Haciendas and Economic Development: Guadalajara, Mexico, at Independence 9781477304600

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Haciendas and Economic Development

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Latin American Monographs, No. 58 I n s t i t u t e of L a t i n A m e r i c a n The

U n i v e r s i t y of Texas

Studies

at Austin

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Haciendas and Economic Development Guadalajara, Mexico, at Independence

by Richard B. Lindley

University of Texas Press, Austin

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Lindley, Richard B. (Richard Barry), 1945Haciendas and economic development, Guadalajara, Mexico, at independence. (Latin American monographs; no. 58) Includes index. 1. Guadalajara Region (Mexico)—Economic conditions. 2. Elite (Social sciences)—Mexico—Guadalajara Region —History. 3. Haciendas—Mexico—Guadalajara RegionHistory. 4. Guadalajara (Mexico)—History. I. Title. II. Series: Latin American monographs (University of Texas at Austin. Institute of Latin American Studies); no. 58. HC138.G8L56 1983 330.972'35 82-17646 ISBN 0-292-72042-4 Copyright ©1983 by the University of Texas Press A l l rights reserved

First Edition, 1983 Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to: Permissions University of Texas Press P. O. Box 7819 Austin, Texas 78712

Contents

Acknowledgments

xi

A Note on Sources and Dates xv Introduction

3

1. City and Countryside The City

9

9

Guadalajara's Beginnings and Growth 9 The City's Agrarian Base Commerce and Mining

10

12

The Eighteenth-Century Boom

13

Manufactures and Other Businesses

13

Neighborhood Race and Class Patterns The Oligarchy's Size and Wealth The Oligarchy's Economic Base The Countryside

15

18 19

21

Products of Guadalajara's Local Economy

21

The Hacienda as Microcosm of the Regional Economy The Hacienda: Economically Isolated or Integrated? The Hacienda and the Rural Community The Boundaries of the Local Economy Relationship of City and Countryside

28 30

33

27

24

viii

Contents

2. Credit and Kinship Credit

35

35

The Local Economy's Dependence on Credit 35 Sources of Credit 37 Lack of Liquidity in Personal Estates Types of Credit Transactions

39

40

Security to Underwrite Credit Transactions Marriage Alliances Kinship

43

47

48

Wealth and Privilege 53 Proof of Elite Status

54

Kinship, Credit, and the Elite Family Enterprise 3. Four Elite Family Enterprises The Villasenor Entail

59

63

65

The Porres Baranda Entail

75

The Portillo Family Enterprise

78

The del Río-Pacheco Family Enterprise 4. Effects of Independence

82

89

Independence in Guadalajara

90

Foreign Merchants 95 New Sources of Capital

99

Introduction of Business Corporations

101

Decline of Traditional Credit Sources

104

Changes in Credit Availability

104

Creation of an Open Land Market 105 Survival and Adaptation of Family Enterprises Conclusion Notes

113

123

Appendix: Genealogies of Four Family Enterprises Index

108

149

143

Tables 1. Approximate Area Sown in Major Crops, Intendancy of Guadalajara 2. Approximate Yields of Major Crops, State of Jalisco 23 3. Creole-Peninsular Marriage Alliances

49

4. Rural Properties Owned by Porres Baranda Family, 1834 5. Merchant Immigrants to Guadalajara, 1814-1823

Map Colonial Guadalajara and Haciendas

8

96

76

23

Tables 1. Approximate Area Sown in Major Crops, Intendancy of Guadalajara 2. Approximate Yields of Major Crops, State of Jalisco 23 3. Creole-Peninsular Marriage Alliances

49

4. Rural Properties Owned by Porres Baranda Family, 1834 5. Merchant Immigrants to Guadalajara, 1814-1823

Map Colonial Guadalajara and Haciendas

8

96

76

23

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Acknowledgments

Finishing this book brought many kinds of relief, more than a few longawaited pleasures, and some unanticipated changes in point of view. The opportunity to acknowledge the very large contributions others made to a project that sometimes seemed so oppressively mine alone is now pleasantly welcome. Many generous mentors, friends, and colleagues made this book possible. Some filled gaps, some excised the questionable and the superfluous, some analyzed, some contributed major elements of the theoretical structure that arches over and around the data; all helped immeasurably. They have assisted in making an author, as difficult a task but less rewarding than authoring a book, and no one deserves more credit in this regard than Dr. Nettie Lee Benson, who maintained a steadfast faith that I belonged in the company of published scholars. Dr. Benson and a few others have convinced me that a good teacher's virtues are mostly negative. In other words, good tutors are notable for what they do not do, rather than what they do, and it might seem like faint praise to catalog the merits of restraint Perhaps the virtues of right inaction can be summed up most positively by saying that they proceed from respect for, and generosity toward, the student, and Dr. Benson has these merits in abundant measure. No one who knows Dr. Benson's exacting scholarly standards will think that the errors of this book can in any way be attributed to her, and I only hope they are few enough to make the book an appropriate tribute to her exemplary dedication and her sobering command of Mexican history. M y other friends and contributors are likewise innocent of any sins of omission or commission that future readers may find lurking in the text or its apparatus. Among those I thus happily consign to a paradise beyond the purgatory of judgment we authors must endure, I am particularly grateful to

xii

Acknowledgments

Phil Holliday. Phil showed me that the lens of academic specialization could be meticulously employed without supposing that either the world or the imagination was confined to its depth or range. His was the gift of vision, and I hope to repay it in more appropriate coin at another place and time. Charles O'Neil I thank for helping to shepherd the first drafts through their precarious months with the kind of humor that makes the best of friends truly priceless. I owe a very special word of thanks to Eric Van Young, both for what he gave and what he put up with. I will be honored if my own book is judged to meet standards as high as those he set in his fine study of eighteenth-century agriculture in the Guadalajara area. M y sincerest gratitude goes out toward the directors and personnel of Guadalajara's archival collections for their enlightened assistance, for the consistent courtesy they showed me, and for a certain experiential ethos that cannot be so readily classified or repaid. The quality of Licenciado Hernandez Alvirde's mercy toward Yankee interlopers at the Archivo de Instrumentos Públicos was not strained, but rather lent a certain elan, by the revolutionary pistol he periodically wore around his shoulder. Dona Mari, with her bejeweled bark beetle on a leash, and Jesus with his tireless trips for ladders, g a r n a c h a s , and documents, lightened many a hyperallergenic day among the notarial protocols. In this cheerful but sometimes mildly baffling atmosphere, Licenciado Jose Razo Zaragoza provided a welcome example of sobriety and perseverance for apprentice chroniclers like myself. At the Archivo Histórico Municipal de Guadalajara, Salvador Gomez was a model of Old World courtesy and New World accessibility, and Dona Herminia and her assistants graced this steel and concrete vault with a particular hominess and charm that ten years of social progress have taught me to appreciate more highly. The late Licenciado Jose Cornejo Franco, then-director of the Biblioteca Pública del Estado, was magnanimous enough to ignore proliferating rumors of book-stealing gringos and allow me access to this fine collection. Amidst the clatter of student typewriters and the buzz of pocket tape recorders, I particularly admired the licenciado's imperturbable concentration, exemplified by his ability to smoke a cigarette from tip to butt without once removing it from his mouth or disturbing the ever-growing column of finely balanced ash. Takako Sudo provided much-needed support and encouragement during the difficult period of my first full-time academic job, a dangerous time for any uncompleted manuscript. Takako was generous, loyal, and capable when she might well have saved those resources to meet the intense demands made upon her by a university in turmoil.

Acknowledgments

xiii

In the latter stages of readying the book manuscript, Carmen Castaneda was most helpful and encouraging. Mr. Alain Bally has done a highly professional job of redrawing the map of haciendas and towns. I thank them both from the bottom of my all too slovenly heart. Not a little psychic blood has been spilled along the road from prospectus to printed page. To those wounded along the way I offer apologies no less sincere than the thanks that precede them. In closing, I am delighted with this opportunity to publicly thank my parents, Dr. Ries Raleigh and Mrs. Vesta Muriel Lindley, for giving me a chance at a great adventure, and to all my family for struggling to follow the adventure's many twists and turns, among which the present book counts as one of the more unequivocally happy ones.

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A Note on Sources and Dates

An E. D. Farmer Scholarship and a supplemental grant from the Institute of Latin American Studies of the University of Texas at Austin financed the research for this study. I conducted most of the primary research in 1971 and 1972 in several of Guadalajara's historical archives and in the state library. Of the city's rich documentary collections, the notarial and municipal archives proved to be the most important for my work. The Archivo de Instrumentos Publicos de Guadalajara (AIPG) houses the collection of notarial protocols, or records, for the city and several of the outlying municipalities. These drafts of wills, surety bonds, lawsuits, bills of sale, loan agreements, and other papers form a unique source of information about the region's day-to-day social and economic activities. Most of the notarial protocols were bound in the late nineteenth century. Except in the outlying districts, where frequently no official notary resided, each bound volume ( t o m o ) contains chronological records of one notary public. In a majority of the volumes, the leaves are not numbered. In the interest of facilitating searches for the documents cited here, I have given the most exact date possible in each case. I have also cited the folio or leaf number where it is marked, and supplied one of my own where it is not For brevity's sake, I have used each notary's name only in the first citation and his initials thereafter. The full name and abbreviation of each notary may be found in the list of abbreviations preceding the notes. Volume numbers refer to each notary's series of bound protocols, not to a general numbering system for the entire archival collection. Protocols from the outlying municipalities are bound under the name of the c a b e c e r a , or municipal capital. A typical citation might be " A I P G , FB, 24 January 1805, vol. 4, f. 1." This should be read as "Archivo de Instrumentos Públicos de Guadalajara,

xvi

A Note on Sources and Dates

Protocolos del Notario Francisco Barrionuevo, volume 4, folio 1." A v (verso) following the folio number indicates the reverse side of the leaf. The Archivo Histórico Municipal de Guadalajara ( A H M G ) contains the minutes of town council meetings (the actas de c a b i l d o ) and any supporting documents or correspondence attached thereto. This collection covers the sixteenth century to the present time, and is kept in boxes arranged in notvery-reliable chronological order. Ideally each box would contain the business of the council for one year, but in fact some boxes contain several unrelated years, and others only a fraction of one. Within a box, documents are supposed to be filed in the standard expedientes and legajos (an expediente is a file of papers relating to a single person or "case," and a legajo is a group of expedientes classified and stored together). Unfortunately, the disorder within the boxes is too great to make citation of these categories more than occasionally useful. I usually cite the archive by box (caja) number only and I use the newer of the two extant numbering systems. Several archivists and scholars have made progress in classifying and indexing the material since this project was completed; their cataloging work is not published but presumably is available from the director or from personnel at the Archivo Histórico de Jalisco. The archival repository of Guadalajara's a u d i e n c i a has not survived intact, but important portions of it remain in the Biblioteca Pública del Estado de Jalisco (BPE). The Archivo del Juzgado de Bienes de Difuntos (JBD) de Nueva Galicia (Nueva Galicia's court for the disposition of estates left by peninsular Spaniards or other nonlocal subjects of the Spanish realm who died intestate) proved very useful. The Archivo Judicial de la Audiencia (AJA), which contains criminal and civil proceedings and which once formed part of the province's Archivo de Gobierno, also proved valuable. Items taken from either of these two sources are cited according to expediente and legajo number. Again, the citations are somewhat approximate, since many of the original bindings have deteriorated, and entropy has taken its toll of the original filing system. Given the nature of these collections and of the information I was gathering, it is difficult to asign precise outside limits to the time period under study. In order to amass a significant body of data on a family or a piece of property, it was often necessary to cast considerably forward or backward in time through the notarial records. The period covered by this work (1795-1826) reflects my desire to look at adult members of the elite who were active in business and politics during the generation that made the transition from colony to independent nation. The year 1795 is a somewhat arbitarry date that represents the approximate culminnation of the building boom and the beginning of conspiracies for independence; 1826 inaugurated the first constitutional state government of Jalisco.

Haciendas and Economic Development

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Introduction

Late-colonial Guadalajara's economy and government were controlled by an oligarchy, a ruling elite of families that concentrated wealth, prestige, and political power in its own hands. Using kinship and credit as mainstays, the oligarchy built a pattern of social relations that prevented redistribution of wealth and power outside its control. Kinship and credit also permitted the local elite to straddle, and in considerable measure to rise above, the great dichotomies built into colonial Spanish society: those between church and state, agriculture and commerce, or between Creoles (American-bora Spaniards) and peninsulars (natives of the Iberian peninsula). Intermarriage between Creoles and peninsulars and the commingling of agricultural, commercial, manufacturing, and mining interests in family enterprises cemented by kinship and credit bonds were strategies for social survival that permitted the elite to turn the divisive thrust of colonial dynamics to its own advantage. In a very concrete sense, family enterprise, with its ability to incorporate both colonizer and colonized into a single working unit, gave Guadalajara's oligarchy its special character as a semiautonomous, local elite apart—though never completely divorced from—Mexico City or Spain. National independence, which Mexico achieved in 1821, undercut this particular system for preserving wealth and power, although it was to be at least half a century before the new nation-state and its institutions firmly controlled Mexican society. Economic dislocations caused by the independence wars that broke out in 1810 led the royalists to open western New Spain to immigration. Dozens of powerful merchants flocked to the city of Guadalajara from different parts of the world and carried with them the most potent of weapons for change in a regional society built on credithard, British currency. With the speed and single-mindedness of zealous

4

Introduction

missionaries, these new merchants set about changing the system they encountered. Between about 1814 and 1826 they bought out local family haciendas and mercantile operations, brought new areas under cultivation, encouraged adventures in industrial corporations, changed the terms and scale of moneylending operations, helped remove both the formal and informal encumbrances that prevented ready alienation of land, and made spectacular, albeit unsuccessful, attempts to revitalize the crippled mining economy. Despite this flurry of activity, which either circumvented or entirely replaced the local elite's traditional means of mobilizing funds and maintaining its monopoly on city government and markets, the same group of families that dominated the public life of the region under the Spanish crown continued to govern and exploit the newly emerged state of Jalisco. In fact, there is some evidence that many of the new foreign merchant families, such as the Panamanian Olazagarres, the British Lancaster-Joneses, or the Irish-Spanish Barrons, intermarried with the local elite and were sooner or later absorbed into its method of operating, rather than the other way around. Many of the privileged social bodies of the colonial era, such as the Real Consulado (the royal merchants' guild), the tobacco monopoly, and the church's and military's separate courts of justice, survived well into the national period. Did the Revolution of 1810, then, bring real or only apparent change? Focusing attention on kinship and credit relations makes it possible to see that real and important changes did take place. The oligarchy may have remained largely the same, but the context within which that oligarchy was imbedded changed quite drastically. In other words, the same people continued to seize and hold the twin prizes of wealth and power, but the rules by which they competed for them were altered irrevocably. Guadalajara's society moved from one organized along family and community lines in the direction of one constructed around impersonal contractual relations. Like Henry Sumner Maine's "progressive societies," Guadalajara was moving from "status" to "contract." "Status" refers to obligations determined on a "personal" basis, and "contract" to a set of obligations created by, and limited to, a specific agreement Writing after Maine, Ferdinand Tönnies expanded the concepts of status and contract into G e m e i n s c h a f t (or community), and Gesellschaft (or association). He used "community" to signify an ideal group of human relationships that included birthright, home, kinship, and belonging to a locale. Family, local agriculture, villages, and religious congregations are examples of institutions in which community prevails. "Association" typified social entities created to fulfill a specific, conscious purpose and were usually based on voluntary

Introduction

5

association. Examples of this group are cultural clubs, business corporations, urban government, and scientific educational institutions. Tönnies first published his work on community and association in 1887, when Germany was only recently unified and still in the throes of a historical process initiated in Europe by the French Revolution. The process, essentially the emergence of modern nationhood under bourgeois institutions, has everywhere brought greater centralization of government authority and greater secularization of the state bureaucracy. It acted to abolish special juridical exemptions and privileges, such as the right of clergymen and military men not to be tried in civil courts; it disencumbered land of entails, which limited inheritance to a specified succession of heirs, and of mortmains, by which institutions such as the church held land in perpetual ownership and were forbidden to alienate it; it replaced church registration of births, marriages, and burials with state-controlled records; it created secular public-education systems; and it instituted state licensing of banks and limited-liability corporations. Since the modern bourgeois state encompasses aspects of social life that were formerly the province of tradition, it regards all traditional community institutions as rivals. It therefore systematically eliminates these institutions and effectively severs the individual from his or her traditional lands, village community, language, native religion, folk culture, or even extended family. 1

Thus "liberated" from a complex of largely community or G e m e i n s c h a f t like institutions individuals find themselves compelled to restructure their relation to society around a new set of organizations and institutions much more heavily characterized by association (Gesellschaft). Modern business corporations, social clubs, labor unions, and political parties have developed as the most important of these new contractual organizations, after more than two centuries of painful trial and error. But these pillars of the bourgeois state have not replaced all of the values and services once provided by traditional community: many people, for example, now live without the intimate assistance in child-rearing that extended kinship networks once provided. Guadalajara in 1821 was no stranger to this worldwide process of change. Chapter 4 details some of the local manifestations of the process— replacement of personal credit with institutional, and of family enterprise with business corporations, abolition of entails, creation of a universal court system independent of executive powers, legalization of divorce, disamortization and sale of church lands, and elimination of separately incorporated Indian communities with their independent municipal funds. Without stopping to evaluate when or to what extent this tendency succeeded in recreating the European models from which it derived, we may fairly state that

6

Introduction

independence introduced a powerful tendency to replace community with association. Although Tönnies's concepts permit us to characterize large and important changes that took place in Guadalajara's regional society and economy between 1795 and 1826, they do not require us to presume that the oligarchy disappeared or that its membership changed drastically. Nothing in the association concept implies that a society organized in accordance with that concept's principles is any more or less democratic than any other, or that wealth is distributed in any more equal fashion. A society moving from community to association may do so without undergoing the particular kinds of social change (inversion of the power structure and redistribution of wealth) for which we now reserve the term "revolution." The changes that took place in a transition such as early nineteenthcentury Guadalajara underwent were nonetheless radical with respect to their colonial precedents. The internal organizing principles by which the elite preserved its identity and position, the mechanisms by which aspirants might rise to that elite, and the social instruments through which the elite mediated its relations with the rest of society changed quite profoundly as a result of the transition from colony to independent nation. Tönnies's ideas permit us to see this radical change without confusing it with the contemporary notion of revolution. Another great change with ultimately revolutionary implications was affecting Guadalajara at this time: the transformation of peasants, craftsmen, and muledrivers into a proletariat that would harvest the new cash crops and man the textile, match, and shoe factories of the midnineteenth century. As in Europe, the internal development of New Spain's society created a pool of free wage labor before institutional changes created the conditions that permitted a truly capitalist exploitation of labor. The feudal-like institutions ( e n c o m i e n d a and r e p a r t i m i e n t o ) that required natives to work for landlords in the city or the countryside in exchange for certain "services," (such as Christianization), had died a more or less natural death by the beginning of the eighteenth century. A mixed system of debt peonage and wage labor existed in the eighteenth century, with wage labor becoming increasingly more common as the nineteenth century approached. Eric Van Young has shown that population growth, encroachment on village lands by large landowners, and increasing specialization of labor functions impoverished rural laborers and dislodged many of them from their villages and propelled them into migrant rural labor or into crafts or day labor in the city. We know that by 1795, some twenty thousand o b r a j e r o s (textile weavers) were working in shops throughout the intendancy of Guadalajara. The scope of this study does not permit me to analyze or characterize in 2

Introduction

7

any detail the changes that took place at the other end of the social spectrum from the oligarchy. The historical processes acting on all social classes were nevertheless similar, although their effects varied in different settings. Insofar as it permits us to see the more general theme of social change, my study of the oligarchy also helps put the working class in perspective. The new rural and industrial proletarian was not only a worker deprived of the means of production (land and tools), but deprived as well of the mutual support that extended-family relations offered, of the economic defenses that the traditional craft guilds offered, of membership in a community where survival was a collective project—deprived, in short, of traditional community ( G e m e i n s c h a f t ) and forced to enter into the grimmest Gesellschaft relation of all, the contract to exchange labor for wage, and full community life for alienanted subsistence.

8

Colonial Guadalajara and Haciendas

Introduction

1. City and Countryside

The

City

Guadalajara's Beginnings and Growth The Spaniards settled many of their early colonial cities in unlikely locations. A number of well-known European travelers commented on this peculiarity, and Baron Alexander von Humboldt, perhaps the best known of all European visitors to the New World, named Guadalajara of the Indies a good example of a misplaced city. The future city was not to be located on the site of an Indian settlement, as were Mexico City and Cuzco, and the Hapsburgs, with the formalism typical of their dynasty, issued a cėdula ("decree") "founding" the ci ty in 1536, even before the earliest dwellers had deci ded on a fi nal si te for bui ldi ng. Later, the strikingly geometri c preci si on of the ci ty's street plan would reflect the arbitrary formality of the ci ty's founding, and several colonial commen­ tators would characterize the city as a synthetic artifact, i mposed on the surrounding envi ronment wi th li ttle regard to mi li tary, economi c, or social consi derati ons. Even now a casual observer mi ght have di ffi culty seei ng the advantages of Guadalajara's si te. The precipitous walls of La Barranca, an i mposi ng gorge that cuts across the north and east sides of the ci ty, render northward travel di ffi cult even i n thi s age of sophi sti cated technology. For the fi rst three hundred years of urban growth, ci ty fathers could supply Guadalajara's i nhabi tants wi th only margi nal amounts of potable water. The li ttle stream of San Juan de Di os cut through the center of town a path roughly the same as today's Calzada de la Independenci a, but the tanneries and mills along its banks turned it into little more than a noxious sewer. The cleaner, much more abundant waters 1

10

City and Countryside

of the Rio Santiago ran in remote, rough country, out of reach of the technology of aqueducts until long after Guadalajara's founding. Winters in the area are dry, summers can be oppressively hot, and the nearest neighboring settlements then were small, widely scattered towns with weak economies, offering little in the way of available supplies or labor. Despite such obstacles, Guadalajara quickly became New Spain's "second city," a rank it held well into the twentieth century, when Monterrey displaced it. The urban population expanded from a few families to about 600 white residents in 1600, then to 11,000 inhabitants of all types around 1750. By about 1800, nearly 35,000 people lived in Guadalajara, at a time when Boston, the United States' third-largest city, had a population of about 25,000. Economically, Guadalajara became the trade link between New Spain and the interior provinces to the north and west. Politically, the city enjoyed special privileges as the head of a large diocese and the seat of New Spain's only a u d i e n c i a outside Mexico City. 2

3

The C i t y ' s A g r a r i a n Base The viability of its agrarian base constituted a critical factor in determining the city's potential for growth. Guadalajara commanded an array of agricultural commodities sufficient to maintain a decent urban standard of living by colonial standards. The wet lowlands along the banks of the Rio Santiago to the south and east supplied wheat for the European palate, and copious shipments of corn came into the city from all directions. From the west came sugar and tequila. Still more corn, lesser amounts of tequila, and pork, came in from the east The more barren land to the north specialized in sheep, cattle, horses, mules, and burros. In addition to food, these animals provided wool for textiles, hides for shoes, saddles, and packs, and the backbone of the region's transportation system. Lake Chapala, about fifty kilometers to the south, was commercially fished during the colonial period, although the perishability of white fish limited its contribution to the local diet Locally grown beans, chiles, tomatoes, squash, and fowl supplemented available grain staples. Many area growers raised barley, probably used mainly to feed animals. Beeswax for candles, charcoal, firewood, clay and clay goods, glass manufactures, and other handcrafted goods also originated in the city's immediate surroundings. Large orchards were common around dwellings along the urban perimeter, although it is not clear to what extent they contributed to "home" consumption as opposed to local markets. Wood was scarce, but could still be brought down from the more rugged mountain tops. Construction materials, mainly adobe and quarry stone, existed locally in abundance, and surface mineral deposits supplied salts and soap-making materials.

City and Countryside

11

Area haciendas, located for the most part within a one-day mule ride of the city, produced all of the staples in this list and many supplementary items as well. Many of the supplementary commodities supplied by r a n c h e r o s (small landowners) and peasants found their way to city markets through the hacienda system as well, because r a n c h e r o s depended on the hacienda's credit network, its storage facilities, and its mule train service. Market regulations written by a government in which hacendados sat as the principal agents often controlled their deliveries. Guadalajara's geographic isolation and the particular history of the region's conquest by the Spaniards combined to give the hacienda special prominence. The local indigenous population had never been as dense as that of the Central Valley of Mexico before the Conquest. Nuno de Guzman led the campaigns to subjugate Nueva Galicia. The Indians intensely and violently resisted his incursions, and his cruelty was so notorious that even his hardened military peers condemned the wholesale slaughters he perpetrated in the Northwest Most of the area's inhabitants died in battle or fled, and their families were stripped of their communal land rights. Thus the Indian community was prevented from acting as a serious competitor to the colonial hacienda. Moreover, since the semiarid climate around Guadalajara dictated extensive rather than intensive land use, local haciendas grew in number and attained impressive size and economic power. By the end of the eighteenth century, the haciendas played at least as important a role as the small, rural town, or p u e b l o , as nuclei of rural social life. Haciendas perhaps exceeded the towns in diversity of social, religious, and economic functions, and not infrequently surpassed the towns in population. Haciendas came to be more than the city's rural counterpart. Through the local-market structure—the substratum for all other commerce—haciendas acted as an integral part of the city and its life. Far from being isolated from the city, they were imbedded in the urban context through the grain market The local trade in grain staples, in fact, occupied so important a place in the city that David Brading attributes only two basic functions to colonial Hispanic city government: "It maintained public order [and] it regulated the sale and supply of grain by the upkeep of a municipal granary." By the late eighteenth century, Guadalajara had become first and foremost a market for locally produced agricultural commodities, and its government existed to regulate that market Given the importance of the hacienda, and the intimacy of its relationship to the city, the name "Guadalajara" should be used to include both the city and its surrounding countryside. In this sense Guadalajara is comparable to Richard Morse's prototype of the Latin American colonial town: a 4

12 City and Countryside "semiautonomous, agrourban polis, rather than . . . empire."

an outpost of

5

Commerce and Mining Built on this simple base, of course, was a complex structure of long-range trade, mining, and cultural activity. Interoceanic trade was the link that connected the "semiautonomous polis" to the "outpost of empire" in Morse's formula. Spain employed long-distance commerce to exploit the local agricultural economy to its advantage. Principal goods supplied by external trade were wine, textiles, and nonprecious metals (mainly iron and iron products). These were "paid for" with the principal items of local produce: grain staples, animals, and animal products. Perhaps an even more important role of external trade was to furnish credit for financing the local economy. Local merchants were also local moneylenders: they paid interest on money deposits and collected interest on money they lent out Guadalajara's merchants operated independently of Mexico City at least to the extent that they traveled in person to Veracruz or to San Juan de los Lagos to buy their inventory. Whether they typically bought from Mexico City middlemen or whether they more often bought direct consignments of goods from the exterior does not emerge clearly from the documents. Since the merchants made these trips in person, since they had close kinship ties and kept up close correspondence with the influential mercantile community in Cadiz, and since they enjoyed direct access to shipments from Manila or South America arriving at San Blas, on the west coast, it seems reasonable to assume that the city's traders were "semiautonomous" of Mexico City with respect to their lines of supply. Of course, they maintained business and family ties in Mexico as well as in other regional centers. San Juan de los Lagos, less than two hundred kilometers from the capital of Nueva Galicia, hosted one of the New World's largest commercial fairs, comparable to those of Jalapa and Acapulco. Every December Guadalajara's merchants repaired to this little highlands town, where as many as 100,000 persons from all parts of New Spain's territories met to mix business, pleasure, and danger. In a few days of brawling and bartering, twenty thousand muleloads of merchandise changed hands, not to mention the livestock that ranchers must have traded in great numbers. This narrow funnel of San Juan's trade fair, where interoceanic, central, provincial, and hinterlands trade mingled, channeled most of the profits toward Guadalajara's pool of commercial capital. 6

City and Countryside

13

The E i g h t e e n t h - C e n t u r y B o o m Mining, the "seed" industry that promoted the development of so many towns and agricultural regions in colonial New Spain, had relatively little impact on Guadalajara's early growth. Local discoveries had been modest before the eighteenth century, and the rich mines of Zacatecas poured their silver directly into Mexico City's coffers. The bonanza in 1747 at Bolaiios (actual discovery, 1746) initiated a period of explosive development and prosperity for Guadalajara. The income from a mine that, in 1802, ranked fifth among New Spain's silver producers must have had a great deal to do with the sudden expansion experienced by the city after about 1760, although commercial developments also figured as a cause. Legislation in 1774 permitted reciprocal trade for the first time among Peru, Nueva Granada, Guatemala, and New Spain. Cacao from Guayaquil, indigo from Guatemala, and cotton began to flow into the port of San Blas, in spite of still-heavy taxes. Population swelled as the city's economy boomed. Landowners refurbished old rural estates and founded new ones. Tequila-producing agave plants and other cash crops, such as tobacco, apparently flourished more vigorously than before. Although mining seeded many of these developments, the fact that Guadalajara's producers found markets in Mexico City, throughout all of northern New Spain, and among its own growing population indicated that the boom would not collapse with the decline of the mines, and in fact it did not. Evidence of how this eighteenth-century boom transformed Guadalajara is still visible in the city's monumental architecture. As new institutions sprang to life, the buildings designed to house them changed the city's face. The university, the mint, the gigantic orphanage known as the Hospicio Cabanas, the sprawling Hospital de Belen, all came into existence between 1790 and 1810. At the same time Guadalajara became the site of one of the New World's few c o n s u l a d o s , or royal merchant guilds. The church, as always, remained the chief custodian of the artistic expressions of Guadalajara's opulence. The baroque extravagances of the Chapel of Aranzazu, the more restrained elegance of San Felipe Neri, and the massive neoclassical addition to the cathedral were all products of the latter part of the eighteenth century, although San Felipe Neri and the cathedral addition were finished in the first years of the nineteenth. The city that we think of today as colonial Guadalajara had in fact only recently mushroomed when the Spanish empire began to collapse. 7

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Manufactures and Other Businesses With prosperity came the beginnings of industry. Humboldt comments on

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the textile boom after 1765, and Robert Potash notes the tremendous increase in the number of o b r a j e s , or weavers' shops. The first real textile mill would not begin production until the 1840s, but clearly the groundwork for local industry was being laid before independence. The commercial and mining boom attracted a labor pool, and independence would open a path for new capital. Even before independence, however, textile manufacture was expanding through the establishment of numerous shops, which Humboldt calls "factories," but which can only have been pequenos t a l l e r e s , or small workshops. Several other branches of manufacture had moved beyond the stage of individual artisanry, although, like textiles, none of them had yet arrived at a truly industrial stage. Rather, they were heavily commercialized, so that they acquired some of the characteristics of a large, capitalist enterprise. What distinguished them from craft-guild enterprise (though most were still subsumed under the guild system) was primarily the high level of capital investment required and the type of exploitation of labor: specifically, subordination of the master craftsman to a financier, and aggregation of as many as twenty, perhaps fifty, laborers under a single roof. Enterprises that fit this model of organization were hide tanning, wheat milling, wheat-bread baking, and wax manufacture (cereria). Bakeries were especially numerous; there were over twenty major ones before 1810, and so many of the bootleg variety that guild inspectors despaired of even counting them. Closely connected to the bakeries were the city's four major flour mills: the Molino del Batan, the Molino de las Beatas, the Molino de los Joya, and the Molino de la Sierra. The Molino del Batan, for example, was assessed a value of 25,000 pesos in 1829. Tanneries also were numerous, ranging from one-man shops to enterprises valued as high as 35,000 pesos. One local wax manufacturer had a personal fortune of over 10,000 pesos; another suffered sharp criticism in 1809 for opening a branch shop in contravention of guild regulations. Like many of the bakeries and tanneries, his c e r e r i a had grown too large to be contained in the narrow limits of the self-employed artisan's shop. At least half a dozen travelers' inns (mesones) existed in the area, and entrepreneurs in town also owned a number of inns in o u t l y i n g p u e b l o s such as Zapopan, Zapotlanejo, and Tepatitlan. The assessed value of these mesones ranged from around thirteen thousand pesos to thirty thousand pesos. These were only the more profitable and highly organized city business adventures. Opportunities for investment were quite diverse, as shown by the kinds of businesses listed in Guadalajara's early-nineteenth century tax 10

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rolls: public lodgings, bathhouses, mills, commercial locations, craft shops, sugar or mezcal refineries, even billiard halls. Gambling was the vice of soldiers and muledrivers, and a variety of games operated lucratively, if not always legitimately—all this without counting the lowest strata of business: the profusion of market stalls, street vendors' stands, miniature taverns that consisted of little more than a pot and a ladle, brothels, prepared-food dispensaries, and laundries. Finally, there was the omnipresent business of urban-property rental, which went on at both extremes of the capitalist spectrum. Guadalajara may have been provincial, but its economic base was variegated, expansive, and prosperous. Some tangible sense of Guadalajara's affluence emerges from an account of the expropriations of Hidalgo's insurgent army when it occupied the city in 1810. In spite of the flight of many wealthy peninsulars and numerous attempts to bury or abscond with funds, Hidalgo's men managed to round up in the space of one chaotic day (December 12) over half a million pesos. Almost half came from royal coffers, a somewhat lesser proportion from the church, and perhaps a fifth from private fortunes. In sum, this was an urban center very much like Mexico City in every respect but size. Like the viceregal capital, Guadalajara in 1800 was the seat of an a u d i e n c i a and an episcopal see; it enjoyed revenue from one of the world's most productive silver mines; it engaged in commerce with several areas of the world; it commanded a typical New World variety of agricultural commodities and livestock, ranging from maize to mules; it was in the process of acquiring the textile factories the absence of which up to that time had distinguished it from other second-ranking urban centers such as Puebla; it would soon (within ten years or so) acquire a community of foreigners to give itself a cosmopolitan polish; and it had enjoyed the luxury of its own theater for almost two generations. 14

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N e i g h b o r h o o d Race a n d Class Patterns Guadalajara was topographically segregated according to class, race, and occupation. People from every background met and mingled in public places such as the market, the main downtown plazas, parochial churches, and the theater. In their private lives, however, the Indians retreated to their dwelling places in the suburbs, the artisans to their quarters in casas de v e c i n d a d and boardinghouses, and the affluent merchants retired with their landed wives to mansions located around or near the central plazas. The most ancient of Guadalajara's divisions was that between Indian and white. Indian p u e b l o s flanked the city on three sides. Only one of these p u e b l o s , San Miguel de Mezquitan, existed before the arrival of the 17

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Spaniards. It was inhabited by Tecuex Indians under the C a c i c a z g o (the territorial jurisdiction of an Indian c a c i q u e , or chief, and in a broader sense, the perquisites of the corresponding office) of Tonala. Other Tecuex, mixed with some Coca, followed the Franciscans from their first settlement at Tetlan to the Valley of Atemajac and there founded the p u e b l o of San Sebastian de Analco. The third community, San Juan Bautista de Mexicalzingo, consisted of Indians, many of them Tlaxcala, transplanted from Mexico's central valley on orders of Viceroy Mendoza in 1540. By 1800 the city had physically, but not yet legally, incorporated all three Indian p u e b l o s . Legal incorporation took place in 1821. Although racial distinctions had blurred considerably, these b a r r i o s retained their basically Indian character under the abbreviated names Mezquitan, Mexicalzingo, and Analco. Two larger Indian towns, the v i l l a (in size and legal privileges, between a p u e b l o and a city) of Zapopan and the p u e b l o of San Pedro Tlaquepaque, originally more distant, were already virtual adjuncts of the city by 1800, although they would not merge with Guadalajara's urban sprawl until the twentieth century. Tlaquepaque, then as now, was famous for two things—-its pottery and the resort homes of Guadalajara's plutocrats. Zapopan, a small, rural center producing corn, fruit, and cattle, has always been best known as the home of the Virgin revered by the T a p a t i o s (natives of the city of Guadalajara) as their patroness. Between these Indian outskirts and the wealthy, Europeanized center lay a large, indeterminate district inhabited by professionals, semiprofessionals, craftsmen, shopkeepers, laborers, unemployed people, transients, beggars, mule drivers, r a n c h e r o s , soldiers, and simple hustlers whose life-style ran the gamut from extreme poverty to the near side of opulence. 18

19

With its university and its special courts, Guadalajara supported an especially large and diversified professional class. Lawyers, physicians, teachers, pharmacists, bureaucrats, managers, accountants of various sorts, even career military officers, made up a group that, because of its genealogies and credit relations, we should class as a subsidiary fragment of the agrocommercial elite. We can also group rank and file clergymen in this category of people who were similar mainly in that all received a salary. Their pay might range from one hundred or two hundred pesos a year to as much as six hundred, even one thousand pesos. A respectable "subsistence" income for a widow, a retired officer, or a clerk was twenty to fifty pesos a month. Many professionals differed from their cousins in the oligarchy mainly in their lack of any independent capital with which to invest, and this is undoubtedly why the contemporary literature sometimes refers to them as poor. The artisan class was also large, also internally complex. The city's 20

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records for 1809 show at least a dozen organized craft guilds, including milliners, blacksmiths, wax-chandlers, and the like. The coach or carriage makers, probably one of the smaller trades, reported a membership of at least twenty-eight Cobblers must have been numberless. Income varied enormously from one trade to another, and, within a trade, from the independent artisan to the employee of one of the larger manufacturing firms. The famous "Indian" architect Pedro Cipres received an income comparable to that of a successful lawyer, although many craftsmen worked for skilled-labor wages. Skilled workers received four or five reals (one peso=eight reals) for a day's labor before independence. Of course, the wage lasted only as long as the job, and jobs were often measured in terms of days, not weeks or months. Day laborers (jornaleros) were paid at about half this rate, and often did odd jobs and ran errands for a half-real, or medio. A medio before independence would buy a shot of raw liquor ( c h a r a p e ) , seven ounces of soap, or about a kilo of meat One or two reals was a ticket to the local house of prostitution. The public life of the city revolved around the central plazas. Here, to judge from contemporary observers' accounts, was the only place where Guadalajara displayed any discernible character or style. The rest of the city wore a plain face, but the downtown, the core from which Guadalajara initially grew and spread outward, was imposing, ornate, articulate in the rhetoric of stone. Here stood the altars dripping with gold, the government palaces, the markets and stores that poured the odors and noises of merchandising into the streets, the merchants' tribunal, the bishop's castle, and the city's cloisters and schools. Also here, among the sacred monuments and the profane, the rich built their homes. Palatial in size, expense, and complexity of function, preindependence mansions were nevertheless modest in outward show. Most of the older homes were quite plain, breaking into ornamentation only at the main entrance. Luis Perez Verdia described the upper classes as retiring and unsociable, and the only two houses that reflected a lately acquired taste for ostentation seem to have been the mansion of the Cariedo family, finished after the turn of the century, and the eighteenth-century palace of the Spaniard Juan Manuel Caballero. Most of the town houses of the wealthy contained storehouses, shops, and stables, servants' quarters, and coach houses. The practice of combining living space with storage, stabling, and merchandising space would no doubt seem undignified to a modern person of "quality," but was probably intended to permit the safeguarding of inventory; at any rate, it was traditional. The existence of t i e n d a s and t r a s t i e n d a s (shops and warehouses) in the architectural descriptions of upper-class mansions points to an important 21

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fact By the late-eighteenth century, commerce had been thoroughly integrated into Guadalajara's pattern of wealth and class. No longer could the city's chroniclers treat the merchants, as Don Alonso de la Mota y Escobar did at the beginning of the seventeenth century, as an anomalous entity sandwiched in between the "rich" and the "poor." "There are in this city," he said, "three citizens called rich, the fortunes of each of whom reaches one hundred thousand pesos; the rest, not including the merchants, are poor, and one is called poor in this country who does not have above two thousand pesos. There are twenty-two merchants at the present time. . . . The fortunes of these merchants are four, six, ten, fifteen, and twenty thousand pesos. By 1800 de la Mota would have been wrong on all counts: the merchants were now indistinguishable from the rich. They had multiplied in number, and the average mercantile fortune had more than trebled. Since the mercantile class forms the subject of this book, it is useful to pause for a moment over two questions about the oligarchs: How numerous were they? and What were their fortunes typically worth before the wars for independence? 25

The O l i g a r c h y ' s Size a n d W e a l t h Guadalajara had a population of about 35,000 in 1803. Assuming that some 3 to 5 percent of the inhabitants could be classed in the oligarchy, this class would comprise 1,000 to 1,500 individual members, or 200 to 300 five-member families. Since census records indicate that many wealthy families tended to group together in extended households (up to 20 individuals under a single roof), the actual number of elite family units was probably smaller still, around 100 to 150. Given the weight of the rural hacienda in the local economy, the number of nonhacienda-owning families in Guadalajara's oligarchy was small indeed, and thus the number of local haciendas provides a cross-check on the number of elite families. Antonio Garcia Cuba's geographical atlas of 1858 lists 391 haciendas in the state of Jalisco. The jurisdiction's surface area in 1858 was some 15 percent larger than that of the intendancy of Guadalajara in 1800. If anything, we would expect the density of haciendas under cultivation to have been lower at the earlier date, so perhaps 300 is a reasonable estimate of the total number of haciendas in the intendancy of Guadalajara before independence. Since many of these properties depended for their markets and social relations not on Guadalajara, but on outlying towns such as Lagos, Autlan, or Zapotlan el Grande (Ciudad Guzman), and since most landowning families tended to control several haciendas, the number of 26

