Maya and Spaniard in Yucatan, 1648-1812 9780804765640

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Maya and Spaniard in Yucatan, 1648- 1812

Maya and Spaniard in Yucatan, 1648- I8I2

Robert W. Patch

Stanford University Press Stanford, California

Stanford University Press Stanford, California © 1993 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University

CIP data appear at the end of the book Original printing 1993 Last figure below indicates year of this printing: 04 03 02 01 00 99 98 97 96 95 Stanford University Press publications are distributed exclusively by Stanford University Press within the United States, Canada, Mexico, and Central America; they are distributed exclusively by Cambridge University Press throughout the rest of the world.

To My Mother and Father

Preface

Over the course of the years I have incurred debts to people and institutions too numerous to list. I would, however, like to mention some of them, even though many of the individuals are now deceased. First, I would like to thank my teachers: Stanley J. Stein and Joseph R. Strayer, of Princeton University, and Joseph L. Love, of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Second, I thank the staffs of the Archivo General de la Nacion, Archivo General del Estado, Archivo Notarial del Estado, Biblioteca "Crescencio Carrillo y Ancona," Archivo Historico Nacional, and Archivo General de Indias, with special thanks to Luis Lopez Rivas, Alfredo Barrera Vazquez, J. Ignacio Rubio Mane, Miguel Civeira Taboada, and Maria Teresa Monforte de Menendez. Third, I thank my friends and colleagues for their support over the years, especially Antonio Calabria, Gilbert Joseph, Cristina Garda Bernal, Sergio Quezada, Salvador Rodriguez Losa, Edward Kurjack, Rodolfo Ruz Menendez, Juan Francisco Peon Ancona, Michael]. Fallon, Carlos Bojorquez Urzaiz, and Pedro Bracamonte y Sosa. I especially thank my wife Beatriz, not only for her support but also for constructive criticism. My debt to my mother and father is acknowledged in the dedication, but that to my brother Jim-one of my biggest obligations-is not, and I therefore acknowledge it here. Research was made possible in part by grants from the Henry L. and Grace Doherty Charitable Foundation and by a Foreign Area (Fulbright) Fellowship administered by the U. S.-Spanish Joint Committee for Cultural and Educational Cooperation. Finally, a note about spelling. In order to simplify the identification of places, I have used the modern spelling of place-names. Hispanic surnames have also been modernized, but to retain some of the feeling of the past I have kept the older forms of given names (e.g. Joseph rather than Jose) and have used the original spelling in citing contemporary documents. R. W.P.

Contents

Introduction PART ONE: YUCATAN TO I 648 I. 2.

Geography and Civilization

9

The First Century of the Colonial Regime

21

PART TWO: THE COLONIAL REGIME, 1648-1730

3. Maya Society

41

4. The Peasant Economy

67

5. Hispanic Economy and Society

94

PART THREE: THE REGIME IN DECLINE, I730-I8I2

6. Economic and Social Change

13 7

7. The Structure of Production

169

8. Commerce, Markets, and the Crisis of Production 9. Rural Society Conclusion

201

225 245

Appendix A. Estimated Population of Indian Settlements, 1700 and 1716 Appendix B. Non-Indians in the Villages of Yucatan, 1777-1791 Notes

265

A Note on the Primary Sources Works Cited Index

303

315

299

253 259

Tables and Illustrations

TABLES

3. I

The Indian Population of Yucatan, r643-1700

3.2

Village Parcialidades, I700-1722

3· 3

Proportion of Indians Living Outside Authorized Settlements, 1700 53

3·4

Provenance of Wax Contracted in the Valladolid and Tizimfn Regions Under the Repartimiento of the Santa Cruzada, 1716 55

3. 5

Distribution of Indian Population in Authorized Settlements by Quartile and Decile, 1700 57

3.6

Proportion of Non-Native Indians (Forasteros) and Women in 22 Villages of La Costa and Beneficios Bajos, 1721 60

3· 7

Migration Pattern of Non-Native Indians (Forasteros) in Five Parishes, I72I 64

44

51

Sales of Village-Owned Property to Non-Indians, 1689-I737 4.2

Contracts of the P6sito of Merida with Indian Villages and Parcialidades, 76 I678-1727

4· 3

Villages and Parcialidades Contracted to Provide Maize to Merida, I 68 I and I686 79

