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Title: The Haciendas of Mexico - An Artist's Record
Author: Bartlett, Paul Alexander
Language: English
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*** Start of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The Haciendas of Mexico - An Artist's Record" ***
[Illustration: Front dust jacket cover]
The Haciendas of Mexico
[Frontispiece: Hacienda de Mediñero. Jalisco: residence. One-room
school was located in right wing of residence.]
+The Haciendas of Mexico+
+An Artist's Record+
PAUL ALEXANDER BARTLETT
Foreword by James A. Michener
Introduction by Gisela von Wobeser
UNIVERSITY PRESS OF COLORADO
Copyright © 1990 by the University Press of Colorado, Niwot, CO 80544
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
First Edition
The University Press of Colorado is a cooperative publishing enterprise
supported, in part, by Adams State College, Colorado State University,
Fort Lewis College, Mesa State College, Metropolitan State College,
University of Colorado, University of Northern Colorado, University of
Southern Colorado, and Western State College.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
the American National Standard for Information Sciences--Permanence of
Paper for Printed Library Materials.
ANSI Z39.48-1984
+Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data+
Bartlett, Paul Alexander.
The haciendas of Mexico: an artist's record/Paul Alexander Bartlett;
foreword by James A. Michener, Introduction by Gisela von
Wobeser.--1st ed. p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 0-807801-205-x (alk. paper)
1. Bartlett, Paul Alexander. 2. Haciendas in art. 3.
Haciendas--Mexico--Pictorial works. I. Title.
N6537.B2264A4 1989 728.8'0972--dc20 89-24922
Manufactured in the United States of America
***************
_The Haciendas of Mexico: An Artist's Record_, a copyrighted work,
originally published by the University Press of Colorado, is now
out-of-print. The University Press of Colorado has released all rights
to the book to the author's literary executor, Steven James Bartlett,
who has decided to make the book available as an open access
under the terms of the Creative Commons
Attribution-Noncommercial-NoDerivs license, which allows anyone to
distribute this work without changes to its content, provided that both
the author and the original URL from which this work was obtained are
mentioned, that the contents of this work are not used for commercial
purposes or profit, and that this work will not be used without the
copyright holder's written permission in derivative works (i.e., you
may not alter, transform, or build upon this work without such
permission). The full legal statement of this license may be found at:
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/legalcode
[Illustration: Creative Commons logo]
_Dedicated to my son, Steven,
who was my compañero on many hacienda trips.
This book would not exist without his help._
[Illustration: Hacienda de Colonia Campo. Chihuahua: residence.]
+Contents+
List of Illustrations
List of Photographs
Foreword
_by James A. Michener_
Preface
Introduction
_by Gisela von Wobeser_
Map
I. The Hacienda System
II. Through the Eyes of Hacienda Visitors
III. Hacienda Life
IV. Fiestas
V. Education
VI. The Revolution
VII. Mexico Since the Revolution
Bibliography
+Illustrations+
Hacienda de Mediñero, Jalisco: residence. One-room school was located
in right wing of residence.
Hacienda de Colonia Campo, Chihuahua: residence.
Hacienda de Buena Vista, Jalisco: well-preserved residence and patio.
Hacienda de San Felipe, Oaxaca: 19th-century residence, patio fountain.
Hacienda de Encero, Veracruz: church, 1799.
Hacienda de Bledos, San Luis Potosí: map of the hacienda.
Hacienda de Cedra, Jalisco: ornamental entry to 18th-century chapel;
door and gate of mesquite. Orange trees shade patio.
Hacienda de Endo, Sonora: residence, stable below.
Hacienda de Valenciana, Guanajuato: patio fountain.
Hacienda de Valenciana, Guanajuato: figure on 1788 church wall.
Hacienda de Holactún, Yucatán: chapel and residence.
Hacienda de San José, D.F.: churrigueresque-style residence and chapel
with blue and white tiled dome.
Hacienda El Pópulo, Puebla: residence with tiled façade.
Hacienda de Santana, Hildago: residence and chapel.
Hacienda de Teya, Yucatán: residence, 1700.
Hacienda de Leoncito, Guanajuato: 16th-century chapel.
Hacienda de San José, D.F.: rococo façade of residence.
Hacienda de Bledos, San Luis Potosí: coat-of-arms.
Hacienda de Calderón, Guanajuato: bronze bell on residence, 1838.
Hacienda de Ciénega de Mata, Jalisco: 16th-century church
Hacienda de Cabezón, Jalisco: chapel Virgin; her elaborate wardrobe
valued at $50,000.
Hacienda de Cabezón, Jalisco: capital, front of residence, 1800;
building designed by architect Eduardo Tresguerras.
Hacienda de Cuisillos, Jalisco: late 17th-century church in rose
stucco. A famous Jesuit hacienda.
Hacienda de Cuisillos, Jalisco: floor plan of residence.
Hacienda de Cuisillos, Jalisco: handpainted wall fresco in bedroom of
ruined residence.
Hacienda de Cuisillos, Jalisco: mural, one of fourteen panels on
veranda wall of residence.
Hacienda de Xcanatún, Yucatán: one of a series of gold wall motifs
around chapel walls.
Hacienda de San José Huejotzingo, Puebla: florentine armor in residence.
Hacienda de San José Huejotzingo, Puebla: pistol and brand of hacienda.
Hacienda de San José Huejotzingo, Puebla: 16th-century stone bas
relief, 3 feet x 5 feet, unearthed in garden.
Hacienda de San Francisco, Jalisco: residence.
Hacienda de Sodzil, Yucatán: narrow-gauge railway passenger car drawn
by mule or horse.
Hacienda de Dolores Noriatenco, Puebla: century-old carriage.
Hacienda cattle brands, state of Jalisco.
Hacienda de Cedra, Jalisco: stone cross to one side of hacienda chapel,
8 feet tall.
Hacienda de Tabi, Yucatán: early 18th-century church.
Hacienda de Altillo, Coyoacán, D.F.: pastel of St. Andrew.
Hacienda de Zapotitán, Jalisco: remains of 1750 residence and mirador,
white stuccoed masonry.
Hacienda de Dolores Noriatenco, Puebla: polychrome wood statue, 16th
century, 5 feet tall.
Hacienda San Ignacio, Yucatán: 18th century brass sacristy
implements--handbell and Bible holder.
Hacienda San Ignacio, Yucatán: brass ecclesiastical candle holder.
Hacienda de Castamay, Campeche: _cepo_ (stocks), made of mahogany.
Hacienda de Castamay, Campeche: chapel stairway.
Hacienda Corralitos, Corralitos, Chihuahua: one-million-acre cattle and
mining hacienda, 1750. Adobe residence, 1886, surrounded by
cottonwoods.
Hacienda de Bellavista, Jalisco: sugar refinery silo.
Hacienda de Sodzil, Yucatán: bronze weathervane on residence.
Hacienda de Puerto de Nieto, Guanajuato: stone residence and chapel.
Hacienda de Puerto de Nieto, Guanajuato: gate.
Hacienda de Puerto de Nieto, Guanajuato: church.
Hacienda de Aurora, Jalisco: commemorative bridge column dated 1750.
Hacienda de los Morales, D.F.: patio fountain, 1643.
Hacienda de Xala, Hidalgo: residence and chapel, 1785.
Hacienda Pixoy, Yucatán: brick-adobe residence and storage rooms. 18th
century, eleven rooms.
Hacienda de los Ricos, Guanajuato: residence.
Hacienda de los Ricos, Guanajuato: bullring entry door.
Hacienda de Yaxche, Yucatán: Virgin, 14 inches high, 17th century.
Hacienda de San Antonio, Colima: 17th-century chapel and terminus of
aqueduct.
Hacienda de Jajalpa, D.F.: pink stucco sixteen-room, red-tiled
19th-century residence and chapel.
Hacienda San Cayetano, Nayarit: one of a pair of pink ceramic lions at
entry to residence.
Hacienda de Guarache, Michoacán: residence and chapel. Now a
government school.
Hacienda de Petaca, Guanajuato: residence.
Hacienda de Juana Guerra, Amado Nervo, Durango: millstone.
Hacienda San Cayetano de Valencia, Guanajuato: church, 1788.
Hacienda de Juana Guerra, Amado Nervo, Durango: baroque church.
Hacienda de la Venta del Astillero, Jalisco: 18th-century stone and
brick residence and chapel, 220 feet long.
Hacienda la Gavia, Estado de México: wood figure, 5 feet tall.
Hacienda de Cocoyoc, Morelos: 16th-century chapel.
Hacienda de Tikuch, Yucatán: rear view, stairway to second floor
residential area
Hacienda de Chinameca, Morelos: residence and chapel. Emiliano Zapata
assassinated here, 1919.
Hacienda de Canutillo, Durango: Pancho Villa buried here July 23, 1923.
Hacienda de la Erre, Guanajuato: 1673. Father Miguel Hidalgo began his
march from this church.
Hacienda de Pueblilla, Zempoala, Hidalgo: chapel tower, 1860.
Hacienda de Tepa-Chica, Hidalgo: chapel, 1864.
Hacienda la Gavia, Estado de México: carved figure on library door.
Hacienda de Arenillas, Puebla: chapel gateway.
Hacienda Manga de Clavo, Veracruz: owned by Santa Anna. Rendering from
an 1868 bank bond; hacienda destroyed.
Hacienda de Esperanza, D.F.: residence. Cattle stalls on ground floor.
Hacienda de Águilar, Oaxaca: bas relief, 3 feet x 5 feet, front wall of
residence.
Hacienda de Sodzil, Yucatán: 19th-century residence.
Hacienda de los Molinos, Tlaxcala: 16th-century chapel. Cholula
pyramid in the distance.
Hacienda Quinta Carolina, Chihuahua: residence of more than fifty
rooms, 1892. Abandoned as of 1981.
Hacienda de Caleturia, Puebla: silver door knocker.
Hacienda de Chichén Itza, Yucatán: church.
Hacienda de Valenciana, Guanajuato: residence.
Hacienda cattle brands from various states in Mexico appear at the
beginning of each chapter.
+Photographs+
Hacienda Castillo, Jalisco: 18th-century landscape view typical of many
haciendas.
Hacienda de Buena Vista, Jalisco: well-preserved residence and patio.
Hacienda de San Felipe, Oaxaca: 19th-century residence, patio fountain.
Hacienda Uxmal, Yucatán: main gate.
Hacienda de Valenciana, Guanajuato.
Hacienda Petaca, Guanajuato: patio side of main residence.
Hacienda de Puerto de Nieto, Guanajuato: 17th-century defense tower.
Note bullet holes.
Hacienda de Barrera, Guanajuato: residence.
Hacienda de Cañedo, Jalisco: 19th-century church.
Hacienda Yaxcopoíl, Yucatán: residence. Note narrow-gauge rail-road
car.
Hacienda de los Morales, D.F.: spinning wheel in residence patio.
Hacienda de Blanca, Oaxaca: patio.
Hacienda de Xotla, Puebla: residence patio and oven.
Hacienda Zapotitán, Jalisco: map on veranda of residence.
Hacienda de Buena Vista, Jalisco: 18th-century aqueduct.
Hacienda de Castamay, Campeche: 18th-century church
Hacienda de Dolores Noriatenco, Puebla: saddle belonging to former
President Ávila Camacho decorated with silver.
Hacienda de Yocotepec, Hidalgo: church and stone cross.
Hacienda de Tenache, Oaxaca: twin bells on roof of residence.
Hacienda la Calera, Jalisco: second residence on the property, 1890.
Hacienda de Tamanche, Yucatán: 17th-century colonial residence and
remains of sugar refinery chimney.
Hacienda de San Antonio, Guanajuato: 18th-century chapel ruin.
Hacienda Aguilera, Oaxaca: former 19th-century hacienda residence, now
university building.
Hacienda de Matanzas, Jalisco: chapel and residence, chapel date 1750.
Hacienda los Molinos, Puebla: fortified wall and stairway to tower of
16th-century residence.
Hacienda de Matanzas, Jalisco: 18th-century chapel, residence,
Hacienda Quinta Carolina, Chihuahua: main residence.
Hacienda Mendocina, Puebla: 18th-century guest home on island in small
man-made lake.
+Foreword+
+_James A. Michener_+
Distinguished Visiting Professor, University of Miami
I first became aware of the high artistic merit of Paul Bartlett's work
on the classic haciendas of Old Mexico when I came upon an exhibition
in Texas in 1968. His drawings, sketches, and photographs evoked so
effectively the historic buildings I had known when working in Mexico
that I wrote to the architect-artist to inform him of my pleasure.
Subsequently, I saw examples of his devotion to the great haciendas
with their strong Mexican-Spanish coloration, and always I enjoyed his
reminders of what life in colonial Mexico must have been like for the
favored classes.
It is rewarding to renew my acquaintance with this remarkable body of
work, for it is a reassuring example of what a lifetime of scholarship
can accomplish.
+Preface+
The haciendas of Mexico have a special appeal for me. They represent a
way of life that is now gone--some would say fortunately, since it was
often a burdensome and cruel way of life for the peasant workers, a way
of life that eventually motivated a revolution and the dissolution of
the majority of hacienda landholdings.
Many haciendas can be reached only with difficulty by horse or by foot,
by boat or motorcycle or jeep. Their isolation from the culture of
Europe, three hundred years ago, impresses the mind with its severity.
In their isolation, these estates recall the brave attempts of hacienda
families to re-establish cultivated patterns of living in the New
World, with fine china and crystal, grand pianos and chapel organs,
ornate furnishings, paintings, and tapestries.
For my project, I received no financial rewards. Hence, I made
repeated trips to Mexico, each funded by the modest savings accumulated
in the United States between visits, with the hacienda project ever in
mind.
My wife, Elizabeth encouraged my efforts. She was my mainstay, my
constant friend and faithful companion. Our son, Steven, was born in
Mexico and was raised in a world punctuated by hacienda visits; he was
my _compañero_ on many hacienda trips. The three of us usually
returned to Mexico to stay for a year or two at a time.
To find out where haciendas were located in a particular area, I turned
to local government officials, owners of village stores, the postman,
or the peasant who delivered charcoal on his burro. Mostly, I found
the haciendas on random trips, when their archways and rooftops
appeared in the distance.
In 1941, when I began this project, few studies of the Mexican hacienda
had been made. Only a handful of scholars had visited individual
haciendas, and had gained first-hand familiarity with a limited number
of them. To this day, with the possible exception of my own work, this
is still true. And it is certain to remain true, since many of the
haciendas I visited no longer exist. My own interest in that heritage
was to re-create the special aura that my visits to more than three
hundred haciendas had created. As an artist I felt an enduring
affinity with a time that is no more, a heritage and tradition that may
be recaptured only, I think, through the medium of art.
