This seems to have been the case
during one of Mexico's most important Indian revolts, the "guerra de castas" in
Yucatan in the nineteenth century. According to Moises Gonzailez Navarro, "la
guerra fue iniciada e impulsada por los mayas de la frontera, los huits, y por
quienes solo recientemente habian dejado de pertencer a esa categoria. Los mayas
occidentales, en cambio, por largo tiempo acostumbrados al peonaie acabaron por
unirse a los blancos.
These Indians "habian transferido su lealtad del pueblo
a la hacienda" (Gonzalez Navarro, Raza y tierra, p. 87).
33. Jesus Silva Herzog El agrarismo mexicano y la reforma agraria (Mexico,
1959), pp. 97-98.
34. Gonzalez Navarro, Raza y tierra, p. 87.
35. Coatsworth, "The Impact," pp. 245-249.
36. Paul Friedrich, Agrarian Revolt in a Mexican Village (Englewood Cliffs,
New Jersey, 1970), p. 51. In spite of these tendencies the passivity of hacienda
peons should not be exaggerated. In some cases resident peons did develop social
movements of their own, but unlike the inhabitant of communal villages, in most
cases these peons limited their action to appeals to government authorities. Frangois
Chevalier describes the efforts of inhabitants of haciendas in northern Mexico as
well as Guanajuato to secure the independent status of pueblos for themselves at
the end of the eighteenth and during the first half of the nineteenth centuries
(Frangois Chevalier, "The North Mexican Hacienda: Eighteenth and Nineteenth
Century," The New World Looks at Its History (Austin, Texas, 1963), pp. 101-
LABOR CONDITIONS
ON HACIENDAS
11
Despite limited data, it is evident that something can already be
said about the relative position of the different groups of laborers in
pre-Porfirian Mexico in terms of their status, living standards, access
to goods, and satisfaction with existing socio-economic structures.
Sources on the Porfirian Hacienda
To what degree did patterns which existed in the late eighteenth
and early nineteenth centuries on Mexican haciendas persist into the
Porfirian period? One of the main difficulties faced by historians trying
to examine this problem is the nature of the sources they have to work
with. It seems contradictory at first that less information is available
and less work has been done on haciendas at the end of the nineteenth
and beginning of the twentieth centuries than on those of previous
periods. After all, this period is much less remote in time, statistics
began to develop in Mexico by the end of the nineteenth century, and
many of the participants are still alive.
Successful agrarian revolutions generally tend to produce a large
literature describing conditions on estates prior to revolution. Archives
of confiscated estates are generally made available to historians by the
new revolutionary governments. But Mexico is a conspicuous exception to this rule. Not one major description of conditions on the Porfirian hacienda has as yet been published.37 The few descriptions of
hacienda conditions based on hacienda archives which have been
published so far practically all go back to the colonial period or the
1o6). Ewald, "Versuche zur Anderung," found similar attempts being made in
the Puebla-Tlaxcala region. Most appear to have been unsuccessful (pp. 245-247),
but in a few cases, such efforts by resident peons achieved their aims. In the last
years of the Spanish colonial administration the resident peons of the Hacienda de
San Miguel obtained the approval of the Spanish authorities to found an autonomous pueblo named San Sebastian Buenavista on hacienda lands (pp. 246-247).
A few very rare instances are recorded in the nineteenth century in which acasillados seem to have taken part in armed uprisings. In 1869 Chavez Lopez a peasant
revolutionary operating between Chalco and Puebla, called on the acasillados to
rise. He accused the hacendados of having "subjected us to the greatest possible
abuses; they have established a system of exploitation by which means we are
denied the simplest pleasures of life." He seems to have had a measure of success
and more than 1,500 men joined him in his uprising. Though there is no evidence
as to the type of peasants who joined his movement the fact that he appealed to
the acasillados indicates that he at least expected to gain their support (John M.
Hart, "Mexican Agrarian Precursors," The Americas, 29:2[October 1972],131150).
37. Unpublished studies on Mexican haciendas during the Porf?riato are also
rare. An important exception is Edith Boorstein Couturier, "Hacienda of Hueyapan:
The History of a Mexican Social and Economic Institution, 1550-1940," Ph.D.
Diss., Columbia University, 1965, which describes in great detail the history and
organization of an hacienda near Pachuca.
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early nineteenth century. It is not the purpose of this paper to examine
the complicated reasons for this. Probably, the fact that twenty-four
years elapsed between the beginning of the Mexican Revolution and
the time when agrarian reform began to be carried out on a large
scale, as well as the fact that hacendados generally managed to retain
part of their property and its archives, are factors contributing to this
lack of data. Since the hacendados constituted the main point of attack of the Mexican revolutionary government, there was no reason
for them, as long as they retained control of their archives, to put
them at the disposal of historians.
Porfirian statistics, except for some limited data for 1884,38do not
reflect much interest in debt peonage nor in tenantry or sharecropping
arrangements on haciendas. As long as records of individual haciendas
are not made available to researchers, the main sources available to
them will be of four kinds: (i ) accounts by contemporary journalists
and social reformers; (2) parliamentary debates, some during the Dlaz
period but mainly from the Madero years; (3) local historical and
anthropological surveys; (4) reports by foreign diplomats.
While the first of these constitutes an extremely valuable and important group of sources,39 its usefulness is limited by the Diaz government's control of most of the press and the opposition newspapers'
limited circulation and sporadic character. Everything was done to
prevent opposition journalists and social reformers from gaining access to Porfirian haciendas. Information made available by these
sources, therefore, is not continuous and tends to concentrate on the
most glaring inequities of the system. There are a relatively large
38. Some statistical data on debt peonage in southeastern Mexico in 1884 is
contained in, Informes y documentos relativos a comercio, interior y exterior, agricultura e industria, julio 1885 a febrero de i8gi, 65 vols. (Mexico, 1885-1891).
39. Andres Molina Enriquez, Los grandes problemas nacionales (Me6xico, 1909o);
Wistano Luis Orozco, Legislacio'n y jurisprudencia sobre terrenos baldios (Me6xico,
1885); Wistano Luis Orozco, "La cuestion agraria," in Jesus' Silva Herzog, La
cuestio'n de la tierra (Me6xico, 1960); John Kenneth Turner, Barbarous Mexico
(Austin, 1969). Much valuable information on labor conditions in the Mexican
countryside is contained in the proceedings of Catholic agrarian congresses which
took place in the first years of the twentieth century; see: Congreso Agrtcola de
Tulancingo (Me'xico, 1905). Important data can be found in the newspaper
Regeneracio'n edited by the Flores Magon brothers. The huge body of literature by
foreign travelers who visited Mexico in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, has
not yet been systematically studied and evaluated. The best description of social
conditions on Mexican haciendas which I found are contained in: Channing Arnold
and Frederic J. Tabor Frost, The American Egypt. A record of travel in Yucata'n
(London, 1909); Henry Baerlein, Mexico, the Land of Unrest (London, 1912);
Charles Flandrau, Viva Mexico (Urbana, 1964); Harry Graf Kessler, Notizen iiber
Mexiko (Leipzig, 1921).
LABOR CONDITIONS
ON HACIENDAS
13
number of pamphlets, articles, and books on debt peonage in Yucat'an
or the Valle Nacional in Oaxaca, but very little was published in the
Diaz period about haciendas in central Mexico and in the North.
Debates in the Mexican Congress constitute an important source
only for a limited period of time. Very little debate on hacienda conditions went on in the Porfirian period. After 1917, when peonage had
been legally and to a large degree practically abolished, debates concentrated on agrarian reform. Only during the Madero period, when
agrarian reformers were represented in Parliament while debt peonage
continued to subsist, did large-scale debates on this subject take
place.40
Local histories and local anthropological accounts are becoming
increasingly important as sources. Nevertheless, up to now, some of
the best anthropological and historical accounts have concentrated on
communities which managed to retain their lands in the Diaz period.4'
This trend has only been reversed in the last few years by such studies
as that of the village of Naranja in Michoac?anby Paul Friedrich42
and the study of a large hacienda of the Garcla Pimentels in the state
of Morelos now being carried out by a number of anthropologists of
the Universidad Ibero-Americana.43
Some of the most interested observers of labor conditions in the
Porfirian period were foreign diplomats who were required to make
exact reports available to prospective investors. The most ambitious
and thorough, as well as least known of such reports was prepared
by the German agricultural attache in Buenos Aires, Karl Kaerger.
After the Spanish-American War of 1898 the German Kaiser considered the possibility of a German-American conflict. For this reason,
he was interested in diminishing German dependence on agricultural
imports from North America. As Latin America was seriously considered as an alternative to the United States, Kaerger was sent on a
mission of nearly three years to examine agricultural conditions
40. The most important speeches on the subject in the Mexican congress as
well as relevant articles and brochures were published by Jesus Silva Herzog in
La cuestio'n de la tierra, 4 vols. (Me'xico, 1960).
41. Oscar Lewis, Life in a Mexican Village: Tepoztla'n Restudied (Urbana,
1951); Robert Redfield, Tepoztlan, A Mexican Village (Chicago, 1930); Luis
Gonzalez y Gonzalez, Pueblo en vilo; microhistoriade San Jose'de Gracia (Me'xico,
1968).
42. Friedrich, Agrarian Revolt.
43. I would like to express my thanks to Professor Arturo Warman and the research team he heads at the Universidad Ibero Americana for the information they
have supplied me concerning social and economic conditions on the Hacienda of
Santa Ana Tenango in Morelos.
14
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throughout Latin America. Since he was to make a detailed study of
Latin American agriculture with a view to increasing exports to
Germany and stimulating increased German investments, labor conditions in Latin American agriculture played a very prominent role in
his reports. Kaerger was eminently fitted for this task. He had worked
for many years on agricultural conditions in Germany, especially on
Prussian estates and had published a number of reports on the conditions of Polish migrant agricultural workers in Germany. During his
trip, Kaerger found a large measure of co-operation from LatinAmerican landowners. Some were Germans, others were linked to the
large number of German traders operating in different parts of Latin
America and still others hoped for German investments in their properties. The result of this trip is a unique document, published in 19go
in Leipzig, which constitutes one of the bases of the present study.44
The South
As we have seen, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries labor conditions in Mexico showed two broad patterns: that of
the South and the North on the one hand and that of the Center on
the other. But in the Porfirian era labor on Mexican haciendas evolved
in three different ways in the tropical South, the central plateau and
highlands, and in the North of the country.
The large-scale increase of demand for products of the tropical
lowlands, embracing essentially the states of Yucat'an,Tabasco, Chiapas,
parts of Oaxaca and Veracruz, led to a corresponding increase in
production there. From 1877 to 1g1o production of rubber, coffee,
44. Karl Kaerger, Landwirtschaft und Kolonisation im Spanischen Siidamerika,
vols. (Leipzig, 1901-1902).
