El peonaje en las haciendas mexicanas

Interpretaciones, Fuentes, Hallazgos

Bibliographic Data

ID2826329
AuthorsJohn Tutino (Georgetown University, corresponding author)
Year2000
Volume80
Issue1
Pages200-201
Publication date2000-02-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueHispanic American Historical Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0018-2168 • E-ISSN: 1527-1900
PublisherDuke University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1215/00182168-80-1-200
OpenAlexW2036909926
LanguageES
Citations received6

Herbert J. Nickel has devoted a distinguished career to studying Mexican haciendas and labor relations from the late colonial era to the revolution. This Spanish translation (with one new chapter) of a study published in German in 1991 details Nickel’s conclusions about estate labor and debt “peonage.” The preponderance of primary evidence comes from the Puebla-Tlaxcala basin east of Mexico City. New materials from Yucatán allow comparative perspectives.Nickel begins by reviewing established interpretations that portray “peonage” as a system of coerced labor, almost slavery. He notes, with little comment, that many recent scholars have challenged that view—emphasizing variations across time and Mexico’s diverse regions. A very useful survey of legislation on debt and labor from the late colonial era through the revolution follows. The core of the work offers a close examination of estate labor accounts, most from the late nineteenth century.Nickel’s careful exploration of documents adds another challenge to the notion of a pervasive, coercive “peonage.” He demonstrates that it was workers who repeatedly demanded the advance payments that created debts. The same workers generally claimed food rations, gaining a basic security of sustenance. Landowners, in contrast, tried to limit advances, debts, and rations—with limited success. Nickel recognizes the security such labor relations gave many workers; he also sees coercion. He may be right. A labor system can provide security to workers and coerce them. Estate operators may resent costly advances—and use debts as pretexts for legal coercion. Complexities laden with contradictions may reflect historical realities better than simple visions of imposed coercion.Yucatán remains the classic region where wage advances created debts that legitimated state-sanctioned coercion. Nickel reinforces the recent analysis of Allen Wells and Gilbert Joseph, emphasizing that on prerevolutionary henequen plantations coercion coexisted with secure sustenance. For Yucatán, the notion of “peonage” as near slavery may persist—even as it acquires more nuanced meanings.Nickel’s research on Puebla-Tlaxcala haciendas reveals superficially parallel but fundamentally different labor relations. As in Yucatán, wage advances created debts, while food rations brought security. Yet in the central highlands, workers regularly moved between estates. Employers seeking new workers had to pay off old debts; they rarely pursued those who fled with debts unpaid. Estates wrote off debts when workers died; obligations were not inherited. At Puebla-Tlaxcala estates, debts documented workers’ earnings in excess of wage levels, while rations brought basic security. There was little restriction of mobility. There was little coercion, little “peonage,” in such labor relations.Nickel is most successful in detailing labor relations at estates. He devotes less attention to the political, social, and economic contexts of estate production in distinct Mexican regions. The henequen estates of Yucatán operated in a vibrant export economy that facilitated the payment of advances and under a planter regime that sustained local systems of coercion. In the Puebla and Tlaxcala, haciendas sought profit in less dynamic internal markets, while landlord political power was regularly contested. The differences Nickel describes might be analyzed more fully by exploring them within the dynamics of contrasting regional contexts.Ultimately, Nickel’s careful examination of estate labor relations raises questions about the continuing utility of “peonage” as a descriptive concept. Only once in the many documents reproduced here does the word appear—in the title of a document produced in English by the U.S. government in 1865. I have never found the term in nineteenth-century Mexican estate accounts, managerial correspondence, or judicial disputes. Did the notion of “peonage” originate in the United States, built upon North Americans’ presumptions about Mexican labor relations? Was the construct later adopted by Mexican scholars condemning hacienda labor relations? The origin and diffusion of the concept of “peonage” demands careful, transnational, cultural, linguistic—and historiographical— analysis. But as we understand that Mexican labor relations differed across regions, changed over time, and resulted from complex negotiations among elites, villagers, and estate workers in varying sociocultural and economic contexts, “peonage” seems of diminishing value as a general description of life and labor in agrarian Mexico

Coercion (linguistics) · Colonialism · Debt · Economics · Economy · Estate · Legislation · Political economy · Political science · Sociology · Historical Studies in Latin America · History · History and Politics in Latin America · Law · Politics and Society in Latin America

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