This, then, is an attempt to survey the story of the haciendas. It is
not a treatise about their economic structure, their political
influence, or their historical importance in the establishment of New
Spain. Despite the meager records relating to the many individual
haciendas, there are excellent studies of regional haciendas in Mexico.
The reader will find references to them in the Bibliography.
The text was written to accompany a selection of my hacienda
illustrations, including descriptions of hacienda life based on
information received from personal contacts with hacienda families and
caretakers who could still recall the old days. My impressions and
commentary are offered to enable the reader to leave the twentieth
century for a while and return to a period when the freshly colonized
American continent witnessed the birth, the spread, and eventually the
death of a unique way of life.
Finally, I wish to acknowledge my thanks to the many who helped my
hacienda project to develop and grow through its many stages; among
them: historians Frank Tannenbaum of Columbia University and Silvio
Zavala of Mexico City; authors Ralph Roeder, Stuart Chase, and Russell
Kirk; artist Roberto Montenegro; art directors Reginald Poland of the
Atlanta Art Association, Herbert Friedmann of the Los Angeles County
Museum, Donald Goodall of the University of Texas Art Gallery in
Austin, the Reverend J. Pociask, S.J. of the DeSaisset Gallery at the
University of Santa Clara, and Stella Benson of the Latin American
library collections at the University of Texas in Austin; and art
patron Huntington Hartford. I am especially grateful to my son,
Steven, without whose help this book would have remained an unfinished
project. I am also indebted to Dr. Fae Batten for her magnanimous
effort, patience, and skill in preparing my photos for this book, and
to Lowell Waxman, head librarian of the Claremont Branch of the San
Diego Libraries for his tireless assistance in the department of
references. In addition, I am thankful for the good friends and
associates it has been my fortune to come across on the long journey
over the years.
[Illustration: Hacienda Castillo, Jalisco: 18th-century landscape view
typical of many haciendas.]
This book contains reproductions of a selected number of illustrations
and photographs, drawn from a collection of more than 300 original
pen-and-ink illustrations and several hundred photographs, which now
form part of the Benson Latin American Collection of the University of
Texas in Austin. A collection of hacienda photographs, illustrations,
and other materials is also maintained by the Western History Research
Center of the University of Wyoming in Laramie.
[Illustration: Hacienda de Buena Vista, Jalisco: well-preserved
residence and patio.]
+Introduction+
+_Gisela von Wobeser_+
Professor of History, Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas
Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, México, D.F.
Translated from the Spanish by
Steven J. Bartlett
Senior Research Professor, Oregon State University
The lifework of artist Paul Alexander Bartlett to retrieve the past of
the Mexican hacienda has made this book possible. This volume contains
a selection of his original pen-and-ink illustrations and photographs,
realized over a period of some forty years, of more than three hundred
haciendas.
Bartlett began his record during the 1940s. He made a series of visits
to Mexico to sketch and photograph the hacienda buildings that had
survived the Agrarian Reform. Many haciendas were inaccessibly
located, at considerable distances from population centers. He
traveled hundreds of miles on foot, on muleback, by train and by boat,
climbed hills, and descended into canyons to find them.
The record that Bartlett has made represents an important chapter in
Mexican history. Because the majority of hacienda structures have been
subjected to severe and progressive deterioration, his study, in many
cases, is the only trace that remains of the physical appearance of
individual haciendas. His collection of illustrations and photographs
is now in the custody of two institutions, the University of Texas at
Austin, in the Benson Latin American Collection, and the University of
Wyoming in Laramie, in the Western History Research Center [Now the
American Heritage Center]. These two archives will be useful to
scholars interested in the physical structure of the haciendas, their
evolution and history, their economy, as well as in comparative
studies. At the same time, this collection of materials makes it
possible to study the characteristics of different types of haciendas.
Above all, the contents of the two archives form an extremely valuable
resource for the history of art and architecture.
[Illustration: Hacienda de San Felipe, Oaxaca: 19th-century residence,
patio fountain.]
[Illustration: Hacienda de Encero, Veracruz: church, 1799.]
When Bartlett began his travels through the Mexican backcountry, the
producing haciendas had largely disappeared. What he found were often
remnants of an earlier existence during the Porfiriato, the period
between 1877 and 1911. Many of the buildings he saw dated from this
epoch, along with their interior decorations, water and irrigation
systems, machinery, and farming tools. In addition to these haciendas,
he also found vestiges of the first half of the nineteenth century and
of the colonial era. These were mainly hacienda buildings, some of
which had been rebuilt during the Porfiriato.
The disintegration of the haciendas began as a result of the Mexican
Revolution, and it ended with the redistribution of their land during
the Agrarian Reform. During the 1930s and 1940s, huge rural estates
were fragmented and converted into _ejidos_ or _minifundios_. _Ejidos_
are tracts of land that are granted as communal property to rural
towns. They are worked by members of the community, who benefit from
the land's yield. Ejidal properties cannot be sold or transferred.
The _minifundios_ are small private pieces of property, amounting on
the average to 100 hectares but varying according to the region of the
country and type of soil. Between 1934 and 1940, approximately
17,900,000 hectares (44,230,900 acres) were redistributed, representing
close to half of all tillable land. This repartitioning of the land
has continued into the present, though its pace has been much slower.
As hacienda property was broken up, the hacienda owners, the
_hacendados_, were left in possession of the hacienda buildings and the
immediate land around them, the size of which was restricted by the
limits that were set for these small properties. This meant that
immense haciendas were reduced to very tiny ranches. Along with their
land, the hacendados lost access to water, they lost their means of
irrigation, machinery, and livestock.
Because of these measures, the hacienda system was annihilated. For
the majority of the hacendados, the few acres left them turned out to
be unproductive land, and their hardships were magnified by the
instability and the violence that prevailed in the country. As a
result, many hacienda buildings were abandoned or were destined for new
purposes.
Only a few of the ex-haciendas remained in production. Some landowners
took advantage of the limited property left to them to plant lucrative,
high-yielding crops, while others augmented the size of their
cultivated land by leasing adjoining land or by purchasing it under
assumed names.
[Illustration: Hacienda de Bledos, San Luis Potosí: map of the
hacienda.]
When Bartlett began his hacienda visits in the 1940s, he found many of
the hacienda buildings in ruins, exposed to the ravages of time and
vandalism. Buildings had been converted into chicken coops, pigsties,
public apartments, and machine shops. Others served as sources for
construction materials, from which were scavenged rocks, bricks, beams,
and tiles for the habitations of the local population. In some cases
the destruction was total: All the hacienda's structures were removed,
and only the name of the place alluded to the fact that an hacienda had
ever existed there.
At other haciendas, buildings were adapted to new uses. They were
transformed into hotels, resorts, government buildings, barracks,
hospitals, restaurants, and schools. The exterior of the buildings
were generally left intact; interiors were completely changed.
[Illustration: Hacienda de Cedra, Jalisco: ornamental entry to
18th-century chapel; door and gate of mesquite. Orange trees shade
patio.]
[Illustration: Hacienda de Endo, Sonora: residence, stable below.]
The best-preserved hacienda buildings were those that continued to
function as country properties or vacation homes. In these, Bartlett
often found furnishings and utensils from the epoch of Don Porfirio,
surrounded by the old traditions of Mexican country life.
As an artist, Bartlett's attention was drawn foremost to the hacienda
buildings themselves and to the works of art that they housed. The
majority of his illustrations and photographs therefore depict the main
group of hacienda buildings or certain buildings--for example, the main
residence, the church, the patios, and work buildings. However, among
his rich materials, one can also find a testimony to hacienda work and
life: machinery, irrigation devices and structures, farm implements,
mining equipment, warehouses, barns, corrals, and carriages, among
others.
The history of the hacienda spans three centuries. The first haciendas
appeared in New Spain toward the beginning of the seventeenth century,
when demand for agricultural products increased and the prehispanic
supply system crumbled. Farming received an impetus at the hands of
Spaniards, and the small farms and livestock ranches, which dated from
the sixteenth century, expanded their landholdings. Many new sources
of water were tapped, and a resident labor force was developed. These
steps encouraged production and supplied the regional as well as the
continually growing metropolitan markets.
The increase in hacienda production and in the number of hacienda
workers made it necessary to expand the sixteenth-century facilities,
which, with the exception of those of the sugar plantations, had been
very modest. In this way, a large number of buildings were
constructed, buildings that were to be preserved as the core of many
haciendas until the Porfiriato.
There were three principal types of haciendas. Grain haciendas were
the most important because they were dedicated to the cultivation of
the subsistence crops corn and wheat. In addition, beans, barley, lima
beans, chiles, and other crops were planted. Grain haciendas were
established mainly in the vicinity of the urban centers, which they
supplied. The important areas of grain cultivation were Puebla,
Atlixco, Toluca, Guadalajara, Oaxaca, and Michoacán. Livestock
haciendas occupied a second level of importance. They raised cattle
and horses, as well as goats and sheep. This type of hacienda tended
to be located in more remote areas, in an attempt to prevent the
livestock from invading cultivated fields. Sugar haciendas were
located in tropical regions, where they could count on sufficient water
for the cultivation of sugarcane. The most important sugar regions
were Veracruz, Cuernavaca, Cuautla, and Michoacán.
Throughout the seventeenth century the haciendas grew in significance.
They held much of the land and water resources, expanded their labor
force, intensified their control over the market, and consolidated
their territorial rights in accordance with _composiciones de tierras_.
(The phrase _composiciones de tierras_ belongs to the legal terminology
of the time. It relates to a legal mechanism that was instituted by
the Spanish Crown during the first half of the sixteenth century but
which was applied mainly during the seventeenth century. It made it
possible to legalize properties whose titles were not in order.) They
sought to make improvements by constructing, for example, buildings,
irrigation systems, roads, granaries, and shelters for livestock.
Together, these made it possible to increase agricultural yields
substantially. It was not an easy process, often involving transfers
of hacienda property, severe indebtedness of their owners, and great
difficulties in production.
Hacienda expansion proceeded throughout the following two centuries.
Huge tracts of uncultivated land were transformed into farmland and
impressive water distribution systems opened up new areas to
irrigation. The population, constantly growing, demanded an ever
greater quantity of food. Much land that had been devoted to the
raising of livestock was turned over to cultivation, and the stock were
gradually displaced until livestock haciendas came to be located mainly
in the north of the country. However, this was not a period of
unimpeded progress: there were severe periods of crisis, sharp
fluctuations in production, a lack of continuity in the transmission of
property, and frequent bankruptcies. Hacienda properties tended to be
deeply mortgaged to ecclesiastical institutions and to individual
lenders.
[Illustration: Hacienda Uxmal, Yucatán: main gate.]
When dictator Porfirio Díaz assumed power in 1877, a boom period for
the hacienda began. Historical circumstances were favorable, and the
government offered all manner of facilities to the livestock and farm
impresarios. The substantial increase in the country's population, as
well as the strengthening international economy, created a great demand
for farm and livestock products. The consumption of goods from the
tropics, such as coffee, cacao, sugar, tobacco, and vanilla, grew
considerably during this time both in Europe and in the United States.
The same thing happened with certain basic materials, among them
_henequén_, rubber, chicle, and _ixtle_. (_Ixtle_ or _istle_ is the
name given to the hard fibers that are extracted from different plants
of the genus agave, of which the most important are the _maguey_ and
the _lechuguilla_. They are raised mainly in northern Mexico.)
As a result of laws that secularized communal land and set aside fallow
land, huge areas of cultivation and land suitable for farming were
placed at the disposition of commercial agriculture. Supporting
capital for the most part came from foreign sources--from the United
States, France, and England. Labor came from the impoverished
peasants, from town workers, and from indigenous groups, among them the
Mayas and the Tarahumaras.
Large landed estates appeared and a powerful class of hacienda owners
arose. It was during this period that it was possible to overcome some
of the endemic problems that had beset the hacienda since its birth:
instability, indebtedness, lack of capital, and scarce revenues.
During the Porfiriato, the majority of the haciendas were highly
productive and provided their owners with plentiful earnings. Yet, at
the same time there were haciendas that had to face financial problems
and fluctuations in production.
Frequently, hacendados participated in other areas of business, such as
finance, commerce, and mining. Their privileged economic position
permitted them to furnish their rural properties with great luxury and
to sustain a life of affluence. Bartlett found hacienda residences
with twenty bedrooms, salons for dancing, Japanese gardens, billiard
rooms and music rooms, swimming pools, bullrings, and palisades.
Bearing witness to the interior splendor of these mansions, there was
fine furniture from Europe, carpeting from Persia, velvet draperies,
chandeliers of cut crystal, and valuable oil paintings. There were
haciendas that possessed chapels that rivaled the provincial churches
in size, architecture, and decor. Of course not all haciendas were
this elegant: most had much more rustic appointments; many were in
decline, poorly maintained, furnished with the very barest minimum.
Bartlett captured and transmits to us today through his art the grand
cultural richness that enfolds the hacienda, its diversity according to
its moment in time, its location, and its type of production, and he
accompanies these with a portrayal of hacienda life, customs, and its
inherent style of thought. He is one of the pioneers in his field of
study.
