The Mexican hacienda, a great agricultural estate, evolved at the junction of Spanish power and Indian resistance.1 Through the ownership of rural properties, Spaniards strove to control land and water resources and thus to profit in an economy based on feeding Mexico’s urban population. In opposition to the long-term growth of the great estate, Indians struggled to retain subsistence lands, fighting to avoid total dependence on the Spaniards’ economy. Estates developed, with important regional variations, from the resolution of this widespread conflict. By the late colonial years the hacienda had become, in the words of Charles Gibson, “the most comprehensive institution yet devised for Spanish mastery and Indian subordination.”2
The present inquiry examines the hacienda as a vehicle of Spanish-Indian relations at Chalco, a region of fertile lands and dense Indian settlement lying from fifteen to forty miles southeast of Mexico City. Primary attention is focused upon both the persons involved and their relationships: a landed elite residing in the capital and directing the hacienda economy; estate administrators and village priests serving urban, Spanish interests in the rural environment; village leaders tying the Indian population into the wider society; and the Chalco village Indians laboring at the estates yet preserving remarkable social cohesion and autonomy.
During the three decades following the achievement of national independence in 1821, five Chalco haciendas passed through the hands of Mexican President Vicente Guerrero and his son-in-law, Mariano Riva Palacio. The family papers, preserved to honor three generations of political preeminence, deal above all with estate operations and related economic activities. This material revealed most of what is new and detailed here.3 Other manuscripts provided a broader context for rural conditions.4 And a more comprehensive understanding of the Mexico City elite emerged from analysis of the Chalco materials in the light of recent elite studies by D. A. Brading and Doris Ladd.5
Two related theses emerged from the inquiry. The first, most clear—and likely most important—is that the haciendas in this region of dense Indian settlement near Mexico City were not major centers of residence. Instead they were primarily units of extensive agricultural production. This did not, however, preclude an important social role. To acquire the labor needed for estate operations a clientage network evolved that tied the peasant villagers into the society and economy dominated by the urban elite. The hacienda social hierarchy bound two cultures, the urban-Spanish and the rural-Indian, into one interdependent, though unequal, society.
The second thesis became evident as a result of the effort to describe that social system. In the years just after independence the highest and lowest segments, the elite and the villagers, underwent changes that implied a major alteration in their interaction. Estate operators emerged from the struggles of new nationhood saddled with onerous financial difficulties. At the same time, Indian villagers showed a remarkable and apparently increasing autonomy. This conjunction, given the ties between the two groups, suggested that the break with the Spanish imperial government and economy led to a weakening of social control mechanisms in Mexico. I shall argue this point with conviction, since it emerged emphatically from the data consulted. I understand, however, the limitations of that material. It applies primarily to a few families and estates in a single, though not atypical, region. Thus, the hypothesis of a social breakdown inherent in Mexican independence requires testing on a broader scale.
Villages and Haciendas on the Eve of Independence
In the last years of Spanish colonial rule, Indian villages and Spanish haciendas shared the fertile Chalco plain. The villages, the end product of an evolution dating from Mexican antiquity, rested on a base of corporate resource control. The haciendas arose after the Spanish conquest and were derived from a more European notion of private property.
Three centuries of Spanish domination facilitated a generalized transfer of lands from corporate villages to individual Spanish families.8 Yet the Indian communities greatly outnumbered the estates and retained the vast majority of the Chalco population on the eve of independence. In 1792 there were 105 towns and villages, 39 haciendas, and 35 smaller, independent ranchos in the Chalco jurisdiction. Census materials from 1800 and 1845, both before and after independence, show a greater than 90 percent concentration of the Indian population in the corporate communities.7 The Spaniards’ estates may have come to dominate extensive lands, but the villages continued to serve as the locus for the overwhelming majority of the Indian peasantry.
The enduring social cohesion of the Chalco villages was based on their retention of a critical remnant of subsistence lands. These provided a corporately owned cushion against dependence on the Spaniards’ macroeconomy.8 A survey taken of 45 Chalco villages in 1769 reported that almost 60 percent of the population lived in communities that distributed agricultural plots to their residents (see Table I). This is a minimum figure. I have corrected the original survey to account for two communities reported as landless, but which other sources revealed as possessing land. These may not have been the only villages reluctant to report the existence of community holdings to the authorities in Mexico City.
The proportion of villagers living in landowning communities is also minimized by the reported landlessness of most lakefront villages. This presents problems that can be resolved only tentatively. The towns situated along the shore of Lake Chalco drew their subsistence from chinampa agriculture, a system of intensive, small-scale, irrigated cultivation. Gibson has shown that in nearby Xochimilco chinampa agriculture remained in the hands of small Indian producers until independence.9 The residents of the lakefront villages of Chalco likely also controlled their chinampas, though apparently not through community landholding. Whatever the precise tenure, if they did thus retain a locally controlled subsistence base, the chinampa villages may be combined with those stated as landed in the survey. This would raise to 75 percent the proportion of Indians living in villages providing their residents a landed base.
Even without such calculations of unproved validity, the imperfect 1769 survey points to the retention of communal lands as the essential support of continued village solidarity. On the Chalco central plain, the subregion with the largest population and the greatest number of haciendas, the concentration of Indians in landed villages was nearly 70 percent. And for the entire Chalco jurisdiction, Table I shows that landed villages tended to hold nearly twice the population of their reportedly landless neighbors.
Yet, if a landed subsistence base was the major support of the Chalco villages, that support was clearly on the wane through the late colonial years. This was not due to estates usurping village lands, of which there is no generalized evidence, but because of the effects of demographic growth on a largely stabilized land tenure situation.10 The evidence of growing landlessness is plentiful. No longer supported by village resources, many families emigrated to Mexico City. Others remained in the Chalco villages, vainly seeking subsistence by growing corn in their house lots, while scraping out a supplemental income by fermenting pulque from wild maguey cactus and collecting firewood. Such efforts brought a minimal income from sales in the larger Chalco towns. The proliferation of this deprived, landless element signaled the widening socioeconomic differentiation within the Chalco communities.11
As population pressed hard on available resources, some village leaders took personal advantage of the growing tensions and inequalities. With villagers fearful of losing their often meager plots, local bosses used their control of land distribution to reward themselves and their supporters and to punish insubordination. For instance, in San Gregorio Cuautzingo, around 1800, a small elite monopolized the village government. Its few members, all kinsmen, had usurped lands extensive enough to produce a marketable surplus. Two-thirds of the remaining villagers held community plots, but many allotments were too small to assure a single family’s subsistence. An even more deprived one-third of the community found itself landless.12 Thus could the self-interested actions of village elites exacerbate the internal village inequalities first stimulated by the pressures of population on limited resources. With a growing landless substratum, the Chalco communities became less and less able to provide the autonomous subsistence which most villagers cherished.
On the eve of independence commercial relations increasingly conditioned the lives of Chalco Indians. Village leaders who raised crops for profit favored this development. So did the few local traders, usually Spaniards or mixed-bloods, who controlled most village commerce. These merchants imported textiles, candles, lard, chile, and other goods not produced locally, and exchanged them for the small amounts of surplus corn available from the Indian population. The priest at the Chalco village of Tenango reported that two merchants monopolized commerce there, buying corn from the Indians at only one-third of the price it earned in Mexico City.13 As many villagers grew little or no corn, or had no surplus to sell, they needed a cash income to buy subsistence foodstuffs and other necessities. In the late colonial years the spread of landlessness caused increasing numbers of Chalco Indian families to experience this need.14
The Spaniards’ haciendas alone regularly employed numerous villagers and sold them surplus grain.15 The estates required numerous workers to cultivate their extensive landholdings devoted to commercial crop production. The growth of the urban and rural landless populations stimulated demand for estate produce. Larger crops, in turn, demanded more laborers, and at Chalco the concentration of population in the villages left their residents the only possible source. Through the late eighteenth century, population growth thus reacted upon a relatively fixed land tenure situation to promote both the villagers’ need for wage labor and the estates’ demand for workers.
