Abstract
The social and material conditions of postcolonial haciendas in Yucatan, Mexico, were greatly influenced by power relations intrinsic to the institution of debt peonage. Although landowning elites exercised enormous control over debt peons, hacienda social relations involved continuous negotiation between master and servant. Recent investigations at Hacienda Tabi, a sugar hacienda in southern Yucatan, explore the interplay between power relations and the creation and maintenance of the built environment. The evidence from Tabi suggests that during the Porfiriato (1876–1911) hacendados manipulated the settlement landscape to emphasize an order of social inequality. The spatial and structural elements of the hacienda's settlement reflected and supported the owners' attempts to control resident peons. However, those attempts were challenged by the resident Maya community, who defined the hacienda landscape imposed on them in alternative ways.
Similar content being viewed by others
REFERENCES CITED
Abercrombie, N., Hill, S., and Turner, B. S. (1980). The Dominant Ideology Thesis, George Allen and Unwin, London.
Alexander, R. T. (1997a). Haciendas and economic change in Yucatán: Entrepreneurial strategies in the Parroquia de Yaxcabá, 1775-1850. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 4(3/4): 331–351.
Alexander, R. T. (1997b). Settlement patterns of the late colonial period in Yaxcaba Parish, Yucatán, Mexico: Implications for the distribution of land and population before the caste war. In Gasco, J., Smith, G. C., and Fournier-Garcia, P. (eds.), Approaches to the Archaeology of Mexico, Central & South America, Institute of Archaeology Monograph 38, University of California - Los Angeles, Los Angeles, pp. 29–40.
Alexander, R. T. (1998). Community organization in the Parroqui de Yaxcaba, Yucatan, Mexico, 1750-1847: Implications for household adaptation within a changing colonial economy. Ancient Mesoamerica 9: 39–54.
Andrews, A. P. (1981). Historical archaeology in Yucatán: A preliminary framework. Historical Archaeology 15(1): 1–18.
Anthony, C. (1976). The big house and the slave quarters, Part 1: Prelude to new world architecture. Landscape 21(1): 8–19.
Armstrong, D. V. (1990). The Old Village and the Great House: An Archaeological and Historical Examination of Drax Hall Plantation, St. Ann's Bay, Jamaica, University of Illinois Press, Urbana.
Arnold, C., and Frost, F. J. T. (1909). The American Egypt: A Record of Travel in Yucatan, Hutchinson, London.
Baerlein, H. (1914). Mexico: The Land of Unrest, Herbert and Daniel, London.
Baker, F. C. (1895). A Naturalist in Mexico: Being a Visit to Cuba, Northern Yucatan, and Mexico, David Oliphant, Chicago.
Ball, J. W., and Kelsay, R. G. (1992). Prehistoric intrasettlement land use and residual soil phosphate levels in the upper Belize Valley, Central America. In Killion, T.W. (ed.), Gardens in Prehistory: The Archaeology of Settlement Agriculture inGreater Mesoamerica, University of Alabama Press, Tuscalossa, pp. 234–262.
Barceló Quintal, R. (1981). La tierra y sus dueños: San Juan Bautista Tabi. In Maldonado Coello, R. (ed.), Yucatán: peonaje y liberación, Comisión Editorial del Estado, INAH, M´erida, pp. 141–149.
Bauer, A. J. (1979). Rural workers in Spanish America: Problems of peonage and oppression. Hispanic American Historical Review 59(1): 34–63.
Benavides Castillo, A. (1985). Notas sobre la arqueología histórica de la Hacienda Tabi, Yucatán. Revista mexicana de estudios antropológicos 21: 43–58.
Bracamonte y Sosa, P. (1985). Sirvientes y ganado en las haciendas yucatecas (1821-1847). Boletín de la escuela de ciencias antropológicas de la Universidad de Yucatán 12(70): 3–15.
Bracamonte y Sosa, P. (1990). Sociedades de sirvientes y uso del espacio en las haciendas de Yucatán, 1800-1860. Historia Mexicana 40(1): 53–77.
Bracamonte y Sosa, P. (1993). Amos y sirvientes: las haciendas de Yucatán 1789-1860, Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán, M´erida.
Charnay, D. (1887). The Ancient Cities of the New World: Being Voyages and Explorations in Mexico and Central America from 1857-1882, Gonino, J., and Conant, H. S. (trans.), Harper & Brothers, New York.
Clement, C. O. (1997). Settlement patterning on the British Caribbean island of Tobago. Historical Archaeology 31(2): 93–106.
Delle, J. A. (1998). An Archaeology of Social Space: Analyzing Coffee Plantations in Jamaica's Blue Mountains, Plenum Press, New York.