[Illustration: Map of Mexico and its states]
+Sonora+
1. Hacienda de Endo
+Chihuahua+
2. Hacienda de Colonia Campo
3. Hacienda Corralitos
4. Hacienda Quinta Carolina
+Durango+
5. Hacienda de Juana Guerra
6. Hacienda de Canutillo
+Nayarit+
7. Hacienda San Cayetano
+San Luis Potosí+
8. Hacienda de Castamay
+Guanajuato+
9. Hacienda de Valenciana
10. Hacienda de Leoncito
11. Hacienda de Calderón
12. Hacienda de Puerto de Nieto
13. Hacienda de los Ricos
14. Hacienda San Cayetano de Valencia
15. Hacienda de Petaca
16. Hacienda de la Erre
+Jalisco+
17. Hacienda de Medinero
18. Hacienda de Cedra
19. Hacienda de Ciénega de Mata
20. Hacienda de Cabezón
21. Hacienda de Cuisillos
22. Hacienda de Zapotitán
23. Hacienda de Bellavista
24. Hacienda de Aurora
25. Hacienda de la Venta del Astillero
+Hidalgo+
26. Hacienda de Santana
27. Hacienda de Xala
28. Hacienda de Pueblilla
29. Hacienda de Tepa-Chica
+Michoacán+
30. Hacienda de Guarache
+Colima+
31. Hacienda de San Antonio
+State of México+
32. Hacienda de San José
33. Hacienda de Altillo
34. Hacienda de los Morales
35. Hacienda de Jajalpa
36. Hacienda la Gavia
37. Hacienda de Esperanza
+Morelos+
38. Hacienda de Cocoyoc
39. Hacienda de Chinameca
+Tlaxcala+
40. Hacienda de los Molinos
+Puebla+
41. Hacienda de Pópulo
42. Hacienda de San José Huejotzingo
43. Hacienda de Dolores Noriatenco
44. Hacienda de Arenillas
45. Hacienda de Caleturia
+Veracruz+
46. Hacienda de Encero
47. Hacienda Manga de Clavo
+Oaxaca+
48. Hacienda de Águilar
+Campeche+
49. Hacienda de Castamay
+Yucatán+
50. Hacienda de Holactún
51. Hacienda de Teya
52. Hacienda de Xcanatun
53. Hacienda de Sodzil
54. Hacienda de Tabi
55. Hacienda San Ignacio
56. Hacienda Pixoy
57. Hacienda Yaxche
58. Hacienda de Tikuch
59. Hacienda de Chichén Itza
I. The Hacienda System
[Illustration: Hacienda cattle brand]
Forty years ago, traveling by train in Mexico, I saw, in remote areas,
what appeared to be miniature villages. I made sketches of them from
the train and later visited some of the sites and learned they were
ancient haciendas. Over the years since then, I have visited 330
haciendas and made the first art record of these estates. I traveled
on horseback, on foot, by bus, train, car, truck, motorbike, and
mule-drawn, narrow-gauge railway. I saw that haciendas had become mere
place-names as they disintegrated or were bulldozed.
Walk into a handsome mansion and you find twenty or thirty empty rooms.
To escape the revolution, the owner fled years earlier. Earthquakes,
weather, and abandonment have riddled walls and floors. The residence
stands roofless, windowless, doorless--constructed of stone, brick and
adobe, or a combination of these. Church and chapel exist at every
hacienda and they are still used by neighbors and peasants who may
occupy the manor house. There are dates on bell skirts, on walls or
beams of a storage bodega, on escutcheons, on archways; often they are
carved in the mesquite floor of a chapel or church.
[Illustration: Hacienda de Valenciana, Guanajuato: patio fountain.]
In the tropics, flame trees, bougainvillea, red-orange galeanas,
lavender jacaranda, and yellow primavera flower among ruins. In
northern areas, pine, tall eucalypti, mesquite, cedar, pepper, and
chinaberry remain.
I sketched under the tropic sun, in corrals, in a bullring, under an
Indian laurel; I poked through empty rooms.
As I sketched, burro trains passed, their sacks loaded with charcoal or
corn; goat bells tapped as a herd grazed; ox teams hauled carts with
wooden wheels; blackbirds crowded a treetop; a cowboy tipped his hat.
There was always courtesy. I drank _pulque_ from a communal gourd; I
shared pineapple grown in Tecomán; I was entertained at town houses of
hacendados. On the estates there was silence from the days of the
viceroys, the silence of padres, the silence of abandonment.
[Illustration: Hacienda cattle brand]
In the sixteenth century, following the Spanish invasion of Mexico
between the years 1519 and 1521, the Spanish Crown granted enormous
land areas to the conquerors and adventurers who came to the New World.
Since this property belonged to the natives, the grants amounted to
usurpation. Scattered throughout Mexico, from Yucatán to Sonora, the
extensive holdings frequently included towns and villages. These
grants of land were the origin of the haciendas, the rural estates.
During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Spanish immigrants
sometimes passed themselves off as noblemen--camouflaging criminal or
poverty-stricken backgrounds. Others, with a sack of cash or a pair of
brawny shoulders, used the invasion as an opportunity to bluff their
way and claim land and lives through the power of the sword. They
remembered that dropping quicksilver into a mule's ear made the animal
trot faster. Wealthy immigrants were able to purchase titles, and this
arrangement was encouraged by the Crown since it benefited the treasury.
The hacendado (or his representative) employed or coerced native
workers to build a residence, church or chapel, storage buildings,
mills, dams, aqueducts, fences, and roads. He paid lip service to the
Crown and whenever possible circumvented legalities. It was
advantageous to sidestep the Crown since a letter or document took half
a year to reach Spain. The employer was unable to communicate with the
people who spoke Otomi, Coro, or Chichiméc. He was thwarted by new
diseases, strange customs, tropical climate, and crop problems. Unlike
the countries of Europe, Mexico was a corn culture, not a wheat
culture. During his first years he learned that grain did better when
planted in the most primitive manner, by stick and foot.
[Illustration: Hacienda de Valenciana, Guanajuato: figure on 1788
church wall.]
[Illustration: Hacienda de Holactún, Yucatán: chapel and residence.
[Illustration: Hacienda de San José, D.F.: churrigueresque-style
residence and chapel with blue and white tiled dome.]
[Illustration: Hacienda de Valenciana, Guanajuato.]
[Illustration: Hacienda Petaca. Guanajuato: patio side of main
residence.]
[Illustration: Hacienda El Pópulo, Puebla: residence with tiled façade.]
[Illustration: Hacienda de Santana. Hildago: residence and chapel.]
[Illustration: Hacienda de Teya, Yucatán: residence. 1700.]
[Illustration: Hacienda de Leoncito, Guanajuato: 16th-century chapel.]
[Illustration: Hacienda de San José, D.F.: rococo façade of residence.]
As rapidly as possible, the landowner, the _hacendado_, added to his
holdings, buying or usurping acreage. An hacienda might consist of
several thousand or several million acres. The terrain might be
mountainous, semi-desert, coastal strips, forest or jungle, or a
combination of topographical zones. There were cattle haciendas, sheep
haciendas, mining haciendas, pulque/tequila haciendas; others produced
henequén, grew coffee, sugarcane, corn, wheat. A few bred bulls for
the bullring.
During the first century of the occupation, Fray Bartolomé de Las
Casas, friend of the Indians, objected to the atrocities committed by
the Spanish. Alfonso de Zorita, writing his "Brevíssima Relación,"
exposed Indian mistreatment. Burnouf, French agronomist, wrote Emperor
Maximilian that the whip of the _mayordomo_ (the hacendado's
administrator) was destroying many lives. Regardless of objections
through the years, the hacienda system prospered.
Counts, countesses, dukes and duchesses, crude invasionists, wealthy
men, and religious orders owned estates. Some of the famous hacendados
were Hernán Cortéz, Porfirio Díaz, Martín Ruiz de Zavala, General Santa
Anna, and Pancho Villa (who was given his hacienda as a political
bribe). Famous families owned estates: Terrazas, Rosa, Amor, Jaral,
Ibarra, Echeverría, and Regla.
From the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, hacienda architecture
varied: Where generation after generation owned the hacienda, in
families of great wealth, façades were gothic, churrigueresque,
plateresque, Islamic, baroque, rococo. The most widespread
architectural style derived from the Roman. Most residences had their
living quarters around an _atrium_, or patio. Grilled windows and
massive wooden doors and shutters were common. Thousands of work-hours
went into the carvings and embellishments--in gray, pink, or yellowish
limestone. _Hornacinas_ (niches) peppered a church or chapel façade.
[Illustration: Hacienda de Bledos, San Luis Potosí: coat-of-arms.]
[Illustration: Hacienda de Puerto de Nieto, Guanajuato: 17th-century
defense tower. Note bullet holes.]
Each niche contained a saint or religious figure: It was tapestry in
stone.
In the states of Puebla and Oaxaca, tiled façades ornamented the
hacienda residences and lofty walls surrounded them. Church and chapel
domes were also tiled. In the Sierras, haciendas were often built of
logs and planed wood--rustic, two-story buildings with outside
stairways. In the tropics, the usual residence was one story with
ample verandas and deep-set doors and windows. Most buildings were
roofed in cone-shaped, interlocking, or flat tiles.
The majority of hacienda structures were skillfully mortared in stone
block _cantera_ (limestone) by rule-of-thumb. Professional architects
like Francisco Eduardo de Tresguerras were seldom available. Instead,
artisans were employed who used various styles learned from early
ecclesiastical buildings.
Bitter rivalries between estates were part of the scene. Owners were
on the alert for a bankrupt hacienda that could be purchased at a very
low price. If extending landholdings meant violating the rights of a
village or of an individual farmer or rancher, those rights were
brushed aside, or contested legally.
[Illustration: Hacienda de Barrera, Guanajuato: residence.]
To bolster his stature, the hacendado placed a baronial device on the
façade of his residence or church: A coat-of-arms elevated his status.
He also respected his skin, and against the threat of _la intrusa_ (the
intruder) he installed gun slots, grilled windows, studded doors, and
armed his retainers. _La intrusa_ was his Old World enemy. Now and
then he raised a private army to repel difficult natives, belligerent
hacendados, or revolutionaries. Thick-walled, ponderous buildings
reflected his philosophy. They indicated his loneliness and his fear
of death as well.
As life became less threatening in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, as roads improved and travel became safer and more
comfortable, hacienda owners erected open structures: Residences
appeared with multiple arches across the front, and tiled verandas led
to the outdoors. Two-story homes, with balconies on the second floor
became common. Eucalypti, jacaranda, chirimoya, and columnar cypress
shaded a complex of buildings: church, residence, _bodega_. In the
north country, a line of cottonwoods led to the gracious house, which
was stuccoed pink or pale yellow. Farther south, a grove of palms
graced the setting.
As time passed, viceroys, churchmen, lawyers, and teachers became more
and more aware of the language barriers that existed throughout the
country and that impeded progress. The Catholics, through their
_colegios_ (ecclesiastical schools) attempted to upgrade life. There
were no public schools.
Among the ecclesiastical orders, the Jesuits were major hacienda
owners. Their design-for-living began at 4:00 A.M. and ended at 7:00
P.M. At the most famous Jesuit hacienda, Santa Lucía, near Mexico
City, slaves were purchased, bred, sold, or retained for work on the
estate. There were no fiestas at Santa Lucía. For almost two hundred
years the hacienda functioned to support the ecclesiastical schools of
the order. The Colegio Máximo, in Mexico City, was the principal
beneficiary. Until June 25, 1767, when all Jesuits were deported from
Mexico, the estate prospered, selling wheat, corn, textiles, cattle,
sheep, and slaves. Its economic influence extended as far as
Guadalajara, Zapotlán, and Colima.
Schooling at the hacienda was largely disregarded. There were sixty
foreign dialects to contend with. There were no dictionaries, no
language bridges for the Zapotec, Coro, Méxica, and Nahuatl people. On
the estates a priest or teacher, one who knew a little Latin, gave
lessons in Spanish, arithmetic, Latin, and the catechism. Scholarly
priests began linguistic studies of some tribes; they edited
dictionaries, but these were never circulated. Some of their work has
yet to be published.
_Machismo_ was more meaningful to the average estate than education.
The blacksmith from Barcelona, who now owned ninety thousand acres, was
eager for compliant women. Sex life, for the invaders, for the
colonist, was freer than in Europe. Since the men did not speak the
Indian dialects, sex was a body language. Some were promiscuous and
guilty of perversion. Priests and nuns were shocked by their animality
and attempted to control their countrymen. Since most haciendas were
remote and few women accompanied the settlers, isolation and power
granted license.
The kindly man, the gentile man, looked for other ways to overcome
loneliness, isolation, homesickness. Some, preferring the familiar
life, returned to their homeland. By 1910, thousands of estates were
scattered across the country. Mansions were located in the midst of
maguey and henequén fields or were situated in lush valleys. Some
faced the ocean; some were lost in acres of corn; miles of range
country surrounded others; there were desert haciendas with the nearest
neighbor fifty miles away; there were rain forest haciendas, mahogany
haciendas. Many were regional landmarks.
[Illustration: Hacienda de Calderón, Guanajuato: bronze bell on
residence, 1838.]
Haciendas became an embodiment of time. They seemed to defy time,
offering the illusion that a family could live there indefinitely.
+II. Through the Eyes of Hacienda Visitors+
[Illustration: Hacienda cattle brand]
Through the years there were notable visitors to the haciendas who have
left us their impressions: Bishop Landa, Father Alonso Ponce, Gemelli
Gareri, Samuel de Champlain, John Chilton, Mora y Escobar, Sieur Bully,
Fathers Balalenque and Acosta, Thomas Gage ("clerical spy"), Don
Ernesto de Icaza, Emperor Iturbide, Emperor Maximilian I, Baron von
Humboldt, Madame Calderón de la Barca, James Stephens, and Frederick
Catherwood, among others.
[Illustration: Hacienda cattle brand]
One of the most famous haciendas, in the state of Jalisco, is Ciénega
de Mata, legalized by the Crown in 1697. Owned by the Rincón Gallardo
family, it was a tract of eighty-seven estancias (ranches). According
to Alfonso Rincón Gallardo, reminiscing about his father's estate, the
residence was built during the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth
centuries. It is a two-story building with twenty rooms and spans or
arches across the front. The church is gray limestone, like the
residence, with a baroque façade. An elaborate coat-of-arms
embellishes the entry. Sculptured pink stone _cantera_ saints and
angels fill various niches. The octagonal dome and tower are richly
carved.
[Illustration: Hacienda de Ciénega de Mata, Jalisco: 16th-century
church.]
Gallardo appreciated the life at Ciénega, the brandings, the roundups,
sheep pasturing, shearings, and weanings. "I liked to ride with the
cowboys," he wrote, "those extraordinary horsemen, pleasant companions,
tanned by sun and wind, simple in tastes, frank, never tiring--the
classic men of the great haciendas."
Recalling his life he tells us:
Every morning after breakfast, all of us--my father dressed in his
charro outfit; my mother attired English style--would set out on
horseback, riding about the hacienda's vast fields of corn and
barley. After the midday meal, back at the house, we walked about
the stables, the granaries, and over a small hill that lay nearby;
and sometimes we played fronton or went out riding again. At
night, after supper, we read or played games. In this tranquil,
pleasant manner, life went on, broken only by the annual festival,
an event celebrated on a grand scale with parades, banquets, horse
races, cockfights, boxing matches, and, in the evening, a fantastic
display of fireworks.
[Illustration: Hacienda cattle brand]
Brantz Mayer, secretary of the United States Legation in Mexico during
1841 and 1842, enjoyed a horseback visit to the Hacienda de San
Nicolás, near Tetécala, in the state of Mexico. He admired the white
buildings and the neatness of the estate: "The sugarcane fields were in
capital order, the roads smooth, the fences maintained; cattle were
under the care of herdsmen."
[Illustration: Hacienda de Cabezón, Jalisco: chapel Virgin; her
elaborate wardrobe valued at $50,000.]
