Agrarian Change in Eighteenth-Century Yucatán

In the past two decades the historical interpretation of the colonial Spanish American hacienda has undergone substantial revision. The earlier view of the institution was based in part on firsthand acquaintance with the great estates as they existed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the landowning aristocracy ruled over vast properties pieced together over the years at the expense of small holders and peasants. Through a methodology known in anthropology as “up-streaming,” this conception of the hacienda was projected backward in time and influenced the interpretation of the great estate in colonial Latin America. In retrospect François Chevalier’s classic magnum opus,¹ the first full-scale analysis using archival sources, did not result in a reinterpretation of the hacienda, for the French scholar essentially accepted and reinforced the earlier view of the hacendados as “rich and powerful,” land-grabbing, resource-monopolizing, feudal lords. Chevalier’s work represented not the beginning, but the end, of what David Brading has referred to as “an entire cycle of research and interpretation. ”²

Thirty years after the appearance of La formation des grandes domaines au Mexique, historical revision has led to a different understanding of the colonial hacienda. Chevalier has been shown to have generalized too much from data derived primarily from one large and important region. Studies of other areas revealed that colonial haciendas were frequently quite small and burdened with debts, and that hacendados only sporadically gained profits from their properties. Moreover, peonage frequently was not a major source of labor, and, in fact, landowners were sometimes indebted to their so-called peons. Finally, nonelite people also owned haciendas, estates rarely stayed in one family for a long period of time, and many Indian peasants retained possession of land until long after the colonial period.³ From recent research, the hacienda has emerged as an extremely diverse institution, the development of which was intimately linked to the complex of geographic and socioeconomic conditions existing in each region.

Regional or local history has thus played the major role in the revision, and sometimes the rejection, of broad generalizations such as those presented by Chevalier. Since most regions of Latin America have yet to be studied, however, it is still premature to construct new interpretations before more is known about local economic and social history. Moreover, while recent research has clarified some historiographical issues, it has also raised new questions by revealing the variety and complexity of regional social and economic structures and by demonstrating the existence of what Eric Van Young has recently described as “a heretofore unsuspected economic vitality” at the local level.⁴ Because of the regional study’s relevance to both current and past historiographical issues, it will certainly remain in the vanguard of research on the economy and society of colonial Latin America.

This article will analyze the development of the agrarian structure of colonial Yucatán, a region thus far little studied in modern socioeconomic historiography,⁵ and will help clarify both the history of the hacienda and the emergence of internal regional structure, one of the new themes of historiography and historical geography.⁶ At the same time, the study of the dynamics of agrarian change will further the continuing discussion of dependency theory by demonstrating the unequal importance of the internal and external causes of social and economic development. In short, this essay will address itself to three related issues: the great estate, socioeconomic geography, and historical causation in Yucatán.

Geography and Early Colonial Development

Limestone bedrock and generally thin soil were geographic features that caused the history of Yucatán⁷ to diverge from that of much of Spanish America. Rivers cannot form in these conditions, because water sinks rapidly through the soil and porous bedrock; and the plow cannot be used, because the soil is too rocky. Water for agriculture is not in abundant supply, for although Yucatán is a hot, lowland area bounded on three sides by water, its climate is not tropical. What precipitation there is usually occurs during a pronounced summer rainy season. As in most of Mesoamerica, the rainy summer is followed by a drier autumn and winter and then by a very dry spring.

These environmental conditions substantially limited economic development in Yucatán. The Yucatec Maya had managed to survive and even prosper employing swidden agriculture to raise beans, maize, squash, chili peppers, and cotton, as well as a variety of fruits and vegetables; but the Spaniards wanted to grow cash crops. Of these, wheat, barley, and rye—typically introduced elsewhere in America—would not grow in Yucatán, for the wet spring and dry summer appropriate for these crops were missing; and the extreme heat of spring and summer was ultimately fatal to these Old World grains. As the Cabildo of Mérida explained in 1579, “There is no wheat in this land, although with irrigation by hand it begins growing well and buds, but. . . lacking water it dries out because the earth is not humid, nor is there water to grow it using irrigation, and the water that nourishes maize comes at a time different from that which wheat requires, because it comes along with many hot winds and heat, which cause the wheat to turn yellow and shrivel.”⁸

In these circumstances, as the cabildo noted, only irrigated fields could have produced wheat. In the twentieth century, the introduction of concrete has allowed the construction of irrigation canals, but in the colonial era these were technologically impossible. The permeability of the soil and bedrock, therefore, made ditches and canals useless. Aqueducts from the cenotes (sinkholes) to the fields were technologically feasible but would have required capital investment beyond the capabilities of the relatively poor Spanish elite in Yucatán. Thus, the only possible irrigation system was never built. Wheat, barley, and rye were consequently of no historical importance in Yucatán.

Geographic conditions obviously did not rule out agriculture altogether, however. Despite the heat and poor soil, rainfall was usually sufficient for maize cultivation, even in the driest part of Yucatán, the peninsula’s northwestern tip. Moreover, in central and southern Campeche and in the area known as the Sierra⁹ there was enough rainfall for semitropical crops like rice and sugar. Agricultural possibilities, then, clearly did exist for Spaniards in Yucatán.

