Liberalism, Land Reform, and Communities in the Purépecha Highlands of Michoacán, Mexico, 1800-1915

POISED TO BREAK: LIBERALISM, LAND REFORM, AND COMMUNITIES IN THE PURÉPECHA HIGHLANDS OF MICHOACÁN, MEXICO, 1800-1915

A Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Georgetown University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

in History

Fernando Perez Montesinos, M.A.

Washington, DC December 8, 2014

POISED TO BREAK: LIBERALISM, LAND REFORM, AND COMMUNITIES IN THE PURÉPECHA HIGHLANDS OF MICHOACÁN, MEXICO, 1800-1915

Fernando Pérez Montesinos, M.A.

Thesis Advisor: John Tutino, Ph.D.

ABSTRACT

This dissertation studies the history of liberal land reform in Mexico in the nineteenth century and early twentieth century. It examines, in particular, why and how it came to happen in the meseta purépecha, a region located in central-west Michoacán and home to numerous indigenous communities. The dissertation traces the colonial origins of the reform under the

Spanish rule and describes how efforts to turn long-standing indigenous corporate land rights into private landownership became the banner of liberal governments after independence. It analyses the communal land regime of the meseta communities, how it was intimately connected to the physical and environmental aspects of the region, how corporate land-rights worked in practice, and why they came into conflict with liberal land policies.

The work also explains why, despite repeated efforts to push its implementation, the reform did not come to fruition until relatively late in the nineteenth century. It argues that the enforcement of liberal land policies was the product of an unprecedented combination of historical circumstances, including a major political shift after 1867, a new fiscal policy affecting

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the lands in possession of indigenous communities, demographic pressures, the introduction of railroad lines in Michoacán, and the subsequent expansion of commercial forestry in the meseta.

Communities, the dissertation shows, actively engaged land reform. Engagement, however, fluctuated over time and differed from one community to another—even from one community group to another. Local support or opposition to liberal land policies depended on existing disparities and rivalries between communities, community members, and other non-indigenous residents of the meseta (i.e. landowners, tenants, merchants, government officials).

The dissertation concludes that liberal land reform in the meseta brought about ambiguous results. It significantly modified land rights, but it did little to alter inequalities within communities and between communities and the larger Mexican society. It took place at the expense of comparatively underprivileged community members, did not represent meaningful improvements for a majority, and benefited for the most part the local wealthy—including some better-off community members.

Para gina, con g, como le gusta

Acknowledgements

Va para gina la dedicatoria de este trabajo. Ella lo hizo posible en formas que tal vez ni se imagina. Yo, por mi parte, no me imaginaba todas las cosas que serían posibles gracias a estar a su lado. Gracias es poco.

One happy day, in the middle of a conversation, a fellow graduate student came up with the term tutinistas to describe the passionate way with which a group of students engaged

Professor Tutino’s courses. A generous teacher, a patient advisor, and an exceptional scholar,

Professor Tutitno has left an enduring mark on countless students. I was lucky to be one of them and to be a part of tutinismo. Even better, I was honored to have him as my mentor. Gracias, muchas gracias.

I was not entirely sure what I was getting into when I first got to Washington D.C. and

Georgetown University. The experience was at times challenging, but rewards far outdid any setbacks and uncertainties. That I owe to an extraordinary community of professors, fellow- graduate students, and friends. Gracias a Elizabeth Chavez, Rodolfo Fernández y Luis Fernando

Granados por la compañía, los sakes, las pupusas y todo lo demás. Gracias también a Veronica

Vallejo, Okezi Otovo, Xenia Wilkinson, Marisabel Villagómez y Alejandra Ezeta, la “vieja” guardia de latinoamericanistas en el departamento de historia. Mi gratitud también va para la

“nueva” guardia: April Yoder, Larisa Veloz, Javier Puente, Daniel Cano y Geraldine Davies.

Hay que agregar a este grupo a Graham Pitts, Eric Gettig y Jonathan Graham, los primeros dos amplios conocedores del fútbol y todos los tres muy versados en la historia de América Latina.

Experts in other world regions, I would also like to thank Joshua Kueh, Paul Adler, and Onur

Isci.

