Writing Mexican History

Eric Van Young

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780804780551
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia messicana

This collection brings together a group of important and influential essays on Mexican history and historiography by Eric Van Young, a leading scholar in the field. The essays, several of which appear here in English for the first time, are primarily historiographical; that is, they address the ways in which separate historical literatures have developed over time. They cover a wide range of topics: the historiography of the colonial and nineteenth-century Mexican and Latin American countryside; historical writing in English on the history of colonial Mexico; British, American, and Mexican historical writing on the Mexican Independence movement; the methodology of regional and cultural history; and the relationship of cultural to economic history. Some of the essays have been and will continue to be controversial, while others—for example, those on studies of the Mexican hacienda since 1980, on the theory and method of regional history, and on the "new cultural history" of Mexico—are widely considered classics of the genre.

PART I

The Historiography of Rural Mexico and Latin America

CHAPTER 1

---

Waves and Ripples

Studies of the Mexican Hacienda since 1980

In an astute, wide-ranging analysis of Mexico’s social and economic problems published on the very eve of the Mexican Revolution of 1910, the jurist, writer, and agrarian reformer Andrés Molina Enríquez produced the somewhat gnomic, oft-quoted statement, “La hacienda no es negocio” (The hacienda is not a business).¹ By this he meant that the Mexican landed estate was in general not profit oriented, probably not capitalistic, and certainly not modern, but a “feudal” legacy of the Spanish colonial past. At the very moment he wrote, however, capital-intensive Mexican-and foreign-owned agricultural interests were in some regions of the country producing tropical crops for export (fiber, coffee, bananas), as well as more traditional agropastoral products (meat, wheat, maize) primarily for domestic markets. Molina Enríquez’s characterization proved more accurate in some areas of the country, among them tracts of the arid north (although some large estates in this region of Mexico produced cattle and other livestock for export and domestic consumption), the more isolated zones of the west coast, and the Indian south outside henequen-, coffee-, cacao-, vanilla-, and sugar-producing areas. In these places the insertion of the hacienda into local, regional, and international markets was much shallower, capital investment and economic rationalization were at much lower levels, and social relations of production were largely untransformed from older practices, including debt peonage. To the extent that the Mexican Revolution of 1910 was an agrarian upheaval, much modern scholarship would ascribe it to the social and economic stresses generated by growing commercialization and modernization in large-scale agriculture, while other scholars would see the Mexican countryside of that era, and the hacienda within it, as feudal and backward in much the same way that Molina Enríquez did. The apparent internal contradiction in the central institution of Mexican rural life—that in some incarnations the hacienda could look feudal and in others highly commercialized, even capitalistic—did not originate in the nineteenth or twentieth century, however, but found its origin in the colonial period. It is therefore with the colonial period, and to some degree with the nineteenth century, that one must begin to construct a genealogy of land-labor regimes in Mexican history, and the ways in which these have affected virtually all spheres of life up to the present, even as the Mexico of the twenty-first century continues becoming year by year less rural and more urban, less peasant and more industrial, less “traditional” and more “modern.”

The extended scholarly debate in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s over the nature of the Mexican hacienda (and large landed estates elsewhere in Latin America) and the institution’s place in rural society, often still framed today in terms of a capitalist versus a feudal model, deeply influenced historical writing on Mexico in general and on the colonial period in particular.² There emerged in this extensive literature a number of important questions, still to some degree unresolved today, about colonial land-labor regimes and the legacy they bequeathed to Mexico and the other nations of Latin America. As research advanced, for example, the hacienda began to look a lot less feudal as an agrosocial unit (that is, a place where rural people both lived and worked simultaneously) than previously imagined. Nor was this a purely academic debate: there were political stakes involved, especially outside Mexico, in Latin American countries that had yet to experience anything resembling an agrarian political revolution. For if the “traditional” rural estate was capitalist (or proto-, quasi-, or even cryptocapitalist) from its inception in the sixteenth century, rather than feudal, then the emergence of a bourgeois order and the ensuing social revolution that must inevitably follow in its wake were not as distant as Marxist thinkers of radical tendency might once have feared.