The haciendas at Chalco, favored by the spreading commercialization of rural life, varied greatly in size and harvest yield (see Table II). Four land types were basic to the estates’ agricultural operations. Irrigated fields produced wheat, the staple of those who were culturally Spanish. Corn, for Indian consumption, and barley, for beasts of burden, shared nonirrigated expanses. Pastures supported livestock for hauling and transport on the estates and for local consumption. Highland forests provided lumber, firewood, and charcoal for both hacienda needs and sales in nearby villages.16
Beyond this agricultural base, many Chalco properties included facilities for processing natural products. The hacienda Compañía, for instance, distilled aguardiente (cane liquor) from molasses it bought from sugar estates to the south near Cuautla;17 both Moral and Miraflores milled wheat, grinding much of the Chalco crop into flour; Asunción fermented pulque from cultivated maguey; and Archicofradía manufactured bricks.18 These semi-industrial operations earned a more regular income than was afforded by the seasonal sale of grain.
Both the agricultural and the processing activities of the Chalco haciendas hinged on the needs of the Mexico City market. As that metropolis expanded from about 100,000 persons in the 1790s to over 150,000 in the first decades after independence, the business of supplying its subsistence necessities was clearly growing.19 The operators of Chalco haciendas, however, did not seek to feed the urban populace continuously. Rather, they stored their estate crops following bountiful harvests and allowed small farmers to satisfy urban demand at then low prices. Only when preharvest scarcity or the periodic misery of drought drove grain prices to a peak did estate agriculturalists begin to sell. For feeding Mexico in such times of crisis, they extracted substantial profits.20 Late colonial haciendas supported an urban elite by exploiting the vulnerability of a growing Mexican population to an unpredictably variable climate.
In carrying out that basic function, rural estates restricted and conditioned the lives of large numbers of Mexicans of quite varied social positions. In many ways those affected constituted a vertical cross-section of society, including both the wealthy and powerful urban aristocracy and landless rural villagers, concerned above all with physical survival. It is to the social system that I now turn, seeking to describe its components and their changing relationships as they passed through the troubled years of emerging nationhood.
The Hacienda Elite in Transition
Defined most simply, the Chalco hacienda elite included all persons called dueños de haciendas in the documents of the independence period. That designation applied to those earning the profits and suffering the losses of hacienda agriculture. The dueño could be either the owner or a leaseholder, but not a salaried estate administrator.
Being a dueño de hacienda, however, did not define a person’s role in Mexican society. Ladd has shown the variety of economic activities engaged in by the greatest of Mexican estate owners during the independence period.21 In light of her findings, the application of the modern concept of “occupation” to eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Mexico results in an anachronism. No single business orientation could define the social position of a prominent Mexican family. Nor does the aggregation of economic functions adequately characterize the broader Mexico City elite. The social patterns underlying multiple economic roles must be sought before eliteness can be understood.
The dueños of Chalco haciendas were an integral part of the Mexico City oligarchy, which in the late colonial years controlled both commerce and estate agriculture across a wide area of New Spain. Table III identifies over a century’s time the known owners and leaseholders of five Chalco estates. The changing composition of this small elite segment mirrored the larger alterations that national independence imposed on the entire Mexico City oligarchy.
That group was never wholly closed or static. Rather, continuity emerged from a consistency in the recruitment of new members. During the eighteenth century most newcomers to the aristocracy were newly wealthy entrepreneurs, or their immediate offspring, following a long-established pattern of landed investment. Independence wrought far-reaching changes in Mexican life, one of which was the replacement of wealthy miners and merchants by wealth-seeking politicians as the primary entrants to the landed oligarchy. The complexities and ramifications of this transition require detailed exposition.
Through the late colonial years, the Mexico City elite was a unified and interdependent social class. The dual predominance of church institutions and great families—emphasized by François Chevalier in his pioneering study of the origins of the Mexican hacienda system22—continued down to independence. Church and laity were closely interlocked, and both were supported by forms of corporate organization and the regular acquisition of new capital.
Free of the vagaries of inheritance, while at the same time they remained beneficiaries of the deathbed piety of the wealthy, ecclesiastical corporations long endured as economic pillars of New Spain. They controlled extensive urban and rural properties and served as major credit banks. Strong personal and economic ties bound them to the lay segment of the elite. Members of the great landed families often held important ecclesiastical positions. And the Church’s banking activities, lending capital at a standard, moderate rate of five percent yearly, aided the hacienda-based agricultural enterprises of many laymen.23
Lacking the automatic incorporation characteristic of religious organizations, great landed families looked to other means of prolonging elite status. Many achieved a measure of incorporation by locking the family patrimony into entail. This vitiated the problems of repeated testamentary divisions and protected estates from creditors’ demands.24 Financial reinforcement came most often through merger with families who were more recently wealthy, thus whose capital was more liquid.
While focusing on the entrepreneurial side of eliteness, Brading has described in detail the social pattern through which newly gained wealth repeatedly moved into the landed oligarchy. Entrepreneurial success in late colonial New Spain usually belonged to immigrant Spaniards. They normally divided their wealth into two portions late in life. One part was invested in rural estates and was commonly left to the eldest male heir. The other part remained in commerce and was passed to a daughter who had married another immigrant Spaniard, often a cousin. The latter was charged with carrying on the family commercial enterprise. This one social pattern assured the continuity of entrepreneurship, the landed investment of a substantial portion of most newly acquired capital, and continuity of kinship ties between recently landed heirs and their aspiring merchant in-laws.25
Entrepreneurship and estate ownership were thus inseparable halves of one system of elite recruitment and maintenance during the late colonial years. Success in commerce and mining brought the wealth prerequisite to social ascent; hacienda ownership looked to the preservation of that wealth and the elite status which depended upon it. The most successful entrepreneurs invested in rural estates, seeking to escape the risks of mining and commerce, which they knew could destroy fortunes as well as create them.26 Their acceptance within the landed elite was confirmed by the propensity of the more established families to marry their offspring to those of wealthy newcomers. The geneologies compiled by Ladd treat 32 titled families of the Mexico City elite during the late eighteenth century. In that group, there were at least 17 marriages that united old and new wealth.27 Such ties brought social acceptance to newly wealthy parvenues, and access to liquid capital for the older landed families. And that access was basic to the long-term viability of the hacienda as a mechanism of elite support. As noted previously, rural estates earned important profits only when crops were held off the market to be sold in times of scarcity and high prices. Liquid wealth was required to support elite families and to fund estate operations while awaiting the most propitious moment for sales. Ties with the recently wealthy brought to the landed families thus favored the capability of waiting without recourse to credit at interest.