Delle, J. A. (1999). The landscapes of class negotiation on coffee plantations in the Blue Mountains of Jamaica: 1790-1850. Historical Archaeology 33(1): 136–158. Documents of Tabi, Yucatan, 1569-1820, Vols. 1-5, Latin American Library, Tulane University, New Orleans.
Dore, C. (1996). Built Environment Variability and Community Organization: Theory Building Through Ethnoarchaeology in Xculoc, Campeche, Mexico, Unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque.
Farriss, N. M. (1984). Maya Society Under Colonial Rule: The Collective Enterprise of Survival, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ.
Ferguson, L. (1991). Struggling with pots in South Carolina. In McGuire, R. H., and Paynter, R. (eds.), The Archaeology of Inequality, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, pp. 29–39.
Ferguson, L. (1992). Uncommon Ground: Archaeology and Early African America, 1650-1800, Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, DC.
Florescano, E. (1987). The hacienda in New Spain. In Bethell, L. (ed.), Colonial Spanish America, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 250–285.
Foucault, M. (1979). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Sheridan, A, (trans.), Vintage Books, New York.
Gal, S. (1995). Language and the “Arts of Resistance.” Cultural Anthropology 10(3): 407–424.
Giddens, A. (1984). The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration, University of California Press, Berkeley.
Gruening, E. (1928). Mexico and Its Heritage, Century, New York.
Hanks, W. F. (1990). Referential Practice: Language and Lived Space among the Maya, University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Higman, B. W. (1974). A report on excavations at Montpelier and Roehampton. Jamaica Journal 8: 40–45.
Higman, B.W. (1988). Jamaica Surveyed: Plantation Maps and Plans of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, Institute of Jamaica, Kingston.
Isaac, R. (1982). The Transformation of Virginia, 1740-1790, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill.
Jordan-Bychkov, T. G., and Domosh, M. (1999). The Human Mosaic: A Thematic Introduction to Cultural Geography, 8th edn., Longman, New York.
Kaerger, K. (1980).Yucatán. In Katz, F. (ed.), La servidumbre agraria enMéxico en la época porfiriana, Ediciones Era, Mexico City, pp. 59–60.
Katz, F. (1974). Labor conditions on haciendas in Porfirian Mexico: Some trends and tendencies. Hispanic American Historical Review 54(1): 1–47.
Keith, R. G. (1977). Introduction. In Keith, R. G. (ed.), Haciendas and Plantations in Latin American History, Holmes and Meier, New York, pp. 1–35.
Leone, M. P. (1984). Interpreting ideology in historical archaeology: Using the rules of perspective in the William Paca Garden in Annapolis, Maryland. In Miller, D., and Tilley, C. (eds.), Ideology, Power, and Prehistory, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 25–35.
LePlongeon, A. D. (1885). The new and old in Yucatan. Harper's Magazine 70: 372–386.
Maldonado Coello, R., (ed.) (1981). Yucatán: peonaje y liberación, Comisión Editorial del Estado, INAH, M´erida.
Mendez, S. (1921). The Maya Indians of Yucatan in 1861. Indian Notes and Monographs 9(3): 143–195.
Mercer, H. C. (1975). The Hill-Caves of the Yucatan: A Search of Man's Antiquity in the Caverns of Central America, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman. (Originally published in 1896)
Meyers, A. D. (1998). Community, Household, and Status at Hacienda Tabi, Yucatan, Mexico, Unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation, Texas A&M University, College Station.
Norman, B. M. (1844).Rambles in Yucatan: Or, Notes of Travel through the Peninsula, Including a Visit to the Remarkable Ruins of Chi-Chen, Kabah, Zayi, and Uxmal, 4th edn., Henry G. Langley, New York.
Ober, F. (1884). Travels in Mexico and Life Among the Mexicans, Estes and Lauriat, Boston.
Olmstead, F. L. (1959). The Slave States, G. P. Putnam's Sons, New York.
Orser, C. E., Jr. (1988). The archaeological analysis of plantation society: Replacing status and caste with economics and power. American Antiquity 53(4): 735–751.
Orser, C. E., Jr. (1990). The continued pattern of dominance: Landlord and tenant on the postbellum cotton plantation. In McGuire, R. H., and Paynter, R. (eds.), The Archaeology of Inequality, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, pp. 40–54.
Orser, C. E., Jr., and Nekola, A. M. (1985). Plantation settlement from slavery to tenancy: An example from a Piedmont plantation in South Carolina. In Singleton, T.A. (ed.), The Archaeology of Slavery and Plantation Life, Academic Press, San Diego, CA, pp. 67–83.