Empirical studies of the colonial hacienda uncovered in the institution an economic dynamism and a social polymorphism suggesting that it was in fact sensitive to changing market and labor conditions, and to the availability of capital, rather than a fly trapped in the amber of seigneurial tradition. Even the most market-oriented haciendas in the late colonial decades often relied in part on coerced labor, however, retaining a strongly paternalistic social organization and equally paternalistic labor practices, and therefore presumably a precapitalist character. This is quite apart, of course, from sugar plantations, concentrated in the Morelos lowlands to the south of Mexico City but also scattered in pockets elsewhere throughout the colony, which relied upon a core labor force of African slaves while still producing a highly commercialized commodity for the domestic market. We are thus faced with the apparent paradox of commercial economic organization and feudal/paternalist social organization, a theoretical anomaly but a manifest historical reality. It is also necessary to keep in mind that the large landed estate did not exist alone in the colonial countryside, in a moonlike landscape devoid of other population concentrations or other types of production units. Rather, it cohabited—some-times symbiotically, often conflictually—with small towns, semidependent or independent family holdings (often called ranchos), and most importantly with landholding indigenous communities. Certainly the terms of this conflict have increasingly been studied, from informal to litigated contention over land and other resources, through everyday forms of subaltern resistance (including some forms of criminality), to small-scale riot and rebellion, and finally widespread popular insurgency, as exemplified by the Mexican independence movement (1810–1821) and the Mexican Revolution of 1910 that followed it by exactly one century.³

Since the initial publication of my book on the haciendas of the Guadalajara region (Van Young 1981; revised 2006a), one of the most obvious tendencies in historical writing on colonial and nineteenth-century rural Mexico has been a shift in focus from the hacienda as an economic and social institution, which drew the attention of scholars for three decades or so, to the forms of political conflict, the technologies of power, the configuration of large regional societies, the long-term macroeconomic trends, the repertoires of social distinction (among them ethnicity and the constitution of elite family networks), and even the cultural contexts that the traditional landed estate was in large measure instrumental in shaping, and in which it therefore came to be embedded. This shift in focus was partly the result of broader positive changes in the discipline of history, among these its “anthropologization.” By this I mean the bleeding over into history of concepts and questions derived from its cousin discipline—questions about symbolic systems and culture, for example, or the tendency to see powerful groups of landholding elites not only in terms of genealogies and intergenerational property transfers, but also in terms of kinship systems, kinship ideology, and elite social reproduction.⁴ There were also negative changes, however, including an unfortunate decline in interest in economic history, at least in the United States.⁵ As I noted in a 1983 review article about the hacienda literature, the change was also possibly due in part to the apprehension of scholars that in undertaking more studies about the traditional landed estate, especially at the level of the individual enterprise, they were tending to repeat an exercise at which they had already become adept, with the addition of each case study learning more and more about less and less (Van Young 1983).

The wave of historical studies of Mexican landed estates beginning with François Chevalier’s pathbreaking 1952 work on colonial haciendas waned in the early 1980s, giving way to a hiatus in this literature that has continued until very recently.⁶ While there has occurred something of a resurgence of interest in agrarian structures in the pre-1910 countryside, much of it has been in the hands of anthropologists and ethnohistorians, and much of it has focused on the historical interplay of class and ethnicity rather than exclusively on the conflictual relations between haciendas and indigenous communities (for some early examples, see Wasserstrom 1983 and Schryer 1990), let alone the economic history of the haciendas themselves. Some of the impulse behind this newer approach may be traced to the internal logic of investigation, by which the more accessible sources used by an earlier generation of researchers who concentrated on the economic aspects of the great estate (account books, records of litigation, notary records) gave way to more fragmentary and difficult sources (local tax returns and census documents, parish records, and the like) or to rereadings of familiar documents in a new light (e.g., Van Young 1996). Then, too, the growing maturity of ethnohistory as a hybrid discipline (this is where the “anthropologization” of history comes through most clearly), heavily historical in method and subject but anthropological in conceptual framework (e.g., Radding 1997), has brought new sets of questions to bear on established economic, political, and sociocultural themes. Finally, the convergence of subaltern studies with ideas about the agency of common people as historical actors and shapers of their own destinies has redirected the gaze of scholars to arenas in which people formerly seen only as objects—of labor exploitation, of resource appropriation, of social domination—are reimagined as subjects: subsistence farmers, petty commodity producers, consumers, participants in markets, strugglers over local forms of power, religious celebrants, and above all as resisters, rioters, and rebels (e.g., Joseph 1992; Schroeder 1998; Ducey 2004; Guardino 2005).

