Racismo

Mexican Peonage: What Was It and Why Was It?
Author(s): Alan Knight Reviewed work(s): Source: Journal of Latin American Studies, Vol. 18, No. 1 (May, 1986), pp. 41-74 Published by: Cambridge University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/157204 . Accessed: 11/11/2012 16:21
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J. Lat. Amer. Stud. i8, 41-74
Printed in Great Britain
4I
Mexican Peonage: What Was It and Why Was It?

by ALAN KNIGHT
Our knowledge of Mexican agrarian history has been greatly enhanced by hacienda studies, based on original hacienda archives.1 Interalia, these have finished off for good the old notion of 'feudal' hacendados who spurned profit for prestige. But if - thanks to their reliance on hacienda accounts these studies have shed light on hacienda marketing and profit-maximizing, they have told us less about the hacienda's internal workings. The hacienda's relations of exchange are, therefore, better understood than its relations of production. And, from some theoretical perspectives, it is the latter
Ward Barrett, The Sugar Hacienda of the Marquesesdel Valle (Minneapolis, 1970); Jan Bazant, CincoHaciendasMexicanas: Tres Siglos de Vida Rural en San Luis Potosi (Mexico, 1975); 'Peones, arrendatarios y aparceros: I868-I904', Historia Mexicana, vol. 24 (I974-5), pp. 94-121; 'Landlord, Labourer and Tenant in San Luis Potosi, Northern Mexico, I822-1910', in Kenneth Duncan and Ian Rutledge (eds.), Land and Labour in Latin America (Cambridge, 1977), pp. 59-82; Marco Bellingeri, 'L'economia del latifondo en Messico. L'hacienda San Antonio Tochatlaco dal x880 al i920', Annali della FondationeLuigi Einaudi (Torino, I976), pp. 287-428; Edith Boorstein Couturier, 'Modernizaci6n y tradici6n en una hacienda, San Juan Hueyapam', Historia Mexicana, vol. 18 (I968), pp. 35-55; David Brading, Haciendasand Ranchosin the Mexican Baj'o, Ledn i780-860o (Cambridge, 1978); Harry E. Cross, 'Living Standards in Rural Nineteenth-Century Mexico: Zacatecas 8 20-80', Journalof Latin American Studies,vol. 10 (1978), pp. I-I9; Charles H. Harris, A Mexican Family Empire: The Latifundio of the Sdnche. Navarros, i76J-1967 (Austin, 1975); Simon Miller, 'The Mexican Hacienda between the Insurgency and the Revolution: Maize Production and Commercial Triumph on the Temporal', Journal of Latin American Studies, vol. i6 (1984), pp. 309-36; Barbara Luise Margolies, Princesof the Earth: SubculturalDiversity in a Mexican Municipality (Washington D.C., 1975); Enrique Semo and Gloria Pedrero, 'La vida en una hacienda aserradera mexicana a principios del siglo XIX', in Enrique Florescano (ed.), Haciendas,latifundiosy plantacionesen Amirica Latina (Mexico, 1975); John Tutino, 'Life and Labour on North Mexican Haciendas: the Queretaro-San Luis PotosiRegion, 1775-18Io', in Elsa Cecilia Frost et al. (eds.), El trabajoy los trabajadores en la historia de Mexico (Mexico, I979), pp. 339-77; Arturo Warman, Y venimos a contradecir:los campesinosde Morelosy el estado nacional (Mexico 1976). For additional bibliography, see Friedrich Katz, La servidumbre agraria en Mexico en la epocaporfiriana (Mexico, 1980), p. I5.
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Alan Knight
which are primary (which, in grand terms, determine whether the hacienda is to be termed 'feudal', 'capitalist', 'transitional' or something else again). Even where data on labour relations are abundant, their interpretation is not easy. Lists of indebted peons can be derived from librosde cuenta,but they do not readily reveal whether these peons were the classic debt-peons of the Porfirian leyenda negra- defacto slaves, languishing in bondage - or rather rural analogues of the North American professors who now research them and who are themselves, to quote one, 'bound by Household Finance Corporation or by the... retirement plans of the... universities we work for, which recruit us (bind us) through contributions and then threaten to withdraw their share if we try to "escape" ,.2 Finally, hacienda studies have been biassed towards central and northern Mexico, thus towards cereal-producing enterprises. The principal studies with which I am familiar deal with: Morelos (Warman, Womack, Bazant, Barrett); Puebla (Semo and Pedrero); Mexico state (Margolies); Hidalgo (Boorstein, Couturier, Bellingeri); the Bajio (Brading, Miller); Zacatecas (Cross); San Luis Potosi (Bazant, Tutino); Coahuila (Harris). Southern Mexico is strangely under-represented. We have, it is true, some excellent regional studies which shed light on hacienda/plantation operations in the south (Joseph, Wells, Benjamin, Hernandez Chavez).3 But these are not analogous to the specific hacienda studies mentioned. Hence the southern hacienda/plantation remains neglected and obscure. The conventional picture of this neglected species is familiar: southern plantations were the great bastions of servile debt-peonage. Bauer, critically questioning the stereotype of South American debt-peonage, exempts this region: 'about Yucatain and the southeast Mexican lowlands there is no disagreement: labour conditions were harsh; workers were imported by force; debt was systematically used to provide a legal basis for coercion; and plantation owners, aided by the local police or army, were able to restrict workers' movement and tie them to the estates'.4 It is a picture which, Bauer recognizes, traces back to the celebrated polemic
Arnold Bauer, 'Rural Workers in Spanish America: Problems of Peonage and Oppression', Hispanic American Historical Review, vol. 59 (I979), p. 4I. 3 G. M. Joseph, RevolutionfromWithout: Yucatdn,Mexico and the United States, I880-I924 (Cambridge, I982); Allen Wells, 'Family Elites in a Boom-and-Bust Economy: The Historical vol. 62 Molinas and Pe6ns of PorfirianYucatan', Hispanic American Review, (1982), pp. 224-5 3; Thomas Louis Benjamin, 'Passages to Leviathan: Chiapas and the Mexican State, 1891-1947', Unpublished Ph.D. Diss., Michigan State University, I98I; Alicia Hernandez Chavez, 'La defensa de los finqueros en Chiapas, 19I4-20', Historia Mexicana, vol. 28 (I979). 4 Bauer, 'Rural Workers', p. 36.
2
Mexican Peonage
43
of John Kenneth Turner, the muckraking journalist who denounced the evils of peonage in the closing years of the Porfiriato. Turner alleged that there were 750,000 chattel slaves in Mexico at the time.5 Another radical critic preferred five million.6 Echoes of these estimates recurred in subsequent, scholarly works, such as Eyler Simpson's monumental study of agrarian conditions in the 1930S.7 Often, continuities with the colonial period were stressed: peonage was another grim feature of the 'colonial heritage'.8 Hence, in recent synthetic studies, the image of Porfirian agriculture is still one of a pervasive, servile, and atavistic debt-peonage.9 In other areas, the character and significance of peonage have been substantially re-interpreted by historians. Under the colony, Gibson has persuasively argued, hacienda peonage represented a retreat from earlier, coercive methods of labour recruitment (chattel slavery, encomienda, repartimiento de indios). Economic change - not least the dispossession of Indian communities and the growth of a large, landless population - meant that' the hacienda could affordto reject outright coercion in the procurement of workers'. Debts existed, but they were modest (most workers owed less than the equivalent of three weeks wages), they affected about half the labour force, and - most significant of all - potential workers bid up cash advances when they negotiated with prospective employers. 'Here', Gibson concludes, 'the emphasis is reversed from the conventional interpretation of debt labour, for it (namely eighteenth-century practice) assumes relative freedom among the workers, whose objective was not to 1 escape but to enlarge indebtedness'. No doubt there were exceptions to this rule. Semo's timber hacienda, which displayed 'a permanent and organized system of maintaining the peons in debt', was perhaps such an exception.1l (I shall go on to argue for a functional relationship between timber - and comparable non-seasonal products - and coercive peonage.) More typical would seem to be the Queretaro/San Luis haciendas researched by John Tutino, in which an ostensibly enveloping indebtedness and social control are shown - on closer inspection - to be porous and
5John Kenneth Turner, BarbarousMexico (London, 191i), p. I o. Emp. G3o9, Rhodes House, Oxford.
Manuel Sarabiato J. H. Harris, 5 Sept. I9I0, Anti-SlaverySociety Papers,MS. Brit.
7 Eyler N. Simpson, TheEjido,Mexico'sWayOut (ChapelHill, 1937), p. 39.