The original text, containing a few p-aragraphs
which are not to be found in the printed version, is located in: Deutsches Zentralarchiv Potsdam AAII 14460. For more information on the Kaeraer mission see
Friedrich Katz, Deutschland, Diaz und die Mexikanische Revoluttion (Berlin,
1964), pp. 154-156. While Kaerger's report constitutes by far the most valuable
description of labor conditions on Mexican haciendas, a number of American reports are also of importance. The best of these are contained in a collection of
reports by officials in over forty different Mexican localities; "Agricultural Labor in
Mexico," Reports from the Consuls of the United States on the Commerce, Manufactures, etc. of their Consular Districts, N. 67, September i886 (Washington,
i.886) pp. 525ff. Another report from 1896 (Special Consular Reports, Money and
Prices in Foreign Countries. Vol. XIII, part I., [Washington, 1896], p. iiiff.) describes wages and prices but does not contain information on working conditions.
The Bulletin of the Department of Labor, VI Washington, 1902,
iff. contains a detailed report by Walter E. Weyl on "Labor Conditions in Mexico." Unlike
Kaerger, Weyl does not base his report on first hand observation but on secondary
sources.
2
LABOR CONDITIONS
15
ON HACIENDAS
tobacco, sisal, and sugar increased sharply.45 With the exception of
sugar, a large part of which was cultivated in the central zone, most
of these products came from the tropical lowlands.
Southern planters resorted to four different methods to increase
output: (1) some increase in the use of machinery; (2) utilization of
outside labor; (3) changes in the mode of utilization of hacienda
labor; and (4) increasing use of laborers from communal villages.
Mechanization was limited to the transformation of raw materials.
Practically no effort was made to use machines for planting or harvest;
labor was cheaper than machines.46
To the southern planters, outside labor primarily meant labor from
other parts of Mexico. European labor was considered too expensive
and one attempt to bring Italian workers to Yucatan was a failure.
Chinese and Korean indentured laborers were brought to Yucat'an,
but many could not withstand the climate, the diseases and harsh
treatment, and became ill or died.47 This alone would not have constituted a sufficient reason for discontinuing the practice, but foreign
labor importation ceased during the Diaz period because more and
more labor from within the country became available.
Technically, such laborers were divided into two categories, deportees and voluntary contract workers. In practice, there was scarcely
a difference between them. The deportees were: (1) members of
frontier Indian tribes who had resisted the confiscation of their lands
45. On this matter, the following table is instructive:
Commodity Production Increases, 1877-1910
Commoditya
Rubber
Coffee
Tobacco
Sisal
Sugar
1877
27
8,i6i
7,504
11,383
629,757
(in tons)
1910
7,443
28,014
8,223
128,849
2,503,825
Source: El Colegio de Mexico, Estadtsticas economicas del Porfiriato:Fuerza
de trabajo y actividad economica por sectores (Mexico, 1961), pp 71-82.
a Cotton is not included here since it was cultivated mainly in the North;
labor conditions there will be examined in connection with northern Mexico.
46. See Lauro Viadas, "El problema de la pequefia propiedad" in Jesi's Silva
Herzog, La cuestio'n de la tierra (Mexico, 1960), p. 117. Kaerger, Landwirtschaft
und Kolonisation, II, 650.
47. Gonzalo Camara Zavala, Reseiia historica de la industria henequera de
Yucatdn (Me'rida, 1936), p. 59. Deutsches Zentralarchiv, Potsdam Nr. 1571;
Deutsche Gesandtschaft in China. Emigration nach Mexiko, 1gog-1g9o.
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by Mexican hacendados, principally the Yaquis of Sonora, thousands
of whom were sent to Yucatan;48 (2) political dissenters from central
and northern Mexico who had resisted the Diaz regime, mostly
villagers and urban workers who were sent to the plantations of
Yucatan, the Valle Nacional in Oaxaca, or to Tabasco;49 and (3)
criminals, including genuine criminals too poor to buy their way out
of prison or at least out of deportation, as well as vagrants and the
unemployed considered criminal only by Porfirian standards.50
The contract workers were mainly expropriated peasants and unemployed workers from Mexico City, as well as from other parts of
central Mexico, lured to the tropics by promises of higher pay or
simply made to sign labor contracts while drunk or drugged. The
enganchado, literally the "hooked one," a contemporary observer sympathetic to the Diaz regime wrote, "was generally a man who was
practically Shanghaied from the cities of the temperate and cold zones
of Mexico. Often disease-ridden, almost inevitably soaked with pulque,
captured and signed up for labor when they were intoxicated, these
men were brought down practically in chain gangs by the contractors
and delivered at so many hundred pesos per head. They were kept
in barbed wire inclosures, often under ghastly sanitary conditions,
their blood vitiated with drink and tainted with disease, and were
easy victims of tropical insects, dirt and infection."51
In 1914 Woodrow Wilson's special representative in Mexico, John
Lind, together with the commander of the American fleet in Veracruz,
Admiral Fletcher, was invited to visit a Veracruz sugar plantation
owned by an American, Sloane Emery, which depended entirely on
contract workers. "They were contract laborers," John Lind later reported
who were virtually prisoners and had been sent there by the
government. Admiral Fletcher and I saw this remarkable situation in the twentieth century of men being scattered through
the corn fields in little groups of eight or ten accompanied by
a driver, a cacique, an Indian from the coast, a great big burly
fellow, with a couple of revolvers strapped to a belt, and a black
snake that would measure eight or ten feet, right after the
group that were digging, and then at the farther end of the
road a man with a sawed-off shotgun. These men were put out
in the morning, were worked under these overseers in that
48. Gonzalez Navarro, Raza y tierra,pp. 223-229.
49. Turner, BarbarousMexico, pp. 57-63, 92, 131.
50. Ibid., p. 59.
51. Wallace Thompson, The People of Mexico (New York,
1921),
p.
327.
LABOR CONDITIONS
ON HACIENDAS
17
manner, and locked up at night in a large shed to all intents
and purposes. Both Admiral Fletcher and I marveled that such
conditions could exist, but they did exist.52
John Kenneth Turner found similar conditions in the tobacco plantations of the Valle Nacional of Oaxaca, which he vividly described
in his now famous Barbarous Mexico. According to Turner, the average life-span of an enganchado in the Valle Nacional was less than a
year. "The Valle Nacional slave-holder," Turner wrote, "has discovered
that it is cheaper to buy a slave for 45 dollars and work and starve him
to death in seven months and then spend 45 dollars for a fresh slave
then it is to give the first slave better food, work him less sorely, and
stretch out his life and his toiling hours over a longer period of time."53
Contract labor was also widespread in lumber-producing areas of
Mexico's southeastern state of Tabasco. Workers there were attracted
to the Mejares properties by promises of high wages. These promises
were effectively kept for the duration of one year. After that, instead
of being allowed to return home, the laborer was kept on the property
and forced to work for less than half of his first year's wages by the
Mejares brothers.54
Living and laboring conditions of many acasillados in southeastern
Mexico were becoming more and more similar to those of the contract workers. These changes can be most clearly seen by the evolution of the status of the acasillados on sisal plantations in Yucat'an.
Prior to the introduction of sisal on a large scale, Yucatecan haciendas
had produced chiefly maize and raised cattle. Labor conditions of
acasillados in this earlier period were aptly described by roving diplomat and archaelogist, Tohn Lloyd Stephens, in his Incidents of Travel
in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatan. In 1845 he described an
hacienda he visited as "thirty miles square but only a small portion is
cultivated and the rest is mere roaming ground for cattle." He noted
that although there were some vaqueros "who receive twelve dollars
per year with five almudes of maize per week," the bulk of the laborers were luneros so called "from their obligation, and in consideration
of their drinking the water of the hacienda, to work for the master
without pay on lunes or Monday." Stephens observed that "there is no
obligation upon him to remain on the hacienda unless he is in debt
52. United States Senate Documents.
Foreign Relations Committee. Investigation of Mexican Affairs. 2 vols. 66th Congress. Second Session. Senate Document
No. 62, Washington 19i9. Testimony of John Lind, Vol. II, p. 2326.
53. Turner, Barbarous Mexico, p. 67.
54. J. D. Ramirez Garrido, "La esclavitud en Tabasco, Mexico 1915," in Silva
Herzog, La cuestion de la tierra, IV, 35.
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to the master, but practically this binds him hand and foot."55 Later,
because of massive increases in the production of sisal at the encd of
the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, the area of
maize production was sharply reduced in Yucat'anfrom 15,000 hectares
in 1845 to 4,500 hectares in 1907.56 One of the clearest consequences
of this was a large scale reduction of the lands put at the disposal of
the hacienda laborers. In many cases, only a few privileged retainers
still had access to hacienda lands; the great majority of acasillados
became completely dependent upon food supplied by the haciendas.57
This loss of access to land eliminated one of the greatest differences
between debt peonage and slavery.
The tendency for the acasillados to decline into slave-like conditions expressed itself in another way. In the classic system of debt
peonage, when a peon wanted to transfer from one hacienda to another, his new master had to assume his debt. When an hacienda was
sold, these debts were added up. In Yucat'an this practice, though
existent in theory, had been superseded by another. The peon's value
was decided by a market price independent of the peon's debt but
very much dependent on general market conditions, especially on the
price of sisal. Around 1895 the price of a peon was quoted at between
two and three hundred pesos. In Lgoo, with a sharp rise in the price
of sisal, the price of a worker rose to between 1,50o and 3,000 pesos.58
After the crisis of 1907, it fell back to 400 pesos.59
In the early years of the Diaz period, 'until the turn of the century, the conditions of these acasillados we4e, nevertheless, far better
than those of the deportees or contract workers. The hacendados retained some minimum of mutual obligations in relations with their
acasillados. In go9LKarl Kaerger reported that
the legal means to bind criados to an hacienda consists in an
advance payment which in this state means that a worker who
leaves can be returned by force by the police to the hacienda.
These advance payments are generally made when a young man
born on the hacienda reaches the age of i8 or 20 and marries.
55. Stephens, Incidents of Travel, p. 414.
56. El Henequ-en,Revista editada por la Comisi6n Reguladora del Henequen
(April 30, 1918), p. 14.
57. Baerlein, Mexico, p. i66.
58. Hubert Boecken, "Der Sisalhanf,"Der Tropenpflanzer,4. Jrg. 1900, I, 23.
59. Turner, BarbarousMexico, p. io. The fact that the real debt a peon accumulated was unimportantif an hacendado was determined to keep him on his
hacienda is repeatedly stressed by a wide variety of sources. The hacendado would
apply parent's debts to their sons, falsify records, or simply declare a peon to be
indebted to him.
LABOR CONDITlONS
ON HACIENDAS
19
His master then gives him a hundred to a hundred and fifty,
sometimes two hundred pesos, to set up a household and both
parties silently agree that this sum as well as other sums which
might be advanced at a later date in case of accident or illnesses would never be repaid. They are the price for which the
young Yucateco sells his freedom.60
In the last years of the Porfiriato the situation of these acasillados
became progressively worse. As the price of sisal fell and the pressure
of the International Harvester Corporation on the Yucatecan planters
increased, salary advances to workers constantly decreased.61
These accounts should not create the impression that uniform labor
conditions existed throughout the tropical southeast of Mexico. Differences were not only regional in nature, but even varied between
neighboring haciendas. On some haciendas contract workers predominated, others relied mainly on landless acasillados. In still others,
traditional types of peonage predominated, with the acasillados provided plots of land that they could till. Above all, there was an essential difference between those haciendas and plantations relying mainly
on a permanent labor force and those that relied mainly on temporary workers, at planting and harvest time. On the coffee plantations in Chiapas, the cacao plantations of Tabasco, and some of
the tobacco-raising haciendas most of the labor force was temporary.