Nevertheless, in the early colonial era all the Spaniards’ agricultural endeavors ultimately failed. For a brief time the conqueror of Yucatán, the adelantado Francisco de Montejo, maintained sugar plantations near Champotón, on the peninsula’s west coast.¹⁰ Since the adelantado was the encomendero of Champotón, it is highly likely that he used his encomienda Indians as laborers. When in the late 1540s, however, the Montejo family was stripped of its encomiendas, the sugar plantation was abandoned. Sugar production is occasionally mentioned in the early colonial sources, but the small size of the local Spanish population, combined with Yucatán’s great distance from other Spanish American urban centers, made large-scale production impractical. Only with the rapid population expansion of the late-colonial period would the basis be laid for a substantial sugar industry in Yucatán.

Another agricultural enterprise begun by Spaniards early in the colonial era was the production of indigo (añil). This crop was introduced shortly after the conquest, and by 1577 Yucatán reportedly had fortyeight ingenios de añil, each valued at between 2,000 and 3,000 pesos.¹¹ When the Franciscans informed the crown about the dangerous working conditions in the industry, however, the Spanish government banned indigo production in order to protect the Indian laborers. As a result, the industry declined, and eventually production almost ceased. There are a few reports of indigo later in the colonial period, but the industry was clearly of little significance after the boom of the second half of the sixteenth century.¹²

Rice, cotton, and maize were the only remaining agricultural products that Spanish landowners could have cultivated. Rice was apparently unknown to the Hispanic settlers in Yucatán in the early colonial era, however; and no attempts were made to cultivate this Old World grain until the eighteenth century. Cotton, on the other hand, was well known to Spaniards, and, in fact, cotton textiles were Yucatán’s major export throughout the colonial period. But both the production of raw cotton and the weaving of cloth were effectively carried out by the Indians, and Spaniards found it unprofitable to compete with the native producers. Consequently, as in the case of cochineal elsewhere in early colonial America, production remained in the hands of the Indians as long as the tributary system or illegal methods of extracting a surplus yielded a sufficient supply for the Spaniards. This was the case in Yucatán until the late colonial period.

The same was true of maize. As long as the surviving native population was capable of producing its own subsistence and a surplus for the Spanish cities, there was no shortage of maize, and grain prices tended to be low. Writing in 1579 about the provisioning of the city, the Cabildo of Mérida reported that “Mérida is established in a region of four Indian provinces. . . and each province has many villages of native Indians with lords and governors who come to this city. . . and bring to it the necessary sustenances that the earth produces, with which we, the Spanish and foreign residents who live in it, sustain ourselves.”¹³ With tribute in kind arriving in such quantities, the Spanish landowners found it unprofitable to produce maize as a cash crop for internal consumption, and Yucatán’s great distance from other Spanish American urban centers precluded production for export.

Geographic, social, economic, and political influences, therefore, worked to keep agriculture in the hands of the Indian peasants. With the exception of the short-lived efforts to produce sugar and indigo, Spaniards made no attempt to enter into agricultural production. Moreover, since Spanish society depended on the payment of tribute by Indians, Spaniards had a very good reason to protect the natives from dispossession, and they had no cause to interfere in a major way with Indian land tenure. Geography, therefore, had a significant impact on the history of Yucatán, for it helped impede the colonial onslaught that destroyed so many indigenous peoples and cultures in America. In this respect Yucatán was not alone, for there were many other Indian groups whose economy and society were not seriously disrupted by the Spaniards’ search for resources to exploit.¹⁴ In the long run, however, geography only slowed down the effects of colonialism, for most of the historical trends evident in the empire’s core areas eventually made their appearance in Yucatán.¹⁵ The peninsula’s special geographic conditions, in brief, did not lead to a unique path of historical development. The impact of geography was to impede the development of agriculture on Spanish estates, which consequently tended to be dedicated almost entirely to stock raising. The conditions of the early colonial period, therefore, were appropriate only for the growth of the economically and socially simpler estate called the estancia.

The Age of the Estancia

As in most areas of Spanish America, Old World livestock proliferated in Yucatán after the conquest. Especially important was stock raising by Spaniards, who raised cattle on properties known as estancias, sold meat to the Spanish residents of the local cities, and exported leather and tallow. A secondary economic activity of the early estates was apiculture, the resulting honey and wax being both exported and consumed locally. For easy access to markets, estancias were usually located near the coast, around the cities of Mérida, Campeche, and Valladolid, and along major roads.¹⁶

The establishment of estancias represents the first stage of the Spanish occupation of the soil. Yet there was little conflict with the Yucatec Maya as a result of the emergence of the ranching economy. This absence of conflict was due in part to the Indian population decline, which resulted in substantial depopulation of the countryside. Spaniards then could occupy abandoned land with little or no resistance from the native people. At times, large tracts of land opened up and were eventually occupied by estancias.¹⁷ Also of importance in diminishing Spanish-Indian land struggles was the encomienda. Since the tribute system was the most important source of income for the colonists until the late seventeenth century, the encomenderos did not find their interests served by the expulsion of their tributaries from the land. Church and state also benefited from the preservation of a tribute-paying peasantry. Consequently, powerful vested interests to a certain extent protected the Indians from complete dispossession.

The Yucatecan estancias of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were simple institutions. Stock raising was not labor-intensive, and therefore required few permanent workers. The division of labor was also simple. Most ranches employed just a steward, called a mayoral, and a few cowboys, or vaqueros.¹⁸ The simplicity of the estancias was reflected in their record-keeping, apparently based only on the most rudimentary accounting procedures. As a result, although there are a number of surviving títulos from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century estates, researchers have not yet discovered a single account book detailing or summarizing production, expenses, or marketing. Probably none was kept.

