Hacienda (UK: /ˌhæsiˈɛndə/, US: /ˌhɑːsiˈɛndə/, American Spanish: [aˈsjenda]) is a Spanish word for an estate. Some haciendas were plantations, mines, or even business factories. Many haciendas combined these productive activities. The hacienda system of Argentina, parts of Brazil, Chile, Mexico and New Granada was a system of large land-holdings that were an end in themselves as the marks of status (in Portuguese, the cognate term fazenda applies to the similar system in Brazil). The hacienda aimed for self-sufficiency in everything but luxuries meant for display, which were destined for the handful of people in the circle of the patrón.
Haciendas originated in land grants, mostly made to conquistadors. It is in Mexico that the hacienda system can be considered to have its origin in 1529, when the Spanish crown granted to Hernán Cortés the title of Marquess of the Valley of Oaxaca, which entailed a tract of land that included all of the present state of Morelos. Significantly, Cortés was also granted an encomienda, which included all the Native Americans then living on the land and power of life and death over every soul on his domains.
In Spanish America, the owner of a hacienda was called the hacendado or patrón. Aside from the small circle at the top of the hacienda society, the remainder were peones, campesinos (peasants), or mounted ranch hands variously called vaqueros, gauchos (in the Southern Cone), among other terms. The peones worked land that belonged to the patrón. The campesinos worked small holdings, and owed a portion to the patrón. The economy of the eighteenth century was largely a barter system, with little specie circulated on the hacienda. There was no court of appeals governing a hacienda. Stock raising was central to ranching haciendas. Where the hacienda included working mines, as in Mexico, the patrón might be immensely wealthy. The unusually large and profitable Jesuit hacienda Santa Lucía near Mexico City, established in 1576 and lasting to the expulsion in 1767, has been reconstructed by Herman Konrad from archival sources. This reconstruction has revealed the nature and operation of the hacienda system in Mexico, its peones, its systems of land tenure and the workings of its isolated, intradependent society.
The Catholic Church and its orders, especially the Jesuits, were granted vast hacienda holdings, linking the interests of the church with the rest of the landholding class. In the history of Mexico and other Latin American countries, this resulted in hostility to the church, including confiscations of their haciendas and other restrictions.
In South America, the hacienda remained after the collapse of the colonial system in the early nineteenth century. In some places, such as Santo Domingo, the end of colonialism meant the fragmentation of the large plantation holdings into a myriad of small subsistence farmers' holdings, an agrarian revolution. In Argentina and elsewhere, a second, international, money-based economy developed independently of the haciendas which sank into rural poverty.
In most of Latin America the old holdings remained. In Mexico the haciendas were abolished by law in 1917 during the revolution, but remnants of the system affect Mexico today. In rural areas, the wealthiest people typically affect the style of the old hacendados even though their wealth these days derives from more capitalistic enterprises.
Haciendas were more prevalent in Bolivia until the 1952 Revolution of Victor Paz Estenssoro which established an extensive program of land distribution as part of the Agrarian Reform.
There were haciendas in Peru until the Agrarian Reform (1969) of Juan Velasco Alvarado, who expropriated the land from the hacendados and redistributed it to the peasants.
The hacienda system and lifestyles were also imitated in the Philippines which was colonized by Spain through Mexico for 300 years. Attempts to break up the hacienda system in the Philippines through land reform laws during the second half of the 1900s have not been succeeded especially the Hacienda Luisita that resorted to protests.
In popular culture, haciendas are often portrayed in telenovelas like A Escrava Isaura and Zorro.
Contents |