Haciendas in Guanajuato: Big Farming in Mexican History

Today I took a morning off work to explore. I live in Guanajuato, Mexico which was for hundreds of years one of the richest silver mining towns in the world. Figuring out how such an operation could work in the eighteenth or nineteenth century, without railroads or rivers for transport, a hundred and fifty miles from Mexico City, several hundred from the ports of Acapulco (for the Asian market) and Veracruz (for Spain) is one of my hobbies. Of course, I can rely on a ton of scholarly works in Spanish and English. But there’s nothing like seeing it for yourself.

So first off to Exhacienda San Jose about twelve miles from my house as the crow flies. No pics of this. The few ruins that are now a primary school were closed. The lady outside who sells shoes to the mothers from her pick up truck said the teachers had a meeting.

But on to Exhacienda Guadalupe.

There it is.

And here’s another straight on view. It’s in ruins of course. The Mexican Revolution and the redistribution of land that followed meant that these big haciendas were broken up and (often) nationalized. The government owns this one but has so much property of this kind that they can do nothing. There’s a village store in the central building now but the rest is abandoned.

But imagine once. Those mines in Guanajuato needed mules, they needed thousands of mules: mules to haul ore in the mines, mules to run the crushing equipment that was preliminary to extracting the ore, mules to carry it to the coasts, mules to carry food for the mules in the mines, mules to carry food for the people who worked in the mines and who ran the mines.

These big haciendas grew the corn that fueled that huge industrial enterprise. And they were run as huge what we would now call agribusinesses. That is, if you realize that the labor was all human labor, no machines. My grandfathers were peons on this hacienda, said the lady who ran the shop in the exhacienda. She also mentioned that those who still live there would like to put a new roof on the hacienda church but they did not have the money. They still lived off the small parcels of land they received when the hacienda was broken up. No way that produced enough money for roofing this substantial church.

And here are the buttresses of the church.

So on to Exhacienda La Paz just five miles away. This has been bought by new investors and is producing on the large scale again. I reckoned that the three pieces of John Deere machinery that I saw in another dusty space in front of another exhacienda must have cost between $300,000 and half a million US dollars.

A drive just ten miles down the road. And here you have material for a dozen posts: on the ancient history of agribusiness; on the dual problems of feeding animals and humans; on the cost to humans of producing food; on the history of Mexico in the last five hundred years; on why there is migration to the United States; on how to organize the labor of producing food; and on things that make your heart ache.

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