Study Guide: The Hacienda System and the Mexican Revolution

An excerpt from our study guide compiled by Caitlin Crisp for "¡Viva la Revolucion!", our Day of the Dead celebration ...

            The hacienda system in Mexico was similar to the feudal system in Europe. It functioned by keeping the people working on the land in debt in some way or another so that they could not leave the land that they were working. In this way the hacendado, or the owner of the hacienda, was able to make huge profits off of their land worked by others. The traditional hacienda was a hierarchical and paternalistic social organization and community with the landlords at the top and the peones at the bottom. Throughout the evolution of the hacienda system the work conditions of the peasants became increasingly harsh in many areas of the country. Even though hacendados acquired land by pushing villagers and indigenous people off the land they had been working for centuries, they were left with few options but to work for their oppressors. During the revolution, everybody on the hacienda was affected in one-way or another and had his or her lives changed, sometimes slowly, sometimes dramatically. Thus the hacienda was a major political, social and economic consideration before, during and after the Mexican Revolution.   

            The hacienda did not just develop overnight, it had been around for centuries gradually developing into the system that one thinks of today. In the 18^th century the hacienda faced two large problems that had to be rectified in order to become the influencing institutions that they were at the dawn of the revolution: the haciendas had a hard time finding labor to work the land and the maize prices were being held down by the competition from autonomous peasants and Indians.

The hacienda came into its own as the benefits to having a hacienda increased during the Liberal Reforma. Previously the majority of Mexico’s haciendas had been subject to heavy demands from various clerical sources in the form of tithes, annuity payments, and interest accruing on large mortgages. The Reforma released them from their crippling burden, thereby raising levels of profitability and increasing scope for capitalization. Additionally, during the Reforma, changes allowed the hacendados to seize village and indigenous lands for their own use. The results of the Reforma were visible and the hacienda began to flourish. Destabilizing the communal village created more available labor and undercut the competition in maize. These changes allowed the hacendados to gain economic and political power that grew steadily until the Revolution.

Because of the nature of the hacienda, it became a ready source of class and ethnic conflict that would ignite during the Mexican Revolution. When the peasant became a laborer, it was more than exploitative; it was an attack on his cultural identity.

Knight explains, “The Revolution was the product of class conflict – of ‘explosive confrontation between proletarians and capitalists’. It was, in effect, a failed proletarian/socialist revolution, which challenged but could not defeat the established bourgeois order, and which has left a legacy of ‘intense class conflict’”. 

Prerevolutionary politics, the growing economic and social inequalities generated by Porfirian policies, affected every major social group, not only workers and peasants but small farmers, merchants, middle-sector intellectuals, and even leading members of the hacendado community. Because of the wide spread animosity, a large number of the rebellion leadership came from the hacendado community. There are several instances of members of the hacendado community joining and leading the rebellion. Carr explains, “the leaders of the rebellion in the District of Guerrero and in other areas were generally drawn…not from the ranks of the peasantry or day-laborers but from the rural elite and merchant class”.