The _mayordomo_ was hospitable and accommodated Mayer and his party
with comfortable rooms. Following dinner, Mayer walked among the
hacienda's fields of sugarcane. He inspected the _tienda de raya_ (the
general store), and the hacienda's offices, kitchens, parlors,
bedrooms, and an "immense corridor of arches filled with caged birds,
hung with hammocks, where the family pass most of the long warm days of
summer."
[Illustration: Hacienda de Cabezón, Jalisco: capital, front of
residence. 1800: building designed by architect Eduardo Tresguerras.]
At sunset the workers gathered under the arches of the residence
and the administrator called the roll and each man replied with
"Alabo a Dios" ("I praise God"). When all were dismissed they
walked away singing a hymn to the Virgin.... That night a group of
musicians played in a hut: violin, clarinet, flute, and drum.
[Illustration: Hacienda cattle brand]
In 1833, travelers Emma Undsay Squier and her husband were guests at a
tequila hacienda, Ometusco, about an hour and a half by horseback from
Mexico City. From the railroad station, the complex appeared like a
"salmon-pink birthday cake in the shape of a walled fortress." The
buildings were surrounded by fields of maguey. The Squiers entered the
grounds through a large gateway where soldiers lounged. The walled
patio was enormous and paved with stone. Burros trotted by, bearing
casks of freshly collected _agua miel_ (sap of the maguey).
Ometusco was the size of a village; the hacendado's home was a palace
of many rooms, kitchens, winding stairways, patios, poultry yards,
corrals. The largest patio, centered by a stone fountain, was planted
with flowers, trees, and flowering vines. A tiny school had its own
patio. The chapel was elaborate. Guests enjoyed a billiard room in
the main house. Each bedroom had beds protected by mosquito netting.
The dining room could seat seventy persons at a mahogany table. Inlaid
buffets glittered with silver and glassware, seldom to be seen after
the revolutionary period of 1910-1914.
[Illustration: Hacienda de Cuisillos, Jalisco: late 17th-century church
in rose stucco. A famous Jesuit hacienda.]
[Illustration: Hacienda de Cuisillos, Jalisco: floor plan of residence.
A. Residence. B. Kitchens. C. Chapel. D-E. Living Quarters. F-G-H.
Corrals. I. Granary. J. Jail. K. General Store (Tienda de Raya). L.
Living Quarters. M. Yard.]
[Illustration: Hacienda de Cuisillos, Jalisco: handpainted wall fresco
in bedroom of ruined residence.]
[Illustration: Hacienda de Cuisillos, Jalisco: mural, one of fourteen
panels on veranda wall of residence.]
By 1952, the renowned Hacienda Cabezón had become a mere _casco_ (a
shell). Located about 48 miles from Guadalajara, near Ameca, the
residence was designed in 1780 by the famous architect Francisco
Eduardo de Tresguerras. Now, grunting, shuffling pigs have squatters'
rights to the fifteen rooms. The building is roofless; its handpainted
bedroom walls are open to the weather, all that remains of the handsome
structure, once the focal point of fifteen or twenty _sitios_
(ranches), is the chapel, pewless, clean, its walls faded red, gold,
and yellow. Swallows fly in and out of their nests in the gold
curlicues of the reredos.
[Illustration: Hacienda cattle brand]
Cabezón has a single treasure: the Virgin of Candelaria, protected by a
plate-glass case. Her face seems Andalusian. Colored scrolls,
garlands, and angels frame her as she stands on a silver crescent moon,
her figure the center of a gilded _reredo_. About 18 inches tall, she
wears a white satin gown sewn with gold. A jeweled pearl crown rests
on her hair, making her the perfect madonna. Close by, under the dark
mesquite floor, members of the hacienda family are buried: Ignacio
Cañedo de Valdivierlos (1836); Estanislao Cañedo (1887); Manuel Calixto
Cañedo (1905).
According to a chiseled inscription, the floor was laid in 1858 and
cost 166 pesos.
[Illustration: Hacienda cattle brand]
The land belonging to the famous ecclesiastical hacienda, Santa Lucía,
was purchased by the Jesuits on December 4, 1576. Legally, the
estate's area measured 18.8 square miles, an area populated by Otomi,
Tepaneca, and Chichimeca Indians. At the time of its purchase it had
16,800 sheep, 1,400 goats, 125 brood mares and colts, 1 stallion, 1
saddle horse, 2 donkey mares, 2 donkey stallions, and 8 slaves.
During the 1580s, construction work was carried out on residences,
offices, storage buildings, corrals, sheds, and quarters for the
slaves. A chapel was built in 1592. The hacienda produced barley,
oats, beans, wheat, corn, chickpeas, and livestock: cattle, sheep,
goats, mules, and horses, in increasing numbers each year. Santa Lucía
prospered for nearly two centuries.
[Illustration: Hacienda cattle brand]
Cuisillos is another Jalisco hacienda, a place of jacaranda, palms,
eucalyptus, ash, and mesquite, near Cabezón. Horizon hills are often
steel blue, and a low-lying volcano is often misty gray. Cuisillos,
deeded in 1620, first belonged to Juan González de Apodaca, chief
constable under Cortéz. During the sixteenth century it was one of the
largest estates in Mexico and added substantial revenues to the Crown.
Neoclassic, its _casa principal_ (main house) and chapel form an L, and
fronting the L is a grove of palms. The main house has thirty rooms,
two tiled patios with a fountain in each; in the main patio there are
fourteen fresco panels painted in 1910 of seascapes, landscapes, and
scenes of women in the eighteenth century.
The grilled patio gate bears the renovation date 1910 and the hacienda
brand and family monogram. All rooms are still roofed and floored.
The house is putting up a valiant struggle. Its primitive kitchen has
an igloo-shaped oven with a charcoal basket dangling from its chimney
pipe. A corkscrew limestone stairway leads to the chapel tower where
there are bronze bells whose skirt dates are 1895, 1895, 1896, and
1896; the fifth bell has no date. The chapel façade is ornate. The
interior is simple: a small _coro_ (choir gallery), with a small
darkwood organ that is badly battered. The walls of the chapel are
white and gold.
[Illustration: Hacienda cattle brand]
A neighboring hacienda is architecturally imposing. The Hacienda
Cañedo has a church that would be outstanding in any city. The
building, of yellow limestone, is baroque-Italianate. It towers above
the surrounding structures and is amazing for its spire and its twelve
stone apostles in the forecourt--8-foot carvings of limestone on stone
pedestals--native craft at its finest.
The church interior is blue, white, and gold. Sedate. The black
mesquite floor has a carved strip leading to the altar, and the words
on the strip indicate when the floor was laid and what it cost. Altar
and decorations are simple: brass candle holders, vases with paper
flowers. There are solid-backed wooden pews in cedar. The room
expresses spaciousness.
The residence, which adjoins the church, is a stone mansion with badly
scaled walls. All rooms are vacant except the kitchen, a
charcoal-blackened room with smudged clay pots and a row of cracked
white plates in racks above a tiled stone stove. Around this _casco_
are other buildings, storage rooms--all stone, all neglected. At one
time, according to a wall sign, there was a _biblioteca rural_ (rural
library) in the complex.
[Illustration: Hacienda cattle brand]
In the state of Hidalgo, the Hacienda de San Francisco--a pulque
estate--was refurbished in 1880. The twenty-room mansion stands in a
giant field of maguey ringed by hills. Fifty carriages could park in
front. Once there were twin swimming pools, a bullring, and fifty
Japanese gardeners to maintain the gardens.
The residence has rooms around a flower-weed-garbage patio. The
building is in a pseudo Arabian-Spanish style. On a wall there is a
crank-style phone. There is electricity and a broken television
antenna. A large _sala_ (parlor) has a number of ornate tables, tufted
velvet couches, and silk-damask chairs; imported brocaded drapes are
fastened by gold sashes, all from France via train, ox cart, and
tumpline. On the stairway leading to the roof, the hacienda workers
killed the owner in 1910.
Occasionally there are guests, weekenders. Barefooted girls wearing
braids serve among the antiques.
[Illustration: Hacienda cattle brand]
[Illustration: Hacienda de Cañedo, Jalisco: 19th-century church.]
Far south, in Yucatán, Yaxcopoíl is a working henequén hacienda, a
survivor of two centuries, still semi-successful economically. Located
about forty miles from Mérida, on the Uxmal-Campeche highway, the
residence forms a U. Residence, chapel, offices, and storage space are
eighteenth-century structures. The main house has thirteen arches
along its broad veranda and micro-chapel. This section of the complex
is connected by an imposing pillared breezeway to the dining room,
kitchen, and servants' quarters.
[Illustration: Hacienda de Xcanatún, Yucatán: one of a series of gold
wall motifs around chapel walls.]
The floor of the extensive patio between these buildings is paved with
flagstone carved with Mayan glyphs and designs, appropriated from
nearby ruins on the property. The residence is furnished in eighteenth
and nineteenth-century styles with marble-topped tables, bronze and
brass beds, dangling chain lamps with handpainted globes and shades,
henequén hammocks, and tanned hides on tile floors. Bathroom fixtures
are British and washbasins with silver faucets bear a porcelainized
coat-of-arms.
There are reed chairs in the living room. Mediocre prints and a
seventeenth-century religious canvas decorate the walls. The floor
tiles are conventional in pattern; there are no rugs; the ceiling beams
are stenciled in pastel floral designs. Double doors lead to the
veranda. The dining room has a center table with a Tiffany-type lamp.
In the office there are chairs, an oak desk, a handpress, and a
bookcase.
In the micro-chapel, its wall decorated with gold and silver
fleur-de-lys and pink roses, there is a large sixteenth-century canvas
by an accomplished, anonymous artist: the descent from the cross, with
eight or ten figures merging with the background. There are no chairs.
The altar is small, insignificant. A white Seybold organ, a silver
crucifix, a pair of silver candles on a side table complete the
furnishings.
Behind the residence stands a theater with simple stone façade and
pilaster figures of women representing spring, summer, autumn, and
winter. A windmill spins behind a carved Mayan head perched on the
roof line. The auditorium accommodates a couple of hundred people for
movies and plays.
[Illustration: Hacienda de San José Huejotzingo, Puebla: florentine
armor in residence.]
The henequén production mill consists of a large open shed with a
corrugated roof. There is a machine press for crushing the maguey
leaves, which are hauled in by narrow-gauge flat cars, pulled by mules
or Ford-engine. There are fence-like racks behind the mill for drying
thousands of fibers at one time. Employees here work on salary; today
there are no feudal restrictions.
[Illustration: Hacienda de San José Huejotzingo, Puebla: pistol and
brand of hacienda]
From the rooftop of the residence, Mayan ruins are visible as earthen
mounds in the midst of maguey plantings. The seven mounds are an
unexplored archaeological site.
[Illustration: Hacienda cattle brand]
The imposing Hacienda San José Huejotzingo is near the city of Puebla
in the state of Puebla. Its stark one-story red brick, white brick
façade faces a lane of dying elm and willow. The residence measures
170 feet across the front. At each corner there is an ornamental
tower. The house encloses two patios. Destroyed by revolutionaries,
its chapel and storage areas are roofless, but the residential rooms
have been reconditioned. They are filled with _recuerdos_ (mementos):
incunabula, antique firearms, a suit of Italian armor, oil paintings,
Aztec figures, charro spurs, leather chests, colonial tables and chairs.
In the dining room are tall ecclesiastical wooden candelabra, carved
cedar chairs, monogrammed chests, pre-Columbian objects, colonial
pottery, and old dishes. Modern Tonalá pottery ornaments a
nineteenth-century buffet. Throughout the residence the floors are red
tile.
The central patio has a 5-foot limestone statue of St. Joseph, carved
in 1624. It stands near a wall tile that reads: _Margarita Barrados,
died June 3, 1871_. A stone plaque of a conquistador on horseback, in
primitive style, decorates another wall.
The property--a corn, wheat, and cattle estate dating from Cortesian
days--is owned by Juan Matienzo, who has made a hobby of reconstructing
his ancestral home. Few other haciendas have Popocatépetl's
18,000-foot peak looming behind.
[Illustration: Hacienda de San José Huejotzingo, Puebla: 16th-century
stone bas relief, 3 feet x 5 feet, unearthed in garden.]
[Illustration: Hacienda de San Francisco, Jalisco: residence.]
[Illustration: Hacienda de Sodzil, Yucatán: narrow-gauge railway
passenger car drawn by mule or horse]
[Illustration: Hacienda Yaxcopoíl, Yucatán: residence. Note
narrow-gauge railroad car.]
[Illustration: Hacienda de los Morales, D.F.: spinning wheel in
residence patio.]
[Illustration: Hacienda de Bianca, Oaxaca: patio]
San Martín Rinconada, a feudal hacienda, is halfway between Puebla and
Jalapa on the Jalapa route. The buildings are enclosed in a compound.
The protective walls, 30 feet high, are in good condition--mellowed by
age. Extensive cornfields surround the compound, which is about one
half-block square.
An intricate grilled gateway opens to a plateresque church. The church
clock keeps time, and the stone sundial by the corral also keeps time,
hacienda time. Behind the church, a windowless chapel, with double
doors for light and air, contains five mauled wooden desks, dusty
benches of adzed wood, and a cracked blackboard. This was once a
school.
Outside the compound, facing the church, are adobe huts roofed with
straw. They accommodated the workers, their poultry, pigs, and dogs.
Perhaps one hundred people lived in the twenty huts. A shingle-roofed
_pozo_ (well) supplies water for horses, cattle, and people, spilling
it into a 20-foot wooden trough. Gun slots in the compound walls slant
toward the well and trough. Zapatistas and Carrancistas threatened the
hacienda in 1914; they banged on the residence door and demanded beef
and saddle horses but left the property undamaged.
Now empty, the bedrooms are papered in gold and white and are
semi-frescoed overhead. A minute patio, facing several bedrooms, has a
few shabby cypress. The _sala_ has no furnishings.
Stained-glass windows, humble panes of colored glass, light the
auditorium that seated one hundred people. Behind a plaster life-size
Christ on the altar hangs a dark red velvet drape; nearby, on the same
wall, is a tortured Christus. A pair of prayer wheels stands by the
altar. Chandeliers are encased in white covers, carefully tied. There
are stubby oak candelabra with fat candles that have dripped wax. A
foxed, framed letter is dated 1742.
+III. Hacienda Life+
[Illustration: Hacienda cattle brand]
Life on an hacienda was basically agrarian, revolving around the care
of livestock, poultry, planting, harvesting, crop storage, irrigation,
and general maintenance. If the estate was located in an area that
included tropical low-level land, mountainous terrain, and semi-desert,
administration was complex. The thousands of acres had to be
supervised on horseback. Weather was a daily concern. Keeping a
competent work force was an ever-changing problem.