4·4

Villages and Parcialidades Contracted to Provide Maize to Valladolid, 80 1717-18

4. 5

Provenance of Maize Delivered to Merida as Indicated by Transport Costs, 1709-20 So I2I

5.I

Debt Structure of 29 Estancias, 1718-38

6. I

The Population of Yucatan, I70o-r8o9

6.2

The Structure of Production on Selected Haciendas, 1777-96

7· I

Tithe Revenues of the Diocese of Yucatan, I 564-r 8 r 5

7.2

Purchase Prices of Tithe-Farming Rights for the Years 1795-98

7·3

Agricultural Production of Non-Indians by Crop, 1777-95

139 I47

170 171 174

Tables and Illustrations

Xll

7-4

Agricultural Production of Hacendados by Crop, 1777-96

I76

7· 5

Agricultural Production of Hacendados and Village Vccinos by Crop, 1777-96 177

7.6

Fluctuations in the Value of Tithe Payments of I45 Haciendas in Five Parishes, 1790-92 179

7. 7

Tithe Payments in Cotton from the Valladolid-Tizimfnjurisdictions, 1782-87 r8o

7.8

Peso Value of Tithe Payments from the Valladolid-TizimfnJurisdictions, 1782-87 r8o

7·9

The Structure of Production on 77 Cofradfa Estates, 1777-96

184

7· ro

Sales of Livestock by a Cofradfa Estate, Estancia Loci, 1746-75

7· I I

Livestock of Estancia Lod, 1727-75

185

7.12

The Structure of Production on Vecino Farms, 1777-93

8. r

Provenance of Maize Delivered to Merida and Valladolid as Indicated by Transport Costs, 1770's-8o's 21 r

8.2

Price Index of Beef in Merida, 1708-I807

9. r

Racial Structure of the Population of Yucatan by Political District, 1779 234

9.2

Distribution of Racial Groups by Political District, 1779

9. 3

Racial Structure of Tixkokob and Campeche Extramuros Parishes as Indicated by Church Rites, 1769-87 235

9·4

Regional Variations in Tithe Payments, 1777-95

r86 189

217

235

239

MAPS

The Yucatan Peninsula

ro

2

Village Populations in the Tizimfn and Valladolid Districts, ca. I7I6

54

3

Political-Ecclesiastical Districts (Partidos) in the Eighteenth Century

58

4

Location of Spanish Estates Relative to Villages: The Area South of Merida, Seventeenth Century ro8

5

Parishes in the Late Eighteenth Century

6

Distribution of the Indian Population on Landed Estates by Parish, ca. rso r8oo

7

Value of Tithe Farms of 72 Parishes, 1795-98

r 46

FIGURE

Official Price of Beef, Merida, 1740-r8ro

216

172

Maya and Spaniard in Yucatan, 1648- 1812

Introduction

LATIN

AMERICA has usually been interpreted in European terms and measured by European standards. In modern historiography, this began in 1846, when Marx and Engels wrote in The German Ideology that the development of capitalism "received an enormous impetus through the extension of commerce which came with the discovery of America and the sea-route to the East Indies. The new products imported thence, particularly the masses of gold and silver which came into circulation and totally changed the position of the classes towards one another, ... the extension of markets into a world-market, . . . called forth a new phase of historical development."' And a year later, in The Communist Manifesto, they wrote, "The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape opened up fresh ground for the rising bourgeoisie. The East Indian and Chinese markets, the colonization of America, trade with the colonies, the increase in the means of exchange and in commodities generally, gave to commerce, to navigation, to industry an impulse never before known, and thereby, to the revolutionary element in the tottering feudal society, a rapid development. . . . Modern industry has established the world market, for which the discovery of America paved the way." 2 Marx and Engels thus laid the basis of the historical analysis of Latin America in terms of its role in the development of Western capitalism. And this is still the dominant interpretation today. It is the cardinal tenet of dependency theory, which transformed the historiography of Latin America in the 196o's and 1970's.3 It is also one of the key elements in the history of world capitalism put forth in the 1970's by Immanuel Wallerstein, who has had a major impact on recent European historiography.• Latin America undeniably did play an important role in funneling money, precious metals, primary products, and raw materials to Europe, and eventually to the United States, once it had replaced Europe in the vanguard of capitalist development. Modern capitalism was stimulated and transformed as a result. But is that all there is to it? Should Latin America be viewed merely as the passive victim whose "open veins" are