This paucity of sources thus prohibits anything but a general summary of the Yucatecan landed estates in the early colonial era. The documentation extant from the late seventeenth century on—especially notarial records—permits a much better understanding of Spanish-owned rural properties shortly before the agrarian changes of the middle and late eighteenth century. By the early Bourbon era, landed properties in Yucatán were called either estancias, as before, or sitios. The latter were either small, newly founded, and growing ranches, or estates of any size that raised cattle without a government license to do so. There was no economic difference between the two kinds of estates, both being dedicated primarily to stock raising and secondarily to apiculture. Agriculture, on the other hand, was not yet common on Spanish-owned rural properties.

These characteristics of the landed estate clearly emerge in an analysis of notarial records dating from the early eighteenth century. In the fifty-four surviving inventories of estancias registered with notaries between 1718 and 1738, agricultural production—in all cases cropland planted with maize—was included in only three. Among the sitios registered during the same period, the sixty-eight inventories included only two cases in which cropland or agricultural production was recorded.¹⁹ Moreover, agriculture was of little economic significance even on the estates found to be carrying out maize cultivation. For example, Estancia Chiló, near Sotuta (80 kilometers southeast of Mérida), had the largest quantity of land under cultivation of any estate included in the sample. The cropland, however, totaling 17.5 hectares, was evaluated at only 55 pesos, which was but 5 percent of Chiló’s total value of 1,093 pesos 4 reales. Much more important in determining this estancias worth was the planta (the combination of buildings, equipment, and legal rights attached to the estate). The latter was worth 800 pesos, or 73 percent of the estancia’s total value. The livestock and apicultural properties included 14 head of cattle, 10 horses, 2 mules, and 177 apiaries; these were valued at 70, 50, 30 and 80 pesos, respectively.²⁰ Uncultivated land was assigned no specific monetary value because it was included under the heading of the legal rights attached to the estate. In fact, the notarial records demonstrate that uncultivated land had value only if the estanciero already had or stood to obtain the legal right to use it.

The other two cases of estancias with land under cultivation further demonstrate agriculture’s lack of importance. Estancia Hobonil (125 kilometers south-southeast of Mérida, in the jurisdiction of Peto) was one of the most valuable estates in Yucatán. Its cropland totaled 12.5 hectares, valued at 12 pesos 0.5 real, and the 543 cargas of harvested maize included in the inventory were worth 135 pesos 6 reales. The total value of agricultural land and produce was thus 147 pesos 6.5 reales, only 4 percent of Hobonil’s net worth of 3,580 pesos. The estancias most valuable assets were the livestock (135 head of cattle, 182 horses, 2 mules, 8 donkeys, and 13 hogs, worth 1,911 pesos 2.5 reales) and the planta (1,300 pesos). These constituted, respectively, 54 and 37 percent of the estate’s total value.²¹ The third estancia with cropland was San José Kibá (15 kilometers northeast of Mérida, jurisdiction of Conkal). This estate’s cropland totaled 10 hectares, valued at 32 pesos 5 reales. This represented only 3 percent of Kibá’s net worth of 1,138 pesos 5 reales. Again livestock (90 head of cattle, 18 horses, 1 mule, and 1 donkey, valued at 516 pesos) and the planta (500 pesos) were the estate’s most valuable assets. They constituted 45 and 44 percent of Kibá’s net worth.²²

These inventories reveal that stock raising was the overwhelming concern of the early eighteenth-century Yucatecan estancia. Apiculture was of much less significance: only 37 percent of estancias in the sample were found to have apiaries included in the inventories. What also clearly emerges as a characteristic of these estates was their low value. Of the 46 estancias sold between 1718 and 1738, the average selling price was only 1,471 pesos 2.5 reales. The median selling price was an even lower figure, 1, 175 pesos. At the low end of the scale were two estancias worth only 420 and 200 pesos, respectively. Yet small estancias were the most common, for a full two-thirds of the estates were worth less than 2,000 pesos. At the other end of the scale, the most valuable estate in the sample—the above-mentioned Estancia Hobonil—was assessed at 3,580 pesos. Only three estates were worth more than 3,000 pesos.²³

Since meat, cowhides, and tallow were the most important products of stock raising in Yucatán, the quantity of cattle on the estates is a good indicator of the level of estancias’ economic activity. It also permits comparisons between Yucatán and other areas of Spanish America. The inventories over the years 1718-38 reveal that the median number of cattle on estancias (not counting abandoned, i.e., nonfunctioning, estates) was a meager 87. One-fourth of all operating estancias possessed 21 or fewer head. At the other extreme, the quartile with the largest estancias included estates with between 180 and 263 head. This, of course, was a far cry from the great herds of thousands of cattle reported in other areas of Spanish America.

The inventories also reveal that peonage was not a common feature of Yucatecan estancias. In the period under consideration, the debts of peons were included among estancia assets in only 5 of 53 estates for which information was available. Moreover, the debts were frequently very small. In the cases of Estancias San José Kibá, Katzcupó, and San José Tiholop, the “Yndios sirvientes” or “criados” collectively owed only 10, 25, and 39 pesos 5.5 reales, respectively. Substantially more money was owed in the remaining two cases. The peons of Hobonil and San Gerónimo Bolonpich—two of the most valuable estates in Yucatán— owed 170 and 142 pesos 6.5 reales.²⁴ Since four of these five estates with debt peons were worth considerably more than the average or median estancias in the sample, it is possible that there was a relationship between the size of estates and the incidence of peonage. In any case, it is significant that only a small number of estates had debt peons. Even allowing for errors of omission by buyers, sellers, or notaries, it is reasonably certain that peonage was not as important as free labor on early eighteenth-century estates in Yucatán.