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landed property units (groups of haciendas under common family ownership) is probably compatible with the estimated number of elite families living under a common roof. That is, there were probably 100 to 150 elite families closely associated with the city and important in its power structure. An hacienda, in order to be properly so called before 1810, had to be worth a minimum of six thousand pesos. Interestingly, this matches the figure given by the prestigious merchant Ignacio Gil as the minimum estate he required of his daughters' prospective husbands. This was evidently the amount of capital needed to distinguish an individual of recognized wealth ("de conocidas proporciones," in Gil's words) from someone like a salaried teacher or bureaucrat, whose yearly income might be only as great as the interest on such principal, but who did not have capital behind his income. Of course, 6,000 pesos was only a minimum; Guadalajara's family fortunes were worth many times more by 1800. The family of Guadalajara's cathedral canon, Cesareo de la Rosa, owned properties worth about 280,000 pesos. The Villasenor estate in 1808 was valued at over 120,000 pesos in improvements to rural property alone. Eric Van Young has gathered data showing that the Vizcarra family (holder of the title of Marques de Pánuco) was worth over a million pesos as a group by the end of the eighteenth century. Broadly speaking, this is the oligarchy the internal structure of which I will attempt to describe. This is neither the elegant millionaire class of Mexico City, nor the powerful but crude-living c a u d i l l o class of Argentina; it is, rather, a particular kind of oligarchy defined by the potential and limits of the region that nurtured it. The elite's control of social wealth and power enabled it to realize this potential by incorporating local resources into an internal structure of family and credit relations, of inheritance and exploitation. This structure expressed the overall society's integration of agricultural and commercial, metropolitan and colonial elements into a functioning whole and gave that whole its continuity. This is why the oligarchy is worth studying—not because its members are more "powerful," "important," or "interesting" in themselves, nor because they can be more readily documented, but because the structure of their internal relations renders visible the hidden machinery that powered the colonial system, or at least its local variant, for several centuries. 27

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The O l i g a r c h y ' s E c o n o m i c Base For the local oligarchy, its own integration into the local economy was synonymous with integration of the economy's rural and urban poles. As Chapter 3 shows, elite individuals used marriage ties to form family

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enterprises that coordinated mining, agriculture, and commercial ventures. Products of these family enterprises were marketed mainly in the city, and the city government controlled most of the market structure through its regulation of the two great staples—grain and animal products. But every product that figured importantly in urban trade except precious metals originated in the great agricultural estates. Mining was the only major economic activity that stood apart from the great rural estates. Production of silver and gold required a different system of labor and a different organization of economic factors. Most importantly, production and marketing of the precious metals was controlled not by the city government, but by the crown itself, through a centralized bureaucracy that bypassed local control. The crown technically reserved all subsoil rights to itself, extracted up to a fifth of the value of the ore directly from its producers, and delegated its regulatory authority to the recently organized Mining Tribunal in Mexico City, for which there was no equivalent in Guadalajara. To place mining in its proper economic perspective in Guadalajara's history would require a very special effort. The actual mining took place in relatively distant centers such as Bolanos, Hostotipaquillos, and Guachinango. The Mining Tribunal's records are in Mexico City. Records of the crown's extraction of tribute or of mint operations may have existed in the archives of Guadalajara's a u d i e n c i a , but a major part of this archive has disappeared, and the rest is in Spain. Disputes between the city council and the g o b i e r n o s u p e r i o r (the crown bureaucracy, principally t h e jefe p o l i t i c o [political chief], the a u d i e n c i a , and the royal treasury officials), which must have frequently centered on the crown's share of local revenue, are shrouded in a veil of secrecy, since the notary of the a y u n t a m i e n t o (the combined organs of city government the c a b i l d o , or city council, and its adjunct committees and officers) was forbidden to record internal disputes or to identify officials by name with positions taken in debate. Notarial protocols, on the whole, reveal less about mining because the miners performed their legal transactions in Mexico City, Zacatecas, or Aguascalientes at least as often as in Guadalajara. For these and other reasons, the present study penetrates only superficially the relation of society and economy in Guadalajara's mining sector. Nevertheless, a number of circumstances lead me to believe that a full account of mining would not vitiate or profoundly alter any conclusions about the local oligarchy based on agricultural and commercial data. Mining production was closely related to agricultural haciendas. Both the mules that turned the winches and the corn that fed the mules came from rural estates. The miners fed their laborers with corn and mutton, clothed them with

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woolen textiles, and otherwise provisioned them with hacienda products. Guadalajara's elite families included mines, along with haciendas and merchandise, in their investment portfolios. There was no distinct set of mine-owning families set apart from landowners or merchants. Finally, a look at the local production statistics supports the interpretation here offered, that agriculture was far more fundamental to New Spain's colonial economy than was the production of precious metals. The Countryside P r o d u c t s of G u a d a l a j a r a ' s L o c a l Economy In 1802 Guadalajara's intendant, Fernando Abascal, reported that the total value of his province's agricultural production was about 2,599,000 pesos per year. Working from the same reports, Humboldt raised Abascal's estimate to about 3,000,000 pesos. By way of contrast, Bolanos and the other mines of the intendancy produced some 230,000 marcos of silver annually. Depending on which equivalency figure one uses in the conversion, this yields a minimum annual silver production of 1,610,000 pesos or a maximum of 1,955,000 pesos. In either case, the annual amount is considerably less than that for agricultural production. Surprisingly enough, Guadalajara was representative of the colony as a whole in this respect In spite of the popular, one-dimensional image of New Spain as a spectacular world producer of gold and silver, the value of precious metals produced yearly was always lower than the value of all crops. Spain's richest colony was fundamentally an agricultural and commercial colony, and Guadalajara typifies this agrourban base better than do specialized, boom-and-bust towns like Guanajuato or Zacatecas. Abascal's 1802 report makes manufacturing as important or even more so than agriculture by giving it an annual value of 3,302,000 pesos. It is well to remember, however, that the major branches of local manufacture depended directly and entirely on the hacienda to supply their raw materials. Thus hides, valued at 419,000 pesos a year, and textiles, valued at 1,600,000 pesos annually, derived from local hacendados' animal herds. The 260,000 pesos' worth of soap produced every year was made primarily from tequesquites and animal fat, or sebo ( t e q u e s q u i t e s , a mineral made up mostly of sodium chloride and sodium carbonate, is found on the surface of dry lake beds and was exploited as a resource by hacendados whose land included such sites; Guadalajara's poor still use it as a cleansing agent, and it can be bought in the Libertad market). Together these three industries accounted for nearly 70 percent of the value of regional manufactures. The wood, sand, 30

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woolen textiles, and otherwise provisioned them with hacienda products. Guadalajara's elite families included mines, along with haciendas and merchandise, in their investment portfolios. There was no distinct set of mine-owning families set apart from landowners or merchants. Finally, a look at the local production statistics supports the interpretation here offered, that agriculture was far more fundamental to New Spain's colonial economy than was the production of precious metals. The Countryside P r o d u c t s of G u a d a l a j a r a ' s L o c a l Economy In 1802 Guadalajara's intendant, Fernando Abascal, reported that the total value of his province's agricultural production was about 2,599,000 pesos per year. Working from the same reports, Humboldt raised Abascal's estimate to about 3,000,000 pesos. By way of contrast, Bolanos and the other mines of the intendancy produced some 230,000 marcos of silver annually. Depending on which equivalency figure one uses in the conversion, this yields a minimum annual silver production of 1,610,000 pesos or a maximum of 1,955,000 pesos. In either case, the annual amount is considerably less than that for agricultural production. Surprisingly enough, Guadalajara was representative of the colony as a whole in this respect In spite of the popular, one-dimensional image of New Spain as a spectacular world producer of gold and silver, the value of precious metals produced yearly was always lower than the value of all crops. Spain's richest colony was fundamentally an agricultural and commercial colony, and Guadalajara typifies this agrourban base better than do specialized, boom-and-bust towns like Guanajuato or Zacatecas. Abascal's 1802 report makes manufacturing as important or even more so than agriculture by giving it an annual value of 3,302,000 pesos. It is well to remember, however, that the major branches of local manufacture depended directly and entirely on the hacienda to supply their raw materials. Thus hides, valued at 419,000 pesos a year, and textiles, valued at 1,600,000 pesos annually, derived from local hacendados' animal herds. The 260,000 pesos' worth of soap produced every year was made primarily from tequesquites and animal fat, or sebo ( t e q u e s q u i t e s , a mineral made up mostly of sodium chloride and sodium carbonate, is found on the surface of dry lake beds and was exploited as a resource by hacendados whose land included such sites; Guadalajara's poor still use it as a cleansing agent, and it can be bought in the Libertad market). Together these three industries accounted for nearly 70 percent of the value of regional manufactures. The wood, sand, 30

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and clay that must have gone to produce the better part of the remaining 30 percent were also products of the land. Maize overwhelmingly dominated the region's crops in terms of volume. Land cultivated in wheat usually represented only a small fraction—perhaps the tenth or twentieth part—of the land devoted to maize production, and the average yield of wheat was approximately one-third less. Nevertheless, since wheat commonly sold for a price twelve to twenty times higher than that of maize, it took a close second place among area crops in terms of market value. No general estimates are available for total production of bovine, equine, porcine, or ovine livestock and their processed products, although hacienda inventories and municipal accounts make it clear that animal herds compared favorably with corn and wheat in value and importance. Contemporary observers reported that "abundant shipments of bulls were made annually to the states of Querétaro, Mexico, and Puebla" before 1810. The staples of regional produce were maize, wheat, and animals. Tables 1 and 2 summarize estimates of the land area sown in major crops and the harvests for 1802, 1826, and 1858. The dates correspond, respectively, to the publication of Humboldt's essay on New Spain, to a statistical report prepared for the government of the state of Jalisco, and to Garcia Cuba's atlas of Mexico, the sources of the data. Since these different texts sometimes estimate tillage and sometimes harvests and since they express their estimates in widely varying measures, everything in the tables has been converted and reduced to its equivalent in fanegas. The figures italicized in the tables are those actually given in the documents, or their equivalent in fanegas. The other data represent extrapolations based on average yields given in the 1826 statistical report as indicated in the notes. The figures in tables 1 and 2 must be used only as broad indicators, and even then with caution. The inaccuracies inherent in using various conversion equivalents compound the inaccuracies of nineteenth-century statistical reporting. Moreover, the data represent time spots rather than a connected time series. Nevertheless, the consistent and voluminous growth shown in maize cultivation is entirely plausible, and the wide fluctuations in wheat cultivation are not implausible when one considers wheat's role as a diet luxury and the natural fluctuations in price and yields from year to year. Interpreted with precautions, the data illustrate the consistency and volume of maize's primacy as an agricultural staple and its tendency to increase in importance with population and economic growth. The data show that wheat and beans took a distant second place in volume and they probably reflect a genuine phenomenon of fluctuation in tillage and yields for these crops. 33

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Table 1 Approximate Area Sown in Major Crops, Intendancy of Guadalajara

(Fanegas) 1826

1802 22,000 3,440 (not given)

Maize Wheat Beans

41,000 13,076 2,688

1858 68,405 2,144 9,970

Sources: N o t a estadistica r e m i t i d a por el gobierno supremo del estado de Jalisco a la c&mara de senadores del soberano congreso general con arreglo a l a r t i c u l o 1 6 1 número 8° de l a constitucion federal de los Estados Unidos Mexicanos el ano de 1 8 2 6 (Mexico City: Imprenta del Aguila, 1826); Alexander von Humboldt, Ensayo politico sobre el Reino de la N u e v a Espaha (Mexico City: Editorial Porrúa, 1966); and Antonio Garcia Cubas, Atlas geogràfico, estadistico, e historico mexicano (Mexico City: Imprenta de J. M. Fernandez de Lara, 1858). Notes: Estimates offiguresin roman type are based on table in note 35, Chapter 1. A fanega =8.8 acres, or the amount of land capable of receiving onefanega of seed. In 1826 and 1858 the state of Jalisco had a surface area of 8,324 square leagues; in 1802 the colonial intendancy of Guadalajara had an area about 15 percent larger. J. Villasana Haggard, Handbook for Translators of Spanish H i s t o r i c a l Documents [Austin: University of Texas, 1941], pp. 71-87, is the source of conversion figures for fanegas, acres, and cargas.

Table 2 Approximate Yields of Major Crops, State of Jalisco

(Fanegas)

Maize Wheat Beans

1802

1826

1858

1,657,000 86,000 (not given)

3,075,000 326,900 37,632

5,130,000 53,600 139,580

Sources: Same as table 1. Notes: Estimates of figures in roman type are based on table in note 35, Chapter 1. A f a n e g a = 2 . 6 bushels. In 1826 and 1858 the state of Jalisco had a surface area of 8,324 square leagues; in 1802 the colonial intendancy of Guadalajara had an area about 15 percent larger. J. Villasana Haggard, Handbook for Translators of Spanish H i s t o r i c a l Documents (Austin: University of Texas, 1941), pp. 71-87, is the source of conversion figures for fanegas, acres, and cargas.

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Next in importance after these three crops (though not necessarily listed here in order of importance), according to Garcia Cubas, came garbanzo (chick-peas), barley, sugarcane, tequila, cotton, and indigo. In the earlier reports of Humboldt and Abascal, cochineal took the place of indigo. Cotton and dyes, along with tobacco and bananas, need not be considered here. Their cultivation was often experimental in this period (1780-1830), and largely confined to the southern or coastal areas of the intendancy. For the most part, these particular cash crops fell outside the immediate socioeconomic orbit of Guadalajara. (Chapter 4 discusses the important role British capital played in initiating tropical cash-crop cultivation.) Sugar and tequila, on the other hand, provided important sources of income, although their quantitative impact on the local market is difficult to establish. City fathers estimated Guadalajara's total annual urban maize consumption in 1809 at about 90,000 to 100,000 fanegas, of which the public grain monopoly (posito) purchased and resold some two-thirds. From time to time, as droughts occurred, the city council might appeal to Tlaltenango, Zacatecas, or other neighboring districts for supplemental grain shipments. Under ordinary circumstances, however, the city filled its collective belly from the agricultural estates lying within fifty to one hundred kilometers of its perimeter. 36

The H a c i e n d a as M i c r o c o s m of t h e R e g i o n a l Economy Typically, each of the major haciendas adjacent to Guadalajara reproduced the regional economy in microcosm. Rather than specializing in maize, animals, or sugarcane, the larger haciendas diversified their resources to reflect internally the broader macro-economic patterns of land use. Climate and geography modified these patterns, of course: semiarid land to the north was better suited for grazing; the v i n o de mezcal produced around Tequila had an inimitable texture and flavor, and irrigated crops flourished mainly in river basins or near lake shores. Within these limits, Guadalajara's hacendados usually devoted most of their land to maize and pasture, tilled smaller amounts of land in wheat, barley, and beans, and varied their staple production with cash crops (typically sugarcane and tequila) and the less commercially important vegetables, small animals, and fowl. A particularly complete inventory exists of the Portillo family's Hacienda de las Navajas (map D-3) in 1828. This hacienda, located to the west of Guadalajara near the town of Tala, was not uncharacteristic of the larger regional estates. A summary of its buildings and chattel goods helps illustrate the typical features of rural properties run by the city's oligarchs. From time to time it will be necessary to use illustrations from other regional haciendas to fill in the features of a typical great estate not found at Navajas.

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The main house at Navajas had about twelve rooms. Next to it stood the chapel, where both family and workers were baptized, married, confessed, and buried. In size and in the richness of their decorations, such hacienda chapels often competed with urban parish churches. The Canedo family chapel at E l Cabezon, near Ameca, still boasts an important Baroque r e t a b l o , or altar backdrop, for example. The ruins at E l Cabezón provide an interesting comparison with Navajas. At E l Cabezón the home of the Hacienda's a d m i n i s t r a d o r (the administrator or general supervisor, sometimes identical to the lessee) was almost as large and well-appointed as the owner's home. At Navajas, there was apparently no a d m i n i s t r a d o r , only a labor foreman, who lived in a small shack with a grass roof. Numerous other structures existed at Navajas. Most prominent were the three t r o j e s , or granaries. Several granaries still standing at the Hacienda de Huejotitan (map D-4, near Jocotepec), illustrate the simple, rectangular, adobe construction characteristic of these storage buildings. At Navajas the largest of the three granaries stored maize; the smaller two stored wheat and beans. Two threshing floors, one paved with brick and the other with stone, probably served to dry beans and fruit and to separate the wheat chaff from the grain. Nearby stood a small plaza surrounded by a stone wall and a bull pen. On festive occasions this area must have functioned as an arena for some spartan version of bull-fighting and calf-throwing, and on more utilitarian occasions it may have facilitated the handling and branding of the hacienda's small herds. A carriage house and two or three corrals undoubtedly housed passenger coaches and the mules that drew them, as well as oxen and oxcarts. If the Portillo family was at all fashion-conscious, they, like the priest Bruno de la Vega, may have kept a team of color-matched mules to draw the carriage in which they promenaded around the a l a m e d a . Several casas de o p e r a r i o s existed to house hacienda workers. Since the inventory describes them as being in good condition, they were certainly in use. Although the document is somewhat vague on this point, there seem to have been sixteen of these little houses, which would represent the minimum number of families needed during the quiet times of the agricultural year. Large gangs of field laborers would have been brought in for planting, harvesting, or livestock roundup. A small shed for manufacturing soap and another for storing lime completed the set of service and administration buildings. Also at the heart of the hacienda, near the main house, was a large orchard with a stand of over a thousand trees and nearly double that number of

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vinestocks. The orchard ( h u e r t a ) was surrounded by a high adobe wall, described as five v a r a s tall and measuring 232 v a r a s on one side by 128 on the other (a v a r a officially measured 32 or 33 inches). On one side of this enclosure stood three arches spanning a corridor between three piezas, or rooms. In these rooms was stored the fruit from the various trees, of which there were 421 perón, 274 peach, 135 pomegranate, 96 banana, 40 orange, and 12 fig. Scattered among these trees grew an odd assortment of avocado, t o r o n j a , c h i r i m o y a , mamey, tamarind, apricot, c a p u l i n , and cherry trees that brought the total to over one thousand. Of seventeen hundred grapevines in the orchard, seven hundred vinestocks are separately listed for reasons that remain unclear, perhaps they were immature. Since the climate at Navajas was at least as dry as that at Huejotitan, a small complex of irrigation canals similar to that still in existence at the latter hacienda probably crisscrossed the orchard. Together, all of these buildings and improvements constituted the casco of the hacienda, the vital heart of the estate's connecting services, dominated always by the main dwelling, the chapel, and the granaries. The small cluster of workers' houses, the corrals, and the orchard were also commonly a part—virtually an obligatory part—of the casco. Unfortunately, the Navajas document does not describe the hacienda's fields. Nevertheless, the amount of seed ( s e m i l l a ) on hand at the time of the inventory suggests the patterns of cultivation. In stock in 1828 were 700 fanegas of maize, 50 c a r g a s of wheat (100 f a n e g a s ) , 60 fanegas of beans, and 20 fanegas of barley. If we assume, as seems reasonable, that the owners were holding this seed for planting, the conversion figure of 8.8 acres per f a n e g a would indicate a total area under cultivation of between 7,500 and 8,000 acres, or just over 3,000 hectares. The figure is plausible in comparison with other major properties in the area, such as, for example, the Villasenor haciendas described in Chapter 3. These figures also show how heavily a single hacienda could weigh in the regional economy. Since, according to government statistics in 1826, area growers sowed only 41,000 fanegas in the entire state of Jalisco, the annual planting at Navajas accounted for almost 2 percent of the total. Navajas's operators were running just over 400 head of livestock on the hacienda's pastures, broken down by type as follows: 60 horses, 65 mules, 12 burros, 18 bulls, 272 oxen, 47 sheep, 72 goats, and 8 hogs. Unfortunately, the dating of the inventory is too imprecise to determine how these figures reflected annual reproduction, depletion, or sales. Many of the oxen may have been hired out for income to neighboring growers, a fairly common practice. Woodcutting rights constituted a major item in the lease contract that 38

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occasioned the 1828 inventory of Navajas, so the hacienda presumably enjoyed a significant stand of trees. A large part of the value of nearly every hacienda of this size inhered in stone fences, dams, and mills, but the Navajas inventory is silent with regard to any such items. Neither does Portillo mention in his inventory any t i e n d a de r a y a , or company store. If Navajas had such a store, it was probably similar to the one known to exist at the Hacienda de Huejotitan. A theft recorded in 1812 reveals that the Huejotitan store stocked mostly cloth, ranging from coarse cotton and woolen textiles to fine silks, as well as steel, probably used for manufacturing tools and knives. Small items such as candles, soap, sugar, cheese, scissors, cigars, buttons, and paper made up the rest of the stock. It is interesting to see how this small shop reflected local commerce in microcosm, just as the hacienda reproduced regional agriculture on an individual scale. At E l Cabezon (map C-4), what seem to be the vestiges of a company store still exist in the form of a tiny pharmaceutical dispensary that serves local ejido residents. Its location in the old a d m i n i s t r a d o r ' s house suggests that this was the traditional site for such stores. Among the hacienda's tools the Navajas inventory lists a dozen axes or hatchets, a copper water pump, thirty-seven wooden yokes, nine paddles for threshing, and a large collection of baskets, bags (mostly leather), and boxes. A l l together Navajas's chattel goods were valued at about 10,000 pesos. The total worth of the hacienda was probably around 50,000 pesos, since the rent was 2,400 pesos a year. 39

The H a c i e n d a : E c o n o m i c a l l y I s o l a t e d o r I n t e g r a t e d ? The use of the term "microcosm" may evoke an image of the rural hacienda as a self-sufficient unit, and of the regional economy as an atomistic aggregation of such self-contained units, each one unrelated to its neighbors or to the whole. As James Lockhart has shown, however, the line between diversification and self-sufficiency in colonial agriculture was thin and variable. It may be more accurate to think of the great landed estates as having two principal aims: maximum adaptability to the local market, and maximum security against capital shortages, commercial crises, or natural disasters. In order to achieve the first goal, the haciendas emphasized maize and animal production, because demand for these commodities was high and relatively predictable. But it probably would have been unwise to grow only high-volume, low-priced produce when so much money stood to be made from the urban consumer's demand for wheat, sugar, liquor, and other variety items in the diet. Using the staple crops and variety crops in a complementary way permitted local growers flexibility and maximized their 40

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commercial gains while keeping the risks of market failure at a minimum. Survival provided the motive for the second of these aims, in the sense of maintaining continuous family ownership of land from generation to generation and of maintaining productive capacity from year to year. Periodic droughts and floods posed a constant risk. Epidemic disease might strike the hacendado's crops, his livestock, or his workers. Breakdowns in communication caused by wars or natural disasters threatened to cut the hacienda off from its markets. Social risks such as shortages of capital, violent price fluctuations, or a partner's bankruptcy compounded the danger from unforeseeable acts of God. In such circumstances, diversification of resources held clear advantages. Income from animals might compensate losses from a blighted grain crop, for example, and the ability to survive on internal production and consumption could tide the hacienda community over a period of market collapse. In this way a relatively high degree of selfsufficiency dovetailed with the commercial orientation of the hacienda. In a multitude of ways, local haciendas were linked to each other, to the city, and to the colonial system of which New Spain was a part First of all, hacienda production flowed primarily toward the urban market; maize and wheat were grown to be sold in Guadalajara, and animals were shipped to the large urban concentrations of Guadalajara, Mexico City, Puebla, and Queretaro. Second, the labor system called for hacendados to supply hacienda workers with clothes and tools; for both textiles and utilitarian metals, local growers looked to the city or to the mother country. In the third place, each hacendado's share of the market, his price, and hence his plans for production were largely determined by the city council's regulation of public grain and meat monopolies. Since most city councilmen were members of landowning families, and since the overwhelming volume of the council's business consisted of purchasing agrarian staples and reselling them at fixed prices, the council effectively became a device for making economic adjustments among oligarchs competing for the local market Finally, the hacienda was tied to mining and commerce (both local and longrange) by a policy of "assiduous intermarriage," in Doris Ladd's phrase, and credit relations the structure of which is the main theme of this book. In no sense was the local hacienda an "isolated" unit with essentially "uneconomic" aims. 41

42

The H a c i e n d a a n d t h e R u r a l C o m m u n i t y Because of its size and the complexity of its functions, the hacienda had the power to set the pattern according to which the rest of rural life was organized. The other major nuclei of Guadalajara's rural social complex were the traditional Indian community, other, non-Indian towns, the

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r a n c h e r o class, and the rural arm of the church. In its way, each of these institutions shaped the rural laborer's life, but among them the hacienda was dominant. Only vestiges of the self-supporting Indian community remained in this area by the nineteenth century. The initially low density of indigenous population, the manipulation of old tribute rights to extract labor, and the combined processes of Indian abandonment, expropriation of communal lands by hacendados, and confiscation of Indian community funds (as in the Law of Consolidation [1804-1809]) had reduced the Indian population to a state of penury and dependence on the Spanish economy. A provincial survey done in 1813 describes the villages near Guadalajara as extremely poor and reports that they had few or no a r b i t r i o s (sources of revenue). Post-Conquest towns (pueblos and v i l l a s not founded on traditionally incorporated Indian villages) with largely mestizo populations did not compete very strongly as focuses of rural life. The intendancy of Guadalajara supported 322 such towns and more than that number of haciendas. A single rural estate, Huejotitan, reported 743 permanent residents in 1813. The estate of the Marques de Jaral, located north of Guadalajara's sphere of influence but in similar terrain and circumstances, supported more than 850 persons. A t this same time, prosperous towns like Tequila or Jocotepec had only 1,400 to 1,800 inhabitants, of whom about one-third dwelled beyond the edge of town on surrounding r a n c h o s . Even where such rural settlements were relatively strong, townsmen worked on nearby haciendas, sold the h a c e n d a d o or his workers their merchandise, attended mass sung by a relative of some h a c e n d a d o in chapels built with hacienda wealth, and observed the decrees of a local government dominated by wealthy estate owners. Mestizos, blacks, mulattos, and nontribute-paying Indians also depended greatly on the hacienda. They found occupation mainly as tenant farmers, mule drivers, cowboys, field laborers, messengers, and artisans. Always it was the h a c e n d a d o who used most of these services. Even the thieves among this loose, unincorporated class of workers looked to the hacienda for stores of goods they could pilfer or embezzle. Alone among the rural population, the area's r a n c h e r o s (small, proprietary farmers and cattle raisers) possessed some claim to real independence from the hacienda and its environment Perez Verdia describes them as free from hacendados both in pocketbook and spirit, prosperous and characteristically gregarious in their social manners. A t the same time, his use of terms like " r a n c h e r o r i c o , " ("middle class") and his praise of the r a n c h e r o ' s outwardness, honesty, and work ethic, suggest that he is investing this class with his own ideals of Porfirian liberalism (that 43

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is, political authoritarianism and economic liberalism). In fact, many who were called r a n c h e r o s were tenants of large landowners. A review of the notarial records of towns where r a n c h e r o s existed in numbers (Zapotlanejo, Cuquío, Tlajomulco) indicates that most r a n c h e r o s depended heavily on hacendados or their merchant allies for advances of seed and tools, or for other forms of credit And of course r a n c h e r o s participated in market structures dominated by large landowning families. Undoubtedly, Guadalajara's rural workers and small proprietors carried on a social life with special values of their own. Certainly r a n c h e r o s , p e o n e s (rural laborers), mule drivers, and the like deserve a more rigorous study than any scholar has yet given them. This study singles out their ultimate dependence on the economy of the hacienda in order to emphasize that the latter, by its relative weight, affected rural life and institutions far beyond the boundaries of the landed estate itself. The insertion of the hacienda in the world of colonial commerce dragged the rural poor and small rural proprietors into the middle of this same world and subjected them to many of its contradictions, in spite of the rural population's apparent isolation and "backwardness." 46

The B o u n d a r i e s of t h e L o c a l Economy We can infer the area within which colonial haciendas traded with Guadalajara more often than with other urban centers from the frequency with which rural residents visited or lived temporarily in the city, as recorded in the notary archives; from the frequency and volume of produce shipments to the city, as recorded in the municipal archives; from special remarks in censuses like that of 1813; and from a variety of less easily documented impressions. Provincial political boundaries are not a reliable guide: many haciendas that supplied grain to Guadalajara and whose owners served on the city council technically were subsumed in the jurisdiction of New Spain and Mexico City. Geopolitical boundaries also changed relatively often, even before independence, although economic regions were quite stable. The agricultural region tied to the city of Guadalajara was roughly rectangular or elliptical in shape. Its approximate outer boundaries can be defined by lines drawn through Hostotipaquillo, San Cristobal de la Barranca, and Juchitlan on the north; through Tepatitlán, Atotonilco el Alto, and La Barca on the east; along the shore of Lake Chapala and outward through Zacoalco and Tecolotlán on the south; and through Guachinango and past Etzatlán to Hostotipaquillo again on the west (see map, p. 8). Data gathered for this study permitted the naming and locating of slightly over one hundred local haciendas. This number probably includes most local haciendas in existence in 1810, and its magnitude confirms my

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earlier estimate of Guadalajara's oligarchy as comprising about 100 to 150 family units with corresponding rural properties. In the following sketch of the geographical distribution of these major rural estates I emphasize entailed family properties because a familiarity with their names may help orient the reader and because their topographical distribution reveals a good deal about the history and geography of land cultivation around Guadalajara. There is, however, no major difference between entailed and unentailed families in Guadalajara's oligarchy with regard to scale of wealth, the practice of mercantile-agricultural intermarriage, land use, or place of origin. Even the gigantic Canedo family found unentailed rivals for wealth and power within the Ameca Valley, where the Ochoa family's unentailed estate, based on the Hacienda de Santa Maria (B-4), was valued at a quarter of a million pesos. The powerful, intermarried lines of the del Rio and the de la Pena families owned the valuable Hacienda de Santa Cruz (B-3) and its satellites near Etzatlán. Closer to Guadalajara, the Sanchez Lenero heirs floated to prominence on the wealth of their commercial ventures and of the Hacienda de Santa Lucia (D-2), at Zapopan. Such unentailed families resembled the entailed ones in every respect except in the lack of a title and primogeniture. Far and away the most important sector of agricultural land was the area to the south of Guadalajara. This territory included the banks of the Rio Grande de Santiago between Ocotlán and Guadalajara, the northern shore of Lake Chapala, and extended out to take in the wet plains and lakes around Zacoalco and Santa Ana Acatlán. Also in this zone was the small, shallow Lake Cajititlán. Here was an abundant concentration of water and flat land, within easy distance of the city, and adapted to the widest variety of agrarian commodities: corn, wheat, barley, beans, animals, agave plants, sugarcane, and vegetables. So it is not surprising that nearly half of the entailed estates based in the Guadalajara region were to be found in this zone. (See Chapter 3 for a discussion of entails, unalienable estates whose line of succession was rigidly fixed by law.) The Basauri family, patrons of the richly adorned Franciscan Chapel of Aranzazu, founded their entail on the Hacienda de Atequiza (map F-4), with its satellite Hacienda de la Huerta (map E-4). Hidalgo is reported to have spent the night at Atequiza after his victory over the royalist defenders of Guadalajara at Zacoalco in 1810. A modern tourist may still appreciate the somber elegance of the hacienda's casco, where the little town of Atequiza installed the municipal cinema a few years ago. Just above the western tip of Lake Chapala were the two main properties of the Villasenor family's entail: Huejotitán (map D-4) gave this m a y o r a z g o (may refer either to an estate inherited through the provisions of 47

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Spanish primogeniture, or to the person who is head of such an estate) its name, and Potrerillos (map E-4) acted as the main sister hacienda. The Villasenores also owned the Haciendas de Cedros, Santa Rosa, and San Nicolas de la Labor in this same district (map E-4). To the north of the Villasenor properties was Mazatepec (D-4), the hacienda that gave the Porres Baranda m a y o r a z g o its name. This m a y o r a z g o was erected in 1692. Mazatepec and Plan de Santa Ana (D-4) formed a pair, and the family held smaller properties scattered over the area around Guadalajara. Between Guadalajara and Lake Cajititlán lay the Hacienda de la Concepción (E-4), founding property of the Echaurri entail. On the edge of the main wheat-growing district, just beyond Lake Zacoalco, the Vizcarra family, possessor of Guadalajara's only native title of nobility, the Marquesado de Panuco, established one of Guadalajara's more recent entails on the Haciendas de Estipac (sometimes called Nestipac, C-4), and la Sauceda (C-4). Extending beyond the eastern limits of Lake Chapala, still following the course of the Rio Grande de Santiago, the zone surrounding Atotonilco el Alto was also well-suited to the growing of wheat. Much of the flour milled in modern Guadalajara still originates in this area. Here was the fifth of Guadalajara's entailed estates. The sister haciendas Margaritas (H-4) and Milpillas (H-4) served as the economic base of the Castaneda family. The entail holder, Jose Maria Castaneda, a kinsman of the Condes de Medina, was serving as Guadalajara's alferez r e a l before the insurgency broke out in 1810. Another of the city's entails, belonging to Manuel de la Mota y Velasco (who was related to the historians de la Mota Escobar and de la Mota Padilla), comprised only urban property. The only remaining m a y o r a z g o was certainly the best known and one of, if not the last to be established. In fact, the founder, Manuel Calixto Canedo, had been a mining partner of the first Marques de Pánuco; both men used profits from their mining bonanza to set up rural entails in the second half of the eighteenth century. The Canedo entail was located in Guadalajara's second-most-productive rural district, the Valley of Ameca. The Canedo family and the area are unusually well-documented. Jesus de Amaya's excellent monograph on Ameca describes the valley, its early settlement by the family of the conquistador Juan de Ojeda and his son Luis de Ahumada, and their ties to prominent families like the Villasenores of Huejotitan. The Canedo family dominated this valley in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as Ahumada did in the sixteenth. One of the Canedo descendants, genealogist and historian Jorge Palomino y Canedo has 49

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written the family up with considerable style and unusual rigor. The major haciendas bought by Manuel Calixto Canedo around 1765 were E l Cabezon (C-4, the keystone of the group), La Vega (C-3), and Aguacaliente (C-4). Sugarcane replaced wheat here as the major supplement to the maize crop. As one moved northward from Ameca to Tequila, passing through Ahualulco and Etzatlán, rows of mezcal were likely to replace rows of sugarcane. Small shelves of land along the canyon of the Rio Grande de Santiago to the north of Guadalajara and small patches of river bottom permitted cultivation of corn, but limited it for the most part to a very small scale. To the east of the river, forded at this time at Ixcatán, horse raising prevailed. Cuquio sat at the center of this pasturage zone. Tepatitlan lay on the boundary between the spheres of influence of Guadalajara and Lagos. The area around Tepatitlán constituted the center of the independent r a n c h e r o class so admired by Perez Verdia. Land and climate conditions may have had something to do with the prevalence of smaller properties, and historically the area may have been influenced by settlement patterns in l o s a l t o s (the highlands) of Jalisco, where a remarkably white-skinned and ferociously Catholic population of small Spanish proprietors set the social tone. The t e p a t l i t e c o ' s (native or resident of the town of Tepatitlán) predilection for c a r n i t a s (roast-pork bits) still testifies to the survival of r a n c h e r o values locally. Beyond the limits of these various districts, land and people tended to gravitate toward other centers. Lagos, Aguascalientes, Leon, Valladolid (now Morelia), Zapotlán el Grande (now Ciudad Guzman), Tepic, and Zacatecas began to exert commercial and political influence along the edges of Guadalajara's rural sphere. Of course, the actual exchange and communication networks were infinitely more complex and subtle than I have described them here. Still, within the sphere thus broadly outlined, the flow of goods, money, and people between the capital city and the surrounding haciendas was constant The families that dominated and directed this flow hold the clue to the broader patterns that linked city to countryside. 56

R e l a t i o n s h i p of C i t y a n d C o u n t r y s i d e Two basic modes integrated the local society's rural and urban spheres— one public and the other private. In the public mode, the city government essentially dictated the form of integration through its control of major markets. In the private mode, kinship united the opposing poles of agriculture and commerce. These two modes of integration were, of course, intertwined.

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Guadalajara's city government—by maintaining formal boundaries and defining competitive limits between local elite families—made possible the coexistence and cooperation that enabled these same families to maintain their wealth and power. In turn, the families controlled the city's government because they controlled its lifeline—the grain and animal supply. It is precisely this interlocking web of concentrated wealth, continuous ownership of land, and political power that makes these families an oligarchy. In both the public and private modes, a constant exchange or interplay between land and credit integrated the urban and rural worlds. The elite family, through intermarriage, investment, and inheritance, largely determined the structures through which this exchange operated. Thus it is to the family that we must turn for an explanation of how this process of integration worked in concrete terms, and what its strengths and weaknesses were.

2. Credit and Kinship

Credit The Local Economy's Dependence on Credit In 1803 Francisco Ordonez, then-manager of the Hacienda de Cuisillos, wrote an apologetic letter to his commercial agent in Tepic, Jose Martinez Mestas. Regarding Martinez Mestas's request for a loan, Ordonez wrote that it seems your misfortune and mine that you should have remembered so late, since I kept the few funds [medios] that I had for more than five or six years without using them. And as I've told you in my previous [letters), by hand of the Lord Archdeacon, there was not a single resource left to me, nor to His Lordship, because he invested everything at interest. And although you ask me to find you some money among friends, you may well assure yourself that they have all theirs invested, and it is easier to turn a friar into a woman than to find a peso among friends, for every one of the merchants is walking on his uppers ["handan... a la cuarta pregunta"], and anyone who goes so far as to turn a peso loose wants more conditions and guarantees than he himself is willing to furnish. So that for the present I have nothing with which to help you; least of all [credit] with the Lord Archdeacon, when he himself asked me for my [funds] in order to complete payment to Don Juan Calera of the twenty thousand [pesos] that he requested at interest This should satisfy you that it is not in my hands to facilitate your request, since for my part the only principal I have is in agricultural goods. And although I would like to help you with them, there is no one who will pay cash for them, for just as it costs you so much trouble to collect the funds that you lend out to friends, the same happens to me, and money is very scarce . 1

Ordonez was voicing a chronic lament of his time. In spite of the eighteenthcentury boom spurred by the Bolanos mining bonanza, and the establishment of a mint in Guadalajara in 1793, money was scarce in Nueva Galicia.