The pre-1810 owners and leaseholders of the Chalco estates listed in Table III fell within this late colonial process of amalgamation. The Condes del Valle de Orizaba, owners of Asunción—among other estates—and holders of one of the oldest Mexican titles, headed an elite clan, which included Bartolomé Terreros y Trejo and Miguel de Lugo y Terreros. The latter two were dueños of Chalco haciendas descended from merchants who had allied with the Condes during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.28 Joaquín Gómez de Pedroso, owner of the Moral estate, was part of an extended family, which had more recently merged entrepreneurial and landed wealth. He, like his cousin the Conde de San Bartolomé de Jala and an in-law, the Marqués de Rivascacho, had inherited commercial wealth amassed in the eighteenth century and invested in haciendas at Chalco and elsewhere.29 The Chalco leaseholders also fit into this tightly knit colonial elite. Three of the four listed in Table III for the years before 1810 were owners of neighboring Chalco haciendas, supplementarily operating leased properties.30
Such aristocratic families, interrelated and reinforced by mergers with new capital, profited nicely from the often tragic intersection of long-term population growth and periodic drought that was characteristic of late eighteenth-century Mexico. Their desire and ability to use their haciendas to capitalize on climatic variations brought them to near domination of the urban grain market. Such power and its abuses evoked criticism from officials of both crown and clergy, but complaint had little effect on the late colonial hacienda elite.31
Where adverse opinion accomplished little, the economic and political crises of the early nineteenth century did take a toll.32 Its first decade witnessed the severe economic repercussions of European war. The resulting problems then merged with the dislocations caused by the internal insurgency that lasted from 1810 to 1817. Prolonged economic instability and social unrest undermined the Mexico City elite. The erosion is evident in the quickening pace in which Chalco haciendas appeared for sale in the Gazeta de México (see Table IV). Most such advertisements followed judicial orders that estates be auctioned to satisfy creditors. Thus if advertisement in the Gazeta is not a sure sign of the sale of an hacienda, it does signal the growing economic problems of its owner. If a property were not sold, the struggling dueño likely had to begin operating the estate more to pay his creditors than to support his family.33
The fast-changing ownership of the Moral estate illustrates problems typical of Chalco in the independence years. Joaquín Gómez de Pedroso had owned and operated the estate from before 1793 (see Table III). By July of 1817, however, his creditors had obtained a ruling from the Audiencia, the highest court in New Spain, ordering the sale of the estate. Moral, one of the largest haciendas at Chalco (see Table II), was then valued at 201,629 pesos. After the first round of bids, the best offer was only 110,000 pesos. This was rejected by Gómez de Pedroso, as it did not cover two-thirds of the estate’s inventoried value—the legal minimum which a debtor had to accept in estate auction. The bid must have been improved, for Moral soon passed into the hands of the wealthy Conde de Basoco’s widow.34
Neither Gómez de Pedroso’s nor Moral’s problems ended quickly. To satisfy continuing demands by creditors, the former owner saw two of his urban properties forced into auction a year later.35And the Condesa de Basoco relinquished Moral in 1821 to complete the settlement of her late husband’s estate.36 The next known owner, Atilano Sánchez, held the property by 1830. He, too, was forced by debts to sell Moral, this time in 1837. He then asked 120,000 pesos and accepted the 110,000 pesos that had been refused two decades earlier.37
A rapid turnover in elite membership might have renewed the landed oligarchy by weeding out the weak and rewarding the newly wealthy. Changes in the patterns of entrepreneurship initiated by national independence precluded such an outcome. During the decade of insurgency, from 1810 to 1821, nearly an entire generation of Spanish immigrant merchants left Mexico, taking their capital with them.38 After independence, the decentralization of commerce further cut into the concentration of entrepreneurial wealth in Mexico City. At the same time, the customary role of immigrant merchant shifted from Spaniards who had usually sought a place in the Mexican oligarchy to newcomers from northern Europe and North America who rarely chose to join the local elite.39 A parallel change inhibited elite reinforcement with mining capital after independence. As a result of the economic dislocations of international wars and local insurgency, most Mexican mines emerged from independence operating below peak capacity at best, and at worst utterly destroyed. The task of resurrection fell to British investors whose access to steam-powered drainage technology appeared a necessity, but whose ultimate goal of sending profits back to England cost the Mexican oligarchy another traditional source of financial support.40
With few rising entrepreneurs seeking landed investment, the colonial elite recruitment system, which had thrived on the repeated merger of new money and old land, was doomed. After independence, as Ladd has noted, generals and politicians became the primary entrants to the hacienda oligarchy.41 This change serves as the thematic base of Manuel Payno’s Los bandidos de Río Frío, a neglected, semi-fictional account of post-independence social life written later in the nineteenth century.42 Several of its episodes contrast the declining fortunes of the Marqués de Valle Alegre with the troubled rise of Moctezuma III. The latter, a mestizo of undistinguished origins, aspired to political rule while making a concerted drive to acquire haciendas—at Chalco.
The shift from entrepreneurial to broadly political recruitment clearly characterized the dueños of Chalco haciendas after independence. The 1819 list presented in Table II highlights the transition. Many older families had already departed, but newly wealthy merchants such as Basoco, Heras, and Echave were still following the colonial pattern of investing mercantile capital in rural estates.43 Only the Echave family was still involved in Chalco hacienda operations in the 1830s.44 The same 1819 list includes Agustín Iturbide, a most prominent politician of the independence years. He would soon take the lead in the proclamation of national sovereignty, and shortly thereafter elevate himself to the exalted, if short-lived, role of Emperor of Mexico. Many other rising politicians followed Iturbide into the ranks of dueños of Chalco haciendas. Of those involved after 1821 with the five properties listed in Table III, Vicente Guerrero, Mariano Riva Palacio, Atilano Sánchez and José María Tornel came to hacienda operations from political, military, or bureaucratic careers.
During the troubled years after 1810, many newcomers to estate agriculture acquired properties that members of the older elite lost under strained circumstances. Often having risen through successful insurgency and lacking great personal wealth, many post-independence politicians bought estates at bargain prices and agreed to pay the debts of the previous owners rather than the full value of the property.45 Entry into the landed elite was thus eased, but exit was equally facilitated. Hacienda ownership remained a shortterm phenomenon after independence, as accumulating debts continued to force estate auctions.46 Through the colonial years wealthy families had sought through estate operations to perpetuate their commercially gained fortunes; after independence the newly ascendent politicians hoped to build an economic base upon haciendas alone. This forced new demands on the entire system.
The growing numbers of estate operators who lacked personal wealth had to rely on credit to fund their agricultural activities. Yet, through most of the first half of the nineteenth century, credit was becoming increasingly scarce and expensive. This was partly a result of the general economic decline and restructuring already mentioned. Especially damaging to credit availability was the Royal Consolidation of 1804 to 1808. Asunción Lavrin has shown the extent to which the major church banks lost substantial capital under this emergency, wartime measure.47 To preserve remaining funds, clerical bankers began to insist on greater security against loans. This effectively barred many new estate operators, who were burdened with debts from the start, from utilizing this traditional source of mortgage financing.48 Alternatives were scarce. Manuel López Escudero, a priest who owned and operated the small Chalco Hacienda of Axalco, searched Mexico City for credit in 1831, but could find only one offer. And that came at the steep rate of three percent monthly. He decided that his best course was further to delay his previous creditors.49 Such tactics could not long support an entire system of estate agriculture.