On a coffee plantation in Soconusco, Kaerger found 240 temporary
workers and only 50 permanent ones.62 This discrepancy was even
greater on a tobacco finca in San Andres Tuxtla which employed 264
temporary and only 14 permanent laborers.63 In the German coffee
plantations in the Soconusco region of Chiapas, most laborers were
migrant workers from the highlands who were employed for only
two to three months. The plantation gave them a small wage advance
and paid for their transportation to the coffee finca. Their wagesfour reales (fifty centavos)-were reduced further by paying them in
Guatemalan currency, worth 25 percent less than Mexican money.64
Kaerger provided us with one of the few descriptions we have of
the operation of the tienda de raya, the company store. "The migrant
workers," he wrote, "are required to buy their own food at the finca.
Except for maize the finca has a relatively high profit from this trans6o. Kaerger, Landwirtschaftund Kolonisation,II, 490.
6i. Friedrich Katz, "Plantagenwirtschaft und Sklaverei: Der Sisalbau auf der
Halbinsel Yucatan bis 1910," Zeitschrift fur Geschichtswissenschaft, VI. Berlin,
Jahrgang 1959, Heft 5, p. 1024-1025.
62. Kaerger,Landwirtschaftund Kolonisation,II, 543.
63. Ibid., 511.
64. Ibid., 543-544.
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action. A bullock costing 40 pesos is sold for 8o. An almud of beans
which has cost one and a half pesos is sold for $2.25." Irrespective
of the market price, the hacienda was required to furnish an almud
of maize for 50 centavos. The result of this system was that the laborers
had no money left when their contract ended. Since they needed funds
to return home and the hacienda generally did not pay for transportation back to the laborer's home town, or provide means to subsist
once they had returned, the plantation owner gave each of them a
small sum of money. This was considered an advance on the next
year's wages and meant that the laborers were forced to return next
season to pay off their debt.65
These newer forms of slavery and forced labor had diminished but
had not eliminated the older forms of debt peonage. On most plantations relying mainly on temporary forced labor, there was a basic stock
of acasillados who lived on the hacienda permanently and obtained
a piece of land from it, generally not large enough to fulfill completely
their fooa requirements. On cacao plantations in Tabasco they received half a zontle (2.24 hectares) of arable land from the hacienda,
in return for working the hacienda's land whenever asked to do so,
for 25 centavos and a food ration per day. On the tobacco plantations
of San Andres Tuxtla the acasillados also received land to raise maize;
they were also obliged to work the hacienda's lands whenever required
to do so, for 50 centavos per day without food. A similar system existed on the coffee fincas of Soconusco, where an acasillado received
between ilo and 15 cuerdas of land, in order to plant maize and beans.
He was also required to work the finca's land whenever asked to do
so, for 50 centavos per day.66
65. Ibid., 545-547. Complaints about the tienda de raya play a decisive role
in all writings about the Porfirian period. In his famous speech to the Mexican
Congress in December, 1912, Luis Cabrera summarized them when he stated: "La
tienda de raya no es un simple abuso de los hacendados; es una necesidad economica de el sistema de manejo de una finca; no se concibe una hacienda sin
tienda de raya" (Luis Cabrera, "La reconstitucion de los ejidos de los pueblos," in
Jesu's Silva Herzog, La. cuestio6nde la tierra, II, 296). Essentially the company
store fulfilled three functions: (1) It was to a great extent there that peons became indebted to the hacienda. (2) It provided a large supplementary margin of
profit to the hacendado who arbitrarily set the prices at the tienda de raya- often
selling low quality merchandise at inflated prices. (3) The hacendado saved money
by not paying cash but selling products manufactured on the hacienda. This greatly
reduced his dependence on outside markets.
66. Kaerger, Landwirtschaft und Kolonisation, II, 543. The hacienda tended to
treat the full-time peons better than the temporary laborers. Not only did they
represent a larger investment but the hacienda probably hoped to gain some measure of loyalty from them. This contrast is vividly illustrated by J. K. Turner in a
conversation he had with a part-time peon in Yucatan: "'Which would you rather
be,' I asked of him, 'a half-timer or a full-timer?'-'A full-timer' he replied promptly,
LABOR CONDITIONS
ON HACIENDAS
21
Alongside these groups most plantations also employed free laborers from neighboring villages. Their wages were generally higher than
those of the acasillados or the temporary forced workers. In the
Soconusco region laborers indebted to the hacienda received four
reales a day, free laborers five.67
Laborers on haciendas clearly did not constitute a mass of peons
living under identical conditions but a very complex hierarchy of
social groups. There were differences in access to land, differences in
access to resources, differences in access to the hacienda's paternalism,
and differences in ethnic and social origin.
As the system went far beyond traditional types of debt peonage,
new ways of enforcement had to be set up. At the top of the system
were national authorities. The army and the rurales fought the Yaquis
in the north and the Maya in Quintana Roo and were instrumental in
carrying out their deportation. At the bottom, a large number of state
and local authorities, private contractors and hacienda policemen
supervised the workings of the system. "So valuable did this labor
become," an observer wrote, "that bribery and government coercion,
special detectives and policemen had to be called in to capture and
return the peons who ran away from their contracts and judges and
the mayors of towns were induced to arrest the runaways."68
Local authorities not only enforced the system, but they very frequently were involved in it as contractors. In Pochutla, the jefe
politico provided the plantation owners with laborers from the villages under his authority. If the peons fled before the contract expired,
the jefe politico returned them to the haciendas.69 In Tabasco, nunicipal authorities of Tenosique or Balancan regularly returned laborers
who had fled from the Mejares lumber property.70 Jefes pol'ticos of
four large southern Mexican cities regularly sent prisoners as contract
workers to the Valle Nacional.7' A large number of private contractors
also had sprung up to furnish laborers to the plantations. The large
ones did their recruiting in Mexico City itself.72
In addition, village caciques organized and supervised cuadrillas
and then in a lower tone: 'they work us until we are ready to fall, then they throw
us away to get strong again. If they worked the full-timers like they work us they
would die.'" (Turner, Barbarous Mexico, p. 23).
67. Kaerger,Landwirtschaftund Kolonisation,II, 543.
68. Thompson, The People of Mexico, pp. 326-327.
69. Kaerger,Landwirtschaftund Kolonisation,II, 535.
70. Ramirez Garrido, "La Esclavitud," p. 36.
71. Turner, Barbarouis
Mexico, p. 59.
72. Thompson, The People of Mexico, pp. 327-328. Turner, Barbarous Mexico,
p. 6i.
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of laborers from their villages. In this way, seasonal workers from the
Huasteca region of Veracruz were brought to Yucatecan sisal plantations. The contractors who brought, supervised, and returned the
laborers to their native villages received 6 percent of their wages from
the hacienda.73 The hold that these contractors had on their fellow
villagers is not clear. Were they local merchants or caciques whose
authority rested on traditional bases, or were they government officials? Research needs to be done on this.
On the tobacco plantations of San Andres Tuxtla land was leased
out to tenants called habilitados who had to tend a large number of
tobacco plants and hire laborers on their own account. On the coffee
fincas of the Soconusco district every coffee finca had a recruiter and
supervisor called habilitador with at least two helpers whose duty
it was to recruit laborers in the highlands, bring them to the plantation and recapture them if they escaped. The importance attached
to these habilitadores is shown by the relatively high wages they were
paid. They received 1oo pesos a month, the same as a chief of police
in Mexico City. The wages of their helpers varied from seventeen to
twenty pesos a month.74
How effective was this whole system of supervision in maintaining
the new slavery and the forms of forced labor, in preventing escape
and curbing resistance? There is little doubt that the system was most
effective in controlling and restraining the deportees and contract
workers. There are scarcely any reports of revolts or uprisings by
these groups. They were in a completely alien environment, which
made escape difficult and resistance rare and unlikely. Frequently very
heterogeneous groups, such as Yaquis and convicts from Mexico City,
were placed together and this also made concerted action difficult.
Peons of local origin, who were less closely supervised and knew
conditions well, had a better chance of escaping and sometimes tried
to do so. An independent Maya state in Quintana Roo gave asylum to
escapees from the rest of Yucat'an, but after the Mexican army subjugated this state in 1902, the last avenue of escape was closed. Many
never tried to flee. As their families had lived near or on the hacienda
for centuries and there were no industrial centers nearby, escape was
not considered a serious possibility.75
The cuadrilla workers, temporary forced laborers, most frequently
tried to escape. In the Soconusco region, about 30 percent of the contract workers escaped before their contract expired. Since they re73. Kaerger, Landwirtschaft uind Kolonisation, II, 491.
74. Ibid., 544. Walter F. Weyl: Labor Conditions in Mexico, p. 63.
75. Reed, The Caste War, p. 48. Gonzalez Navarro, Raza y tierra, p. 87.
LABOR CONDITIONS
ON HACIENDAS
23
turned sooner or later to their own villages, it was not difficult either
for the jefe politico or the policeman sent by the hacienda to return
them to the plantation.76
These coercive mechanisms facilitated a phenomenal increase in
the production of tropical goods during the Porfirian period. The
beneficiaries of this plantation system, outside of Yucatan, were mainly
foreigners: German coffee planters in Chiapas, Spanish and Cuban
tobacco producers in the Valle Nacional, American rubber planters in
the Tehuantepec area. In Yucat'anthe sisal hacendados were all Mexican. The principal beneficiaries of the increase in sisal production up
to 1g9o, however, were not the producers but the International Harvester Company.77
Why did conditions akin to slavery appear in southern Mexico at
a time when in most other parts of Latin America legal slavery was
being abolished or in decline? The rise of slave-like conditions in
Porfirian Mexico was linked to a number of factors, none of which
alone would be able to account sufficiently for this development:
(1) A sharp increase in the demand for tropical goods, closely related to the development of railroads and other means of communications that linked plantation regions to markets.
The existence in central Mexico of a large reservoir of expro(2)
priated peasants uncommitted to haciendas and not absorbed by a
slowly developing industry.
(3) The lack of industry and mining in southern Mexico facilitated
enslavement there as neither industrialists nor miners competed for
labor. As will be shown in the description of northern Mexico, such a
demand could considerably weaken the power of the hacendados over
their labor.
(4) A strong government willing to help in the rise of this system
of neo-slavery. Increasing revenues from foreign investment and especially the building of railroads, had greatly strengthened the power
of the Diaz government. It had set up a strong police force, the
rurales, as well as a relatively strong army capable of crushing local
peasant resistance and uprisings (though not, as was to be shown in
1g9o, capable of withstanding a revolution on a national scale). The
Diaz government was blatantly linked to the enslavement of masses
of Yaquis and Mayas.