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Scarce currency was only one of a set of interlocking factors that made credit a particularly crucial resource in the local colonial economy. Then current production technologies, relatively scattered settlements, weather cycles, accidents of geography, labor use and payment patterns, natural resource distribution, and the colonial system itself, with its demand for expatriation of large capital surpluses, each worked to render colonial production heavily dependent on high-volume, long-term credit The main branches of the colonial economy—mining, agriculture, and commerceshared all of these problems to one degree or another. Historians have long recognized credit needs as a critical component of the mining economy. David Brading has discussed the massive injections of credit required to excavate and equip the mines, as well as the long delays miners often experienced before the returns on their investments began to surpass maintenance and operation costs. Agriculture depended equally, though perhaps less obviously, on credit. Guadalajara was fortunate in that its growing season permitted two harvests: one by natural rainfall, usually gathered in November, and an irrigated crop usually came in during May. Nevertheless, there were many months when growers faced expenses of repairs, food, and salaries without any immediate income to cover them. Because irrigated fields, moreover, represented only a fraction of total land under cultivation, many farmers harvested only one crop a year. Animal sales yielded income once a year only. Stock raisers had to wait for the natural increase of their herds and also had to pay close attention to the weather. Once the annual rainfall had begun (around June), mud made it difficult to move the animals. There was even a risk in some areas that animals would bog down in the swamps and die of starvation. A number of problems were common not only to agriculture but to commercial enterprise, as well. They fell into two general classes: problems of distribution, and risk of natural disaster. Both export-import merchants and regional suppliers had to move goods over enormous distances by primitive means of transportation and along a relatively poorly developed system of routes. Although the whole society was astonishingly mobile in the face of these obstacles, time and expense factors made profits possible only for those who could obtain credit on good terms. A storm at sea or an attack by highway robbers could wipe out numerous fortunes at one blow. Plagues (both animal and human), droughts, floods, and other natural disasters that periodically afflicted landowners had equally catastrophic effects on merchants. Obviously, a person whose business was to withstand such acts of God must be able to amass credit on a long-term basis. 2

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Credit and Kinship

37

Describing the importance of the credit market in Guadalajara involves more than simply determining who could command loans. In a situation in which credit was so crucial to the local economy, the sources of loans, the forms those loans took, the channels through which they flowed, and the uses to which they were put constituted determining features of the regional society. Guadalajara's credit picture on the eve of independence may be roughly sketched in as follows. Virtually no central public or institutional loan sources existed, with the significant exception of the church (whose position as a moneylender is discussed in greater detail later). Borrowers turned regularly to wealthy individuals or families as a source of credit Merchants, with their relatively more liquid fortunes, fell naturally into the role of moneylender. The merchants' connections to rural estates, however, were essential to their lending (and borrowing) capabilities. In repeated instances, merchants did not amass significant capital sums until they became associated with a major hacienda. Furthermore, high risklevels caused most lenders to insist on the mortgage of income-producing rural properties as security for large loans. Since merchants in this period could not count on a very active market for land, and since no legal or institutional context existed to support the impersonal money relations characteristic of modern capitalism, marital alliances between merchants' and hacendados families provided the logical means to establish credit viability. Such marriages also furnished the major channels through which loans might flow, even when the money came from church coffers. With the merchants' liquidity and the hacendados security, family enterprises created by kinship alliances were in the best possible position to manipulate credit as either borrowers or lenders. Thus the family enterprises could put capital to productive use in commercial agriculture— the predominant economic activity of the region—as well as in trade, manufacture, and mining. With this overall sketch of the credit picture in mind, let us now explore its features in greater detail. 5

9

9

Sources of C r e d i t Banks, properly so called, did not begin to operate until the second half of the nineteenth century. The government began to experiment with the concept of public banking in the eighteenth century by creating the Royal Mining Tribunal and giving it certain lending functions, but the government was still much more likely to borrow from the private sector than to lend to i t Nor did commercial companies exist that were comparable to the large European houses that provided many colonial enterprises with investment capital. Merchants in New Spain formed business partnerships, but they lent

38

Credit and Kinship

money as wealthy individuals. The responsibility for compliance with the contract fell not on a legal abstraction or on groups of persons, but on the individuals who were actually party to the agreement. The natural institutional framework for such personal obligations rested on that form of relationship that creates and formalizes personal loyalties and obligations at their most basic level—kinship. Only the church lent money on a large scale as an institution. Was the church, then, the bank of New Spain? The church-as-moneylender was not a single institution. Every convent, sodality, parish, and individual clergyman followed its or his own financial policy. They were not subject to any central decision-making body, nor did any of the church's lending arms hold a license or charter from the state to give it an advantage over other lenders. The major advantage church bodies had was the amount of capital they could accumulate in one mass. If we think, however, not of "the church's" capital, which was a nonexistent abstraction, but of the capital of the actual lenders, such as the Convento de Santa Maria de Gracia de Guadalajara, then the sums or advantages may still seem large but perhaps not so much larger than those of the great family estates. Moreover, the social services performed by the church (marriage, baptism, burial, education, support of surplus family heirs in convents) undoubtedly restrained capital accumulation and influenced church bodies to allocate resources in ways that an ordinary bank would not. For example, the church maintained a huge and expensive clerical bureaucracy that did not contribute directly to its "banking" functions and probably tended to deplete them. The church that appeared so distinct and independently powerful in New Spain in fact remained largely dependent on local families for personnel and revenue, as well as for construction and other facilities. New recruits into the clerical bureaucracy frequently came from landed families and returned to the family estate after receiving their training. Both the secular and the regular arms of the church drew most of their income from the tithe (a tax on commercial agriculture) or from special endowments by landowners, miners, and merchants. Legacies to the church most often took the form of chantries secured by the mortgage of some hacienda. Church organizations always demanded land as a mortgage to secure loans and nearly always granted large loans on the basis of kinship connections between the borrower and the clergy. Thus the church depended on and tended to reinforce the system of elite kinship alliances I am describing, just as modern banks act to reinforce our system of government and economic relations. The church was not a single, central bank, but a series of small, local, unchartered moneylenders tied to local families and local traditions. In this sense, the church is not an 6

Credit and Kinship

39

exception to the rule that there were no "banks" in Nueva Galicia just before or just after independence. In Nueva Galicia, as in New Spain at large, no formal banking institutions existed; private individuals or families, then, were key sources of credit. In order for a credit market to function without banks or in the face of inadequate banking, the basic preconditions for any type of market must obtain: people wishing to lend must have sufficient capital available in an adequately liquid form; those wishing to borrow must be able to furnish adequate security; the lenders and borrowers must have some means of finding each other, and both parties must have some means of defining, structuring, and enforcing mutual obligations. We shall see that creolepeninsular marriage alliances played a major role in fulfilling all four of these conditions. 7

L a c k of L i q u i d i t y i n P e r s o n a l Estates In an economy heavily dependent on credit operations and short on cash, personal liquidity was obviously at a premium. An individual might be quite wealthy in terms of total worth and yet have little readily available capital. Records of the Juzgado de Bienes de Difuntos, a special court to adjudicate the fortunes of u l t r a m a r i n o s (people born outside the jurisdiction of greater New Spain, but within the Spanish realm—literally, people born overseas) who died intestate in the New World, provide a number of illustrations of such "frozen" fortunes. Jose Manuel de Aray[s]aga, a Basque, died in 1786, leaving an estate valued at more than 100,000 pesos. Fully 74,000 pesos were tied up in credits, of which only some 13,000 pesos' worth proved recoverable. His debts to other parties totaled about 30,000 pesos. Assuming that his heirs paid these debts conscientiously, gave him a funeral service appropriate to his class, and paid the extravagant legal fees connected with the execution of an estate, they were lucky if the merchant's death did not plunge them further into debt. Of Angel Gomez's potential wealth in 1807 of 35,900 pesos, the following amounts were assigned to credits: 8,900 pesos to recoverable credits; 2,300 pesos to "doubtful" credits; 15,000 pesos to "lost" or unrecoverable credits. His cash on hand amounted to only 328 pesos, and after deducting over 14,000 pesos in debts from his estate, his heirs divided only about 1,495 pesos—less than 5 percent of his supposed worth. The Bienes de Difuntos archive (BPE-JBD) reports only the property of intestate u l t r a m a r i n o s and by its nature may tend to reflect emergency situations in years such as 1786 or 1810, when famine or war caused an 8

9

40

Credit and Kinship

unusual number of unanticipated deaths. Similar illustrations occur abundantly in other sources, however, and show that the problems of heavy indebtedness and short liquid-asset supply were common to other sectors of society at other times as well. Antonio de Iriarte, for example, a Creole with significant investments in land as well as in mercantile goods, left a fortune ( c a u d a l ) assessed at 121,800 pesos in 1822. His executors deducted no less than 109,900 pesos from this amount for payment of debts and expenses. This left only about 10 percent of the estate in liquid form to be assigned to Iriarte's heirs. To this amount the executors added a credit for just over 6,000 pesos owed Iriarte's estate by an hacienda. Iriarte's heirs thus divided about 18,000 pesos, or some 15 percent of his nominal worth, and one-third of their inheritance was in the form of an unpaid credit In other examples, by 1833 the Hacienda de Mojarras had piled up debts of over 79,300 pesos, although the hacienda itself was only valued at 51,300 pesos, and the owners of the Hacienda de Valparaiso did not pay a cent of the interest owed on the hacienda's multiple mortgages during the entire decade between 1811 and 1821. If this indebtedness was due to emergencies caused by the wars for independence, then clearly emergency was an ongoing fact of life during the period under discussion. 10

11

Types of C r e d i t T r a n s a c t i o n s Under" the circumstances described above, people had a clear incentive to reduce their cash outlays to a minimum. To this end they wove a tangled and precarious web of what modern bankers would call second mortgages, refinanced and discounted loans, surety bonds, and defaults. When Anastasio Caiiedo bought an 8,500-peso house from Doctor Jose Maria Gil in 1827, he paid 1,800 pesos in cash and received credit for payment of the remaining 6,700 in exchange for assuming service on two previously existing mortgages. In 1822 Ramon de Alzaga bought all or part of the Hacienda del Humedo, priced at just over 14,000 pesos, for a total cash outlay of 986 pesos, 5 reals. The widow who sold him the land deducted 858 pesos from the price for payment of the a l c a b a l a (sales tax), an unusual measure, since the purchaser usually paid this tax. In any case, this spared Alzaga another cash outlay. She also credited him with 2,723 pesos for payment of back-due interest on mortgages, as well as more than 1,000 pesos corresponding to debts she owed. Alzaga assumed the service obligation on a previous mortgage of 5,800 pesos and retained control of the balance of 3,000 pesos or more "by judicial order, to cover another debt of the seller." Alzaga may well have discharged this obligation by assuming interest payments on the debt rather than canceling it—the practice was common enough. 12

13

Credit and Kinship 41 Just as people sought to reduce actual cash outlays to a minimum, so they sought to extend the terms of payment to a maximum and often "refinanced" obligations by assigning them over to third parties. Don Tomas Serrato of Tequila owed Juan Alvarez several hundred pesos in 1822. Serrato passed the debt on to his heirs, and Alvarez endorsed his right to payment over to the merchant, Ventura Garcia Sancho. Garcia Sancho, in turn, appointed a power of attorney in Tequila to collect the debt. Such practices turned relatively short-term loans into long-term credits, actually investments. For instance, when Agustin and Joaquin Echaurri borrowed 35,000 pesos from the University of Guadalajara in 1792, it was to pay off a private debt owed by Agustin's father-in-law, Antonio Colaso, to Manuel Calixto Canedo. The documents indicate that the university granted the loan as an income-producing investment—that is, for the sake of the steady income the interest payments would produce over an extended period of time. Dr. Rafael Hernandez borrowed 4,000 pesos from the university in 1805 to pay off an already outstanding debt to the Convent of Santo Domingo. His new debt to the university was not canceled until forty-five years later. In this particular case, failure to collect the principal may have been due to the political vicissitudes of the university and its eventual closing. 14

15

16

Nevertheless, long-overdue loans were a common feature of the credit landscape: Matias Calamateo repaid a note in 1839 that had come due in 1825; Bishop Cabaiias's nephew Dionisio took twenty-three years to settle accounts with Magdalena Cid de Basauri regarding a loan of 21,000 pesos, which she had originally furnished to him for four years only; Colonel Jose Antonio Davalos took out a "five-year"loan in 1819 that he still had not redeemed in 1835 (even at that time, he preferred to subrogate the loan rather than repay it). Some of these obligations ran into the third and fourth generations. The Villaseiior family finally canceled in 1837 an obligation that had first been assumed in 1761. Jose de Arochi, a young merchant, had a particularly difficult time keeping his head above water in this world where everything was bought and sold on credit Having once sunk into bankruptcy under the weight not so much of debts as of uncollectible credits, Jose turned to his family for capital to start a new business. The set of restraints his mother and siblings imposed on him speaks eloquently of the painfully human side of the credit market. Jose agreed to live on no more than a peso per day and to rent a small house at no more than six pesos a month. He was to reserve at least one-fourth of his daily receipts for payment of previous debts and promised to remain in the store during meal times and siesta hour, as well. Also, "with respect to the fact that he is accustomed to the familiarity or business confidence of 17

42

Credit and Kinship

individuals who buy without saying that it is on credit, and take the item without paying, he will not permit this no matter who the individual is who wants to do so." Furthermore, no one was to receive any goods on trial without depositing three times the value of the merchandise. Arochi "expressly has to dismiss from the store any idle gabbler, and any time his siblings catch him in a lie in matters of commerce, he is to turn over the store without any objection or contest whatsoever, even if he's left out in the street." As a final check against Arochi's irresponsibility, his family warned him that his wife was in full cognizance of the 3,000-peso principal he was to receive from them and instructed him to consult her concerning all of his business affairs. A burden on the credit market less often mentioned in the literature is that represented by the ecclesiastical and the civil bureaucracies. We may think of these bureaucracies as existing principally to collect revenue for the church and the state. A t this time, the collection of civil taxes and the tithe were commonly farmed out to contractors. The veritable armies of tithe collectors, tobacco factors, and other assorted publicans thus created had to post surety bonds, or f i a n z a s . Guadalajara's daily round of activity would have come to a complete halt without the footing this kind of bond provided. Every time a citizen deferred payment on a purchase, took out a loan, became a party to litigation, assumed a public office that required manipulation of funds, or helped execute an estate, he or she must post bond, either by appointing an agent or by mortgaging his or her property. Bondsmen (fiadores) assumed the risk of paying obligations in case of default It seems reasonable to assume that they received certain emoluments in return. The documents maintain a surprising silence on this topic, but hidden in the municipal archives is a hint that the f i a d o r e s who bonded the city's meat-supplying agency ( a b a s t o ) received the slaughtered animals' hides in exchange for their services. Although bondsmen did not normally deposit any actual money when issuing a bond, the frequency with which borrowers defaulted meant that the bondsmen often had to draw on the capital they had committed. If bondsmen mortgaged property to guarantee their obligations, as they commonly did, this correspondingly reduced the income they could derive from the same property by further mortgages. Altogether, the salaries and surety bonds issued in favor of tax collectors and other parties at risk, the gratuities that bondsmen may have received, the mortgages they created, and the money siphoned from bondsmen's purses by frequent defaults and bankruptcies had the effect of sending capital through a relatively unproductive loop. (Some side effects, such as the appropriation of hides, may have had a positive productive effect) In general, 18

19

20

21

Credit and Kinship 43 bond making put yet another strain on an already-tight supply of capital resources. Contemporaries also felt that the headaches and risks involved in posting bonds for others were so great that they canceled out any hypothetical rewards. As Jose Ignacio Gil, of Cocula, felt driven to exclaim in his will, " M y dear children, I charge you with this my tacit and explicit precept, that you never be bondsmen for any person in any affair whatsoever, and least of all for the Royal Treasury or for public interests, because the duty having been discharged, paid and even years having passed, there is still almost always a deficit." Don Jose's cry of exasperation highlights another critical feature of Guadalajara's credit market. The web of tenuously interlocked credit transactions that financed the region's economy frequently caught local entrepreneurs in snags such as interminable legal suits over competing creditors' claims, long-overdue loans, excessive commitments, and outright bankruptcies. Anyone entering this web as a lender naturally demanded the maximum security possible to cover the evident risks. 22

Security t o Underwrite Credit Transactions Credit, whether in the form of loans, surety bonds, time payments, or chantries, had to be secured by a mortgage. Merchants could put up the liquid capital for these transactions, but could not effect them without proper security, and the only proper security for credit in Guadalajara was land. The chapter, or assembly, at Guadalajara's cathedral (and what better authority could we ask for in these matters?) made this point very clear in 1805. Juan Fernandez de Ulloa, a merchant from Etzatlan, had asked for a sizable loan. The chapter noted that although he "offers to mortgage the interests of his commercial [enterprise] without expressing its actual value, and although mercantile goods are not usually considered sufficient property for such investments, being subject to easy dissipation, and [uncertain] sale [by the] creditor, yet as he adds the fianza of Don Jose Joaquin Basauri, owner of the Hacienda de Frias, of notorious productivity sufficient to secure even larger principals, the doctoral [canon] believes that if Don Jose Joaquin will expressly mortgage the above-cited hacienda" the loan could justifiably be approved. Fernandez de Ulloa was a kinsman of one of the cathedral canons, and that helped his case, too. But the main point is clear: in order to have access to credit, a merchant must have access to real property. Land in the city was much less desirable than haciendas as security for loans. The Convent of Jesus Maria borrowed from the cathedral in 1822 by 23

44

Credit and Kinship

mortgaging a city block of houses. The canons accepted the mortgage of urban real estate only grudgingly, in view of "the lack that there is of secure properties in which to invest the said fourteen thousand pesos for income." If credit was indispensable to this economy, the ability to mortgage land was what gave prospective borrowers access to credit They must be able to offer an hacienda as security. Prospective lenders, as the cathedral chapter made clear, needed to find haciendas to invest in because they needed a secure, productive outlet for their available capital. The emphasis creditors placed on the income-producing improvements of landed property might lead to speculation that debtors would mortgage the income from their property, rather than the land itself. This was not the case in Guadalajara. In the course of this study, only one mortgage turned up that specified the income from an hacienda. This writ was issued by the holder of an entail, who, of course, was forbidden by law to mortgage the landed portion of his estate. In another instance, Tomas Ignacio Villasenor did not receive permission to underwrite a loan to Jose Maria Castaneda in 1808, because the unentailed part of his property, consisting precisely of incomeproducing improvements, was considered worthless, since he could not mortgage the land that went with i t Although it had to be improved to be desirable as a security, land was what made these mortgages fast. Just as no central banking system existed to make credit readily available, there was no open, developed, land market outside the kinship network to give prospective buyers ready access to haciendas. If a "free" or open market for haciendas had existed, we would expect to find that new land was being rapidly developed, or that established properties were changing hands frequently enough to be readily accessible to new owners through purchase, rather than inheritance or marriage. Turnover in established haciendas might proceed from speculation in land value, bankruptcy and foreclosure, the breakup of older properties, or the migration of traditional landowners into other, nonagricultural economic pursuits. I found instances of all of these changes except speculation in Guadalajara, and altogether the turnover in hacienda ownership has turned out to be considerably greater than I once thought. But only after independence did the market open up sufficiently to allow a wholly new, landless group to acquire major estates rapidly with money without first establishing traditional and ceremonial ties within the community. Few titles to land were recorded in the Ramo de Tierras y Aguas from 1800 to 1822. The majority were to properties described as arid, mountainous, rugged, and uncultivable, which suggests that most desirable land in the vicinity of Guadalajara had already been deeded out by the lateeighteenth century. In partial exception to this rule, Doctor Rafael 24

25

Credit and Kinship 45 Hernandez at some unknown date paid 4,000 pesos for the Hacienda del Potrero. He then opened a new plot for cultivation, fenced it, made building repairs and bought animals, all of which brought the value of the hacienda to 10,050 pesos in 1805. Two different aspects of Don Rafael's history are worth singling out In the first place, the doctor's hacienda was worth ten to twenty times less than some of his contemporaries' were worth. This fits my conclusion that properties available for new development at this time were likely to be small, arid, or poorly located. Data now available for the eighteenth century, plus notarial documents detailing other cases of recent land development in the early nineteenth century, tend to support the same conclusion. A second aspect of Don Rafael's story worth mentioning is the very small fraction of the hacienda's total worth represented by the land itself. Since there were buildings to be "repaired," the initial price of 4,000 pesos reflected only in part the value of the land itself. In fact, it is doubtful whether anyone had any conception of what the land was worth apart from the mentioned improvements. Nowhere in the notarial protocols of the first third of the nineteenth century is the value of "land" discussed. By inference, the value of land on great estates such as Huejotitan, like that of the Hacienda del Potrero, represented only a fraction of the worth of an hacienda. When Huejotitan was evaluated in 1808, for example, about one-third of the estate's given worth was assigned to the stone fencing alone. Haciendas did increase dramatically in value over the course of the eighteenth century, but real improvements in productivity occasioned this appreciation, apparently. Fields were enclosed, mills built, dams constructed or repaired. Landowners neither sought nor offered land in hopes of a quick turnaround at a higher price. Bankruptcies and foreclosures played a significant part in making haciendas available to new owners. In fact, Eric Van Young has shown that the vulnerability of haciendas to financial collapse led to surprisingly frequent turnover in hacienda ownership, especially in the first half of the eighteenth century. He demonstrates that eighty haciendas in the Guadalajara region changed hands by sale 375 times between 1700 and 1815. This revises our understanding of the period considerably, and opens up an important branch of inquiry. Still, as Van Young says, these figures do not indicate "that properties changed hands rapidly for speculative purposes." On the average, haciendas remained in the same hands for about 25 years at a time. If there were 375 sales in 115 years, with the rate of sale twice as high in the first half of the century, then sales in the second half probably averaged only slightly more 26

27

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29

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Credit and Kinship

than one a year. Since financial collapse often motivated these sales, many of these haciendas would have carried a heavy burden of indebtedness. Thus, although they may have attracted some potential buyers as a sort of investment coup, they must have repelled many others because of their infection with that most dreaded of colonial plagues—risk. "The overwhelming majority of these transfers," writes Van Young, "took the properties out of one family and into another." In other words, although haciendas were not available for purchase on a moment's notice, they did change hands often enough to indicate an "endemic instability" of Spanish land ownership. Did a steady recruitment of new elements into the landed oligarchy exist, then? Van Young does not speculate as to the new owners' origins, but many will wonder whether they were previously landless merchants. We should exercise considerable caution in reaching conclusions on this point. Many of the peninsular-born "merchants" who came to Guadalajara in the eighteenth century mentioned v i n c u l o s (entails) that they had left behind in Spain. Such entails were almost certainly much smaller than and very different in character from the great colonial entailed estates. Nevertheless, they show that these peninsulars owned real property before becoming merchants and suggest that their families enjoyed a fairly long-term association as residents with a given locality (northern Spain, in most instances). There are a few hints here and there that peninsular migrants to the New World were related to Creole families by previous kinship ties. In other words, these merchants were probably not, like Marx's Jews, "living in the pores of society." We might more accurately portray them as living "in the pores" of the imperial elite, since many were nephews to bishops, inlaws of courtiers, and noninheriting siblings of propertied families. It is worth remembering, too, that when haciendas failed financially, their owners or the courts would probably sell them to the estate's creditors or to someone those creditors trusted to honor their debts, in other words to someone who was likely a member of the clique already. Another question we must ask before formulating conclusions about social mobility is, What happened in the long run to the families that lost haciendas through bankruptcy and sale? When the great sixteenth-century estate of Luis de Ahumada broke up, we might suppose that his kin allies, the Henriquez Topetes, who had no entail to guarantee their continuity as landholders, would drop from sight, victims of "endemic instability." Yet two centuries later and some seventy-five kilometers away, we find them intermarrying with the "newly" landed Villasenor family that built its eighteenth-century empire around the estate of Huejotitan. Did this sort of historical sequence constitute the exception or the rule? We need more than 30

31

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Credit and Kinship 47 the largely anecdotal evidence now available to decide whether this chronic movement represented a closed rotation of "ins" and "outs" recruited from essentially the same class (as in many nineteenth-century political systems, for example) or an open-ended recruitment of middle class elements and expulsion of aristocrats (into what sociological limbo?). However we ultimately resolve this important historical problem, it seems reasonably safe to maintain the view that most prospective landowners of whatever origin had to follow the fairly long and involved traditional route of establishing or maintaining kinship through intermarriage with landed families. Eligible landed women may not have come on the "market" much more frequently than haciendas, but alliance with them offered several advantages: greater assurance of financial solvency; access to additional reserves of capital; a broad spectrum of useful civil and social connections; prestige value; and a good chance for setting up a continuous line of inheritance. Inheritance, of course, is the other great avenue to land ownership in this period. Unfortunately, Van Young offers no comparative estimate of how often Spaniards joined the landowning class by inheriting property, and I am not in a position to do so, either. I can only remark that, like marriage, inheritance is a form of acquisition that implies a complex network of overlapping social, economic, and ceremonial commitments, and membership in a common class. Some heirs (not all) acquired direct ownership and control of haciendas; merchants who intermarried with landowners usually did not, because of the separation of husbands' and wives' estates. Wives' estates nonetheless did become integral parts of the family estates based on such haciendas, and spouses enjoyed the privileges of using the hacienda's resources in their trading affairs, with a corresponding obligation to supply supporting goods and services to the agricultural operation. Perhaps most importantly, merchants or other individuals marrying into h a c e n d a d o families acquired that invaluable commodity, security. The ability to mortgage hacienda properties enabled such individuals to enter the dangerous but essential game of lending, borrowing, posting surety bonds, making advance payments, taking deposits, funding subordinates, and the other credit-related maneuvers without which the merchant could not buy and sell large shipments of goods, nor the h a c e n d a d o finance his stock- and grain-raising operations. 33

Marriage Alliances Neither miners, merchants, nor hacendados were exempt from shortages of currency, capital, and liquid assets. The frequency with which merchants

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acted as bondsmen, trust holders, moneylenders, financiers, and major suppliers shows that they enjoyed a relative advantage with respect to liquidity. With respect to security to underwrite loans, however, the merchants depended on their kinship ties to h a c e n d a d o families to obtain mortgageable properties. In one other important respect, merchants frequently depended on their landed in-laws. In spite of their reputation for wealth and monopoly, many merchants from Spain arrived in the New World with relatively insignificant sums of capital. Only through marriage into local, wealthy families did they acquire sufficient capital to take part in large-scale transactions. The prototype of the powerful peninsular merchant in Mexico's history is Gabriel Yermo, the man who deposed a viceroy. Yet Lucas Alaman, that equally prototypical apologist of peninsular merchants and detractor of Creole landowners, is quite explicit about the origins of Yermo's fortune. Don Gabriel married Dona Maria Josefa Yermo in Mexico. She was his first cousin and had inherited from her father, Don Juan Antonio, the rich sugar haciendas of Temisco and San Gabriel in the Valley of Cuernavaca. Alaman clearly states that Yermo was "respected for his conduct a n d f o r t h e very c o n s i d e r a b l e f o r t u n e he h a d r e c e i v e d f r o m h i s wife a n d much i n c r e a s e d by h i s i n d u s t r i o u s n e s s a n d l a b o r . " In Guadalajara, as well, merchants not intermarried with local landed families were less likely to be wealthy and socially prominent We shall see cases like that of Francisco Rubio, who began his mercantile career with little more than two thousand pesos, but who, through his brother's marriage into the Villasenor family, became one of the city's most prominent merchants and financiers. Here, as in Mexico City, marriage to a landed Creole woman provided the peninsular merchant's ticket to social status and financial success. 3 4

35

Kinship The logic of the local credit market suggests that merchants and hacendados sought to establish kinship ties through marital union, since such union permitted sufficient accumulation of capital, combined liquidity and credit, and brought lenders and borrowers together in an institutional setting that insured some regularity and predictability in their credit relations. Were such marriage alliances in fact a common practice in Guadalajara during the late colonial period? Table 3 details fifty cases in which peninsular merchants residing in Guadalajara married Creole women from landowning families. If the ninety-six individuals involved (there were four who married twice) were members of the local elite, and if they

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acted as bondsmen, trust holders, moneylenders, financiers, and major suppliers shows that they enjoyed a relative advantage with respect to liquidity. With respect to security to underwrite loans, however, the merchants depended on their kinship ties to h a c e n d a d o families to obtain mortgageable properties. In one other important respect, merchants frequently depended on their landed in-laws. In spite of their reputation for wealth and monopoly, many merchants from Spain arrived in the New World with relatively insignificant sums of capital. Only through marriage into local, wealthy families did they acquire sufficient capital to take part in large-scale transactions. The prototype of the powerful peninsular merchant in Mexico's history is Gabriel Yermo, the man who deposed a viceroy. Yet Lucas Alaman, that equally prototypical apologist of peninsular merchants and detractor of Creole landowners, is quite explicit about the origins of Yermo's fortune. Don Gabriel married Dona Maria Josefa Yermo in Mexico. She was his first cousin and had inherited from her father, Don Juan Antonio, the rich sugar haciendas of Temisco and San Gabriel in the Valley of Cuernavaca. Alaman clearly states that Yermo was "respected for his conduct a n d f o r t h e very c o n s i d e r a b l e f o r t u n e he h a d r e c e i v e d f r o m h i s wife a n d much i n c r e a s e d by h i s i n d u s t r i o u s n e s s a n d l a b o r . " In Guadalajara, as well, merchants not intermarried with local landed families were less likely to be wealthy and socially prominent We shall see cases like that of Francisco Rubio, who began his mercantile career with little more than two thousand pesos, but who, through his brother's marriage into the Villasenor family, became one of the city's most prominent merchants and financiers. Here, as in Mexico City, marriage to a landed Creole woman provided the peninsular merchant's ticket to social status and financial success. 3 4

35

Kinship The logic of the local credit market suggests that merchants and hacendados sought to establish kinship ties through marital union, since such union permitted sufficient accumulation of capital, combined liquidity and credit, and brought lenders and borrowers together in an institutional setting that insured some regularity and predictability in their credit relations. Were such marriage alliances in fact a common practice in Guadalajara during the late colonial period? Table 3 details fifty cases in which peninsular merchants residing in Guadalajara married Creole women from landowning families. If the ninety-six individuals involved (there were four who married twice) were members of the local elite, and if they

Table 3 Creole-Peninsular Marriage Alliances Peninsular Men

Consulado

Ramon de Amati

Kin of member

Cabildo

Sociedad Patri6tica

Jose Manuel Araysaga Diego Baz Fernando Bello y Prieto Member Member Member Juan Manuel Caballero Kin of Member Kin of Member Member Dionisio Ruiz de Cabanas Juan Jose Cambero Fernando Cambre Fernando Cambre

Francisco Cerro Escudero Juan Francisco Corcuera y Landazuri

Member Member Member

Kin of Member Kin of Member Member Member

Kin of Member

Haciendas

Maria Manuela de Zumelzu Anna Maria Vallarta Concepcion Palafox Guadalupe Vizcarra Juana de Dios Fernandez de Barrena Maria Guadalupe Estrada de Porres Baranda Marcela de Castro Maria Teresa de Casillas Maria Simona de la Ascension Gabriela Lazcano Sagaz de Cenizares Maria Guadalupe Villasenor Isabel Ortiz y Sierra Maria Dolores Vizcarra del Castillo y Pesquera

San Clemente Vinculo de Mazatepec

Mayorazgo de Huejotitan

Santa Cruz

Credit and Kinship

Jose Maria Castanos y del Llano Garcia Cerpa

Member

Creole Wives

49

Consulado

Cabildo

Sociedad Patri6tica

Juan Baudsta Chacon Member

Jose Maria Chafino Jose Maria Chafino Josef Domingo Zumelzu Juan Esteban de Elgorriaga Francisco Escobedo y Daza Ventura Garcia Gutierrez Manuel Garcia Sancho Francisco Garcia de Quevedo Manuel Garcia de Quevedo Fernando Gonzalez Manuel Gonzalez de Vallejo Sebastian Gutierrez de Allende

Member Member

Member

Creole Wives Maria Gertrudis Benavides Josefa Vallarta y Barrionuevo Dolores Vallarta y Vargas Clara de Castro

Member

Member

Clara de Castro

Member

Kin of Member

Isabel Ortega

Member

Santa Lucia

Kin of Member Kin of Member Kin of Member

Ignacia Servin de la Mora Ma. Josefa Camila Gdpe. Moreno Sanchez Lenero Isabel Portillo

Member

Eusebia Portillo

San Jose and

Member

Member

Haciendas

Member

Member

San Jose and

Navajas Member

Member

Navajas Kin of Member Kin of Member Member

Member

Member

Kin of Member Member

Maria Manuela de Velasco Antonia Fernandez de Castro Maria Francisca Sanchez Lenero

Santa Lucia

Credit and Kinship

Peninsular Men

50

Table 3 — C o n t i n u e d

Table 3 — C o n t i n u e d Peninsular Men

Consulado

Bernabe Gutierrez de Higuera Agustin Gutierrez de la Higuera Manuel Pacheco Calderon Domingo Ibarrondo Jose de la Madrid Cubillas Manuel Lavin

Kin of Member

Sociedad Patriotica

Maria Dolores Ortiz y Sierra Gertrudis Muguiro

Kin of Member Kin of Member Member Member

Member

Member

Gertrudis Muguiro Member Member

Ignacia Maruri Maria Teresa Colsa

Member

Maldonado (first name unknown) Dolores Iraizos y Celis

Member

Member

Member

Kin of Member Member Member Member

Member Member

Member

Member

Member

Creole Wives

Member

Member

Ignacia Avendano Josefa Sanchez Lenero Manuela Sanchez Lenero Maria Vitala Gonzalez Barbara Sierra Maria Guadalupe Martinez de los Rios y Ramos Josefa Garate

Haciendas

San Sebastian and San Pedro San Sebastian and San Pedro

Santa Lucia Santa Lucia del Salto

Santa Cruz and El Xacal

Credit and Kinship 51

Antonio Llanos (or del Llano) Geronimo de la Maza Eugenio Moreno de Tejada Jose Prudencio Moreno de Tejada Ramon de Munia Juan Angel Ortiz y Escudero Antonio Pacheco Calderon Francisco Xavier Pacheco de Villegas

Cabildo

52

Table 3 — C o n t i n u e d Consulado

Member Francisco Vicente Partearroyo Francisco de la Pena y Alvarado Pablo Benito Saenz de Tejada Bias Saliente Senen Palomar Miguel de Urquijo Jose Zabalza Ramon Rucabado Baron de Santa Cruz (Guillermo Daens Stuart de Caserta) Pascual Fernandez Rubio

Cabildo Member

Member

Member

Member

Member

Member

Member

Sociedad Patriotica

Creole Wives Maria Francisca Sanchez Juana del Rio Maria Luisa Aguirre y Ubiarco Ana Maria Megia Maria de Jesus Gutierrez Maria Francisca Partida y Lazo Maria Ignacia de Villareal Maria Guadalupe Canedo Ana Josefa Canedo

Haciendas

El Xacal and Santa Cruz

El Cabezon and La Vega El Cabezon and La Vega

Maruri (first name unknown)

Sources: Archivo Historico Municipal de Guadalajara (AHMG) and Archivo de Instrumentos Publicos de Guadalajara (AIPG) (for detailed list of citations, see Richard B. Lindley, "Kinship and Credit in the Structure of Guadalajara's Oligarchy" [Ph.D. dissertation, University of Texas at Austin, 1976], pp. 97-98; Jorge Palomino y Canedo,La casa y mayorazgo de Canedo deNueva G a l i c i a , 2 vols. [Mexico City: Editorial Athenea, 1947]; Jose Ramirez Flores, E l R e a l Consulado de G u a d a l a j a r a [Guadalajara: Banco Refaccionario de Jalisco, 1952]; Ramiro Villasenor y Villasenor, Bibliografia general del estado de Jalisco [Guadalajara: Publicaciones del Gobierno del Estado, 1958]; and the Gaceta del gobierno de G u a d a l a j a r a , various dates).

Credit and Kinship

Peninsular Men

Credit and Kinship 53 represented a significant fraction of that elite, then the table establishes that creole-peninsular intermarriage was common, was perhaps even the typical elite marriage pattern. Wealth and Privilege What is meant by the phrase "Guadalajara's elite"? In an abstract definition of elites, the distinction between wealth and social status is of theoretical importance. In almost any concrete case of civilized culture, however, families who enjoy only one of these prerogatives have been the historical exception rather than the rule. In Guadalajara as well, privilege and wealth went hand in hand in the region's "best" families. A s in David Brading's Guanajuato, "possession of public office [a good measure of social status] closely followed the distribution of wealth." In fact, even if we apply a variety of different criteria for membership in the elite, such as possession of high public office, enrollment in the royal merchants' guild, extensive land ownership, exercise of monopolies (such as the meat market or the collection of public revenues), membership in the cathedral chapter, high military rank, or even residence near the central square of the city, the same families qualify again and again for inclusion among the privileged few. The titled nobility itself was indistinct from the society of bureaucrats, merchants, and clergymen. Among this list of elite characteristics, membership in the exclusive Real Consulado (the royal merchants' guild) and ownership of one or more major haciendas are particularly applicable to the identification of wealthy families. In a regional economy based on commercial agriculture, these were universal conditions for achieving, demonstrating, and maintaining wealth. Inclusion in the Real Consulado was reserved for the city's uppermost stratum of merchants, and, as we saw in Chapter l, landholdings did not usually merit the name "hacienda" unless they were worth the minimum amount (certainly no less than six thousand pesos) required to mark a person as having something more than a comfortable income. Since the primary function of the city government at this time was to regulate the marketing of local agricultural produce through such institutions as the a b a s t o , t h e p o s i t o , and the a l h o n d i g a (a monopoly right to supply the city with meat, the grain stock maintained by the city, and the public grain market, respectively), control of these institutions was in the best interests of the commercial and agricultural elite. Elite families assured themselves of access to these market regulators by placing members in service on the c a b i l d o , the city's governing council. Thus, we may assume that men who served as a l c a l d e s and r e g i d o r e s (city council members and officials) belonged to local elite families. 36

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The aforementioned characteristics, along with membership in the Sociedad Patriotica, are indicators of elite status (see table 3). The Patriotic Society was a semiofficial club of eminent local citizens, modeled on Europe's "enlightened societies," that met to recommend programs to improve agriculture, mining, and industry. Since it formed in the 1820s, it provides some continuity from the colonial into the national period as an indicator of social status. It is also useful in that it included both merchants and landowners, as well as miners and members of the professions (principally law and medicine). P r o o f of E l i t e Status Twenty-four of the peninsular men listed in table 3 served on the Real Consulado during its nearly three decades of existence. Another nine were close kinsmen (by blood or marriage) of Real Consulado members, so that the families of thirty-three of these forty-eight men were represented in the most powerful merchants' association. If it were possible to make a more exhaustive genealogical study, and if I were to include business dependents of Real Consulado members, it is likely that only a few of the Spaniards on the list would not be connected to the merchants' guild. Fifteen of these same peninsular men held office on the city council, either as a l c a l d e s (presiding justices) or r e g i d o r e s (council members) during some part of the period 1790 to 1821. Perhaps another eight are closely related (as brothers, in-laws, sons, or fathers) to city officeholders. This would bring to twenty-three the number who had some intimate connection to the city government Reviewing the G a c e t a d e l g o b i e r n o de G u a d a l a j a r a for the names of members of the Sociedad Patriotica, I again found peninsulars with Creole wives prominently represented. Fourteen of the men in table 3 belonged to this local version of Europe's "enlightened" societies in 1821 and 1822. Eleven years of war and economic disruption, and one year of independence, had evidently done little to alter the underlying pattern linking Guadalajara's peninsular and Creole oligarchs. If we next ask how many of these merchants had landed interests, the answer will be more complex. Many, if not most, of these peninsular men acquired land holdings through their wives. Women's property relations are more difficult to trace because they appear with less frequency in the protocols. Nevertheless, it is clear that at least sixteen of the wives listed in table 3 owned land or were inheritable members of important landowning families. There can be little doubt that wives often contributed the benefits of landed interests to the marital partnership. The main landed properties of 37

38

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40

Credit and Kinship 55 such prominent local personages as Juan Manuel Caballero, Juan Francisco Corcuera, Manuel Garcia Quevedo, Ramon de Munia, Francisco Xavier Pacheco, Francisco de la Pena, Ramon Rucabado, and the Baron de Santa Cruz (Guillermo Daens Stuart de Caserta), came to them through their wives. Further research could probably establish landowning ties for more of the women, such as the Vallartas or Casillas, since their surnames were those of regionally prominent families. To appreciate the significance of wives' ownership of haciendas, we must know at least the rudiments of Spanish inheritance laws of the time. Women of the Spanish empire enjoyed considerably greater property rights and legal standing than did their counterparts in the British possessions: Spanish women were bearers of property and name, the twin pillars of their children's social identity. It was in the public realm—that is, in the realm outside the home and family—that men made their dominance felt Still, home and family in colonial Guadalajara meant a great deal more in terms of owning and managing business property than we might guess if we allowed our own postindustrial experience to distort our views. Spanish colonial law strongly endorsed women in matters of property and inheritance. Far from being regarded as "legally merged in the identity of their husbands," as were their colonial neighbors to the north, New Spain's wives retained their surnames and their capital throughout marriage. Legal documents always referred to a woman by her maiden name (usually a paternal name, to be sure), and whatever dowry or "capital" she brought to her husband had to be returned to her or to her heirs at the natural end of the marriage contract Moreover, any gains accrued to the couple during the marriage (that is, any capital over and above that present on the wedding day), belonged equally to the estates of both partners. The wills recorded in Guadalajara's notarial protocols show that maternal and paternal estates were divided equally among male and female children or heirs. Colonial law permitted variations from this general rule, but only within severe limits. When the eldest son inherited an hacienda intact, for example, he had to pay his sisters and younger brothers a sum equivalent to their natural shares in the property. Inheritance practice reserved only a small fraction of the estate for the testator's free disposition, and "primogeniture" would in fact be a misnomer for a system that gave only a very relative advantage to the oldest male heir. Practice, of course, modified the dictates of the law considerably, but for the most part local families honored their women's right to inherit When a man married a woman from a landowning family, he did not automatically become an hacienda owner himself (since men's and women's estates were separate), but he could reasonably expect that his children would become 41

56

Credit and Kinship

owners of some fraction of the land. Moreover, the husband presumably could enjoy the benefits of landed property, such as the ability to mobilize credit on the strength of a productive hacienda, without owning the hacienda outright. Creole men also used marital alliances to unite agricultural and commercial enterprises. The following cases serve as examples. Alfonso Sanchez Lenero, owner of the Hacienda de Santa Lucia, married Josefa Moreno Calderon Marin del Valle, who was almost certainly from a large mercantile family based in Tepic. Alfonso was himself a merchant and a member of the Real Consulado in Guadalajara. Antonio Iriarte married Guadalupe Alcaraz, heiress to a share of the Hacienda de Contla. Antonio was also a member of the Real Consulado. Lie. Crispin Velarde, also a member of the Real Consulado, married the daughter of Juan Jose de la Mora y Palma, who owned the Haciendas de Buenavista, Cumuato, and San Jose. Velarde used his wife's inheritance to begin a "commercial business." Where the land came from mattered less than the need to combine it, wherever possible, with commercial enterprise. Among the peninsular men listed in table 3, there are five who owned haciendas but whose wives did not Fernando Cambre, Jose Maria Castaiios y del Llano, Jose Maria Chafino, Francisco Xavier Pacheco de Villegas, and Senen Palomar, bringing to twenty-one the number of merchants who had landed properties large enough to be termed haciendas. Many prominent Creole businessmen also owned haciendas in their own right, which they may or may not have inherited, but which they apparently did not acquire through their wives. Matias Vergara, Colonel Jose Maria Lopez, Jose Maria Olague, and Fernando Sanchez Pareja were all "merchants" (Vergara and Sanchez Pareja belonged to the Real Consulado), and each owned at least one hacienda. Clearly, Guadalajara's merchants' guild did not represent merchants to the exclusion of hacendados, nor peninsulars to the exclusion of Creoles. Robert Smith has pointed out that the Spanish crown in 1793 expressly willed that the newly created c o n s u l a d o s include landowners as well as merchants: the crown was implicitly recognizing the fact of h a c e n d a d o merchant intermarriage and defining the c o n s u l a d o not as a guild in the old sense, but as a kind of representative club of the local society's most prominent members. Guadalajara's elite at the turn of the nineteenth century could not be conveniently compartmentalized into merchants, landholders, miners, Creoles, or peninsulars. A single elite based in the city dominated the political, commercial, and agricultural life of the region. Three quarters of 42

43

44

Credit and Kinship 57 the men in table 3 meet one or more of the tests for membership in this local oligarchy. Twelve of the couples show none of the indicators of elite status, perhaps because of incomplete data, in some cases. When working in notarial records, it is easy to prove that a particular individual d i d own an hacienda or hold some office, but it is extremely difficult to prove that some one did n o t . Impressionistic evidence strongly suggests that most, if not all, of the above twelve couples were members of Guadalajara's elite. There is clearly a high degree of correspondence between elite status and creolepeninsular intermarriage. Is that correspondence significant? The practice of intermarriage between Creoles and peninsulars, or between landholders and merchants, may have resulted not from some social purpose, but from the force of circumstances. Peninsular immigrants were overwhelmingly male and usually merchants. The available women were, of course, Creoles and often from landowning families. Thus it was inevitable that Old World trade should marry New World agriculture. Such unions would result in the creation of family properties in which commerce and agriculture functioned not as competitive rivals but as complements of a single enterprise. The question remains, nevertheless, of whether intermarriage was in some respects a necessary condition for inclusion in the elite, of whether in some respects intermarriage was a consciously sought condition and not simply a kind of historical accident One way to measure the significance of intermarriage patterns is to look at the alternatives. Peninsulars in the New World had the options of remaining single, or of not legalizing their unions. In the records of the Juzgado de Bienes de Difuntos for the early 1800s there appear perhaps a dozen peninsulars who never took New World wives. Some of them remained unmarried and had no children; others had offspring by concubines or prostitutes, and a few left wives and children permanently behind in Spain. Granting the usual exceptions to any rule, most of these unmarried Spaniards shared two salient characteristics: they resided in provincial towns and they were considerably less well-to-do then their wedded compatriots. Luis Quiros, one-time subdelegado of Tepatitlan and a bachelor, seems to have become a partner in two small r a n c h o s with Manuel de la Torre Marroquin, another peninsular who never married (although he sired an illegitimate family). Both men's careers were violently interrupted by the wars for independence: Quiros was beheaded by the insurgents in 1810, and de la Torre Marroquin was killed in the Battle of Zacoalco. Although Quiros's goods alone were assessed at over three thousand pesos, the actual (that is, liquid) estate left by both men together amounted to less than a