The generally adopted solution for the credit crisis forced the dueños of Chalco haciendas to rely on especially onerous short-term loans. During the 1820s and 1830s a small number of grain merchants and bakers from Mexico City financed Chalco estate agriculture. Early each growing season they contracted to provide from 100 to 300 pesos each week to help fund estate operating expenses. In return, the agriculturalist agreed to deliver after the harvest a stipulated amount of grain at a predetermined price. Most of the men financing the estates worked with two to three haciendas each year, while larger properties required simultaneous funding by more than one creditor. The latter enjoyed the long-run advantage. Recurrent problems of damaged or reduced harvests left the agriculturalist with debts in grain, but the contract terms prohibited him from raising prices. This combined credit and marketing system thus deprived many dueños of Chalco haciendas of the traditional means of exploiting precarious Mexican agriculture. Some survived for a time, but only the small number of creditors could earn real profits.50
It appears that national independence broke the unity of the Mexico City elite. The colonial solidarity between rising immigrant merchants and established landed families could not continue. After independence the newly landed were far from established, and new enterpreneurial patterns directed wealth away from the land. As a result, relations between the landed and commercial sectors of the elite became economically more antagonistic. Those with capital exploited the dueños de haciendas’ weaknesses more than they fortified joint elite strength. A merchant-landowner dichotomy, never an absolute division in Mexico, more nearly describes the Mexico City oligarchy after independence.
Post-Independence Estate Operators: A Family History
A case study of one family illustrates the confluence of difficulties facing the dueños of many Chalco haciendas in the years after independence. The troubled rise of the Guerrero-Riva Palacio connection, documented in the family papers, highlights the paradoxical unity of political drive and economic weakness. The aspirations and failures of these well-known men epitomized the struggles of a generation of Chalco hacienda agriculturalists.
Vicente Guerrero rose to national prominence as an insurgent leader in southern Mexico. He became national president in the late 1820s. He consistently strove to complement political ascent with economic success. By the time of independence, he already owned an extensive mule transport enterprise, which served the Taxco, Tixtla, Acapulco axis of his native region.51 Following the armed struggle, he began to acquire haciendas along these transport routes. In 1824 he bought Platanillo, a sugar estate near Taxco. Five years later he leased Tierra Colorada, a similar property near Acapulco, from a Tixtla religious confraternity. Both estates had suffered from years of abandonment during the insurgency and required costly renovation before sugar production could resume. Guerrero complemented these haciendas by leasing smaller nearby properties which produced grains.52
Having attained national political stature, he turned his entrepreneurial attention to Chalco, a region economically tied to the national capital. The valuable Chalco estate called Compañía belonged (following the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1767) first to the viceregal authorities and then to the national government. Agustín Iturbide leased the property during the transition that he led from colonial to national rule. Following Iturbide’s demise, Guerrero took over the estate in 1824 for the costly annual rent of 6,550 pesos. Again integrating his enterprises, he bought lakeshore landing and storage facilities to speed deliveries to the capital where his bakery utilized the produce of the estate.53 Guerrero’s economic achievements, however, rested heavily on his presidential power. He never paid the rent for leasing Compañía. After his politically hastened death in 1831, his widow found that she owed the government 63,511 pesos. She also was burdened with substantial debts, not only to the brotherhood that owned Tierra Colorada but to numerous individuals as well.54
Mariano Riva Palacio inherited the leadership of the struggling family. His origins are unclear, but his marriage to President Guerrero’s daughter explains his elite position. During his father-in-law’s tenure as chief executive, Riva Palacio held various posts in the Mexico City government. Later he served as Deputy to the liberal congress of 1833 and 1834, and continued throughout his life to play an important role in Mexican politics.55
Leaving the family’s southern holdings to the late president’s widow, Riva Palacio concentrated his business concerns around Chalco. As a dueño de hacienda there he suffered an unhappy mixture of exaggerated ambition and endless financial difficulties. The government granted him a nine-year lease to continue to operate Compañía, beginning in 1833. The officials involved saw this as the only means to recover Guerrero’s debts. Produce found stored at the estate, apparently stockpiled by Guerrero awaiting higher prices, was sold immediately, at the government’s insistence. The proceeds covered much of the claim. The remaining 13,063 pesos was Riva Palacio’s obligation, to be paid in installments, along with his annual rent, which was further increased to 6,990 pesos.56
This was a less than favorable start. In search of assistance he entered into partnership with Atilano Sánchez, owner of the nearby Moral estate. Sánchez was also Chief Notary of the Mexico City Cathedral’s Juzgado de Capellanías, a major church bank, but his position did little to alleviate either partner’s chronic shortage of capital. The unsatisfactory results of the attempt at joint operations led Sánchez to lease Moral to Riva Palacio, while contemplating selling the property. The lease arrangement brought no improvement, as Riva Palacio was repeatedly tardy in paying the rent. Finally in April of 1837, Sánchez sold Moral to a third party for 110,000 pesos. Although below his expectations, it did liberate him from mounting debts. The new owner quickly revoked Riva Palacio’s lease.57
He was also about to lose Compañía, since his unpaid rents by 1838 had accumulated to over 7000 pesos. His only recourse was to beg for time. He pleaded that the deficit resulted from uncontrollable, climate-caused crop damage. The argument is revealing. Before independence the hacienda operators had based their profits on crisis years. Now they suffered. In Riva Palacio’s case the difference clearly lay in his lack of personal wealth with which to fund the estates. His agricultural enterprises, like those of many others at Chalco, depended fully on the disadvantageous credit and marketing system already described. He could not profit from it, and the government terminated his lease early in 1840.58
Riva Palacio persevered, lowered his expectations substantially, and began operating much smaller Chalco estates. In a complicated and not entirely clear transaction, he acquired the combined Asunción-Archicofradía properties in 1842. He paid only 4000 pesos (much less than the annual rent for either Moral or Compañía) while assuming responsibility for a previous owner’s massive debts. In such an arrangement Riva Palacio was little more than an administrator for the creditors. He was fully responsible for any losses, yet unlikely to earn substantial profits. Somehow he held on. A decade later he bought San Juan de Dios—one of the smallest Chalco estates—for 28,000 pesos from General José María Tornel. By mid-century Riva Palacio did own two lesser Chalco haciendas. After three decades of struggle, the newly risen family was finally approaching establishment on the land.59
Both the general and particular views of the Chalco hacienda elite indicate that the traditional function of the estate system broke down after independence. Though the provision of foodstuffs to the national capital continued, the extraction of capital to support a broad group of elite families declined severely. What profits emerged after independence were more likely to benefit the small group able to finance estate operations than the more numerous dueños de haciendas. Thus the self-reinforcing cycle of elite financial weakness and membership instability, which began during the troubled years of insurgency, continued for at least two decades past independence. How did this “crisis of the aristocracy” affect society at Chalco?