Since the economic activities of the estancias were not labor-intensive, the size of the work force tended to be quite small. A case study of one eighteenth-century ranch revealed that one mayoral and two or three vaqueros sufficed to carry out the stock raising and apicultural labor on an estancia that was slightly larger than average at the time.²⁵ With the demand for labor so low, the estancias tended to be essentially economic units. Not until the emergence of substantial agricultural production on the estates would the Spanish-owned rural properties become major centers of population.

The Rise of the Hacienda

The establishment of Spanish estancias in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Yucatán had taken place during a period of Indian population decline. The ranches had largely occupied lands being abandoned by Indians. As long as the native population continued to decline or remained stable at a low level, the development of Spanish-owned properties in the countryside presented no major problem for the Indians. The latter maintained control over enough land to continue to produce food for themselves and a surplus for the cities.

In the eighteenth century, however, the situation changed dramatically. Most important, the Indian population reversed its earlier decline. By 1750 the indigenous population had begun a rapid expansion that would continue, with only a few temporary setbacks, until 1847.²⁶ As a result, Indians needed to expand their landholdings. Where the possibilities for peasant colonization of new lands were great, peasants simply moved out and established new settlements. This was true in the eastern half of the peninsula, where population was sparse and there were few Spanish-owned estates to bar the way. Where the possibilities of expansion were limited, however, as in the western half of Yucatán, peasants had to make arrangements to use the lands owned by non-Indians. A process of expanding Indian holdings at the expense of the Spanish-owned estates—in other words, an agrarian reform—was out of the question. Therefore, the new demographic trend resulted in the rise of tenancy. It also meant that there were more people in the villages to feed. Consequently, if peasant production could not keep pace with the Indian population’s increase, there would be less food available to Mérida, Campeche, Valladolid, and the peninsula’s other minor urban centers.

At the same time, the urban demand for food was increasing rapidly. In the inner city of Mérida, the demographic expansion was only moderate, for the population of the casco (“inner city”) increased from between 4,000 and 5,000 in 1700 to only 5,358 in 1794. Apparently little room for expansion was left in the center of the city, and consequently there was an overflow into the barrios. Data for two of the barrios show the population rising from 3,612 to 17,416 between 1700 and 1794. By the latter date, the capital’s population had risen to 26,723. In 1807 the governor estimated the urban population of the capital to be approximately 30,000, a figure that made Mérida a major Spanish American urban center. Substantial demographic expansion was not evident in the eastern city of Valladolid, which by 1794 had a population of 11,860. Campeche, however, grew very rapidly and replaced Valladolid as the peninsula’s second city. In 1794 the western port city had a population of 16,940. Demographic expansion, then, was the general trend of the eighteenth century; the total population of Yucatán rose from 200,000 to 350,000 between 1700 and 1794.²⁷

The market for grain was therefore expanding, though the Indian peasantry’s surplus production was apparently not increasing as rapidly. Grain shortages were the inevitable result. To be sure, there had been other shortages, but before 1750 it seems that only general crop failures had caused scarcities. After that date, however, anything less than a good harvest resulted in a grain shortage; and crop failure produced famine.

The colonial government took measures to counteract the crisis, but its efforts succeeded in alleviating only some of the effects of the food shortages. To encourage agricultural production, the government issued proclamations reminding the Indians that every adult male was required to plant at least 60 mecates (about 2.4 hectares) of milpa per year.²⁸ It is not known whether these reminders had any effect. The cabildos of Mérida and Campeche dealt with the problem of scarcity by introducing the rationing of grain, paying bounties to importers, and sending out agents to purchase grain. These officials, entrusted with substantial quantities of cash, scoured the countryside in search of both maize and rice, the latter being first mentioned in the sources in the second half of the eighteenth century, precisely when the food shortages became acute. The purchasing agents were often sent as far away as Veracruz, Tuxpan, and New Orleans in search of food for Yucatán.²⁹

To a certain extent these measures alleviated urban hunger, but the problems of insufficient production remained unsolved. To make matters worse, in the second half of the eighteenth century natural catastrophes, in the form of locust plagues and especially droughts, began to occur with a greater frequency than before, as a climatic shift toward hotter, drier conditions probably took place.³⁰ Yucatán therefore suffered from chronic grain shortages. Between 1750 and 1809 no fewer than eighteen severe shortages and two full-scale famines took place, while only six abundant harvests were reported. The chronic shortages in fact continued right up to the Caste War in 1847 and resulted in the quadrupling of maize prices between 1813 and the 1840s.³¹

As a result of the increasing demand for food, private landowners began to produce maize on their estates. The demand also stimulated production of rice, which was grown exclusively in Campeche and in the southern Sierra, where there was greater humidity and more plentiful rainfall than in the other inhabited areas of the peninsula. Much of the produce was shipped to Mérida for sale, although Campeche was also ideally suited to export the product to New Spain or Cuba when the rare event of a plentiful harvest resulted in a general surplus of food in Yucatán.³²

The occasional export of rice draws attention to the role that the demands of the world economy played in bringing about economic change in Yucatán. Internal demand was not the only economic influence at work. Yucatán traded regularly with the outside world, and consequently it was affected by changes in the world economy. Rice exports are one example of how local producers took advantage of the existing external demand for a product that could be sold in local markets as well. Another is offered by the livestock economy, which also produced primarily for local markets. In the second half of the eighteenth century, however, major markets for livestock products developed in Veracruz and Havana. This external stimulus, combined with the increasing internal demand for meat, led to the expansion of the ranching economy.³³ It was, therefore, the interaction of internal and external factors that brought about economic growth in Yucatán.