(5) Southern Mexico's geographic isolation facilitated government
control and made the emigration of workers difficult.
76. Kaerger, Landwirtschaft und Kolonisation, II, 552-553.
77. Katz, "Plantagenwirtschaft,"pp.
1002-1010.
24
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Central Mexico
The situation of the haciendas in central Mexico was in many respects radically different from that which existed in the tropical South.
While the South mainly produced cash crops for export, the Center
relied mainly on the domestic market. And while there was a shortage
of labor in the South, there was a labor surplus in the Center. The
population had always been denser here and the massive expropriations of Indian villages in the Porfirian period created a large class
of landless peasants. Only a minority of these could be absorbed by
the very limited industrial development taking place in central Mexico
between 1876 and 1910.
In examining the haciendas of the highlands two types must clearly
be differentiated: the majority, producing maize, wheat, and pulque,
and others, including the sugar cane plantations of Morelos, located
in the lower part of the highlands and geared to production of tropical
goods.
Although the demand for maize and wheat greatly rose during the
Diaz period, production actually decreased, and Mexico had to rely
more and more on importation of these products.78 The low cost of
labor discouraged mechanization. In 1902 Karl Kaerger calculated that
in Jalisco it cost 8 percent more to use farm machinery than hand
harvesting.79 This tendency was further encouraged by difficulties in
securing credit for maize and wheat production, high tariffs protecting inefficient Mexican hacendados from outside competition, and the
possibility of expanding production at practically no cost through the
expropriation of Indian lands.
Mechanization might have induced many haciendas to replace
tenantry and sharecropping arrangements by demesne. The lack of it
contributed to preventing any large-scale disappearance of such arrangements.
During the Diaz period real wages paid to hacienda laborers fell
sharply. If sharecropping was to remain as profitable as direct use of
hacienda land, the hacendados had to find a means to reduce the real
income of the sharecroppers as much as that of the agricultural workers. The way the haciendas accomplished this is most clearly illus78. Corn production fell from 2,730,620 tons in 1877 to 2,127,868 tons in 1907
and wheat production fell from 338,683 tons in 1877 to 292,61i tons in 1907. El
Colegio de Mexico, Estadtsticas economicas del Porfiriato, Fuerza de trabajo y
actividad economica por sectores (Me6xico, 1961), pp. 67, 69. At the same time the
population increased from 9.666,397 in 1877 to 14,890,030 in 1908, ibid., p. 25.
79. Kaerger,Landwirtschaftund Kolonisation,II, 650.
LABOR CONDITIONS
ON HACENDAS
25
trated by the evolution of sharecropping patterns on an hacienda near
Celaya in the state of Guanajuato. Up to the latter part of the nineteenth century there had been two types of sharecroppers on this
hacienda: the medieros al rajar and the medieros al quinto. The
medieros al rajar furnished their own agricultural implements and
oxen and received 50 percent of the harvest. The medieros al quinto
borrowed farm machinery and animals from the hacienda and in return had to pay the usual 50 percent of their crops, plus one-fifth of
the remaining harvest as payment for the use of machinery and animals. This left them with at most 40 percent of the harvest. By the end
of the nineteenth century this hacienda began to cut down on the
number of medieros al rajar simply by not allowing the sharecroppers
to use hacienda grazing lands to tend their cattle. By the beginning
of the twentieth century only a few privileged retainers still worked
their lands on a half share basis. All others had become medieros al
quinto.80
With local variations similar conditions seemed to have existed in
most other maize and wheat producing haciendas of central Mexico.
In a maize-producing hacienda in Oaxaca, half a hectare of land was
rented out to sharecroppers known as terrazguerros. They were required to furnish their own oxen, seed and agricultural implements.
After the harvest the crop was split into two parts. Half belonged to
the hacienda but the other half did not entirely belong to the sharecropper. From it, he had to pay a derecho de surco, one centavo for
a surco on good land and two centavos for three surcos of lesser lands.
In some cases, these payments were not made in crops or money but
by working ten to fifteen days on the hacienda without pay. The
sharecropper was also required to work the hacienda's land when
asked to do so, for one-and-a-half to two-and-a-half reales a day, or
to labor for the hacienda on Sundays without pay. If the sharecropper
had no cart in which to deliver the hacienda's share of the crop, he
had to rent one from the hacienda at a charge of three to four reales
a day. In return for this the hacienda' allowed his wife and children
to walk alongside the cart as it was bringing the crop to the hacienda's
main building, any cornstalk that fell on the way could be picked up
and kept by the sharecropper's family, but hacienda guards went
along making sure that this amount was minimal.81
An efficient and frequently practiced way of extracting more from
sharecroppers was to advance them relatively large amounts of money
and seed at planting time. Kaerger describes an hacienda in Michoaca'n
8o. Ibid., 637.
8i. Ibid., 639.
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where the medieros received advances of 3 hectoliters of corn for
every yoke of oxen, a weekly advance of one peso plus an extra advance of twenty-two to twenty-five pesos for the whole period. They
had to return all this at harvest time in corn for which the hacendado
paid them a much lower price than he had charged. "Under these
circumstances," Kaerger wrote, "it is not surprising that at harvest
time the medieros not only received no corn but ended up in debt
to the hacendado."82
Gabriel Vargas, Deputy from Jalisco, told the Mexican Congress
in 1912 that many hacendados asked for even larger returns from the
medieros. Money and corn advanced to the sharecropper at planting
time had to be repaid with a surcharge of loo percent or more to the
hacienda at harvest time. If any oxen died while rented out by the
hacendado to the sharecropper, the mediero was required to pay full
compensation to the hacienda. Vargas notes that this was a frequent
occurrence since these oxen were generally the most decrepit and
sick animals the hacienda could muster.83
The medieros faced an absolute lack of security. Whatever the
provisions of their contract, the hacendado could suddenly appear at
harvest time and simply confiscate the harvest. There was no judicial
authority to which the sharecropper could appeal. This arbitrariness
became greater in the Diaz period when after the expropriation of
communal lands the number of people seeking to rent lands from the
haciendas sharply increased.84
A very different situation existed on haciendas in central Mexico
which produced tropical goods, above all, sugar. Sharecropping played
a subordinate role and the plantations worked most of the lands directly as they did in southern Mexico. In contrast to the South, though,
this did not entail such large-scale changes within the hacienda. Unlike henequen, rubber, tobacco or coffee for which large-scale demand
was relatively new, sugar had been an important crop ever since the
82. Ibid., 637.
83. Gabriel Vargas, "Iniciativa de ley sobre mejoramiento de la situaci6n actual
de los peones y medieros de las haciendas," in Silva Herzog, La cuestio'n de la
tierra, II, 271. There are many descriptions, most of them written after the outbreak
of the Mexican Revolution of 1910, of the exploitation of the sharecroppers. One of
the most interesting and revealing is an article by a villista general, Julian Malo
Juvera, who had rented lands to sharecroppers. He describes how sharecroppers,
in order to rent farm animals were forced to enter into a complex system of borrowing, which brought them into a situation of complete dependence upon local
moneylenders. Julian Malo Juvera, "La miseria de los medieros" in Marte R.
Gomez, La reforma agraria en las filas Villistas (Me'xico, 1966), p. 234ff.
84. Wistano Luis Orozco, "La cuestion agraria" in J. Silva Herzog, La cuestion
de la tierra, I, 236-237.
LABOR CONDITIONS
ON HACIENDAS
27
Spanish conquest of Mexico. While some corn-producing lands of the
haciendas that had been leased to peasants were switched over to
sugar, major changes occurred not within but outside the traditional
hacienda. Expansion of production took place chiefly on land expropriated from the free Indian villages.
The labor force consisted of a majority of temporary workers and
a minority of acasillados. At harvest time cuadrillas of temporary
workers came to work on the plantation. Unlike those in the tropical
southeast these workers were free and not bound to the hacienda by
large salary advances. This was probably due to the large labor surplus in central Mexico caused by the massive expropriation of Indian
lands. These laborers received between three to four reales per day
without food. The only money the hacienda spent for food was used
to hire a man called the tlaqualero for every ten to twelve men working on the hacienda. The tlaqualero traveled every two days between
the hacienda and the villages from which the laborers came, bringing
the tortillas their families had prepared.
Contractors from the villages called capitanes were responsible for
bringing laborers to the plantations and supervising them there. These
contractors received normal wages of four to five reales per day and
were paid one real per day for every ten persons they supervised. On
some haciendas this sum was replaced by a straight wage of one peso
a day, which was about double what the other laborers earned.85
Permanent laborers "rarely received a piece of land as good land
capable of irrigation is generally dedicated to sugar cane production.
If this does happen they only have to pay a small amount of money
to rent the land."86While living on the hacienda, permanent residents
were subject to restrictions. On the Hacienda de Santa Ana in
Morelos, they could not leave the casco and go outside the hacienda, especially to towns such as Cuautla, without the consent of
their supervisors. But there is no indication that any kind of overt
coercion was used to keep them on the hacienda. On the contrary, if
they did not appear for work on time, the supervisor would simply
expel them from their houses. This is not surprising in view of the
surplus of labor in central Mexico. There are some indications that
the acasillados on the sugar haciendas considered their position a
privileged one. On the Hacienda de Santa Ana the acasillados scarcely
85. Kaerger, Landwirtschaft und Kolonisation, II, 493. John Womack notes
hacendados in more remote areas of Morelos and especially the Garcla Pimentels
and Amors tried to increase the permanent labor force on their haciendas to reduce
the hacienda's dependence on seasonal work gangs. Zapata and the Mexican Revolution (New York, 1969), pp. 45-46.
86. Kaerger, Landwirtschaft und Kolonisation, 593.
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participated in the Revolution, even though it was located in a Zapatista
area.
Those areas of the hacienda that were not suitable for cash crops
and were not worked by the hacienda itself were either put at the
disposal of some acasillados or rented out to the sharecroppers. As
the number of plots the hacienda rented out was frequently smaller
than the number of candidates, those who received lands were a
privileged group. At Santa Ana the privileged minority were those
tenants who rented land from the hacienda, as well as cattle owners
who received grazing rights from the hacienda and in return rented
out their oxen to the tenants. The tenants employed a large group of
laborers to work their lands. These gainanes or inditos, as they were
called, constituted the poorest laborers on the hacienda.87
It is difficult to say whether debt peonage increased or decreased
in central Mexico during the Diaz period. Several contradictory tendencies appear to have been at work. The hacendado's need to bind
peons to his lands by debt peonage in order to have sufficient labor
tended to decrease. But the number of permanent residents on haciendas as well as the debts they incurred tended to increase.
The decrease in the need for debt peons is not difficult to explain.