Urban-Rural Mediators: Estate Administrators and Village Priests
As confirmed urban residents, the dueños of Chalco haciendas rarely acted personally in the rural environment. In their stead, a hierarchy of dependents mediated their relations with the members of rural society—especially the Chalco villagers. General administrators (administradores) managed day to day activities at the estates. In addition to directing agricultural operations, they hired most subordinate administrators, recruited workers from the villages, and arranged sales of grain and livestock to the residents of neighboring communities. They kept their superiors in Mexico City informed through regular accounting procedures and weekly written reports (the former often mentioned but rarely preserved; the latter important sources for this study).60
Administrators’ positions varied with the size and complexity of the hacienda and the nature of individual arrangements. José María Caballero managed Compañía for both Guerrero and Riva Palacio through the entire period from 1824 to 1840. He remained in the family’s service afterward. His salary in 1835 was a substantial 38 pesos weekly. In contrast, the administrator of a single, more modest hacienda might receive only 12 pesos per week. The latter’s position approximated that of the subordinate stewards (mayordomos) charged with one agricultural or processing operation at the larger properties.61
Most estates also employed a clerk (escribiente), the administrator’s chief assistant. Usually an educated youth from Mexico City or a larger town, such as Chalco, he earned about 7 or 8 pesos each week. Primarily keeping the estate’s accounts, he periodically found himself fully in charge of the hacienda and responsible for labor recruitment and produce marketing during an administrator’s absence. The clerk’s position was a school for potential managers. At Moral and Compañía, with great stability in the higher managerial roles, the turnover of clerks approached one per year. Either they rose to stewardships or they left in search of fresh opportunities.62
In the correspondence between dueños and their subordinates the profitable attainment of economic goals clearly emerges as the major criterion used to evaluate administrative personnel. The economic bond was often confirmed by the establishment of ties of ritual kinship (compadrazgo) between elite members and their administrative dependents. The same mixture of economic and kinship concerns characterized the managers’ choices of subordinates.63 Thus interrelated, the supervisory hierarchy formed the first links in the social chain uniting Mexico City and rural Chalco. Administrators, often of urban origin, shared the urbanized, commercial outlook of the urban resident dueños de haciendas for whom they acted.
The Chalco village priests held a special mediating role. They divided their attention between religious duties and commercial activities, often trading in their parishes as agents of the dueños of Chalco haciendas. Questions of estate labor recruitment and crop sales occupy much of the correspondence between the pastor at Temamatla and his colleague at Amecameca, to the south. Merchant clerics sold livestock, foodstuffs, and some manufactures to their parishioners, deducted a commission, and returned the profits to the estates to help pay for operating expenses. The latter, in turn, largely consisted of wages paid to villagers whom the priests helped recruit.64 The career of Juan Antonio de Germán, pastor at San Gregorio Cuautzingo, exemplified this role. His trade in the several villages of his parish at times earned over 300 pesos weekly to help finance Riva Palacio’s estates. The priest sold corn and livestock to the same villagers he persuaded to work at Moral and Compañía. Not surprisingly, his religious and economic roles merged. He once complained to Riva Palacio of the adverse effects of delayed wage payments at the haciendas. The villagers knew that their spiritual guardian provided payroll funds, and they had begun to lose respect. Father Germán’s demise demonstrates the dependence of the merchant priest. Early in 1834 his debts to Riva Palacio surpassed his ability to pay. Pressed, he begged for time, but his once lucrative trade with Compañía was terminated. Riva Palacio, dissatisfied with a stalemate which threatened a small market and an important source of labor, quickly arranged Germán’s transfer to another parish. The dueño of Compañía then recruited and instructed in the requisites of the position a new pastor, Mariano Olmedo, formerly at Culhuacan.65
The Chalco priests were an integral part of the post-independence hacienda social network, representing the urban elite within the Chalco villages. Ties of ritual kinship with dueños de haciendas and estate administrators often cemented this connection also.66 The priests helped the elite finance estate agriculture and recruit workers— two critical aspects of hacienda economics. Taking advantage of the internal village inequalities discussed previously, clerics worked to foster an Indian lifestyle combining wage labor at the estates with the purchase of necessities in the marketplace. They did little to implement the villagers’ oft-manifested preference for subsistence autonomy. In this perspective, the Chalco priesthood led the advance of urban, Spanish economic culture into village life.
The urban oligarchs and their dependents also controlled the means of transportation tying Chalco into the regional market centered at Mexico City. The haciendas universally kept mule trains, cared for by estate resident muleteers. Those at Compañía regularly carried wheat south to Cuautla, returned with molasses for aguardiente distillation, and delivered the finished liquor to the capital. They also transferred the estate’s wheat to nearby mills and carried corn bound for the urban market to the lakeshore, where it was loaded onto canoes.67 Urban merchants dealing in Chalco grains also owned means of transportation, either carts or mule trains. When estates and merchants could not handle all their own transportation needs, their hauling contracts gave business to the few independent pack train operators serving the region.68 And while the canoes carrying bulk goods over the canals to the capital belonged primarily to Indian villagers, they too were dependent on the hacienda economy for many cargoes.69 The embarcaderos, lakeside landings which doubled as warehouses, remained firmly in the hands of the landed elite or its dependents.70
The clientage network, which ranged down from the Mexico City oligarchy in the years after independence, controlled the Chalco haciendas, reached into the villages, and monopolized the channels of transportation integrating the region into the wider commercial system. This hierarchy of dependency had endured through independence, despite the elite’s troubles. One of its major goals was to influence village life sufficiently to insure adequate labor supplies at the haciendas. It is to this basic question of hacienda-village relations that I now turn.
Haciendas, Labor Systems, and the Chalco Villagers after Independence
During the late colonial years, as outlined in the opening section of this study, the Chalco haciendas were primarily units of extensive crop production, relying on the residents of neighboring villages for labor. The region’s Indian population remained in the corporate villages, clinging to the minimal subsistence base provided by community landholdings. In the same period, population growth and the self-interested distribution of lands by local village elites combined to create an expanding landless segment within the villages. This increased the number of Chalco residents who had to rely on
No consistent population figures allow a full understanding of demographic trends at Chalco after 1821. The qualitative data that follow do suggest that population pressures subsided, or at least stabilized. Such a conclusion remains speculative pending future demographic research.
The available, limited census totals, summarized in Table V, do indicate that the Chalco population remained concentrated in the towns and villages after independence. From the numbers of estate residents listed in that table, it is useful to estimate the potential labor forces included therein. To do this I have presumed families of four members.71 I then subtracted from two to four families to account for administrators and their kin. There being no evidence of women ever working at the Chalco haciendas, I have assumed that the male heads of household and male children above the age of twelve were the laboring members of each family. I thus estimate that 1.5 persons in every family of four potentially labored for the estates.
The results of these calculations are also presented in Table V. Given that small haciendas often needed up to 60 workers and that larger ones regularly required as many as 200, the residents of five of the six estates listed clearly could not fully satisfy labor demands.72 Only Miraflores, a large property emphasizing wheat cultivation and milling, listed a number of residents sufficient to meet most needs. Zabaleta had numerous workers, but surely not enough to cover the requirements of such a large estate (see Table II). The other four properties must have required nonresident workers to fulfill even minimal weekly demands.
The limited laboring role of estate residents is further illustrated by the more detailed information about two other Chalco properties. Moral and Compañía in 1835 shared a total of 46 resident employees (Usted in Table VI), corresponding to a total population of about 132 persons. The occupations listed are specialized and are often skilled tasks. No resident is called an agricultural laborer, though some likely worked in the fields to help meet great demands.