Nevertheless, evidence from other areas of economic activity demonstrates that growing internal demand was the most important cause of economic change. In the second half of the eighteenth century, external demand for Yucatán’s cotton textiles—once the peninsulas major export— declined precipitously because of English competition. At the same time, Indian production of cotton declined because of the natives’ increasing preference for paying tribute in money rather than in cloth.³⁴ The Indians’ goal was to avoid the hard labor of weaving; but there still existed substantial local demand for cotton textiles, the cloth most widely used for wearing apparel. Thus, in certain regions of the peninsula, Spanish landowners found it profitable to produce what the Indians would not, and they began the cultivation of cotton on their estates. This was especially so in eastern Yucatań, where conditions were most appropriate for the crop.³⁵ In this case the internal demand for the product was not generated by the growing need for food, which was the major stimulus for the rise of agriculture on private estates. Still it is an important example of agricultural development taking place despite a declining external desire for the product. Clearly the internal needs were crucial in the development of the cotton-producing estate in Yucatán.

Sugar cultivation offers another example of the importance of internal demand in generating economic change. As in the case of cotton, the rise of sugar production was not related to the increasing food shortages that were stimulating grain cultivation on private estates. As already mentioned, sugar had been produced in Yucatán in the earlier colonial period, but it had never achieved much importance. There are some indications that by the late seventeenth century, this crop was being grown on a small scale in the southern Sierra,³⁶ but there is no mention of sugarcane in any of the notarial records until the 1750s. At that time milpas de caña dulce and cañaverales (“cane fields”) began to be registered in estate inventories. Considerable local demand already existed for sugar and its byproduct, aguardiente. This fact is borne out by import statistics for the 1750s and 1780s, which demonstrate that sugar and aguardiente together usually accounted for 40 percent of imports arriving in Sisal and bound for Mérida and the rest of the northern interior. These goods continued to arrive in Campeche in large quantities in the 1790s and in the first decade of the nineteenth century, but at no time were exports of sugar or aguar-

To meet this internal demand, landowners, especially in Campeche and in the Sierra, began to cultivate sugar on their estates. This accounts for the dramatic increase in the incidence of cañaverales in notarial records in the second half of the eighteenth century. By the 1770s local producers were so firmly established that the crown, undoubtedly responding to complaints by competing producers elsewhere in the empire, tried to limit production through the introduction of the estanco de aguar diente. In 1781 the government estimated local aguardiente production at 8,000 barrels annually. A few years later it was reported that the labor demands of the expanding sugar industry had exceeded the local supply of workers. This circumstance prompted Campechano planters to request the massive importation of Black slaves.³⁸ Clearly, sugar production was one of the leading sectors of economic growth in late colonial Yucatán.

Internal demand, then, was clearly the major cause of the introduction or expansion of agriculture on the landed estate in Yucatán. Since this economic activity was more labor-intensive than was stock raising, the landowners needed to attract workers; as a result, the estancias developed into centers of population with mixed economies of ranching and agriculture. Soon the nomenclature in use reflected these social and economic changes, for around the middle of the eighteenth century a new term made its appearance in Yucatán. This was hacienda, which had earlier been used to refer to wealth in general or to the royal exchequer. Now the term also began to mean a rural property used for ranching and agricultural activities.³⁹ Clearly, new terminology was developing in response to historical change.

The transition from estancia to hacienda was slow. As late as 1773, the Cabildo of Mérida reported that few non-Indians were involved in grain production and that in a normal year, i.e., one without a grain shortage, the city was supplied with maize by the Indian peasantry.⁴⁰ Yet by the 1780s the haciendas were transforming the countryside. In one well-documented case, the parish of Umán, on the southwestern outskirts of Mérida, only 44 percent of the Indians lived in the four parish villages; the rest were residents of the 38 private estates.⁴¹ In 1786 an official of the Real Hacienda noted this trend and reported that the Indian villages “are becoming depopulated and almost barren at the same rate that the haciendas are becoming like populous villages.”⁴²

The Hacienda Economy

The rise of the hacienda represented the second stage of the Spanish occupation of the soil. To a certain extent the emergence of this new agrarian institution can be demonstrated statistically. As already noted, according to the notarial records of 1718–38, only three of fifty-four estancias carried out agricultural production. In a sample of fifty-four estancias and haciendas in notarial records in the years 1756–1803, however, twenty-one had cropland listed in their inventories. Moreover, a trend toward the introduction of agriculture on the estates was evident, for between the years 1792 and 1803, exactly half the estates were found to be carrying on agricultural pursuits.⁴³

Estate values also rose as agriculture became more important. Compared with the earlier period, the average values of estates in the second half of the century were 58 percent higher, while median values rose by 67 percent.⁴⁴ One of the most notable changes, furthermore, was the increasing number of valuable haciendas. In the 1718–38 period only three estates were found to be worth more than 3,000 pesos, the most valuable being one assessed at 3,580 pesos. But in the later period, fifteen of forty-nine estates were found to be worth over 3,000 pesos, and seven had values of more than 4,000 pesos.