The number of laborers available to central Mexican haciendas greatly
increased from 1876 to 19go, as the massive expropriations of that
period created a new landless proletariat, which the limited industry
in most parts of central Mexico could not absorb. Even in those villages which managed to retain most of their lands, such as Tepoztlan
in the state of Morelos, population increases made it necessary for
many villagers who could no longer get access to communal lands to
seek work on haciendas.88 This large supply of uncommitted inexpensive laborers made it unnecessary for many hacendados to bind their
laborers to the hacienda. It allowed them to employ many peons for
a limited period of time without having to support them during the
whole year. Moises Gonzalez Navarro believes that die to this excess
of labor, debt peonage was beginning to disappear in a number of
states in central Mexico.89
Nevertheless, this was not the case for the whole of central Mexico.
Debt peonage maintained its importance as a means of providing
cheap labor in the Puebla-Tlaxcala region, where the hacendados used
it to protect themselves from the competition of higher wages offered
in the textile industry. This competition forced the price of free labor
87. Oral communication from Prof. Arturo Warman.
88. Oscar Lewis, Tepoztldn, p. 93.
89. Gonzalez Navarro,El Porfiriato:La vida social, p. 222.
LABOR CONDITIONS
ON HACIENDAS
29
on haciendas up to five reales while indebted labor was still being
paid two-and-a-half to three reales a day. Debt peonage, therefore,
was enforced with special stringency in the Puebla-Tlaxcala region.90
There is no evidence that the industrialists protested against these
measures. The large surplus of labor in central Mexico allowed industry to fill its needs without difficulty.
The massive increase in debt owed by laborers to the hacienda
did not occur necessarily because the hacendado wished or needed to
keep them on his land through debt peonage. It was also the consequence of the great increase in the number of sharecroppers and
tenants on central Mexican haciendas after the expropriation of communal villages lands and of the way sharecropping and tenantry were
practiced. The fact that most tenants and sharecroppers worked marginal lands under extremely harsh conditions and had to pay an ever
increasing part of their produce to the hacienda, placed them in a
very precarious position. When the harvest was good, they barely
managed to make ends meet and were not able to accumulate any
kind of reserve. When the harvest was bad, they had no choice but
to borrow from the hacienda.
For the acasillados salary advances were largely an expression of
traditional forms of paternalism on the part of the hacendado. The
salary advances at Easter and Christmas and on certain important
occasions in the laborer's life, such as the day of his marriage, advances
tacitly acknowledged as non-repayable, were considered an expression
of the hacendado's generosity and of his concern for the well-being
of his laborers. Traditionally on many haciendas the prestige and importance of the laborer increased in proportion to the amount of the
advances granted to him by the hacienda owner. Even if there was no
need to tie laborers to the hacienda, such advances frequently became
the price the hacendado paid, or thought he had to pay, to insure
the loyalty of the acasillados and their transformation into trusted
retainers.
Did such debts always imply debt peonage? In most states of
Mexico they legally meant that laborers could not leave the hacienda
without repaying their debts. The constant reduction in their real
income made it improbable that most of them could ever have done
so. It is difficult to determine to what degree the hacendados forced
unwilling laborers to stay on their haciendas or tried to bring them
back by force if they fled. Did the labor surplus in central Mexico
make such enforcement and the cost it entailed uneconomical? Or did
und Kolonisation,II, 638.
go. Kaerger, Landwvirtschaft
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the hacendados fear that lack of enforcement of debt peonage would
weaken their authority? More research is required to answer these
questions.
Most communal villagers who lost their lands in the Diaz period
became at least partly dependent on the hacienda for their livelihood.
What form did this dependence take? Did they become acasillados on
the haciendas? The one fact that can be statistically established is that,
as Frank Tannenbaum has shown, the great majority of these villagers
continued to live in their own villages. While the village lands were absorbed by the hacienda the villages themselves continued in most
cases to maintain some autonomy. Sometimes they managed to retain
a limited amount of land, not sufficient to feed their inhabitants
throughout the year, but enough to maintain them for at least part of
it. Some lost all their lands. While very little has been done as yet to
discover what happened to these villagers after the expropriation of
their lands, Paul Friedrich's study of the village of Naranja, which
lost most of its lands to the Hacienda of Cantabria in the state of
Michoacan may represent a common pattern. Friedrich shows that
the newly established hacienda brought all of its acasillados and most
of its sharecroppers from the outside. Only a very small number of
villagers, presumably those who were on best terms with the hacienda
were allowed to rent lands. The great majority had to go to distant
haciendas to find work as temporary laborers.9' This pattern is quite
logical since the hacienda was mainly interested in maintaining a staff
of loyal acasillados. This strategy clearly paid off since many acasillados
refused to join the revolutionary movement in the free villages, and
remained loyal to the haciendas. More studies on the behavior of the
acasillados, tenants, sharecroppers, and temporary laborers during the
revolution are necessary.
On central Mexican haciendas possibilities for upward mobility
existed only for a relatively small middle group of labor contractors,
foremen, and wealthier tenants. The great mass of acasillados, temporary laborers, tenants and sharecroppers, not only had no possibility
to accumulate capital, but on the contrary their living standard was
constantly decreasing. Nevertheless, at a time when communal villagers suffered both a precipitous decline in living standards and increasing insecurity, the acasillados were relatively better off. They at
least enjoyed security at a time of mounting insecurity. Loyalty to
the hacendado was sometimes rewarded by promotion to positions of
privileged retainers.
91. Tannenbaum, The Mexican Agrarian Revolution, chapter I; Friedrich, Agrarian Revolt, pp. 44-46.
LABORI CONDITIONS
ON IIACIENDAS
31
The North
A third pattern of hacienda labor emerged in the northern states
of the country. The North was similar to the South in that a large increase in the demand for agricultural goods was coupled with a shortage of labor. As in the South, forms of forced labor were much more
predominant in the North than in central Mexico prior to the Diaz
period. Nevertheless, the North and the South took widely divergent
paths of development in the Porfirian period.
Long before the Spaniards conquered Mexico, the North had stood
apart from the evolution of the South and Center. Since most of the
land was not suited for agriculture, only small groups of agriculturalists lived in the Northb The lack of a large sedentary Indian population capable of serving as laborers limited Spanish expansion to the
North. The Spaniards could send settlers only into the mining regions
and their surroundings. The rest of the North remained very sparsely
populated. The existence of warlike nomadic Indian tribes also tended
to discourage extensive settlements in the North. These tendencies
were further strengthened by the loss of the most fertile lands in
northern Mexico to the United States in the Mexican-American War.
The results of these developments were contradictory. On the one
hand haciendas were much more dominant in the North up to the end
of the nineteenth century than in the South or the Center. There
were very few free Indian villages to offset their influence. What vi1lages there were in the North had been erected by a small number
of agricultural tribes, the largest one of them being the Yaquis in
Sonora. A few Indians from central Mexico, especially from Tlaxcala
had been settled in villages by the Spaniards in the colonial period.
As in medieval Europe, where the lord's castle was the point of refuge
in times of attack, the hacienda offered protection to its inhabitants
from the attacks of hostile nomadic Indians. On some haciendas, such
as those of the Sanchez-Navarros in Coahuila, this fact tended to give
the hacendado nearly absolute powxer over his retainers who were
practically all tied to the hacienda by debt peonage and scarcely had
any possibility of leaving. 20n other northern hlaciendas, as Franmois
Chevalier has shown, the hlacendado's dependence oi1 the armed force
of his peons against the Indians gave these retainers an added influence. By the end of the eighteenth centuiry some resident peons on
northern haciendas had managed to secure a large measure of autonomy from the hacienda.93
92. Harris, The SainchezNavarros,pp. 33f.
93. Chevalier, "The North Mexican Haciend&," pp. 94f.
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During the Porfirian period, profound changes affected the Mexican North and especially the regions nearest the United States border.
The development of the American Southwest and the establishment
of railroad links between northern Mexico and the United States
created a large new market for northern Mexican cotton, cattle, and
industrial metals. As in the South, these developments created a severe shortage of labor. Unlike the South, though, with the conspicuous exception of the Yaqui Indians in Sonora, there were few Indian
villages which could be expropriated and whose inhabitants could be
forced to work on the haciendas. Creating a new slavery as in the
South with convict or contract labor was also much more difficult.
Peons could flee across the border to the United States which did not
return debt peons to their Mexican owners. The mines competed with
hacendados for labor; desperately in need of laborers for many years,
mineowners proved willing to employ fugitive peons.
If the northern hacendados wished to attract and keep laborers
they had to offer them a number of incentives. One of the most important incentives offered was a rising wage level, which increased
agricultural wages in parts of the North to a level higher than anywhere else in Mexico.94 Sharecropping arrangements were also generally more favorable to the sharecropper than in the South and Center
of the country. While in these two regions sharecroppers often paid
nearly two-thirds of their crops to the hacendado, in the North the
94. This was the case in parts of Nuevo Leon (Gonzalez Navarro, El Porfiriato:
La vida social, p.
219)
and Coahuila (Stanley R. Ross, Francisco Madero, Apostle
of Mexican Democracy [New York, 1955] pp. 3f ) . In 1904 the International Bureau
of the American Republics estimated that in northern Mexico in connection with
agricultural wages "labor is scarce, the influence of American customs is felt to
some extent, and wages are higher than in the central portion," International
Bureau of the American Republics, Mexico (Washington, 1904), p. 405. This
tendency comes out very clearly in an interview which an American cotton planter
of the State of Durango, Wallace C. Morrow, gave the Mexican Herald on February 7, 1906. He stressed that io percent of the cotton harvest in Durango might be
lost because of a lack of labor. "Then again there is an actual scarcity of labor in
the market," he declared. "Most of the old businesses have increased very considerably thus demanding more laborers. But there are fewer laborers. Many
Mexicans from Durango have been attracted to the United States by the higher
wages paid there, and others have been induced to go to the various new mines
and to work upon the railway construction, in both of which latter places the wages
are more than doubled that which was paid to the peon a few years ago. In many
cases the cotton growers have offered double the wages they have been accustomed
to pay, without even then being able to secure a sufficient supply."
It is not surprising that the hacendados and the Porfirian authorities frequently
resisted such concessions to laborers and tended to exercise even more pressure on
laborers. In 1894 the governor of Tamaulipas suggested instituting forced labor
throughout the state. Such a law would have destroyed the myth of free labor in
Porfirian Mexico and was strongly resisted by national authorities. Gonzalez Navarro, El Porfiriato:La vida social, p. 220.
LABOR CONDITIONS
ON HACIENDAS
33
hacendado's share was usually between a third and a half of the
harvest. In the cottonfields of the Laguna region, sharecroppers paid
one-third of the cotton crop if they provided their own seed, animals
and agricultural implements. If they had to borrow them from the
hacienda, they either paid a rental fee of one peso per day or had to
deliver half of their crop to the hacendado. The hacienda managed
to increase somewhat its income from sharecroppers by forcing the
tercieros (sharecroppers paying only one-third of their crops to the
hacienda) to sell their own share of the cotton to the hacendado at
prices cheaper than those of the market. In addition, the sharecroppers were required to work hacienda lands when asked to do so
for three reales a day, far less than half what non-sharecroppers were
paid.95
The need to attract new laborers led a number of hacendados, especially in Coahuila, to experiment with new paternalistic approaches
designed to provide their laborers with at least minimum of security.