8
0 CharlesGibson, TheAztecs Under Rule(Stanford,1964), pp. 249-56. Spanish 1 Semo and Pedrero,'La vida', p. 286.
La Vida Social (Mexico, 1970), pp. 2 9ff., where central Mexico is excepted.
Michael C. Meyer and William L. Sherman, The Course MexicanHistory(Oxford, of Moderna Mexico.El Porfiriato: de 1979),pp. 460-I; Moises GonzalezNavarro,Historia
Leslie B. Simpson, Many Mexicos (Berkeley, I971), p. I26.
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Alan Knight
highly imperfect: peons resisted and bargained; debts rarely exceeded a couple of months' wages; large debts correlated with social status rather than economic oppression ('indebtedness was often a privilege allowed to those in the higher ranks of the labour hierarchy').12 In short, 'close study of the system's operations... shows little sign of coercion', beyond that exercised impersonally through the market: peons 'lived on haciendas because they offered employment, or land for rent, or both, and thus allowed access to food, clothing and other essential goods'. The 'mode of exploitation' (to anticipate this paper's brief theoretical excursion) was economic, as in industrial capitalism. This was not servile peonage. And apart from any theoretical significance, this carried contemporary political implications: Potosino peons were not itching to lynch mayordomos or hacendados; they spurned Hidalgo's rebels and even served in the local militias backing Calleja's royalists. If their economic subordination was not coercive, neither was their social subordination illegitimate. Likewise, at Bazant's sugar Hacienda of Atlacomulco (Morelos) the resident workers contrasting with the fractious day-labourers from the neighbouring villages - were 'neither revolutionary, nor insubordinate, nor uppity (altanero)' but, on the contrary, 'tranquil, long-suffering, and peaceloving'. 13 In part this was maintained by the hacienda's perpetuationwell into the nineteenth century - of a quasi-monastic deference and religiosity; but management also displayed a deft economic paternalism - rewarding peons for putting out fires, for pursuing criminals or for starring in hacienda fiestas. Though, with Independence, Mexico entered upon a long period of relative economic stagnation, this did not fundamentally affect the character of debt-peonage. If labour was less plentiful,14 this was more than offset by slack demand; hence landlords did not have to compete for scarce labour by raising wages or coercing workers. Broadly speaking, hacienda work was still sought after, and resident peons were far from being the most exploited rural class (exploitation being judged, in this case, according to contemporary, subjective evaluations). One major study of a northern latifundio, it is true, depicts peons as 'victims of a hopeless indebtedness', hence 'defacto slaves'. Here, debts averaged about a year's
12
13
14
Tutino, 'Life and Labour', p. 363. Jan Bazant, 'El trabajo y los trabajadores en la hacienda de Atlacomulco', in Frost et al. (eds.), El Trabajo,p. 383. The question of labour supply is, of course, extremely complex and relates not only to absolute figures of population but also to the prevailing land tenure (cf. Marx's famous Swan River example), work practices and attitudes, and cyclical demand. Some of these factors are considered later.
Mexican Peonage
45
wages, though some were as high as two years'; here, too, were all the familiar paraphernalia of coerced labour - corporal punishment, penalties for escape, close control of peons' movements, the assiduous (and usually successful) pursuit of runaways.15 Though this - the Sanchez Navarro pattern - has been seen as typical of Coahuila and the north in general, there is strong evidence and opinion to the contrary.16On the Hacienda Maguey in Zacatecas (where parallels with Coahuila might be expected) debts were 'relatively insignificant' and peons were free to come and go; most, however, stayed put, since the hacienda offered acceptable work, wages and rations, which remained stable at least until i880.17 And on Bazant's Potosino estates permanent peons enjoyed certain 'traditional rights' (food rations, credit and, above all, access to land), such benefits accruing according to a complex hierarchy of privilege. Debts, of modest levels, were incurred, but they reflected less some uniform system of hacienda control than the vicissitudes of family size and consumption; hence, provident and productive families were actually owed sums by the hacienda (that is, the hacienda banked their accumulated surpluses). Furthermore, peons came and went with great frequency.18 Thus, though there may be arguments about specific cases, it seems clear that colonial and early nineteenth-century peonage embraced two forms (one coercive, according to the conventional leyendanegra, the other voluntary, in that market pressures rather than 'extra-economic coercion' underpinned it). It also seems clear that the second form - which I shall shortly define as 'traditional' peonage -was very probably the more common. In general terms, therefore, peonage rested upon non-coercive foundations. The arguments and uncertainties which are evident in these Mexican cases are replicated, mutatis mutandis,in the study of late nineteenth- and twentieth-century peonage in Latin America as a whole.l9 Here, however, the contrast is not between coercive peonage on the one hand and voluntaristic traditional peonage on the other, but rather between coercive
Harris, A Mexican Family Empire, pp. 205-30. Ibid., p. 205, asserts the typicality of this pattern; cf. the critique in Bauer, 'Rural Workers', p. 46. 7 Cross, 'Living Standards', pp. 2, I6-I7. 18 Jan Bazant, 'Peones, arrendatarios y aparceros en Mexico, I85 -53', in Florescano (ed.), Haciendas,pp. 306-26. 19 Bauer, 'Rural Workers'; Brian Loveman, 'Critique of Arnold J. Bauer's "Rural Workers..."' and Bauer's 'Reply', same vol., pp. 478-89; related problems are debated, more amicably and over a narrower range, between Tom Brass and Laird W. Bergad in Journal of Latin American Studies, vol. i6 (1984), pp. I43-56.
16
15
46
Alan Knight
peonage and voluntaristic free wage labour. Again, the overt element of debt is present, but the question arises whether debt serves as an excuse for servitude, or as a cash incentive to attract workers. Clearly, the distinction is far from academic. It is one thing to be enslaved, another to be induced - by means of cash advances - to enter the labour market. From the employer's perspective, a coerced labour force and an induced, proletarian labour force will differ certainly as regards the social control required and perhaps as regards the productivity achieved. And at the macro-economic level a free market in labour will make for an equalization of rates of profit according to efficiency, while servile relations will place a premium on 'extra-economic coercion', hence on political muscle. Capitalist development will accordingly be inhibited. Needless to say, there are further social and political ramifications. The classic example of 'debt-peonage' characterized by cash advances, which served to attract labour (voluntarily) from the subsistence to the commercial sector, was the Peruvian enganche system. Though this system - whereby highland Indians were induced to underof labour recruitment take 'seasonal' work on the coastal sugar plantations - initially involved elements of coercion, these atrophied, so that the mature enganche system of the early twentieth-century represented a form of incipiently proletarian labour.20 Other Latin American examples may be cited, and we shall note Mexican analogues of the Peruvian enganche.21 Beneath the superficial similitude of debt, therefore, three distinct forms of labour recruitment may be discerned, each displaying different characteristics and carrying different implications. They may be summarized as: (i) free wage labour linked to the payment of cash advances (a system associated with the creation of an incipient proletariat); (2) 'traditional' peonage, examples of which have been given, and which is distinguished by the peon's voluntary commitment to the hacienda, debt often figuring as a perk rather than a bond; and (3) classic debt servitude, cases of
which - certainly for the period c. i60oo-850 - are rather less common
than once supposed. It is of some theoretical interest that types (2) and (3) fit awkwardly, if at all, within the conventional schema of labour systems derived from Marx. For they depart (type 2 most clearly) from the
20
Peter Blanchard, 'The Recruitment of Workers in the Peruvian Sierra at the Turn of the Century: the enganche System', Inter-AmericanEconomicAffairs, vol. 33 (I979), PP. 63-84. 21 Cf. Ian Rutledge, 'The Integration of the Highland Peasantry into the Sugar Cane Economy of Northern Argentina, 1930-43 ', in Duncan and Rutledge (eds.), Land and Labour, pp. 205-28.
Mexican Peonage
47
'standard historical liaisons' which Marxist analysis generally posits: that is, 'extra-economic coercion' (in Cohen's terms, an 'extra-economic mode of exploitation') associated with surplus labour in kind or labour (not value); market coercion (Cohen's 'exploitation mediated by labour contract') with surplus labour in the form of value.22 Putting it simply, wage-labourers work because they lack the means of production and are compelled by economic necessity; serfs work because of extra-economic coercion (force and/or ideological compulsion). It is theoretically conceivable (though, Cohen thinks, historically unlikely) that these 'standard liaisons' should be ruptured. In fact, the historical record, a fragment of which is reviewed here, shows plenty of rupture. Our type (2) constitutes voluntary serfdom (market - not physical/ideological - compulsion, linked to surplus labour largely produced in labour time or kind). Type (3) corresponds to Cohen's hypothetical supposition that 'a producer could be coerced into working for a wage and producing surplus value'. Such were the classic debt-peons: waged slaves in the literal, not metaphorical sense.23 These three forms of peonage - superficially similar, but basically distinct - flourished in late nineteenth-century Mexico. Before homing in on the south, the bastion of classic debt-peonage, it is worth placing it in a wider economic context. The Porfiriato (I876-I91 i) was a period of rapid economic change, in which Mexican exports grew at some 6 % per annum, with agricultural exports particularly prominent.24 In most (not all) parts of Mexico, land tended to concentrate in fewer hands; many peasants were dispossessed, and real wages slipped (certainly from the I89os) as landlord profits rose. Within this general framework, however, there were marked regional diversities. In northern Mexico, where free wage labour had flourished from the early colonial period,25 economic growth was accompanied by proletarianization and labour mobility. Cash advances were used, in some cases, to attract workers - to the commercial cotton estates of the Laguna, even to some of the northern mines.26 Though some nor22
23
24
25 Ignacio del Rio, 'Sobre la apariciony desarrollodel trabajolibre asalariado el norte en de Nueva Espafia(siglos XVI y XVII)', in Frost et al. (eds.), El Trabajo, 92-I I4. pp. 26 El Correo Chihuahua. Jan., 26 Feb. 191o, refersto an enganche de 9 system operatingin the mines of Dolores (Chih.) and the Laguna cotton plantations.According to the
G. A. Cohen, Karl Marx's Theoryof History: A Defence (Oxford, 1978), pp. 79-83 This theoretical point is argued a little more fully in Alan Knight, 'Debt-Peonage: Theoretical Problems and Latin American Practices', History Workshop Conference on Slavery and Unfree Labour, publication forthcoming. Alan Knight, The Mexican Revolution,I908-20 (2 vols., Cambridge, 1986, forthcoming), vol. i, pp. 8o-i.
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Alan Knight
them landlords (those with more political than economic clout?) flirted with the ideas of coercing labour - in 1894 the Governor of Tamaulipas proposed measures to tie labourers to their haciendas - this was never attempted.27 Nor was it feasible. The brisk competition of North American and nascent industrial interests made coerced labour impractical; furthermore, the north was traditionally liberal, leaning to Madero and the revolution in 19o1 and, after I915, imposing its economic liberalism on the
esclavistasouth. In the populous heartland of central Mexico, too, wage labour and debts-as-advances tended to increase in importance during the Porfiriato. In part this reflected the growing integration of the economy and the development of networks of migrant labour, especially as dispossessed peasants trekked down from the highlands to the tierra calientein search of seasonal work.28 But the transition to wage labour was also hurried along by landlords who, like their Bourbon predecessors a century earlier, sought to take advantage of economic boom, falling real wages, and rising food prices. The opportunity costs of payment in kind (land and rations) had risen. Equally, with labour supply outrunning demand, landlords could take a stronger line with 'traditional' peons who sought to bid up their credit. As the terms of their labour contracts worsened, peons found themselves progressively stripped of their plots, rations, and overdrafts.29 In central Mexico, therefore, debts-as-bonds (never as strong as supposed) and debts-as-perks (once a key item of hacienda negotiations) declined in importance. In Morelos, the chief sanction against peon waywardness was eviction from the estate, not (as it necessarily would have been for a bonded peon) corporal punishment.30 Here, too, peon dependence on the hacienda - increasingly determined by the adverse conditions of the labour market rather than by any affective tie - was illustrated by the events of the Revolution, when Morelos' resident peons spurned the appeal of Zapata, just as those of San Luis had spurned that of Hidalgo a hundred years before.31 In those (numerous) central Mexican haciendas where debts remained, they constituted debts-as-perks, rather than debts-as-bonds; but in the day-to-day haggling over these perks the terms of trade had shifted.
