I. The Hacienda System
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.
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.
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.
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 BartolomĂ© de Las Casas, friend of the Indians, objected to the atrocities committed by the Spanish. Alfonso de Zorita, writing his "BrevĂssima RelaciĂłn," 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 CortĂ©z, Porfirio DĂaz, MartĂn 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, EcheverrĂa, 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.
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.
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 LucĂa, near Mexico City, slaves were purchased, bred, sold, or retained for work on the estate. There were no fiestas at Santa LucĂa. 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, MĂ©xica, 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.
Haciendas became an embodiment of time. They seemed to defy time, offering the illusion that a family could live there indefinitely.