On his hacienda in the Laguna region, Francisco Madero set up
schools, provided medical facilities for his workers, and in times of
famine or unemployment fed inhabitants of neighboring villages who
worked part-time on the hacienda (as well as some who did not).
The result of this was that Madero not only became extremely popular
but his hacienda became the most profitable in the Laguna region.
Many other hacendados began to follow his example.96
On the cottonfields where most of the land was irrigated, the
sharecroppers could count on a regular yearly income. The situation
was different on the wheat- and corn-producing haciendas where most
of the land rented out to tenants or sharecroppers was not irrigated.
In Banamachi in the state of Sonora, the hacendados put animals,
seed and agricultural implements at the disposal of the sharecroppers
who kept two-thirds of -their harvest. If they contributed all of this
themselves and only rented the land, all they had to pay was onefourth of the harvest. Conditions varied from hacienda to hacienda
and were dependent to a large degree on the quality of the land, the
amount of rainfall as well as on the neighborhood or distance from
the American border. The farther away any hacienda was from the
border or from industrial or mining areas, the harsher the sharecropping conditions became and the more the hacendados seemed to
cling to methods of debt peonage. In Durango, for example, debt
peonage played a greater role than in the more northern states of
Sonora, Coahuila or Chihuahua.
95. Kaer.ger, Landwirtschaft und Kolonisation, II, 593.
96. Ross, Francisco Madero, pp. 3ff.
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In general, plots rented out in the North were larger than those
in the South, reflecting an abundance of land and a lack of labor. This
gave at least some tenants possibilities of earning more than a mere
subsistence, and of evolving into a kind of agricultural middle-class.
At the same time, the situation of many of the northern tenants was
precarious. Land in the North was not of the same quality as in the
Center and above all, the rainfall was more irregular.97A bad harvest
was to be expected every few years. Still, in central Mexico when such
a bad harvest occurred, the tenant either went deeper into debt with
the hacendado, or if he still had land of his own, returned to his village and tried to eke out an existence the rest of the year; in the North
the peasant tended either to go to the mines or to look for work across
the border in the United States. This was not difficult since his agricultural work only required three months of the year. Thus in the
North there emerged a new type of semi-industrial, semi-agricultural
laborer unknown in the Center and South of the country.98
Many temporary laborers were found in the few highly specialized
export-oriented agricultural areas in the North, such as the cottonproducing Laguna region in the state of Coahuila. But on many northern haciendas, primarily because of their concentration on cattle,
permanent labor seems to have played a greater role than in the rest
of Mexico. Cowboys and shepherds were needed throughout the year.
They formed a larger segment of the labor force of northern haciendas than in any other part of Mexico and their situation was better.
In the state of San Luis Potosi vaqueros received five pesos a month
plus food. In Chihuahua, their wages were seven to eight pesos plus
food in 1902.99
By 1913 on the largest of the northern haciendas,
owned by the Terrazas family, their wages had risen to fifteen pesos
a month.100If a cowboy became a caporal, a foreman of which there
97. Pastor Rouaix, "El fraccionamiento de la propiedad en los estados fronterizos," J. Silva Herzog, La cuestion de la tierra, I, 165.
98. Managers of mines and railway construction companies in Mexico constantly complained of workers who left their jobs to return to work on haciendas,
e.g., Harvey O'Connor, The Guggenheims, p. 324. On July 12, 1906, the Mexican
Herald reported that the Mexican Central railroad, in order to continue the extension from Tuxpan to Manzanillo had contracted "for i,ooo Japanese railroad
laborers to fill the places of the Mexican laborers who have left the railroad work
to enter the employ of the hacendados and men in the cities." Over 3,000 workers
had left the company's employ.
The Engineering and Mining Journal (October 5, 1907) considered the effects
of a drought in northern Mexico beneficial since it would make agricultural labor
available for mines.
99. Kaerger, Landwirtschaft und Kolonisation, II, 706-707.
100. Interview with Nicolas Fernandez in Pindaro Uriostegui Miranda, Testimonios del proceso revolutionariode Mexico (Mexico, 1970), pp. 92-93.
LABOR CONDITIONS
ON HACIENDAS
35
were on the average one for every seven or eight cowboys, his wages
rose to thirty pesos a month.10' As a supplementary source of revenue
many cowboys were allowed to keep cattle of their own on the
hacienda and have it graze on the hacienda's lands.102Northern cowboys enjoyed relatively good conditions because they were greatly in
demand on United States ranches. And as they were mounted and
frequently armed it was much easier for them to leave the hacienda
than for any other social group to do so.
Conditions of shepherds were somewhat similar to those of the
cowboys. They were divided into three groups: The ayudantes, who
supervised io,ooo head of sheep, received the highest wage-thirty
pesos per month. Pastores and basieros cared for herds of up to 2,000
head, the pastores by day and the basieros by night. The pastores received fifteen pesos and the basieros twenty pesos per month. The
salary was higher than that of many cowboys but unlike them, shepherds had to feed themselves.'03
Cowboys and shepherds on the one hand and the tenants on northern Mexican haciendas on the other differed most importantly in the
relative security and stability the former enjoyed. Cowboys and shepherds were assured of work and paid throughout the year; there were
very few fluctuations which could force an hacendado to fire his cowboys or shepherds. But the semi-agricultural and industrial laborers
who constituted a great part of the working force on northern haciendas were confronted by constant insecurity. This instability was produced by cycles in the industrial economy as well as by agricultural
uncertainties. As the investment in mining by foreign companies rose
precipitously, cyclical fluctuations increased apace, so that every few
years large numbers of miners would be laid off. Similar cyclical fluctuations affected Mexican workers in the Southwest of the United
States. Whenever a recession or crisis occurred separately, the agricultural workers could always resort to another occupation. If the harvest
was bad they could go to the mines, if there was no work to be found
in mining they could go to the United States, and if the Americans
offered no work they could go to an hacienda and try sharecropping.
But if all three employment opportunities were affected by the same
crisis, their situation became desperate. This was precisely the case on
the eve of the Mexican Revolution which helps explain the large participation of northern agricultural laborers in the first phase of that
Revolution. In 1908 thousands of Mexican laborers working in the
Kaerger, Landwirtschaftund Kolonisation,II, 706-707.
Ibid., 707.
103. Ibid., 717.
LoL.
102.
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Southwest of the United States had lost their work and the American
authorities were shipping them back to the Mexican border.104 By
1gog a cyclical crisis profoundly affected Mexico and thousands of
miners were laid off. In the same year the corn harvest was one of the
worst northern Mexico had ever suffered. The result of these simultaneous disasters are very clearly summarized in a report sent in 1gog
by the German consul in Chihuahua. "Price increases in basic food
stuffs," he wrote, "have greatly contributed to worsening the already
difficult economic situation. Maize rose to 7 pesos per hectoliter instead of 3.5, beans now cost 15 pesos instead of 6 pesos per hectoliter. . . . Salaries were reduced to between 75 centavos and i peso
per day."105
A number of questions concerning labor conditions on northern
Mexican haciendas are not easily answered. How extensive and effective was debt peonage? How large a part of the labor force of northern Mexican haciendas was temporary and how much of it was
permanent?+Were there possibilities of upward mobility for these
laborers? While some information exists about debt peonage in the
South and Center of Mexico, there is very little information about it
in the North. The proximity of the United States where peons could
flee,106 as well as the competition from newly developing industries
suggest, as has been noted, that it was much more difficult to tie
laborers to the haciendas by coercion in the North than in any other
104. R. L. Sandels, "Silvestre Terrazas, the Press and the Origins of the Mexican Revolution in Chihuahua," Ph.D. Diss., University of Oregon, 1967, p. 162.
105. Deutsches Zentralarchiv Potsdam, AA II, Nr. 4491. Consul in Chihuahua
to Billow, October 5, 1909. A similar situation was described by the German Consul in Colima, Deutsches Zentralarchiv in Potsdam, Nr. 4492, Consul in Colima
to Biulow, October 21, 1908 and by the Consul in Guadalajara, Deutsches Zentralarchiv Potsdam AA II, Nr. 4494 Consul in Guadalajara to Builow, November 6,
1906.
io6. In the latter years of the Porfiriato many observers were registering an
ever increasing labor shortage in northern Mexico due to emigration to the United
States. An agricultural expert wrote in 1911 that
El jornal exiguo en muchisimas regiones del pais seniala la causa de escasez
de brazos, pues los nacionales, quiza por efecto mismo de las exigencias de
la vida, tienden a emigrar en busca de trabajo mas bien remunerado,
formandose asi una ola emigratoria alarmante, muy especialmente hacifa
la vecina del Norte. En esta Nacion, el jornalero obtiene remuneracion
mas equitativa y condiciones de vida y alimentacion mas alagadoras, sin
tener que sufrir las expoltaciones inmoderadas por parte de los administradores de las fincas y por no pocos propietarios, que casi convierten al infeliz
peon en un verdadero esclavo. Las infamantes tiendas de raya, los prestamos, etc., etc., hacen del jornalero, una victima de los terratenientes.
(Gustavo Duran, "Importancia de la agricultura y del franccionamiento de tierras,"
in JesiuisSilva Herzog, La cuestion de la tierra, I, 190.)
LABOR CONDITIONS
ON HACIENDAS
37
part of Mexico. This hypothesis is strengthened by the fact that legislation concerning peonage was different in the northern Mexican states
from that in the rest of the country. The state governments of Nuevo
Leon and Sonora established that a peon's debt to his employer could
not legally surpass his salary for three months.107Such legislation represented not only a recognition of the increased mobility of agricultural workers it also resulted from pressures exerted by industrialists
and mineowners whose growing power the hacendados were compelled to accommodate. Hacienda peons were the inevitable source of
a large part of the labor force working on railway construction and
in mines and industries. Since the Dlaz government as well as the
hacendados wanted foreign investments, they could not very well
oppose the recruitment of laborers from their haciendas. But the
hacendados did want some compensation for their loss. While the
industrialists and miners were willing to pay some compensation they
sought to keep it low enough to ensure its recovery through forcing
the former agricultural laborers in their employ to repay whatever
sums had been spent to hire them.
On the whole, laborers on northern Mexican haciendas possessed
a far greater degree of upward mobility than their counterparts in
the South and Center. Since there was one caporal for every seven
or eight cowboys, it was not all too difficult for a cowboy who stayed
on a ranch for a longer period of time to be promoted. Tenants who
worked their lands during three or four months of the year could frequently make money on the side either by working in mines or across
the border in the United States. Many of them were able to save
enough to invest in buying ranches or setting up small stores. For many
northern laborers, however, upward mobility was as frequently
matched by downward mobility. While the indebted laborers of the
South were protected by the fact that they represented an investment
which the hacendado did not want to lose, there was no such protection for the free laborers of the North. The traditional patterns of
paternalism which were predominant in the Center as well as in the
South appear to have been much less common in the North.108
107. Gonzalez Navarro, El Porfiriato:La vida social, p. 220. In Sonora in 1883
debts were limited to three month wages, but two years later the law was changed
and allowed peons to accumulate debts equal to six months wages. In Sinaloa and
Chihuahua the state governors attempted to restrict the debts peons could accumulate, ibid. These laws represented a return to similar legislations enacted by the
Spanish colonial authorities: see, Silvio Zavala, "Los origenes coloniales del peonaje
en Mexico," in Estudios Indianos (Madrid, 1935).