Living together in small estate villages called rancherias, these regular estate employees received both the salaries listed in Table VI and weekly corn rations. Should the dueños financial troubles delay any part of this expected recompense, work ceased—a not uncommon occurrence during the years from 1820-1840. To retain their residents, estate administrators were careful to provide rations and medicines during famine and epidemics, times when villagers suffered excessively from scarcities and high prices. Further, many resident workers demanded and received advance payment against future work, which they were not (or could not be) obliged to work off. Such advances accumulated in the estate accounts, creating debts owed, at least on paper, by the worker to the estate. There is no indication that these could be invoked to force a resident to remain at an hacienda. Departure without payment was not uncommon. Administrators were repeatedly warned against advancing large sums, as these were uncollectable. Yet there was often no alternative. Prospective residents demanded advances before beginning work, and established families demanded bonuses or threatened to depart. Clearly, post-independence haciendas never dominated their resident workers. Administrators were often frustrated in their search for newcomers and in their attempts to retain families already resident. Success in either case required concessions both in cash and in promised security for the worker and his family.73
As a result of the minimal role of estate residents in providing agricultural labor, the Chalco villagers filled the breach after independence as they had in the late colonial years. The continuing inability of their communities to provide enough subsistence lands made wage labor a necessity for many. They were recruited and organized in an informal, though clearly delineated, system of labor gangs (cuadrillas). Each Sunday, estate administrators visited numerous communities and paid cash bonuses to local labor bosses (capitanes de cuadrillas), who in return promised to provide workers.74 Thus recruited, work crews went to Moral and Compañía from at least eight Chalco villages, including San Lucas, San Gregorio Cuautzingo, San Martín Cuautlalpan, Huexoculco, and Tlapala. Half of the eight known communities supplying labor reported subsistence lands in the 1769 survey summarized in Table I; the others did not. Apparently both subsistence needs and the desire for supplemental earnings could motivate villagers to labor at the Chalco haciendas.75
Two weekly accounts showing the wages paid to workers at Moral and Compañía have survived and illustrate the magnitude and diversity of the hacienda-village labor relation (see Table VII). From a recent analysis of the labor accounts of estates on the Texcoco plain, just north of Chalco, I found that differing wage levels usually correspond to the age and work experience of the laborers.76 It is thus likely that the reward of 3 reales (1 peso equalled 8 reales) per day was reserved for the labor bosses, who regularly accompanied their crews as overseers. It is also probable that the two lowest categories comprised youths seen as not fully contributing to the work. The majority of adult villagers earned from 2 to 2.5 reales daily while working at the haciendas.
If the wage of 3 reales did go only to the labor bosses, the weekly totals of 338 and then 375 workers presumably represented first 11 gangs of about 31 members each, then 13 groups averaging 29 workers. Given Compañía’s larger crop production, these combined crews probably provided about 200 workers to that estate and nearer 150 to Moral.
Were these two-weeks labor forces typical? Within a context of seasonal variations, they were. From January to June of each year, while the two estates cultivated and harvested the irrigated wheat crop that demanded intensive labor, remaining records of joint weekly labor expenses indicate a work force of approximately 350. Slightly smaller numbers usually labored during the period of corn cultivation, which occupied most of the rest of the year.77 It is evident that these estates drew workers in large numbers and from numerous communities. And they were only a part of the larger labor network that linked the full complement of Chalco haciendas and villages.
Though the control of scarce landed resources gave the estates a position of strength in this relationship, they never fully dominated the villagers. Labor bosses extracted major concessions from hacienda administrators in exchange for providing workers essential to estate operations. Their insistence on receiving a weekly cash reward prior to organizing any villagers has been noted. In addition, groups traveling more than a short distance began to work each Tuesday, but demanded and received full wages for Monday’s journey. In one week of May, 1835, only 50 workers appeared at Compañía on Monday, yet 124 labored the rest of the week. All received pay for the full six-day week. The estates also had to pay youths, called clacualeros, who never gave direct labor service, but accompanied the gangs and provided the older workers with sustenance. Administrators called all these outlays dead wages (jornales muertos). They were not paid in exchange for work, but demanded if laborers were to appear at all.78
The villagers, or rather the labor bosses, also enjoyed the independence to choose when to work at the haciendas. This could lead to severe shortages at the estates. Villagers regularly attended numerous community fiestas in preference to laboring at the haciendas. The most common ground for their refusal to work, however, was the priority that they always gave to village crops. This was especially important to all villagers with access to subsistence plots, and important, above all, to the local bosses (likely the same men as the labor organizers, or their close allies) who had allotted themselves lands that produced marketable surpluses. While waiting for the villagers to plant or harvest, administrators often had to postpone the same operations at the haciendas. Reduced estate crops often resulted. Delayed plantings shortened the growing season, and tardy harvesting increased the matured plants’ vulnerability to frost. Yet, even after villagers were plied with substantial cash advances, they arrived at the estates only after completing all village chores.79
Did the concessions obtained by the villagers in return for their labor result from long-standing circumstances or from changes taking place at the time of independence? As evidenced by their fixed nomenclature, the dead wages were probably long established. In the main they derived from the bargaining power afforded by traditional village cohesion. More a result of the dislocations of national independence was the inability of the estates to regularly obtain sufficient workers. The alarm with which long-resident estate administrators at Chalco viewed the situation suggests a problem of recent origin or one suddenly worsening. The breadth of the condition can be seen in the identical laments voiced by managers at the hacienda of Pilares, near Acolman, and at Vicente Guerrero’s southern sugar properties. Both saw labor as impossible to recruit and insolent toward estate administrators.80 Ward Barrett’s discussion of labor recruitment at the sugar hacienda of Atlacomulco, near Cuernavaca, further illustrates the mounting labor crisis. There, the traditional preoccupation with contracting village workers became a stubborn difficulty after independence.81
In an estate system that locked an urban elite and peasant villagers into one society and economy, and in which cash payment by the elite member was prerequisite to the provision of labor by the peasant, it seems that the post-independence financial difficulties of the dueños de haciendas allowed the increased village autonomy manifested at Chalco. The resulting labor shortages could only serve to sink the elite deeper into its cycle of decline.
Ties between haciendas and villages at Chalco extended beyond the question of labor. Though more famous for their urban marketing, the estates also sold agricultural produce in nearby Indian communities. After independence as before, village merchants, both clerics and laymen, sold estate com to the numerous Indians unable to grow their own subsistence crops. To survive the recurrent crop failures that plagued Mexican agriculture, entire communities had to rely periodically on the stored corn of the haciendas. The estates also controlled the lines of trade through which post-independence villagers bought livestock. Antonio de Terán, Gregorio de Mier, and other urban entrepreneurs obtained animals bred on the ranges of northern Mexico and sold them to the dueños of Chalco haciendas. They in turn sold the livestock to the villagers through client administrators and village merchants. In purchasing livestock, as in buying corn and finding wage labor, the Chalco Indians participated in an economy directed in Mexico City by an elite that included the dueños de haciendas and that was represented at Chalco by their dependents.82
In general, an unequal symbiosis characterized relations between Chalco haciendas and villages. In the context of a stabilized division of lands, in which the haciendas dominated, and of population, where the villages held the great majority, estates could not prosper without the labor of numerous villagers. And the latter could not subsist as a group without the income earned as hacienda workers. In addition, estate incomes did increase through sales to villagers who in turn relied on hacienda food supplies to a greater or lesser extent, depending on the fortunes of community crops.
Given this relationship, the Chalco village leaders assumed a strategic brokerage role. Standing between estates and potential workers, their interests lay in part with both, yet wholly with neither. Their self-serving distribution of limited and insufficient community lands forced many villagers to labor at the estates and to buy subsistence foodstuffs. At the same time, the Indian leaders gained rewards for both themselves and the villagers through the controlled organization of the labor force. Their combined control of both land distribution and labor organization insured to the local elites the dependence of both the landed and landless members of the Chalco communities.
