III. Hacienda Life
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 LucÃa, 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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