1o8. These descriptions of labor conditions on Porfirian haciendas are to a large
degree based on Kaerger's report. A survey carried out about fifteen years earlier
and whose results are affixed to an American consular report on labor conditions
38
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Conclusions
Several conclusions can be drawn from all of these developments.
No uniform pattern can be discerned in the development of debt
peonage in the Porfirian era in Mexico. Under different circumstances
similar causes produced contrary effects. Increasing demand for agricultural products linked to large-scale foreign investment produced a
sharp increase in debt peonage in Mexico's Southeast. Forms of debt
peonage there becamnemore and more similar to overt slavery. In the
North the same causes produced exactly the opposite result, the weakening and frequently the disappearance of debt peonage. The reasons
for these discrepancies have already been discussed. Geographical
isolation and the lack of industry favored an increase of debt peonage
in the South, while the proximity of the American border and the increasing demand for labor by mines and industry tended to weaken
debt peonage in the North. In the Center of Mexico developments are
much more difficult to assess since tendencies toward weakening and
strengthening debt peonage operated at the same time.
in Mexico ("Resources of Mexico," Reports from the Consuls of the United States,
XIX, [April-September, i886] Washington, i886; pp. 494-568.) bear out Kaerger's
observations. It is not clear, whether the State Department printed a Mexican
enquiry or whether American authorities had carried out or commissioned this
survey. The three most relevant questions the survey asked concerned: ( 1) wages
of agricultural labor, (2) conditions under which contracts for agricultural labor
are made, (3) supply of labor. The localities surveyed comprise only a small part
of the country. The survey is weakest for the northern border states since there is
no data at all from Baja California, Sonora and Chihuahua and only two localities
in Coahuila were examined.
Of eight localities in southern Mexico, mainly located in Chiapas and Tabasco,
all reported a scarcity of labor. Six of the eight mention large debts while two
mention yearly contracts where advances are given at the beginning of the year.
The statements accompanying this data are even more revealing. "No proprietor
of this locality will accept any laborer born here who does not have a debt against
him," wrote the agent from Pichucalco (p. 534). "Contracts are made before the
civil judge, when the servant owes less than ioo pesos; if he owes more than loo
pesos, they are made before the judge of the court of first instance. The reason for
this is because in the State of Chiapas servitude still exists, the remains, unfortunately, of slavery in the past" reported the agent from Catazaja, District of Palenque, Chiapas (p. 537). The agent in Jonuta in the State of Tabasco wrote: "Field
hands are under a sort of bondage, constituted by a debt of $300, $400, $500, or
even more, which each servant owes, and, by the law which governs these contracts and permits the forced confinement of the servant, he who for just cause
wishes to chaige master shall have three day's time for $ioo he owes given him
to find one who will pay his indebtedness" (p. 557).
In Central Mexico of thirty-one localities surveved, fifteen reported suifficient
laborers and sixteen a scarcity of available labor. While most localities in Michoa-
LABOR CONDITIONS
ON HACIENDAS
39
If there is one linear tendency which can be documented throughout Mexican history from 1427 to 1g9o it is the constant expansion of
private property at the cost of communal property. The first recorded
instance we have of this expansion was in 1427, when the armies of
the triple Alliance, Tenochtitlan, Texcoco and Tlacopani, conquered
Atzcatpotzalco. At that time, Aztec chronicles recorded that the warriors who had displayed their courage by fighting against Atzcapotzalco
were rewarded with large grants of conquered land, while the common people who had been too cowardly to fight received practically
nothing.109
During the Aztec and Spanish colonial periods, this expansion was
gradual. It was resisted both by the Aztec and by the Spanish states
both of which feared that the power of the landowners could get out
of hand. With the advent of Independence, Mexico's landowners acquired increasing political dominance over the state. After 1876 the
expansion of their holdings reached a climax. Indian communal villages were all but wiped out. Was this expansion of land and power
paralleled by a similar expansion in forms of forced labor? Had the
climactic development of large haciendas in the Porfirian period
created a country composed of a few landowners, and their policemen and retainers on the one hand and huge armies of debt peons on
can, Mexico, Jalisco, Queretaro and Morelos reported an adequate supply of labor,
scarcity of labor was reported in the semi-tropical regions of Veracruz and Guerrero and from the States of Tlaxcala and Oaxaca where there was still a very great
concentration of communal Indian villages. It should not be forgotten that at the
time this report was written, a large part of the communal lands had not yet been
expropriated, so that many villagers felt no need to work on the haciendas.
There is no absolute correlation between yearly contracts implying peonage
and scarcity of labor, though such a tendency emerges. Of twenty-nine localities
where data on labor contracts was available, eleven mentioned debts or yearly
contracts while eighteen reported free labor or sharecropping. Of the eleven
localities where some form of debt peonage existed, eight mentioned a scarcity of
labor while three reported that sufficient laborers were available. Of those reporting free labor conditions eight mentioned a scarcity of labor while eleven reported
sufficient laborers available. Sharecropping is always linked in these reports to a
sufficient supply of laborers..
In the North, of thirteen localities reporting, three stressed a scarcity of labor,
while ten mentioned that sufficient laborers were available, only three mentioned
debts or yearly contracts, while ten stated that laborers were free. Of the latter,
nine were localities with a sufficient labor supply, and one reported a scarcity of
labor. Of the three localities reporting some kind of peonage, two stressed the
scarcity of available labor. It must be stressed that this report was made in 1885
and that from then until 1910 an enormous increase in the demand for labor in
Northern Mexico took place.
pp. 146109. Friedrich Katz, Ancient American Civilisations (London, 1972),
147.
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the other? This constitutes one of the most difficult and unresolved
problems of Mexican history.
There is no evidence of any linear correlation between the expansion of land-holding on the one hand and an increase in the use of
forced labor on the other as far as central Mexico was concerned. In
the more peripheral regions of the North and South, the evolution of
labor arrangements was different. In these regions a kind of correlation does seem to have existed, though in the North it only lasted
until 1870.
In central Mexico, two phenomena, closely related but not identical, must be taken into account: changes in the number of laborers
residing permanently on the hacienda, and changes in the amount of
forced labor, including debt peonage among other forms. Nearly all
the haciendas required two types of laborers. Permanent residents were
needed throughout the year and temporary laborers required on a
seasonal basis. The ratio between both groups depended on two sets
of factors:
(a) Ecological and economic determinants such as the type of
production prevailing on an hacienda (cattle ranches, for example
required more permanent laborers than predominantly wheat- or cornproducing haciendas), the quality of its lands (most haciendas tended
to cultivate good lands for themselves, leaving marginal lands to tenants or sharecroppers), and the proximity of markets;
(b) The availability of temporary labor, which depended on several variables like demographic factors or the land available to communal villages (if villages lacked sufficient lands an ever increasing
number of inhabitants had no choice but to work on the hacienda).
Attempts by the state to control allocation of temporary labor also
played a role.
Up to the middle of the seventeenth century, there was a scarcity
of freely available temporary labor to work on Spanish estates. This
labor scarcity was due in part to the enormous decline in the Indian
population after the Spanish Conquest, in part to the fact that until
mid-century most Indian villages still had sufficient lands at their disposal. The villagers thus had few economic incentives to work on
Spanish estates. Meanwhile, the Spanish administration, through such
institutions as the repartimiento, did its utmost to control the allocation of Indian labor. Large numbers of permanent resident peons thus
offered two advantages: a more stable work force and greater control,
independent of crown officials. It is therefore not surprising that
Woodrow Borah found that during the seventeenth century, "debt
LABOR CONDITIONS
41
ON HACIENDAS
peonage had become the major source of labor" for Spanish estates.110
The sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries were also periods when
forms of forced labor directed towards the inhabitants of communal
villages reached their peak.11'
In the eighteenth century, the situation changed again. The slow
rise of the Indian population, increasing shortages of land owned by
communal villages (due to confiscation by haciendas as well as because of an increment of the population), the practical end of efforts
by the Spanish crown to allocate labor through the repartimiento, the
appearance of large groups of mestizos having no claim to communal
lands, all tended to increase the availability of temporary labor. The
result was a tendency by the end of the eighteenth century for the
haciendas in central Mexico not to increase the number of permanent
resident laborers and to rely less on forms of forced labor such as
debt peonage. All evidence we have up to now for the eighteenth
century confirms these trends.
During the Porfiriato, a new situation arose. The expropriation of
communal villages brought about two contradictory tendencies. On
the one hand, cheap temporary labor became more readily available
than ever before. This made it economically less and less necessary
for the hacendados in central Mexico to rely on forced labor. On the
other hand, as the haciendas acquired more and more land, much of
it of mediocre quality, they preferred not to work it themselves but
to shift the risk to sharecroppers and tenants. The condition of these
occupants was so precarious that many of them, for reasons described
above, inevitably incurred debts with the hacienda which they could
not repay.
The relative strength of these two tendencies (less need for debt
peons, but more laborers than ever dependent upon the hacienda) is
very difficult to assess, given the present state of research on rural
Mexico in the Porfiriato.
Social stratification and differentiation on haciendas was much
lo.
P. 39.
Woodrow Borah, New Spain's Century of Depression
(Berkeley,
1951),
1. The official end of the repartimiento in 1633 at first did not weaken but
rather strengthened debt peonage as hacendados tried to compensate for the loss
of repartimiento labor by settling more and more resident peons on their estates.
(Borah, New Spain's Century of Depression, [Berkeley, 1951], pp. 40-41. Silvio
Zavala, "Los origenes" p. 328). For a time the Spanish state tried to limit debt
peonage by such measures as setting a ceiling (generally four month wages) on the
debt an Indian peon could accumulate. Mestizos, negroes and mulattoes were excluded from this legislation. These measures do not seem to have been strongly
enforced and somewhat later Spanish viceroys officially allowed Indian peons to
accumulate much higher debts. (Silvio Zavala, "Los origenes.")
42
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more complex than has generally been assumed. It is not possible to
speak simply of the hacendado, the mayordomo and the few privileged
retainers and employees on the one hand and a large amorphous indistinct and homogeneous mass of peons on the other. At least three
groups of hacienda workers may be identified, each of which evolved
differently during the Porfirian era. There was one group whose situation in terms of access to goods or access to land, upward mobility,
freedom of movement and security had improved in relation to the
pre-Diaz era. A second group was composed of workers whose situation in absolute terms had deteriorated in relation to the prePorfirian period, but whose relative situation had improved. A third
group suffered both absolute and relative deterioration between 1876
to 1910.
Besides the mayordomo, the first group included an increasing
number of free technicians who were hired to work some of the machines brought to the more modern haciendas. It included the supervisory personnel whose size had greatly increased from 1876 to LgLo.