2

Introduction

sucked by the vampires of colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism?5 Does Latin American history have significance only insofar as it contributed to the development of Europe and the United States? The answer to these questions must surely be no. Latin America plainly has a history that can and should be understood primarily in Latin American terms. This point must seem obvious. But in fact modern historians often avoid the obvious and attempt to force Latin America into a Western mold of analysis. For example, the noted French scholar Fernand Braudel, one of the most important historians of our time, uses an unabashedly Eurocentric framework in his famous history of world civilization and capitalism. He classifies the Aztec and Inca Empires as "semi-civilizations," that is, as cultures not quite up to the standards of a full-fledged civilization, because Inca and Aztec agriculturalists used the hoe rather than the plow, and lacked the technology of the wheeL• But in America there were no beasts of burden to be used with a wheel; and what would happen if, instead of the plow, irrigation were used as the criterion for defining a civilization? The efficient use of hydraulic resources, after all, requires systematic planning and the application of technology for the purpose of adapting the environment to human needs. It is, therefore, just as much a part of agricultural technology as the plow. Yet if irrigation is the major criterion, then most of Europe was well behind the Incas and the Aztecs in the development of civilization. Braudel's emphasis on the plow and the wheel is simply the arbitrary selection of Europe as the standard by which all other cultures must be judged. Latin America must be studied as part of the world, but as a part of the world sui generis. For as Gabriel Garda Marquez has lamented, Latin American existence is ultimately made to appear meaningless by the Europeans' insistence "on measuring us with the yardstick that they use for themselves .... The interpretation of our reality through patterns not our own serves only to make us ever more unknown, ever less free, ever more solitary. " 7 Since the 196o's our store of historical knowledge about Latin America has increased substantially. This is due not just to the greater number of historians working in the field but also to a greater emphasis on social and economic history. That emphasis is the result of three factors. First, after the Second World War, the French historians of the Annales school began to transform research in the Western world. This resulted in an intellectual movement away from the traditional historiography, concerned overwhelmingly with political and institutional topics, and toward a broader conception of history as the study of societies. Historians, in short, became social scientists. Second, the problem of Latin American underdevelopment stimulated a search for explanations. That search nat-

Introduction

3

urally took social scientists into the field of history, especially into economic and social history. Third, this trend coincided with the rapid spread of Marxism, especially in Latin America but also in the United States, as a result of the breakdown of intellectual consensus in the 196o's. Since Marxists had always emphasized the economy and social classes, this ideological development gave added impetus to the study of social and economic history. By the 1970's the new historiography had produced a flood of monographs.• Regional studies have been in the vanguard of this movement, and have revealed that many long-standing interpretations of past developments were based on generalizations derived from quite limited information. The traditional interpretation of the hacienda, for example, was based in part on firsthand acquaintance with the great estates as they existed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when a landowning aristocracy ruled over vast properties pieced together over the years at the expense of smallholders and peasants. This latifundium conception was then projected backward in time and influenced the concept of the hacienda in colonial Latin America. But recent regional and case studies have revealed that colonial haciendas were in fact frequently small and burdened with debt, and that hacendados only sporadically gained profits from their properties. Moreover, peonage (long assumed to be the mainstay of the hacienda) was frequently not a major source of labor; indeed, landowners were sometimes indebted to their so-called peons. Finally, hacendados were not invariably members of the elites; non-elite people also owned haciendas, and estates rarely stayed in one family for a long period of time. But even as the new research was helping to clarify some historiographical issues, it was also raising new questions by revealing the variety and complexity of regional social and economic structures. Indians, far from being simply the passive victims of colonial exploitation, were found to have fought back and defended their culture and their lands, and in some places the native peoples managed to retain possession of the resources necessary for their cultural survival. In many regions, therefore, the free village was just as important as, or even more important than, the hacienda. Moreover, it turns out that the supposedly nonexistent class of non-Indian small farmers, whose absence had long been used to contrast the history of the region with that of Anglo-America, was in fact present all over colonial Latin America. To be sure, their numbers were small in some places. But in others they were quite numerous, thus belying the old interpretation of Latin America as a society consisting only of rich landowners on the one hand, and slaves, peons, and poor Indian peasants on the other. Socioeconomic structure, in short, was found to be remarkably heterogenous.