58

Credit and Kinship

thousand pesos. Jose Maria Andiasabal, a bachelor from Guipiizcoa, received three hundred pesos a year as administrator of the Hacienda de la Cienega in La Barca. The Navarra-born administrator of the Hacienda de Cedros at Real de Mazapil also died a bachelor, presumably he earned an equally modest income. A native of Santander who lived in Zacoalco left at his death an illegitimate daughter and several houses worth approximately seven thousand pesos. These men clearly were not poor, but neither did they stand in a class with the great landlords and merchants of Guadalajara's elite. Two other peninsulars not married to Creole women were wealthy, but belonged more properly to the peripheral elite of the small outlying towns. Angel Pablo Gomez had a wife in Spain, and Vicente Sein Terrones remained celibate. Gomez was worth from fifteen thousand to forty thousand pesos at his death, depending on whether we count bad debts. Sein Terrones had a potential estate of more than seventy thousand pesos and an actual one (after deductions) of around seventeen thousand. In both cases, the men ran stores in provincial towns (Gomez's in Tepatitlan, Sein Terrones's in Cocula and Etzatlan) and both were subordinates of major Guadalajara merchants. Sein Terrones was a nephew and employee of Ventura Garcia Diego; Gomez was heavily reliant on Antonio Pacheco Calderon for supplies and credit Juan de Mestas, another unmarried peninsular, operated a store in Tepic in the name of the powerful Ramon de Munia. Placido de Cazeda, attached to a "muger que lo cuidava" ("a woman who took care of him"), constitutes an anomaly to the extent that he resided in Guadalajara. Still, he fits the pattern to the extent that he was a small-time operator: his entire estate consisted of two thousand pesos in debts. Also, he was almost certainly a dependent or employee of Juan Estevan de Elgorriaga. Thus those peninsulars not married to Creole women were geographically or commercially on the periphery of Guadalajara's elite society rather than at its center. To reiterate, at least three out of four peninsular merchants listed in table 3 were definitely members of Guadalajara's elite. Conversely, a number of peninsulars who are known not to have married Creole women failed to accumulate enough capital or prestige to be included in the inner circle of the big-city oligarchy. There thus appears to be a more than casual connection between membership in the city's oligarchy and m e r c h a n t - h a c e n d a d o intermarriage. Does the sample in table 3, then, include a large enough portion of Guadalajara's elite families to constitute a representative sample? Eduardo Arcila Farias cites a report in the Archivo General de la Nation, dated 1799, that listed 481 well-to-do individuals in the city. Of these, only 45

46

47

48

Credit and Kinship 59 57 qualified as truly "rich persons." Assuming each of the 57 represented a separate household, Arcila's estimate of the city's elite population would be even more conservative than my own. If we take the more generous estimate of elite population offered in Chapter 1, which puts the number of elite families at 100 to 150, then the couples listed in table 3 may have represented as much as one-half of the area's most prestigious families. At its most conservative, table 3 shows that twenty-one out of perhaps one hundred elite families held equally important agricultural and commercial properties and united Creole and peninsular kinship lines. By adding another seven examples cited of Creoles with agricultural and commercial interests, we can conservatively estimate that about one-third of local elite families combined haciendas with mercantile business. Since this study falls well short of exhausting the voluminous notarial archive, it seems safe to guess that this pattern was even more prevalent than present evidence suggests. 49

K i n s h i p , Credit, a n d the E l i t e F a m i l y Enterprise Conflicts of economic interest and provincial identity existed within Guadalajara's elite, but in many respects the kinship system that operated in the upper layers of local society evolved as a means of subsuming and mitigating those conflicts. If marital alliances did not always succeed in dissolving or transcending such conflicts, they did succeed in placing the diverse economic resources of the region within the bounds of unitary enterprises controlled by families. A t the micro-economic level of individuals and families, the distinction between merchant and landholder interesected rather than coincided with distinctions of social class or geographical origin. Even though the elite cannot be divided into discrete and competing economic sectors, perhaps the colonial macro-economy can. The different sectors (agriculture, mining, commerce) did, after all, present very different sets of problems and each had a unique system of organization to fulfill its needs (the hacienda in agriculture, the two-man partnership in trade, and the mine with its attached h a c i e n d a de beneficio [ore-processing hacienda]). Is it possible to discuss such diverse economic functions under the umbrella of a private family's enterprise without violating the essential diversity of these various endeavors? It must be possible, since families such as the Porres Barandas, the Portillos, and the Villasenores were able to conceive of all the sectors as an integrated whole and to operate unitary enterprises that cut across sectoral boundaries. We may contend that they found it necessary to operate businesses that encompassed all three of the main economic sectors at once. We must look for some factor that families and economic entities had in

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Credit and Kinship

common. In the first part of this chapter, I tried to show that credit was such a factor in turn-of-the-century Guadalajara. A l l considerations of labor, social values, or resources internally unique to the mining industry, to tobacco production, to haciendas, or to export-import operations shared a peculiar dependency on credit In a system in which there was never enough capital, and in which no central banking institution was acting to accumulate and disburse investment funds, each family had to serve as its own bank. Marital partnerships that combined agricultural, commercial, and mining interests fulfilled many of the conditions and performed many of the functions that banks and corporations now perform in our society. Such partnerships allowed for sufficient capital accumulation, complemented security with liquidity in the family's assets, divided large risks into smaller ones, prevented the family's isolation from any particular productive or lucrative economic branch, structured patterns of business confidence, and provided some means of enforcing loyalties. The setting in which kinship alliances performed these "modern" banking functions of course differs greatly from our social setting. In a kinshipdominated society, such functions were much less centralized and the institutions that performed them necessarily less specialized. Not only did each family act as its own generator of credit and investor of funds, but the family's role made it a pillar of religious, cultural, and political life, as well. In this chapter, I have focused primarily on credit and kinship because the former is a key to the kinds of needs that Guadalajara's regional society most urgently felt, and the latter provides the structural lines along which institutions grew to meet those needs. The most relevant of these institutions was the elite family enterprise, grounded in marriages that allied landowners with merchants. In the setting here described—of little centralization and little specialization—such families evolved far beyond their simple bipolar base to become miniature societies complete in their own right They became, in other words, colonial society in microcosm. The merchant and the landowner's daughter were perhaps key figures in the elite family tableaus thus created, but so were the clergyman, the military officer, the bureaucrat, doctor, and lawyer. Having established the m e r c h a n t - h a c e n d a d o alliance as the bones of the family enterprise, it becomes necessary to put some flesh on those bones by looking at the total family enterprise in greater detail. The next chapter describes a number of prominent local families that typify the internal structure and functions of the local oligarchy. Profiling these families should give a more concrete, better-rounded picture of the elite family as a working institution, of its strategy to survive and maintain position by combining

Credit and Kinship 61 economic resources and political leverage to reproduce local society in microcosm, and of its tendency to integrate the regional socioeconomic structure by transcending the severe dichotomies inherent to the colonial dynamic—dichotomies such as Creole versus peninsular, landowner versus merchant, or church versus state. With this image of the local oligarchy more firmly in place, we can then examine, in Chapter 4, how the events surrounding the wars for national independence challenged or transformed this important set of institutions and relations.

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Four Elite Family Enterprises

65

emerge from family archives, but from a sampling of notary archives. Thus, for example, comparisons of one family's income in 1795 with another's in 1820 are somewhat risky, and we must take generalizations in a spirit of caution. Within the limits of the material, however, these family sketches tell us a great deal about the marriage alliances described in Chapter 2. The picture of elite family enterprise painted in this chapter necessarily remains a static one. The next chapter sets the scheme in motion by showing the effects of the independence wars on Guadalajara's credit market and the consequences republican institutions had on the elite family as an economic unit. The Villasenor Entail At the turn of the nineteenth century, the Villasenor family looked to the patriarch Tomas Ignacio Villasenor as its head. The family had its property base in the territory immediately south of Guadalajara. Like most of the regional m a y o r a z g o s , or entailed estates, the Villasenor entail was founded on the lands of its central hacienda and the family's urban dwelling—the unalienable properties. The hub of the extensive family universe was the Hacienda de Huejotitan, located between the towns of Jocotepec and Acatlan (map D-4). Immediately to the east lay the principal satellite hacienda, Potrerillos. The Villasenor family traced its roots to the Valley of Ameca and to Spain. Its genealogical line reached back into the sixteenth century, which is probably why Jose Laris mistakenly described the Villasenor entail as "without a doubt the most ancient and venerable in Guadalajara of the Indies." We now know that the entail was not founded until the eighteenth century (after the Porres Baranda entail). Major improvements to the central hacienda were not made until around 1780. Among its ancestors the family numbered Diego de Aguilar y Solorzario, an archdeacon of the Cathedral of Valladolid (now the city of Morelia, Michoacan), and various canons or dignitaries of Guadalajara's cathedral, such as Doctor Juan Arriola. Another forerunner, Don Basilio de la Canal, had served as high constable of Guadalajara's a u d i e n c i a , and several generations of Villaseiiores or their relatives served as mayors or members of the city council. In the early nineteenth century, the family's sphere of influence reached as far north as Monterrey, where the Gomez branch of the family was represented on the cathedral chapter. Through connections with the Foncerrada family, the Villaseiiores continued to extend their ties as far 3

4

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south as Valladolid (Morelia). Huejotitan was one of the largest haciendas in the area, although it is difficult to give an exact measure in surface area. What was apparently the main wheat field was a p o t r e r o (a rather loose term that seems to have referred to almost any developed or fenced piece of land) large enough to permit the sowing of about 180 c a r g a s , or roughly a thousand bushels. According to J. Villasana Haggard's equivalency figures, the wheat field covered about three thousand acres. Several other p o t r e r o s or r a n c h o s received plantings that totaled 165 fanegas, or about 330 bushels of maize, equal to an area of around 1,400 acres. A s m a l l e r p o t r e r o of unspecified size was devoted to the production of barley and garbanzo. Two other p o t r e r o s , used seasonally for animals, were probably quite large, since the value of their stone enclosures was high (five thousand pesos, or one-half the value of the stone wall encircling the wheat field). Available documents do not record the amount of pasture land, but the Villaseiior family sold large quantities of animals to the city and had large herds of livestock grazing at any given time. The particular inventory I used was dated March 1808, about three months before the beginning of the rainy season. At that time, the animal population of Huejotitan alone consisted of 420 mules, 660 oxen, 2,380 horses (of which some two-thirds were mares), 1,500 head of cattle, and 14 burros. In this same inventory, the family declared the worth of the unentailed portion of the estate, including Potrerillos, to be over 120,000 pesos in buildings, fences, mills, dams, and the like. Of course, they may have inflated the figure, since the purpose of the inventory was to establish the family's capacity to secure a large loan for another of Guadalajara's entail holders. Witnesses to this inventory may have exaggerated when they stated that the evaluation underestimated the family's real worth by at least one third. Still, in another unrelated document, the head of the family declared the estate's total yearly income to be 14,000 pesos. We can reasonably capitalize the estate from its income at a presumed interest rate of 5 percent, a practice that contemporaries themselves used to find the value of certain kinds of property. At this fairly conservative rate of interest or dividends, the total Villasenor estate would have been worth around 280,000 pesos, exclusive of commercial interests. We can get still another perspective on the size and importance of the Villasenor estate by looking at the haciendas' populations. Huejotitan alone supported a permanent human population of almost 750. Of these, well over 300 had citizenship status under the Constitution of 1812, which shows that they were probably higher in social status than laborers or peons. The sister 5

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property, Potrerillos, counted some 300 permanent inhabitants within its boundaries. During festivals and harvests, Huejotitan may have been as populous as the nearby town of Jocotepec, many of whose 1,800 residents were actually scattered among outlying r a n c h o s ? Huejotitan, as indicated by the brief property inventory above, was a typical mixed hacienda of the region; it produced large quantities of both of the major regional crops (corn and wheat) as well as animals. A s on other haciendas located on the more fertile, better irrigated lands near the lake and river, wheat production equaled or surpassed corn production. In terms of crops and animals, Potrerillos resembled Huejotitan on a small scale. Properties, like people, tended to group together in more or less continuous "families." Huejotitan and Potrerillos, although separately owned and rented within the family, formed a distinct pair. Each of these haciendas in turn had a number of satellite r a n c h o s . These properties formed the economic nucleus of the successors to the family entail, although not all of these lands were entailed. Another group of haciendas, although definitely within the economic orbit of Huejotitan, was separately administered by and clustered around a second branch of the family, cousins to the first. The Hacienda de Cedros, located near Lake Cajititlan, formed the center of this group (map E-4). Another of these haciendas, Santa Rosa, lay nearby. Laris's history of the Villasenor estate fails to mention it, but notarial records show that the Gomez Villasenor side of the family, owners of the Hacienda de Cedros, also controlled the Hacienda de San Nicolas de la Labor in the jurisdiction of the town of Chapala (E-4), and the Hacienda de Colimilla, situated on the river bank between Guadalajara and Zapotlanejo (E-3). A l l of these properties were of considerable size and worth. San Nicolas de la Labor, for example, rented for 1,425 pesos a year in 1825, an amount comparable to the 1,600 a year yielded by the populous Hacienda Potrerillos. Huejotitan rented for at least 6,000, perhaps 7,000 pesos a year. The sale of Santa Rosa in 1826 brought 50,000 pesos, and it seems doubtful that Cedros would have yielded less, since it was the principal property of this group. Colimilla was the least valuable of the Villasenor haciendas. It apparently had come into the family only recently, had only recently been developed, and may have just attained the status of hacienda, rather than rancho. Cedros and San Nicolas de la Labor engaged in mixed grain production and cattle raising. Colimilla also grew some sugarcane. A l l of the haciendas undoubtedly had the usual complement of agave plants, beans, other secondary crops, and small livestock. 9

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Land ownership gave the Villasenor family an impressive geographic range. A glance at the map shows that the main lines of the family held sway over properties extending from one end of Lake Chapala nearly to the other. The dealings of Francisco Rubio (the household's principal mercantile agent) with the city illustrate the kind of economic and political leverage land ownership gave them. In 1820 he contracted to sell 10,000fanegas of corn to Guadalajara's public granary. The amount in itself is large, but it takes on a special importance when we realize that the city bought only 83,000fanegas of corn that year. If Rubio fulfilled his contract, the family he represented furnished something like 10 percent of the staple item in the diet of a city of forty thousand to fifty thousand inhabitants. This sale casts an interesting light on the enterprise's commercial and agricultural branches. If Rubio intended to supply the entire 10,000 fanegas from Villasenor lands (as he might well have done, given the size of the family's holdings), he was a very important merchant who used both his political and his commercial connections to market what must have been virtually the entire Villasenor corn crop for that year. If he intended to piece together the 10,000 fanegas by buying from neighboring haciendas and reselling to the city, we have a more complex situation. In this case Rubio was still an important merchant, but he was also a major broker with a role in apportioning market shares and integrating regional agricultural production for the city's consumers. In either case, two points are well worth making: the commercial aspect of the Villasenor estate was just as large and important as the agricultural one; and commerce and agriculture were heavily interdependent branches of the family enterprise. I cannot overemphasize the fact that dividing the family into an agricultural and a commercial side is a useful but largely arbitrary analytical convenience. The distinction has its roots in historical reality: some families (such as the Rubios) specialized in commerce, and some (such as the Villasenores) specialized in agriculture. But the enterprise created by the intermarriage of such families was a complex organism that subordinated individual specializations to a larger whole and often blurred the original distinctions between h a c e n d a d o and merchant even at the individual level. I will first sketch in the more important personalities of this particular enterprise, and then try to show how kinship and credit relations wove them into a complex, organized network that was more than just the sum of its parts. Don Tomas Ignacio Villasenor inherited the entail from his father, Don Francisco Gregorio. As owner of the central hacienda (Huejotitan) and titular head of the family, he was the sun that shone in the Villasenor heavens from perhaps as early as 1770 until his death in 1818. Apparently well-suited to his role, Don Tomas appears in Luis Perez Verdia's history 11

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of Jalisco as the model of the creole landowner, aloof but pious and humanitarian. Perez Verdia quotes the following remarks from a contemporary periodical: Among the senores hacendados there are many [who are] excellent, beneficent human beings and who could be the model for men of good will. I know of one who, after paying his peons, gave them land and oxen so they could sow separately, and stored their crop so that it would be sold at an advantageous time: each year he distributed, over and above salary, a considerable quantity in mantas [bolts of cloth] and blankets, giving to each in proportion to his family; they were provided with an abundance of medicines to give out free to the sick; the master paid his peons' parochial fees; widows were given a half pension, etc. Such was Don Tomas Ignacio Villasenor. 13

Don Tomas served on the city council in various capacities for almost forty years. He capped his public career by assuming the rank of lieutenant colonel in the military and leading a contingent of royalist troops against the rebels in 1810. Jose Maria Villasenor, Don Tomas's brother, enjoyed full property rights to the Hacienda de Portrerillos while Tomas was alive and succeeded to the entail when his brother died without issue. Because entails were abolished after independence, Jose Maria was the last Villasenor to control the undivided estate. The branch of the family centered on the Hacienda de Cedros was headed by Don Rafael Villasenor y Gomez. Interestingly, Cedros passed to Don Rafael through his wife's inheritance, although it had belonged in the family, since Dona Guadalupe Arriola de la Hoz was herself a descendant of the Villasenor household. According to Laris, the original patriarch of the entire family was Buenaventura Guadalupe Villasenor Solorzano y Arriola. The Arriolas, from whom Buenaventura took his last surname, also had their agricultural and genealogical origins in the Valley of Ameca, and they had apparently been intermarrying with the Villasenores for several generations. Rafael's son Jose Maria Gomez Villasenor (note the apparently arbitrary transposition of surnames), owned the Hacienda San Nicolas de la Labor. Another son, or perhaps nephew, Rafael Francisco Villasenor, brought the Hacienda de Colimilla into the family when he married Rafaela Eguiarte, his second wife. The various patriarchs and scions of the Villasenor family had an important historical role to play in 1810. Don Tomas Ignacio led the royalist troops against Hidalgo in the crucial battle of Zacoalco and suffered a defeat that permitted Hidalgo to move in and occupy Guadalajara. Don 14

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Rafael Villasenor was one of the two delegates commissioned by city authorities to receive the victorious Hidalgo and ask his conditions for surrender. Later, Hidalgo's lieutenant Ignacio Allende would ask Jose Gomez Villasenor, in his capacity as governor of the diocese, whether it would be moral for Allende to poison Hidalgo in order to avoid even greater evils. Thus in quick cross-section we can see the Villasenores as military, political, and moral authorities of Guadalajara. The various family heads so far described were all Creoles, and all major landowners in the district. Was this one of those model aristocratic families supposed to despise commerce and profits as being beneath their "feudal" tradition, and supposed to resent Spaniards as usurpers of their social rank? They certainly filled the requirements for a local aristocracy and were among the four families considered eligible for ennoblement in 1805. But if they despised or resented Spaniards or merchants, it was not evident in their business and matrimonial relations. Rafael Francisco, in spite of his hacienda, is consistently identified as one of the city's merchants in the notarial protocols. Don Tomas Ignacio's niece Guadalupe was married to Captain Garcia Cerpa, a naval officer from the Canary Islands, whose brother occupied a canonry in Guadalajara's cathedral. Most important, the second-ranking person in the entire family enterprise from the business point of view was Francisco Rubio, one of Guadalajara's leading Creole merchants. Francisco Rubio was one of twenty-two people living under Tomas Ignacio Villasenor's roof in 1814. His older brother, Juan Nepomuceno Rubio, married Villasenor's adopted daughter, Gertrudis. Don Tomas's union with Antonia Barragan was barren, and he left her eight thousand pesos when he died. Since he left a similar amount to his housekeeper, who was also named Gertrudis, it seems at least possible that he may have fathered his adopted daughter with his housekeeper. A t any rate, she inherited like any other daughter, so it is perfectly proper to consider Juan and his younger brother Francisco as in-laws of Tomas Ignacio. Two younger Rubio sisters also lived with the family, which included Don Tomas's wife and mother-in-law, various cousins, and servants. We know that Francisco Rubio was born in the New World, but legal problems concerning his inheritance lead directly to Spain, which suggests that his origins in the Iberian peninsula were not very distant in time. He and his brother Juan Nepomuceno each inherited two thousand pesos in the form of crude and minted silver. Don Tomas did not die until 1818, and Gertrudis's relatively modest patrimony of eight thousand pesos undoubtedly went to support her children by Juan Rubio. As far as we know, Francisco never married. 18

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In spite of these humble beginnings, Francisco went on to become a prominent citizen and large-scale merchant who shipped sixteen thousand pesos' worth of goods to northern New Spain in a single consignment His older brother remained socially invisible by comparison, but it was not unusual for a younger brother to excel in business if his talents or propensities were better suited to a public career. If Francisco Rubio never married and hence received no large dowry, if he could not have borrowed large sums from his older brother, and if he did not figure prominently on the mercantile scene before his association with Villasenor, then it seems reasonable to conclude that his social connection with the great family estate centered on Huejotitan made his career as a large-scale export-import merchant possible. Although Francisco financed agricultural operations with injections of credit, at the beginning of his career it would seem that the hacienda "financed" his mercantile careernot necessarily with actual sums of money, but with large amounts of intangible values such as social prestige, introductions, and mortgageability, which undoubtedly made it possible for Francisco to obtain credit on good terms. Francisco was much more than a merchant; he played a multiple role in the family enterprise. He arranged for and financed the sale of corn, wheat, and animals to the city. Like Don Tomas Ignacio, he served on the city council, where he undoubtedly influenced the city's grain-purchasing and pricing policy. Through Rubio, the family invested in what we might call light industry. He managed one of the city's four principal flour mills, the Molino de las Beatas. Not only was this mill one of Huejotitan's best customers for wheat, but virtually every bakery in Guadalajara—and some of them were large—depended on the mill for some portion of its yearly supply of flour. Furthermore, most of the other prominent wheat-growing families sold to this mill, putting Rubio in a position of considerable leverage vis-a-vis the Villaseiiores' immediate "rivals." Rubio probably purchased textiles and other items to be sold on the family's haciendas, since he performed this service for other landowners. He owned a tannery in Guadalajara, although there is nothing to show whether the hides tanned there came from Villasenor animals. On top of all this, Francisco Rubio was for several years the a r r e n d a t a r i o (renter or tenant) of the Hacienda de Huejotitan. In order to understand what Rubio's role as lessee of the main hacienda meant, and in order to understand his relation to the owners, we must consider several factors. Tomas Ignacio, Jose Maria, and Jose Maria Gomez Villasenor kept their haciendas rented out continuously. We cannot assume, however, that they did so in order to relieve themselves of 21

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administrative duties concerning the land and to transform themselves into idle r e n t i e r s . Tomas Ignacio, at least, was anything but a sybaritic landlord; he spent comparable amounts of time in town and in the country. In fact, we can deduce the immediacy of his authority in the countryside from an 1810 incident. A hired hand, Manuel Ximenez, stole some goods from the family's store at Huejotitan. Tomas Ignacio's young wife, Antonia Barragan, was afraid to reprimand the delinquent while her husband was absent on his military campaign, even though the store manager (her nephew), the hacienda's administrator, and the m a y o r d o m o (steward) were all present on the hacienda, as was Juan Nepomuceno Rubio. Clearly, Tomas Ignacio was not a "drone" or a parasitic consumer of the estate; he continued to exercise decision-making power. Even if his duties were only moral or ceremonial, we should not underestimate the importance of these, or the necessity of such services for the smooth functioning of the economically productive part of the enterprise. It would have been no small task for the old man to plan and make advantageous marriages for the youngsters, mediate disputes among his prolific dependents, represent the estate in civil government, carry out his military duties, and keep the necessary business and ecclesiastical connections in the city constantly supple. Little wonder that he might need administrative assistance. The estate had both an administrator (Don Jose Valencia and later his son Domingo) and a steward (Miguel Robledo), as well as numerous foremen and superintendents. What then was Francisco Rubio's role as lessee? In light of the argument set out in Chapter 2 and the circumstantial evidence here, it is logical to interpret the rental contract in part as a formalization of Rubio's role as financier of the estate. Rubio was not some sort of glorified tenant farmer. Rather, he was the person who supplied the family enterprise with credit in the form of mercantile goods, seed, or cash; in return he received authority as manager of the business and of the property and the right to sell some or all of the crop. Rubio's access to the landed resources of the Villasenor estate probably enabled him to function as a sort of financier or personal bank. Although he rarely mortgaged property (we must remember that the entail forbade the mortgaging of a major portion of the property), he did frequently act as bondsman, and it was always clear that the assets of the Villasenor household stood behind his paper securities. A number of Rubio's transactions show that he was often the recipient, rather than the donor, of credit. In 1818 he owed one year's back rent on Huejotitan; for a year he had been operating on a credit from the hacienda. In 1820 he took more than six thousand pesos' worth of animals from the hacienda without making immediate payment. He undoubtedly intended to pay for them with the money he received when he sold them, so in effect the 23

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hacienda was again financing his commercial operations, rather than the other way around. As lessee of the hacienda, Rubio was immediately superior to the hacienda's a d m i n i s t r a d o r . At the a d m i n i s t r a d o r level, too, we find kinship ties at work. Huejotitan's two administrators were Jose Valencia and his son Domingo. The reader will recall that Tomas Villasenor's servant Gertrudis Valencia inherited eight thousand pesos from him and may have borne his adopted daughter, Maria Gertrudis Villasenor. Don Jose Maria Villasenor, Tomas's brother and owner of Potrerillos, who later inherited the entail, was married to Dona Maria Antonia Valencia. Since Maria Antonia only inherited four hundred pesos or less from each of her parents, there is no reason to suppose that she came from a social stratum any higher than that of Jose or Domingo Valencia, although I was unable to document any kinship with them in the archives. Did the Villasenor family, then, intermarry with its subordinates? 25

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Manuel Payno's perceptive novel, L o s b a n d i d o s de R i o F r i o , is built around the assumption that such marital alliances were a social outrage; in the novel it is unthinkable that the daughter of an a d m i n i s t r a d o r should marry the hacienda owner's son. Jose Maria Villasenor may have committed just such an "outrage." Don Tomas of course did not marry a Valencia, and if he did father a child with a Valencia, she was technically illegitimate. But surely intermarriage was outrageous only because it exposed the family property to inheritance by social "inferiors." If Tomas Ignacio gave both his servant and his adopted daughter status as heirs (and not insignificant heirs), then in effect his legitimate heirs had to share the family estate with servants. Yet, if his legitimate heirs were outraged, they did not indicate it by disputing his will. In the section in this chapter on the Porres Barrandas, we will see what to all appearances is a case of an a d m i n i s t r a d o r ' s relative disputing inheritance rights with the owners' family. If Jose Maria Villasenor did marry a kinswoman of Huejotitan's administrators, the union may have cemented the loyalty of these dependents to the estate's interests. Such an alliance might also have tied the family property to local interests. Domingo Valencia was born in Jocotepec. So was Francisco Villalaz, who for several years joined Francisco Rubio as colessee of Huejotitan. Kinship and credit apparently worked to integrate the interests of members of the subprovincial elite with their peers, as well as with their social superiors in the provincial elite. Credit played as important a role as these kinship relations in defining the structure of the Villasenor enterprise. Although kinship and credit relations were sometimes independent, they frequently overlapped and even became 27

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almost indistinguishable in such institutions as the dowry, the inheritance, or tutelage ( t u t e l a s , a kind of trust fund for the upbringing and financial security of minors). Tomas Ignacio Villasenor borrowed several sums, each in the thousands, from his niece's brother-in-law, cathedral canon Francisco Cerpa. Among Tomas Ignacio's creditors and debtors at the time of his death was a wideranging assembly of relatives, from Licenciado Jose Maria Foncerrada y Gomez (nephew of Doctor Jose Maria Gomez Villasenor) to his wife's brother and his cousins' kinsmen in Monterrey. If in many of these transactions the church was the source of funds, it is also clear that kinship provided the channels through which the funds flowed. Of course this proves only that people borrowed from their kinsmen or through them, a worthwhile but not a startling point. We might ask for a better indication that such transactions were indeed a structural part of the family enterprise. The Villasenores furnished one good illustration of how such a structural pattern might work. Shortly before his death, Tomas Ignacio planned to borrow nineteen thousand pesos to pay off some debts incurred in making capital improvements at Huejotitan. The principal of the loan was to be repaid with the five hundred pesos a month paid by Francisco Rubio in rent for the hacienda. In a very direct sense, Rubio the kinsman and lessee was financing capital improvements of the enterprise. This discussion of the Villasenor enterprise hardly exhausts the family's genealogy or economic history; in fact, it barely scratches the surface. Nevertheless, it gives an idea of the kind of structure we can expect to find in the typical family enterprise —who the major personalities were, what functions they performed, how they related to each other. The Villasenor family enterprise demonstrates a pattern of kinship and credit that transcended the distinctions of regionalism, occupation, birthplace, or economic sector usually employed in social typologies of early nineteenth-century Mexico. Peninsular Spaniards, Creoles, merchants, hacendados, professionals, clergymen, estate administrators, and even certain types of household servants shared a common roof, contributed their talents and resources to the maintenance of a huge, remarkably wellintegrated business, and shared in the proprietorship and other benefits of the enterprise. Among the family's interests were agricultural and livestock haciendas; local, regional, and interoceanic commerce; a flour mill, a tannery; and certain types of income-earning capital. A l l the Villasenor estate lacked to be a complete microcosm of New Spain's economy was a mining investment. Some mining connection undoubtedly existed, since Juan and Francisco Rubio inherited silver from their forebears, but I did not find any evidence of a continuing interest in mine exploitation. Both the 29

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Porres Baranda and the del Rio-Pacheco households, however, maintained an ongoing investment in mining operations. The

Porres Baranda Entail

Diego de Porres founded the m a y o r a z g o of Mazatepec in 1692, with the stipulation that his successors be required always to use the surname Porres Baranda. Although the patronymic of the entail's holder at the beginning of the nineteenth century was Estrada, he went by the name Manual Porres Baranda. His siblings—Jose Maria, Ricardo, Maria Guadalupe, and Ana Jacoba—always used the patronymic, Estrada. The confusion of name order here, as with the Gomez and Villasenor families, shows that we cannot be rigid in applying a strict patriarchal criterion in tracing family lineages; we must watch property as well as the paternal and maternal surnames (see the Porres Baranda genealogy in the Appendix). Laris identifies the principal haciendas of the estate as [San Isidro de] Mazatepec, el Plan de Santa Ana, and Navajas, all located between the towns of Tala and Santa Ana Acatlan, to the west and south of Guadalajara (map D-4). There seems to be some uncertainty about the Haciendas de Navajas and Plan de Santa Ana; some of the documents I encountered described them as Porres properties, and others as belonging to the family of Miguel Portillo (see the next section of this chapter). Historically, these estates were in fact closely associated with the Porres Barandas, and there is evidence that there were close kinship or business ties between them and the Portillos. It may be that one family owned and the other managed, or even that they traded these functions back and forth across generations. Whether or not the Porres Barandas owned Navajas and Santa Ana in Manuel's generation, there was no dearth of rural properties in the family holdings. As in the case of the Villasenores, the Porres entail included an opulent mansion in Guadalajara and an entire city block of buildings surrounding it in the central downtown area. Table 4 lists the rural properties owned by the family in 1834. They are grouped according to the towns they surrounded and show that the family had property to the north, east, south, and west of Guadalajara. Mazatepec and Santa Ana, like the Villasenor haciendas, Huejotitan and Potrerillos, were sister haciendas that produced corn, wheat, and animals. Apparently more modest in scale and more nearly equal in worth than the Villasenor pair, Mazatepec and Santa Ana together yielded 6,700 pesos per year in rent in the relatively high-priced decade of the 1820s. Mazatepec rented for 3,100 pesos and Plan de Santa Ana for 3,600 pesos. I could find no figures for the rents yielded by the r a n c h o s , although even at 50 pesos to 31

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Porres Baranda and the del Rio-Pacheco households, however, maintained an ongoing investment in mining operations. The

Porres Baranda Entail

Diego de Porres founded the m a y o r a z g o of Mazatepec in 1692, with the stipulation that his successors be required always to use the surname Porres Baranda. Although the patronymic of the entail's holder at the beginning of the nineteenth century was Estrada, he went by the name Manual Porres Baranda. His siblings—Jose Maria, Ricardo, Maria Guadalupe, and Ana Jacoba—always used the patronymic, Estrada. The confusion of name order here, as with the Gomez and Villasenor families, shows that we cannot be rigid in applying a strict patriarchal criterion in tracing family lineages; we must watch property as well as the paternal and maternal surnames (see the Porres Baranda genealogy in the Appendix). Laris identifies the principal haciendas of the estate as [San Isidro de] Mazatepec, el Plan de Santa Ana, and Navajas, all located between the towns of Tala and Santa Ana Acatlan, to the west and south of Guadalajara (map D-4). There seems to be some uncertainty about the Haciendas de Navajas and Plan de Santa Ana; some of the documents I encountered described them as Porres properties, and others as belonging to the family of Miguel Portillo (see the next section of this chapter). Historically, these estates were in fact closely associated with the Porres Barandas, and there is evidence that there were close kinship or business ties between them and the Portillos. It may be that one family owned and the other managed, or even that they traded these functions back and forth across generations. Whether or not the Porres Barandas owned Navajas and Santa Ana in Manuel's generation, there was no dearth of rural properties in the family holdings. As in the case of the Villasenores, the Porres entail included an opulent mansion in Guadalajara and an entire city block of buildings surrounding it in the central downtown area. Table 4 lists the rural properties owned by the family in 1834. They are grouped according to the towns they surrounded and show that the family had property to the north, east, south, and west of Guadalajara. Mazatepec and Santa Ana, like the Villasenor haciendas, Huejotitan and Potrerillos, were sister haciendas that produced corn, wheat, and animals. Apparently more modest in scale and more nearly equal in worth than the Villasenor pair, Mazatepec and Santa Ana together yielded 6,700 pesos per year in rent in the relatively high-priced decade of the 1820s. Mazatepec rented for 3,100 pesos and Plan de Santa Ana for 3,600 pesos. I could find no figures for the rents yielded by the r a n c h o s , although even at 50 pesos to 31

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Four Elite Family Enterprises Table 4 Rural Properties Owned by Porres Baranda Family, 1834

Town/Map Coordinates

Properties Hacienda

Tlajomulco (D-4) Acatlan (D-4)

Mazatepec (in municipality of Ahuisculco) Plan de Santa Ana (ownership uncertain)

Cocula (C-4)

Rancho la Mariscala

San Nicolas (also known as el Espinal) la Huerta de las Ciruelas la Joya Chica, el Rincon de Agua, el Colorado, el Lindero, el Potrero, el Mayoral, la Estancia Vieja, Potrerillos, la Mesa, la Mina, la Enyerbada, el Arenal, el Mesquite, Huejotitan, Tepehuaje, Salitre, las Liebres, Puente del Colorado, el Comedero, el Tepetongo, el Cacalote, la Joya Grande, Corral de Silvestre, los Llanitos, el Carrisco, el Ocote, la Nostra (?), el Rincon de Atengo, Atepami, los Sastres (also known as las Lagunitas), el Cerrito de los Platos, el Pozo, las Senoritas, el Salero de Colimilla, el Rincon de Matatlan Rio Grande, el Salitrillo, la Mesa Alta, el Valuarte el Sauz la Resolana, la Leonera, la Ceja, los Charcos, San Diego, Rincon de Camacho

Zapopan (D-3) San Cristobal de la Barranca (D-2)

Zapotlanejo (F-3) Acatic (F-2) Tepatitlan (C-2)

Source: Archivo de Instrumentos Publicos de Guadalajara, Protocolos del Notario Guadalupe Altamirano, 11 December 1834, vol. 6, f. 329.

75 pesos a year apiece (a conservative estimate), they would have added several thousand pesos a year to the estate's income. One source put the estate's total yearly income, including urban rents and capital investments, at about 12,000 pesos, a figure comparable to the 14,000 pesos a year reported by the Villasenor entail. 33

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As in the case of the Villaseiiores, this annual figure did not include profits from commercial transactions. The cash value of the family's nonlanded assets must easily have equaled or exceeded the value of the haciendas and ranchos, since the household counted one of Guadalajara's most prominent merchants among its members and had numerous mining investments. Jose Maria de Estrada, the entail holder's brother, continued a patriarchal tradition as a merchant entrepreneur. His grandfather was born in Spain and conducted his commercial career in Mexico City. His father was born in Mexico City and also made a career of being a merchant There was no general summing up of Jose Maria's business in the documents, but judging from the size of some of his transactions (he bought whole ship cargoes in a single transaction), the range of his deals (he had customers as far north as Sonora), and the extent of his connections and prestige in the community (for example, as trustee of the Franciscan convent), he was clearly one of the city's leading Creole merchants before about 1830. Jose Maria's father had been a business associate of Manuel Calixto Canedo, who made his fortune in mining. Between the Hidalgo revolt (1810) and national independence (1821), Jose Maria funneled one thousand pesos a year into mining operations in Briones, in only one of many such arrangements. In 1827 he disposed of several mines in the Hostotipaquillo district worth over thirty thousand pesos and he was involved for a time in the ownership and operation of several ore-processing haciendas. There was no evidence that the Porres Barandas owned a flour mill or bakery, but Jose Maria was involved in the ownership and financing of more than one tannery in Guadalajara. It might be well to remember in this connection that Humboldt estimated the province's yearly hide production at 419,000 pesos. This was an important "industry." Thus, through Jose Maria's capital and his brother Manuel's holdings, the household had interests in every important branch of the provincial economy—agriculture, mining, commerce, and industry. The entail holder's sister, Maria Guadalupe Estrada de Porres Baranda, wed peninsular Spaniard Dionisio Ruiz de Cabanas. She could not have drawn a better tie with the church. Dionisio described himself as nephew to "the Most Illustrious Lord Doctor Juan Cruz Ruiz de Cabanas, Bishop [of Guadalajara]... under whose Superior attentions, protection, and tutelage I have lived always subject to him since a child, owing to him my upbringing, education and the status in which I now find myself." Dionisio was also a military officer; he managed the funds of one of Guadalajara's "best" convents, Santa Maria de Gracia, and bought two haciendas of his own, Guadalupe and Ixcuintla, in the jurisdiction of Cuquio (F-2). Dionisio was the Porres Barandas' most direct tie to the peninsular world, 34

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but the family itself, although it had local ties dating back at least to the seventeenth century, was descended from peninsulars. Manuel Porres Baranda's grandfather was a peninsular merchant. Manuel, the entail holder, enjoyed income from an entail in Spain, and a Porres Baranda girl of undetermined connection to this branch of the family spent several years with members of her family in Spain. This same girl, incidentally, appears to have been a half-sister of the Rubio brothers who married into the Villasenor family. There is also indirect evidence that the Porres Barandas' kinship connections reached out to embrace the administrators of the estate, as was the case with the Villasenor family. In 1780 Manuel de Mestas was the administrator of the Hacienda Mazatepec. In 1827 Ignacio Mesas and his brother Jose, who were almost certainly descendants of Manuel, had brought suit against the Pores Amanda entail for a share in the inheritance. The fact that the family eventually settled at least part of Jose Mental's claim around 1834 would seem to indicate that there was substance to the suit Whether that substance was lent by debts (credit relations) or kinship ties, the Mestas seem to have moved from employee status to at least partial ownership of the hacienda in the two generations that spanned the years of the independence movement. Within one generation of the family we find among the Porres Barandas representatives of virtually all the higher-status social types usually associated with novohispanic society—landowners, merchants, Creoles, peninsulars, churchmen, military officers, mineowners, and owners and administrators of a primitive industry. The Creoles in the family were not strictly land owners, nor were the peninsulars exclusively merchants. In fact, in both the Villasenor and the Porres Baranda families the most prominent merchant was Creole, and the marriages to peninsulars represented ties to the church and the military, rather than to commerce. Like their neighbors the Villasenores, the Porres Barandas held numerous public posts that reflected their power and privilege. Clearly, the household did not correspond to many of the traditional stereotypes, but it certainly showed a significant set of patterns. The household taken in its totality adds up to a complete and well-integrated enterprise extending through a tremendous geographic and economic range, with a structure that rested on kinship and credit ties. 38

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The Portillo Family Enterprise At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the family head was an already aging Don Miguel Portillo, almost an exact contemporary of Don Tomas

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but the family itself, although it had local ties dating back at least to the seventeenth century, was descended from peninsulars. Manuel Porres Baranda's grandfather was a peninsular merchant. Manuel, the entail holder, enjoyed income from an entail in Spain, and a Porres Baranda girl of undetermined connection to this branch of the family spent several years with members of her family in Spain. This same girl, incidentally, appears to have been a half-sister of the Rubio brothers who married into the Villasenor family. There is also indirect evidence that the Porres Barandas' kinship connections reached out to embrace the administrators of the estate, as was the case with the Villasenor family. In 1780 Manuel de Mestas was the administrator of the Hacienda Mazatepec. In 1827 Ignacio Mesas and his brother Jose, who were almost certainly descendants of Manuel, had brought suit against the Pores Amanda entail for a share in the inheritance. The fact that the family eventually settled at least part of Jose Mental's claim around 1834 would seem to indicate that there was substance to the suit Whether that substance was lent by debts (credit relations) or kinship ties, the Mestas seem to have moved from employee status to at least partial ownership of the hacienda in the two generations that spanned the years of the independence movement. Within one generation of the family we find among the Porres Barandas representatives of virtually all the higher-status social types usually associated with novohispanic society—landowners, merchants, Creoles, peninsulars, churchmen, military officers, mineowners, and owners and administrators of a primitive industry. The Creoles in the family were not strictly land owners, nor were the peninsulars exclusively merchants. In fact, in both the Villasenor and the Porres Baranda families the most prominent merchant was Creole, and the marriages to peninsulars represented ties to the church and the military, rather than to commerce. Like their neighbors the Villasenores, the Porres Barandas held numerous public posts that reflected their power and privilege. Clearly, the household did not correspond to many of the traditional stereotypes, but it certainly showed a significant set of patterns. The household taken in its totality adds up to a complete and well-integrated enterprise extending through a tremendous geographic and economic range, with a structure that rested on kinship and credit ties. 38

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The Portillo Family Enterprise At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the family head was an already aging Don Miguel Portillo, almost an exact contemporary of Don Tomas