To this first group must also be added the more prosperous tenants
such as the habilitados in the tobacco fincas of San Andres Tuxtla.
Probably the ganaderos of the Hacienda of Santa Ana in Morelos as
well as the richer tercieros in the Laguna region of Coahuila should
also be included. At the lower end of this group were the cowboys,
especially in the North, whose salaries had steadily increased, as well
as a number of privileged acasillados whose access to lands from the
hacienda and paternalistic grants from the hacendado had either remained constant or increased.
The second group included those acasillados who had managed to
retain their access to hacienda lands and to some form of periodic
salary advances from the hacendado. In spite of this, their real wages
had gone down since the nominal salary they received had remained
almost constant while prices of goods sold to them by the hacienda
had increased by 30 percent or more. But in comparison to the mass
of expropriated villagers who now worked on haciendas as sharecroppers, tenants or temporary laborers, these acasillados at least
enjoyed a basic security.1"2The communal villagers had become de112. In his famous speech to the Mexican Congress in December 1912
Luis
Cabrera designated those peons at whose disposal the hacienda had put a small
piece of land popularly known as "piojal" as privileged retainers. (Luis Cabrera,
"La reconstitucion de los ejidos de los pueblos como medio de suprimir la esclavitud del jornalero mexicano, discurso pronunciado en la Camara de Diputados el 3
de Diciembre de 1912," in Jes's Silva Herzog, La cuestion de la tierra, II, 277.)
But even these "privileged" retainers lived under conditions of extreme misery
and dependence. There are innumerable reports of mistreatments, beatings, and im-
LABOR CONDITIONS
ON HACIENDAS
43
pendent on the hacienda but unlike the acasillados, the paternalism
of the hacendado seldom extended to them.
The tenants and temporary laborers of northern Mexico must also
be included in this intermediary group. On the one hand, thanks to
their great freedom of movement, the proximity of the United States
and the development of mining and industry, they had better opportunities for accumulating wealth than temporary laborers in the South
and Center of the country. On the other hand their situation was also
more precarious. While many expropriated peasants in the Center
and the South still retained a minimum of land at their disposal, most
tenants in the North, where communal villages had only played a
subordinate role, did not. The quality of land in the North except in
irrigated areas, was generally worse than in the Center or South and
rainfall was much more irregular. Cyclical crises increasingly affected
their employment opportunities in mining and across the border in
American industries where in times of recession they were the first to
be laid off.
The third group embraced laborers whose absolute and relative
situation had deteriorated during the Porfiriato. It included those
acasillados who had lost access to lands, the majority of tenants and
sharecroppers, the contract workers, the temporary free laborers in the
South and Center, as well as the indebted temporary laborers. The
deterioration of the situation of this group expressed itself in three
ways:
(a) Loss of lands or worsening of the conditions of access to
land. The majority of temporary laborers and tenants in this group
were former members of communal villages that had been expropriated. The acasillados in this group had also lost access to lands,
but this loss may not have been as acute for them as for the villagers,
since income from hacienda lands made up only part of their earnings. For the tenants, the Porfiriato did not mean loss of access to land,
prisonments on haciendas, which are not limited to the tropical zones of the South.
When John Kenneth Turner's famous book Barbarouts Mexico was published in
1910, the Diaz press and government as well as the hacendados sharply denied his
allegations. About fifteen years later Ernest Gruening traveled through the same
region which Tumer had visited before him. He specifically confirmed Tuirner's
judgments and added, "In 1923 I traveled through those regions. Even the
Yucatecan hacendados denied little, although at the time with a militantly revollutionary governor, Felipe Carillo Puerto, in the saddle, recollections of that nature
were painful. It was on the other fellow's hacienda that those things happened.
'We treated our peons very much better than the rest.' The hacendados were
unanimous on that point." (Ernest Gruening, Mexico and its Heritage [New York,
1940], p. 138.)
44
HAHR
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I FRIEDRICH KATZ
but it meant getting land on much more onerous terms than before.
This is very clearly shown by the evolution on the hacienda of Celaya,
where medieros al rajar were gradually replaced by medieros al
quinto.13 For the contract workers, many of whom were former landowners, the situation had worsened even more drastically.
(b) Decrease in the value of real wages on the hacienda. While
nominal wages remained nearly constant, prices during the Porfiriato
increased by at least 30 percent.
(c) The loss of freedom of movement by a large part of this group,
especially in southeastern Mexico, due to increased debt peonage.
Looking at these three groups, it is significant that the majority
of the first group, an important part of the second, but only a small
part of the third, were people who had resided on haciendas prior to
the Diaz period. A general trend in this period seems to have been
that the relative conditions of the pre-Diaz acasillados became better
in relation to former communal villagers.
The most complicated question to be answered is how these different experiences affected the behavior of each group during the
Mexican Revolution of g19o. Very little concrete research has been
done to answer this question. There is as yet no detailed study of the
social composition of Mexican revolutionary armies, nor are there
many local studies describing who joined the armies and why. Conclusions can only be drawn from the regional distribution of revolutionary activity and from evidence available in the few local studies
that have been carried out.
No direct correlation exists between the degree of exploitation in
the Diaz era and participation in the Mexican revolutionary movement. The southern states of Mexico, Oaxaca, Chiapas, Tabasco,
Yucatan where forced labor and slavery were most predominant
either took very little part in the revolution, or as in Yucatan, joined
the revolutionary tide quite late. While this may seem surprising at
first, it is quite understandable. Common action by laborers on southern haciendas was hampered by the wide diversity of their origins.
Sonoran Yaquis, central Mexican deportees and Mayan laborers worked
side by side on an henequen hacienda. This frequently led to mutual
rivalries and conflicts which the hacienda was quick to exploit. Another important fact was that southern haciendas relied much less than
113.
For the tenants and sharecroppers on the Hacienda de Hueyapan between
1goo and Lg9o the terms of tenantry became harsher and were enforced with in-
creasing stringency. Many tenants were forced to become sharecroppers which
often meant a deterioration of their situation. Couturier, "Hacienda de Hueyapan."
LABOR CONDITIONS
45
ON HACIENDAS
haciendas in other parts of the country on national and state repressive forces and generally had their own police apparatus. Until the
revolutionary armies penetrated their territories these estates were not
affected by the Revolution. If to all this one adds the geographical
isolation of Mexico's South and the difficulty the laborers had in obtaining news of what was happening in the rest of Mexico, it is not
difficult to understand why revolutionary movements either did not
occur or occurred very late.
There are also indications that the majority of acasillados never
joined the Revolution. On the Hacienda of Santa Ana in the heart of
the Zapatista territory in Morelos, the acasillados residing on the
casco of the hacienda did not join the Revolution and seem to have
resisted agrarian reform up to 1938. Paul Friedrich describes a similar attitude on the part of the acasillados of the Hacienda of Cantabria
in Michoacain.14 While the reasons for this require more study, certain
factors can be cited. Rivalry between the acasillados of an hacienda
and the residents of neighboring free villages had an old tradition in
Mexico, and probably continued on the hacienda even after the communal villagers had lost most of their lands. The relative security which
the acasillados enjoyed as well as the paternalism of the hacendado
may have enhanced their sense of superiority, reinforcing their ties
to the hacienda. This attitude did not extend to all acasillados. In
Yucatlanafter 1917 many of them participated very actively in agrarian
movements and this may have been the case in many other parts of
Mexico. This is another problem that requires more research.
In the Center of Mexico it was essentially the former owners of
communal lands, now expropriated and working as tenant sharecroppers, and temporary laborers on haciendas who constituted the
bulk of the membership of the revolutionary armies. For therm the
revolution had the clear claim of restoring their lands.
In the North this cannot be said. Prior to the Porfiriato there had
been very few Indian villages and the mass of laborers on northern
haciendas were not expropriated peons. The mass of the revolutionary
armies of the North seems to have been composed of semi-agricultural,
semi-industrial workers, as well as cowboys and shepherds. Much more
research is required to determine the factors which drove them to
Revolution. Certainly the insecurity of their situation, especially in the
case of the agricultural-industrial workers must have played an important role. In the state of;Chihuahua for instance, on the eve of the
Revolution, three crises coincided at one and the same time. A large
114.
Friedrich,AgrarianRevolt, pp.
112-113.
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I F1UEDRICTH KATZ
mass of laborers working in the Southwest of the United States had
lost their jobs after the crisis of 1907-1908. For similar reasons and
at the same time, many of the mines in northern Mexico were closing
down. To all this was added an extremely bad harvest in the year
1909.
It is more difficult to determine why the cowboys joined the Revolution since, especially in the North, they belonged to the relatively
privileged groups on the hacienda. There are at least some indications
that many of them joined the Revolution only in 1913-1914, when the
state took over many of the haciendas and the state management actively encouraged recruiting and at the same time reduced employment opportunities by selling much of the cattle across the border.
As with so many other problems, this hypothesis requires far more
investigation.
It is not surprising that only a very small part of the first groupthose whose situation had improved in relation to the pre-Diaz erajoined the Revolution. This part was concentrated in the North, where
many hacendados took part in the Revolution and very frequently
armed a large part of their retainers. Even where hacendados did not
participate, many foremen joined the Revolution, such as Nicolas
Fernandez, a caporal on a Terrazas hacienda, who became one of
Pancho Villa's most famous lieutenants. This difference between supervisors in the North and South is not difficult to understand. A caporal
on a northern Mexican hacienda had a far different relationship to
the cowboys he supervised than the contractor or supervisor had to
his men on a southern Mexican hacienda. The caporal had not forcibly
recruited the cowboys, could not restrict their freedom or movement,
and did not receive part of their salaries. It was thus far easier for
him to side with the cowboys than for a supervisor in southern Mexico
to side with the peons.
In spite of enormous local differences, three regional tendencies
appear to emerge in the Mexican Revolutionary movements of 1910
to 1920. In the Center, large numbers of former owners of communal
village lands (or their offspring) demanded the return of their lands
and frequently occupied them when those in power refused to recognize their claims. In the North, the Revolution was much broader and
heterogeneous. It included members of nearly all classes of society,
including hacendados. Peasants and agricultural laborers played a
subordinate role in the leadership. While some agrarian demands were
formulated and some haciendas temporarily expropriated by the states,
few lands were given to peasants, and still fewer were occupied by
them, even for a short time. In the tropical South, a significant de-
LABOR CONDITIONS
ON IIACIENDAS
47
velopment of the revolutionary movement took place only after much
of the political aind repressive power of the h-cacendadoshad been
curbed by outside forces. At that point, former owners of com-munal
village lands as well as many acasillalos seem to have joined in forming one of the most radical movements in the country. It goes beyond
the scope of this paper to try to connect these tendencies with the
complex patt-ernsof development of Mexican haciendas in the period
between 1876 and 1910. Some links emerge very clearly, others are
more obscure. Certainly the multiple connections of social organization and working conditions on Porfirian haciendas and the timing,
forms, and structure of revolutionary movements in the succeeding
period constitsite a significant, and fascinating field for further research.