Otto, J. S. (1984). Cannon's Point Plantation, 1794-1860, Academic Press, Orlando, FL.
Patch, R.W. (1985). Agrarian change in eighteenth-centuryYucatán. The Hispanic American Historical Review 65: 21–49.
Paynter, R., and McGuire, R. H. (1991). The archaeology of inequality: Material culture, domination, and resistance. In McGuire, R. H., and Paynter, R. (eds.), The Archaeology of Inequality, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, pp. 1–27.
Peniche Rivero, P. (1994). Gender, bridewealth, and marriage: Social reproduction of peons on henequen haciendas in Yucatán, 1870-1901. In Fowler-Salamini, H., and Vaughan, M. K. (eds.), Women of the Mexican Countryside, 1850-1990, University of Arizona Press, Tuscon, pp. 74–89.
Rejón Patrón, L. (1981). Tabí, una hacienda azucarera de Yucatán a fines del siglo XIX. In Maldonado Coello, R. (ed.), Yucatán: peonaje y liberaciín, Comisión Editorial del Estado, INAH, Mérida, pp. 117–140.
Rejón Patrón, L. (1985). El papel de la hacienda diversificada en la zona sur de Yucatán: San Juan Bautista Tabí, un estudio de caso, Tésis de Licenciado en Ciencias Antropológicas, Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán.
Rejón Patrón, L. (1993). Hacienda Tabi: un capitulo en la historia de Yucatán, Cuadernos de Cultura Yucateca 3, Gobierno del Estado de Yucatán, Mérida.
Rugeley, T. (1996). Yucatán's Maya Peasantry and the Origins of the Caste War, University of Texas Press, Austin.
Saunders, T. (1990). The feudal construction of space: Power and domination in the nucleated village. In Samson, R. (ed.), The Social Archaeology of Houses, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, Scotland, pp. 181–196.
Scott, J. C. (1985). Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT.
Scott, J. C. (1990). Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT.
Stallybrass, P., and White, A. (1986). The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, Cornell University Press, Ithaca.
Stephens, J. L. (1963). Incidents of Travel in Yucatan (2 vols.), Dover, New York. (Originally published in 1843)
Stephens, J. L. (1969). Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan (2 vols.), Dover, New York. (Originally published in 1841) 252 Meyers and Carlson
Strickon, A. (1965). Hacienda and plantation in Yucatan: An historical-ecological consideration of the folk-urban continuum in Yucatan. America Indígena 25(1): 35–63.
Thomas, B. (1998). Power and community: The archaeology of slavery at the hermitage plantation. American Antiquity 63(4): 531–551.
Thompson, E. H. (1965). People of the Serpent: Life and Adventure Among the Maya, Capricorn, New York. (Originally published in 1932)
Tozzer, A. M. (1907). A Comparative Study of the Mayas and the Lacondones, Macmillan, London.
Turnbull, W. R. (1871). A peep at an hacienda. Overland Monthly and Out West Magazine 7(6): 514–521.
Turner, J. K. (1969). Barbarous Mexico, University of Texas Press, Austin. (Originally published in 1911)
Upton, D. (1988). White and black landscapes in eighteenth-century Virginia. In St. George, R. B. (ed.), Material Life in America, 1600-1860, Northeastern University Press, Boston, pp. 357–369.
Vlach, J. M. (1993). Back of the Big House: The Architecture of Plantation Slavery, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill.
von Wobeser, G. (1983). La formación de la hacienda en la época colonial: el uso de la tierra y el agua, Universidad Nacional Autónama de México, Mexico City.
vonWobeser, G. (1988). La hacienda azucarera en la época colonial, Secretaria de Educación Pública, Mexico City.
Wauchope, R. (1938). Modern Maya Houses: A Study of their Archaeological Significance, Carnegie Institution of Washington Publication 502, Carnegie Institution, Washington, DC.
Wells, A. (1982). Family elites in a boom-and-bust economy: The molinas and peons of Porfirian Yucatan. Hispanic American Historical Review 62(2): 224–253.
Wells, A. (1984). Yucatan: Violence and social control on henequen plantations. In Benjamin, T., and McNellie, W. (eds.), Other Mexicos: Essays on Regional Mexican History, 1876-1911, University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, NM, pp. 213–241.
Zavala, S. (1944). Orígenes coloniales del peonaje en México. El trimestre economico 10: 711–748.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Meyers, A.D., Carlson, D.L. Peonage, Power Relations, and the Built Environment at Hacienda Tabi, Yucatan, Mexico. International Journal of Historical Archaeology 6, 225–252 (2002). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1021315414297
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1021315414297