The personnel of an hacienda consisted of a mayordomo (the
administrator), minor supervisors, field workers, cowhands, shepherds,
blacksmiths, masons, saddlers, cobblers, carpenters, woodcutters,
weavers, a stable boss and assistants, errand boys, a barber, a
chandler, gardeners, dairymen, maids, butler, cooks, seamstresses, the
manager of the tienda de raya, butchers, a priest, an organist, a
teacher, a governess, and sometimes a doctor. The bigger the estate,
the bigger the staff. All were responsible to the hacendado who lived
on the hacienda or who was an absentee owner-administrator.
[Illustration: Hacienda de Dolores Noriatenco, Puebla: century-old
carriage.]
During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the haciendas became
increasingly self-sufficient. Isolated as they were, they made every
effort to provide for their own needs: water, food, carriages, wagons,
carts, saddles, shoes, spurs, harnesses, clothing, linen. Equipment
like saws, plows, pumps, pipe, guns, and machetes had to be "imported."
The hacendado, his family, and staff ate an early breakfast. Bells
clanged for a Mass at 6:00 or 7:00 A.M. (before or after breakfast),
depending on the weather. In most tropical regions, work commenced at
dawn to escape the noon heat; during the summer, work was often
suspended around midday and resumed late in the afternoon.
[Illustration: Hacienda cattle brands, state of Jalisco.]
Each morning, the hacendado found his clothes laid out by his mozo
(valet), perhaps his charro outfit, a shirt, socks, sombrero, pistol,
boots, gloves, and quirt. His breakfast menu included fruit, eggs,
meat dishes, beans, tortillas, or _pan dulces_ (varied sweet rolls).
The chef offered coffee, chocolate, tea, pulque, or beer. Cuban cigars
were favored. Mounted on a well-groomed thoroughbred, riding western
saddle, the hacendado checked crops, cattle, corrals, granary,
irrigation project, and village laborers. He also conferred with
village _caciques_ (chiefs). During a lifetime the hacendado rode some
60,000 miles.
[Illustration: Hacienda de Cedra, Jalisco: stone cross to one side of
hacienda chapel. 8 feet tall.]
The hacendada looked after her staff, her maids, the governess, the
tutor, she allocated tasks: sheets to be laundered, soap to be made,
the purchase of _manta_ for linen, clothes to be mended, skirts to be
hemmed. If guests were expected, the dinner menu had to be carefully
planned. Children, relatives, friends--they were all important.
Supplies had to be brought to the hacienda from the nearest village or
town: kerosene, salt, lamps, matches, drugs.
By 2:00 or 2:30 P.M., it was time to eat. At a kind of makeshift
picnic, the workers shared their clay pots of hot beans or rice, their
tortillas, and pulque. Sometimes there was meat with the rice or
beans: chicken, pork, beef, goat. In season, there were zapotes,
mangos, oranges, avocados, bananas, chirimoyas. Workers wore
cast-offs: torn shirts, torn trousers, battered hats; the women were
usually dressed in blue cotton dresses and blue and white rebozos.
They ate in the fields, in the kitchen, in the corral and
stables--sharing their food.
[Illustration: Hacienda de Tabi, Yucatán: early 18th-century church.]
At the same hour, inside the big house, the hacendado, his family, and
guests enjoyed a meal at the long table set with imported or hacienda
linen, elegant china, cut glass, and Mexican and European silverware.
Barefoot maids served. Perhaps the maids wore Tehuana or Yucatecan
dresses. The butler may have worn white gloves. In the spacious,
beamed, windowed room, cool in summer, warm in winter, the menu was
varied:
Hors d'oeuvres
Soup
_Sopa Seca_ (pasta, rice, etc.)
Beef, chicken, pork, lamb, venison--or
a combination of these (Turkey, rabbit,
quail, fish, when available)
_Flan_ (custard), _chongo_ (a milk and
syrup confection), _cajeta_ (caramelized
goat's milk), cake--or fresh fruit and
cheese
Coffee, tea, wine, liquor, _horchata_
(a rice drink), _jamaica_ (a tropical drink),
chocolate.
Wine and liquor were both domestic and imported. Both local and
imported cheeses were served, as well as European delicacies like
caviar, marmalades, jellies, mints, nuts, and bon-bons.
After dinner, the siesta called for relaxation, comfortable chairs,
hammocks. A well-earned sense of ease took over. A few guests played
pool or billiards, bridge, rummy, pinochle. At dusk, croquet was a
favorite game. Some estates had a swimming pool or access to a river,
lake, or ocean playa.
[Illustration: Hacienda de Altillo, Coyoacán, D.F.: pastel of St.
Andrew.]
[Illustration: Hacienda de Xotla, Puebla: residence patio and oven.]
[Illustration: Hacienda Zapotitán, Jalisco: map on veranda of
residence.]
[Illustration: Hacienda de Buena Vista, Jalisco: 18th-century aqueduct.]
[Illustration: Hacienda de Zapotitán, Jalisco: remains of 1750
residence and mirador; white stuccoed masonry.]
At a Jesuit hacienda, a peasant who failed to attend Mass might be
lashed; but the average hacienda was lenient about attendance. At
evening Mass after a day's labor, the workers were glad to kneel or
squat: the hour was a humble reward. Hymns were sung. Someone played
the organ or piano.
Each chapel or church boasted an altar--a lace-covered table with paper
flowers or a rococo gilded carving, with _santos_ (saints) and angels
in the gray niches. The Virgin or saint was the focal point.
Stained-glass and onyx windows appeared in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries. Marble and onyx sometimes replaced mesquite or
tiled floors. Some chapels and churches had pews, but in those without
furniture the workers knelt. As for the hacienda family, they sat on
cane chairs or worshipped behind a screened _coro_. There was a clear
distance between them and the "unwashed."
[Illustration: Hacienda de Dolores Noriatenco, Puebla: polychrome wood
statue, 16th-century, 5 feet tall.]
Most services were conducted in Latin, a language disliked by the
Indians because they considered it an affront to their integrity.
Spanish was a tribulation and Latin was another. When they memorized
songs in Latin or Spanish, they often mispronounced words intentionally.
[Illustration: Hacienda de Castamay, Campeche: 18th-century church.]
Crucifixes were evident in most places of worship. The figure of
Christ was sometimes pornographic in style, sometimes tragic. "Yerma,"
Federico Garcia Lorca's tragic evocation, was brought to life again and
again.
Young people grew up seeing marriage distorted, warped by superstition
and rigid conventions. They learned to admire martyrs. They learned
that the body was unclean--putrefying. The bloody cross hung in
countless minds. With a cross dangling at her throat, the señorita
made confections: sugar skulls. "A Nun's Cry" was the name of a
confection. Hacienda loneliness did strange things; it summoned
_duendes_ (spirits). In this remote place, the church bred
intolerance--deep whispers of death and damnation.
[Illustration: Hacienda de Dolores Noriatenco, Puebla: saddle belonging
to former President Ávila Camacho decorated with silver.]
Great art--when it could be found--added to extremism. St. Sebastian
and his arrow-pierced body, Murillo and his forlorn madonnas,
Caravaggio and his rebellious saints--each tilted the mind a little
further askew. However, there was great music at some estates.
Freighted by train, retransported in sections by ox cart, the London
Broadway piano brought Bach, Händel, and Couperin to the señora's
_sala_. Most haciendas had a sala cluttered with heirlooms: horsehair
sofas, tapestry chairs, wicker rockers, a parotta table, an ormolu
screen, an inlaid card table, brass spittoons, and a whatnot of
oriental ivory carvings.
[Illustration: Hacienda San Ignacio, Yucatán: 18th century brass
sacristy Implements--handbell and Bible holder.]
Since most work was onerous and the hours long, with most workers
undernourished and small-boned, the haciendas faced labor problems.
Most man-hours went into agricultural jobs; in some areas where the
water supply was critical, wells had to be dug and serviced, pipelines
demanded upkeep. If an aqueduct supplied the estate, the canal, its
outlets, and spans had to be maintained. In the fields--across
thousands of acres--there was planting, weeding, harvesting, and
shucking to be done. There were beans, peppers, and tomatoes to pick.
Fences had to be repaired. The cycles continued, altered by rain or
drought, by pests and soil failure.
[Illustration: Hacienda cattle brand]
The most capable agronomists were the Jesuits; their haciendas achieved
the best production records. Their workers often were treated with a
measure of consideration. The Jesuit conduct book called for respect.
This 200-page bible of _Instrucciónes_, written in the sixteenth
century, forbade the whip, ball and chain, and the pillory. Yet even
so, Jesuit cruelty was evident. In Santa Lucía, administrators chained
mill workers and left skeletons of men in chains in subterranean rooms.
In 1767, the Jesuits were expelled from New Spain. By 1810,
Augustinians, Carmelites, Dominicans, and Franciscans owned more than
half of the nation's real estate.
As for slavery on the haciendas, when is a man a slave? He is a slave
if he works in perpetual debt. If he cannot, under penalty of
imprisonment and death, leave the hacienda and work elsewhere, he is a
slave. From the days of the _encomiendas_ (land grant estates) until
1910, workers were enslaved by the hacienda. A small hacienda kept ten
or twelve black slaves. Since there were approximately eight thousand
haciendas in 1910, the total of black slaves must have reached many
thousands. A large hacienda kept one hundred to one hundred and fifty
slaves, of all ages. There is no accurate count, but it is clear that
black slavery played an important role in the hacienda system.
[Illustration: Hacienda San Ignacio, Yucatán: brass ecclesiastical
candle holder.]
Disharmony was common among the ethnic groups: negro, mulatto, mestizo,
Creole, Zapotec, Méxica, Chichimeca, Yaqui. The mores of each group
were affected by Spanish customs and demands. Ethnic problems existed
at each estate to varying degrees. At the mining hacienda, the sugar
refining hacienda, and the vast cattle properties, the worker was less
valuable than the horse. Big jobs and big land grants minimized
personalities; anonymity took over. At the mine holdings, workers
grubbed for ore 1,000 feet below. They worked almost naked, without
adequate food, drank contaminated water, climbed precarious ladders in
shafts faintly lit. Men, women, and children were employed. In
principle, they were to work for a few days and then return home, but
they worked until they were ill or until they died. Overseers were
unwilling to spare the workers. There was no medical care.
[Illustration: Hacienda de Castamay, Campeche: _cepo_ (stocks), made of
mahogany.]
With their mining, sugar refinery, and cattle properties, the
hacendados were proud of their affluence, evident in their elegant
mansions, ornate churches, endowed schools, and hospitals. They lived
like Carolingian kings as they traveled from one hacienda to another,
attended by friends, relatives, and parasites. They were famed for
their hospitality, hated for their cruelty, kowtowed to when they went
abroad.
Rincón Gallardo offered his private army to the Spanish Crown should
there be a need. It took the Gallardo family less than a century to
create a principality with its own administration, castle, village, and
subordinate haciendas.
[Illustration: Hacienda de Castamay, Campeche: chapel stairway.]
Rincón Gallardo reminisced about his hacienda life:
I spent my vacations with friends at Tlalayote, near Apán, in the
state of Hidalgo. There we rode in the morning; in the afternoon
we hunted for pheasant, quail and rabbit, and, near Tultengo Lake,
for ducks. Since there was no automobile we went everywhere on
horseback.
I can remember returning late from a hunt, the stars our only
guide, since the one we were supposed to use--Evaristo, our
groom--had by then a headful of pulque and was in no shape to lead
us home. But once back at Tlalayote's main house we handed over
our game-bags to Miscaela, the magnificent cook, who prepared
several of the birds and served us plentifully with great mugs of
pulque brought in from the fermenting shed.
This rural life seemed yet another indication of the land's undying
attraction. As a young man I learned to ride charro style, to
throw a calf by its tail, to lasso on horseback and on foot, to
drive a six-mule team, to break wild colts and calves, and use
firearms of various kinds.
I enjoyed the brandings, the shearings, and the weanings, which
include one of my favorite sports ... separating calves from their
mothers.
[Illustration: Hacienda Corralitos, Corralitos, Chihuahua:
one-million-acre cattle and mining hacienda, 1750. Adobe residence,
1886, surrounded by cottonwoods.]
But there were a few hacendados who disavowed the great estates: One of
them said: "I'd rather have an attic in Paris than an hacienda."
[Illustration: Hacienda de Bellavista, Jalisco: sugar refinery silo.]
+IV. Fiestas+
[Illustration: Hacienda cattle brand]
Haciendas were the home of the fiesta. The first fiestas were held
shortly after the Conquest. As the influence of Catholicism spread,
fiestas increased in number--honoring a saint, commemorating a
religious event, a holiday, a wedding. Generally, fiestas were
initiated by the peasants and represented a communal expression. At an
hacienda village someone had to collect funds, arrange for costumes,
supervise church or chapel decorations, commission the fireworks, hire
or borrow musicians, and arrange for food and drinks. If the hacendado
hosted a fiesta, he might leave the details to his wife or the
_mayordomo_. The priest and his assistant also managed fiestas.
People came on foot, by ox cart, palanquin, burro, mule, horse, wagon,
and carriage--from distant haciendas and towns. For some four hundred
years fiestas livened these feudal outposts that existed across the
nation. Guests were often royalty or politically important: a viceroy,
a duke, a governor, or church dignitary. Since travel was usually
tedious and fatiguing, everything was done to make the festival
memorable.
[Illustration: Hacienda de Yocotepec, Hidalgo: church and stone cross.]
Sixteenth-century fiestas were announced by drums and the _chirimía_--a
shrill flute from Aztec-Toltec-Mayan days. Dancers performed in front
of the big house or danced in a patio or on the tiles of the church
plaza. They wore harlequin-like costumes, feathered headdresses,
conquest clothes, white trousers sashed with red, giant sombreros,
masks; they flaunted wands, shields, spears, bows, and arrows. Ankle
rattles hissed. Gourds thumped and rustled. Only male dancers
participated.
In the far south, at estates in Chiapas, Yucatán, Quintana Roo, and
Campeche, the marimba replaced the flute and drum. Sometimes six or
eight musicians pounded out music simultaneously on four or five
instruments.
[Illustration: Hacienda de Sodzil, Yucatán: bronze weathervane on
residence.]
In the north, on Sonoran and Chihuahuan haciendas, the violin was the
chief instrument. Fashioned with no other tools than pieces of glass
and a knife, it supplied basic rhythms, one or several instruments
wailing for Yaqui and Tarahumaran dances.
[Illustration: Hacienda de Puerto de Nieto, Guanajuato: stone residence
and chapel.]
