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 18th 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”.