recollection of Trinidad Vega, La Junta, Chihuahua, traditional forms of peonage still survived in that state in the 900oos: Programa de Historia Oral 1/126, pp. 2-6, Museo de Antropologia e Historia, Mexico City. 27 Gonzalez Navarro, La Vida Social, pp. 220-I. 28 Knight, Mexican Revolution,vol. i, pp. 89-9i. 29 Bazant, 'Peones... i868-1904'; Margolies, Princes, pp. 26, 3I. 30 Warman, Y venimosa contradecir, pp. 67-70. 31 Ibid., pp. 124-5; cf. Tutino, 'Life and Labour', pp. 374-5.
Mexican Peonage
49
Operating in a buyer's market, hacendados were less ready to concede credit. Hence debts were run up at the instigation of the peon rather than the landlord; they were grudgingly, not deviously, conceded; and gratefully, not resentfully, accepted. At the pulque hacienda of San Antonio Tochatlaco - a progressive, profitable enterprise in the state of Hidalgo debts averaged 9 pesos (about a month's wages) per head of the total peon population; or 11 pesos per head of the indebted population.32 They were certainly not entrapments into servitude. They were minutely recorded; they usually rose over time (i.e. they did not figure as initial advances, designed to tie a worker); they sometimes fell (as a labourer cleared his debt); and they correlated with the senior, better-paid workers. During the 9oo00sthe businesslike manager of San Antonio sought to eliminate both debts and food rations (for reasons already explained). But he faced peon opposition. Compelled to buy and subsist on the inflationary open market, peons again solicited advances against wages and began to run up fresh debts. After a brief period, debt-peonage (of the traditional type 2) was restored.33 Nor was this problem unique to San Antonio. Other landlords in the region complained that peons 'are asking for more money than is necessary with the intention of not paying it back'; that 'the debt-peons do not pay off but rather contrive to augment their debt. The masters put up with this out of necessity and for fear that another master will take them away'.34 Central Mexico thus exhibited a phenomenon not unknown in Latin America and elsewhere; resistance to the creation of free wage labour on the part of peasantries who (like the Andean shepherds whom progressive landlords sought persistently and often vainly to evict) found a degree of protection in the maintenance of 'feudal', certainly non-capitalist labour practices.35 And the social conservatism of the Morelos peons had many parallels in the states of the central plateau not only during the years of revolution but also as the institutional agrarian
reform of post-1920
32
got under way.36
The argument so far has been largely negative: from colony to Porfiriato
San Antonio Tochatlaco archive, on microfilm, Museo de Antropologia e Historia, Mexico City. 33 Bellingeri, 'L'economia del latifondo', acutely analyses events; Katz, La servidumbre agraria,pp. 40, Ioo-I also refers to this case but misses out the reintroduction of debts. 34 Katz, La servidumbre agraria, pp. 89, 91, quoting Galindo's 1905 report to the Tulancingo Catholic Agricultural Congress. 35 Cf. Juan Martinez Alier, Haciendas, Plantations and Collective Farms (London, 1977), pp. 52-6. 36 Luis Gonzalez, Pueblo en vilo: microhistoria San Josi de Gracia (Mexico, 1972), p. 179; de David Ronfeldt, Atencingo: The Politics of Agrarian Strugglein a Mexican Ejido (Stanford, I973), p. I6ff.
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the fact of debt cannot be taken to imply bondage. If anything, bondage was the exception rather than the rule, and, in central and northern Mexico, it had virtually disappeared by the late nineteenth century. The south,
however, was a different matter. The south, as critics alleged and even some defenders conceded, was steeped in servitude. Here, Turner wrote, a 'cruel chattel slavery' prevailed; Yucatan, a recent monograph argues, was a 'de facto slave society'.37 In the I9oos especially a succession of foreign observers excoriated southern servitude: Turner, Henry Baerlein, Arnold and Frost.38 And Mexicans were not blind to their own peculiar institution.39 Together, they rehearsed a litany of abuses: debts ingeniously contrived and cynically augmented to justify bondage; the defacto sale of peons, as if they were chattel slaves; harsh social control involving physical confinement in barracoons; long, debilitating, unhealthy work; repeated corporal punishment, often of an extreme, sadistic kind. Peonage of this kind certainly compared with New World chattel slavery; indeed, taking the three criteria proposed by Genovese for making such comparisons (roughly, material conditions, cultural space, and access to freedom), it often compared unfavourably.40 Yucatan's henequen plantations, Joseph suggests,41 had less in common with the paternalistic slaveholding regimes of the Old South than with the young, expansive cotton plantations on the Alabama and Mississippi frontier or the newer sugar estates of the Caribbean, where exploitation was so severe that it would not foster cohesive communities, only physical settlements where workers stayed temporarily before checking out for good. There was, in other words, little provision of cultural space; therefore, little sign of a 'world the slaves made' in the interstices of the dominant plantation system.42 Unflattering contemporary comparisons were also
from Without, p. 29. Turner, BarbarousMexico, p. 6; Joseph, Revolution Henry Baerlein, Mexico: The Land of Unrest(Philadelphia, 1914); Channing Arnold and Frederick J. T. Frost, The American Egypt (New York, I909). 39 See the I88os denunciations of Chiapaneco peonage in Gast6n Garcia Cantd, El socialismoen Mexico, siglo XIX (Mexico, I974), pp. 239-4I, 378-403; and J. D. Ramirez Garrido, 'La esclavitud en Tabasco, Mexico, I915', in Jesus Silva Herzog (ed.), La cuestidnde la tierra (4 vols., Mexico, 196I), vol. IV. 40 Eugene D. Genovese, 'The Treatment of Slaves in Different Countries: Problems in the Application of the Comparative Method', in Laura Foner and Eugene D. Genovese History(Englewood Cliffs, I 969), (eds.), Slaveryin theNew World: A Readerin Comparative
37
38
pp. 41
42
202-10.
Joseph, Revolutionfrom Without, p. 84. Cf. Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York, I974).
Mexican Peonage
drawn: 'Siberia', Turner concluded, 'is a foundling hospital compared to Yucatan. 43 Such servile peonage lacked any legal basis. Chattel slavery had been abolished in I829, and debt servitude was outlawed by Article V of the 18 57 Constitution which laid down that 'nobody shall be obliged to render personal service without proper compensation and full consent .44 But with the Mexican, as with other servile systems, political power and economic incentive overrode legal provisions.45 In doing so, however, they still remained partially constrained. Though outright deportees (a class we shall consider) were victims of simple coercion, other labourers - the classic debt-peons of the south - retained a degree of freedom, however fictive in practice. Their 'access to freedom' (Genovese's criterion number 3) exceeded that of slaves, at least North American slaves. 'Nobody could drag him by force to the monterias',reckoned the Chamula Celso Flores, 'there had to be a contract'; the task of the labour contractors who played cat-and-mouse with Celso was to contrive a contract which would justify periods of defactoservitude.46 And if the (written) contracts of the monterias lasted - in the first instance - only a year or two, the (customary) contracts of Yucatain were for life. Nevertheless, the constitutional ban on slavery, and the (pseudo-) contractual requirement which it imposed, provided ammunition for apologists of the system. Since the i870s Chiapaneco spokesmen had contended that 'neither direct nor indirect, open or disguised slavery exists (in Chiapas)'. President Porfirio Diaz, visiting Yucatan in I906, declared allegations of Yucateco slavery to be 'the grossest calumny': 'he who is a slave', Diaz went on, 'necessarily looks very different from these labourers I have seen in Yucatan'.47 Foreign apologists agreed. Edward H. Thompson - landlord, antiquarian and, for twenty-five years, U.S. consul in Yucatan - denounced Turner's muckraking (it was 'outrageous in its statements and absolutely false in many " details') and argued that 'the so-called slavery"' was in fact a 'simple contract convenient to both parties', hence comparable to the contractual relationships which characterized 'all of the great industries of our country
43 Turner, BarbarousMexico, p.
44
34.
Simpson, The Ejido, p. 39. 45 Elsa V. Goveia, 'The West Indian Slave Laws of the Eighteenth Century', in Foner and Genovese, Slaveryin the New World, pp. I 13-37; Franklin W. Knight, Slave Society in Cuba duringthe Nineteenth Century(Madison, 1970), pp. 22z-6. 46 B. Traven, March to Caobaland(Harmondsworth, 1971), p. 74. The source is 'fictional' but, I shall later suggest, convincing. 47 Benjamin, 'Passages', pp. 65-6; Nelson Reed, The Caste War of Yucatdn (Stanford, I964), p. 247.
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Alan Knight
(namely the U.S.)'.48 The British Foreign Office, too, badgered by the Anti-Slavery Society, dismissed Turner's account as 'sensational, highlycoloured and overdrawn'. But when the British consul in Yucatain was empowered to investigate the situation, his report was not disclosed, despite repeated requests. And, though the report in question can no longer be traced in the F.O. files, the ancient card index refers to it - in fading copperplate handwriting - as 'Report by Consul Peirce supporting allegations of slavery in Yucatain.'49 Turner may well have embellished his story. He travelled with a known opponent of the Diaz regime and, at times, he certainly strove for emotive impact. But more 'objective' observers, like the British journalist Henry Baerlein, who spent 'many weeks' in Yucatain (certainly long enough to become a favourite of the local cartoonists) substantially corroborated his version.50 So did an obscure Anglican missionary: 'there is indeed a deplorable state of affairs here, which not only amounts to slavery, but is slavery'.5 And, most telling of all, apologists were driven to admit, in order to defend, the fundamentals of debt servitude. Chiapaneco landlords, involved in the polemics of the I87os, I88os and I89os, considered debt
servitude - as one put it - as 'the principal element of life of our fincas (farms) '.52 In the Pichucalco district of the state, an ex-Governor admitted,
debts were high (the equivalent of two years' wages) and heritable; the foremen imposed extreme targets of work, in foul conditions (these were 'unhealthy, marshy places, infested with reptiles'), resorting to shackles, stocks and chains. And why? 'This can only be explained', he went on, 'in terms of the workers' lack of education, their rough, doltish character, their proverbial idleness, and in terms of custom and habit, this being the only way of subjecting them to obedience.'53 Servile labour, then, was a regrettable necessity, occasioned by the Indians' fecklessness. So, too, in
Thompson's statements appear in the CambridgeTribune (Mass.), 23 Oct. 1909: AntiSlavery Society Papers, Brit. Emp. G309; they are quoted by Turner himself, London, Barbarous Mexico, p. 223; see also pp. 226-7. Wells, 'Family Elites', p. 225, finds Turner's picture of the plantocracy 'decidedly one-dimensional': muckrakers, it seems, should strive for Solomonic balance! 49 Louis Mallet to Anti-Slavery Society, 9 Aug. 9Io0, Anti-Slavery Society Papers, Brit. Emp. G3o9; my italics in the second quotation. 50 Baerlein, Mexico, p. I2: 'the worst of Mr Turner is that he is pretty full of truth'; and pp. 87, 144, 148, 154 (life-long debts and peon sales); pp. 20, 25-6, 28-9, 150, I80--5 (floggings); pp. 148-9, 194-5, 198 (slave hunters). 51 Fred J. Smith, Peniel Mission, Progreso, Yucatan, to J. H. Harris, II May 19o0, Anti-Slavery Society Papers, Brit. Emp. G3o9. 52 Benjamin, 'Passages', p. 66. 53 Garcia Canti, El socialismo,pp. 385-6.
48
MexicanPeonage
53
Yucatan: 'once the Mayas were a noble race. And now the hacendado says that they are indolent, that the prosperity of Yucatan would vanish if the Mayas were not forced to labour; they would live on sunlight and a patch of beans. '54 Here, in fact, slavery was evasively denied; when mentioned, it produced 'cringing apologetics'; and landlords were embarrassed when foreigners witnessed the outward signs of servility (when, for example, peons kissed their masters' hands).55 Debt servitude was clearly seen as reprehensible, even retrograde, but planters could hardly deny its existence in the cavalier manner of Diaz or the British Foreign Office. As for the inhuman treatment of peons, this was either casually admitted (see below) or attributed to a few, bad masters. Nor should the extremes of maltreatment recorded by Turner be rejected out of hand as examples of muckraking sensationalism. Comparable abuses (involving harsh corporal punishment, excessive work-loads, poor food, and hence wantonly high mortality) have been carefully recorded in the analogous cases of the Peruvian coolie traffic (especially during the guano boom of the i86os)
and in the Putumayo rubber exploitation of the I900s.56
To establish that debt servitude existed, amid harsh conditions, is no great thing (though it does establish a ne plus ultra to the revisionist researching away of coercive peonage). More taxing is the task of explaining its rationale; why it developed and declined. For one obvious feature of southern peonage is that it was not a simple continuation of colonial practices. A degree of continuity was evident, as we shall note for Yucatain; but even this was partly illusory, while in several other cases peonage was created de novo, in response to new circumstances. We are therefore trying to explain a dynamic innovation rather than a vestigial colonial remnant. The classic scenario for servile labour, sketched by Domar and Chirot, involves: (i) strong market demand; (ii) scarce labour; (iii) virgin land; and (iv) a powerful landlord class enjoying political back-up.57 Southern Mexico, which contributed disproportionately to the Porfirian agricultural export boom, broadly displayed these attributes.
54 Baerlein, Mexico, 6I-z2. 55 Arnold and Frost, The American Egypt, p. 325; Jorge Flores D., 'La vida rural en Yucatan', Historia Mexicana, vol. io (I96I), p. 472.
56
Watt Stewart,Chinese in Coolie Peru,I84P-I874 in Bondage Peru:A History theChinese of