In the face of Spanish elite interests, this tight village power structure was at least partially beneficial to the dependent villagers. Though suffering from the maldistribution of village lands and the subservience that dependence likely imposed, they could only benefit from the interest of village bosses in holding onto community lands and in demanding concessions for the provision of labor. Village solidarity under the local elites saved the Indian peasants the in security of being left individually at the mercy of the Spanish elite and its many dependents.
Of course wealth and power were reserved for the urban aristocracy, while toil alone rewarded the villagers, both before and after independence. Yet in times of oligarchic difficulties, as in the post-independence years, village bosses could win additional advantages for their communities. Insufficient knowledge of internal village life prevents broader discussion of the effects of this interaction on the Indian peasantry. Estate-related sources do not provide that insight. Yet the impasse may be useful in emphasizing that neither the hacienda nor the village evolved in isolation. Neither will be well understood until both are studied as institutional and cultural poles of one social and economic system.
Conclusion
Chalco did not develop great estates similar to those described by François Chevalier as manorial, self-contained social units.83 Recent studies point to the applicability of his view primarily to northern Mexico, where the absence of numerous sedentary Indian peoples allowed the hacienda to become a quite independent social institution.84 William Taylor has seen the error of applying the Chevalier model to Oaxaca, where the persistence of strong Indian villages under vigorous local leadership limited the possibilities of hacienda development.85 Similar conditions prevailed at Chalco, though there the strength of the Spanish presence in Mexico City created a more powerful market impulse, which led to greater Spanish control of once-Indian lands.
Important similarities between the estate structures of Oaxaca and Chalco suggest a preliminary model of the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Mexican hacienda as it flourished in regions of dense Indian village settlement and within the agricultural hinterland of a Spanish city:86 Elite city dwellers owned and/or operated the estates, selling foodstuffs and other rural products to the urban population. They aimed to support their aristocratic positions by exploiting the subsistence needs of the cities, especially in times of crisis. Their long-term success depended on their access to other sources of liquid capital: haciendas could preserve wealth, but they rarely created it. In regions like Chalco, estates were centers of agricultural production scattered among Indian villages, which held most of the rural population. Only an administrative hierarchy and a few specialized workers lived at most properties. Resident workers remained without coercion, held, at times loosely, by wage advances and the umbrella of security of the haciendas. Indian villagers performed most agricultural labor at the estates, working on a regular though seasonal basis. At this level haciendas and villages interlocked as complementary, though often antagonistic, poles of rural life.
Inquiry into the human relationships embedded in the Chalco hacienda system further revealed a hierarchy of social dependence. Through the mediation of estate administrators, village priests, and Indian community leaders, the landed elite of Mexico City was tied to the poorest of landless villagers. Parallel networks likely integrated hacienda societies in other areas, such as Oaxaca, with similar economic structures. Only further research can delineate their varying configurations.
Equally in need of investigation is the hypothesis of a breakdown of hacienda social control in the years following national independence. Should research find the disorganization uncovered at Chalco mirrored in other regions, a first understanding of the social foundations of the new nation’s political instability may emerge.
Finally, the present findings, if further confirmed, would place the long-term evolution of the Mexican hacienda in new perspective. In a recent and stimulating analysis of the colonial Mexican economy, Enrique Semo concludes that after the great estate emerged in the sixteenth century and developed through the entire colonial period, “it became the most important internal factor in the social and economic life of the country in the second half of the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth centuries.”87 The situation at Chalco during the independence years suggests a modification of this scheme. Focusing on the hacienda as a vehicle of elite support, Semo seems near the truth. With large-scale commerce increasingly in the hands of non-Hispanic aliens disinterested in joining Mexican society, the independence years saw more and more Mexico City elite families relying almost completely on their haciendas for economic support.
But at the same time, national independence left the elite financially weakened (very much a result of the same loss of ties with entrepreneurial activities). The resulting difficulties undermined the hacienda as an institution of social dominance and control. From this view, the first half of the nineteenth century was a period of stagnation, if not actual regression, in the development of the great estate and of increased autonomy for the long-struggling Indian villagers.
Spanish and Indian here denote broad cultural groups; no reference to place of birth or exact genetic composition is intended. This follows James Lockhart, “Encomienda and Hacienda: The Evolution of the Great Estate in the Spanish Indies,” HAHR, 49:3 (Aug. 1969), 426-429.
Charles Gibson, The Aztecs Under Spanish Rule (Stanford, 1964), p. 407.
The Mariano Riva Palacio collection is held in the Latin American Collection Library of The University of Texas at Austin (hereafter cited MRP).
Especially the Manuel López Escudero manuscripts, also held in the Latin American Collection Library of The University of Texas at Austin (hereafter cited MLE), and diverse items consulted in the Archivo General de la Nación, Mexico City (hereafter cited AGN).
D. A. Brading, Miners and Merchants in Bourbon Mexico, 1763-1810 (Cambridge, 1971); and Doris Ladd, “The Mexican Nobility at Independence, 1780-1826,” Diss. Stanford University, 1972.
Gibson, Aztecs, pp. 279, 293-295.
AGN, Historia, Vol. 578, exp. 1, fol. 63-65; AGN, Tributos, Vol. 43, último exp., fol. 4; AGN, Bienes Nacionales, Vol. 369, October 15, 1845 and November 8, 1845.
José Miranda, “La propiedad comunal de la tierra y la cohesión social de los pueblos indígenas mexicanas,” in Vida colonial y albores de la independencia (México, 1972), pp. 54-73.
Gibson, Aztecs, pp. 320-321.
For a general statement of population increase at Chaleo, see Peter Gerhard, A Guide to the Historical Geography of New Spain (Cambridge, 1972), p. 104.
AGN, Tierras, Vol. 1791, exp. 3, fol. 3; Vol. 2551, exp. 12, fol. 1-12; AGN, Mercedes, Vol. 76, fol. 116-118.
AGN, Tierras, Vol. 1912, exp. 12; Vol. 2551, exp. 12, fol. 1-12; Vol. 2555, exp. 6, fol. 1-6; Vol. 2555, exp. 8, fol. 1-110.
AGN, Intendencias, Vol. 73, exp. 5, fol. 26.
AGN, Tierras, Vol. 1910, exp. 2, fol. 1-2; Vol. 2555, exp. 11, fol. 1-2; AGN, Mercedes, Vol. 76, fol. 116-118.
Gibson, Aztecs, p. 333.
MRP, 13q, 299, 563, 570, 572.
MRP, 335, 386, 402, 499.
MRP, 13a, 417, 425, 479, 539, 549.
Catalina Sierra, El nacimiento de México (México, 1960), p. 115.
See Enrique Florescano, Precios del maíz y crisis agrícolas en México, 1708-1810 (México, 1969).
Ladd, “Mexican Nobility,” p. 91.
François Chevalier, Land and Society in Colonial Mexico (Berkeley, 1966).
Asunción Lavrin, “La riqueza conventual femenina en Nueva España, con especial referencia a las relaciones juradas de 1744,” unpublished manuscript, 1973; Michael Costeloe, Church Wealth in Mexico (Cambridge, 1967), pp. 27-28.
Ladd, “Mexican Nobility,” pp. 123-151.
Brading, Miners and Merchants, pp. 95-219.
Brading, Miners and Merchants, p. 215.
Tabulated from Ladd, “Mexican Nobility,” pp. 320-368.