Flowers decked every fiesta. Gardenias were tossed into the fountains,
carnations were woven into bell ropes, and rambler roses were spun
around ox cart wheels and wagon wheels. Blossoms filled churches and
chapels with fragrance, they crisscrossed patios on wires, they
brightened roadside shrines.
Food and drink were plentiful: tortillas, beans, beans cooked with beef
or chicken, pots and pots of beans, iron caldrons of soup, meat
barbecued on spits, ox and goat, barrels of punch, buckets of pulque,
barrels of beer, bottles of tequila, and, of course, cognac--for the
_gente de razón_ (gentry).
[Illustration: Hacienda de Puerto de Nieto, Guanajuato: gate.]
In the big house, dinners were elaborate--the hacendado presiding. The
menu offered _Cochinita pibil_ (pork barbecued in banana leaves),
squash blossom soup, _quesadillas_ (tortilla turnovers stuffed with
cheese and mushrooms), _uchepos_ (corn mush steamed in husks), _muk-bil
pollo_ (chicken and pork tamale pie), _tamales Veracruzanos_
(pork-filled tamales), and _ate de guayaba_ (guava candy paste). For
special guests, the chefs served more elaborate dishes: pheasant,
quail, javelina, venison, dove, rabbit. There were no government
restrictions on wild game. Fishermen contributed _gallo_ (rooster
fish), _pardo trucha_ (trout), _huachinango_ (red snapper), turtle,
turtle eggs, lobster, and crab.
[Illustration: Hacienda de Puerto de Nieto, Guanajuato: church.]
The guests gathered for cockfights. If it was summertime, a canopy
shaded the pit. In the highlands a _mozo_ swept aside pine needles and
built a green fire to fight the mosquitoes. In the south, white
awnings and striped parasols furnished shade. The cocks, which were
uncaged at a pit, were named: _Biba Manza_, _Panadero_, _Porfirio_,
_Tigre_, _Mi General_, and _El Rayo_. At a signal the birds flew at
each other, their razor blades flashing. Bets were wagered ... a
hundred ... a thousand ... five.
[Illustration: Hacienda de Aurora, Jalisco: commemorative bridge column
dated 1750.]
[Illustration: Hacienda de los Morales, D.F.: patio fountain, 1643.]
[Illustration: Hacienda de Xala, Hidalgo: residence and chapel, 1785.]
[Illustration: Hacienda de Tenache, Oaxaca: twin bells on roof of
residence.]
[Illustration: Hacienda la Calera, Jalisco: second residence on the
property, 1890.]
[Illustration: Hacienda Pixoy, Yucatán: brick-adobe residence and
storage rooms. 18th century, eleven rooms.]
[Illustration: Hacienda de los Ricos, Guanajuato: residence.]
[Illustration: Hacienda de los Ricos, Guanajuato: bullring entry door.]
Every fiesta had popular dances: Cora Paixil, Moro, Tapatío, Jarana.
The _gente_ (people) danced in the sala or on a cool veranda or outside
by kerosene lamps, by torches, by candlelight, under chandeliers in the
big house, by gasoline lamps--the illumination changing with the epoch.
Orchestras--brought by train from the cities--played polkas, waltzes,
rustic Bach, "La Bamba," "Torres de Pueblo," "There is Someone," and
other current favorites. Mariachis, in their sequined black suits and
sprawling black hats, played and sang. They were always the favorites
at every fiesta.
Dating from Aztec days, _Los Voladores_ (pole dancers), were the
sensation. Customarily, five men participated, first dancing on the
ground, then climbing a lofty pole where they hurled themselves into
space, roped by the feet. Spinning round and round the pole, they
gradually descended, unwinding.
Fiestas lasted a single day or several days; sometimes they became a
_feria_, a market where vendors would set up booths and display fabric,
produce, herbs, pottery, machetes, knives. Poultry and livestock were
sold or bartered. Early in the sixteenth century, Spanish bullfighters
arrived and performed at haciendas near the capital.
The elegantly-dressed cowboy, the _charro_, spent $1,000 on his outfit;
his trousers were skintight and had single or double rows of silver
buttons trimming the outside seams. His shirt was homespun cotton or
handsomely embroidered linen. His jacket was embroidered and sequined.
His boots were made of inlaid leather, expertly fitted. His sombrero
was ornamented with silver and silver banded. His stirrups and spurs
were chased silver or gold, and his saddle was inlaid with silver or
gold.
It is not known when the first _castillo_ (bamboo tower) spat fire.
When there was ample gunpowder, someone fashioned a windmill for
pinwheels, rockets, Roman candles, blazing globes of flame, and strings
of tangled lights. It was a windmill of bamboo, a shivering, shaking
tower of color, 20 to 30 feet high.
Throughout the fiesta, workers dipped into the pulque casks. They
tried to dance off their intoxication; they did their best to forget
their hardships; sometimes they found themselves in the hacienda jail.
Notables played billiards, pool and cards and tossed dice; until far
into the night they might gamble at the _Monte_ (card game) tables;
when the fiesta came to an end they laid down their cards
reluctantly--it might be a long way home.
July, August, September--the summer calendar rolled on and new fiesta
dates became important: Candlemas, Holy Week, Corpus Christi, Día de
Los Reyes. On the Day of Divine Proficience, candles burned for
twenty-four hours. On carts and on men's shoulders, biblical floats
appeared: It was time for a reappraisal of faith, time to honor the
local Virgin.
[Illustration: Hacienda de Yaxche, Yucatán: Virgin, 14 inches high,
17th century.]
+V. Education+
[Illustration: Hacienda cattle brand]
In bygone days--two hundred years ago--an hacienda church or chapel
bell signaled school. A youngster or priest or acolyte yanked the bell
rope. In the tropics, if you were lucky, you put on your _shirgo_
(raincoat), and got to school dry. Your class started at 7:00 A.M. and
lasted until noon, when the heat moved in. You walked to your home for
lunch or picked it off the trees as you went home. If school convened
regularly you were fortunate. You were fortunate if classes freed you
from hacienda chores.
In the temperate zone, school began about 9:00 A.M. and reconvened
after the siesta--closing at 4:00 P.M. Again intermittency played
havoc with the sessions. The _maestro_ (teacher) was very informal; if
you had a teacher who was dedicated, your education began to acquire
meaning.
Teaching was in Spanish, though the pupils might speak one or more of
the sixty dialects. For centuries the parents objected to Spanish
being taught; at home the children spoke their native tongue. Since
Spanish coercion was continual, it was only normal for the students to
rebel. Intuitively, they sensed the destruction of their way of life.
Both school and church were suspect.
[Illustration: Hacienda de Tamanche, Yucatán: 17th-century colonial
residence and remains of sugar refinery chimney.]
Priests, as instructors, read selections from the Bible, religious
treatises, and pamphlets. There were no books for the students. With
pencil, paper, and blackboard or slate, children learned the rudiments
of writing, reading, and arithmetic. Without musical accompaniment,
they learned hymns and poetry. Their centuries were centuries of
neglect.
It was exceptional when an hacienda hired a priest-instructor
permanently. Since teachers were either poorly paid or were hacienda
guests, they offered halfhearted service. Haciendas were known to
neglect education intentionally: the peasant was to be kept
subordinate--a little reading, a little writing, but no more.
[Illustration: Hacienda de San Antonio, Guanajuato: 18th-century chapel
ruin.]
[Illustration: Hacienda de San Antonio, Colima: 17th-century chapel and
terminus of aqueduct.]
[Illustration: Hacienda de Jajalpa, D.F.: pink stucco sixteen-room,
red-tiled 19th-century residence and chapel.]
[Illustration: Hacienda San Cayetano, Nayarit: one of a pair of pink
ceramic lions at entry to residence.]
[Illustration: Hacienda de Guarache, Michoacán: residence and chapel.
Now a government school.]
[Illustration: Hacienda de Petaca, Guanajuato: residence.]
Usually the main hacienda residence housed the school. One of the
twenty or thirty rooms was designated the classroom. It was small and
had few or no windows; the open door let in light and air. Students in
the sixteenth century sat on the floor. Later, they had benches and
sat around a table, the _maestro_ at one end. Slates came into being
in the eighteenth century; and, in the nineteenth century, blackboards.
Engravings of the presidents began to decorate bare walls. Dirty,
foxed maps hid stains. Tiled floors were often cold and damp. Though
there was sunshine most of the year, classes were never held under the
laurel or palm trees.
Girls sat on one side, boys on the other--if the room was large enough.
There were no sanitary facilities, no health precautions, no hygiene
instruction. At recess, the children drank from the patio fountain or
cattle trough.
[Illustration: Hacienda de Juana Guerra, Amado Nervo, Durango:
millstone.]
On an hacienda employing four hundred workers, about twenty children
attended school. Since the hacienda was on a dawn-to-dark schedule,
work never ran out; the average hacendado felt he could employ those
skinny legs and arms to his advantage. At harvest time there were no
classes; during fiestas there were no classes; if the _maestro_ got
drunk there were no classes. Truancy was a fact of life.
[Illustration: Hacienda Aguilera, Oaxaca: former 19th-century hacienda
residence, now university building.]
At school and at home the children played marbles, using clay marbles
of their own baking. They spun tops and played jacks, tag,
hide-and-seek, and a flower game called "Stealing a Soul." In "The Old
Saints," the "buyer" dashed from one saint to another to see if his
saint is the one he wants to buy. If the saint runs off and is caught
he is given a "job" to do.
A favorite song was "Golden Bell":
_Little golden bell,
Let me pass;
With all my children
Who are behind me._
Singing "La Víbora del Mar," the children divided into two groups; this
was a tug-of-war song and is still remembered:
_The serpent,
serpent of the sea,
here it can pass by.
Those in front run fast,
those in back will be left
behind;
a Mexican girl, selling fruit,
plums, apricots, muskmelons,
and watermelons._
Haciendas had no school libraries. The _casa principal_ may have
acquired a collection of history, travel, philosophy, and fiction; but
such collections were rarely shared. For centuries the Inquisition
influenced most reading habits. Pagan and Catholic superstition
wreaked havoc with young minds; it is still evident in rural Mexico
where men and women knock on the side of a coffin--and listen for an
answer. Men and women flagellate themselves. Tarahumaras, in caves of
the Barranca del Cobre country, worship stone idols and pray to rain
gods. Lacandones still leave offerings on jungle altars.
Until about 1826, when a national school system was created in the
larger towns and in the cities, textbooks were unknown except at
private schools. Homer, Sappho, Plato, Shakespeare and Kant were all
but unrecognized. _Don Quixote_, however, was an influence. So were
Lope de Vega and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. But they were only
literary shadows. No hacienda _maestro_ explored the thoughts of
Voltaire, Rousseau, Hume, or Jefferson. There were no science labs.
There was no art instruction.
During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries only six or eight
Mexican minds contributed to culture and learning: Ruiz de Alarcón,
Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora, and Don Bartolomé de Alba were among
them. Their influence was restricted to metropolitan centers. Without
books, with limited transportation, the hacienda remained a lost
society.
[Illustration: Hacienda San Cayetano de Valencia, Guanajuato: church,
1788.]
In 1910, when there were approximately eight thousand haciendas,
between ten and twenty students attended school each day on a given
hacienda: In all, some 870,000 children and teenagers were
enrolled--gaining a rudimentary education. In towns and cities, where
private schools contributed to the nation's education, schools were
small and offered limited opportunities. With a population in 1910 of
15 million, Mexico's enrollment was among the world's lowest. Mexico
had only 3 million literates. In all hacienda areas millions could not
read or write--or speak Spanish.
[Illustration: Hacienda de Juana Guerra, Amado Nervo, Durango: baroque
church.]
During the more than ten years of civil war and machete madness that
followed 1910-1914, education of the masses was disrupted throughout
the nation. School attendance dropped in towns and cities; on the
hacienda every hint of learning stopped. When hacienda after hacienda
was pillaged or burned, the skeletal school system disappeared.
Books--those there were--went up in flames. Youth had no chance for
scholastic growth. The young who survived were fortunate. During
these years, Mexico's population declined by one million people.
[Illustration: Hacienda de la Venta del Astillero. Jalisco:
18th-century stone and brick residence and chapel. 220 feet long.]
Years of revolution retarded Mexico to an incalculable degree as guns
took the place of brains. Towns, while occupied by troops or harassed
by gunfire, had to abandon teaching and schooling. Youngsters born on
an hacienda during those years grew up without seeing the inside of a
school.
Yet, it is an amazing and stimulating fact that Mexico, after such
havoc, could evolve an educational system of merit and induce the young
and the old to attend classes. The "Each One, Teach One," or
"Analfabetismo Program," was put into effect and successfully carried
out. In 1951, thirty-seven years after the haciendas had been
abolished, the government appropriated 355,680,000 pesos for schools.
Prefabs sprang up overnight; old buildings were renovated; education
became compulsory; efforts were made to attract teachers and to train
them.
The wealthy elite sons and daughters of the hacienda studied at
institutions of higher learning abroad. This favored group, though
small, contributed to the nation's maturity. Universities such as
Salamanca, Heidelberg, Harvard, the Sorbonne, Oxford, and Cambridge
enriched these students. They assumed important posts, government
positions, and engineering jobs; they became senators, doctors,
lawyers, and educators. The long, bitter struggle to attain a middle
class had begun.
+VI. The Revolution+
[Illustration: Hacienda cattle brand]
John Reed, an American journalist who covered the campaign of Pancho
Villa, described in _Insurgent Mexico_ the revolution at an hacienda in
northern Mexico in 1913-1914:
We crept close to the line and when we were almost upon them we
opened fire. There were three detachments and we pushed right into
their encampment and set fire to their shelters. Their corn and
beans were laid out on blankets to dry in the sun and we even
destroyed that.
The Carrancistas fled from us and we chased them through very rough
country. We believed we were winning, but man! It wasn't that way
at all! We followed them without knowing where we were going.
They stopped on the other side of a hill, at the entrance to
Hacienda San Gregorio, and there a fourth detachment withstood us
so we pulled back and joined our forces. There were five thousand
of us but we were extended from San Gregorio to Topilejo. Our
guides were local peasants and they sent General Chon and his men
through the mountains. He was from Guerrero and he didn't know
these mountains so they sent him to the worst peaks. His men were
stopped but we weren't. We were sent along the side of the highway
and General Teodor's men went on the highway because they were all
on horseback. The Carrancistas had artillery but the shots passed
over us because we lay down in the ditches....
But then we entered a little cornfield in a valley where the
fighting was very bad. The Zapatistas were on one hill and the
Carrancistas were on another and we were in the middle, fighting
hand to hand with other Carrancistas. The two armies got all mixed
up, there in San Gregorio. There was a tremendous hail of bullets
and the dead piled up like stones in a milpa (small plot). The man
just next to me fell.... At five o'clock a bullet got the Captain
who had been blaspheming the day before. In the dark we didn't
know who was a Zapatista, who was a Carrancista.