A close examination of the inventories reveals that inflation was not the major cause of the increased values of the late eighteenth-century haciendas. While short-term fluctuations in prices took place throughout the entire century, there was no secular inflationary trend affecting most of the components of estate values. Only horses increased substantially in price, as a result of two equine epidemics. None of the other components of estate values rose substantially in price, and the evaluations of some items declined considerably.⁴⁵ In short, while inflation probably existed in Yucatán, there is no evidence of an inflationary trend substantial enough to account for the 58 percent rise in average estate values in the second half of the eighteenth century.

The major cause of the rising value of haciendas was increased production and capital investment. Since agriculture had been at an extremely low level in the 1718–38 period, the more extensive cultivation of maize, sugar, rice, and cotton after 1750 resulted in a massive increase—1,319 percent—in the agricultural component of estate values. At the same time, apiculture expanded significantly; the average number of apiaries on the estates in the samples rose from 79 to 161, while the proportion of estates carrying out apiculture rose from 37 to 69 percent.

The third sector of the hacienda economy, stock raising, also reached higher levels of production and investment. Compared with the earlier period, the average number of cattle on the estates increased by 66 percent (from 98 to 163), and the median number rose by 48 percent (from 87 to 129). Even more impressive—and significant—was the increased number of mules. In the 1718–38 period, estancias averaged only 2.7 mules per estate, and none at all was reported on 49 percent of the estancias. In the 1756–1803 period, the average was 8.5 mules per estate, an increase of 215 percent, while the percentage of estates without mules fell to only 25 percent.

The importance of the larger number of mules is twofold. First, like cropland and apiaries, but unlike cattle, mules were essentially capital goods, and as such their increasing number signified capital accumulation and investment. This was reflected in prices, for mules cost at least three times as much per head as cattle; the stud donkeys cost nine or ten times as much. Second, mules are significant because their economic function was to transport heavy, bulky goods to market. By volume, grain was by far the most important product to be transported. The larger number of mules on haciendas therefore points to the great importance of grain production on Yucatecan estates.

Increased levels of production and investment, not inflation, therefore accounted for the major share of the massive growth in estate values in the late eighteenth century. An indication of the balance among the agricultural, apicultural, and stock-raising sectors of the hacienda economy— in other words, the structure of production—is offered by tithe records. Although these are too incomplete to enable study of secular trends in production, extant data from 225 estates in the years from 1778 to 1796 permit at least a glimpse at the structure of the hacienda economy in the last quarter of the century. A summary of these data is presented in Table 1.⁴⁶

The data in this table show that the agricultural component of hacienda production was greatest in the Campeche area (partidos I–III), where maize, fruit, sugar, and rice were all extensively cultivated. The only exception was the sparsely populated parish of Bolonchén, in the Chenes region (east of Campeche and southwest of the Sierra), where stock raising was slightly more important than agriculture. Apiculture, on the other hand, was insignificant in Campeche, except in the case of the northern parishes of the Camino Real Alto (partido III).

The Camino Real Bajo (partido IV) was a zone of transition from agriculture to ranching. In the partido’s southern parishes of Maxcanú and Kopomá, agriculture was still dominant. In the northern parishes of Umán and Hunucmá, however, ranching was the major economic activity. The same was true for the area immediately around Mérida (partido V), which was the largest local market for meat, and for the nearby parish of Mocochá, in the western part of La Costa (partido VI). Agriculture was nevertheless quantitatively significant in this northwestern part of the peninsula, because this was the area of the greatest intensity of land occupation by private estates. As a result, the quantity of hacienda grain production was greater here than in other regions less intensively occupied by private landowners.

Economic diversification was evident in the eastern part of La Costa, around Izamal (70 kilometers east of Mérida and 90 kilometers east-northeast of Valladolid). Here for the most part ranching and agriculture were evenly balanced, and apiculture was highly developed as well. The same was true in most cases in the Beneficios Altos y Bajos (partido VII) and in the Sierra (VIII), although considerable variation was evident in both of the latter regions. Agriculture was dominant in Valladolid (partido IX), the heart of the cotton-growing area of Yucatán. It was here that in the nineteenth century Yucatecan entrepreneurs established a modern cotton textile factory.⁴⁷ Finally, stock raising was the major activity in the very thinly populated Petén region, stretching all the way into what are now Guatemala and Belize. No data at all have thus far been found for Tizimín (the area north of Valladolid), and in most of the partidos, lacunae in the data prevent a precise analysis of the hacienda economy. Despite these drawbacks, Table 1 clarifies the nature of the hacienda as an economic unit in many areas of late-colonial Yucatán. It remains, therefore, to analyze the estates as social units, that is, as rural population centers.

The Labor Force

The hacienda was a social unit as well as an economic entity, for numbers of workers were required to carry out the estates production. This was especially true in the case of agriculture, which in Yucatán was, and is, labor-intensive, because, it will be remembered, plows and animal power are unusable. If landowners were to carry out agriculture on their estates, they had to increase the size of the labor force. How did they do so? Not by a large-scale peonage system, for they lacked the social and political controls to maintain such a system. Landowners in fact had great difficulty enforcing existing peonage laws, and peons reportedly left their masters at will.⁴⁸ Indeed, not until the late nineteenth century did an oppressive peonage system become workable.

