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+
+General Works+
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1958).
Beals, Carleton, _Mexican Maze_ (New York: J. B. Lippincott, 1951).
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Chevalier, Francis, _Land and Society in Colonial Mexico_ (Berkeley:
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Cline, Howard F., _Mexico, Revolution to Evolution, 1940-1960_ (New
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Crow, John A., _The Epic of Latin America_ (New York: Doubleday and
Company, 1946).
Ewing, Russell, _Six Faces of Mexico_ (Tucson: University of Arizona
Press, 1966).
Gage, Thomas, _A New Survey of the West Indies_ (New York: Broadway
Travellers, 1929).
Gruening, Ernest, _Mexico and its Heritage_ (New York: Appleton
Century, 1928).
Haring, Clarence H., _The Spanish Empire in America_ (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1947).
Jones, Oakah, _Santa Anna_ (New York: Twayne, 1968).
Kubler, George, _Mexican Architecture in the Sixteenth Century_
(Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1972).
Las Casas, Bartolomé de, _Brevíssima Relación de la Destruction de las
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Leonard, Irving A., _Colonial Travelers in Latin America_ (New York:
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McHenry, J. Patrick, _A Short History of Mexico_ (New York: Doubleday,
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---- _I Saw the World Burn_ (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1976).
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+Works on the Haciendas of Mexico+
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---- "Haciendas of Mexico," with illustrations by the author, _Los
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---- "The Hacienda Mansion," with illustrations by the author, _Mexican
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---- "La Vida en una Hacienda," with Illustrations by the author,
_Américas_ (Organization of American States), Vol. 34, No. 3, May-June
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