(Durham N.C., 195 I); Casement to Grey, 17 March I91I , Anti-Slavery Society Papers, Brit. Emp. G3I7. Evsey D. Domar, 'The Causes of Slavery or Serfdom: A Hypothesis', Journal of EconomicHistory, vol. 30 (1970), pp. I8-32; Daniel Chirot, The Growth of Market and Service Labour Systems in Agriculture', Journal of Social History, vol. 8 (1974-5), pp. 67--80.
57
54
Alan Knight
Unfortunately, so did northern Mexico - or the Argentine pampas - in both of which regions free wage labour was the outcome. Indeed, Domar confesses to a certain inability to explain why the northern and southern United States displayed such divergent patterns of development, given that both broadly fitted the criteria for servile labour.58Why, then, did the north evolve toward free wage labour and family farming? Precisely the same question may be posed in respect of Mexico. Two partial answers, put forward by Domar to explain the anomaly, are also relevant to Mexico. First, there is the great catch-all of' social and political objections'. In crude terms, the Mexican north, like the northern United States, was wedded to a 'liberal', free wage labour system. Slavery might have been economically viable, but it was politically or socially unacceptable. As we have already suggested, this was partially true of northern Mexico during the Porfirian period. But 'social and political objections' should not be regarded as immutable data, causes without causes. First, they arose in specific economic circumstances, in previous centuries or decades; second, they might not have been capable of resisting pressures in favour of servitude had the latter been stronger. Thus, northern Mexico (like the northern United States) had been built on a free wage rather than a servile labour since the colonial period; the late nineteenth-century commitment to free labour was therefore grounded in hard economic practice - which was seen to work - rather than any diffuse ideological preference. Secondly, Domar scouts the possibility that different crops (requiring different climates and seasonal cycles) placed different demands on labour. This, the 'technological' argument, also carries weight in the Mexican case, though not precisely in the manner Domar's analysis would suggest. But there is also a third, fundamental argument which helps explain the Mexican phenomenon, and which Domar - viewing 'labour' in undifferentiated, quantitative terms - fails to consider.59 The planters of the American south, eager for labour, discovered early on that the international slave trade was the best or only answer. Their southern Mexican counterparts of the later nineteenth century, facing a comparable situation in terms of land and demand, could no longer tap the slave trade; at best they could tap its gimcrack substitute, the trade in indentured labour, which they tried to do with little success. On the other hand, there were plenty of bodies in southern Mexico. Regionally averaged, population density was low; but large clusters of population were concentrated in the
58 Domar, 'The Causes', p. 30. 59 Domar concludes his interesting article with an appeal for further research, adding 'after all, the land/labour ratio is readily quantifiable': p. 32.
Mexican Peonage
55
Indian villages of Yucatan, Chiapas and Oaxaca, especially in the highland zones. And teeming central Mexico was not so far away. The problem the planters faced was that these bodies, though numerous, were recalcitrant. Indians possessing subsistence holdings would not readily undertake wage labour (still less would central Mexicans, though dispossessed and proletarianized, trek to the deep south). Southern planters thus had to grapple with a (non-quantifiable) labour shortage that related less to populationper se than to the contrary economic imperatives of commercial and subsistence agriculture: a common feature of 'developing' countries, characterized by resistance to the time and work discipline of rural capitalism, by the 'backward sloping supply curve' and the 'myth of the lazy native'.60 Given these problems, landlords had to coax or coerce labour from the subsistence sector. Coaxing- relying on voluntary incentives - produced a more stable labour system, which may be generally analysed in terms of an 'articulation of modes of production'. Coercion, on the other hand, produced forms of peonage analogous to chattel slavery which, by virtue of their reliance on lavish 'extra-economic' controls, were inherently unstable (since they were vulnerable to political upheaval) as well as economically irrational (since they placed a premium upon extra-economic rather than economic efficiency). Given the absence of a subsistence peasantry in North America, equivalent methods were inappropriate: either coerced labour had to be imported via the slave trade or free wage labour/family farmers had to be attracted by economic incentives. Peonage only proved feasible in the United States once slavery had risen and fallen, leaving - in the south - an impoverished peasantry, the social residue of slavery. Then, landlords proved capable of extorting labour from reluctant peasants (the equivalents of southern Mexican Indians), as well as from duped or dragooned wage labourers from the north (counterparts of the migrants and deportees of central Mexico).61 Peonage thus developed where strong demand, virgin land and a powerful landed class existed, juxtaposed to a recalcitrant local (or 'peri-local')62 peasantry. It offers a striking refutation of Wallerstein's
Syed Hussein Alatas, The Myth of the Lazy Native (London, I977); and, for a succinct, critical resume of the 'backward-sloping supply curve', Henry Bernstein, 'Concepts for the Analysis of Contemporary Peasantries', in Rosemary E. Galli (ed.), The Political Economyof Rural Development(Albany, 1981), p. Io. 61 Pete Daniel, The Shadowof Slavery: Peonagein the South I90o-69 (Urbana, I972). 62 Used by the editors of Duncan and Rutledge, Land and Labour, p. 14, to distinguish labour that is neither local nor immigrant, but which depends upon recruitment 'in other, more distant regions of the country'.
60
56
Alan Knight
sweeping assertion that forms of indigenous slavery (i.e. homegrown labour is alwaysin short supply as slavery) cannot be sustained: 'indigenous as it is too difficult to control'. (In fact Wallerstein's argument, slaves, typically convoluted and, in places, imprecise, depends on a fundamental distinction between slavery and 'coerced cash-crop labour', the latter using indigenous labour which is supposedly more productive and easier to control than slave labour. The dichotomy is crude, and the conclusions are open to objection at every point.)63 In fact, southern Mexico displayed examples of labour systems which - even if they are dignified with the 'coerced cash-crop' title - were directly comparable to chattel slavery; but, in addition, the region included variants of both the 'traditional' peonage and the 'proletarian' peonage which, we have seen, were characteristic of central and northern Mexico respectively. It is this intra- as well as inter-regional pattern which requires explanation. 'Proletarian' peonage (type i), for example, characterized the Soconusco region of Chiapas, where coffee planters - many of them Germanto despatched labour recruiters (habilitadores) the highland Indian communities, whence they returned with their mozos de la sierra for the coffee harvest. If, initially, this recruitment involved a degree of force and fraud,
these tended to fade as a regular flow of seasonal labour - up to 10,000
workers per year - eventually ensued. During the harvest season (August to January) some three-quarters of the labour force were composed of migrants, most of whom worked a few months before returning to the sierra. Initially, it seems, many came with their families; with time it became more common to leave the families in the sierra, in order to maximize earnings on the coast. By 191o, this was clearly established as a regular, voluntary migration: 'most Indians signed on voluntarily and returned to the harvests year after year since wages were nearly twice as high in Soconusco as they were at home'.64 Coercion was at a discount: 'here', a German noted, 'the planter possesses no effective means to bring back the indebted workers who have deserted'; whereas elsewhere in the south the authorities strove to recover deserters (illegal though this was), 'in Soconusco, in contrast,...neither the prefects nor the municipalities wish to devote to that end the great power which in effect they have over the people of their localities '.65And, when debates over the utility of (full)
63
64
65
Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World System (New York, I974), pp. 99-I0. Benjamin, 'Passages', pp. 88-9; Katz, Servidumbreagraria, pp. 79-80; and, for an 'ethnological recreation', Ricardo Pozas, Juan the Chamula, transl. Lysander Kemp (Berkeley, I971), pp. I9-21. Karl Kaerger, quoted in Katz, Servidumbre agraria, pp. 8 x-2.
Mexican Peonage
57
debt servitude agitated Chiapas, the Soconusco interests - logically enough - were forthright critics.66 The Soconusco pattern was common enough elsewhere, as we have noted: in the Laguna cotton estates, in parts of central Mexico (where the seasonal migration down to the tierracaliente was growing more common), and in other southern zones like San Andres Tuxtla, where tobacco was cultivated by a labour force combining seasonal migrants, local daylabourers, and tenant share-croppers (habilitados)who resembled Brazil's coffee colonos.67 In the San Andres case, the migrants received advances (anticipos)to cover their travel and subsistence: anticiposwere designed to elicit temporary workers, not permanent slaves. The Soconusco planters likewise jusified the payment of anticipos- which to some reformists smacked of servitude - in terms of the need to coax subsistence villagers from the sierra. A ban on anticiposwould prejudice the peons themselves, interrupt the flow of labour, and jeopardize 'the natural association which should exist between capital and labour'.68 Even in the Yucatainpeninsula where full servitude prevailed - companies which catered to the new, North American fad for chewing gum could only attract workers into the hot, damp forests of Quintana Roo (where, as chicleros, they tapped the gum of the gapote tree) by cash advances and incentives. These workers were a rough, tough crowd - more like cowboys than peons, they seemed - and many were recruits from the British West Indies; the advances they received were duly paid off, they did not shoulder perpetual debts, and they were clearly not subjected to slavery.69 In these several cases, therefore, 'proletarian' peons were drawn either from existing' proletarian' populations (e.g. the West Indies) or from subsistence peasants who saw real advantages to seasonal work on the lowland plantations. Among the
66 Benjamin, 'Passages', p. 73. 67 Ibid., p. 78; cf. Thomas H. Holloway,' The Coffee colono Sao Paulo, Brazil: Migration of and Mobility, I880-I930', in Duncan and Rutledge, Land and Labour, especially pp. 307-8, where the intermediate colonocontract is described. 68 Enrique Rau, German vice-consul San Crist6bal, to Governor of Chiapas, 27 Sept. 19 I 5, Archivo Jorge Denegri, on microfilm, Museo de Antropologia e Historia, Mexico City, arguing the consensual character of anticipos and the 'serious upheavals' threatened by misguided reforms. 69 E. Gonzalez Salas, i Compafifa Chiclera y Maderera, Cayo Obispo, to V. Carranza, 1 Feb. I915, Archivo Jorge Denegri; that this was not special pleading is borne out by Reed, Caste War, pp. 252-3. Incentives, rather than coercion, had to be used, since the region was frontier territory, still partially controlled by the independent Maya. Its cowboy character is illustrated by the Alonzo Lewis correspondence (I902-5) in FO 50/547 and Phillips Russell, Red Tiger: Adventuresin Yucatdnand Mexico (London,
1929), pp. 113-I4.
58
Alan Knight
advantages were the possibilities of raising cash for reinvestment in the sierra - whether in land acquisition, animals, fiesta expenditure or bridesystem matured into a voluntary purchase.70As in Peru, where the enganche economic liaison linking coastal sugar and highland subsistence, two 'modes of production' thus recognizably 'articulated' (for once).71 Before proceeding to genuinely servile forms, we should pause to consider why the Soconusco planters chose to coax rather than to coerce. A 'technological' explanation, of the kind both Domar and Wallerstein entertain, might stress the fact of coffee, which requires careful cultivation (indeed, which is often associated with relatively small units of cultivation, not massive latifundia). But this would be wrong. Coffee and chattel slavery flourished in Brazil; coffee and a highly coercive debt-peonage co-existed in Guatemala.72 In general, the old equation of servile labour and crude, careless work (espoused by Marx and many others) seems to be overdrawn.73 We need not accept every feature of Fogel and Engerman's 'bourgeois slave' to believe that slavery was compatible with sustained, often skilful effort.74The question of crop was relevant, but not in a simple, technologically determined fashion. It was, rather, the manner in which given crops and their method of cultivation interacted with the labour supply and emergent relations of production which counted. From the peon's point of view it was relevant that cash could be earned on the coast without subsistence farming being deserted and disrupted; coffee also offered opportunities for family employment (logging, in contrast, did not); and, hard and hot though the work was, it was probably preferable to timber-felling, cane-cutting, or henequen harvesting.75 Coaxing villagers down to the coast was therefore feasible. And, as regards the planters themselves, four facts deserve mention. First, the coffee companies were
70 Henri Favre, 'Le travail saisonnier des chamula', Cahiersde l'Institut des Hautes Etudes de l'Amerique Latine, vol. 7 (I965), PP. 63-I34; and, for illustrative fictional cases,
to p. Pozas, JuantheChamula, 4; Traven, March Caobaland, 5-6. pp. 71 Henri Favre, 'The Dynamics of Indian Peasant Society and Migration to Coastal Plantationsin CentralPeru', in Duncan and Rutledge, LandandLabour, 253-67. pp. 72 David McCreery, 'Debt Servitudein RuralGuatemala,1876-1936', Hispanic American Historical vol. 63 (1983), pp. 735-59. Review,
73 Karl Marx, Capital (2 vols., London, I957), vol. I, p. I9I n. I; cf. Manuel Moreno Fraginals. TheSugarmill:TheSocioeconomic Complex Sugarin Cubar76o-g86o (New of York and London, 1976), pp. 132, I34.
74 Robert William of Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, Timeon the Cross.TheEconomics American (z NegroSlavery vols., London, 1976), vol. i, ch. VI. 75 Evaluationsof the climateand work regime of Soconusco differ;but even the more cf. unflatteringconcede that these were preferableto the equivalentsin the monterias: Matias Romero, Coffee India-rubber and Culture Mexico(New York, 1898), p. 290; in to Traven, March Caobaland, 5; Benjamin,'Passages', pp. 88, 103. p.
Mexican Peonage
59
highly capitalized foreign enterprises which were 'incredibly profitable' during the I89os.76 They had the resources to make cash advances on a grand scale. Second, the initial work force for Soconusco had been recruited across the border in Guatemala, where labour was more plentiful and cheap. Here, coercion was at a discount and cash advances were often more efficacious - not least because planters in Guatemala had begun to operate on a coercive system, from which Soconusco offered an escape. Even when Guatemalteco labour gave way to Mexican the voluntaristic system survived and prospered. Third, the planters were mostly German. Though foreign planters certainly employed servile labour (cases appear in this paper) it is my strong impression that servitude tended to correlate with Mexican (and Spanish) farming, while foreign (German, American, British) planters relied more on wage labour. This reflected less superior morality (though morality might have played a part) than politico-economic logic: foreign companies were more highly capitalized and, conversely, they were less well integrated into local political networks. Reliance on 'extra-economic coercion' was easier for Mexican (and Spanish) landlords, who frequently had the authorities in their pockets.77 Fourthly and finally, there is the related question of the sourceof labour. Soconusco planters began by attracting workers from Guatemala: it would have been risky, if not impossible, to get Guatemalan landlords and employers to collaborate in a defacto slave trade which carried away their workers. Within Mexico, too, landlords opposed the forcible deportation of Indians (such as the Yaquis) from their regions. In Chiapas, coastal and highland landlords did not see eye to eye (the 1910 revolution, in this state, turned into a minor, regional civil war). The 'traditional' landlords of the sierra clung to debt servitude; but they also offered a degree of 'protection' (self-interested, no doubt) to the sierra communities, whose survival to an extent suited them.78 It seems likely (and we are now well into the realm of hypothesis) that coastal agriculture came to rely on cash advances and incentives as the best - or only - means to prise the sierra Indians from their 'paternalist' protectors - the highland hacendados - who were unlikely readily
76
77
Benjamin, 'Passages', p. 36-7.
Spanishplanterswere prominentin the Valle Nacional, and a few of Yucatan'smore notorious landlords were also Spanish; otherwise, the Yucateco landed elite-the 'Divine Caste'-was Mexican.Scant,impressionisticevidence suggests that the manawas Mexican. Evidence that pay and conditions were somewhat gement of the monterias
betterin Anglo-Americancompaniesis widespread,but clearlydoes not rule out their (less systematic)resort to peonage. 78 Hernandez Chavez,'La defensade los finqueros';Benjamin,'Passages', pp. 73, 75-6,
II iff.
6o
Alan Knight
to collaborate in the forcible recruitment of their own, dependent, labourers. The main thrust of this argument (the negative argument based on the Soconusco case) is that relations of economic and political power, rather than any 'technological' factor, relating to the nature of the crop, determined the presence (or absence) of servitude. This is borne out by the positive cases of southern servitude, to which I finally turn. Yucatan boasted an ancient, established hacienda system, especially in the densely populated north-western part of the state. Here, the Maya had long been reduced to peonage; but it was peonage of a relatively mild kind, its mildness directly related to the weakness of the market, the low level of demand (for hacienda products: chiefly staples such as maize, corn and cattle), and hence the sheer pointlessness of boosting production and extracting a larger surplus from the workers. Corporal punishment occurred, but it does not appear to have been used to drive peons (save, perhaps, in the one sector which, catering to an external market, displayed greater economic urgency: that of logwood production).79 In general, up to the mid-nineteenth century, the peons' workload was light; they owed limited labour services to the hacienda; and on many haciendas the Indians seemed to be 'their own masters'. As on the 'traditional' haciendas of Andean America, demesne production was dwarfed by production undertaken on peasant plots, let out by the hacienda.80 And the Yucateco peons, dependent though they were, displayed a characteristic resistance to sustained work, away from their own subsistence farming. As a foreign archaeologist complained: 'we... found difficulty in hiring them; it would require constant urging and our continual presence to secure them from day to day. As to getting them to remain with us, it was out of the question'. And supervising such feckless workers, once they were recruited, was frustrating: 'it was, perhaps, the hardest labour I had in that country to look on and see them work, and it was necessary to be with them all the time; for if not watched, they would not work at all'.81 During the early nineteenth century, the inland, frontier regions of Yucatainwere opened up for sugar cultivation, which brought a new, more extreme labour regime. But the more numerous 'traditional' haciendas of
John Lloyd Stephens, Incidentsof Travel in Yucatdn(2 vols., New York, 1963), vol. I, pp. 83, 9 , I 8, 120; Reed, Caste War, pp. o0-II, 44. 80 Stephens, Incidents,pp. 86, 91, II6; cf. Andrew Pearse, The Latin American Peasant (London, 1975), pp. 124-30, 149. 81 Stephens, Incidents,pp. 132, 50, 226.
79
Mexican Peonage
61
the north-west still retained a certain colonial somnolence, based upon a combination of staple production and lingering, deferential relations.82 Thus, when - partly in consequence of the sugar boom - the frontier Maya rose in revolt (the Caste War, I847-8), the focus of rebellion was the interior, and the north-western haciendas scarcely stirred. Indeed, some of the peons rallied to the support of their endangered masters.83 But the Caste War, soon to be followed by a generation of Porfirian stability and development, brought rapid change. Ladino (white) control of the interior collapsed - and was only gradually and bloodily restored over decades and a tighter social control was imposed on the secure north-west. That region now enjoyed a demographic and economic resurgence, based (negatively) on the loss of the interior and (positively) on the growth of the henequen industry, which developed paripassu with the development of the American mid-West.84 As Yucatan came to experience an unusually intimate economic relationship with the North American 'metropolis', henequen became king. Old corn and cattle haciendas were switched to henequen, and the north-west began to face more sustained, thorough exploitation. The hacienda regime became more 'efficient', monocultural, and quasi-industrial. Milpas (corn plots) gave way to henequen fields, and independent Maya communities were stripped of their lands (66 suffered in this fashion between 18 56 and 91o). The corporal punishment of earlier times was extended and now geared to production (Maya peons, it was reckoned, were 'docile, obedient and compliant with their masters' orders, the application of a few strokes being, in the last resort, invariably effective ).85 Runaways were 'cruelly flogged'; so, too, were those who, following Sunday's carousing, skipped work on Monday - devotees of San Lunes, in other words. Flogging, after all, made more sense than incarceration.86 Corporal punishment was also used to increase the speed and efficiency of the henequen cutting. One major hacendado, the Spaniard Rogelio Suarez (who was both Spanish vice-consul and son-in-law of the state boss Olegario Molina) 'had given the order that they should flog all those who did not obey... commands with docility'.87 A British
82 83 84 85
Ibid.,p. 20o; Without, 21-2. Joseph, Revolutionfrom pp.