[Illustration: Hacienda de Matanzas, Jalisco: chapel and residence,
chapel date 1750.]
The revolution swept from hacienda to hacienda, now the Carrancistas
attacking, now the Colorados, now the Zapatistas, now the Villistas.
After four centuries of constant bludgeoning by the Spaniards the
hacienda worker was settling his score: This was his opportunity to
reclaim the land that had been stolen from him, not once but many times.
[Illustration: Hacienda los Molinos, Puebla: fortified wall and
stairway to tower of 16th-century residence.]
[Illustration: Hacienda de Matanzas, Jalisco: 18th-century chapel,
residence, and storage rooms.]
Reed continues, supplying intimate details:
Tomorrow we'll move in on the Hacienda Casasano. You, José, will
set fire to the stable; turn out the horses and colts first ... you
know where the hayloft is so pour your two cans of kerosene there.
You, Magaña, empty the chicken coop just before it gets dark, chase
the chickens into the gully; we'll be waiting there. The more
noise you make the better. María, open the front door and then
open the kitchen door, just stroll through the house and open
doors.... Give us our signal from the kitchen. We'll move in just
as soon as we see your light ... pour inside and wreck the place.
You can have any goddamn thing you want, you bastards, but don't
hang on too long, remember the hacienda is going up in flames.
Revolutionist Emiliano Zapata attempted to destroy the haciendas in his
home state of Morelos. Other radical leaders in other states worked to
undermine the hacienda system. At any cost, the Zapatista/Villista
wanted no more of the Díaz policy. In place of Díazism the peasants
wanted freedom, dignity, land, schools, and food; to achieve these
goals they would ravage the nation. Men, women, and children, intent
on smashing the hacienda world, could no longer exist on tortillas and
water. Singly and in hordes, they scavenged and ravaged. Peasants who
understood less than ten Spanish words found themselves trying Spanish
if it helped the cause.
Raiders commandeered trains and boarded flat cars and freight cars,
perched on the roofs, clung to the ladders, crowding the cowcatcher of
the locomotive. Soldados (soldiers) sang their cockroach songs as the
train rolled, belts of ammunition across their shoulders and around
their waists.
[Illustration: Hacienda la Gavia, Estado de Mexico: wood figure, 5 feet
tall.]
[Illustration: Hacienda de Cocoyoc, Morelos: 16th-century chapel.]
[Illustration: Hacienda de Tikuch, Yucatán: rear view, stairway to
second floor residential area.]
[Illustration: Hacienda de Chinameca, Morelos: residence and chapel.
Emiliano Zapata assassinated here, 1919.]
Women and children trailed the fighting battalions. Women were
determined to prove themselves as resourceful as the men: They were out
to avenge years of maltreatment. They robbed stores in towns and
sacked hacienda wardrobes. They strutted in Parisian finery, wore silk
hosiery, and elegant shawls. Women became terrorists in some regions.
Thieves' markets cropped up in León, Querétaro, San Luis Potosí,
Guadalajara, Mexico City, and Morelia. Women traded silverware for
food, a blouse, a shirt, cigarettes. They traded Sevreware for
ammunition and shoes for pistols.
The women dynamited bank vaults and shared the money--government and
counterfeit. They rifled safes and destroyed documents at
haciendas--land grants, deeds, notarizations. They roared into a
village, waving flimsy flags, encountering dogs barking and howling.
They fired their rifles and pistols; they caroused and conscripted
fighters.
[Illustration: Hacienda de Canutillo, Durango: Pancho Villa buried here
July 23, 1923.]
[Illustration: Hacienda de la Erre, Guanajuato: 1673. Father Miguel
Hidalgo began his march from this church.]
The horde fought, retreated, lost, and fought again, seldom aware of a
victory.
When their dead piled up in cornfields and fields of maguey, too
numerous to bury, they left them to be eaten by coyotes, dogs,
buzzards. They learned to live as much life as possible between sunup
and sundown. They copulated in the fields. They promised one another
fidelity, they lost one another, they found someone else. Children,
born in the field, were bundled into rebozos and lugged to the next
encampment
Again and again, they robbed the government troops of ammunition,
rifles, revolvers, and machineguns. It was steal or quit fighting.
They perpetrated more and more dangerous raids: They spied; they used a
hot-air balloon; they filtered through troop concentrations; they
passed themselves off as scouts; faithfully, they followed Pancho Villa
and his henchmen and they vulturized the dead in the barrancas, on the
haciendas, in the towns.
Without boots or shoes they continued their barefoot war against the
hacendados. Armed with machetes, men stole into enemy encampments and
returned with guns. Some of the fighters believed the words of Zapata:
"It is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees."
In their bravado, they carved initials and dates on trees, on the
leaves of the maguey, and on the doors of churches and haciendas.
"Freedom!" they cried.
Huddled around campfires, in their hideaways, they sang: "If I am to
die tomorrow let them kill me right away."
By now many hacienda mansions had disappeared. Weeds had taken over
farmland, irrigation systems no longer functioned, wells had dried,
mills had been dismantled, and cattle had been driven away or killed
and eaten. Former laborers had fled or had been conscripted, jailed,
or killed. Prices had climbed 300 percent.
[Illustration: Hacienda de Pueblilla, Zempoala, Hidalgo: chapel tower,
1860.]
Zapata took "Tierra y Libertad!" ("land and liberty") as his cry, and
fighting every governmental force he demanded "Land for the Landless!,"
"Land and Water!," "Freedom for the People!"
[Illustration: Hacienda de Tepa-Chica, Hidalgo: chapel, 1864.]
Zapatismo meant business everywhere and at all times. As
revolutionist, Zapata was a lean, moustached young man; without more
than rudimentary schooling, he led his countrymen against the hacienda
system. He had promised his father, whose property was stolen by an
hacendado, that he would recover it for him. When his home village of
San Miguel Anonecuilco was appropriated, Zapata fled to the mountains,
hoping for support from the peasantry. In time he commanded several
thousand armed men.
Ideologically, the revolution was American- and European-inspired since
it was focused on freedom and equality. The goal of this conflict was
in a major sense Utopian. But it lacked intellectual leadership: a
Napoleon, to serve as figurehead. Under a single military leadership
the revolution might have been shortened, saving thousands of lives.
Following the collapse of the Porfirio Díaz regime, leaders tottered
like dominos, and local revolts involved years of quixotic terrorism.
Zapata, Villa, Madero, Carranza, Huerta, and Obregón attempted to form
a government or attempted to attain power for the sake of power. Greed
and chicanery took their toll. Almost every community felt the impact
as governments failed. The Church did its best to retain the feudalism
of the hacienda; hacendados, lobbying in the capital, attempted to
retain their old status.
[Illustration: Hacienda la Gavia, Estado de Mexico: carved figure on
library door.]
Zapata and Villa joined forces briefly, because they sought the same
goal. They met in Mexico City but could not reach an accord or
coordinate their military "hordes." While they held the capital under
their control, they dreamed of power, and yet it is doubtful whether
either man thought constructively of the future of the nine million
peasants remaining on the haciendas, earning from nothing to thirty
cents a day. Suspecting betrayal, both men returned to their native
regions.
[Illustration: Hacienda de Arenillas, Puebla: chapel gateway.]
Villa raided most of the northern states. His armed forces sometimes
had an international character with a menagerie of professional
adventurers: Tom Mix, Pascual Orozco, Óscar Creighton, Guiseppe
Garibaldi, Tracy Richardson, and Hector Worden, the first American
barnstormer to participate in armed hostilities. Villa, as military
governor of Chihuahua, stripped the fourteen haciendas of the Terrazas
family, haciendas totaling 17 million acres. His cronies hanged
Terrazas until he revealed where cash was concealed.
Both Villa and Zapata were known as "horse bandits"--through robbery
they financed their troops or buried their loot for tomorrow. Sonorans
and Chihuahuans winked at the _entierros_ (loot) they concealed in
Sierra Madre caves. Villa and Zapata commanded thousands--killed
thousands.
Reed, in his book _Insurgent Mexico_, describes the fighting at the
Hacienda Santa Clara:
Massed columns of the army halted and began to defile to the left
and right, thin lines of troops jogging out under the checkered sun
and shade of great trees, until six thousand men were spread in one
single front ... Bugles blared faintly far and near and the army
moved forward in a mighty line.... In the center, came the cannon
car; beside that Villa rode with his staff....
From Reed's reports, we learn that haciendas were headquarters for
insurgents. Men were stationed at the Hacienda la Cadena: Maderistas
slept on the tiled floor of the patio, saddles, bridles, sabers,
rifles, and ammunition against the wall, dirty blanket rolls in a
corner.
Reed writes:
Sheep were baaing to be let out of the corral; little knots of
peons were gathered in front of the hacienda, pointing. A little
running horse appeared on the rim, headed our way. He was going at
a furious speed, dipping and rising over the rolling land. As he
spurred wildly up the little hill, where we stood, we saw a horror.
A fan-shaped cascade of blood poured from the front of him. The
lower part of his mouth was shot away. He reined up beside the
Colonel and tried earnestly, terribly, to tell him something; but
nothing intelligible issued from the ruin. Tears poured down the
poor fellow's cheeks. He gave a hoarse cry and driving spurs deep
into his horse, fled.
One after another, haciendas disappeared in flames or were pillaged and
left to rot into windowless, doorless, roofless buildings. Trainloads
of connoisseur furniture and irreplaceable antiques were sold or
forsaken. A squatter, with no home of his own, claimed a room or two,
patched the roof, and blocked a doorway with adobes. Cattle were fed
and watered in the patio. Overnight, abandoned mill and refinery
machinery was stripped and sold. The revolutionaries had stolen the
horses, the thoroughbreds, the mules, donkeys, oxen, and cattle.
Phaetons, buggies, wagons, and cars had vanished. Poverty moved in.
[Illustration: Hacienda Manga de Clavo, Veracruz: owned by Santa Anna.
Rendering from an 1868 bank bond; hacienda destroyed.]
Zapata was assassinated while reconnoitering at the Hacienda Chinameca.
He was shot as he entered the patio. Villa was gunned down in his
Dodge, on the road near his Hacienda Canutillo, the estate given him as
a political bribe.
+VII. Mexico Since the Revolution+
[Illustration: Hacienda cattle brand]
In the summer of 1938, President Lázaro Cárdenas wrote to his American
friend, William C. Townsend:
We are confident that the people and the government of the United
States will be able to grasp the fact that the breaking up of the
large estates is the main point in our national program for
improving the living conditions of the peasants of Mexico. The
ideal of giving land to the masses was written into the
Constitution at the cost of much bloodshed and my government is
duty-bound to comply with that mandate. All the holdings that are
larger than what the Agrarian Code permits are subject to
distribution if there are peasants nearby who do not have land to
till. Each landowner, however, is permitted to retain 370 acres,
whether he is a foreigner or a Mexican.
By 1940, approximately 45 million acres of hacienda land had been
turned over to the homeless and the landless by President Cárdenas
(1934-1940). Three hundred haciendas in the country could claim more
than 1 million acres apiece, and then only for a brief period.
[Illustration: Hacienda de Esperanza, D.F.: residence. Cattle stalls
on ground floor.]
[Illustration: Hacienda de Águilar, Oaxaca: bas relief, 3 feet x 5
feet, front wall of residence.]
[Illustration: Hacienda de Sodzil, Yucatán: 19th-century residence.]
[Illustration: Hacienda de los Molinos, Tlaxcala: 16th-century chapel.
Cholula pyramid in the distance.]
[Illustration: Hacienda Quinta Carolina, Chihuahua: main residence.]
The revolution had achieved an important goal. Men and women were free
to live in a more congenial environment: _Rurales_ (police) would no
longer pursue them. The four-century-old illusion of a _patrón_
(master) had vanished; in its place the workers found themselves
unshackled. They were hungry but no longer whipped. Mexico began to
say goodbye to the culture of poverty.
President Cárdenas, traveling from village to village, from hacienda to
hacienda, crisscrossing his country throughout his term in office,
listened to the little man, and the little man believed what the
_presidente_ said, as he promised roads, bridges, schools, clinics,
water, and land. Millions of peasants thanked him for a home and
independence.
[Illustration: Hacienda Mendocina, Puebla: 18th-century guest home on
island in small man-made lake.]
By expropriating multi-billion dollar oil properties from foreign
companies, Cárdenas returned to Mexico some of its lost pride and a
hope for the future. Although agrarian reform came first on the
nation's docket, there were other reforms to help man improve his lot.
The ejidal bank aided the farmer by loaning him money for his plow,
seeds, fertilizer, harvesting tools, oxen, mules, tractors.
[Illustration: Hacienda Quinta Carolina, Chihuahua: residence of more
than fifty rooms, 1892. Abandoned as of 1981.]
By 1960, the last of the largest haciendas had been abolished: the
Greene Cananea Ranch and the Hacienda Atotonilco had become agrarian
property--millions of acres had returned to the people.
Mexico had become a Spanish-speaking nation. Out of a population of
forty million people, only two million were now unable to speak
Spanish. By 1960, a school teacher earned 36,000 pesos a year, instead
of 400 pesos annually at an hacienda.
[Illustration: Hacienda de Caleturia, Puebla: silver door knocker.]
By the 1970s, about 70 percent of the children were attending primary
grades, while at the turn of the century, in pre-revolutionary decades,
scarcely 10 percent acquired an elementary education. By 1980, rural
schools provided at least two grades, and cities offered the primary
cycle through the sixth year. Ideally, a child can now attend school
at five years of age, learn through six years of primary, three years
of secondary, two years of preparatory, followed by three to seven
years at the university level.
[Illustration: Hacienda de Chichén Itza, Yucatán: church.]
Article 3 of the new constitution prescribes that education, whether in
national, state, or municipal institutions, should develop all the
faculties, encourage patriotism and an awareness of international
solidarity, shun religious dogma, advance science, and oppose
fanaticism and slavery.
This progress was based on a past that combined two distinct
traditions. Mexico's pre-Columbian culture had mastered concepts of
intellectual and practical value, had a knowledge of astronomy, a
number system, metropolitan and temple architecture, and made advances
in writing, surgery and medical skills, sculpture and mural art,
irrigation, and the construction of a system of highways.
The other tradition was based on the methods and knowledge that the
sixteenth-century Iberian brought Mexico: the wheel, sophisticated
tools, steel, industrial know-how, marine architecture, navigational
skills, and gunpowder. But the Conquistadors also destroyed much.