The apparent ebbing by the early 1980s of the wave of hacienda studies that had surged during the preceding three decades or so by no means left the institution flopping on the sand and gasping for breath on the historiographical shore. Excellent studies were and are still being produced that focus on the great estate itself (e.g., Miller 1995), but it is difficult to call to mind any historians other than the prolific Mexican scholars Rodolfo Fernández (1994, 1999, 2003) and Gisela von Wobeser, somewhat earlier (1980, 1983, 1988, 1994), or the German historian Herbert Nickel (1987, 1988, 1989, 1997), who have consistently continued to produce high-quality monographs on this theme. Although Fernández’s work, for example, has strong elements of regional history and the history of western Mexican elites during the colonial era, these approaches are not incompatible with economic ones, and Fernández still works basically within the parameters of economic history. Moreover, while the anthropologization of the discipline drew the attention of historians toward the symbolic and the local, the linguistic turn destabilized the written accounts on which historians had always relied (although never uncritically). The result of these two convergent tendencies was that the questions many historians began to ask during the last twenty-five years or so found no answers in the economic realm. This meant that the traditional Mexican hacienda, whose history was already reasonably well known, simply lost its compelling interest for us. When the apparently inexhaustible variation in the form and function of the hacienda at the local and regional levels was reduced to a limited number of categories or analytic variables—amount and type of land, technological regimen, productive mix, scale of capital investment, organization of labor, patterns of ownership, nature of the available markets—the question arose as to how much variation there really was, and whether the variations from ideal type were worth studying so closely.⁷

Given these trends, many of the Anglophone and Mexican scholars who made early and major contributions to the historiography of the hacienda followed very roughly similar trajectories in their research, moving from the economic history of the colonial and nineteenth-century Mexican countryside, to studies of social movements or protest, and thence to cultural or even intellectual history, in some measure abandoning the field (no pun intended) of basic economic history to pursue more elusive but fashionable themes. To cite but four examples among Anglophone historians of Mexico, this was certainly true of William B. Taylor, David A. Brading, Cheryl E. Martin, and me.⁸ Leaving aside for the moment his excursions into other historical areas, we can follow Taylor’s movement from his important 1972 book on haciendas and native peasants in colonial Oaxaca, to his innovative study of seven years later on forms of rural social deviance and protest, and thence to his massive investigation of priest-parishioner relations and forms of popular religious sensibility in the eighteenth century (Taylor 1972, 1979, 1996). A similar shift in theme can be seen in the work of David Brading, who followed up his classic interrelated works on silver mining and rural landholding in the Bajío region of central Mexico with a series of major studies of Mexican national identity, and most recently the intellectual and cultural history of Marian devotion and the Virgin of Guadalupe (Brading 1971, 1978, 1984b, 1985, 1991, 2001).⁹ Cheryl E. Martin’s scholarly trajectory marked a similar course. From her fine study of sugar production and labor systems in the Morelos sugar zone (Martin 1985), she moved in her 1996 book on late colonial Chihuahua to a more complex study of a diminutive frontier social order (Martin 1996). They are both works on local communities, but the first is single-stranded and economic in emphasis, the second multistranded and largely social and cultural in approach. Among better-known Mexican scholars the same was roughly true of Enrique Florescano, for example, whose early pathbreaking works on the economic history of the Mexican countryside were followed in subsequent years by a series of studies on collective indigenous memory, native cosmogony, and forms of Mexican national self-representation (Florescano 1969, 1971, 1994, 1997, 1998, 1999).