4

Introduction

Finally, the new historiography has led to a new interpretation of the nature of the colonial economy. Recent research in fact has revealed the existence of what Eric Van Young refers to as "a heretofore unsuspected economic vitality" at the local level: Whereas most regions were assumed to have had "natural" (i.e., nonmonetary, barter) economies, the new historiography has found considerable evidence of production for local and sometimes distant markets. Haciendas, small farms, and peasant villages, in other words, were far from the self-sufficient entities that traditional historiography had imagined them to be. Local economies were usually monetized to a considerable degree, and interlocked with the regional, "national," and world economies. Local or regional history, therefore, has proved to be a crucial part of the new historiography. And since this level of analysis requires a much better understanding of geography than was the case with traditional historiography, the new approach has opened up a fruitful dialogue with the increasingly important field of historical geography. In fact, geographers have come to play a major role in the study of Latin American history. 10 This study of the history of Yucatan grows out of the new historiography of Latin America. It is an analysis of the historical development of a society, and as such it takes a broad, multicentury approach studying that society within the framework of a specific ecosystem. The region analyzed is the colonial province of Yucatan, which in fact was a macro- or super-region made up of several smaller regions, or microregions." This area, comprising what are now the states of Yucatan, Campeche, and Quintana Roo, has become one of the best-studied parts of all colonial Mexico. 12 Yet the structure of the colonial economy has received surprisingly little attention, and as this study will demonstrate, this failing has resulted in historical interpretations of limited validity. For example, it has been assumed that colonial Yucatan was well isolated from the world around it because of its almost total lack of exploitable resources, and that as a result the Maya, free from the full rigors of colonial exploitation, managed to survive better as a cultural group than many other native peoples. At the same time, Yucatan has frequently been interpreted in terms of its uniqueness, a condition that resulted, it is said, from the area's special geographic conditions. The thesis of this study is that Yucatan was unique only in the sense that all regions are unique; that Yucatan's history differed from that of some regions but paralleled that of others; that Yucatan was not an isolated province, for it possessed resources that were exploited and used to effect integration into the world economy; and that the survival of Indian culture must therefore be explained not as the result of preservation from

Introduction

5

colonial exploitation but rather as a result of the nature of that exploitation. Finally, it will be demonstrated that the history of Yucatan, far from proving simply that the region was unique, helps contribute to a better understanding of the crucial articulation of relationships between local, regional, and world socioeconomic structures in colonial Latin America.

CHAPTER ONE

Geography and Civilization

WHEN AN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY Treasury official sought to describe Yucatan to the government in Madrid, he wrote that the province reminded him of "the wharf of Barcelona." The comparison was as suitable as any, for northern Yucatan (where most of the people lived in the eighteenth century) is effectively a solid limestone rock, covered with broken stones, a thin layer of soil in some places, and dry, rugged forests. This was a country that did not delight the easily delighted minds of Renaissance Spaniards. Here there were no mountains, the rivers flowed underground, the climate was almost unbearably hot and humid, there was no gold, no silver, no precious metal or stones of any kind, and the Indians were poor, warlike, difficult to defeat, and rebellious, and were "settled on the rocky terrain without there being enough soil there even for a horse race."' On the peninsula as a whole, the soil tends to be deeper as one moves south and east, thinner as one moves north and west. It is only six inches deep in most of the northwest, and in places there is no soil at all. Indeed, in the extreme northwest near the Gulf of Mexico, one can walk for hundreds of yards in places and encounter nothing but rock and thickets somehow growing out of solid bedrock. Even in the southeast, where the soil is deepest, it is often of poor quality. In fact, there is no truly good soil anywhere in Yucatan. In the northern half of the peninsula, with its solid limestone bedrock, water filters rapidly through the soil and stone to the water table below, and rivers do not form. The northernmost river is the Champot6n, and it is nothing more than a stream running west into the Bay of Campeche. Farther south, where there is more rainfall and less limestone, the Candelaria River runs out of the tropical rain forest of southern Campeche. On the Caribbean side of the peninsula, there are no rivers until one gets as far south as Chetumal Bay. Into that body of water flow two substantial rivers, the Rio Hondo and the New River, and a few minor rivulets. The Rio Hondo is navigable by large canoe to a considerable distance inland.

Gulf of Mexico I~ ~r~'!_ ~f_ll!_ap _2- - - -

Map 1

I

I

THE YUCATAN PENINSULA

--- l

I

m

>