Although many of the pre-Columbian societies were warlike, the Monte
Albán temples in the state of Oaxaca appear to represent a local
culture that had fostered peace for some fifteen hundred years. The
Iberian invaders were not familiar with such ancient traditions and
often failed to appreciate their values. They destroyed towns and
cities, burned books, disrupted the ecology, spread disease, and
diminished the arts, crafts, and culture of the new world.
It was not until the twentieth century that Mexico came to the
forefront internationally. Respect for the country grew as Mexico
undertook to restore its pre-Columbian sites, assembled comprehensive
anthropological collections, and established a University City and a
dynamic, original metropolitan architecture. Famous artists
contributed to this period of awakened cultural awareness: Roberto
Montenegro, Covarrubias, Orozco, Rivera, O'Higgins, Tamayo, and
Siqueiros. A folkloric ballet, a national symphony, and entertainers
like Conchita Cintrón, Dolores del Río, and Cantinflas broadened the
cultural landscape.
Among contemporary writers, Luis Spota, Carlos Fuentes, Sergio Galino,
Luisa Hernández, Augustín Yañez, Octavio Paz, and Antonio Haas have
interpreted Mexico for a large public. Leopoldo Zea and Ramón Xirau
have added to Mexico's philosophical thought. Silvio Zavala has
contributed to Mexican history.
The radio and television media are following American footsteps--eager
to keep pace. There is no hacienda nostalgia in Mexico--only frenetic
pressure for industrialization and overall capitalism. Most renowned
haciendas are only memories: they are _cascos_, _recuerdos_.
[Illustration: Hacienda de Valenciana, Guanajuato: residence.]
The 1529 Hacienda San Gabriel de Las Palmas, in Morelos, has become an
American luxury residence; other mansions house millionaires; still
others have become motels, dairies, factories, schools, posh
restaurants, subdivisions with an hacienda office. But hundreds of
hacienda homes have been totally abandoned. They are piles of
rubble--no more than place-names.
In the struggle to eliminate the hacienda system, more than eight
hundred thousand men, women, and children died.
Forces that held together a dubious past seek to achieve an enlightened
future. Education continues to enrich more and more lives. Mexico's
present-day inflation and political corruption have halted the
country's advance, but these unfortunate conditions cannot last.
+Bibliography+
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Leonard, Irving A., _Colonial Travelers in Latin America_ (New York:
Knopf, 1972).
Lewis, Oscar, _Life in a Mexican Village: Tepoztlán Restudied_ (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1963).
McHenry, J. Patrick, _A Short History of Mexico_ (New York: Doubleday,
1962).
Madariaga, Salvador de, _The Rise of the Spanish American Empire_ (New
York: Free Press, 1965).
Mansfield, Edward D., _The Mexican War_ (New York: A. S. Barnes, 1849).
Mayer, Brantz, _Mexico As It Was and As It Is_ (Hartford, Conn.: S.
Drake, 1853).
Meyer, Michael C., and Sherman, William, _The Course of Mexican
History_ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987).
Miller, Robert, _Mexico: A History_ (Norman: University of Oklahoma
Press, 1989).
Ober, Frederick A., _Travels in Mexico_ (San Francisco, 1884).
Parkes, Henry Banford, _A History of Mexico_ (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
1950).
Prescott, W. H., _The Conquest of Mexico_ (New York: Henry Holt, 1922).
Redfield, Robert, _Tepotzlán--A Mexican Village_ (Chicago, 1930).
Reed, John, _Insurgent Mexico_ (New York: International Publishers,
1970).
---- _I Saw the World Burn_ (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1976).
Roeder, Ralph, _Juárez and His Mexico_ (New York: Viking, 1947).
Scholes, W. V., _The Diego Ramírez Visita_ (Columbia, Mo., 1946).
Simpson, L. B., _The Encomienda in New Spain_ (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1966).
Stein, Stanley J., and Barbara H., _The Colonial Heritage of Latin
America_ (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970).
Strode, Hudson, _Timeless Mexico_ (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1944).
Tannenbaum, Frank, _The Mexican Agrarian Revolution_ (New York:
Macmillan, 1929).
---- _Mexico: The Struggle for Peace and Bread_ (New York: Knopf, 1951).
Townsend, William C., _Lázaro Cárdenas, Mexican Democrat_ (Ann Arbor,
Mich.: G. Wahr Publishing Co., 1952).
Whetten, Nathan L., _Rural Mexico_ (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1948).
Womach, John, _Zapata and the Mexican Revolution_ (New York: Knopf,
1969).
Zavala, Silvio, _De Encomiendas y Propiedad Territorial en Algunas
Regiones de la América Española_ (Mexico, 1940).
---- _El Mundo Americano en la Época Colonial_ (Mexico, 1967).
---- _New Viewpoints on the Spanish Colonization of America_ (London,
1943).
Zorita, Alfonso de, _Life and Labor in Ancient Mexico_ (New Brunswick,
1963).
+Works on the Haciendas of Mexico+
Bartlett, Paul Alexander, "Haciendas," with photographs by the author,
_Mexico This Month_, Vol. IV, No. 12, December 1958, pp. 16-21.
---- "Haciendas of Mexico," with illustrations by the author, _Los
Angeles County Museum Quarterly_, Vol. 1, Nos. 3/4, 1962-1963, pp.
18-23.
---- "The Hacienda Mansion," with illustrations by the author, _Mexican
Life_, Vol. 4, No. 46, 1970.
---- "La Vida en una Hacienda," with Illustrations by the author,
_Américas_ (Organization of American States), Vol. 34, No. 3, May-June
1982, pp. 12-17.
Bazant S., Jan, _Cinco Haciendas Mexicanas: Tres Siglos de Vida Rural
en San Luis Potosí, 1600-1910_ (Mexico, D.F.: Colegio de Mexico, 1980).
Bellengeri, Marco, _Las Haciendas en Mexico: El Caso de San Antonio
Tochatlaco_ (Mexico, D.F.: Instituto Nacional de Antropologia e
Historia, 1980).
Bengoa, José, _La Hacienda Latinoamericana_ (Quito: Ediciónes CIESE,
1978).
Brading, D. A., _Haciendas and Ranchos in the Mexican Bajio, Leon,
1700-1860_ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978).
Buve, R., ed., _Haciendas in Central Mexico from Late Colonial Times to
the Revolution: Labour Conditions, Hacienda Management, and its
Relation to the State_ (Amsterdam: Centre for Latin American Research
and Documentation, 1984).
_Coloquio de Antropología e Historia Regionales_ (Zamora, Michoacán:
Colegio de Michoacán, 1982).
Couturier, Edith Boortein, _La Hacienda de Hueyapán, 1550-1936_, trans.
Carlos E. Guerrero (Mexico, D.F.: Secretaría de Educación Pública,
1976).
Ewald, Ursula, _Estudios sobre la Hacienda Colonial en México: Las
Propiedades Rurales del Colegio Espíritu Santo en Puebla_, trans. Luis
R. Cerna (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1976).
Ferguson, Bobbie,_ Tracing John Reed's 1914 Desert Route: The
Haciendas_ (Portales, N.M.: Eastern New Mexico University, Paleo-Indian
Institute, 1979).
Florescano, Enrique, _Haciendas, Latifundios y Plantaciónes en América
Latina_ (Mexico, D.F.: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 1975).
García Luna O., Margarita, _Haciendas Porfiristas en el Estado de
México_ (Toluca: Universidad Autónoma del Estado de México, 1981).
Gómez Serrano, Jesús, _Hacendados y Campesinos en Aguascalientes_
(Mexico, D.F.: Centro de Investigaciónes Regionales de Aguascalientes,
1985).
---- _El Mayorazgo Rincón Gallardo: Disolución del Vinculo y Reparto de
las Haciendas_ (Aguascalientes: Centro de Investigaciónes Regionales de
Aguascalientes, 1984).
González Sánchez, Isabel, _Haciendas y Ranchos de Tlaxcala en 1712_
(Mexico, D.F.: Instituto Nacional de Anthropología e Historia, 1969).
Harris, Charles H., _A Mexican Family Empire: The Latifundio of the
Sánchez Navarros, 1765-1867_ (Austin and London: University of Texas
Press, 1975).
Katz, Friedrich, ed., _La Servidumbre Agraria en México en la Época
Porfiriana_ (Mexico, D.F.: Ediciónes Era, 1982).
Keith, Robert G., ed., _Haciendas and Plantations in Latin American
History_ (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1977).
Kirk, Carlos R., _Haciendas en Yucatán_ (Mexico, D.F.: Institute
Nacional Indigenista, 1982).
Konrad, Herman W., _A Jesuit Hacienda in Colonial Mexico: Santa Lucía,
1576-1767_ (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1980).
Lancaster-Jones, Ricardo, _Haciendas de Jalisco y Aledaños 1506-1821_
(Mexico, D.F.: Financiera Aceptaciónes, 1974).
Luna Marez, Patricia, ed., _La Hacienda Agrícola en México: Guía de
Documentos Localizados en la Biblioteca Nacional de Antropología e
Historia_ (Mexico, D.F.: Biblioteca Nacional de Antropología e
Historia, Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, 1978).
Macera dall'Orso, Pablo, _Población Rural en Haciendas, 1876_ (Lima:
Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, 1976).
Martinez Alier, Juan, _Haciendas, Plantations, and Collective Farms:
Agrarian Class Societies_ (London: F. Cass, 1977).
Millet Camara, Luis, ed., _Hacienda y Cambio Social en Yucatán_
(Yucatán: Maldonado Editores, 1984).
Ponce Alcocer, María Eugenia, _Las Haciendas de Mazaquiahuac, El
Rosario y El Moral, 1912-1913: Catálogo de la Correspondencia de
Antonio Castro Solorzano, su Administrador_ (Mexico, D.F.: Universidad
Iberoamericana, 1981).
Prem, Hanns J., _Milpay Hacienda: Tenencia de la Tierra Indígena y
Española en la Cuenca del Alto Atoyac, Puebla, México (1520-1650)_
(Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1978).
Rójas, Beatriz, _La Destrucción de la Hacienda en Aguascalientes,
1910-1931_ (Zamora: El Colegio de Michoacán, 1981).
Saudet, William, "Land of the Haciendas," _Latin American Report_, Vol.
14, No. 1, February-September 1959, pp. 2-9. Reproductions of art work
by Paul Alexander Bartlett.
Schell, William, _Medieval Iberian Traditions and the Development of
the Mexican Hacienda_ (Syracuse, N.Y.: Maxwell School of Citizenship
and Public Affairs, 1986).
Selmo, Enrique, ed., _Siete Ensayos sobre la Hacienda Méxicana,
1780-1880_ (Mexico, D.F.: Instituto Nacional de Antropología e
Historia, 1977).
Taylor, William B., _Landlord and Peasant in Colonial Mexico_
(Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1972).
van Young, Eric, _Hacienda and Market in Eighteenth-Century Mexico: The
Rural Economy of the Guadalajara Region, 1675-1820_ (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1981).
von Wobeser, Gisela, _San Carlos Borroméo: Endeudamiento de una
Hacienda Colonial (1608-1729)_ (Mexico, D.F.: Universidad Nacional
Autonóma de México, 1980).
---- _La Formacíon de la Hacienda en la Época Colonial: el Uso de la
Tierra y el Agua_ (Mexico, D.F.: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de
México 1983).
Wells, Allen, _Yucatan's Gilded Age: Haciendas, Henequen, and
International Harvester, 1860-1915_ (Albuquerque: University of New
Mexico Press, 1985).
+ABOUT THE AUTHOR+
Paul Alexander Bartlett (1909-1990) was both a writer and an artist,
born in Moberly, Missouri, and educated at Oberlin College, the
University of Arizona, the Academia de San Carlos in Mexico City, and
the Instituto de Bellas Artes in Guadalajara. His work can be divided
into three categories: He is the author of many novels, short stories,
and poems; second, as a fine artist, his drawings, hacienda
illustrations, and paintings have been exhibited in more than 40
one-man shows in leading galleries, including the Los Angeles County
Museum, the Atlanta Art Museum, the Bancroft Library, the Richmond Art
Institute, the Brooks Museum, the Instituto-Mexicano-Norteamericano in
Mexico City, and other galleries; and, third, he devoted much of his
life to the most comprehensive study of the haciendas of Mexico.
Three hundred and fifty of his pen-and-ink illustrations of the
haciendas and more than one thousand hacienda photographs make up the
Paul Alexander Bartlett Collection held by the Nettie Lee Benson Latin
American Collection of the University of Texas, and form part of a
second diversified collection held by the American Heritage Center of
the University of Wyoming, which also includes an extensive archive of
Bartlett's literary work, fine art, and letters. A third archive
consisting primarily of Bartlett's literary work is held by the
Department of Special Collections at UCLA. A fourth archive consisting
of 198 hacienda photographs by Bartlett is preserved by the Latin
America Image Library at Tulane University in New Orleans.
Bartlett's book about the history and life on the haciendas, including
a selection of his illustrations and photographs, was originally
published by the University Press of Colorado in 1990 under the title
_The Haciendas of Mexico: An Artist's Record_.
Paul Alexander Bartlett's fiction has been commended by many authors,
among them Pearl Buck, Ford Madox Ford, John Dos Passos, James
Michener, Upton Sinclair, Evelyn Eaton, and many others. He was the
recipient of numerous grants, awards, and fellowships, from such
organizations such as the Leopold Schepp Foundation, the Edward
MacDowell Association, the New School for Social Research, the
Huntington Hartford Foundation, the Montalvo Foundation, Yaddo, and the
Carnegie Foundation. His novel _When the Owl Cries_ received national
acclaim; his fine art has been exhibited throughout the United States
and in Mexico; his poetry has appeared in numerous literary journals
and anthologies and has been published in individual volumes of his
collected poetry. Bartlett was extremely prolific and left to the
archives of his work many as yet unpublished manuscripts, including
poetry, short stories, and novels, as well as more than a thousand
paintings and illustrations.
His wife, Elizabeth Bartlett, a widely published and internationally
recognized poet, is the author of seventeen published books of poetry,
more than one thousand individually published poems, numerous short
stories and essays in leading literary quarterlies and anthologies,
and, as the founder of Literary Olympics, Inc., served as the editor of
a series of multi-language volumes of international poetry to honor the
work of outstanding contemporary poets.
His son, Steven James Bartlett, has published fifteen books and many
papers in philosophy and psychology.
[Illustration: Front dust jacket inside panel]
[Illustration: Rear dust jacket inside panel]
[Illustration: Rear dust jacket]
[Transcriber's note: italicized text is surrounded by _underscores_;
bold text by +plus signs+.]
*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The Haciendas of Mexico - An Artist's Record" ***
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