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Ignacio Villasenor. The Portillo lands listed at Don Miguel's death in 1819 were the Hacienda de Navajas (map D-3), in the jurisdiction of Tala, and the Hacienda de San Jose (map E-3), in the jurisdiction of Tlajomulco. (See the previous section of this chapter on the Hacienda de Navajas.) The Hacienda de San Jose included the Rancho de los Zapotes and a piece of land called the Terreno del Huage (also known as Guaje). None of these properties were entailed. A l l together the various parcels were valued at more than 73,000 pesos, allowing for, the family claimed, a reduction in value of more than one fifth due to litigation costs. If we add that fifth (around 20,000 pesos, presumably), plus the value of the 11,325-peso home where the widow lived in Guadalajara, we find that the Portillos' worth in real estate approached 100,000 pesos. Again, this figure does not include commercial or mining investments, outstanding capital, family jewels, or inventory. The Portillos were perhaps not as wealthy as the Villasenores or the Porres Barandas, but they were within the same general range. As with these other families, the properties actually owned by the Portillos inadequately picture their involvement in rural real estate. Don Miguel supplied the city with livestock from the Hacienda de Santa Cruz (B3) in 1780, probably as the result of some contractual grazing arrangement with the owner. Before his death he rented the Hacienda de la Capacha (map D-4) from the Casa de Caridad y Ensenanza of Guadalajara (later the Hospicio de Cabanas). His sons-in-law managed, owned, or rented many other properties in the vicinity of the city, so that the total land area in which the household was able to control or influence agricultural production was comparable in geographic scope to that of the Villasenores or the Porres Barandas. The products of the different haciendas displayed a fairly typical mix: wheat, corn, beans, sheep, goats, horses, and other kinds of livestock. Don Miguel had the misfortune (at least so he described it) to be the secondary bondsman of Guadalajara's meat monopoly when the Revolution broke out The principal bondsman, a Santander merchant, Don Pedro Gutierrez de Higuera, fled in terror of his life when Hidalgo's troops approached. Whether he was killed in San Blas or escaped, he never returned. He had brothers in Guadalajara, but both Bernabe and Agustin alleged lack of funds and neither would assume Pedro's financial obligations. The city fathers forced Don Miguel to step in as the official guarantor of the meat supply, and in spite of his many complaints of losses due to the upheavals of the insurgency, they forced him to bond the meat supply until his death, perhaps from bad temper. After Don Miguel's death, family affairs entered a period of strife lasting several years. During that period his younger sons Mariano and Agustin acted as administrators of the two principal haciendas—Mariano of 41

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Navajas, and Agustin of San Jose, which represented one possible solution to the problem of inheritance. This case also illustrates that distinction between members of the owning family and the administrators and managers of an estate were slight. In this instance, however, the "solution" was not a lasting one. The oldest son, Jose Miguel Portillo, took his "usurping" brothers to court to force them to recognize him as sole authority and owner of the lands, for which he and the estate paid a high price in money. The difficulty of bargaining, what is more, shows that the preeminence of the oldest son was far from a preordained fact of the inheritance system. In addition to these three sons, Maria Trigo bore the senior Miguel Portillo three daughters. Eusebia and Isabel married merchant brothers Manuel and Francisco Garcia de Quevedo. Born in Santander, Spain, Manuel and Francisco migrated to New Spain where Manuel became not only one of the merchants' guild's more prominent members, but one of Guadalajara's most notable hacendados. Since the sisters, as a result of the above-mentioned lawsuit, had "sold" their rights to the haciendas to Jose Miguel in 1823, it might seem that the Garcia de Quevedos won no particular advantage in the marriages. In fact, however, Manuel in particular lost no time in adding agricultural interests to his commercial enterprise, like so many other "merchants" of this period. Since his brother-in-law Jose Miguel joined him as a partner to exploit Manuel Porres Baranda's Hacienda del Plan de Santa Ana, it seems the lawsuit did not leave permanent scars. Garcia de Quevedo's position as a major creditor of the Portillo estate indicates that Manuel continued to serve the family as a major financial backer. Manuel Garcia de Quevedo, more than most peninsular merchants, went outside the circle of family inheritance to acquire major haciendas entirely on his own. In 1817 he bought the old Jesuit Hacienda de Toluquilla (also known as Hacienda del Cuatro, map E-3) in the district of Tonala from the estate of the last Marques de Panuco. The sale was handled by peninsular merchant Juan Manuel Caballero, who was to this titled family (the Vizcarras) what Garcia de Quevedo was to the Portillos, that is, peninsular commercial agent and son-in-law of an agricultural patriarch. Later, Manuel sold all his mercantile interests to his sons and their associates and began to style himself " h a c e n d a d o " in his papers. His disposition of his estate when he was expelled to Bayonne in 1829 indicates that he continued to accumulate property. Don Manuel left haciendas to all three of his sons: the Hacienda de Nuestra Senora de Guadalupe del Castillo (also called Hacienda del Castillo, map E-4) to his third son, Jose Valente, the Hacienda del Rosario (E-3) to his oldest son, Jose Ignacio, and the Hacienda de 44

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Toluquilla to Juan Bautista. During an extended period Manuel had been lessee of the Porres Baranda Hacienda de Mazatepec. Manuel Garcia de Quevedo's career raises interesting questions. If he was an intimate member of the Portillo household, yet participated with equal intimacy in the affairs of the Porres Barandas and had close dealings with the Vizcarras, what are the true boundaries of the family enterprise? Were not all the families competitors, since nearly all marketed the same products in the same places? If so, how could they permit an individual like Manuel to perform services for more than one at a time? There are no hard and fast answers, but the paradox is no greater than that of modern-day corporations that compete ferociously while sharing resources, personnel, and services. Family enterprises could compete with each other while presenting a common front to the rest of society. Land had to be concentrated for the oligarchy to exist as such. The device that prevented the dispersal of haciendas was the practice of relatively endogamous marriage, and thus over a period of time the various family enterprises were bound to overlap. As I pointed out in Chapter 2, it was one function of the city council, through its marketing monopolies, to regulate the conditions of competition and cooperation among these families, principally by fixing prices of basic commodities and effectively allotting what might be termed market quotas. The assets the Garcia de Quevedo family had to offer the Portillos were not all located in New Spain. Manuel and Francisco's uncle, Don Vincente Garcia de Quevedo, was a canon of the Cathedral of Santander. A cousin, Manuel Quevedo y Bustamante, was a war commissary and "agente de negocios de Yndias," a kind of bureaucratic broker, at the Spanish court Both kinsmen, particularly this cousin Manuel Quevedo y Bustamante, were in an excellent position to influence those who conferred preferments on residents of the colonies. In a society in which the peninsular bureaucracy still determined who got titles of nobility, seats on local cathedral chapters, or offices such as those of subdelegate or tax farmer ( a d m i n i s t r a d o r e s de r e n t a s ) , as well as countless other clerical posts in the colonies, a kinsman's voice in the king's ear was no mean advantage to offer in a marriage alliance. In Nueva Galicia, Licenciado Pablo Portillo performed important professional and legal services for the entire household. He was a nephew of Don Miguel, and thus a cousin of the latter's son Jose Miguel. He held Manuel Garcia de Quevedo's power of attorney after the latter's expulsion to France and acted as executor for more than one of the household's women. A careful scrutiny of the patterns suggested by these families raises this question: If peninsulars married Creoles' daughters, what sort of women did Creoles' sons marry, since they obviously did not have the opportunity to 46

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marry peninsulars? Jose Miguel Portillo provides one answer. He first married a descendant of the Villasenor family. His second wife, Luisa, was a sister of Don Joaquin Sanchez Hidalgo, a lieutenant colonel who owned the Hacienda del Tablon. The Sanchez Hidalgo family also had commercial interests in Zacatecas and Guadalajara, and one of their female descendants was married to the powerful Mexican merchant Don Jose Vicente de Ollogui. Luisa's son became the fiscal, or attorney general, of Guadalajara's a u d i e n c i a . Jose Miguel, like his peninsular counterparts, with his marriage tied the worlds of commerce and agriculture and the bureaucracies that taxed and regulated both. Jose Miguel Portillo's younger brother, Mariano, lived for several years as a resident of the Hacienda de Toluqilla. Mariano owned some land there, but his holdings were paltry compared to those of his brother-in-law Manuel Garcia de Quevedo, who owned most of this hacienda and several others. The inevitable conclusion is that Mariano was dependent on and subordinate to his peninsular kinsman, was, in fact, a sort of client of the latter. This relationship serves to remind us of two things: first, that the household was more than a simple kinship arrangement and that its structural hierarchy was determined as much by economic considerations as by consanguinity; and second, that motives for tension and conflict existed within the household itself, conflict that may explain why father turned against son and brother against brother in the civil wars that brought about the nation's independence. 49

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The del Rio-Pacheco Family Enterprise This group of families is the least conspicuously organized into a single household. It represents instead a loose but intricately interwoven network of relatives and businesses, so it is perhaps wiser to identify it by two surnames instead of one. The del Rios were by and large Creoles, and the Pachecos were largely peninsular, although of course the Pachecos were "naturalized" by their marriages to the former (see genealogy, page 143). These families, too, approached the form, spelling, and sequence of surnames in a spirit of creativity, if not anarchy. The oldest male I found (Miguel), used only the name Martinez; but his children took the full paternal surname Martinez de los Rios and added the maternal Ramos; thus, Martinez de los Rios y Ramos. Onofre, a relative of Miguel, sired a son named Vicente who dropped "de los" and used only Rios, or sometimes Rio. His close business relations with Juana de la Peiia confirm his kinship with her father, Colonel Manuel del Rio, who used this singular form consistently. Thus we find a common line of descent, or two collateral lines, using the

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marry peninsulars? Jose Miguel Portillo provides one answer. He first married a descendant of the Villasenor family. His second wife, Luisa, was a sister of Don Joaquin Sanchez Hidalgo, a lieutenant colonel who owned the Hacienda del Tablon. The Sanchez Hidalgo family also had commercial interests in Zacatecas and Guadalajara, and one of their female descendants was married to the powerful Mexican merchant Don Jose Vicente de Ollogui. Luisa's son became the fiscal, or attorney general, of Guadalajara's a u d i e n c i a . Jose Miguel, like his peninsular counterparts, with his marriage tied the worlds of commerce and agriculture and the bureaucracies that taxed and regulated both. Jose Miguel Portillo's younger brother, Mariano, lived for several years as a resident of the Hacienda de Toluqilla. Mariano owned some land there, but his holdings were paltry compared to those of his brother-in-law Manuel Garcia de Quevedo, who owned most of this hacienda and several others. The inevitable conclusion is that Mariano was dependent on and subordinate to his peninsular kinsman, was, in fact, a sort of client of the latter. This relationship serves to remind us of two things: first, that the household was more than a simple kinship arrangement and that its structural hierarchy was determined as much by economic considerations as by consanguinity; and second, that motives for tension and conflict existed within the household itself, conflict that may explain why father turned against son and brother against brother in the civil wars that brought about the nation's independence. 49

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The del Rio-Pacheco Family Enterprise This group of families is the least conspicuously organized into a single household. It represents instead a loose but intricately interwoven network of relatives and businesses, so it is perhaps wiser to identify it by two surnames instead of one. The del Rios were by and large Creoles, and the Pachecos were largely peninsular, although of course the Pachecos were "naturalized" by their marriages to the former (see genealogy, page 143). These families, too, approached the form, spelling, and sequence of surnames in a spirit of creativity, if not anarchy. The oldest male I found (Miguel), used only the name Martinez; but his children took the full paternal surname Martinez de los Rios and added the maternal Ramos; thus, Martinez de los Rios y Ramos. Onofre, a relative of Miguel, sired a son named Vicente who dropped "de los" and used only Rios, or sometimes Rio. His close business relations with Juana de la Peiia confirm his kinship with her father, Colonel Manuel del Rio, who used this singular form consistently. Thus we find a common line of descent, or two collateral lines, using the

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forms Martinez, Martinez de los Rios y los Ramos, de los Rios, del Rio, and Rios all within three generations. The brothers Antonio and Manuel Pacheco Calderon came from Santander, Spain, to Guadalajara, and both made good marriages. Antonio married Maria Guadalupe Martinez de los Rios y los Ramos, whose uncle Juan Jose Martinez was a doctor of theology and member of Guadalajara's cathedral chapter. We find Antonio Pacheco Calderon shipping cattle to the city from the Hacienda de la Quesera (sometimes called Queseria, in the jurisdiction of Etzatlan, map B-3), which he probably acquired through his marriage to Guadalupe, in the latter years of the eighteenth century. Antonio's brother Manuel Pacheco Calderon assured his children of rights to the Haciendas of San Pedro and San Sebastian (B-2) by virtue of his marriage to Gertrudis Muguiro. Gertrudis was a resident, and probably a native, of the district of Etzatlan, to the west of Guadalajara, where both these rural properties were located. San Pedro and San Sebastian produced mainly corn. After Manuel's death in 1812, Antonio assumed management of the haciendas and collected 3,450 pesos a year in rent for them (about 2,000 pesos a year for San Pedro, and 1,500 pesos for San Sebastian). A momentary digression to another family will demonstrate how these m e r c h a n t - h a c e n d a d o alliances could dovetail into one another, leading far afield but eventually completing a circle. Antonio Pacheco Calderon was only sublessee of San Sebastian and San Pedro, since the official lessee was Miguel de la Parra. A native of Jiquilpan, de la Parra acquired four other haciendas and an additional s i t i o (a measure of land) in the Valley of Quitupan through his marriage to Ignacia Jimenez. (These properties lay south of Lake Chapala.) Other relatives of Ignacia controlled at least two more haciendas. De la Parra sublet the Hacienda de San Pedro to Jose Chafino, a native of Granada, Spain, who was an officially registered miner in the district of Hostotipaquillo. Chafino was twice married, both times to women of the Vallarta family. Miguel de la Parra was a compadre of merchant Norberto Vallarta, whose base of operations was Etzatlan. By 1851 Norberto had acquired ownership of the del Rio family's Hacienda de Santa Cruz in Etzatlan, thus closing the credit relations-kinship circle. In the same fashion we might trace the Vallarta family's ties with the Creole notary Francisco Barrionuevo, born in the mining district of Magdalena. Or we might follow the Vallarta connections with the Davila family, with their investments in mining, pharmaceuticals, and legal services. The kinship-credit relationship was something like a keyboard— always adding octaves but at the same time repeating basic intervals. Returning to the nucleus of this household, however, we find that Antonio 51

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Pacheco Calderon stood at the apex of a pyramid of credit and supply in a miniature commercial empire. A certain small merchant in the p u e b l o of Zapotlanejo received most of his supply on credit from Angel Pablo Gomez. Gomez was another Santander merchant with a kind of general store in Tepatitlan, where he sold everything from textiles to books. He in turn was supplied by Antonio Pacheco Calderon, who thus became Gomez's major creditor. When Gomez died, his heirs appointed Juan Joaquin Murgoitio as executor. Murgoitio, also of Tepatitlan, worked as c a j e r o , or shopkeeper, for Joaquin Gomez Frayle, who was Antonio Pacheco Calderon's nephew. This means that the Gomez estate's principal creditor (Antonio Pacheco Calderon) was an uncle of the executor's commercial patron (Gomez Frayle). Many other aspects of Antonio Pacheco Calderon's person or his career might make an interesting study by themselves. He served several terms as a member of the city council, where he more than once held the rank of "mayor." In this position he was succeeded by his son Jose Miguel. Antonio had close connections with Francisco Vicente Partearroyo, a Basque merchant whose landed interests were in Tequila. One of Antonio's daughters married Miguel Lopez Rivero, who administered the city's meat monopoly at the time. His sister-in-law's second husband was Agustin Gutierrez de la Higuera, whose brother's sudden defection had forced Don Miguel Portillo to take over the city's meat supply. Antonio also acted as trustee for Rosa Lopez Portillo and Felipa Ruiz de Velasco, both of prominent local families. He seems to have audited the accounts of Fernando Melgosa, who as m a y o r d o m o de p r o p i o s collected the city's official revenues. A l l in all, Antonio's personal history shows that different business and political interests were combined not only in families, but also in individual persons. Another Pacheco family from Santander may have been related to the Pacheco Calderon family. We know that the estate of Francisco Xavier Pacheco de Villegas owed Jose Miguel Pacheco (Antonio's son) over thirteen thousand pesos in 1823. Pacheco de Villegas was also a Santander merchant and came to hold the military command of a mercantile battalion in Guadalajara. His brother, Francisco Antonio Pacheco de Villegas, stayed in Spain to manage their parents' estate. Francisco Xavier married twice in Nueva Galicia, and daughters by his first wife married the brothers Froylan and Crispiniano del Castillo, who would be important in postindependence political life. His second wife, Josefa Garate, was the sister of Doctor Miguel Ignacio Garate of the cathedral and of Licenciado Domingo Maria Garate. Francisco Xavier Pacheco de Villegas probably also invested in agriculture, 54

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since his debts were covered after his death by the Hacienda de Aguacapan in Audan. Guadalajara chose him as its agent to persuade the hacendados of Autlan to send armed and mounted men to Guadalajara's defense in 1810. In view of Antonio Pacheco Calderon's kinship with Joaquin Gomez Frayle, it is interesting to note that the administrator of the Hacienda de Aguacapan was named Jose Agustin Gomez. Unfortunately, I could not document a kinship connection. There is yet another Santander merchant in the del Rio family closet Francisco de la Pena y Alvarado's first wife, Juana, was a daughter of the patriarch Don Manuel del Rio, and his second wife, Maria Ignacia Muguiro, was probably a relative of the Gertrudis Muguiro who married Manuel Pacheco Calderon. Francisco de la Pena y Alvarado inherited an entailed estate in Spain, which was administered in his absence by his brother Ramon, a priest. De la Pena y Alvarado was also a civil servant in his capacity as Oficial de los Oficios de Real Hacienda, Minas y Registros de Guadalajara (chief clerk of the Offices of the Royal Treasury, Mines and Registries of Guadalajara). When de la Pena y Alvarado's first wife died, his father-in-law, Colonel Manuel del Rio, gave him four thousand pesos or more in silver, a portion of which was marked with the brand "R°," surely the personal brand of the del Rio family. After working for a time on the official inventory of his motherin-law's estate, Francisco paid part of this sum back and left for the mining settlement of Real del Rosario. When he later married Ignacia Muguiro, his marriage capital consisted mainly of this same " R ° " silver. This circumstantial evidence makes it very likely that the del Rio family enterprise included mining interests. Francisco de la Pena y Alvarado's first son, Juan de la Pena y del Rio, eventually became sole owner of the Haciendas de Santa Cruz (B-3) and el Xacal (or Jacal, B-3), the two principal family properties, although he first had to buy out his two sisters. The original owner of the two haciendas and the undisputed head of the family was Colonel Manuel del Rio, a man of high standing in Guadalajara as well as in Etzatlan. When Canon Simeon de Uria, on his way to Spain to represent Nueva Galicia in the c o r t e s of 1811, heard of the outbreak of the insurgency, he spoke personally to the viceroy and recommended that del Rio (not yet a colonel) be made commanding officer of the defending armies for the entire province (an interesting recommendation in view of the fact that Uria's own step-brother was a lieutenant colonel). Del Rio was in fact given an extensive command, and like Tomas Ignacio Villasenor, took the field and saw action against Hidalgo's rebels. Evidently, though, Guadalajara's Spaniards did not entirely trust him, since they later asked that he be replaced with a more 57

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loyal and active chief. As a "character," del Rio is reminiscent of Miguel Portillo: ancient, irascible, burdened with unwanted public duties, almost illiterate, and embittered toward his grandchildren because of their quarrels over his land. His son-in-law, Francisco de la Peiia y Alvarado, surely complicated his life by procreating fifteen children by three wives, although it was of course only the first three, Juana del Rio's offspring, who had any claim to the colonel's land. We can completely ignore the six children by his third wife, Micaela Palacio, since none attained majority during the time span of this study. The colonel's granddaughter, Juana de la Peha, her sister Francisca, and their husbands shared a common roof from which they fired legal volleys at their elder brother, Juan, and the colonel. Francisca had married a lawyer, Guillermo Arce, and Juana was married to would-be merchant Ramon Salcedo. Arce lamented loudly his slack law practice, painted a bleak picture of his wife's material privations, and unscrupulously pitted his lawyerly wiles against his in-laws in his attempt to retain some share in the Haciendas Santa Cruz and el Xacal for Francisca. On his side, Colonel Manuel del Rio vociferously complained that the value of the property had declined miserably since the Revolution, and that he could not break it up without ruining it. He was reduced to sputtering verbal abuse when his contemporary and social equal Don Justo Ochoa, offering to act as intermediary, evaluated the Hacienda de Santa Cruz at a figure substantially higher than that proposed by the colonel. Finally, in a move reminiscent of the Portillo family, the oldest male heir, Captain Juan de la Peiia, settled the whole affair by buying out his sisters' rights for four thousand pesos each and then buying the two haciendas and the satellite Rancho Chavel from his grandfather. Ramon Salcedo (Juana de la Peiia's husband) then invested two thousand pesos with peninsular merchant and pharmacist Juan Jose Arezpacochaga (no known kinship connection). Arezpacochaga had also held on deposit three thousand pesos of the disputed estate that ostensibly belonged to Francisca, Guillermo Arce's wife. Perhaps Arezpacochaga was financing the lawsuit for undetermined reasons. For his part, Captain Juan de la Peiia turned right around and rented his new haciendas to Maximo Lazo for an advance payment of 8,000 pesos, exactly the amount he needed to buy his sisters' claims. Actual yearly rent on Santa Cruz and el Xacal together was only 2,500 pesos. Lazo also rented another mezcal hacienda in this district comparable in worth to Santa Cruz. Like other merchants, a good part of his activity provided operating or improvement capital for local haciendas. The unity of the Pacheco-del Rio "portfolio" is particularly difficult to 61

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grasp, since it is the most diffuse and complicated of these enterprises. Nevertheless, I can assert that the nucleus of the household was the haciendas in Etzatlan (San Sebastian, San Pedro, Santa Cruz, and el Xacal), passed down through the del Rio line, and the petty mercantile empire controlled by various members of the Pacheco family from Santander. As in the other three households, creole-peninsular intermarriage united merchants, hacendados, clergymen, military officers, and lawyers. Their mutual economic needs, manifested primarily in the combination of liquidity and security to produce credit, provided them with a common interest, even if their family squabbling tended to obscure their interdependence. Like the Portillos, the del Rios had not entailed any of their property, and there is little reason to suppose that it would have made any essential difference in the structure of their enterprise if they had. Each of the four families discussed in this chapter exemplifies the basic structure of elite family enterprise. The base of the enterprise was always land, usually in the form of a pair or group of several haciendas that produced basic agricultural commodities—corn, wheat, sugar, beef, wool, or pack animals—intended for sale in Guadalajara or occasionally as far away as Mexico City or Puebla. A large-scale merchant incorporated into the family's kinship network managed both this local commerce and the intercontinental trade that complemented it This merchant was usually enrolled in the royal merchants' guild. Apart from his role in obtaining tools, unwrought metals, textiles, and other necessary merchandise from overseas for the hacienda, the merchant member of each household usually acted as a kind of financier, injecting large cash advances into the agricultural enterprise through the lease. In exchange, he used the hacienda itself, or its reputation for productivity, to secure his own mercantile credit transactions. Sometimes the h a c e n d a d o actually financed the merchant by advancing him animals or harvested crops to be paid for after their final sale. From this commercial-agricultural base, the family enterprise threw out its net to take in mining investments, flour mills, tanneries, bakeries, or other similar colonial businesses. The diversity of its economic portfolio gave the estate maximum security and flexibility, if not always maximum efficiency in any individual undertaking. Diversity also ensured maximum social influence and permitted the family to reach into almost any social, geographical, political, or economic sphere of the Spanish imperial world. In this chapter we have seen the family enterprise as a static institution whose stability depended on its internal structure. In the next chapter, I shall attempt to show how the changes brought about by the independence movement affected elite family enterprise. The inclusion of Creoles and

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peninsulars, landowners and merchants, rural and urban dwellers, professionals and the uneducated into a single household complicates any effort to explain the changes of the early nineteenth century in terms of simple dichotomies, such as liberal merchants versus feudal land barons, modern lawyers versus conservative patriarchs, or protoindustrialists versus mercantilists. If the antagonisms implied in these dichotomies were real— and there is no doubt that they existed in some form—we must account for their effects within the context of diversified and integrated elite family enterprises that successfully exploited the inherent inequalities of colonial economic relations. A t a certain point we must explain why the family enterprise could no longer contain the contradictions it was designed to ameliorate or transcend. Why, if Creoles and peninsulars had been more or less harmoniously intermarrying for several generations, did they suddenly launch into a civil war in 1810? There must have been an essential weakness or flaw in the structure of the oligarchy, even though it had persisted essentially intact for four centuries. It seems likely that a , if not t h e , central problem of Guadalajara's colonial oligarchy was credit. Of the resources controlled by the elite, credit was among the most necessary, yet the least adequately integrated into the traditional local economy. As I tried to show in Chapter 2, the continued productivity of the family enterprise depended on its continued access to credit, and the channels through which credit flowed were those of kinship. When a new community of foreign merchants began to arrive in Guadalajara after 1814, the abundant capital they brought became a potent weapon against the traditional order. During and after the wars for independence, the types of credit available, the means by which credit was distributed, and the ends to which it was employed underlay and shaped regional politics. It would not be inaccurate to say that credit problems fomented the insurgency of 1810. Chapter 4 will show that various local oligarchs attempted to change the patterns of business organization to conform to the new liberal principles, especially after 1810, but even before. They sought to replace household enterprises with limited liability corporations and specialized credit institutions. These new economic institutions in turn called into existence a new set of political institutions whose underlying logic expressed in capsule form the doctrine of separation of powers. They also created new relationships between the citizen and the state that, at least from a political point of view, deserve to be called revolutionary.

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Independence in Guadalajara Miguel Hidalgo raised the first large-scaled armed revolt against Spain's colonial authority in 1810 in the heart of New Spain's mining district. At the time, Guadalajara and Veracruz were the two most strategic centers in New Spain outside of Mexico City. Guadalajara easily outstripped the specialized port city of Veracruz as a developed metropolitan center. Puebla, which rivaled Guadalajara as an agricultural market center and surpassed it as a center of colonial manufactures, fell short in the areas of political rank and autonomy because geography sandwiched Puebla between Mexico City and Veracruz, thus tying its growth much more closely to the capital's development. As all with any ambition to govern knew or would soon learn, any regime that wished to stand on two strong legs in Mexico must take and hold Guadalajara. When native son Simeon de Una wrote to Guadalajara's city fathers of Hidalgo's uprising, they must have known immediately that the insurgency would soon loom on their horizon. Two years earlier, New Spain's colonial government had been shaken to its foundations by the Napoleonic Wars in Europe. King Charles IV and his son Ferdinand virtually handed the Spanish throne to Napoleon's brother, Joseph Bonaparte, without protest and effectively undercut the legitimacy of their viceroys in the Americas. Various provincial juntas formed in Spain to take up the resistance to the French occupation, and several of them sent representatives to the Americas to claim loyalty and, of course, contributions from the viceregal governments. Internal threats complicated the situation still further for the American viceroys. Various conspiracies and uprisings had surfaced in the previous two decades, and Guadalajara had not been spared. In 1793 the vice-rector of the Colegio de San Juan Bautista admitted involving several hundred people in a seditious conspiracy. In 1801 an employee of the cathedral was arrested for having the text of a declaration of independence in his possession, and in that same year an Indian uprising had to be put down in the neighboring district of Nayarit. Independence, and undoubtedly the French and American revolutions, were common topics of conversation at Jose Arezpacochaga's pharmacy in Guadalajara at the time of Napoleon's wars. Internal and external uncertainty led to important developments in Guadalajara. The latent conflict between purely Spanish and purely local interests came sharply to the fore. The a u d i e n c i a , which as the viceroy's governing council most clearly represented the mother country's interests, grew morbidly mistrustful of the a y u n t a m i e n t o , or city government, which represented more exclusively local interests. The mistrust was mutual; the 1

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two agencies exchanged nervous and sarcastic letters over the crisis of authority that put their traditional rivalry on an entirely new and more serious footing. The president of the a u d i e n c i a , Roque Abarca, lost the confidence of the a u d i e n c i a ' s judges because of his friendship with Viceroy Iturrigaray, who was suspected by all parties concerned. War in Spain and confusion in Mexico City must also have forced Guadalajara's elite to ponder the limits of their region's autonomy within the imperial system. They took the dangerous step of arming several thousand men between 1808 and 1810. In this climate of heightened factionalism, extreme regionalist sensibility, and increasing local militarization, the coup d'etat that toppled Viceroy Iturrigaray in Mexico City in September 1808 was the figurative equivalent of igniting the fuse of a bomb. The conspirators destroyed the very concept they wanted to save at all costs—the legitimacy of Spanish rule over the colonies—and gave an object lesson in the sources of power to conspirators of another stripe. Because the viceroy's attackers acted explicitly as peninsulars defending peninsular interests (although their leader, Gabriel Yermo, was married to a prominent Creole heiress), they breached the crucial consensus of Creole and peninsular interests among the landed elite that gave the colonial regime its internal coherence. If Creoles had felt like slighted members of the colonial hierarchy, they must have perceived Yermo's blow as designed to exclude them from that hierarchy altogether. Iturrigaray's deposition caused no immediate change in Guadalajara's government, but its impact on the city's frame of mind must have been radical. When Hidalgo's followers appeared on Guadalajara's horizon in 1810 as a rock-bearing peasant mob, the local government was internally divided and unsure of what it was defending, or against whom. It put up a feeble defense; the insurgents overran the loyalist troops at Zacoalco, occupied Guadalajara, and made the city the de facto capital of the insurgent government. Hidalgo joined his troops here in November 1810 and began to show his political colors. He decreed an end to slavery and tribute payments, reduced internal tariffs, declared an end to monopolies, and seized peninsular property. He also ordered the execution of two hundred or more peninsular prisoners. This inflamed peninsular feelings against Creoles, since Hidalgo's highest-ranking lieutenants were Creoles, and in turn alienated Hidalgo's potential Creole supporters, who were horrified to see their kinsmen and social equals brutally liquidated. Hidalgo's position deteriorated quickly. The royalists drove him out of Guadalajara, captured him and most of his army, and executed him in mid1811. The reigning viceroy appointed Spaniard Jose Cruz to head Nueva Galicia's government, which he did until independence in 1821. 2

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The insurgency smoldered and flared up in the countryside between 1811 and 1821, first in the Bajio region, then around the shores of Lake Chapala, later in the Altos region of Jalisco around Lagos. Although no insurgent army threatened Nueva Galicia's capital again until 1821, the change in Cruz's attitude toward the rural insurgents is a good indication that the logic of national independence was slowly becoming overwhelmingly persuasive. When Cruz first assumed the presidency of the a u d i e n c i a , he made possession of even kitchen knives a capital crime, set arbitrary execution quotas and forced men to draw lots to decide who would be the victims who filled those quotas, and burned entire p u e b l o s to the ground. His campaign against the insurgents who fortified the island of Mexcala in Lake Chapala and held it until 1816 was more difficult and showed a much more circumspect and conciliatory side of Cruz. He never defeated the Mexcala rebels in battle; he merely outlasted them. When starvation and disease finally brought them to terms, Cruz agreed to rebuild the defeated soldiers' homes, exempted them from tribute payment, and even outfitted them with farm animals and seed to make a new start at earning a peaceful living. In Spain, meanwhile, Ferdinand VII had tried to restore absolute monarchical rule in 1814, but in 1820 a constitutionalist revolt drove him from the throne again. By now it was clear that if the American interests that had grouped around the fading image of the Spanish crown were to have any hope of controlling the local outcome of the insurgency, they had to act on their own. When the royalist commander, Agustin de Iturbide, made his peace with the insurgent leaders in the south of Mexico and issued his call for national independence in 1821, the rest of the royalist generals, including Pedro Celestino Negrete in Nueva Galicia, seconded the plan with a speed and unity that mere conspiracy never could have achieved; historical necessity had taken a hand. Generals who could agree on nothing else were of a common mind to end Spanish rule. The last viceroy had hardly stepped off the boat when he confronted the f a i t a c c o m p l i ' , his quick acceptance of the change shows that even in Spain, the independence of her richest colony had taken on the aura of historical imperative. Iturbide made a brief and ill-fated attempt to set up a Mexican empire with himself on the throne. Although he personally appointed Luis Quintanar to the post of jefe p o l i t i c o (political chief) in Guadalajara, the latter chose to align himself with the nascent federalist faction that deposed Iturbide and exiled him. The national Congress, although it had also turned on Iturbide, rewarded Quintanar by arresting him and removing him from the scene. By this time, the emergent state of Jalisco had a constitutional Congress of its own that finished its labors at the end of 1824. Elections for the governorship of the new state followed immediately, pitting Licenciado 3

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Rafael Davila, a representative of traditionalist views, against the prototypical liberal merchant Prisciliano Sanchez. Neither won a clear electoral victory (there were only twenty-four votes cast), so the Congress elected Sanchez by a vote of nine to six. As Jalisco's first constitutionally elected governor, Sanchez lost no time in building the administrative structure of a classic, nineteenth-century liberal, bourgeois state. He issued instructions for electoral procedure, organized the civil service, replaced the bewildering sales-tax structure with a single direct tax, called for a statewide census, instructed the local municipalities to submit their financial accounts on a yearly basis, and proscribed burial within church walls. He opened the port of Navidad to exterior commerce and drew up an elegantly symmetrical plan for a secular education system, which never left the paper stage, because there were no teachers to implement it In one important respect Sanchez's state departed from the enlightenment model. The state constitution of 1824 established Roman Catholic Christianity as the state religion; the governor, however, showed his liberal colors by insisting on the state's prerogative to collect tithes and veto ecclesiastical appointments. We must remember that Sanchez was acting in the context of national and state constitutions that had abolished slavery, tribute payments, entailed estates, and the separate courts that had existed for the clergy, the military, and the guilds. 4

5

Governor Sanchez died unexpectedly at the end of 1826, but even had he lived, the liberal enthusiasm he represented was not really equipped to endure the power struggles that followed the early euphoria of independence. When the bottom dropped out of the colonial regime's political legitimacy, the social divisions that had been held in a kind of creative tension openly conflicted. Clergyman and bureaucrat, Spaniard and American, merchant and landowner, Indian and white, centralist and federalist, all joined in a deadly fray for which there were no precedents and no rules. That no one of these groups succeeded in dominating the others for more than half a century is at least partly a testimonial to the Spanish empire's historical achievement in balancing them. In addition to profound political changes, eleven years of war brought important social and economic changes. These changes were visible enough to the insurgency's contemporaries, but the blood pageant taking place on the political and military stage pushed the more abstract changes into the background. As a result, many social and economic changes passed from consciousness without being adequately recorded, and we would now have to perform a kind of archaeological exploration of indirect documentary evidence to reconstruct them. Some of the changes, however, were large enough to be obvious. The

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mining economy shrank drastically as neglected shafts flooded and caved in and workers fled or were recruited into one army or another. Agricultural output likewise declined; haciendas were burned, sacked, and taxed to their limit, and their labor force evaporated as rural workers became urban immigrants, refugees, soldiers, bandits, and, all too often, corpses. The wars affected urban commerce in a very different way. Guadalajara's urban population burgeoned with the thousands seeking refuge from ongoing violence and hunger in the countryside, and growing urban population coupled with the opening of San Bias for trade with the Orient, South America, and the Caribbean swelled the urban commercial market and fattened merchants' pockets. In 1813 the city had acquired an operating mint that coined several million silver pesos before the viceroy shut it down permanently in 1818. Perez Verdia reports that between 1815 and 1819, Guadalajara's customs house produced four times as much revenue as it had in the five-year period immediately preceding 1810. Other changes were less obvious, and it is these that I shall detail in the rest of this chapter. Guadalajara had been part of the world market for centuries. Especially after 1812, however, events thrust the city into a much more direct relationship with the unrivaled princes of that market—the British trading houses. Even before the Spanish ship of state foundered, British capital was flooding the colonies through such ports of entry as San Bias, thus hastening the empire's disintegration. The abundant flow of that capital devastated small local markets that were organized to accommodate precisely the opposite situation—a scarcity of capital and a highly mediated relation to the world at large. The intrusion of this new source of nonSpanish capital is worth singling out at the beginning of this account. Untrained as it was to the market constraints imposed by Spanish traditions of kinship and family credit operations, upstart British capital swept away many old forms of family enterprise and became a major force in Guadalajara's political and social changes. A cursory glance at postindependence Guadalajara might lead to the conclusion that even political changes were superficial. The same propertyholding elite that had governed before independence continued to govern afterwards, including numerous representatives of families with close ties to the old peninsular community. A t the beginning of the insurgency, Nueva Galicia had appointed its first "American" representative to the newly revived Spanish c o r t e s (parliament), Simeon de Una. Una occupied a cathedral canonry, and his step-sister married one of Guadalajara's most prominent peninsular merchants, Domingo de Ibarrondo. Among the later governors of the "free and sovereign state of Xalisco," one finds scions of the great regional families, such as the Canedos, Tameses, or Vallartas, who 6

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were intimately connected with Spaniards and who owed their wealth and position to the old colonial regime. Other governors, like Joaquin Angulo, were descended from high-ranking colonial bureaucrats. The identities and political connections of elite families changed little; nonetheless, the events of the 1810-1821 decade significantly altered the conditions under which family enterprise operated. Although the names remained the same, the structures they stood for were shaken up. The ultimate consequences of the new forms of business association that arose would not manifest themselves until several decades later, when banks, factories, and railroads emerged on the scene. In the meantime, independence laid the foundation for those consequences by introducing a new source of commercial capital, by opening the land market to speculation, and by rendering credit transactions more secular and less personal. The first impulse for these changes came not from the revolution itself or its ideology, but from the simple fact of civil war. As a result of the uprising, New Spain threw its doors open to legal immigration by u l t r a m a r i n o s and foreigners for the first time. Because of its proximity to the port of San Bias, Guadalajara was one of the earliest outposts of the empire to feel the impact of the wave of non-Spanish merchants. 7

Foreign Merchants As early as 1774, the crown began lifting restrictions on foreign and intercolonial trade in the Americas. This liberalization intensified with the outbreak of the insurgency in 1810. The hard-pressed royalists needed goods and contacts and so found it expedient to permit increased liberalization of trade and increased u l t r a m a r i n o immigration. Guadalajara experienced booming population growth and economic activity. Paradoxically, the city's strategic importance to the royalists subjected it to the very process of liberalization that would mark its separation from the metropolis. In shutting its doors to the rebels, Guadalajara opened them to a new merchant group, especially the South Americans, who proved perhaps more effective in subverting the colonial order than did the native insurgents. Whereas the new trade legislation of 1774 had permitted the entry of South American goods, the policies of 1812 permitted the entry of the South American merchants themselves. To the newly thriving port of San Bias came dozens of foreign export-import entrepreneurs, many of whom went on to deal and settle in Guadalajara. The largest contingent of new merchants came from Panama and the west coast of South America. Table 5 lists some of them and their places of origin. Although the list is not exhaustive, it proves that it was no occasional straggler from South America who came to the province of Nueva Galicia. 8

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were intimately connected with Spaniards and who owed their wealth and position to the old colonial regime. Other governors, like Joaquin Angulo, were descended from high-ranking colonial bureaucrats. The identities and political connections of elite families changed little; nonetheless, the events of the 1810-1821 decade significantly altered the conditions under which family enterprise operated. Although the names remained the same, the structures they stood for were shaken up. The ultimate consequences of the new forms of business association that arose would not manifest themselves until several decades later, when banks, factories, and railroads emerged on the scene. In the meantime, independence laid the foundation for those consequences by introducing a new source of commercial capital, by opening the land market to speculation, and by rendering credit transactions more secular and less personal. The first impulse for these changes came not from the revolution itself or its ideology, but from the simple fact of civil war. As a result of the uprising, New Spain threw its doors open to legal immigration by u l t r a m a r i n o s and foreigners for the first time. Because of its proximity to the port of San Bias, Guadalajara was one of the earliest outposts of the empire to feel the impact of the wave of non-Spanish merchants. 7

Foreign Merchants As early as 1774, the crown began lifting restrictions on foreign and intercolonial trade in the Americas. This liberalization intensified with the outbreak of the insurgency in 1810. The hard-pressed royalists needed goods and contacts and so found it expedient to permit increased liberalization of trade and increased u l t r a m a r i n o immigration. Guadalajara experienced booming population growth and economic activity. Paradoxically, the city's strategic importance to the royalists subjected it to the very process of liberalization that would mark its separation from the metropolis. In shutting its doors to the rebels, Guadalajara opened them to a new merchant group, especially the South Americans, who proved perhaps more effective in subverting the colonial order than did the native insurgents. Whereas the new trade legislation of 1774 had permitted the entry of South American goods, the policies of 1812 permitted the entry of the South American merchants themselves. To the newly thriving port of San Bias came dozens of foreign export-import entrepreneurs, many of whom went on to deal and settle in Guadalajara. The largest contingent of new merchants came from Panama and the west coast of South America. Table 5 lists some of them and their places of origin. Although the list is not exhaustive, it proves that it was no occasional straggler from South America who came to the province of Nueva Galicia. 8

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Effects of Independence Table 5 Merchant Immigrants to Guadalajara, 1814-1823

Merchant

Place of Origin

Jose Alvarez y Sagastegui Juan Manuel Berguido Vicente Berguido Manuel de Luna Pedro Juan de Olazagarre Josef Catarino Gomez Domingo Gonzalez Maxemin Miguel Gonzalez Maxemin Jose Maria Lazo de la Vega Luis Lazo de la Vega Juan Martinez Ventura Martinez Juan Millan y Abilez Jose Antonio Moreno Manuel Pino Jose Pinto Florentin Plaza Josef Prieto y Ramos Juan Senosiain

Panama Panama Panama Panama Colombia Panama Guayaquil Guayaquil Panama Panama unknown Panama Ecuador Panama Panama Panama (?) Panama Panama Spain, Peru

Sources: Various notarial protocols, Archivo de Instrumentos Publicos de Guadalajara, 18181823. For an exact listing of sources for each of these merchants' names, see Richard Lindley, "Kinship and Credit in the Structure of Guadalajara's Oligarchy, 1800-1830" (Ph.D. diss., University of Texas at Austin, 1976), pp. 232-233.

