This is a solid regional monograph that presents new empirical findings on a well-worked theme of rural Latin American colonial history. Agueda Jiménez Pelayo’s study is centered on land tenure as viewed through two principal institutions of agrarian life: the Indian community and the hacienda. Her research focuses on Los Canones y Teocaltiche in southern Zacatecas, a frontier region of Nueva Galicia that faced the Chichimec nomads to the north. The sedentary Caxcanes of this area shouldered the burdens of tribute and repartimiento labor to benefit local hacendados. Caxcanes pueblos held on to village lands throughout the colonial period; and in their category of indios fronterizos, they successfully appealed to the crown, through the Audiencia de Guadalajara, for rather generous allotments of land under the headings of fundo legal and tierras de comunidad. However, as Jiménez Pelayo demonstrates, their retention of communal land was achieved only through a prolonged history of confrontation and litigation between Indians and Spaniards and among ethnic communities. Echoing Eric Van Young’s earlier work, Jiménez finds that Indian pueblos most tenaciously defended the monte of woodlands and pastures and opposed hacendados’ claims to this land, even while deeply divided among themselves.
The strength of Haciendas y comunidades is the author’s impressive archival research. She consulted ten different archives, some of them divided into different repositories, and she has included a helpful description of their respective holdings at the end of her book. She has ably woven together a wealth of detail from these different sources on the extension of landholdings, the succession of land tenure through inheritance and sale, encumbrances (censos and capellanías), and credit. Furthermore, she reconstructs a history of litigation and clarifies the distinctions between fundo legal, tierras de comunidad, and mercedes granted to Indian communities.
Jiménez draws carefully documented comparisons of the landholding patterns she found in southern Zacatecas with those researched for other regions of Mexico and the Andes. She confirms earlier findings by scholars working on these same questions, but emphasizes the importance of local variations. Her work is of interest to all historians working on colonial agrarian structures in Hispanic America, and it leaves a number of questions to explore further. How do we distinguish between provincial elites and oligarchies? If the hacendados of southern Zacatecas did not constitute an oligarchy, as Jiménez argues, then what is the wider significance of their ties to merchant and mining families and their use of political office? How did the material conditions of Indian pueblos change over the two centuries covered by Jiménez’ study? What are the linkages between demographic growth and perceived land shortages that provoked increased litigation during the latter seventeenth and eighteenth centuries? What is the deeper meaning of contentious divisions in Indian communities along cultural and political lines?
