The Spanish American Hacienda: A Survey of Recent Research and Debate

Abstract

HE AGRARIAN SECTOR of contemporary Latin America is undergoing a process of conflict and radical change; the traditional system of large estates or haciendas is now disappearing in country after country. Paradoxically, only when fading out has the hacienda finally succeeded in attracting real interest on the part of historians. Until very recently, Mexico was the only country whose agrarian history had been explored at least to some degree. The explanation is, of course, that agrarian unrest played such an important role in the origin and development of the great Mexican Revolution. Twenty years ago, two very influential studies appeared, both dealing with the origins of the large Mexican estate. I refer to New Spain's Century of Depression by Woodrow Borah' and La formation des grands dornaines au Mexique. Terre et society' aux XVle-XVIIIe siecles by Frangois Chevalier.2 Both suggested that the rise of the large landed estate coincided with a moment of pronounced demographic and economic depression stretching from the late sixteenth century through the seventeenth. As Borah put it, at the end of the seventeenth century the Mexican economy was already organized on the basis of latifundia and debt peonage, the twin aspects of Mexican life which . . .helped provoke the Revolution of 1910-1917.3 Ever since the appearance of these pioneering studies, historians have tended to take it for granted that the formation of the hacienda