At least one of the men listed in table 5 was himself a peninsular Spaniard by birth (Senosiain), and the others, most of whom were born in South America, resembled the peninsular merchants who had come before them. They were a close-knit group; Panamanian Prieto y Ramos and Colombian Pedro Juan de Olazagarre were brothers-in-law and business partners long before they came to Guadalajara. Manuel de Luna was a partner of Catarino Gomez, and the Gonzalez Maxemin brothers brought Juan Martinez along as their dependent. These merchants, as their peninsular predecessors, made their money in exports and imports. They settled as permanent residents and some married in Guadalajara (e.g., de Luna), although a proportionately higher number left behind wives and families in the isthmus (e.g., Ventura Martinez and Miguel Gonzalez Maxemin). Some took their natural place as members of the all-powerful merchants' guild. 9

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As their peninsular colleagues, these men dovetailed their commercial business with landed enterprise and became agricultural financiers. Jose Antonio Pinto became the a b i l i t a d o r or financier, of the Hacienda de Guadalupe at L a Barca, just as Domingo Gonzalez Maxemin became "el que hace los desembolsos" ("the one who makes disbursements") at the Hacienda de Guadalupe at Tuxcacuesco. In fact, the Panamanians quickly infiltrated the normal purchase and loan transactions of their peninsular and Creole cousins, and some partnerships sprang up. Creoles Francisco Rubio and Francisco Arochi became good customers of Panamanian Juan Manuel Berguido, and Panamanian Pedro Juan de Olazagarre was in agricultural partnership with the heirs of Creole Alfonso Sanchez Lenero. How, then, were these "isthmanians" different from their predecessors, and how can we explain the significance of their arrival on the scene? 10

The most noticeable difference between the Panamanian and peninsular merchants is the astonishing jump in the size of individual commercial transactions. On one occasion in 1819, Panamanian Sagastegui paid his compatriot Florentin Plaza 50,379 pesos for merchandise, and what is most amazing, he paid it all on the spot, in cash. Previously, a merchant with an estate worth 100,000 pesos would have been hard-pressed to raise more than 15,000 or 20,000 pesos in cold cash. The Gonzalez Maxemin brothers arrived in Guadalajara in 1814 with capital of 50,000 pesos. Within three years, they were manipulating triple that amount in their latest commercial venture. Nor was the geometric increase in liquid capital after 1812 confined to the new u l t r a m a r i n o s ' businesses; in time it worked its way into the transactions of the local merchants as well. Colonel Jose Maria Lopez, a local landowner, commercially invested over 75,000 pesos within a single week in 1824, 28,000 pesos in cash and over 50,000 pesos in inventory. In 1827 Jose de Estrada was able to buy a whole shipload of merchandise at San Bias and he paid the entire 150,000 pesos in cash. It cost him as much to outfit a convoy to escort the payment to San Bias as many other merchants would have invested in their total enterprise. Numerous similar instances could be cited of merchants, particularly Panamanians, spending large sums in single transactions. Where did the South American merchants get all this money? For the answer, we have only to look again at the same transactions. The agreement between Plaza and Sagastegui, under which the latter paid 50,379 pesos, stated that the only balance due was whatever resulted from the interest to be earned in Jamaica. The export-import ventures of the Gonzalez Maxemin brothers flowed regularly between Guadalajara and Jamaica. Manuel and Catarino Gomez also consistently had business dealings in Jamaica. The 11

12

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new center of Guadalajara's trading elite—Kingston, Jamaica—was of course a major entrepot of British commerce. More direct evidence shows that the new merchants were not only buying British goods, but were using British capital as well. In 1818 Daniel O'Ryan, acting for J. G . Moravia and Company of London, accused Pedro de Olazagarre of failing to pay on a draft for ten thousand pounds sterling that he had accepted on their behalf in 1813. For six years, then, de Olazagarre had ten thousand British pounds to work with in the investment marketmoney that was not technically his. De Olazagarre relied on the acquaintance his brother-in-law (Prieto y Ramos) had with an appropriate person in London to liquidate his accounts with Moravia and Company, so Prieto y Ramos very likely traveled periodically to that city. Little direct evidence exists that the British were financing the Panamanians. Nevertheless, there is a strong circumstantial case that the South Americans acted as agents (whether voluntary or otherwise) for the penetration of British capital into Guadalajara. Even if Panamanians had extra capital only because they made such high profits on British goods, that fact would not alter the fundamental fact of British penetration in the local market. Moreover, the volume of British participation in the local trading network determined the volume of capitalization the British could sustain in Guadalajara. The new wave of merchants conducted most of their business outside Guadalajara with London, Kingston, Calcutta, and Manila. The frequency of powers of attorney issued from British merchants to Panamanians and vice versa shows how close their working relationship was. Moreover, it is common to find the British as creditors of South Americans, but uncommon to see them as debtors. The South American merchants stand out as the most numerous single contingent of new arrivals. Many other foreigners, however, began to come to Guadalajara during the military phase of the rebellion. The most important contingent after the South Americans was the British. They, like the Spaniards, were closely related by kinship and business ties. Archibald Tucker y Ritchie came to Guadalajara with his cousin Duncan McViccar and a servant, Thomas Austin. Either Duncan or his kinsman Joseph McViccar went to Aguascalientes and set up a company with a certain Watson. A l l of these were kinsmen of Joseph Tucker Crawford in Mexico City, who seems to have kept up their business association with Richard Exeter. Best-known of the British immigrants were the daughter and son-inlaw of famed educator Joseph Lancaster, who founded a local family (the Lancaster-Joneses) that even now is locally prominent. Several ships arriving at the port of San Blas were described as "Anglo13

14

15

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American," indicating a Yankee presence. Daniel O'Ryan, resident agent for the Moravia House of London, and Eustace Barron, who for several years served as Great Britain's acting consul at San Blas, were both descended from Irish stock. Barron's father was Irish and his mother was a native of Cadiz, although Eustace held British citizenship. If, as I suspect, Archibald Tucker y Ritchie was related to Jose Maria Riesch (sometimes spelled Riecci), whose family roots lay in Cadiz, there may have been a significant stream of Catholic merchants and adventurers from Ireland and Spain and thence to Guadalajara and other parts of the New World. Given the number of Irish immigrants to the New World in the late eighteenth century, it is no mere coincidence that New Spain's last designated viceroy was named O'Donoju. The following merchants came to Guadalajara from Manila: Manuel Darvin y Columbier, Jose Casal y Blanco; Felix Dayot; Matias Sainz; Francisco Velez y Escalante; and Ramon de Zuniga. "Juan Enrrique Fritsch" arrived from Germany (possibly from Bremen), Juan Vanlacken was very probably Dutch, and passport records reveal the presence of Frenchmen and Italians. When so many foreigners came, what made the British and Panamanians, who could be considered in terms of capital a single group, stand out as the most important? 16

17

New

Sources of Capital

The British intruded themselves in person most forcefully into mining. Traditionally, Mexican historiography has emphasized this function of the British almost exclusively. A l l the mining regions from Mascota, Hostotipaquillo, Bolanos, and south of Zacatecas to Sierra de Pinos suffered drastic losses during the insurgency and were virtually paralyzed by 1813. They thus constituted a wide-open, if not very promising, territory for British advances. Notary Guadalupe Altamirano's protocols are full of contracts for a v i a c i o n e s or capitalizations, by British companies, especially the Compania Anglo-Mejicana. ( A v i a c i o n e s [see a v i o or aviar] differ from h a b i l i t a c i o n e s principally in that they imply the direct provision of capital goods as well as of money or credit.) Peninsular Jose Chafino, via his kinsman and agent Julio Vallarta, wrote a contract with Richard Exeter to receive sixty thousand pesos from this English firm. Archibald Tucker had arranged a few months earlier for Exeter to supply ten thousand pesos to Timoteo Davila for twenty years. A descriptive list of such contracts written in 1826 only could go on for several pages. Although Bishop Carleton Hunt claims that these early nineteenthcentury capitalization contracts were not tied to purchase agreements, 18

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American," indicating a Yankee presence. Daniel O'Ryan, resident agent for the Moravia House of London, and Eustace Barron, who for several years served as Great Britain's acting consul at San Blas, were both descended from Irish stock. Barron's father was Irish and his mother was a native of Cadiz, although Eustace held British citizenship. If, as I suspect, Archibald Tucker y Ritchie was related to Jose Maria Riesch (sometimes spelled Riecci), whose family roots lay in Cadiz, there may have been a significant stream of Catholic merchants and adventurers from Ireland and Spain and thence to Guadalajara and other parts of the New World. Given the number of Irish immigrants to the New World in the late eighteenth century, it is no mere coincidence that New Spain's last designated viceroy was named O'Donoju. The following merchants came to Guadalajara from Manila: Manuel Darvin y Columbier, Jose Casal y Blanco; Felix Dayot; Matias Sainz; Francisco Velez y Escalante; and Ramon de Zuniga. "Juan Enrrique Fritsch" arrived from Germany (possibly from Bremen), Juan Vanlacken was very probably Dutch, and passport records reveal the presence of Frenchmen and Italians. When so many foreigners came, what made the British and Panamanians, who could be considered in terms of capital a single group, stand out as the most important? 16

17

New

Sources of Capital

The British intruded themselves in person most forcefully into mining. Traditionally, Mexican historiography has emphasized this function of the British almost exclusively. A l l the mining regions from Mascota, Hostotipaquillo, Bolanos, and south of Zacatecas to Sierra de Pinos suffered drastic losses during the insurgency and were virtually paralyzed by 1813. They thus constituted a wide-open, if not very promising, territory for British advances. Notary Guadalupe Altamirano's protocols are full of contracts for a v i a c i o n e s or capitalizations, by British companies, especially the Compania Anglo-Mejicana. ( A v i a c i o n e s [see a v i o or aviar] differ from h a b i l i t a c i o n e s principally in that they imply the direct provision of capital goods as well as of money or credit.) Peninsular Jose Chafino, via his kinsman and agent Julio Vallarta, wrote a contract with Richard Exeter to receive sixty thousand pesos from this English firm. Archibald Tucker had arranged a few months earlier for Exeter to supply ten thousand pesos to Timoteo Davila for twenty years. A descriptive list of such contracts written in 1826 only could go on for several pages. Although Bishop Carleton Hunt claims that these early nineteenthcentury capitalization contracts were not tied to purchase agreements, 18

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several of the Guadalajara contracts specify that the a v i a d o r e s , or financiers, reserved the right to supply the contracting business with paper, mercury, iron, and other supplies, through the a v i a d o r e s ' agents and at a 25 percent commission. Notwithstanding the remittances of capital to England implicit in such agreements, thousands upon thousands of pesos entered New Spain's economy through the mines and inevitably affected the agricultural and commercial sectors. Jose Chafino's contract, for example, specifically includes the ore-processing Hacienda de San Antonio, which supported 300,000 pies de mezcales (mezcal plants) annually producing three hundred barrels of a g u a r d i e n t e . Chafino's mercantile house in Hostotipaquillo is expressly mentioned as a beneficiary of the same contract. Too little stress has been laid on British participation in crops, commerce, and early industrial ventures. In certain cases, British money went directly into agricultural ventures without passing through the intermediary mines. To see this at work, we will have to look at the South Americans. Using their credit with the British, they acquired land of their own and assumed leadership of vast and important agrarian enterprises. Well before independence, Pedro Juan de Olazagarre had become s o l e o w n e r of the Haciendas Atequiza, la Huerta, and Huejotitan. Furthermore, he was financial backer of the Hacienda de San Nicolas de la Labor and the Hacienda la Calerilla, and was the financial mainstay in a partnership with the heirs of Alfonso Sanchez Lenero, who had owned the Hacienda de Santa Lucia. Thus after about 1818, de Olazagarre single-handedly owned and controlled a whole group of properties, each of which by itself had served as the chief support of a family empire in the past. This was an economic coup of major proportions, yet it only describes part of de Olazagarre's impact. He also owned a ship, the frigate C a z a d o r a , and became a political figure in the transition to independence. His son Manuel was to become a major source of funds for the new state government of Jalisco as collector of credits for the official tobacco monopoly. Domingo Valencia, administrator of Huejotitan, acted as a partner in de Olazagarre's enterprise with the Sanchez Leneros and was also an associate of that other immigrant merchant, Domingo Gonzalez Maxemin. Gonzalez Maxemin funded Valencia's friend and associate Jose Maria Gutierrez for the exploitation of the Hacienda de Guadalupe near Tuxcacuesco, in the south of Jalisco. In 1821 Valencia was at Huejotitan holding several thousand pounds of sugar (in various states of refinement) that represented Gutierrez's repayment of Gonzalez Maxemin's investment Huejotitan (producer of staples) had apparently become an entrepot for cash crops from the semitropical outer regions of Jalisco, and the men whose capital 19

20

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investments made this possible (de Olazagarre and Gonzalez Maxemin) were both South Americans with close ties to British commerce. Thus there was not only a virtual take-over of the local economy by South American immigrants, but we see that the take-over displaced the traditional family enterprise, called into existence new levels of interregional (Tuxcacuesco-Huejotitan) and intraregional (Huejotitan-Atequiza-San Nicolas-Santa Lucia) integration, and expanded the economy to new geographical areas where cash crops played a larger role. Many other instances furnish proof of the preeminence of cash crops such as sugar, cacao, bananas, and cotton in the new merchants' portfolios. The new merchants did not confine themselves to importing cash crops from South America, or cloth from Jamaica; they also employed their money in schemes designed to stimulate local production of these commodities. 21

22

Introduction of Business Corporations A change in commercial business organization accompanied these changes in capital sources, commodities, and regions exploited. After the British and British-financed merchants arrived, the word " c o m p a n i a " began to crop up occasionally in mercantile contracts. For example, Fermin de Goyzueta, a former associate in the Moreno de Tejada enterprise, became Fermin Goyzueta y Compania. His model was undoubtedly someone like Archibald Tucker y Ritchie, who had various dealings with such organizations as Ritchie-Lopez y Compania of Guadalajara, HerreraRitchie y Compania of Tepic, or Watson-McViccar y Compania of Aguascalientes. Not many local merchants became c o m p a n i a s , and we do not as yet know whether use of the name " c o m p a n i a " reflected actual differences from the traditional two-person partnership. Before 1810 commercial organizations were described as c o m p a h i a s de c o m e r c i o , but the tag phrase "y Compania" never appeared in their names. In fact, until about 1814 these partnerships did not themselves have names; they were such highly personal associations that if they were referred to apart from their owners at all, it was usually simply as "el negocio de Don Fulano," or "John Doe's business." It is partly guesswork to suppose that the new names marked a replacement of the two-person partnership by a prototypical business corporation, but it is not unreasonable guesswork. There is also an occasional case after 1810 of three-person associations under the old partnership form—not much of an expansion numerically, but meaningful in the context of a limited-capital economy and the principle of immediate accountability reflected in the two-person partnership. A particularly impressive example from the year 1827 illustrates this new 23

24

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101

investments made this possible (de Olazagarre and Gonzalez Maxemin) were both South Americans with close ties to British commerce. Thus there was not only a virtual take-over of the local economy by South American immigrants, but we see that the take-over displaced the traditional family enterprise, called into existence new levels of interregional (Tuxcacuesco-Huejotitan) and intraregional (Huejotitan-Atequiza-San Nicolas-Santa Lucia) integration, and expanded the economy to new geographical areas where cash crops played a larger role. Many other instances furnish proof of the preeminence of cash crops such as sugar, cacao, bananas, and cotton in the new merchants' portfolios. The new merchants did not confine themselves to importing cash crops from South America, or cloth from Jamaica; they also employed their money in schemes designed to stimulate local production of these commodities. 21

22

Introduction of Business Corporations A change in commercial business organization accompanied these changes in capital sources, commodities, and regions exploited. After the British and British-financed merchants arrived, the word " c o m p a n i a " began to crop up occasionally in mercantile contracts. For example, Fermin de Goyzueta, a former associate in the Moreno de Tejada enterprise, became Fermin Goyzueta y Compania. His model was undoubtedly someone like Archibald Tucker y Ritchie, who had various dealings with such organizations as Ritchie-Lopez y Compania of Guadalajara, HerreraRitchie y Compania of Tepic, or Watson-McViccar y Compania of Aguascalientes. Not many local merchants became c o m p a n i a s , and we do not as yet know whether use of the name " c o m p a n i a " reflected actual differences from the traditional two-person partnership. Before 1810 commercial organizations were described as c o m p a h i a s de c o m e r c i o , but the tag phrase "y Compania" never appeared in their names. In fact, until about 1814 these partnerships did not themselves have names; they were such highly personal associations that if they were referred to apart from their owners at all, it was usually simply as "el negocio de Don Fulano," or "John Doe's business." It is partly guesswork to suppose that the new names marked a replacement of the two-person partnership by a prototypical business corporation, but it is not unreasonable guesswork. There is also an occasional case after 1810 of three-person associations under the old partnership form—not much of an expansion numerically, but meaningful in the context of a limited-capital economy and the principle of immediate accountability reflected in the two-person partnership. A particularly impressive example from the year 1827 illustrates this new 23

24

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trend. Gabriel Nunez y Compania, together with Jacobo Castaneda y Compania, bought Jose de Estrada's cargo of goods from the brigantine H e r i n a r . De Estrada had bought the shipload from a German, Heinrich "Fritsh," and the two "companies" paid de Estrada 150,000 pesos. What is worth noticing here is the size of the transaction, the non-Spanish origin of the goods, and the participation of two "companies" (Nunez and Castaneda). Something approximating a modern business corporation must have been put together to accumulate a sufficiently large, independent capital to accommodate the new terms of non-Iberian trade. Corporations or their prototypes were invented to limit personal financial liability. Limited liability permitted larger accumulations of capital with greater freedom of investment (in particular, greater freedom to take certain kinds of risks). Spain's colonial empire had had plenty of experience with joint-stock corporations before 1800, so why did Spanish merchants not avail themselves more frequently of this solution to their capitalization problems? The case of Britain, presumably the country most "advanced" along the road to modern business organization at this time, helps answer this question. Bishop Carleton Hunt reminds us that in Britain 25

formation of a joint-stock company with limited liability by the now familiar process of registration under general statutes did not, however, become a matter of general right until after the middle of the nineteenth century [because such formation required] either a dispensation or a favor within the special gift of Parliament or a carefully guarded bureaucratic concession. Indeed, freedom of incorporation was achieved only after a protracted and bitter struggle against deeply rooted prejudice, widespread misconception and even fear. 26

If this was the state of affairs in "modern" England, the conservative Iberian legal practice no doubt militated against widespread limited liability in business organization. What was a parliamentary concession in England would have been even more restricted in Spain, where it was a royal or ministerial concession. For a corporation to develop freely, there had to be a general enabling act—the "general statutes" to which Hunt refers. This is a crucial point. The corporation, with its limited liability, virtually demands separation of powers, since there has to be an independent judiciary to regulate corporate behavior. Therefore, a world of business organized by corporations is almost inconceivable outside the context of liberal government—that is, a constitutional monarchy, a republic, or in any event, a government by statute. In Guadalajara the best example of the new business form occurred in

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1824. Ignacio Brambila and ten associates agreed to "form a company among all of themselves to place and establish in this City a factory [to produce] paper from the fiber [estopa] of Maguey and other plants." Brambila contributed only goodwill and labor, the other gentlemen, expressly described as c a p i t a l i s t a s , put up one thousand pesos each in cash for six years. The key clause of the contract was the fourth, which stated that in case of losses Brambila was not responsible. Only the capitalists were held accountable. In return, the capitalists reserved the right to monitor the business's accounts and approve all credit transactions. Each would receive a 5 percent return at the end of the contract in addition to his share of 50 percent of the profits assigned to the participants. Brambila received rights to the other 50 percent of the profits, a two-pesos-per-day allowance, and outright ownership of the factory at the end of the contract Anyone wishing to buy company shares for less than one thousand pesos might combine with one of the capitalists to make up the required sum, but in such a case only one person might sit as a voting member of the sociedad. 27

28

The outcome of this venture is obscure. The company's importance, however, lies in the new method it employed to create and use capital. Also noteworthy is its experimental industrial character—its attempt to create a new local product by means of an industrial plant organized as a business corporation. Another, more famous, example of early attempts at industrialization is the mechanized soap factory opened by Doctor Francisco Severo Maldonado in 1826. This rather extravagant liberal priest (who, for all his touted Jacobinism, was very much a child of the oligarchy) joined Manuel Capetillo (kinsman of the Basauri and Villasenor households) to implement his ideas for a new and labor-saving method of making soap out of t e q u e s q u i t e . In this case the organization was a perfectly traditional, twoperson partnership. Maldonado contributed the physical plant, which he had built at his own expense for four thousand pesos, and Capetillo matched its value in cash. Maldonado's factory was a failure: the two ideas of corporation and industry could not be expected to succeed without a period of trial and error. But only a few years later Jose Palomar would build the first textile factory in the area and become Guadalajara's leading citizen in the mid-nineteenth century. Brambila's and Maldonado's factories represent the first halting attempts at business innovation in Guadalajara, the beginnings of a process that would gather momentum over a long span of time, and the fruits of an expanded pool of investment capital. Juan Lucio Woodbury's application for permission to set up his soda water machine in 1825 is a fitting symbol of the effervescence British capital brought to the newly born state of Jalisco. 29

30

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Decline of Traditional Credit Sources At the same time that foreign merchants were bringing new sources and kinds of credit to Guadalajara, the more-traditional forms of credit almost certainly were declining in importance. Unfortunately, it is virtually impossible to document such a change in very specific ways, but the logic of a violent and disruptive situation would seem to indicate that the church and many private families were less able to provide capital after 1810. Many haciendas suffered extensive damage at the hands of hungry and undisciplined troops on both sides of the conflict Spanish liberals had already attacked the church's wealth, and it was increasingly called on to finance the royalist resistance. The government's habit of living off the church persisted into the new order. In 1822 Iturbide demanded a "contribution" from the Dominicans of twenty thousand pesos: the province of Guadalajara was assigned one thousand pesos as its share, and later that same year Guadalajara's Oratorio de San Felipe Neri was required to pay a similar amount. The amounts were not large in themselves, but as such "contributions" were many, they must have made a considerable dent in the church's financial resources. A number of Spanish merchants fled the country with the first uprisings, taking their capital with them. Others buried their silver and were themselves buried with the secret of its hiding place. Some refused to put their money into circulation until the roads were safe from bandits and guerrillas. Silver mines went out of production as their shafts flooded or caved in from want of maintenance. A l l of these effects of the wars tended to contract the traditional flow of credit Many were only short-run effects, but even so they must have exaggerated the impact of new foreign capital on local society. De Olazagarre, for example, might have taken a good deal longer to acquire his properties and infiltrate the local commercial and political world if he had arrived during a time of general peace. 31

32

Changes in Credit Availability The notarial protocols dating from Hidalgo's insurrection reveal three significant changes, all of which directly affected the credit market in Guadalajara. In the first instance, the arrival of a new contingent of foreign merchants brought a new source of credit Since the ultimate source of this credit was Great Britain, the amount of capital available for investment was suddenly much larger and not tied so closely to land mortgages.

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Decline of Traditional Credit Sources At the same time that foreign merchants were bringing new sources and kinds of credit to Guadalajara, the more-traditional forms of credit almost certainly were declining in importance. Unfortunately, it is virtually impossible to document such a change in very specific ways, but the logic of a violent and disruptive situation would seem to indicate that the church and many private families were less able to provide capital after 1810. Many haciendas suffered extensive damage at the hands of hungry and undisciplined troops on both sides of the conflict Spanish liberals had already attacked the church's wealth, and it was increasingly called on to finance the royalist resistance. The government's habit of living off the church persisted into the new order. In 1822 Iturbide demanded a "contribution" from the Dominicans of twenty thousand pesos: the province of Guadalajara was assigned one thousand pesos as its share, and later that same year Guadalajara's Oratorio de San Felipe Neri was required to pay a similar amount. The amounts were not large in themselves, but as such "contributions" were many, they must have made a considerable dent in the church's financial resources. A number of Spanish merchants fled the country with the first uprisings, taking their capital with them. Others buried their silver and were themselves buried with the secret of its hiding place. Some refused to put their money into circulation until the roads were safe from bandits and guerrillas. Silver mines went out of production as their shafts flooded or caved in from want of maintenance. A l l of these effects of the wars tended to contract the traditional flow of credit Many were only short-run effects, but even so they must have exaggerated the impact of new foreign capital on local society. De Olazagarre, for example, might have taken a good deal longer to acquire his properties and infiltrate the local commercial and political world if he had arrived during a time of general peace. 31

32

Changes in Credit Availability The notarial protocols dating from Hidalgo's insurrection reveal three significant changes, all of which directly affected the credit market in Guadalajara. In the first instance, the arrival of a new contingent of foreign merchants brought a new source of credit Since the ultimate source of this credit was Great Britain, the amount of capital available for investment was suddenly much larger and not tied so closely to land mortgages.

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The second instance of change—the emergence of limited-liability companies resembling modern business corporations—represented a new organizational means for mobilizing credit. A n important implication of this change was greater freedom to take risks, for example, to invest in industrial production requiring mechanical equipment. Limited liability also permitted larger pools of capital to form and very likely allowed the investor a more diversified portfolio, since he need not commit all his resources to a single enterprise. Perhaps an even more important implication of shared-stock companies was the change in the principle of answerability. Such organizations were not predicated on intense personal loyalties and therefore could function with or without kinship to cement them, as long as an appropriate juridical system existed to enforce some ethical conventions. We must take the third change in the local credit market—the decline of traditional sources of credit—on faith until it can be demonstrated more rigorously. The usual holders of liquid financial resources—the church and the Spanish merchant community—came under tremendous pressure both from within and without the colonial system. Creation of an Open Land Market This leaves one major axis of the credit market to be dealt with—land. Land was at the heart of the Spanish system of mobilizing credit Using the notarial records again, we can see that in various ways the independence process encouraged the development of something that had not existed before, an open land market Changes divested land of many of its social obligations and encumbrances and rendered it a more purely "economic" factor of production. Land moved in the direction of becoming a marketable item the value of which was predicated as much on its exchangeability as on its utility, a commodity that could be acquired for money, rather than through a complicated social strategy involving numerous interrelated kinship and credit commitments. One of the earliest attacks on traditional land-tenure patterns in the colonies occurred under the Spanish crown. Reformers in the Bourbon regimes sought ways to undermine the temporal power of the church. The Jesuit order was proscribed and its members expelled from the Spanish dominions in 1767. The properties they left behind were thereafter administered by the state through the agency of the Bienes de Temporalidades. The government continued to operate some of these properties as income producers, but many were sold into private hands. The persecution of the Jesuits had not been designed expressly, or exclusively, to expropriate their lands, but the direction in which royal policy was evolving became

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The second instance of change—the emergence of limited-liability companies resembling modern business corporations—represented a new organizational means for mobilizing credit. A n important implication of this change was greater freedom to take risks, for example, to invest in industrial production requiring mechanical equipment. Limited liability also permitted larger pools of capital to form and very likely allowed the investor a more diversified portfolio, since he need not commit all his resources to a single enterprise. Perhaps an even more important implication of shared-stock companies was the change in the principle of answerability. Such organizations were not predicated on intense personal loyalties and therefore could function with or without kinship to cement them, as long as an appropriate juridical system existed to enforce some ethical conventions. We must take the third change in the local credit market—the decline of traditional sources of credit—on faith until it can be demonstrated more rigorously. The usual holders of liquid financial resources—the church and the Spanish merchant community—came under tremendous pressure both from within and without the colonial system. Creation of an Open Land Market This leaves one major axis of the credit market to be dealt with—land. Land was at the heart of the Spanish system of mobilizing credit Using the notarial records again, we can see that in various ways the independence process encouraged the development of something that had not existed before, an open land market Changes divested land of many of its social obligations and encumbrances and rendered it a more purely "economic" factor of production. Land moved in the direction of becoming a marketable item the value of which was predicated as much on its exchangeability as on its utility, a commodity that could be acquired for money, rather than through a complicated social strategy involving numerous interrelated kinship and credit commitments. One of the earliest attacks on traditional land-tenure patterns in the colonies occurred under the Spanish crown. Reformers in the Bourbon regimes sought ways to undermine the temporal power of the church. The Jesuit order was proscribed and its members expelled from the Spanish dominions in 1767. The properties they left behind were thereafter administered by the state through the agency of the Bienes de Temporalidades. The government continued to operate some of these properties as income producers, but many were sold into private hands. The persecution of the Jesuits had not been designed expressly, or exclusively, to expropriate their lands, but the direction in which royal policy was evolving became

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clear when the crown issued the 1804 decree ordering the "disamortization" of church lands. Expulsion of the Jesuits, disamortization, and the secularization of numerous monastic missions combined to make significant expanses of land available for purchase by laymen. For example, one of Guadalajara's most prosperous haciendas, the Jesuit-owned Hacienda del Cuatro (also known as the Hacienda de Toluqilla), passed into the Bienes de Temporalidades and eventually, in 1818, into the hands of peninsular merchant Manuel Garcia de Quevedo. Ventura Garcia Sancho, another peninsular merchant, bid on the Hacienda de Nuestra Seiiora del Patrocinio de Cienega de Mata, also administered by the Bienes de Temporalidades (I do not know whether he acquired the property). Spanish liberals early on pressed for the abolition of entails, but they were not legally abolished in Mexico until 1823. Full compliance with the law was anything but immediate; for example, the Porres Baranda family did not divide the m a y o r a z g o of Mazatepec until 1834. The disentailment laws probably were never intended to break up either the great estates or the families that held them. The statutes permitted entail holders to retain half of the property in each entailed estate. Such families could and did pass the other half on to a member of the immediate family. The intent of the law was not so much to redistribute wealth as to free families to use their estates as security for credit operations, or to convert them to some other form of wealth. The aggregate assessed values of entails surrounding Guadalajara surpassed a million pesos, so disentailment would have significantly affected the volume and flow of credit, even though it applied only to a half dozen families. Although families like the Porres Barandas failed to comply immediately, there exists little evidence to suggest that hacienda owners seriously opposed disentailment. On the contrary, several entail holders seem to have welcomed the development. Manuel de la Mota y Velasco began mortgaging portions of his urban entail as early as 1818 in order to purchase wholesale quantities of cigars. In another transaction in which Mota y Velasco again mortgaged "entailed" property, the notary involved insisted that he formalized the transaction only at the insistence of one of the parties to the contract, who assured him that entails would soon be abolished. Tomas Ignacio Villasenor, acting on behalf of another entail holder in 1808, had been refused a large loan on the grounds that even his legally unencumbered goods were so intimately bound to his entail that they could not stand as security for a loan. Disentailment brought the possibility not only of mortgaging land, but also of alienating it The heirs of the entailed Hacienda de Atequiza "sold" 33

34

35

36

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out to Pedro de Olazagarre long before the transaction was technically legal, and in other cases, entail holders lost no time in putting the 1823 law into practice. Jose Maria Castaneda took advantage of the "latest dispositions" of the constituent assembly of 1824 to sell (with permission of his heir) a ranch belonging to his entailed Hacienda de Margaritas. Castaneda appears to have been chronically in debt and experienced difficulty floating loans, so it is not surprising that he made good this opportunity to raise money at the expense of his land holdings. Another important new source of land lay in the communal holdings of the Indians. From the earliest phase of the colonial period, the Spanish presence had uprooted, displaced, coopted, and sometimes utterly destroyed the c o m u n i d a d e s of the Indians. Independence did not initiate this process, but it did intensify it. Indians joined Hidalgo's victorious army in large numbers when he entered Guadalajara in December 1810, then followed him in his flight to the north and capture. Many Indians died in the campaigns; many who survived did not return to their homelands for fear of reprisals from the brutal regime of General de la Cruz. The r a n c h o s they thus abandoned fell prey to neighboring hacendados who absorbed the land into their estates. Perhaps it was these abandoned lands that first drew the attention (or greed) of liberal ideologues. After considerable discussion and haggling, the progressive government of the newly sovereign state of Jalisco wiped out the legal category of "Indian," making the former members of the Indian "republics" into "Spanish citizens." The tracts of liberal thinkers like Doctor Francisco Severo Maldonado very lucidly described the intent of this legislation: to make available for acquisition the communal lands of the Indians. The law prescribed that the formerly unalienable communal lands be equitably distributed in fee simple to the members of the extinct communities. Maldonado clearly perceived that these small, individual tracts would not be viable or attractive and that the newly "liberated" owners would immediately sell out, leading to the formation of a kind of yeoman class, a "middle" class of small propertyholders to benefit agriculture. Actually, Maldonado himself was among the first to begin buying numerous small parcels from "ex-Indians," thus accumulating not-so-small holdings. Maldonado was an entrepreneur in his own right, and an uncle by marriage of Anastasio Canedo, another patrician liberal. Toribio Gonzalez, h a c e n d a d o , ecclesiast, and related by marriage to the powerful community of Basque merchants, also purchased large amounts of "ex-Indian" lands. Unfortunately, only a few notarial protocols from the outlying towns have survived, but even among their disorderly leaves appear bill after bill of sale alienating ex-communal lands. Sometimes a single individual sold a tiny plot, 38

39

40

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and sometimes the whle body of e x - p r i n c i p a l e s (village notables) would come together to sell several plots at once. The buyers were a mixed group; sometimes ex-caciques, occasionally r a n c h e r o s or members of local elites (i.e., local landowners, shopkeepers, and functionaries), often priests and ranking ecclesiasts, perhaps even a mule driver now and then. This same process took place in Analco and Mexicalcingo, which now ceased to be communities in their own right and became b a r r i o s , or neighborhoods of the city of Guadalajara. Again the ex-Indians sold off small parcels of land in large numbers, frequently several to a single buyer. Liberals professed to favor breaking up the Indian communities in order to create a yeoman class and make land available for purchase, but they may have had another motive, as well. If they could dispossess and uproot the Indians from the land and community, those Indians might form a pool of wage-dependent labor. A landowner or industrialist could then exploit their work without assuming the financial burden of social services usually provided on the great estate (the most important of which may have been extending credit). Although most land immediately around Guadalajara was occupied and developed by the late eighteenth century, undeveloped land was apparently still available in remoter parts of the intendancy. Several of the new South American merchants in Guadalajara acquired land in the southern part of what is now the State of Jalisco. The influx of British capital may have made it possible to develop commercial agriculture in areas where the cost had been prohibitive. My analysis of colonial Guadalajara shows that a severe shortage of liquid capital created heavy dependence on credit in the local economy. Credit movements could be securely underpinned only with land mortgages, and land was not generally available for free purchase. Local production and distribution had to be organized not along strictly commercial or monetary lines, but according to a set of social obligations and relations, chief of which was kinship. Kinship assured colonial elites of access to land and capital and ensured loyalty and accountability of both parties to any credit transaction. These factors help explain the predominance and persistence of the family enterprise as the major organizing unit of the local economy. 41

42

Survival and Adaptation of Family Enterprises The years leading up to independence brought changes in nearly every aspect of credit—its sources, institutions, and destinations. More capital became available as traditional sources of loan funds shrank and as capital flow became less dependent on the security of land mortgages. A t the same

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and sometimes the whle body of e x - p r i n c i p a l e s (village notables) would come together to sell several plots at once. The buyers were a mixed group; sometimes ex-caciques, occasionally r a n c h e r o s or members of local elites (i.e., local landowners, shopkeepers, and functionaries), often priests and ranking ecclesiasts, perhaps even a mule driver now and then. This same process took place in Analco and Mexicalcingo, which now ceased to be communities in their own right and became b a r r i o s , or neighborhoods of the city of Guadalajara. Again the ex-Indians sold off small parcels of land in large numbers, frequently several to a single buyer. Liberals professed to favor breaking up the Indian communities in order to create a yeoman class and make land available for purchase, but they may have had another motive, as well. If they could dispossess and uproot the Indians from the land and community, those Indians might form a pool of wage-dependent labor. A landowner or industrialist could then exploit their work without assuming the financial burden of social services usually provided on the great estate (the most important of which may have been extending credit). Although most land immediately around Guadalajara was occupied and developed by the late eighteenth century, undeveloped land was apparently still available in remoter parts of the intendancy. Several of the new South American merchants in Guadalajara acquired land in the southern part of what is now the State of Jalisco. The influx of British capital may have made it possible to develop commercial agriculture in areas where the cost had been prohibitive. My analysis of colonial Guadalajara shows that a severe shortage of liquid capital created heavy dependence on credit in the local economy. Credit movements could be securely underpinned only with land mortgages, and land was not generally available for free purchase. Local production and distribution had to be organized not along strictly commercial or monetary lines, but according to a set of social obligations and relations, chief of which was kinship. Kinship assured colonial elites of access to land and capital and ensured loyalty and accountability of both parties to any credit transaction. These factors help explain the predominance and persistence of the family enterprise as the major organizing unit of the local economy. 41

42

Survival and Adaptation of Family Enterprises The years leading up to independence brought changes in nearly every aspect of credit—its sources, institutions, and destinations. More capital became available as traditional sources of loan funds shrank and as capital flow became less dependent on the security of land mortgages. A t the same

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time, various forces exerted pressure to make land into a more flexible commodity, subject to speculation, mortgage, and sale. As part of its response to these changes, Guadalajara's community of potential capitalists began to experiment with new forms of business organization. These new "companies," imitations of British business corporations, freed their members from many of the limitations of kinship obligations. This freedom was necessary, since many of the new foreign merchants were already married when they arrived in Guadalajara and thus had to use money instead of social relations to open the doors to local success. But if limitedliability corporations freed capital from many social encumbrances, they also did away with the most important of the traditional checks against malfeasance, the principle of personal accountability. It would be difficult to imagine the nineteenth-century business corporation without its juridical complement, the principle of equality before the law. Disputes arising from bankruptcies, which must have been common enough occurrences in the new business climate, could not logically be taken to the exclusive merchants' guild, or through the enormously tedious procedure required by the colonial bureaucracy. Any capitalist who thought to risk his money in one of these new, democratic ventures needed assurance that his interests would receive the same consideration in the courts of law as those of any other investor; and he wanted assurance of speedy redress in case of default or fraud. Equality before the law was preceded by the equalizing force of money, a social leveler comparable only to the six-shooter in its effectiveness. The separation of political and juridical powers to ensure speedy justice, and the abolition of legal privileges and exemptions enjoyed by certain social groups or institutions to ensure impartial justice complemented the new, impersonal form of business association. (Ironically, proponents of the business corporation gave it a greater privilege than the exemption and privileges they denied to the medieval social corporations. This new, anonymous corporation won the right to be considered a juridical personality.) Thus the commercialization, or liberalization of Guadalajara's economy and the creation of a bourgeois state were natural counterparts in the independence process, although it would be difficult to determine with any precision which was cause and which was effect Viewed from the perspective of business practice and law, rather than government or politics, independence in Guadalajara tended toward the destruction of the family enterprise and its replacement by the modern business corporation. The paternalistic and ceremony-bound relations of the colonial regime gave up ground to impersonal forms of association in which one man's money was as good as another's.