Ladd, “Mexican Nobility,” p. 24; J. Ignacio Rubio Mañé, ed., “Gente de España en la Ciudad de México: Año de 1689,” Boletín del Archivo General de la Nación, 2nd. seríes, 7:1-2 (1966), 34; Eduardo Baez Macías, ed., “Planos y censos de la Ciudad de México, 1753,” Boletín del Archivo General de la Nación, 2nd. series, 8:3-4 (1967), 1032.
“Testamento…,” Washington State University Library, Papeles de los Condes de Regla (uncatalogued materials), folder dated 1765.
Mario Colín, ed., Índice de documentos relativos a los pueblos del Estado de México: Ramo de Tierras del Archivo General de la Nación (México, 1966) pp. 56, 62; Miguel de Lugo, “Escritura de arrendamiento…,” García Collection, The University of Texas Library (hereafter cited GC), G231.
Florescano, Precios, pp. 180-195; Enrique Florescano, Estructuras y problemas agrarias en México, 1500-1821 (México, 1971), pp. 193-210.
Aspects of elite problems during these years are discussed in Ladd, “Mexican Nobility,” chapters 5, 6, 7.
MRP, 13j, 13k, 13m, 409, 422, 427, 511, 512; GC, G231, G296, G330; Gazeta de México, July 12, 1817; November 24, 1821.
Gazeta de México, July 26, 1817; and see Table II.
Ibid., July 16, 1818.
Ibid., July 19, 1821.
MRP, 622, 853, 883, 885.
Romeo Flores Caballero, La contrarevolución en la independencia (México, 1969), pp. 78-79; H. G. Ward, Mexico, 2nd. ed. (London, 1829), I, 320.
Ward, Mexico, I, 320-325; D. A. Brading, “Government and Elite in Late Colonial Mexico,” HAHR, 53:3 (Aug. 1973), 414.
See, for example, Robert W. Randall, Real del Monte: A British Mining Venture in Mexico (Austin, 1972).
Ladd, “Mexican Nobility,” p. 212.
Manuel Payno, Los bandidos de Río Frío (Mexico, 1971).
Brading, Miners and Merchants, pp. 124-128, 192; Ladd, “Mexican Nobility,” p. 333.
MRP, 283, 376, 509, 513.
See numerous offers of estates for sale in the Gazeta de México 1817-1820.
MRP, 409, 422, 424, 511, 512, 622, 853, 883, 885, 1343, 5606.
Asunción Lavrin, “The Execution of the Law of Consolidación in New Spain: Economic Aims and Results,” HAHR, 53:1 (Feb. 1973), 36-37, 48-49.
Costeloe, Church Wealth, p. 112.
MLE: March 2, 1831; July 27, 1831; October 18, 1831.
MRP, 149, 173, 251, 252, 255, 256, 262, 264, 265, 268, 270, 278, 286, 302, 316, 326, 331, 336, 339, 340, 341, 348, 354, 358, 359, 367, 376, 384, 389, 403, 404, 405, 407, 408, 410, 412, 417, 418, 429, 435, 436, 438, 442, 447, 448, 451, 459, 464, 475, 481, 483, 486, 488, 492, 496, 500, 501, 506, 507,’ 523, 649, 579, 579, 622.
José María Catalán, “Quenta de cargo y data …,” GC, G395; “Libro de data general …,” GC, G413.
José Guzmán, “Avaluó de la Hacienda…,” GC, G418; MRP, 143, 167, 217.
MRP, 149, 162, 173, 191, 300.
MRP, 195, 228, 229, 356, 449. In a situation similar to Guerrero’s, Guadalupe Victoria, another insurgent leader turned Mexican President, sought in the 1830s enormous loans of government funds to finance his declining estate operations in the coastal state of Veracruz. See Robert A. Potash, El banco de avío de México: El fomento de la industria, 1821-1846 (México, 1959), pp. 140-142.
Miguel Ángel Peral, Diccionario biográfico mexicano (México, 1947), pp. 688-689; Francisco Sosa, Biografías de mexicanos distinguidos (México, 1884), pp. 879-885.
MRP, 226, 299, 304, 324, 503, 570, 572, 574, 563.
MRP, 306, 321, 326, 328, 331, 334, 337, 354, 359, 362, 391, 403, 432, 526, 622, 853, 883, 885.
MRP, 1021, 1031, 1038, 1045, 1052.
MRP, 1343, 5606.
MRP, 191, 242, 326, 413, 440, 446, 455, 462, 493, 517, 616, 629.
MRP, 191, 242, 384, 394, 517, 616.
MRP, 260, 284, 288, 290, 372, 384, 388, 394, 412.
MRP, 181, 243, 252, 265, 316, 383, 404, 417, 419, 452, 548, 561, 568, 586.
MRP, 31, 240, 394, 398, 426, 582, 594, 600, 608, 616, 619, 1343; MLE, February 10, 1829; February 16, 1831; May 19, 1831.
MRP, 309, 314-318, 322, 420, 529, 544, 547, 551, 554, 555, 564, 577.
MLE, March 1, 1831; April 23, 1831.
MRP, 282, 285, 351, 413, 421, 428, 440, 458, 493.
MRP, 373, 382-384, 389, 394, 410, 438, 441, 458, 479.
Gibson, Aztecs, p. 364; Payno, Bandidos, pp. 156 ff.
MRP, 191, 300, 341, 385, 426, 614.
See Sherburne F. Cook and Woodrow Borah, Essays in Population History: Mexico and the Caribbean, (Berkeley, 1971), I, 171.
Gibson, Aztecs, p. 254.
MRP, 243, 252, 280, 296, 297, 303, 372, 470; for the similar situation at Axalco, see MLE, April 8, 1829, fols. 9, 25.
MRP, 429, 459, 480; MLE, December 10, 1829.
MRP, 224, 256, 260, 274, 310, 480, 486, 581.
AGN, Vínculos, Vol. 53-55.
MRP, 372, 389, 418, 447, 486, 499.
MRP, 297, 316, 468.
MRP, 149, 268, 280, 389, 397, 581; MLE, December 10, 1829.
MRP, 61, 107, 167, 175; GC, G418.
Ward Barrett, The Sugar Hacienda of the Marqueses del Valle (Minneapolis, 1970), pp. 87, 91.
MRP, 194, 235, 254, 267, 268, 296, 297, 321, 354, 372, 412, 540, 578, 601, 611, 618, 620, 624.
Chevalier, Land and Society.
See D. A. Brading, “La estructura de la producción agrícola en el Bajío de 1700 a 1850,” and Jan Bazant, “Peones, arrendatarios, y apaceros en México: 1851-1853,” both in Historia Mexicana, 23:2, (Oct.-Dec. 1973), pp. 197-237 and 330-357.
William Taylor, Landlord and Peasant in Colonial Oaxaca (Stanford, 1972), pp. 200-202.
Taylor’s analysis of Oaxacan haciendas has been further refined in "Haciendas coloniales en el valle de Oaxaca,” Historia Mexicana, 23:2 (Oct.-Dec. 1973); for further, though not comprehensive, corroboration of the view proposed here, see Gibson, Aztecs, pp. 252-256, 289-292, 326-334; and François Chevalier, ed., Instrucciones a los hermanos Jesuítas administradores de haciendas, (México, 1950).
Enrique Semo, Historia de capitalismo en México: Los orígenes, 1521-1763 (México, 1973), p. 259.
Author notes
The author is a doctoral candidate in Latin American history at The University of Texas at Austin.