Reed, Caste War, pp. 64, 102. from Without, pp. 26ff. Ibid., pp. 147, 230-I; Joseph, Revolution
vol. 17 (1977), p. 64; Moises Gonzilez Navarro, 'La guerra de castas en Yucatan y la venta de Mayas a Cuba', Historia Mexicana, vol. 18 (1968-9), p. 23. 86 82. Baerlein, Mexico, pp. 19-20, 87 Ibid.,p. 181. The Americanconsul E. H. Thompson (see n. 48) assertedthat reports
A. J. Graham Knox, 'Henequen Haciendas, Mayan Peones and the Mexican Revolution Promises of 91o0: Reform and Reaction in Yucatan', Caribbean Studies,
62
Alan Knight
observer - and hacienda employee - sought to defend the system: 'I have never seen any barbarous or inhuman treatment of the Indians on the plantations', he began. 'There is very little flogging except for cases of ill-treatment of wives or drunkeness and also for continued lazyness [sic].' Abuses were punished by the authorities, he stressed. A manager was gaoled for 'keeping an Indian in the lock-up for two days without food' (the 'lock-up', he explained, 'is a hole in the ground not large enough to lie down in and shut with a heavy wooden grating').88 In addition, as exploitation worsened, the peons' freedom of movement was necessarily curtailed. Previously, some mobility was allowed: peons visited towns and flocked to the regular markets (where they sold their produce). By the I89os this was curtailed, and some peons were rigidly confined to the hacienda.89 Perhaps remarkably, the condition of resident peons in Yucatan still retained elements of paternalism (that is, of the preceding system which had functioned in part because of peon compliance - not simply because of fear and coercion). And, even as the market undermined this older paternalism, it introduced a countervailing economic pressure, which perpetuated the peons' 'voluntary' (that is, non-coercive) dependence on the estate. Debts were integral to this relationship. Landlords advanced money to peons in their youth (for example, to enable them to set up a family). The sums involved were (by peon standards) considerable:
between
o00
and
200
pesos (9-
8 months wages: cf. the comparable figure
of debt at San Antonio Tochatlaco: 9- 1 pesos, or a month's wages). The debt, the subject of a verbal contract, bound the peon to the estate (as even defenders of the system conceded).90 Thereafter the landlord sought to keep the peon in situ, to encourage marriage and procreation (especially of an endogamous kind: marriages off the estate were discouraged, or prevented). The maintenance of family units not only expanded the current labour supply (eight-year-olds were at work in the fields) and guaranteed
of whippings were 'bogey tales of a past generation'; this is refuted by Baerlein,
Turner, BarbarousMexico, pp. 23-4, 56-60, Joseph, Revolution from Without, pp. 75-6, i90, and Smith (n. 5I) who comments that 'the mayas are whipped every day'. Deportees and contract workers fared no better. T. E. Dutton, Merida, to J. H. Harris, 3 July 1910, Anti-Slavery Society Papers, Brit. Emp. G309.
Baerlein, Mexico, pp. I9, I50, I97.
88
89
90 Kaerger, quoted by Katz, Servidumbre agraria, p. 59; Dutton (n. 88) concedes the fact of debt servitude but, he adds, 'the worst feature is that (the peons are kept in the darkest ignorance... (and) the little children are but taught some Romish Catechism in a language they do not understand...'
MexicanPeonage
63
the supply for future years (debts were, defacto, heritable); it also acted as a powerful deterrent against flight. A critic of peonage in neighbouring Chiapas pointed to 'the calculations of the master, who looks to protect himself against runaways by tieing [sic] (the peon) by means of his love
of wife and children'.91
Though the 'industrial' nature of the enterprise involved harsh corporal punishment, this could not be counter-productively harsh. Apologists of the system, who described the Merida hospitals reserved for sick peons, went too far, but they did not entirely invent the institutions.92 Some medical treatment was provided, Henry Baerlein noted: 'if you are the owner of a mule or a slave you naturally will prevent the creature's body from becoming inefficient'.93 Equally, another critic pointed out, peons were flogged, but rarely flogged to death: 'labour is far too scarce in Yucatan'.94 And some 'progressive' planters sought to combine peonage with payment by piece-rate, in order to increase the output of henequen fibre.95 The consequence of this complex relationship (in which market and paternalistic relations combined in a manner reminiscent of the American south, at least as described by Genovese) was that peons were bound to estates by much more than coercion. Debts provided more than a mere legal fiction or alibi. 'In Yucatan', a Department of Labour official
reported (I914), 'there is no law which forcibly compels the worker to
cover his debts with labour and, to understand the strength of the bond which ties him to the estate, it is vital to take into account the Indian's del profound sense of honour (la profundahonradeg indio)'.96The same was true of peonage in Chiapas: 'while this system is not legal under Mexican laws... ', an American consul observed,' the Indians consider it binding '.97
91 Baerlein, Mexico, 187, i89; Flores, 'La vida rural', p. 478; Garcia Cantu, El socialismo, 92
93
P. 393. p. agraria, 59; Flores, 'La vida rural', p. 479, Kaerger, quoted by Katz, Servidumbre who makesthe plausibleobservations(a) that conditionshad improvedin recentyears (up to 1914) and (b) that conditions were worse on more remote plantations.Catmis, notorious for maltreatmentand scene of a famous rebellion in 191I, lay in the far south-eastof the state.
Baerlein, Mexico, p. I43.
Anti-SlaverySociety Papers,Brit. Emp. G3o9. 95 Turner, Barbarous Mexico,pp. 28-9; Kaerger, quoted by Katz, Servidumbre agraria,
96
94 F. Frost and C. Arnold to PorfirioDiaz, n.d.,

