La historia secreta de la hacienda henequenera de Yucatán: Deudas, migración, y resistencia maya (1879–1915)

Resumen

Provocatively titled, La historia secreta presents a complex portrait of henequen production in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Yucatán. Based on archival sources at the Archivo General del Estado de Yucatán and the Simón Peón papers at the University of Texas– Arlington, Piedad Peniche Rivero brings together several different strategies of argumentation. Microhistorical treatments of individual court cases are joined with large-scale analyses of wages and population profiles. Catholic rituals of marriage, baptism, and confirmation are brought into dialogue with theories of resistance as well as statistical evidence for outmigration.Individual chapters place relations between hacienda owners and workers within both larger- and smaller-scale contexts: transnational ties linking the production of henequen to markets in the United States, on the one hand; ideas about the sacred and traditions of resistance within Maya communities, on the other. Chapter 1 considers the development of commercial agriculture in the Yucatán from the sixteenth century and argues that the new demands on labor created by the late nineteenth-century expansion of the henequen market were viewed as violent ruptures in previous relations of production. Chapter 2 places these transformed worker-employer relations within a regional and transnational context, discussing US financing and markets, the role of the government of Yucatán in encouraging the development of henequen-processing machines, and the infamous 1902 secret treaty between then-governor Molina and International Harvester. Chapter 3 returns to the details of life on henequen plantations, outlining the different categories of workers, their tasks, and their wages; the origins of long-term worker indebtedness in the loans they received from hacienda owners to pay for weddings; and the different “economies of violence” (employers versus workers, workers versus employers) generated by the hacienda. Chapter 4 focuses on questions of demography, reconstructing population profiles of age and gender for haciendas in the municipio of Umán and explaining the gender-age irregularities in those profiles according to different forms of legal and illegal population movement.If the first four chapters explore structures of life, economy, and inequality, the next three consider questions of resistance and compliance, drawing on James Scott’s ideas about hidden transcripts and the weapons of the weak. Chapter 5 studies hacienda gender relations, using court cases to provide microhistorical examples of women (and some men) who challenged the patriarchal assumptions (in general shared by both workers and employers) of male dominance over women. Chapter 6 argues that population movement — voting with the feet — had been a strategy of Maya resistance since the colonial period, and proposes that the gender-age irregularities in population profiles (revealed in chapter 4) suggest that marriageable males (aged 16 – 20) tried to resist the trap of marriage-finance-debt (discussed in chapter 3) by moving. Arguments for long-term Maya cultural traditions are also evoked in chapter 7, which concerns the shared Catholicism of workers and employers. Peniche Rivero argues that since the colonial Maya had “Mayanized Christianity,” academics should not assume that the coparticipation of workers and employers in Catholic religious festivals simply indicates false consciousness on the part of Maya workers. Indeed, in contrast to the traps of marriage loans analyzed in chapter 3, here the author argues that owner participation in worker baptism and confirmation ceremonies was one way in which hacienda profits benefited both social classes (p. 171). Chapter 8 returns to large-scale regional, national, and international perspectives, chronicling the fortunes of the henequen hacienda system from the Mexican Revolution to the 1990s. A photographic appendix completes the volume.Peniche Rivero begins her study with a critique of black legend accounts of henequen “slavery” published by travelers who visited the Yucatán during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (such as John Kenneth Turner in his 1911 Barbarous Mexico). The challenge is not to create an inverted white legend but to understand the tangled social relations linking workers and employers in all their complexity. The key obstacle to creating such a portrait — as Peniche Rivero highlights in her introduction (p. 11) — is the need to reconstruct such social relations from often-recalcitrant economic records. One of the most interesting aspects of this monograph is how different chapters draw on different types of archival sources. Microhistorical citations of individual legal cases, for example, are used to illustrate the broad transformations of worker-employee relations in chapter 2, and are the centerpiece of the analysis of resistance to gender hierarchies in chapter 5. In contrast, other chapters are driven by large-scale statistical analysis: chapters 3, 4, 6, and 7 all contain extensive tables and graphs. But these statistical discussions are always pushed beyond mere numeric tallies and are interrogated for what they may reveal, however obliquely, about social meanings.