While a personal anecdote hardly constitutes proof of this trend, at the risk of being overconfessional let me suggest that my own experience in selecting a venue and a theme for my doctoral dissertation research in rural history demonstrates it. Around 1970 or so I was looking for a relatively uncrowded part of colonial Mexico (that is, not overpopulated with the work of other historians) in which to do my own work. I had considered the Valleys of Puebla and Cuernavaca when in a casual conversation Enrique Florescano suggested the Guadalajara area because of its rich archival sources and sparse modern historiography. Initially I had hoped to concentrate this study on social rather than economic history, but during the first stage of the research—as early as the reconnaissance phase, if you will—discovered that I had neither the obvious materials at hand for such an inquiry, nor the knowledge of how to read the primary sources that I did encounter for evidence of forms of domination, covert resistance, accommodation, and so forth. So in a sense I fell back on the economic history of the city and its hinterland, and of the great estates there, producing the kind of single-stranded history typical of economic studies. Only later—having asked myself why this region beginning in 1810 should have produced such a long-lived rural insurgency among common and indigenous people (especially in the villages around Lake Chapala, for example), a problem only alluded to briefly in the conclusion of my book on the Guadalajara region—did I turn to social, political, and cultural themes, including popular religious sensibility, political culture, and the nature of community and ethnic identifications (Van Young 1992c, 2001c). My own doctoral students have since produced much more sophisticated work on rural society both in Mexico and elsewhere. The net result of the intersection of these shifting personal interests with larger historiographical trends is that precisely as my study of Guadalajara and its hinterland was being published, in 1981, or at least within the next couple of years, the wave of hacienda studies had already crested and was receding.

One is hard pressed to think of major studies in English on this theme that have appeared within the last decade, although I will allude to some works in Spanish by Mexican historians. Younger scholars doing their doctoral research seem not to be interested in the topic. When one does see studies of rural economy in more recent years, rather than focusing on the economic workings of rural estates as such, they are quite likely to be cast in terms of environmental history (still not very well developed), and/or the struggle over resources between powerful landowners and humble people, or the way some particular agropastoral activity fit into regional, colony-wide, or even international markets. Examples of these styles of work, respectively, are Elinor Melville’s (1994) fine study of sheep culture and its environmental consequences in the Mezquital Valley of the Mexican near north, Sonya Lipsett-Rivera’s (1999) work on water rights and farming in later colonial Puebla, or Jeremy Baskes’s (2000) reconsideration of the cochineal (a brilliant red organic dye produced from cultivated insects) industry in Oaxaca. Then, too, sometime in the 1970s or early 1980s rural history, embracing primarily hacienda studies, began to be subsumed under the rubric of the “new regional history” in the sense that everything in the country outside the Valley of Mexico tended to become known as “regions” or “provinces” (often, and still today, with an implicitly dismissive connotation). The oversaturation of the central parts of the country (historiographically speaking), the increasing organization and accessibility of provincial archives, and the need to test hypotheses beyond single cases or miniregions—about the feudal nature of the colonial rural estate, for example—all contributed to this outward shift of focus. Although a technical or conceptual definition of what regions were, and how they changed over time, was hardly ever offered, many scholars confidently carved regions out for study, spaces most often organized by urban concentrations at their centers.¹⁰

My 1981 study of the Guadalajara region, therefore, for whose second edition (Van Young 2006a) the present essay was written as an introduction, needs to be situated within the historiography of rural Mexico as the product of a particular historical and autobiographical moment. I suppose many of us who studied the traditional hacienda—immersing ourselves in account books, wills and testaments, sales and rental contracts, and dusty files of litigation over landownership not infrequently running to hundreds of pages each—felt ourselves to be getting under the surface of conventional wisdoms about rural life as we looked at the actual economics of the putatively feudal agrosocial units that dominated much of the Mexican countryside in the colonial era, and even up to the early decades of the twentieth century. But these interests were by no means completely homegrown among historians of Mexico. They found antecedents and models in other historical literatures, most notably in that of medieval and early modern Europe, where both the origins of the modern state system and the transition from feudalism to capitalism focused the attention of historians importantly, if by no means exclusively, on the premodern countryside (e.g., Aston and Philpin 1987). A complete discussion of these influences lies outside the scope of this brief essay,...