p. 59.
Flores, 'La vida rural',p. 478; see also Ignacio Pe6n's commentsin Baerlein,Mexico,
97
p. I53.
Benjamin,'Passages', p. 103. The concludingclauseshould perhapsbe added: 'much more so since the authoritieshave connived to imprison peons for debt'.
64
Alan Knight
Thus, radicals, seeking to uproot the system, had to take seriously the paternalistic (non-coercive) ties which linked the peons to the landlord. 'You... must learn who your true friends are', Carrillo Puerto appealed to the peons of Yucatan once the Revolution was under way (I 96), 'the hacendados will tell you things were better in the old days, when they paid you 11 reales, gave you a little medicine, and a copita (drink) once a year and beat you the rest of the time for being drunkards and lazy good-for-nothings... In this and other ways do they seek to destroy the revolution of ours'.98 The dependency and defence which the revolutionaries perceived were real enough. Peons sought to link their families to that of their masters by means of compadra,go(godfatherhood; fictive kinship); and there were outward displays of deference (e.g. the kissing of hands) which masters preferred to avoid, at least when foreigners were on the estate.99 By the same token revolts were rare (and usually directed against particular, vicious overseers - especially in the interior, away from Merida).100 True, physical repression was swift, and runaways were remorselessly, and usually successfully, hunted down (Yucatan had a whole battery of slave hunters).101But the tenacity of the system, especially after the Revolution broke out in 191o, attests to the strength of non-coercive ties as well. These non-coercive ties were by no means purely paternalistic. Indeed, paternalism was probably in decline; but economic trends now made peon status relatively attractive in itself. In other words, peons stayed on the plantations (maltreatment notwithstanding) because it was a rational, as well as customary thing to do. As at San Antonio Tochatlaco, 'traditional', non-capitalist status might represent a rationally chosen alternative to the vicissitudes of the free labour market. For, by the 9 oos, the henequen zone was densely populated.102 Villages had been stripped of much of their land. Temporary workers, who laboured seasonally on the henequen estates (receiving anticipos, working for six months, then returning to their communities) had a worse deal than resident (permanent) peons. These 'half-timers' were a recent creation of the planters (who were beginning to take advantage of population growth). Their pay was lower than that of the permanent peons, though their day-to-day treatment was no better (in that they were separated from their families, and were kept locked in
Joseph, Revolutionfrom Without, p. 186. 99 Flores, 'La vida rural', p. 472; Baerlein, Mexico, p. I89. 100 Knight, Mexican Revolution,vol. I, pp. 225-6, 336-7. 101 Baerlein, Mexico, pp. 148-9, 194-5, 198, 203. 102 Knox, 'Henequen Haciendas', p. 63; Turner, BarbarousMexico, pp. I2- 3.
98
Mexican Peonage
65
barracoons by night, it was worse). One such 'part-timer' told Turner that it was certainly preferable to work as a permanent peon. As regards part-timers like himself, he added,' they work us until we are ready to fall, and then they throw us away to get strong again. If they worked the full-timers like they work us they would die'.103 Not surprisingly, given this abundance of labour supply (which made even de facto slavery preferable to some alternatives), planters began to favour and introduce free wage labour.104 But, here, as at San Antonio Tochatlaco and elsewhere, a complete reliance on free labour was risky; for, even if proletarians were cheaper, they were unreliable; they were not subject to the regimented control of the estate and they could not be counted on to work regularly, especially during the high points of the season (which often coincided with the high points of subsistence agriculture too).105 We may note three additional factors which help to explain the peons' toleration of their lot, at least in the 'traditional' haciendas of Yucatan. The economic advantages derived from the hacienda's provision of pay, food, and, sometimes, a plot of land. The latter, while it represented a clear economic benefit (especially as food prices were rising), also afforded an additional, non-economic tie. 'In his gun and his milpa (corn plot) lies the Indian's happiness', one planter observed; hence the provision of milpas - where the landlord deemed the opportunity cost low enough was an effective 'psychological' tie, linking the Maya to the land his people had cultivated for centuries.106 Priests, it was generally reckoned, reinforced such psychological ties, preaching submission now as they had at the time of the Caste War: '"you must obey your master" says the priest,
103 104
105
106
Turner, BarbarousMexico, pp. 30-3. Flores, 'La vida rural', pp. 479-80. Katz, Servidumbre agraria, pp. 41-2, ponders the problem of the survival of debtpeonage in (central Mexican) circumstances of surplus labour. The answer partly lies in the (voluntary) debt-peon's ability to secure credit, as already mentioned: landlords preferred to concede on this front rather than to force through thorough proletarianization which - apart from its social repercussions - could have led to a faster turnover of employees as well as higher (money) wages. The presence of a stable (and in Yucatan sizeable) nucleus of resident peons guaranteed social stability and economic continuity; it also enhanced profits by cutting the hacienda's cash expenditures, as Bellingeri has convincingly shown (n. i). The durability of comparable systemsChilean inquilinaje,Peruvian yanaconaje- which did not face agrarian revolution and reform, and which only declined in response to sustained demographic growth, is instructive. Baerlein, Mexico, pp. I 54, 165-6, Turner, BarbarousMexico, pp. 25-6, reckoned that on about half the henequen plantations peons had access to plots ('barren garden patches'); in one case, 380 married men, out of a total 700 peons, enjoyed this privilege.
LAS I8
66
Alan Knight
"or you will go to Hell"'.107 More practically, hacienda employment afforded the peon protection from the ever-present, and hated, threat of forced military service, an ancient privilege, which acquired fresh attractions during the years of armed revolution after II9o.108 Thus, a barrage of instruments - economic, physical, ideological - gave Yucateco peonage great internal strength. It did not depend on simple coercion and therefore could not be terminated by a simple act of counter-coercion in (e.g. the military triumph of the Constitutionalists 1915). Increasingly, such 'traditional' peonage was shored up by the market (its 'mode of exploitation' was economic), since market pressures made even permanent peonage preferable to some grim alternatives. If, as Macaulay said, slavery was the Indian poor law, peonage was Yucatan's. Peonage alone, however, could not guarantee sufficient labour: it was inflexible, it tied up capital, and it could not adequately respond to the periodic booms of the henequen industry. Like all hacendados, therefore, those of Yucatan sought to supplement their permanent, resident labourers (who were reliable but costly) with cheap, expendable workers, who could be hired and fired at will. They therefore recruited local temporary workers - the half-timers already mentioned - and they set out to acquire cheap labour from further afield. Indentured Koreans were brought in; there were hopes of other foreign immigrants (which were disappointed); Huastec Indians were contracted in central Mexico (these, it seems, readily assimilated to their Maya kin); criminals and dissidents were deported from gaols elsewhere in the Republic. Most important of all, the Yaqui Indians, engaged in a protracted rebellion in their home state of Sonora, were rounded up and shipped the length of Mexico to work on Yucatan's plantations.109 No voluntary or paternalistic elements entered the Yaqui trade (indeed, the very attachment to the ancestral land which facilitated
Baerlein, Mexico, pp. 47, I62; GonzAlez Navarro, 'La guerra de castas', p. 16; Arnold and Frost, The American Egypt, p. 335; for similar allegations of clerical connivance in Chiapas: Garcia Canti, El socialismo,p. 393. 108 'The pressgang operates on those who are without protector': Baerlein, Mexico, pp. 30, 53; a sanction that was particularly effective, given the Maya's loathing of military service (see Governor of Yucatan to Carranza, 14 Jan. 191 5, Archivo Jorge Denegri), and which was both long-established (Reed, Caste WIar,pp. 22, I47) and common to other Latin American labour recruitment systems (Silvio R. Duncan Baretta and John Markoff, 'Civilization and Barbarism: Cattle Frontiers in Latin America', Comparative Studies in Societyand History, vol. 20 (1978), pp. 6oi-2). 109 Turner, BarbarousMexico, pp. 38-5 2; Wells, 'Family Elites', p. 248; Jordan, Seoul, to Foreign Office, 6 April, i July i905, and attached correspondence justifying the Korean trade in terms of the planters' 'great need of labour' hence munificent treatment of workers: it is 'not (that) the Koreans are our slaves', declared an agent
107
Mexican Peonage
67
Maya deference made the Yaquis redoubtable rebels in Sonora, and recalcitrant peons in Yucatan). Their trek through Mexico involved overnight stops in special, secure 'bullpens'; on arrival in Yucatan (their numbers depleted by some 20 % by the rigours of the journey) they were, like American slaves,' tamed' by corporal punishment; families were often broken up; and, since the Yaquis' fighting qualities were well known, tight control was imposed. The authorities, especially the Sonoran authorities, thus made handsome profits (Sonoran landlords, on the other hand, protested at this loss of Yaqui labour); while the Yucateco planters acquired a cheap, additional supply of labour which was traded according to slave market principles, with value fluctuating according to the fortunes of the henequen industry.110It would seem, however, that Yaquis sold for less than Maya resident peons, in what was, in effect, a two-tier slave market.11l The reason is clear enough: a Mayan debt-peon was a permanent asset, bought (in adolescence) for 200 pesos; that outlay secured a dependable worker for life. The Yaqui peon, cheaply purchased out of the deportee market, was a risk: mortality was high, and the risks of rebellion or recalcitrance were greater.112 It was not coincidental that Yaquis figured in some of the bigger uprisings which occasionally affected Yucatan after 9Io0. And, given his lower value, and ease of replacement, the Yaqui could be treated with less 'paternalistic' concern. In particular, it seems, the 'new' henequen planters (some of Spanish and Cuban origin) achieved new extremes of callousness which established Yucateco planter families (like the Pe6ns) deplored.1l3
Yaqui Resistanceand Survival: The Struggle Land and Autonomy, I821--191o (Madison, for I984), pp. I63-200. 110 Turner, BarbarousMexico, pp. I6-17. Ibid., gives a cost of 400-I,ooo pesos for a Maya peon (prices fluctuated with the were also sold for up to 400 pesos.
112
in best YucatecoNewspeak, 'but we landedproprietorsarepractically their slaves and the slavesof all our labourers... ': FO 5o/ 546. On the Yaquitrade:Evelyn Hu-Dehart,
henequenmarket)comparedwith only 65 pesos paid to the government for a Yaqui deportee; the latter price undercut the market considerably,however, since Yaquis p. Kaerger, quoted by Katz, Servidumbre agraria, 59 (Kaerger'sfigures date from the
113
Frost and Arnold to Diaz (n. 94) quote Augusto Pe6n's opinion of Olegario Molina, 'whom he declared to be an illbred parvenu'. On Molina's operations see Wells, ethic which informedPe6n, but not Molina, family business,partiallyjustifyingDon Augusto's declaration:'I am an illustratedman.'
3-2
late I89os). On Yaqui mortality and resistance: Turner, BarbarousMexico, pp. 19, 62; Knight, Mexican Revolution,vol. i, p. 226.
'Family Elites'; Joseph, RevolutionfromWithout,pp. 40-I, 46-54. Baerlein, Mexico, pp. 19, 164, i66, i68, 174,, i80, I85,89, 94, presents evidence of a certain seigneurial
68
Alan Knight
Thus, alongside the 'traditional', but updated, peonage, which provided the backbone of the estates' labour force, there flourished a newer, harsher form, from which all paternalistic and voluntary elements had been stripped, which responded-- in accordance with short-term, cynical calculation - to the vicissitudes of the market, and which depended on coercion for its supply and maintenance.114 This new form of servitude (type 3) was not confined to Yucatan. Nor was Yucatain the scene of the worst abuses. Throughout the south, market demand provoked a labour shortage which could only (or preferably) be met by servile labour. And, whereas in Yucatan this new peonage was grafted on to the older, 'traditional' form, with 'traditional' peons working alongside deportees on the same estates, elsewhere the new, ultra-coercive peonage formed the (lumber very basis of the labour system. The classic cases were the monterias the Tabasco/Chiapas border and the tobacco plantations of camps) along the notorious Valle Nacional in north-eastern Oaxaca. Here, new enterprises had been carved out of underpopulated or virgin territory. No 'traditional' haciendas preceded them, providing an existing labour force were or set of labour practices (as was the case in Yucatan). The monterias islands in an ocean of jungle. In the Valle Nacional the local Indians, resistant to plantation labour, were pushed into the surrounding hills and an alternative labour supply had to be found (it may be presumed that coercing the local Chinantecos was undesirable on two counts: the Indians knew well enough what life on the Valle Nacional plantations was like; and they had greater opportunity for successful escape). The planters' recruitment from central answer was extensive deportation and enganche a year. Local officials rounded up Mexico, perhaps to the tune of 15,000 and despatched gangs of convicts, vagrants, political dissidents and kidnapped youths (boys were suitable for tobacco-harvesting; they were of little use in the monterias).Other recruits went through the formality of a labour contract and thus went to the valley formally on a voluntary basis (Baerlein reported ostensibly free labourers being led by their towards the valley).115But, like other contract labourers, those enganchador destined for the Valle Nacional soon realised that their grim fate did not
114
115
Despite the influx of Yaqui and other 'foreign' labourers the Yaquis at a rate of 500 a month in 1908 - they remained a small minority on the plantations (Turner reckoned 8,ooo Yaquis, 3,ooo Koreans and I0o-z25,000 Maya: BarbarousMexico, p. I5, and p. 26 for a sample hacienda). Flores, 'La vida rural', p. 480, encountered few nonMaya peons in 1914: further proof of the outsiders' high mortality. Turner, BarbarousMexico, pp. 67-107, where outright prison deportees are-reckoned to comprise only I0 % of the total labour force, the rest being enganchados kidnapped or children. Baerlein, Mexico, p. 333 is not at his most convincing.