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Effects of Independence

Yet the progress of bourgeois, liberal institutions appears to have been truncated. Independence was achieved and medieval privileges abolished, but family enterprise seems to have reasserted its hold over society after a time. The names of Guadalajara's old oligarchic families continued to figure prominently in the social, business, and political registers of the new nation. This study would have to be projected into the mid-nineteenth century, when the region's first successful industrial plants began operations and new land legislation (forecasted by the independence movement) finally came into effect, to determine conclusively whether Guadalajara's oligarchy survived only in name, or continued intact, or was radically transformed without being destroyed. It is clear, though, that important aspects of the old oligarchic structure endured in spite of changes that affected the very bases of its existence. In fact, the independence movement was not the first nor would it be the last attack on the oligarchy's power and integrity. Since the sixteenth century, both Spanish ruling dynasties had attempted to reduce the autonomy of the local colonial elite, and the Reform and the Revolution of 1910 launched a series of attacks on the traditional elite that would culminate in the land expropriations of the Cardenas regime. Yet the essentially familial nature of power and wealth in Mexico seems to have survived even the undeniably radical agrarian reform of the 1930s. The durability and adaptability of the oligarchic households has greatly frustrated historians concerned with Mexico. With few exceptions, the latter have been liberal in their sympathies and have sought to paint the "feudalistic" structure of the landholding elite as irrational, anachronistic, "backwards," and ill-adapted to the realities of modern life. This was the view of nineteenth-century liberals, and the liberal appraisal of the colonial oligarchy has changed little in the last century and a half. The fact remains, though, that any institution that survived over four hundred years and weathered at least three major revolutions cannot have been altogether irrational or unadaptable. Perhaps the first to learn this lesson were the early British reformers of the independence period, whose efforts to remake Latin America in the classic liberal mold were largely frustrated. Tulio Halperin-Donghi argues that after 1825 many British merchants lost their enthusiasm for innovation. These new investors discovered that "many of the practices [of the traditional elite] which appeared absurd were those which ensured the best use of plentiful and hence low-cost resources locally available and which reduced to a minimum the use of those which were scarce and hence unduly expensive." This may have been only one way in which the traditional economy was "rational," and the family enterprise may well have represented just such a case of a seemingly absurd but fundamentally well43

Effects of Independence

Ill

adapted institution. Halperin-Donghi concludes that after independence "family solidarity lost none of its importance, [although] the relative power of the different families and the tactics which they employed to settle their rivalries underwent a change." Like so many other problems associated with independence, then, the fate of the family enterprise presents a kind of paradox. The movement intended to end this patrician institution won control of the government, but the institution survived and may have grown even stronger in some areas. Still, it should be clear that, although there was no change in the group in power in Guadalajara, there were certainly revolutionary changes in social relations. Independence brought a revolution in politics, a revolution in the form of the state; a revolution in forms of business associations, and a revolution in the local land and credit markets. If these radical changes did not immediately yield their logical historical consequences, it is nevertheless impossible to imagine the Reform of 1857 and the Revolution of 1910 without their precedent in 1821. 44

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Notes

Abbreviations AHMG AIPG —JTS —FB —GA BPE —AJA —JBD vol. f. v

Used Archivo Historic© Municipal de Guadalajara Archivo de Instrumentos Publicos de Guadalajara Protocolos del Notario Jose Tomas Sandi Protocolos del Notario Francisco Barrionuevo Protocolos del Notario Guadalupe Altamirano Biblioteca Publica del Estado (de Jalisco) Archivo Judicial de la Audiencia (de Nueva Galicia) Archivo del Juzgado de Bienes de Difuntos (de Nueva Galicia) volume foja (leaf) verso (the reverse side of the leaf)

Introduction 1. Henry Sumner Maine, Ancient L a w (New York: Dutton, 1972), p. 110. The complete quotation is "If then we employ Status . . . to signify these personal conditions only . . . we may say that the movement of the progressive societies has hitherto been a movement f r o m Status to Contract." See also Ferdinand Tonnies, Community and Society (Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft), trans, and ed. Charles P. Loomis (New York: Harper & Row, 1963). Although the term "Gesellschaft" is usually translated "society," as in Loomis's edition, I prefer the term "association," to avoid the confusing overlap in meaning between community and society. 2. Eric Van Young, H a c i e n d a and M a r k e t in Eighteenth-Century M e x i c o : The R u r a l Economy of the G u a d a l a j a r a Region, 1 6 7 5 - 1 8 2 0 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1981), pp. 236-269. Regarding the number of textile weavers in the intendancy of Guadalajara, see Robert Potash, E l Banco de Avio de M e x i c o , trans. Ramon Fernandez (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Economica, 1959), p. 18. Chapter 1. City and Countryside 1. Alejandro de Humboldt, Ensayopolitico sobre el Reino de la N u e v a Espaha (Mexico City: Editorial Porrua, 1966), p. 128. Juan B. Iguiniz, G u a d a l a j a r a a

124

Notes to pages 10 to 14

traves de los tiempos, 2 vols. (Guadalajara: Banco Refaccionario de Jalisco, 195051), a collection of travelers' accounts. 2. Guadalajara was first the capital of the "Kingdom" of Nueva Galicia, and later of the intendancy of Guadalajara. "New Spain" strictly meant the central Mexican jurisdiction, but also applied loosely to all of the Spanish territories north of Central America. It should be obvious from the context which usage of "New Spain" is intended in future references. 3. Helene Riviere d'Arc, G u a d a l a j a r a y su region (Mexico City: Secretaria de Education Publica, 1973), p. 31, charts the city's growth from 1542 to 1803. Russel Nye, The C u l t u r a l Life of the New N a t i o n (New York: Harper & Row, 1960), p. 124, lists only five United States cities in 1800 with populations over ten thousand. 4. David Brading, M i n e r s and M e r c h a n t s in Bourbon Mexico, 1763-1810 (Cambridge: At the University Press, 1961), p. 236. 5. Richard M. Morse," A Prologomenon to Latin American Urban History," Hispanic A m e r i c a n Historical Review (hereafter cited as HAHR) 52 (August 1972):369. 6. Jose Ramirez Flores describes the fair briefly in E l R e a l Consulado de G u a d a l a j a r a (Guadalajara: Banco Refaccionario de Jalisco, 1952), pp. 73-76. Estimates of attendance and consumption are from Guadalajara, Junta de Seguridad Publica, Noticias geogrdficas y estadisticas del Departamento de Jalisco (Guadalajara: Imprenta del Gobierno, 1843), pp. 66-67. Manuel Payno, Los bandidos de R i o F r i o (Mexico City: Editorial Porrua, 1971), pp. 559-563, gives a novelized account of the fair. 7. Brading, M i n e r s and M e r c h a n t s , p. 187; Humboldt, Ensayo politico, pp. 331-332; Alberto Santoscoy, M e m o r a n d u m acerca del Estado de Jalisco y especialmente de su capital de G u a d a l a j a r a (Guadalajara, 1901), pp. 8-10. 8. Doris M. Ladd, The M e x i c a n Nobility at Independence, 1 7 8 0 - 1 8 2 6 , Latin American Monographs, no. 40 (Austin, Tex.: Institute of Latin American Studies, 1976), pp. 43-45, suggests that tequila and pulque developed late in the colonial period as commercial products. 9. Jose Cornejo Franco, G u a d a l a j a r a (Mexico City, 1959), is a useful short guide to Guadalajara's architectural monuments. 10. Humboldt, Ensayo politico, p. 451; Robert Potash, E l Banco de Avio de M e x i c o , trans. Ramon Fernandez (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Economica, 1959), p. 18; Enciclopedia de M e x i c o (Mexico City, 1966), vol. 5. 11. The Archivo Historico Municipal de Guadalajara (hereafter AHMG), box (caja) 1106, lists nineteen large bakeries in 1810; a list of fines in 1811, box 1107, adds five more names. Mills are described in AHMG, box 1113; in the Archivo de Instrumentos Publicos de Guadalajara (hereafter AIPG), Protocolos de Guadalupe Altamirano (hereafter GA), 20 May 1833, vol. 6, f. 74; and in AIPG, Protocolos de Jose Tomas Sandi (hereafter JTS), 9 April 1829, vol. 11, f. 113v. 12. Tannery (teneria) descriptions are from AIPG, Protocolos de Francisco Barrionuevo (hereafter FB), 24 January 1825, vol. 4, f. 1; AIPG, JTS, 19 April 1805, vol. 10, f. 63; and the Archivo del Juzgado de Bienes de Difuntos, housed in the Biblioteca Publica del Estado (hereafter BPE, JBD), Legajo 178. Wax

Notes to pages 14 to 18

125

manufacture described in AIPG, GA, 22 February 1825, vol. 2, f. 126. 13. Meson de Nuestra Seiiora de Guadalupe and Meson de San Miguel in AIPG, GA, March 1824, vol. 2, f. 17v, and AIPG, JTS, 17 January 1824, vol. 18, f. 13. 14. AHMG, box 1109. 15. Luis Perez Verdia, H i s t o r i a p a r t i c u l a r del estado de Jalisco, 2d ed., 3 vols. (Guadalajara: Editorial Grafica, 1951), 2:63. 16. Cornejo Franco, G u a d a l a j a r a , p. 79. 17. Residence patterns appear in AHMG, box 1110, "Padron de las familias de Guadalajara 1813-1814." Casas de vecindad were multiple dwellings built around a central courtyard with certain common facilities. I have assumed that houses called asesorias, where a widow may have presided over a household of numerous residents with different family names, were probably boardinghouses or pensions. 18. Jose Cornejo Franco discusses the early Indian settlements in L a C a l l e de San Francisco (Guadalajara, 1945), pp. 14-15. 19. Several unsatisfactory but interesting maps of Guadalajara appear in Leopoldo Orendain and Salvador Reynoso, eds., Cartografia de l a N u e v a G a l i c i a (Guadalajara: Banco Industrial de Jalisco, 1961). 20. AIPG, G A, 4 September 1822, vol. 1, f. 62, notes that the substitute curate of Monte Escobedo earned six hundred pesos a year. Donation for school in AIPG, JTS, 28 January 1819, vol. 13, f. 30, specified a teacher stipend of twenty pesos a month. A Captain Castro received thirty-five pesos a month retirement (AIPG, JTS, 16Marchl822, vol. 16,f.63v). AIPG, JTS, December 1823, vol. 17, f. 183v,notes that a widow received a manutencion ("sustenance") of fifty pesos a month. 21. For a list of craft guilds extant in 1809, see AHMG, box 1106. On the coach and carriage makers, see AIPG, JTS, 11 July 1820, vol. 14, f. 126. Cipres worked for a peso and a half a day (AHMG, box 1114). 22. AHMG, box 1114. See also Archivo Judicial de la Audiencia de Guadalajara, in the Biblioteca Publica del estado (hereafter BPE, AJA), Legajo 1, no 27, Ramo Criminal, 1812, and in the same archive Legajo 1, no. 11, Ramo Criminal, 1812. Soap prices in AHMG, box 1105. 23. Cornejo Franco, G u a d a l a j a r a , cxxxi-cxxxiv; Perez Verdia, H i s t o r i a de Jalisco, 2:4-5. 24. A house sold by Basque merchant Domingo Ibarrondo (AIPG, GA, 27 November 1822, vol. 1, f. 95) not only had a shop, or tienda, but its own mill. Similar cases occur frequently in the notarial archive. 25. De la Mota cited in Cornejo Franco, C a l l e de San F r a n c i s c o , p. 38. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are mine. 26. The best estimate of Guadalajara's population before 1810 seems to be Perez Verdia, H i s t o r i a de Jalisco, 2:1, which is based on a notarized report of "recent censuses." Perez Verdia's estimate of 34,697 inhabitants is similar to that used recently by compilers of the Enciclopedia de M e x i c o (see vol. 5). For conflicting estimates, see Humboldt, Ensayo politico, p. 169, and Sherburne F. Cook and Woodrow Borah, Essays in Population History, 2 vols. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1971), 1:181. Brading variously estimates

126

Notes to pages 19 to 22

Guanajuato's elite at 3, 5, and 10 percent of its total population (see M i n e r s and M e r c h a n t s , pp. 230, 256, and 303). A census showing extended elite family households may be found in AHMG, box 1110. 27. Antonio Garcia Cubas, Atlas geogrdjico, estadistico e historico mexicano (Mexico City: Imprenta J. M. Fernandez de Lara, 1858), appendix. 28. On minimum value of haciendas, see AIPG, JTS, 16 January 1821, vol. 15, f. 30. Gil's will is in AIPG, JTS, 1 August 1814, vol. 12, f. 12. 29. De la Rosa in AIPG, JTS, 21 August 1824, vol. 18, f. 92; Villasenor in BPE, JBD, Legajo 180; Vizcarra in BPE, AJA, Legajo 12, no. 154, Ramo Civil, 1736. 30. Intendant Abascal's report to the Consulado of Veracruz cited in Humboldt, Ensayo politico, p. 169. See also pp. 300, 451, and 453 for Humboldt's own estimates. 31. Ibid., pp. 334,312. Enrique Florescano and Isabel Gil, comps., Descripciones economicas generales de N u e v a Espana, 1 7 8 4 - 1 8 1 7 (Mexico City: Secretaria de Education Publica e Instituto Nacional de Antropologia e Historia, 1973), p. 265, give the value of a "marco de plata" as eight pesos, four reals (one peso=eight reals). This seems to be the figure Humboldt used, although in Guadalajara the marco was apparently worth less. AIPG, JTS, 6 September 1827, vol. 21, f. 302v, gives the worth of a "marco de Azogue" as eight pesos, one real, and a "marco de fuego" as seven pesos, seven reals. In AIPG, JTS, 9 July 1818, vol. 12, f. 144, the marco was worth only seven pesos. 32. The British continue to be attracted to Mexican silver. See Peter J. Bakewell, Silver M i n i n g and Society in C o l o n i a l Mexico: Zacatecas, 1 5 4 6 - 1 7 0 0 (Cambridge: At the University Press, 1971), and M i n e r s and M e r c h a n t s by David Brading. 33. Humboldt, Ensayo Politico, pp. 300, 451, 453. 34. Before independence maize often sold for about a peso perfanega. Maize and wheat prices can be compared through the municipal council's records in AHMG. On bull shipments, see the N o t a estadistica r e m i t i d a por el gobierno supremo del estado de Jalisco a l a cdmara de senadores del soberano congreso general con arreglo a l a r t i c u l o 1 6 1 numero 8° de la constitucion federal de los Estados Unidos Mexicanos el ano de 1 8 2 6 (Mexico City: Imprenta del Aguila, 1826), p. 5. Two recent works furnish the best information now available on the structure and history of the region's agricultural and livestock production before independence: see Eric Van Young, H a c i e n d a and M a r k e t in Eighteenth-Century M e x i c o : The R u r a l Economy of the G u a d a l a j a r a Region, 1 6 7 5 - 1 8 2 0 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1981); and Ramon Serrera, G u a d a l a j a r a ganadera (Seville, Spain: Escuela de Estudios Hispanoamericanos, 1977). 35. Estimates of figures in roman type in tables 1 and 2 are based on average yields in 1826 as follows: Average Used in Crop Maximum Yield Minimum Yield Computation Maize Wheat Beans

100 to 1 35 to 1 18 to 1

50 to 1 15 to 1 10 to 1

75 to 1 25 to 1 14 to 1

Source: N o t a estadistica r e m i t i d a por el gobierno supremo del estado de Jalisco a l a cdmara de senadores del soberano congreso general con arreglo a l a r t i c u l o 1 6 1 numero 8° de la constitucidn federal de los Estados Unidos Mexicanos el ano de 1 8 2 6 (Mexico City: Imprenta del Aguila, 1826).

Notes to pages 24 to 31

127

36. See AHMG, box 1106. The total city market, public and private, thus absorbed about one out of every twentyfanegas of maize produced in the intendancy at large and indicates a per capita annual consumption of about 2.9 fanegas, or 7.5 bushels. 37. The inventory that follows in the text is taken from AIPG, GA, 1828, vol. 4, f. 71 v. 38. Peron was probably an acid, local variety of the common pear, Pyrus communis. It is not clear whether toronja was then used to signify the citrus species ( C i t r u s grandis) that we know as grapefruit. The c h i r i m o y a trees were probably A n n o n a c h e r i m o l a , and capulin is known scientifically as P r u n u s capuli. Geographical and chronological variations in usage make it difficult to know whether the mamey trees were a species of L u c u m a , such as L u c u m a mammosa, or perhaps M a m m e a a m e r i c a n a . The usual modern standard for tree nomenclature in Mexico is Paul C. Standley, Trees and Shrubs of M e x i c o , Contributions from the U.S. National Herbarium, vol. 23, parts 1 through 5 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1920-1926). Botanists with a historical bent will want to consult Francisco J. Santamaria, D i c c i o n a r i o de mejicanismos (Mexico City: Editorial Porrua, 1974), regarding common names before turning to Standley. 39. Historians commonly estimate the worth of colonial property by capitalizing it at 5 percent, a typical annual rate of interest in this period. See, for example, Jan Bazant, Cinco haciendas mexicanas (Mexico City: El Colegio de Mexico, 1975). 40. James Lockhart, "Encomienda and Hacienda: The Evolution of the Great Estate in the Spanish Indies," HAHR 49 (August 1969):411-429. 41. Ladd, The M e x i c a n Nobility, pp. 151-154, discusses colonial agriculture's heavy dependence on credit. 42. See Van Young, H a c i e n d a and M a r k e t , for an updated, detailed discussion of the local hacienda system. 43. "Expediente formado a fin de hacer las partidas de formar el censo y estadistica de la Provincia de este Reyno de Nueva Galicia y de que se formen Ayuntamientos donde corresponde que los haya." Dated 1813, A H M G , box 1110. 44. Ibid. Number of pueblos taken from Humboldt, Ensayo politico, p. 169; number of haciendas estimated from data in Garcia Cubas, Atlas geogrdfico, appendix. A pueblo is a small town, larger than a rancho but smaller than a v i l l a . 45. Perez Verdia, H i s t o r i a de Jalisco, 2:4. 46. AIPG, Protocolos de Zapotlanejo (too disorderly to permit precise citation), shows that ranchero Bartolome Masias (illegitimate) owned 3 "caballerias de pan llevar" (about 300 acres of arable land) and some two hundred animals. Another r a n c h e r o , Antonio Felipe Gonzalez, owned only 3 c u a r t i l l a s of tillable land (hardly more than a garden plot), eighteen animals, two plows, an axe, an adze, and two saws. A "rich" r a n c h e r o , don [sic] Jose Albino Gutierrez, owned 13.5 caballerias of land (approximately 1,350 acres) in 1810. Small towns like Tlajomulco and Cuquio had no resident notary, so these records are filed in Guadalajara by place rather than by notary's name. 47. OchoainAIPG,JTS,24May 1819, vol. 13, f. 121 v; del Rio in AIPG, JTS,

128

Notes to pages 31 to 37

15 September 1824, vol. 18, f. 104; Sanchez Lenero in APIG, JTS, 15 September 1825, vol. 19, f. 203. See the discussion of inheritance law and practice on pp. 48-56. 48. AIPG, JTS, 1821, vol. 15, unnumbered leaves at end of volume confirm the Basauri family's ownership of the Hacienda de Atequiza. 49. Guadalajara's wealthy families typically owned several haciendas. Commonly, two of these were similar in size and importance, with numerous smaller properties scattered around them somewhat like planets around a binary star. In the text I use "sister" hacienda to refer to the two principal estates and "satellites" to designate the smaller properties. The pattern poses some questions I cannot resolve: for example, Was one major hacienda kept in the family while the other one was more often leased? Did each type of property specialize in certain functions, such as storage or work-animal raising? If the pattern reflects an economic strategy, what was its main purpose? 50. BPE, JBD, Legajo 180. See Villasenor genealogy in the Appendix. The family enterprise is presented in considerable detail in Chapter 3. 51. AIPG, GA, 11 December 1834, vol. 6, f. 329. 52. AIPG, FB, 14 December 1821, vol. 2, f. 40. 53. BPE, AJA, Legajo 12, no. 154, Ramo Civil, 1736. 54. AIPG, FB, 17 April 1826, vol. 5, f. 58v. AHMG, boxes 1105 and 1107, show that Castaneda resigned as alferez r e a l on 27 January 1810. 55. De la Mota in AIPG, JTS, 21 November 1818, vol. 12, f. 322v. On the Canedo entail, Jorge Palomino y Canedo, L a casa y mayorazgo de Canedo de N u e v a G a l i c i a (Mexico City: Editorial Atenea, 1947), esp. vol. 2, is the best description of the Canedo family, its properties, and its history. See also Alberto Santoscoy, Los Canedos. Apuntes herdldicos y biogrdjicos de una prominente f a m i l i a jaliciense (Guadalajara: L.G. Gonzalez, 1902). 56. In addition to Palomino y Canedo, L a casa de Canedo, see Jesus Amaya, Ameca: Protofundacion mexicana (Mexico City: Imprenta Vega, 1951). Chapter 2. Credit and Kinship 1. Letter from Francisco Antonio Ordonez to Jose Martinez Mestas, 3 March 1803, in AHMG, box 1105. 2. David Brading, M i n e r s and M e r c h a n t s in Bourbon M e x i c o , 1 7 6 3 - 1 8 1 0 (Cambridge: At the University Press, 1971), pp. 169-207. 3. See Estadistica del estado l i b r e de Jalisco f o r m a d a de orden del supremo gobierno del mismo estado con presencia de las noticias que dieron los pueblos de su comprension en los anos de 1 8 2 1 y 1 8 2 2 , por el C. V.R. (Guadalajara: Urbano Sanroman, 1825). 4. Letter from the "alcalde mds antiguo" to the city council, April 1791, in AHMG, box 1108. 5. Eric Van Young, H a c i e n d a and M a r k e t in Eighteenth-Century Mexico: The R u r a l Economy of the G u a d a l a j a r a Region, 1 6 7 5 - 1 8 2 0 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1981), p. 182, argues that the church tended to finance long-term investments, and merchants financed short-term

Notes to pages 38 to 42

129

operating expenses. 6. Scattered among the notarial protocols of Guadalajara (AIPG) are documents showing that merchants most commonly formed two-person partnerships before about 1810. For an important early prototype of a larger, joint-stock type of company, see Carmen Castaneda, "Documentos sobre una fabrica textil u obraje establecido en Guadalajara en el siglo XVIII," Boletin del Archivo Historico de Jalisco 4, no. 1 (January-April 1980): 13-16. 7. On the church as moneylender, see Michael P. Costeloe, C h u r c h Wealth in M e x i c o : A Study of the "Juzgado de capellanias" in the Archbishopric of M e x i c o , 1 8 0 0 - 1 8 5 6 (Cambridge: At the University Press, 1967); idem, "The Administration, Collection and Distribution of Tithes in the Archbishopric of Mexico, 1800-1860," The Americas 23 (January 1966):3-27; Asuncion Lavrin, "The Role of the Nunneries in the Economy of New Spain in the Eighteenth Century," HAHR 46 (November 1966):371-393; Ricardo Lancaster-Jones, "Bienes del Convento Agustino de Guadalajara," H i s t o r i a M e x i c a n a 13 (April-June 1964):578-592. On the history of banking in general, see Abbott Payson Usher, The E a r l y History of Deposit B a n k i n g in M e d i t e r r a n e a n E u r o p e (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1943). Adam Szazdi's "Credit—Without Banking—in Early NineteenthCentury Puerto Rico," The Americas 19 (October 1962): 149-171, describes a situation comparable to that of early nineteenth-century Guadalajara. Eric Van Young { H a c i e n d a and M a r k e t , p. 182) implies a somewhat different evaluation of the church when he states that its role as moneylender can "hardly be overestimated." 8. BPE, JBD, Legajo 179, no. 1, "Cuenta de autos pendientes," 1808. 9. BPE, JBD, Legajo 178, "Autos formados por fallecimiento del ultramarino Don Angel Pablo Gomez," 1807. 10. AIPG, FB, 10 June 1822, vol. 2, f. 130. 11. Hacienda de Mojarras in AIPG, FB, 27 February 1823, vol. 2, f. 233; Hacienda de Valparaiso in AIPG, JTS, 9 March 1821, vol. 15, f. 87. 12. Canedo in AIPG, JTS, 20 December 1827, vol. 21, f. 391. 13. Alzaga in AIPG, FB, 24 April 1822, vol. 2, f. 110. 14. Serrato in AIPG, GA, 20 May 1822, vol. 1, f. 7v. 15. Echaurri in AHMG, box 1118. I cannot automatically write off this investment as nonproductive without knowing more about the university's property holdings. 16. Hernandez in AIPG, JTS, 27 April 1805, vol. 10, f. 69. 17. Calamateo in AIPG, FB, 5 November 1823, vol. 2, f. 395; Cabanas in AIPG, JTS, 2 September 1806, vol. 10, f. 23; Davalos in AIPG, JTS, 24 July 1819, vol. 13, f. 198v; Villasenor in AIPG, JTS, 18 April 1805, vol. 10, f. 60. 18. Arochi in AIPG, JTS, 28 March 1823, vol. 17, f. 58v. 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid. 21. The following are only a few examples of surety bonds in the notarial protocols: AIPG, FB, 27 June 1805, vol. 1, f. 96; AIPG, JTS, 20 May 1818, vol. 12,

130

Notes to pages 43 to 54

f. 90v; AIPG, JTS, 16 March 1829, vol. 11, f. 61. 22. AIPG, JTS, 1 August 1814, vol. 12, f. 12. Bonds to the royal treasury had priority over other debts. 23. AIPG, FB, 25 May 1805, vol. 1, f. 79. 24. AIPG, FB, 30 June 1822, vol. 2, f. 12. 25. Manuel Basauri, partial owner of the entailed Hacienda de Atequiza, took out a loan in 1818 to mortgage the "avonos y rentas," or income, from his property (see AIPG, JTS, 14 October 1818, vol. 12, f. 262). Regarding Villasenor's inability to back a loan with his entailed properties, that is, with the landed portion of his estate, see BPE, JBD, Legajo 180, Expediente datelined Jocotepec, 1808. 26. Hacienda del Potrero in AIPG, JTS, 16 January 1821, vol. 15, f. 30; and AHMG, box 1118. 27. Van Young, H a c i e n d a and M a r k e t , points out that even earlier in the eighteenth century improvement of already-claimed land contributed more to agricultural expansion than new claims. See especially pp. 305-306. 28. BPE, JBD, Legajo 80, Expediente datelined Jocotepec, 1808, shows that the total value of the unentailed (i.e., nonlanded) estate of Huejotitan was assessed at 122,930 pesos, including 47,000 pesos in stone fences or walls. 29. Van Young, H a c i e n d a and M a r k e t , pp. 115-117. 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid., p. 117. 32. A Porres Baranda heir had claim to an entail in Spain (see AIPG, JTS, 18 July 1820, vol. 14, f. 134). Santander merchant Francisco de la Peiia y Alvarado also inherited a Spanish entail (see AIPG, JTS, 20 June 1819, vol. 13, f. 161v). The paraphrase of Karl Marx comes from Precapitalist F o r m a t i o n s (New York: International Publishers, 1965), p. 84. 33. Jesus Amaya, Ameca: Protofundacion mexicana (Mexico City: Imprenta Vega, 1951), p. 11, argues that the Villasenor line can be traced all the way back to the period of the Conquest through the Arriola and other lines to Luis de Ahumada. 34. Lucas Alaman, H i s t o r i a mejicana desde los primeros movimientos que prepararon su independencia en el ano 1 8 0 6 hasta la epoca presente, 5 vols. (Mexico City: Editorial Jus, 1972), 1:156 (emphasis added). 35. Readers will want to consult Linda Greenow, "Spatial Dimensions of the Credit Market in Nueva Galicia, 1721-1820" (Ph.D. diss., Syracuse University, 1980). Carmen Castaneda graciously obtained a copy of this elusive dissertation for me, but, regrettably, it came into my hands too late to permit its proper integration into the present work. 36. Brading, M i n e r s and M e r c h a n t s , p. 303. 37. Jose Ramirez Flores, E l R e a l Consulado de G u a d a l a j a r a (Guadalajara: Banco Refaccionario de Jalisco, 1952), pp. 107-120, gives a complete list of the Real Consulado's members. It was founded in 1795 and continued to function for a short time after national independence. 38. Names of Guadalajara's city council members are from the ayuntamiento's records for the period 1795 to 1821 in AHMG, boxes 1095 to 1129. Since this is not

Notes to pages 54 to 63

131

a political study of the cabildo, no distinction is made between alcaldes, or "mayors," and regidores, or councilmen. The available data are insufficient to permit social comparison of city council members with the officials of the audiencia or the royal treasury. Since the latter are presumed to represent metropolitan as opposed to local interests, it would be especially interesting to know whether they also were kin to local families. 39. Gaceta del gobierno de G u a d a l a j a r a , various dates, 1821 and 1822. 40. AIPG, various books of notarial protocols. See also Jorge Palomino y Canedo, L a casa y mayorazgo de Canedo de N u e v a G a l i c i a , 2 vols. (Mexico City: Editorial Athenea, 1947), 1:50-60. 41. Mary Sumner Benson, Women in Eighteenth Century A m e r i c a , a Study of Opinion and Social Change (New York: Columbia University Press, 1935), p. 232.1 can use almost any public document by a woman to illustrate the points made here. The text of any such document reveals the underlying legal principles as they were put into practice better than an abstract compilation of laws. A particularly interesting example is the will by Gertrudis Morales in AIPG, GA, 20 April 1823, vol. 1, f. 175. 42. For Sanchez Lenero, see AIPG, JTS, 16 February 1819, vol. 13, f. 50v; AIPG, JTS, 6 March 1829, vol. 11, f. 48 v; and AIPG, GA, 6 November 1822, vol. 1, f. 86v. For Antonio Iriarte, see AIPG, JTS, 5 November 1819, vol. 13, f. 276v; and AIPG, FB, 10 June 1822, vol. 2, f. 130. See, for Velarde, AIPG, JTS, 11 February 1820, vol. 14, f. 41. Regarding all three men's membership in the Real Consulado, see Ramirez Flores, E l Consulado, pp. 107-120. 43. Vergara, in AIPG, JTS, 23 February 1825, vol. 19, f. 23v; Lopez, in AIPG, JTS, 29 May 1819, vol. 13, f. 131v; Olague, in AIPG, JTS, 5 May 1829, vol. 11, f. 46v; Sanchez Pareja, in AIPG, FB, 28 January 1809, vol. 1, f. 152v. 44. Robert S. Smith, "The Institution of the Consulado in New Spain," HAHR 24 (February 1944):61-83. 45. Both Quiros and Marroquin in BPE, JBD, Legajo 179, no. 3 (1814), in the "Cuenta de autos pendientes." 46. Andiasabal, in BPE, JBD, Legajo 179, no. 23 (1808), in the "Cuenta de autos pendientes"; administrator of the Hacienda de Cedros, in ibid., no. 19; the native of Santander, in ibid. no. 23. 47. Gomez, in BPE, JBD, Legajo 178(1807) "Autos formados por fallecimiento del ultramarino Don Angel Pablo Gomez"; Sein Terrones, in BPE, JBD, Legajo 179 (1808), no. 49 in "Cuenta de autos pendientes." 48. Mestas, in BPE, JBD, Legajo 179 (1811), no. 4 in "Cuenta de autos pendientes"; Cazeda, ibid., no. 22. 49. Eduardo Arcila Farias, Reformas economicas del sigh XVIII en N u e v a Espaha, 2 vols. "Sepsetentas" Series, nos. 117 and 118 (Mexico City: Secretaria de Education Publica, 1974), 2:198. Chapter 3. Four Elite Family Enterprises 1. L a casa y mayorazgo de Canedo de N u e v a G a l i c i a , 2 vols. (Mexico

132

Notes to pages 64 to 67

City: Editorial Athenea, 1947). 2. Palomino y Canedo, L a casa de Canedo, tells this story. Of course, two cases do not prove by themselves that agriculture was profitable, but they do illustrate the pattern of combining agricultural and mining investments and they indicate that the subjective preference many Spaniards showed for landed property was not totally unfounded. 3. Jose T. Laris, G u a d a l a j a r a de las I n d i a s , historia de sus cronicas, mapas, pianos, glosa, edificios monumentales, templos, calles y barrios (Guadalajara: Taller "Graficos", 1945), pp. 8-10. Palomino y Canedo, L a casa de Canedo, 2:467482. Palomino traces the Villasenor line back to Luis de Ahumada, who, in the late sixteenth century acquired most of the land in the Valley of Ameca. Regarding Ahumada and his descendants, see Jesus Amaya, Ameca: Protofundacion mexicana (Mexico City: Imprenta Vega, 1951), esp. p. 11. In BPE, JBD, Legajo 180, the expediente datelined Jocotepec, 1808, attributes all buildings then extant on the estate to the initiative of either Tomas Ignacio or his predecessor one generation earlier, Guadalupe Ventura Villasenor. Eric Van Young, H a c i e n d a and M a r k e t in Eighteenth-Century M e x i c o : The R u r a l Economy of the G u a d a l a j a r a Region, 1 6 7 5 - 1 8 2 0 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1981), has unearthed a great deal of valuable information about the Villasenores. Unfortunately for the family historian, Van Young's emphasis is agrarian history, so the facts about Huejotitan are scattered widely throughout the book. 4. In AHMG the various "Libros de actas de cabildo" show Tomas Ignacio Villasenor as a member of the city council as early as 1788. He, Francisco Rubio, and Rafael Villasenor served on the city council during the later years of the eighteenth century and on into the national period. Laris, G u a d a l a j a r a , says that Tomas Ignacio's grandfather, as well as "various of his ancestors and collaterals," were alcaldes or other kinds of government official in Guadalajara. 5. Gomez, in AIPG, JTS, 18 April 1805, vol. 10, f. 60. Jose Maria Foncerrada appears in AIPG, JTS, 26 August 1819, vol. 13, f. 225 v, as effective heir of Jose Maria Gomez Villasenor. 6. Equivalency figures are taken from J. Villasana Haggard, Handbook for Translators of Spanish H i s t o r i c a l Documents (Austin: University of Texas, 1941). The description of the Villasenor estate that follows in the text is taken from BPE, JBD, Legajo 180, Expediente "Jocotepec, 30 March 1808." 7. Jan Bazant also uses the device of capitalizing haciendas at the rate of 5 percent to arrive at their approximate value in his Cinco haciendas mexicanas (Mexico City: El Colegio de Mexico, 1975), p. 16. 8. Population data for Jocotepec and Huejotitan may be found in the 1813 census recorded in AHMG, box 1110. For a discussion of the criteria to determine citizenship status under the Spanish Constitution of 1812, see David T. Garza, "Mexican Constitutional Expression in the Cortes of Cadiz," in M e x i c o and the Spanish Cortes 1 8 1 0 - 1 8 2 2 : E i g h t Essays, ed. Nettie Lee Benson (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1966), pp. 45-53. 9. Hacienda de Cedros in AIPG, GA, (indeterminate date, probably between

Notes to pages 67 to 70

133

June and October) 1828, vol. 4, f. 108; AIPG, JTS, 6 February 1823, vol. 17, f. 32; and AIPG, FB, 27 March 1822, vol. 2, f. 94. Hacienda Santa Rosa in AIPG, FB, (indeterminate date, probably in January) 1827, vol. 5, f. 146v. Hacienda San Nicolas de la Labor in AIPG, JTS, 26 August 1819, vol. 13, f. 225 v. See also Laris, G u a d a l a j a r a , p. 11. 10. Hacienda San Nicolas de la Labor in AIPG, JTS, 2 August 1819, vol. 13, f. 225v. Huejotitan in AIPG, JTS, 17 December 1819, vol. 13, f. 309v. Hacienda Santa Rosa in AIPG, FB, (indeterminate date, probably in January), 1827, vol. 5, f. 146v. Hacienda de Cedros in AIPG, JTS, 26 September 1823, vol. 17, f. 134v. Hacienda de Colimilla in AIPG, Protocolos de Zapotlanejo, vol. 2,1803 (no month or day given, no folio number) and AIPG, Protocolos de Zapotlanejo, vol. 3, 15 February 1826, (no folio number). 11. AIPG, JTS, 17 December 1819, vol. 13, f. 309v. 12. Van Young thinks Rubio was to supply the entire amount from the family's own crop ( H a c i e n d a and M a r k e t , p. 235n). The question remains whether local smallholders and tenants ever used the storage facilities, mule trains, commercial or other services of the great estates as intermediaries to move their own crops to the city market. 13. Luis Perez Verdia, H i s t o r i a p a r t i c u l a r del estado de Jalisco, 2d ed., 3 vols. (Guadalajara: Editorial Grafica, 1951), 2:50. 14. Perez Verdia, Apuntes historicos sobre la g u e r r a de independencia en Jalisco (Guadalajara: Institute Tecnologico, 1953), p. 19, identifies Tomas Ignacio as his uncle and discusses Villasenor's military exploits. 15. AIPG, JTS, 6 November 1818, vol. 12, f. 281. Although entails were abolished, families were permitted to divide the properties thus freed among themselves. 16. Laris, G u a d a l a j a r a , p. 8, calls Buenaventura Guadalupe Villasenor Solorzano y Arriola the "founder" of the family line. Guadalupe Arriola's role in the inheritance of the Hacienda de Cedros is documented in AIPG, GA, June 1828, vol. 4, f. 108. Palomino y Canedo, L a casa de Canedo, is the best published source for the Villasenor genealogy. 17. Hacienda San Nicolas de la Labor in AIPG, JTS, 18 July 1825, vol. 19, f. 146. Hacienda de Colimilla in AIPG, FB, 1821, vol. 2, f. 36v. 18. Perez Verdia, H i s t o r i a de Jalisco, 2:52, 53, and 67. 19. AHMG, box 1105, lists Don Tomas Ignacio in 1805 as one of four nominees for ennoblement in that year and specifies his aristocratic qualifications and ancestry. All those nominated for ennoblement were Creoles. AIPG, FB, 18 March 1822, vol. 2, f. 87 v, shows that Francisco Rubio and Rafael Villasenor (the younger) were merchants with landed relations. See AIPG, JTS, 10 March 1823, vol. 17, f. 52, for the Cerpa marriage into the Villasenor family. Perez Verdia, Apuntes, p. 18, calls Garcia Cerpa a m a r i n o , or sailor. AIPG, FB, 1827, vol. 5, f. 190, gives the Cerpas's origins as the Canary Islands. 20. AHMG, box 1110, "Censo, 1813." For other details of the household, see Tomas Ignacio's will in AIPG, JTS, 6 November 1818, vol. 12, f. 281.

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Notes to pages 71 to 77

21. AIPG, JTS, 6 November 1818, vol. 12, f. 281. BPE, JBD, Legajo 179, auto no. 6, shows the Rubios' ties to property in Spain through their half-sister, Maria Manuela Porres Baranda y Davalos. 22. On Rubio's various roles, see the following citations, all in AIPG: JTS, 15 March 1819, vol. 13, f. 69v; JTS, 9 July 1822, vol. 16, f. 138v; and JTS, 18 May 1818, vol. 12, f. 85 v. See also AHMG, box 1113, "Libro de Gobierno del Molino de las Beatas, 1819." 23. BPE, AJA, Legajo 1 (1812), no. 13, Ramo Criminal. 24. Ibid. 25. AIPG, JTS, 18 May 1818, vol. 12, f. 85 v; and JTS, 15 May 1820, vol. 14, f. 106. 26. On Jose Maria Villasenor's marriage to a Valencia woman, see AIPG, JTS, 23 June 1823, vol. 17, f. 110, and AIPG, JTS, 18 February 1819, vol. 13, f. 59v. Domingo Valencia and his father are identified in AIPG, FB, 25 February 1826, vol. 5, f. 33v. Gertrudis Valencia is discussed in AIPG, JTS, 3 January 1820, vol. 14, f. 1. 27. Manuel Payno, Los bandidos de R i o F r i o (Mexico City: Editorial Pornia, 1959). 28. Valencia, Villalaz, and Gutierrez, all of Jocotepec, cooperated in an agricultural venture in southern Jalisco after independence (see AIPG, JTS, 20 June 1821, vol. 15, f. 123). In this venture, Domingo Valencia appears as lessee of the hacienda in question, a step up from his job as administrador at Huejotitan. This may be evidence that independence allowed him some upward social mobility. 29. AIPG, JTS, 6 November 1818, vol. 12, f. 281. 30. Ibid. 31. Van Young, H a c i e n d a and M a r k e t , p. 127, gives the founding date of Mazatepec. Concerning the founding of the Porres Baranda entail, see also AIPG, Protocolos de Ballesteros, 1785, vol. 4, f. lOOv; and BPE, AJA, Legajo 101, Expediente 2, box 1086. Eric Van Young graciously provided these archival references. 32. Laris, G u a d a l a j a r a , p. 11. Van Young, H a c i e n d a and M a r k e t , pp. 127-133, gives extensive information on the Porres Baranda family and its properties in the eighteenth century. 33. BPE, AJA, Legajo 101, Expediente 2, box 1086. The source of the annual income figure is a declaration in this same document by the estate's administrator, Don Manuel de Mestas, to the effect that the estate yielded from 59,000 to 64,000 pesos in the five-year period 1780-1785. 34. AIPG, Protocolos de Ballesteros, 1785, vol. 4, f. lOOv. AIPG, JTS, 14 April 1827, vol. 21, f. 130, shows Estrada conducting the largest single commercial transaction uncovered in the research for the present work. 35. AIPG, JTS, 6 September 1827, vol. 21, f. 302v; AIPG, Protocolos de Ballesteros, 1785, vol. 4, f. lOOv; AIPG, JTS, November 1819, vol. 13, f. 293; AIPG, GA, 4 September 1829, vol. 4, f. 98. 36. Alexander von Humboldt, Ensayo politico sobre el Reino de la N u e v a

Notes to pages 77 to 83

135

Espaha (Mexico City: Editorial Porrua, 1966), p. 300. 37. AIPG, GA, 22 September 1834, vol. 6, f. 291. AIPG, FB, 1 November 1809, vol. 1, f. 194, is the source of the paragraph quoted in the text. 38. AIPG, JTS, 18 July 1820, vol. 14, f. 134, shows Manuel's claim to an entailed estate in Spain. See BPE, JBD, Legajo 179, auto no. 6 for an expediente concerning Maria Manuela Porres Baranda y Davalos, resident in Spain. 39. AHMG, box 1108, contains an expediente dated 1780 that identifies Manuel de Mestas as administrator of the Hacienda de Mazatepec. The connection between Ignacio de Estrada and Jose Mestas is documented in AIPG, FB, 1827, vol. 5, f. 192v. AIPG, GA, 5 May 1834, vol. 6, f. 245, indicates that the Hacienda del Plande Santa Ana was to be adjudicated to Jose Mestas; whether wholly or in part is unclear because of ambiguous wording of the document BPE, JBD, Legajo 179, contains an auto pendiente dated 1811 that describes the affairs of a deceased Jose Mestas and establishes a possible tie of this earlier Jose with the Porres family. 40. AHMG, Libros de Cabildo, show Francisco Porres Baranda on the city council as early as 1720. Ignacio de Estrada, father of Jose Maria Estrada and Manuel Porres Baranda, began serving at least as early as 1782. Manuel Porres Baranda appears on the city council in 1807 or earlier. AIPG, GA, 15 September 1834, vol. 6, f. 285v, shows Jose Maria Estrada as a financial officer of the Franciscan convent AIPG, JTS, 27 April 1829, vol. 11, f. 138v, shows Dionisio Ruiz de Cabanas (husband of Maria Guadalupe Estrada de Porres Baranda) playing a similar role as trustee for the funds of the Dominican convent. 41. AIPG, GA, 9 May 1823, vol. 1, f. 187v. 42. Hacienda de Santa Cruz in AHMG, box 1108, Expediente dated 1780; Hacienda de la Capacha in AIPG, JTS, 3 March 1820, vol. 14, f. 66. 43. AHMG, box 1106. See also AHMG, box 1107. 44. AIPG, GA, 9 May 1823, vol. 1, f. 187v. 45. Ibid. See also AIPG, Protocolos de Tlajomulco, 10 May 1826, vol. 3, f. 79. 46. Haciendas del Rosario and Toluquilla in AIPG, GA, 8 January 1834, vol. 6, f. 170v; Hacienda del Castillo in AIPG, JTS, 7 June 1827, vol. 21, f. 200; Hacienda de Mazatepec in AIPG, JTS, 26 February 1825, vol. 19, f. 28v. 47. Vicente Garcia de Quevedo and Manuel Quevedo y Bustamante in AIPG, JTS, 29 April 1818, vol. 12, f. 71 v. 48. AIPG, GA, 8 January 1834, vol. 6, f. 170v. 49. Sanchez Hidalgo family in AIPG, JTS, 22 May 1821, vol. 15, f. 92v, and FB, 17 November 1824, vol. 3, f. 180. AIPG, GA, 16 April 1834, vol. 6, f. 226v, shows that the Hacienda de Navajas, originally a Portillo property, eventually fell into the hands of Sabas Sanchez Hidalgo. On Jose Vicente de Ollogui, see AIPG, GA, March 1823, vol. 1, f. 158v. 50. AIPG, GA, 9 May 1823, vol. 1, f. 187v. 51. AIPG, JTS, June 1821, vol. 15, f. 3, gives Antonio Pacheco Calderon's origins and identifies his wife. On Hacienda la Queseria, see AHMG, box 1108, expediente dated 1789. AIPG, GA, 20 November 1823, vol. 1, f. 290, identifies Juan Jose Martinez de los Rios y los Ramos.