In the late colonial period, laborers had to be recruited in other ways. One method was the old system of government-sanctioned labor drafts of free peasants. These drafts began to be revived on a considerable scale in the late eighteenth century, when the government responded to recurring food shortages by authorizing the subdelegados to order the caciques to provide landowners with laborers.⁴⁹ Of more importance in the long run, however, was the recruitment of tenants who would work for the landowners in return for land. These people became known as luneros. As a royal official explained in 1786,

Luneros, in other words, worked for the landowner but received no wages; and their labor services were sometimes replaced by cash payments when no work was demanded. In return, the landowners “assist them with as much land as they choose for their milpas, and the water that they need.”⁵¹

It is not known when this system of tenancy began; even royal officials had trouble classifying it. Luneros were not day-laborers or salaried workers, nor were they sharecroppers or renters, because they usually did not pay anything, in money or in kind, for the use of the land. Rather, in the words of one official, they were “those who, taking leave of their villages . . . take shelter or seek protection on . . . the ranches that they freely choose .... These circumstances suggest that this class of Indians be considered emphyteutae [enfiteuticarios] . . . because they contribute a moderate pension to the landlord in recognition of the real ownership that he maintains of the land and water of which they have usufruct.”⁵² It was also made clear that the landowners had no rights over the persons of the luneros; the latter could be neither punished nor forced to make cash payments.⁵³ Presumably the landowners only prerogative consisted of the right to expel the luneros from the land.

These luneros, then, were the agricultural laborers, those who worked in the fields of the hacendados. They were not indebted to the land-owners; the debt peons were the cowboys, who worked in ranching activities. Moreover, the weakness of the existing peonage system was demonstrated by the landowners’ reaction to the government’s attempt in 1786 to make them pay the tribute owed by their luneros. With some exaggeration, the hacendados claimed that they had always paid the tribute of their peons, but they denied any responsibility for the luneros’ tribute, because the latter could not be forced to pay the landowners anything in return.⁵⁴ Paying someone’s tribute, of course, was one way of getting, and keeping, the person in debt. “The Yucatecan . . . knows perfectly well what kind of system is used on the rural estates of the country regarding the Indians who serve on them,” wrote a Yucatecan liberal in the 1870s. “The landlord is the one who pays the taxes to which the [Indian] is subject, and they are added to his account, which is constantly kept open.”⁵⁵ Instead of jumping at this golden opportunity of extending the net of peonage around a whole class of free peasants, the hacendados protested against the measure and predicted total ruin for the province if it were enforced.⁵⁶ Clearly, in 1786 landowners had little use for so many potential peons. The supply of labor, in short, was generally sufficient to make unnecessary the massive expansion of peonage.

Nancy Farriss has suggested that the settlement of Indian tenants on landed estates in eighteenth-century Yucatán represented only a minor change in the Maya way of life.⁵⁷ This was probably true in the short run, for many of the estates continued to emphasize stock-raising activities, which required only a small work force and, in any case, did not involve the luneros at all. Moreover, since many haciendas had their own chapels and grew to have resident Indian populations as large as those of many villages, in practice some estates were almost indistinguishable from other Maya communities. Several haciendas even achieved the religious status of full-fledged visitas, that is, auxiliary villages. This was especially true in the Sierra Baja and Sierra Alta, regions in which large estates proliferated.

The similarity between haciendas and Maya communities is also suggested by the settlement pattern existing in rural Yucatán in the late eighteenth century. Many of the largest estates were located on territory that had earlier been abandoned by Indians as a result of depopulation. In practice, therefore, the attraction of tenants to haciendas represented the reoccupation of land by Indian agriculturalists who resided on private properties rather than in official villages.⁵⁸ At the same time the emergence of the hacienda at first represented the reestablishment of the traditional, pre-Hispanic Maya settlement pattern, which had been disrupted after the conquest by the colonial policy of reducción, that is, the forced concentration of Indians in settlements. The Yucatec Maya resisted this policy throughout the colonial era by establishing clandestine hamlets and villages.⁵⁹ In the eighteenth century this no longer had to be done secretly, for the haciendas provided the Indians with the opportunity of establishing agricultural communities without fear of more reducciones. In short, the settlement of Indians on private estates as agriculturalists in effect represented the officially sanctioned establishment of new Maya hamlets and villages. In the short run, therefore, for the Indians the haciendas were probably more like the other Maya communities than they were units of production dominating their lives.

In the long run, however, the rise of the haciendas did represent a substantial social change, for eventually the hacendados succeeded in dominating the lives of the Indian residents of the estates. A century was required for the process to complete itself, but the direction of the change was becoming clear by the end of the colonial period. Rapid economic growth in the last decades of colonial rule generated an increased demand for labor, and since the government went ahead in 1786 with its program of collecting tribute from hacendados for their luneros, the landowners eventually exacted more labor from their tenants. By 1813 labor services were twice as heavy as in 1786.⁶⁰ They were heavier still in 1840, and by 1843 a government official noted that the luneros had become practically indistinguishable from other debt peons.⁶¹ So what had begun as a fiscal measure taken “with particular consideration for the interests of the Indians”⁶² (or so wrote Governor-Intendant Lucas de Gálvez in 1789) ended up by pushing a whole class of free peasants into peonage. The tenants eventually became the equivalent of medieval European cotters, that is, resident rural proletarians with the right to plant on very small plots. The people who benefited were the plantation owners, who dominated Yucatán until the Mexican Revolution.