Mexican Peonage
69
match the original, rosy prospectus.16 They received - to take one example - only half the pay promised them; and their short-term contracts were arbitrarily extended.17 Meanwhile, conditions were appalling: life expectancy, Turner reckoned, was a mere 7-8 months; 'the cheapest thing to do', one plantation manager confessed, 'is to let them die; there are plenty more where they came from'.118 Since any initial voluntary commitment soon evaporated (for the outright deportees, of course, it had never existed in the first place) tight control had to be imposed. The peons lived in barracoons, suffered floggings, and were ruthlessly hunted down if they tried to escape.119 Possibly Turner and others exaggerated. Possibly they saw the
plantations - in
I908
- at their worst, since
I908
was a year of recession
and cost-cutting. Not all enganchados as slaves in the tobacco fields for died some managed to return home. But their condition -'nearly dead and starving'- corroborates as much as it qualifies Turner's damning account.120Mortality was certainly high, the result not only of maltreatment but also of the physiological shock of sudden transition from the temperate plateau to the hot, malarial tropics, and the valley was littered with bamboo crosses, marking the graves of peons who had never gone home. As the Chinanteco Indians later recalled: 'many went in but few returned'.121 Clearly, this was a labour system devoid of paternalism and - as observers commented - it compared unfavourably with the 'traditional' peonage of Yucatan; equally, in respect of Genovese's criteria one and two, it
pp. 30-76, reveals a similar combination of outright coercion Stewart, ChineseBondage, (such as kidnapping) and pseudo-voluntary recruitment - e.g. of hungry, drugged or indebted Chinese. Even those who signed up 'willingly, though stupidly ignorant', as an observer put it, usually changed their minds in the barracoons of Macao or the holds of pestilential merchant ships; by the time they reached the quays of Callao and the guano islands or coastal plantations that were their final destinations strict supervision was necessary - to prevent not only escape or mutiny but also suicide, op. cit., p. 98. 117 See the complaint of two women ('que no saben firmar') transmitted to the Department of Labour, 29 Jan. I9I4, Trabajo, 3 I/2/1/29, by S. Ferrer, alleging that their menfolk, recruited for a month by a Tuxtepec plantation at a promised peso a day, received only 5oc and were held for seven months 'as if they were criminals, locked up in barracoons, maltreated and abused'. 118 Turner, BarbarousMexico, p. 67; and p. 230 for corroborative evidence from the (scarcely radical) Mexican Herald of Aug. 1909. 119 Ibid., pp. 71, 89-o12. Cf. n. 117 above. 120 A. H. Harrison, British vice-consul Guadalajara, to Anti-Slavery Society, 28 March 19IO, Anti-Slavery Society Papers, Brit. Emp. G309. Turner, BarbarousMexico, pp. 95-6, cites the example of a Tampiquefio who returned, after six months in the Valle Nacional, a 'human skeleton'. 121 Ernest Gruening, Mexico and its Heritage (London, i928), p. 139.
116
70
Alan Knight
compared unfavourably with North American slavery which (we have suggested) more closely paralleled the Yucateco variant. Indeed, it comes closer to Elkins' famous concentration camp model than the original slave system Elkins had in mind.122 The Valle Nacional became a byword for labour oppression in Mexico.123 But it was not entirely unique. The monteriasof Tabasco/ Chiapas, developed in response to world demand for precious wood as (especially mahogany), were similarly worked by enganchados, were certain cacao and rubber plantations in the same region. Here, 'so long as a man owed money to his patron his freedom was only a meaningless technicality'.124 There are, as mentioned at the beginning, no hacienda studies devoted to this sector. Even 'literary' sources are scant, with the notable exception of B. Traven's cycle of jungle novels.125 The latter can be no more than suggestive; however, I admit that I respond to them with what J. H. Hexter calls the 'empathetic way that I perceive a skilful historical account'; in other words, the atmosphere, details and nuances are convincing.126 For Traven, while highlighting the abuses, corruption, and racism of the monterias,with their 'murderous' labour practices by which workers were 'unmercifully sacrificed', also suggests how the formally voluntaristic contract served to sustain a defacto servitude. Again, it was a question of winkling Indians from the sierra: Indians who retained access to the means of production (they were not wholly dispossessed), who looked to temporary wage labour to accumulate modest funds, who were thus acquiring an initial acquaintance with commercial labour systems (with 'the concept of "time linked with necessity"': the phrase is B. Traven's, not E. P. Thompson's).127 Labour recruitment agents fanned out from the monterias seeking recruits, as the habilitadoresof Soconusco did; only by gradual experience would potential takers led appreciate that one form of enganche to quasi-servitude, another to seasonal wage labour. Indeed, there were even variations among the monterias:'Agua Azul, owned by Canadians and Scots, enjoyed among the
Stanley Elkins, Slavery: A Problemin American InstitutionalandIntellectualLife (Chicago, 1959). 123 Turner, BarbarousMexico, p. 7I; striking dockers alleged that the Veracruz wharves had become 'a Valle Nacional' in 9 2: R. Hernandez to A. Perez Rivera, 7 Dec. 1912, Archivo de Gobernaci6n, Mexico City, legajo 889. 124 Benjamin, 'Passages', p. 102, quoting an eye-witness. 125 All six of which have recently been republished by Allison and Busby (London, 98 I: The Government, Carreta,Marchto the Monter'a, TroTas,TheRebellionof theHanged,General from the Jungle. 126 J. H. Hexter, Doing History, (London, I98 ), p. 8. 127 Traven, March to Caobaland, pp. 28, 44, 6o.
122
Mexican Peonage
71
workers the reputation of being the only monteriawhere the worker was treated almost like a human being as far as such a thing was possible at all in a monteria'.l28 In that the (servile) enganche depended on the growing classic debt-peonage (type currency and appeal of the (voluntary) enganche, 3) fed parasitically upon proletarian peonage (type i); again, therefore, it was more a new phenomenon than an atavistic legacy. 'Hooking' workers for the monterias,however, also involved a barrage of extra-economic measures, which countered the inevitable upward push on wages which a free market would have created: the threat of gaol or military service (for this, the connivance of the authorities was essential); the exploitation of the Indians' cultural subjection; the liberal dispensation ofliquor. In the specific contrived circumstances of big annual fiestas - when men gathered, money changed hands, drink flowed and brawls started labour recruiters could circumvent the Indians' justified aversion to monteriawork; 'youths who, shamelessly drunk, had gotten into serious trouble and others who had gambled away their last centavo now out of desperation ran after the agents begging them to be recruited as nothing mattered to them any more save to make a fast getaway'.129 In addition, men could be bought directly out of gaol (the agent paying their fine), as happened in the American south; or planters could sell indebted peons the to the monterias, latter covering the outstanding debt.130And once this combination of methods had secured a labour force, the workers submitted to a harsh labour regime, on yearly contracts which were also subject to contrived extension. Whippings were common, and successful escapes virtually impossible.131 From the peons' point of view, the labour contract was proof of the pressures, both economic and extra-economic, which they faced, especially as subsistence holdings declined. Hence a voluntary element could be exploited by labour agents. 'We come to work gladly', a 'young Maya' told Turner, 'because we're starved to it. But before the end of the first week we want to run away. That is why they lock us up at night. '132 Why,
28
129
Ibid., p. 59.
130
Ibid.,pp. 96-7.
Ibid., pp. 27, 66, 86; B. Traven, The Carreta, London, i984, pp. 253-4; and, for an 'historical' case, Domingo Magafia to Madero, I Nov. I91I, 'Convenci6n Revolucionaria', Archivo de Gobernaci6n, describing the plight of 5o Indians of Paraiso, Tabasco, purchased (by virtue of their debts) along with a plantation, whose new, corporate owners 'subject and deceive them with some documents which represent nothing more than a device to render them exploitable'. Traven, March to Caobaland,pp. 3o, 39-40, which illustrates how the jungle inhibited, rather than facilitated escape. Turner, BarbarousMexico, p. 33.
131
132
72
Alan Knight
a British vice-consul asked, did labourers submit to enganche,' knowing that will be ill-used and robbed'? To which his own reply reflected they consular incomprehension of the 'culture of poverty': 'the fact is they are childlike in the way they live in the present and almost at once forget past hardships'.133 But, given these economic pressures acting on potential workers, why did the monterias unlike the Soconusco coffee fincas- rely so extensively on extra-economic coercion, both to acquire and to retain their labourers? First, like the planters of the Valle Nacional, they enjoyed intimate relations with the political authorities (in some respects it would be truer to say they constituted their own political authorities, in remote, semi-autonomous districts). 'The authorities felt more or less obliged to in support the monterias every respect in the recruiting of labour'; the Valle Nacional planters had formal contracts withjefespoliticos in central Mexico, whence came their deportees.134 Second, they could draw upon a preexisting peonage, which afforded precedents and examples to be followed (interestingly, the Spaniards of the Valle Nacional were in some cases migrants from Cuba, who had 'introduced methods of cultivation and preparation developed on Cuban plantations ).135 But the most important factor - in the case of the monterias was the nature of the enterprise. involved hard, continuous work, in a hostile jungle environment; Logging thus, not only were the intrinsic disincentives powerful, but, in addition, the quasi-industrial nature of the work (seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year, bar the occasional fiesta) meant that a permanent, strictly regimented work force was required, and recurrent seasonal migration was undesirable. Once 'hooked', workers had to be retained; and the nature of the operation encouraged slave-driving, even if this was achieved by piece-rates as well as the lash. It is no coincidence that similar forms of coercive peonage characterized other, remote, forest enterprises, which were subject neither to seasonal cycles (which might have encouraged the ' articulation of modes of production' between commercial and subsistence nor to responsible political control: Putumayo rubber, the sectors) concession companies of King Leopold's Congo, the turpentine companies who were the chief architects of peonage in the American south. A
133 134
135
Harrison, Guadalajara (n. i20). Traven, March to Caobaland,pp. 53, Io3; Turner, BarbarousMexico, pp. 72-3, 76, 85; Benjamin, 'Passages', p. I03, on prison labour in the monterias. Turner, BarbarousMexico, pp. 76, 89, 92-3, on the prevalence of Spaniards; Kaerger, quoted by Katz, Servidumbre agraria, p. 77, who is talking about production techniques rather than labour systems. Nevertheless, it is worth noting the close familial and commercial links between southeast Mexico and Cuba, where, of course, slave, patrocinadoand indentured labour were recent phenomena.
Mexican Peonage
73
combination of political and economic factors thus encouraged coercion, and once coercion was established a vicious circle developed: 'the worse the reputation of a monteriathe lower the wages that were paid, and the more inhuman the treatment of the worker, the greater was the demand for replacements' - which had to be met by further coercion.136 Servitude fed on itself, inhibiting the development of free wage labour. Dependent on extra-economic coercion, classic debt-peonage could only be ended by the exercise of a rival coercion, that of the state. Internal protests, stifled by the enveloping social control of the plantations, were few and largely unsuccessful, being confined to sporadic outbreaks, often by recently ensnared peons - Yaqui deportees in Yucatan, Bachajon Indians in Chiapas. These were 'proud, obstinate, quarrelsome men', the of boZales southern servitude.137And such outbreaks (like the Catmis revolt and massacre of 1911) did not overthrow the system from within. Overthrow came from outside, with the victory of northern revolutionaries and in their local allies. Luis Felipe Dominguez marched through the monterias the peons. Salvador Alvarado claimed to have freed 1914, liberating 100,000 peons in Yucatan. And the tobacco plantations of the Valle Nacional, dependent on the old Porfirian networks of caciquismo, collapsed with the Revolution, allowing the Chinanteco Indians to recover their lost patrimony.138 These changes were dramatic, and indicative of servile peonage's one-legged reliance on coercion. But to the extent that 'proletarian' and 'traditional' peonage both contrastingly depended on market pressures, they were less affected by revolutionary upheaval. Proletarianization, linked to cash advances, was almost certainly accelerated by the Revolution; while traditional peonage (as Carrillo Puerto found) was not easy to extirpate. Only with the agrarian reform of the I920s and I930S was the monopoly power of the traditional landlord, hence his capacity to recruit 'voluntary' peons, finally undermined. But, like the French peasants who exchanged the ancienregimeseigneur for the postrevolutionary usurer, the southern peons, now ejidatarios,swapped one the master for another: 'the (ejidal) bank became a bureaucratic hacendado, in other words, ejidatarioa peon of the bank'.139 The Revolution did not,
136
137
Traven, March to Caobaland,p. 60.
Ibid., p.
iIo;
cf. H. Orlando Patterson, 'The General Causes of Jamaican Slave
Revolts', in Foner and Genovese (eds.), Slaveryin the New World, pp. 21 2-I 3; Eugene of the Modern World (Baton Rouge, 1979), pp. 6, I8-19. from Without, pp. 103-5; Gruening, Benjamin, 'Passages', p. 132; Joseph, Revolution Mexico and its Heritage, pp. I 39-40. Benjamin, 'Passages', p. 249.
SlaveRevoltsin the Making to D. Genovese, FromRebellion Revolution: Afro-American