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Notes to pages 83 to 90

52. Manuel Pacheco and his wife are identified in AIPG, FB, 14 March 1812, vol. 1, f. 278v. Her origin is given in AIPG, FB, 25 September 1823, vol. 2, f. 370. See AIPG, JTS, 9 September 1820, vol. 14, f. 153v, regarding the Haciendas San Sebastian and San Pedro. 53. AIPG, JTS, 9 September 1820, vol. 14, f. 153v; AIPG, JTS, 6 September 1827, vol. 21, f. 302v. 54. BPE, JBD, Legajo 178 (1807), "Autos" concerning Angel Pablo Gomez. 55. The Libros de Cabildo in AHMG, box 1107, show that Antonio Pacheco Calderon resigned as regidor, or councilman, on 31 August 1811, in favor of his son Jose Miguel, and correspondence in this same box establishes his ties with the meat monopoly, with Lopez Rivero and the Gutierrez de Higuera family. AIPG, JTS, 3 January 1822, vol. 16, f. 3v, shows Antonio's relationship to Partearroyo and Lopez Portillo. AIPG, JTS, 29 January 1805, vol. 10, f. 14v, shows his tie to Ruiz de Velasco. AIPG, FB, 14 March 1812, vol. 1, f. 278v, shows that his brother Manuel married Gertrudis Muguiro, whose second husband was Agustin Gutierrez de la Higuera. 56. Francisco Xavier Pacheco's debt to Jose Miguel Pacheco in AIPG, JTS, 17 October 1823, vol. 17, f. 153 v. The former's origins in Santander and the identity of his brother in Spain are given in AIPG, JTS, 17 April 1805, vol. 10, f. 58v. AIPG, GA, 20 May 1834, vol. 6, f. 252, gives the marriage of Francisco Xavier's daughters to the Castillo brothers. AIPG, JTS, 4 January 1820, vol. 14, f. 4, shows Francisco Xavier's marriage to Josefa Garate and specifies her relation to Miguel and Domingo Garate. 57. AIPG, JTS, 31 October 1823, vol. 17, f. 167; AHMG, box 1107; AIPG, FB, 10 February 1825, vol. 4, f. 33v, gives evidence that Jose Agustin Gomez became owner of the Hacienda de Guajes after independence. There are three cases, then, in which colonial administrators became owners after independence (see notes 28 and 39, this chapter). 58. AIPG, JTS, 20 June 1819, vol. 13, f. 161v. 59. Ibid. 60. Ibid. 61. AIPG, JTS, 15 September 1824, vol. 18, f. 104; AHMG, box 1107; Perez Verdia, H i s t o r i a de Jalisco, 2:47. 62. AIPG, JTS, 21 September 1816, vol. 12, f. 25. 63. AIPG, JTS, 21 September 1816, vol. 12, f. 25; AIPG, JTS, 18 August 1821, vol. 15, f. 28v; AIPG, JTS, 21 June 1820, vol. 14, f. 119v. 64. AIPG, JTS, 9 January 1817, vol. 12, f. 29v; AIPG, JTS, 3 November 1821, vol. 15, f. 85. 65. AIPG, JTS, 15 September 1824, vol. 18, f. 104. Chapter 4. Effects of Independence 1. Luis Perez Verdia, H i s t o r i a p a r t i c u l a r del estado de Jalisco, 2d ed., 3 vols. (Guadalajara: Editorial Grafica, 1951), 1:514, for Indian uprising in Nayarit Idem, 2:8, for conversations in Arezpacochaga's pharmacy. Carmen Castaneda

Notes to pages 91 to 97

137

Garcia, "La education en Guadalajara durante la colonia, 1552-1821" (Ph.D. diss., El Colegio de Mexico, 1974), p. 415, reports on the conspiracy at the Colegio de San Juan Bautista. 2. Perez Verdia, H i s t o r i a de Jalisco, 1:540. 3. Ibid., 2:143-164. 4. Ibid., 2:246-302. 5. Ibid., 2:301-314. See also Luis Perez Verdia, Biografias: Fray Antonio Alcalde, P r i s c i l i a n o Sanchez, BibliotecaJalisciense, no. 2 (Guadalajara: Ediciones del Instituto Tecnologico de Guadalajara, 1952). 6. Perez Verdia, H i s t o r i a de Jalisco, 2:167-168, regarding the mint; and 2:190192, regarding customs revenues. 7. For Una's relationship to Ibarrondo, see especially AIPG, GA, 28 October 1822, vol. 1, f. 77v, and AIPG, GA, 6 February 1823, vol. 1, f. 151. Ibarrondo advanced Uria's salary as diputado (deputy) to the Spanish cortes of 1812. See also Uria's correspondence with Guadalajara's ayuntamiento, or city government, in AHMG, box 1107. For a list of Jalisco's governors, see Manuel Cambre, Gobiernos ygobernantes de Jalisco, desde la declaracion de independencia de N u e v a G a l i c i a , hasta el d i a , Letras Jaliscienses, no. 1 (Guadalajara: Presidencia Municipal de Guadalajara, 1969). Consult the Canedo genealogy in Jorge Palomino y Canedo, L a casa y mayorazgo de Canedo de N u e v a G a l i c i a , 2 vols. (Mexico City: Editorial Athenea, 1947), for relations between this family and the Tames and Vallarta families. The elder Joaquin Angulo was factor de tabacos (agent of the tobacco monopoly) in Guadalajara before independence, as shown in AIPG, GA, 18 May 1822, vol. 1, f. 6. 8. Alberto Santoscoy, M e m o r a n d u m acerca del estado de Jalisco y especialmente de su capital G u a d a l a j a r a (Guadalajara, 1901), pp. 8-10, discusses the trade liberalization of 1774 and names some of the merchants who immigrated after 1814. According to Santoscoy, the period from 1814 to 1821 was known locally as "la epoca de los panamenos" ("the age of the Panamanians"). 9. See AIPG, JTS, 2 July 1818, 16 September 1818, 26 October 1818, 19 January 1820, and 16 June 1823. See also AIPG, GA, 17 June 1828,9 December 1829, and May 1832. For a more precise matching of sources to names and relationships, see Richard Lindley, "Kinship and Credit in the Structure of Guadalajara's Oligarchy, 1800-1830" (Ph.D. diss., University of Texas at Austin, 1976), p. 234. 10. Pinto in AIPG, JTS, 12 July 1819, vol. 13, f. 186v; Gonzalez Maxemin in AIPG, JTS, 20 March 1820, vol. 14, f. 79v; Rubio, Arochi, and Berguido in AIPG, JTS, 15 March 1819, vol. 13, f. 69v and AIPG, JTS, 15 March 1819, vol. 13, f. 70v; de Olazagarre and Sanchez Lenero in AIPG, JTS, 3 March 1821, vol. 15, f. 76. 11. Sagastegui in AIPG, JTS, 15 November 1819, vol. 13, f. 288; Gonzalez Maxemin in AIPG, JTS, 16 September 1818, vol. 12, f. 216v. 12. Lopez in AIPG, JTS, 19 October 1824, vol. 18, f. 126v, and AIPG, JTS, 19 October 1824, vol. 18, f. 128v; Estrada in AIPG, JTS, 14 April 1827, vol. 21, f. 130. For other examples of unusually large single transactions, see also AIPG, JTS,

138 Notes to pages 98 to 100 19 December 1820, vol. 14, f. 226, in which Casal y Blanco conducts a transaction of over 84,000 pesos. Also, AIPG, GA, May 1832, vol. 6, f. 22, shows that Ventura Martinez had an estate worth over 215,000 pesos. Compare the much smaller merchants' estates evidenced in Chapter 2. 13. The following AIPG citations demonstrate the frequency of the Panamanian merchants' dealings with Kingston, Jamaica, or London: JTS, 10 December 1818, vol. 13, f. 337; JTS, 15 November 1819, vol. 13, f. 288; JTS, 16 September 1818, vol. 12, f. 216v; JTS, 19 January 1820, vol. 14, f. 18. 14. AIPG, JTS, 30 June 1818, vol. 12, f. 131 v; and AIPG, JTS, 2 July 1818, vol. 12, f. 135v. 15. Tucker y Ritchie and Tucker Crawford in AIPG, GA, 18 June 1824, vol. 2, f. 157v; Duncan McViccar in AIPG, GA, 1828, vol. 4, f. 51; Watson-McViccar in AIPG, GA, 18 April 1829, vol. 4, f. 51; Exeter in AIPG, GA, 9 August 1825, vol. 2, f. 165; Jones (of Lancaster-Jones), McViccar, and Austin in AIPG, Ramo de Tierras y Aguas, Libro 56, f. 23 and 23v. 16. See AIPG, GA for the following dates and locations: December 1824, vol. 2, f. 96; 29 October 1828, vol. 2, f. 150; 29 October 1829, vol. 4, f. 116v. "Anglo American" ships The G e n e r a l B r o w n in AIPG, GA, 14 October 1822, vol. 1, f. 94; and The M a c e d o n i a in JTS, 13 July 1820, vol. 14, f. 132.0'Ryan in AIPG, JTS, 14 September 1818, vol. 12, f. 215 v. John Chapman, who had at his disposal a work by Manuel Romero de Terreros that I was unable to locate, graciously furnished data on Barron's ancestry. AIPG, GA, 1826, vol. 3, f. 100, shows that Archibald Tucker y Ritchie, Joseph Tucker Crawford, and the Chilean Jose Antonio Herrera became business associates, and that Tucker y Ritchie extended his power of attorney to John Hunter in the "Provincia de Ayr," or Eire. Jose Maria Riesch, whose name is sometimes spelled Rieche, Ricci, or Riecci, and his ties to Cadiz are documented in AIPG, JTS, 24 July 1820, vol. 14, f. 136. 17. Darvin in AIPG, JTS, 27 October 1819, vol. 13, f. 267; Casal, Dayot, and Velez in AIPG, JTS, 17 September 1818, vol. 12, f. 223v; Sainz in AIPG, JTS, 4 December 1818, vol. 12, f. 357; Zuniga in AIPG, JTS, 4 January 1821, vol. 15, f. 11. Fritsch in AIPG, GA, 2 September 1833, vol. 6, f. 122; Vanlacken in AIPG, JTS, 23 March 1822, vol. 16, f. 70v. AIPG, Ramo de Tierras y Aguas, Libro 56, reveals the presence in Guadalajara of such persons as the Frenchmen Guillermo Lamothe and Pedro Estevan Perosse, the Swiss Antonio Char, the Swede Manuel Edhelgiferta, and the Italian Juan Pietragrua. Spellings in all cases are given as they appear in the notarial documents. 18. AIPG, GA, 9 August 1825, vol. 2, f. 170, and AIPG, GA, 18 June 1824, vol. 2, f. 157 v. The aviaciones de minas, or mine-financing contracts recorded in volume 2 alone totaled some 140,000 pesos over a period of about two years. 19. On contracts tied to purchase agreements, see Bishop Carleton Hunt, The Development of the Business Corporation in E n g l a n d 1 8 0 0 - 1 8 6 7 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1936), pp. 30-35. AIPG, GA, 18 June 1824, vol. 2, f. 157v, shows that in Guadalajara the British financiers tied their capital advances to the right to supply the American businesses with basic goods. On

Notes to pages 100 to 103

139

Chafino's mezcal plants, see AIPG, GA, 9 August 1825, vol. 2, f. 170. 20. De Olazagarre's ownership of Atequiza and la Huerta in AIPG, JTS, 3 March 1821, vol. 15, f. 76 (see especially the "documentos insertos" at the end of the volume). His partnership with the Sanchez Leiieros is in AIPG, JTS, 7 March 1829, vol. 11, f. 50. His ship, the Cazadora, is documented in AIPG, JTS, 8 October 1818, vol. 12, f. 250v. His son Manuel's involvement in the tobacco monopoly of Jalisco is found in AIPG, GA, 18 October 1834, vol. 6, f. 300v. 21. Valencia's involvement with de Olazagarre in AIPG, JTS, 20 January 1827, vol. 21, f. 52v. His involvement with Gonzalez Maxemin and Gutierrez in Tuxcacuesco in AIPG, JTS, 20 January 1821, vol. 15, f. 123. 22. Instances of Panamanian or South American merchants dealing in cash crops are Millan, in AIPG, JTS, 8 January 1820, vol. 14, f. 7v, and Senosiain in AIPG, JTS, 15 April 1820, vol. 14, f. 89v, as importers of cacao and cotton, respectively. Instances of new merchants stimulating local production of cash crops are Gonzalez Maxemin, whose investments in sugar, cacao, and bananas are detailed in AIPG, JTS, 20 June 1821, vol. 15, f. 123, and in AIPG, JTS, 6 March 1827, vol. 21, f. 88; and Joachim Harmony, a British merchant whose investment in sugar production appears in AIPG, GA, 29 October 1828, vol. 3, f. 150. 23. Goyzueta y Compania in AIPG, JTS, 6 October 1824, vol. 18, f. 111. The company's close connections with the British are indicated by its investments in the corvette Cornway, detailed in AIPG, JTS, 10 February 1826, vol. 20, f. 82v. Ritchie et al. in AIPG, GA, 1826, vol. 3, f. 150. Watson-McViccar y Compania in AIPG, GA, 18 April 1829, vol. 4, f. 50. 24. For examples of three-person partnerships, see AIPG, JTS, 7 January 1826, vol. 20, f. 49, and AIPG, JTS, 23 September 1818, vol. 12, f. 226. 25. AIPG, JTS, 14 April 1827, vol. 21, f. 130. 26. Hunt, The Development of the Business C o r p o r a t i o n , pp. 5-6. 27. AIPG, FB, 12 March 1824, vol. 3, f. 56 v. The rest of the information on this project cited in the text comes from the same source. Since I completed the work for this study, the state archive of Jalisco has published an example of an attempt in 1776 to form a joint-stock company to operate a textile factory (see Carmen Castaneda, "Sobre una fabrica textil u obraje establecido en Guadalajara en el siglo XVIII," Boletin del Archivo Histdrico de Jalisco 4, no. 1 (January-April, 1980): 13-16. Although this document does not so specify, it would appear that in the 1776 company the principle of limited liability did not apply, as it did in the company formed by Brambila et al. 28. Besides Brambila, the participants were Jose Maria Lopez, Juan Jose Arezpacochaga, Jose Estrada, Jose Casal, Francisco Romero, Mariano Flores, Matias Vergara, Jose Cayetano Bobadilla, Francisco Cortes, and Mariano Carrasco. All listed themselves as merchants of Guadalajara. Brambila was a printer and "inventor." Arezpacochaga was a peninsular pharmacist (and sympathizer with independence). Vergara and the licenciado Cortes were both married to daughters of peninsular merchants; Vergara owned an hacienda, and Cortes owned an inn in the city besides his rural properties. Casal was a native of Manila with close ties to

140

Notes to pages 103 to 106

British commerce. Colonel Lopez may be the Lopez in Ritchie-Lopez y Compania. Several of the men (Lopez, Flores, Arezpacochaga) owned land and most came from landed families. Estrada was heavily involved in mining enterprises, especially after independence. All were political figures before and after independence. In short, they were representative in every respect of Guadalajara's oligarchy. See, for Brambila, AHMG, box 1120; for Lopez, AIPG, JTS, 29 May 1819, vol. 13, f. 131v; for Arezpacochaga, AIPG, JTS, 16 March 1805, vol. 10, f. 38v; for Estrada AIPG, GA, 4 September 1829, vol. 4, f. 98; for Casal, AIPG, JTS, 17 September 1818, vol. 12, f. 223v; for Vergara, AIPG, JTS, 23 February 1825, vol. 19, f. 23v, AIPG, GA, 6 February 1823, vol. 1, f. 151, and AIPG, GA, November 1829, vol. 4, f. 137; for Cortes, AIPG, JTS, 17 January 1824, vol. 18, f. 13, and AIPG, FB, 4 October 1825, vol. 4, f. 119. 29. AIPG, JTS, 20 April 1826, vol. 20, f. 160v. 30. On Jose Palomar, see the D i c c i o n a r i o P o r r u a , 1971. AHMG, box 1120, contains information on various innovative economic enterprises in 1824. 31. Asuncion Lavrin says that after the Law of "Consolidation," (ca. 1805), the church "suffered only relatively small losses of property On the other hand, the pious funds of some clerical and civil corporations, and innumerable chantries, did suffer significant depletion." In other words the church would have declined in its capacity to lend money as a result of this piece of legislation inspired by liberal, anticlerical thinking of the late eighteenth century (see "The Execution of the Law of Consolidation in New Spain: Economic Aims and Results," HAHR53 [February 1973]:27-49). That hacienda damage due to the wars could reach considerable proportions is indicated by such documents as AIPG, JTS, 25 January 1821, vol. 15, f. 37 v, which shows that the Vizcarra family owed Ramon Munia thirty thousand pesos as a result of the "disastrous fire" on the Hacienda de Santa Cruz. Regarding Iturbide's imposition of forced loans on the Dominicans and Oratorians of Guadalajara, see AIPG, GA, 20 June 1822, vol. 1, f. 26, and f. 37 v. 32. BPE, JBD, especially Legajo 179, contains documents from a broad span of years, with data on the effects of the independence wars on the peninsular merchant community in the immediate vicinity of Guadalajara. 33. On the expulsion of the Jesuits from New Spain, see Robin A. Humphreys and John Lynch, eds., The Origins of the L a t i n A m e r i c a n Revolutions, 1808-1826 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966), pp. 55-72. 34. Garcia de Quevedo in AIPG, JTS, 31 July 1823, vol. 17, f. 123v; Garcia Sancho in AIPG, JTS, 8 July 1818, vol. 12, f. 143. 35. On abolition of entails, see Palomino y Canedo, L a casa de Canedo, 2:482490. Palomino explains that disentailment, legislated in 1823, followed the general provisions laid out by the Spanish cortes in 1820 but was not put into effect in Guadalajara until 1825. As I pointed out earlier, some local entailed families anticipated the law by mortgaging or selling their properties even before independence. Regarding the disentailment of Mazatepec, see AIPG, GA, 11 December 1834, vol. 6, f. 329. 36. Mota y Velasco in AIPG, JTS, 21 November 1818, vol. 12, f. 322v; and

Notes to pages 106 to 117

141

AIPG, GA, 20 March 1825, vol. 2, f. 135v. 37. See BPE, JBD, Legajo 180, Expediente "Jocotepec, 1808," for information regarding Villasenor mortgage application. 38. Ibid. Castaneda was to be the beneficiary of the loan refused Villasenor in 1808. See also AIPG, FB, 6 March 1824, vol. 3, f. 47v. Regarding Castaneda's debts to Magdalena Cid, which totaled 20,000 pesos, see AIPG, JTS, 6 November 1818, vol. 12, f. 281. De Olazagarre in AIPG, JTS, 30 January 1819, vol. 13, f. 34v. 39. On the effects of liberal legislation after 1824 on the Indian communities, see Guadalajara, Jalisco, Secretaria del Congreso, Coleccion de acuerdos, ordenes y decretos sobre tierras, casasy solares de los indigenas, bienes de sus comunidadesy fundos legales de los pueblos del Estado de Jalisco, 2d ed., 6 vols. (Guadalajara: Cromotipografia del Buen Gusto, 1868-1882), 1:16. Deputy Ignacio Aguirre, in his comments on the legislation, describes how many Indians abandoned or lost their land as a result of the insurgency (see especially p. 32). 40. The notarial protocols of Cuquio and Zapotlanejo in AIPG are especially rich in bills of sale for ex-Indian lands from 1826 to 1829. 41. Ibid. 42. For example, in AIPG, JTS, 28 November 1821, vol. 12, f. 98, Miguel and Domingo Gonzalez Maxemin, two brothers from Guayaquil, mortgaged their lands in the jurisdiction of Autlan (now Autlan de la Grana). 43. The Aftermath of Revolution in L a t i n A m e r i c a , trans. Josephine de Bunsen (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), p. 79. 44. Ibid., p. 124. Conclusion 1. "Urban Growth and Family Structure in Medieval Genoa," in Towns in Societies, ed. Philip Abrams and E. A. Wrigley (Cambridge: At the University Press, 1978), p. 118. In this same volume, see A. D. Hibbert, "The Origins of the Medieval Town Patriciate," pp. 91-104, regarding the historical relationship between merchants and landowners. Also in this work, Keith Hopkins, "Economic Growth and Towns in Classical Antiquity," argues that "no prosperous, highprestige stratum or corporation of urban merchants, as distinct from landowners, ever emerged in Roman society" (see pp. 74-76, especially). 2. Doris M. Ladd, The M e x i c a n Nobility at Independence, 1 7 8 0 - 1 8 2 6 , Latin American Monographs, no. 40 (Austin, Tex.: Institute of Latin American Studies, 1976), p. 70. 3. David Brading, M i n e r s and M e r c h a n t s in Bourbon Mexico, 1763-1810 (Cambridge: At the University Press, 1971), pp. 208-209. 4. Ibid., p. 112. 5. Ibid., p. 219. 6. Ibid., p. 124. 7. Ladd, The M e x i c a n Nobility, p. 164. 8. Charles H. Harris, A M e x i c a n F a m i l y E m p i r e : The Latifundio of the

142

Notes to pages 117 to 119

Sanchez N a v a r r o s , 1 7 6 5 - 1 8 6 7 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1975), pp. 312-313. 9. Arnold Bauer, "The Hacienda 'El Huique' in the Agrarian Structure of Nineteenth-Century Chile," a 1972 mimeograph cited in Magnus Morner, "The Spanish-American Hacienda: A Survey of Recent Research and Debate," HAHR 53 (May 1973):204. 10. Richard M. Morse, "A Prologomenon to Latin American Urban History," HAHR 52 (August 1972):359-394. A. D. Hibbert's article in Towns in Societies (see note 1) cites examples of mixed agrarian and commercial ventures in England, Italy, and Poland during the Middle Ages. 11. Robert Hunt, "The Development Cycle of the Family Business in Rural Mexico," in Essays in Economic Anthropology, ed. June Helm (Seattle, Wash.: Proceedings of the Annual Spring Meeting of the American Ethnological Society, 1965), p. 55. 12. Ladd, The M e x i c a n Nobility, p. 88. 13. Tulio Halperin-Donghi, The Aftermath of Revolution in L a t i n A m e r i c a , trans. Josephine de Bunsen (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), p. 47.

Appendix: Genealogies of Four Family Enterprises

The following genealogies are not complete family trees, but only schematic representations of the relations of various personalities discussed in the text. All irrelevant or secondary people and relations have been suppressed in order to clarify and abbreviate the scheme. Below is a list of symbols used: unspecified line of descent marriage (the number in parentheses specifies whether a first or second marriage, in case of multiple unions) siblings doubtful relation, adoptive children (the phrase in parentheses specifies the exact usage of this symbol) indicates a relationship of nephewship or cousinship via a union of unspecified individuals

144

Appendix: Genealogies

VILLASENOR Hacienda de Huejotitan, entailed Other major properties in 1800: Potrerillos, San Nicolas de la Labor, Cedros

Appendix: Genealogies

PORRES BARANDA Hacienda San Isidro de Mazatepec, entailed

145

146 Appendix: Genealogies

PORTILLO Haciendas Navajas, Plan de Santa Ana

Appendix: Genealogies 147

DEL RIO-PACHECO Haciendas Santa Cruz, El Xacal

148 Appendix: Genealogies

DEL RIO-PACHECO (continued)

Index

Abasto de carries (meat monopoly): bondsman of, 79; and del Rio-Pacheco family, 84 Administrator, hacienda: possible kinship of, with owners, 73, 78; role of, 72-73; social mobility of, at independence, 134n.28, 135n.39, 136n.57 Agriculture: annual value of, 21; secondary crops of, 24; staples of, 22; versus mining as investment, 64 Aguacaliente, Hacienda de, 33, 64 Aguacapan, Hacienda de, 84-85 A r r e n d a t a r i o (lessee, renter), 71-74 Artisans: neighborhoods of, 15; status and incomes of, 16-17 Association: contrasted with community, 4-7; replacement of community by, 120-121 Atequiza, Hacienda de: acquisition of, by Pedro Olazagarre, 100; sale of, before disentailment, 106-107; as seat of Basauri family entail, 31 Aviaciones: and British financing of mining, 99-100 Bankruptcy: role of, in hacienda turnover, 45 Banks. See Lending institutions Basauri, Jose Joaquin de, 43 Basauri family, 31

Bonds, surety (fianzas), 42-43 Boom, economic, 13 Bourgeois state: as modern form of nationhood, 5; in Guadalajara, 93; significance of, 109-110 Buenavista, Hacienda de, 56 Business, local types of, 14-15. See also Manufactures, local Cabezon, Hacienda del: compared to Hacienda de las Navajas, 25, 27; as seat of Canedo family entail, 33, 64 C a b i l d o . See Government, city Calerilla, Hacienda de la, 100 Canedo, Manuel Calixto: as business associate of Ignacio Estrada, 77; as creditor, 41; as founder of family entail, 33, 64; as mining partner of Marques de Panuco, 32 Canedo family: entailed estate of, 32; profile of, 63-64 Capacha, Hacienda de la, 79 Capital: accumulation of, by formation of companies, 101-103; of foreign merchants, 97; new sources of, after independence, 99-101; peninsular dependence on Creoles for initial, 48; shortage of, 113, 118-119. See also Cash; Currency; Credit; Liquidity; Money

150

Index

Capital, British: in agriculture and commerce, 100; effect of, on credit market, 120; in mining, 99-100; penetration of Guadalajara by, 97-98 Capitalism, 116-117 Capitalists, 103, 109 Cash: effect of, on credit-dominated market, 119; minimal use of, 40-41. See also Currency; Credit; Liquidity; Money Cash crops: before independence, 24; after independence, 108 Castaneda, Jose Maria: as alferez real, 32; as borrower, 44; sale of disentailed land by, 107 Castaneda family, 32 Catholic church. See Church, Roman Catholic Cedros, Hacienda de: as Villasenor family property, 67. See also Villasenor family Chafino, Jose Maria: as peninsular merchant-/iace«j0d?0-miner, 56, 99, 100 Church, Roman Catholic: attacks on property of, 105-107; as lending institution, 38, 140n.31; as nucleus of rural life, 29 Cienega, Hacienda de la, 58 City and countryside: relationship of, 11-12, 33 Cocas. See Indians; San Sebastian de Analco Colimilla, Hacienda de: as Gomez Villasenor property, 67. See also Villasenor family Commerce: integration of, into Guadalajara's oligarchy, 18; liberalization of, 13, 95; local versus interoceanic, 12; problems of, and need for credit in, 36 Community: replacement of, by association, 4-7, 120-121 Companias de comercio. See Companies

Companies: effect of, on kinship and credit, 109; replacement of two-man partnerships by, 101-103 Conception, Hacienda de la, 32 Conspiracies, proindependence, in Guadalajara, 90 Consulado: See Real Consulado de Guadalajara Contract, 4-5 Corn. See Maize Corporations, business: emergence of, during independence, 101,109; legal enablement of, 102-103; as liberal institution, 121 Council, city. See Government, city Countryside: in Guadalajara's economy, 21; relationship of, to city, 11-12, 33 Credit: critical need for, 35-37, 113; decline of traditional sources of, 104; effect of disentailmenton, 106; effect of liberalism on, 109; expansion of market for, 120; as factor in independence movement, 88; factors straining supply of, 42-43; and integration of regional economy, 28, 59-60, 73; personal basis for, in Guadalajara, 38-39; personal basis for, in medieval Europe, 114-115; preconditions for, 39; use of, to mitigate social dichotomies, 3-4. See also Capital; Capital, British; Cash; Currency; Liquidity; Money Creoles: combined agricultural and commercial interests of, 56; definition of, 3; versus peninsulars, 91, 115116 Cuatro, Hacienda del. See Toluquilla, Hacienda de Cuisillos, Hacienda de, 35 Cumuato, Hacienda de, 56 Currency, 35-36. See also Capital; Cash; Credit; Liquidity; Money Day laborers (jornaleros),

17

Index De la Pena family: as members of del Rio-Pacheco family, 85-86 Del Rio-Pacheco family, 31, 82-88 Dichotomies, in colonial society, 3 Disentailment, of great estates after independence, 106-107. See also Entails Echaurri family, 32, 41 Entails: abolition of, 106-107, 120; definition of, 5; mortgageability of, 106-107, 120; similarity of, to unentailed estates, 64 Estates. See Family enterprise; Haciendas; Entails Estipac (Nestipac), Hacienda de, 32 Estrada, Jose Maria de: as brother of Manuel Porres Baranda, 75; as leading creole merchant, 77; purchase of ship's cargo by, 97. See also Porres Baranda family Family enterprise: adaptivity of, 110111; boundaries of, 81; broad influence of, 115; cementing of, by kinship and credit bonds, 3; continuity of, 108-111,117-118; and credit market, 38; definition of, 63-65; displacement of, by foreign merchants, 100-101; extraeconomic aspects of, 117; in other Western societies, 118; replacement of, by business corporations, 109; typical structure of, 87-88; use of marriage alliance by, to integrate economic sectors, 19-20; varied social and economic functions of, 60-61 F i a n z a s (surety bonds), 42-43 Finance, 72, 74, 99-100 Foreclosure, 45 Frias, Hacienda de, 43 Garcia Sancho, Ventura: as debt intermediary, 41; purchase of Hacienda de la Cienega de Mata by, 106

151

Gemeinschaft, 4-7, 121 Gesellschaft, 4 - 1 121 Gomez, Angel Pablo: as commercial client of Antonio Pacheco Calderon, 84; as intestate peninsular merchant, 39; wife of, in Spain, 58 Gomez Villasenor, Jose Maria: as owner of Hacienda de San Nicolas de la Labor, 69; as governor of the diocese, 70 Gomez Villasenor family: as branch of Villasenor family, 67. See also Villasenor family Government, city (cabildo): as market regulator, 53; peninsular members of, 54; role of, in integrating regional economy, 33 Grain, 11. See also Agriculture; Maize Guadalajara, city of: agrourban base of, 10,12, 21; boundaries of regional economy of, 24, 30-33; compared with Puebla and Veracruz, 90; cosmopolitanism of, 15; founding of, 9; population of, 10, 13; relation of, to world market changed, 94; as secondranking city of New Spain, 10 Guadalajara, Intendancy of, 124n.2 Guadalupe, Hacienda de, at Cuquio, 77 Guadalupe, Hacienda de, at La Barca, 97 Guadalupe, Hacienda de, at Tuxcacuesco, 97, 100 Guaje (Huage), Terreno del, 79. See also Portillo family 9

Hacendados: neighborhoods of, in Guadalajara, 15; security of, versus liquidity, 37, 48, 113-114. See also Haciendas Haciendas: characteristics of, in Guadalajara region, 18-19; cultivation patterns of, 27, 28; disproportionate value of improvements to, 45; diversification versus self-sufficiency on, 27; as entrepots for regional com-

152

Index

merce, 133n.l2; as microcosm of regional economy, 24, 27; as mortgageable asset, 43-44; Navajas as typical example of, 24-27; as nucleus of rural life, 28-30; number of, in Guadalajara region, 30-31; ownership of, by men independently of wives, 56; pairing of, 128n.49; profitability of, versus prestige, 116-117; rate of turnover in ownership of, 44-47; special importance of, in Guadalajara, 11. See also under individual hacienda names Henriquez Topete family, 46 Hernandez, Rafael, 41, 44-45 Huage (Guaje), Terreno del, 79. See also Portillo family Huejotitan, Hacienda de: changes in, at independence, 100; description of, 66-67; granaries at, 25; location of, 31; permanent population of, 29; role of, in conferring continuity, 46; as seat of Villasenor family entail, 65; theft at, in 1812,27; value of, 45. See also Villasenor family Huerta, Hacienda de, 31, 100 Humedo, Hacienda del, 40 Independence: changes brought about by, 3-4, 93-94; history of, in Guadalajara region, 90-95 Indians: neighborhoods of, in Guadalajara, 15-16; as nucleus of rural life, 11, 28-29; origins of Guadalajara's suburban populations of, 16; as wagelabor pool, 108 Industrialization, 102-103 Inheritance: as route to land ownership, 47; Spanish customs of, 55 Insurgency. See Independence Integration, economic: and kinship, 28, 33, 73; new levels of, after independence, 101 Interest: typical rate of, in Guadalajara,

127n.39 Intermarriage, creole-peninsular, 5859. See also Kinship Ixcuintla, Hacienda de, 77 Jacal (Xacal), Hacienda del, 85 Jalisco, state of: emergence of, in 1824, 92-93 Jamaica: as major entrepot for British commerce, 97-98 Jesus Maria, Convent of, 43-44 Jornaleros (day laborers), 17 Kinship: across family boundaries, 8384; of Creoles and peninsulars in oligarchy, 48-53; evidence of, between Creoles and peninsulars prior to latter's immigration, 46; as factor limiting economy, 108; motives for conflict within confines of, 82; oligarchy's use of, to mitigate social dichotomies, 3-4, 59; possibility of, between hacienda owners and administrators, 73; replacement of, by association, 120-121; role of, in cementing credit obligations, 38-39; role of, in giving access to land, 47; role of, in integration of regional economy, 28, 33, 73 Labor, wage: landless Indians as pool of, 107-108; versus feudalistic or bonded labor, 6-7 Land: alienation of Indian-owned, after independence, 107-108; availability of undeveloped, in remote Jalisco, 108; commodity value of, 105; mortgageability of, as asset, 117; rate of turnover in ownership of, 114; scarcity of desirable undeveloped tracts of, 44-45; well-defined concept of value of, lacking, 45; wives as source of interest in, 54. See also Haciendas Land market: expansion of, after

Index independence, 105-108,120; limited nature of, 44-47. Landowners. See Hacendados Land tenure: changes in, after Bourbon reforms, 105-108; patterns of, as brake on development, 120 Lending institutions: absence of, 3739, 113; church as instance of, 140n.31 Lessee ( a r r e n d a t a r i o ) , 71-74 Liability, limited: versus personal accountability, 102, 109. See also Corporations, business Liberalism: and business corporations, 102-103; economic implications of, 109; in first state government of Jalisco, 93; in interpretation of independence, 110-111; and land tenure, 107-108; partial success of, in Guadalajara, 121 Liquidity: lack of, among unmarried peninsulars, 39-40; merchants as source of, 37, 113-114. See also Capital, British; Cash; Credit; Currency; Money Livestock, 22 Maize: annual consumption of, by city, 24; predominance of, in regional agriculture, 22; price of, compared to wheat, 126n.34. See also Agriculture; Grain Manufactures, local: annual value of, 21; state of, 13-15 Margaritas, Hacienda de, 32, 107 Market, local agriculture, 11-12 Marriage alliances: common practice of, by Guadalajara's oligarchy, 4853; creole men's strategy of, 56; role of, in furnishing credit viability, 3739. See also Kinship Mazatepec, Hacienda de San Isidro de, 32, 75-76. See also Porres Baranda family

153

Meat monopoly (abasto de carnes): bondsmen of, 79; and del Rio-Pacheco family, 84 Merchants: increase in size of transactions by, 97; integration of, into Guadalajara's oligarchy, 18; as landowners in Guadalajara, 46,54,56; as landowners in Spain, 85; liquidity of, versus security, 47-48, 113-114; as moneylenders, 37; neighborhoods of, 15 Merchants, foreign: adaptation of, to local customs, 110-111; as agents for penetration of British capital, 97-98; assets of, 97; displacement of family enterprise by, 100-101; effects of, on regional economy, 3-4, 95-99, 119120; origins of, 95-96, 98-99 Merchants' guild. See R e a l Consulado de G u a d a l a j a r a Mexicalcingo, San Juan Bautista de, 16, 108 Mezquitan, San Miguel de, 15-16 Milpillas, Hacienda de, 32 Mining: annual value of, 21; exceptional nature of, in colonial economy, 20; versus agriculture as investment, 64 Mobility, social: of hacienda administrators, 134n.28,135n.39,136n.5;in New Spain, 46 Mojarras, Hacienda de, 40 Money: as social equalizer, 109. See also Cash; Capital; Capital, British; Currency; Liquidity Moneylenders. See Church, Roman Catholic; Family enterprise; Lending institutions; Merchants Mortgages: of entailed estates, 106107; frequent need for, 42-43; of income, 44. See also Credit Navajas, Hacienda de las: inventory of, 24-27; and Porres Baranda family,

154

Index

75; as Portillo family property, 79. See also Porres Baranda family; Portillo family Nestipac (Estipac), Hacienda de, 32 New Spain: use of term compared to Nueva Galicia, 124n.2 Nuestra Senora de Guadalupe del Castillo, Hacienda de, 80 Nuestra Senora del Patrocinio de Cienega de Mata, Hacienda de, 106 Ochoa family: as major regional property-owners, 31 Olazagarre, Pedro Juan de: acquisition of local haciendas by, 100, 106107; as Colombian merchant, 96; dispute with, over British silver, 98; partnership of, with Alfonso Sanchez Lenero, 97 Oligarchy: composed of single elite, 56; continuity of, after independence, 4, 94-95,110-111; creole-peninsular intermarriage as requisite for membership in, 57; definition of, 3-4, 34,53; family enterprise as basic unit of, 19-20; inclusion of professional class in, 16; recruitment of new members to, 46; size and wealth of, 18-19, 58-59 Pacheco family. See Del Rio-Pacheco family Panama: as source of foreign merchants, 95. See also Merchants, foreign Panuco, Marques de. See Vizcarra family Peninsulars: definition of, 3; as landowners in Spain, 46; as members of R e a l Consulado de G u a d a l a j a r a , 54; not married to New World wives, 57; versus Creoles, 91, 115-116 Plan de Santa Ana, Hacienda de, 32, 75. See also Porres Baranda family

Poor, the: as defined in seventeenthcentury Guadalajara, 18 Porres Baranda family, 75-78,135n.39 Portillo family: kinship of, with Villasenor family, 82; kinship of, with Sanchez Hidalgo family, 82; profiled, 78-82 Potrerillos, Hacienda de, 32, 65 Potrero, Hacienda del, 45 Privilege: abolition of, 5, 109; survival of, 121; versus wealth in oligarchy, 53 Professionals, 16 Proletarianization, 6-7 Property: 107-108. See also Inheritance Property, Indian, 107-108. See also Indians Property, urban, 44 Quesera, Hacienda de la, 83. See also Del Rio-Pacheco family Rancheros: prominence of, around Tepatitlan, 33; relation of, to hacienda, 29-30; typical holdings of, 127n.46 R e a l Consulado de G u a d a l a j a r a : founding of, 13; inclusion of landowners in, 56; membership in, and status of, in oligarchy, 53; peninsular members of, 54 Rental contract (arrendamiento), 71-74 Renter ( a r r e n d a t a r i o ) , 71-74 Republican government, 121 Revolution, 111 Rich, the: as defined in seventeenthcentury Guadalajara, 18; number of, in Guadalajara, 58 Risk: influence of, on credit, 36; role of, in agricultural production, 28; role of, in slowing sale of haciendas, 46 Rosario, Hacienda del, 80

Index Rubio, Francisco: possible kinship of, with Porres Baranda family, 78; as principal commercial agent for Villasenor family, 68, 70-73; relations of, with foreign merchants, 97; small initial capital of, 48 Ruiz de Cabanas, Dionisio, 41, 77-78. See also Porres Baranda family Rural population, 29-30 Rural town, 11, 28-29 San Antonio, Hacienda de, 100 Sanchez Hidalgo family, 82. See also Portillo family Sanchez Lenero family: estate built around Hacienda de Santa Lucia, 31, 56, 97, 100 Sanchez Navarro family, 117 San Isidro de Mazatepec, Hacienda de, 32, 75-76. See also Porres Baranda family San Jose, Hacienda de: as property of Juan Jose de la Mora y Palma, 56 San Jose, Hacienda de: as property of Portillo family, 79. See also Portillo family San Nicolas de la Labor, Hacienda de, 67, 100. See also Villasenor family San Pedro, Hacienda de, 83. See also Del Rio-Pacheco family San Sebastian, Hacienda de, 83. See also Del Rio-Pacheco family San Sebastian de Analco: as coca suburb of Guadalajara, 16; incorporation of, by Guadalajara, 108 Santa Cruz, Hacienda de, 31, 79, 85, 86. See also Del Rio-Pacheco family; Portillo family Santa Lucia, Hacienda de, 31,100. See also Sanchez Lenero family Santa Maria, Hacienda de, 31 Santa Rosa, Hacienda de, 67. See also Villasenor family Santo Domingo, Convent of, 41

155

Sauceda, Hacienda de la, 32, 64. See also Vizcarra family Security: hacendados as main source of, 37, 113-114; importance of, in credit market, 42-43, 47. See also Credit Separation of powers: economic effects of, 102-103; need for, in impersonal forms of business association, 109 Skilled workers, 17 Sociedad P a t r i o t i c a , 54 South America: as source of foreign merchants, 95. See also Merchants, foreign Status to contract: movement from, in Guadalajara, 4-5 Surnames: inconsistency in use of, 82 Tablon, Hacienda del, 82. See also Portillo family Toluquilla, Hacienda de, 80-81, 106. See also Portillo family Unentailed estates, 64. See also Disentailment; Entails Valparaiso, Hacienda de: debts of, 40 Vega, Hacienda de la, 33, 64. See also Canedo family Villasenor, Tomas Ignacio: mortgageability of assets of, 44, 106; profile of, as head of family, 68-70; role of, in family enterprise, 72-74 Villasenor family: ancestors of, 65; as authority figures, 69-70; combined commercial and agricultural interests of, 68; continuity of, as landowners, 46; credit transactions of, 41, 74; Creoles and peninsulars in, 70; documentation of, in other sources, 132n.3; entailed estate of, profiled, 65-75; integration of opposites by, 74-75; kinship ties of, to Canedo family, 32; kinship ties of, to Portillo family, 82;

156

Index

location of major properties of, 31; nonagricultural assets of, 71; significance of rental practice of, 71-73; size of, 70; worth of, 19, 66 Vizcarra family, 32, 64 War. See Independence Wealth, 53. See also Rich, the Wheat, 22, 126n.34. See

also

Agriculture; Grain Wives: property of, as integral to family enterprise, 47; as source of husband's landed interests, 54, 56. See also Family enterprise; Haciendas; Kinship; Marriage alliances Women, 55. See also Wives Xacal (Jacal), Hacienda del, 85