In the long run, the emergence of the lunero class represented a significant social change. The extent of that change by the late eighteenth century can be analyzed through a comparison of the relative proportions of village and hacienda Indians throughout rural Yucatán. This analysis is made possible by the existence of visitas pastorales for the years 1781–87 and 1803–05. These give considerable insight into the rural social structure at the very time that the agrarian transformation was taking place. Data from these visitas are presented on Map 2.⁶³

As the map demonstrates, the effects of the rise of the hacienda were not randomly or evenly distributed throughout the peninsula. In the northwestern quarter of Yucatán, within a 70-kilometer radius of Mérida, haciendas were important centers of Indian population. In many of the parishes around the capital, in the partido of La Costa, and in the northern Sierra (Sierra Baja), more than half the Indian population resided on private estates. This was also true for some of the Camino Real area between Mérida and Campeche.

The southern Sierra, or Sierra Alta, was a region in which some of the most valuable and productive haciendas were found. The private estates, therefore, were the centers of considerable Indian population. The Sierra Alta, however, was also characterized by large Indian villages. In fact, here were to be found the most populous villages in all of Yucatán. Therefore, even though the number of Indian residents of haciendas was large, it represented only a small percentage of the total Indian population of the area. In the Sierra Alta most Indians remained as residents of peasant villages.

In the eastern half of Yucatán, in some of the parishes around Valladolid, and in the more densely populated partidos of Beneficios Bajos and Beneficios Altos (south of Izamal and Valladolid, and east of the Sierra). In both in the thinly populated area east of Izamal and northwest of Valladolid, and in the more densely populated partidos of Beneficios Bajos and Beneficios Altos (south of Izamal and Valladolid, and east of the sierra). In some parishes of Beneficios Altos there were no haciendas; all the Indians resided in villages and hamlets.

Agrarian change, in Yucatán thus resulted in substantial differentiation. In the western half of the peninsula, a large proportion of the Indian population resided on haciendas. Although this did not initially have cultural and political implications, in the long run the Indians of the West became less like those of the East in their settlement pattern and economy. When the Caste War broke out in 1847, most of the Indians of the West did not join the uprising. Rather, like the peones acasillados in some parts of Mexico after 1910, they tended to be “indios pacíficos,” who chose, as it were, to sit out the revolution. Some even fought on the side of their masters. The rebellion was carried to the outskirts of Mérida by the free peasants of the East, who received little or no support from anyone except the Indians of the Chenes region (southwest of the Sierra, and again outside the influence of the colonial haciendas). Consequently regionalization in the colonial era, as well as in the postindependence period,⁶⁴ formed a major part of the background to the great social upheaval of the nineteenth century.

Agrarian change in Yucatán demonstrates the complex relationship among geographic, social, and economic factors in the development of the landed estate in Spanish America. As Eric Van Young recently noted, all too often geography is treated as a given, to be mentioned in passing as “background,” but ignored as a causal factor.⁶⁵ In practice, however, every region’s unique topography, soil, and climate contribute to historical development. This is clear in the case of Yucatán, for geographic factors prevented certain kinds of economic activity and at the same time encouraged others. Moreover, intraregional differences in soil and rainfall caused local variations in historical development and concomitant structures of production.

The rise of the hacienda in Yucatán is also significant because the historical causation that was evident is relevant to the controversy over the dependency interpretation of Latin American history. Advocates of the dependency theory have emphasized the role that the external forces of the world economy have played in stimulating the production and export of raw materials and primary products, thereby providing the basis of the colonial, neocolonial, and imperialistic relationship between the modern capitalist countries and the Third World.⁶⁶ In the case of Yucatán, at a later time—after 1870—there is no question that world demand brought into existence an export economy based on the gross exploitation of the labor force, a skewed distribution of income and domination by the external forces of world capitalism. In fact, even in the colonial period the world economy played an important role in Yucatáns development. The existence of a growing demand abroad permitted the substantial expansion of stock raising and rice cultivation, and although the export of cotton textiles declined significantly, Yucatán continued to export cloth in the late colonial period. The traditional export economy did not cease altogether.

The major causes of the rise of the hacienda in Yucatán were nevertheless internal. The increasing demand for food made it profitable for local landowners to raise maize and, to a lesser extent, rice on their estates. At the same time, a process of import substitution (avant le mot) was at work in the production of sugar and aguardiente, which had been major imports since the earlier colonial period. This demand, met eventually by local producers, again owed nothing to external factors. The suppliers did need imported technology, but this was readily available in other nearby Spanish colonies, and its importation did not result in any foreign involvement in the productive process.

The existence of internal causes of agrarian change has been demonstrated in recent studies of the Bajío and the Guadalajara regions of colonial Mexico.⁶⁷ The history of Yucatán provides further evidence of autonomous causes of Latin American social and economic development, for the motor force of change—demographic expansion—was essentially internal in nature. This is not to say that external forces were never of fundamental importance. Rather, the balance of internal and external factors changed over time, just as the force and impact of the world economy increased or decreased as a result of the instability of capitalism. At times the internal dynamism has outweighed the external factors and led to largely autonomous socioeconomic change. It should not be surprising that this internal dynamism failed to bring about the development of a modern capitalist economy. Still, the local origins of change are significant: they demonstrate that even though the historical path taken by Latin America was not the same as that of Western Europe and North America, at least that path was sometimes determined by autonomous factors. Local people, not just the world economy, were also responsible for historical change in Latin America.

Author notes