138
139
74
Alan Knight
eliminate the inequalities of the market (Cohen's economic 'mode of exploitation'). Nor did its leaders intend to. But the Revolution - which many historians today demote as an agent of change - did 'put an end to slave peonage' in Yucatan and elsewhere in the south.140 That was some achievement.
140
Joseph, Revolution from Without, pp. 214, 298; Gruening, Mexico and its Heritage, p. 140, concurred: 'whatever else the agrarian revolution has failed to do it has wiped out the horrors of haciendaslavery'.

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Mexican Peonage: What Was It and Why Was It?

J. Lat. Amer. Stud. i8, 41-74

Printed in Great Britain

Mexican Peonage: What Was It and Why Was It?

Manuel Sarabiato J. H. Harris, 5 Sept. I9I0, Anti-SlaverySociety Papers,MS. Brit.

7 Eyler N. Simpson, TheEjido,Mexico'sWayOut (ChapelHill, 1937), p. 39.

Leslie B. Simpson, Many Mexicos (Berkeley, I971), p. I26.

got under way.36

Watt Stewart,Chinese in Coolie Peru,I84P-I874 in Bondage Peru:A History theChinese of

Benjamin, 'Passages', p. 36-7.

Ibid.,p. 20o; Without, 21-2. Joseph, Revolutionfrom pp.

8 months wages: cf. the comparable figure

94 F. Frost and C. Arnold to PorfirioDiaz, n.d.,

- at their worst, since

was a year of recession

Traven, March to Caobaland,p. 60.

cf. H. Orlando Patterson, 'The General Causes of Jamaican Slave

SlaveRevoltsin the Making to D. Genovese, FromRebellion Revolution: Afro-American

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