Everything about Hacienda totally explained
» For the Manchester discotheque, see The Haçienda. In Spanish, Ministerio de Hacienda
means "Ministry of Public Finances", or Treasury. The equivalent in Argentina, Chile and Uruguay is Estancia. The Portuguese language equivalent is Fazenda. The UK equivalent is estate
and the USA equivalent is "plantation".
Hacienda is a
Spanish word for an estate, usually, but not always, a vast
ranch. Some haciendas were plantations, mines, or even factories. Many haciendas combined these productive activities.
The
hacienda system of
Argentina, parts of
Brazil,
Mexico and
New Granada was a system of large land-holdings that were an end in themselves as the marks of
status, which produced little for export beyond the hacienda itself, which 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 minor nobles, as the
grandees of Spain were not motivated to leave, and the bourgeoisie had little access to royal dispensation. 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
Marquis of the Valley of
Oaxaca, which entailed a tract of land that included all of the present state of
Morelos. Significantly, the grant included all the Indians then living on the land and power of life and death over every soul on his domains. There was no court of appeals governing a
hacienda. The unusually large and profitable Jesuit
hacienda Santa Lucia near Mexico, established in 1576 and lasting to the expulsion in 1767, has been reconstructed by Herman W. Konrad (1980) from archival sources. This reconstruction has revealed the nature and operation of the hacienda system in Mexico, its
serfs, its systems of
land tenure, the workings of its isolated, interdependent society.
In Mexico, 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 (serfs),
campesinos (peasants), or mounted ranch hands variously called
vaqueros,
gauchos, etc. 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.
Stock raising was central to the ranching haciendas. Where the
hacienda included working
mines, as in Mexico, the
patrón might be immensely wealthy.
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 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.
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 1900's have proven moderately successful.
In popular culture, haciendas are often portrayed in telenovelas like
A Escrava Isaura and .
Famous haciendas
Further Information
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