The Department of History of Georgetown University is one of the best places in the world to learn and practice the profession of historian. I mean it. There I found an outstanding community of scholars and human beings. My professors, and the faculty at large, showed me why it is worth loving and pursuing the study of history. I would specially like to express my gratitude to Erick Langer, John McNeill, Alison Games, Chandra Manning, Aviel Roshwald, as well as Maurice Jackson, Brian McCann, and Adam Rothman. They all made me see history and the world in a very different light—literally. My gratitude also goes to Kathy Gallagher, Miriam

Okine, and Carolina Madinaveitia who, also literally, made it possible for me and many other graduate students to get things done.

Gracias a Alfonso y Ruth. De apellido Álvarez los dos y metidos como yo en eso de dejar el D.F. por D.C., me ayudaron más de una vez a pasarla mejor (mucho mejor) lo mismo cuando las cosas iban mal que cuando iban bien. En una ciudad distinta, Morelia, pero a la que por fortuna fui a parar por un tiempo para hacer mi investigación, me encontré con Amelia Enciso.

Sin ella mi conocimiento de Michoacán y la meseta purépecha se habría quedado en buena medida en pura teoría. Muchas gracias por las corundas, los churipos y por llevarme, entre otros lados, al mismísimo San José de Gracia. En el D.F. toca agradecer a Daniela Arroyo por haberse animando a trascribir una parte de los papeles viejos de los que está hecha está investigación. A

Tatiana Ramírez, ahora también metida de lleno en el oficio de historiadora, le agradezco mucho haber compartido ideas y numerosa bibliografía. Esta tesis tiene como cómplices a César

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Rebolledo y Teresa Carlos. Entre chelas y bromas (y frustrados viajes a Acapulco) nunca dejaron de animarme a seguir escribiendo. Con ustedes siempre me sentiré en entera libertad.

Totalmente ajeno al mundo de la academia y sus rollazos, mi hermano Carlos leyó la

última versión de la introducción de esta tesis. Dijo haber entendido lo que ahí escribí. Gracias carnal, con eso me basta; muy perdido, entonces, no debo andar. A mi padre va todo mi cariño y profundo agradecimiento. Ella ya no está, así pasó y sin avisarnos. Este trabajo es un tributo para los dos.

Gracias, pues, a todos. Cheers!

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS VI-VIII

INTRODUCTION 1

CHAPTER 1. THE IMPERIAL ROOTS OF LIBERAL LAND REFORM 21

The predicament of communal land rights 23

Imperial Reforms 29

Reforms in Spanish America 32

The Reform of pueblos de indios in New Spain 41

Seeds of Land Reform 55

Imperial Crisis and the Birth of Land Politics 62

CHAPTER 2. ECOLOGY, ECONOMY, AND COMMUNITY IN THE PURÉPECHA HIGHLANDS 75

A Stretch of Hilly Country 76

An Uneven Distribution of Water: The Upper and Lower Meseta 79

A Three-part Make-up: Urban, Agricultural, and Forest Lands 83

Settlement Hierarchy 87

Three-part Households 91

Distribution of Land Shares in Built-up Areas 95

Distribution of Agricultural and Forest Lands 98

Haciendas and Ranchos in Nineteenth-century Michoacán 105

The Ebbs and Flows of a Rural Economy 111

The Chronic Limits of Hacienda Dominance and Commercial Expansion 117

Resourceful Pueblos 120

The Centrality of Corn 127

Supplementary Activities 130

Conclusion 133

CHAPTER 3. THE FOUNDATIONS OF LIBERAL LAND REFORM IN THE MESETA 136

A definition 136

An Unconventional Story 136

Six Conditioning Factors 138

Periodization: The Two Repartos 143

Christmas Day, 1868 146

The Radical Egalitarianism of Early Liberalism 148

The Limited Impact of Early Land Policies 151

Politics against Policies 153

A New State Reparto Law 156

The Federal Disentailment Law and a Country at War 158

A Struggling Treasury 163

An Overlooked Link: Reparto and Fiscal Policy 167

CHAPTER 4. THE FIRST REPARTO: FEDERAL, STATE, AND LOCAL LIBERALISMS MEET 172

Initial Responses: Qualified Support and Outright Rejection 174

Buying Time 179

State Reparto vs Federal Disentailment 181

Communities Split 185

Conflict of Laws 191

Hard Choices 193

Supporting Liberalism against Liberalism 197

Implementation: Compromise and Ruptures 200

Conclusion 215

CHAPTER 5. THE SECOND REPARTO: STATE EXPANSION AND THE RISE OF COMMERCIAL

FORESTRY 218

Signs of a New Era 218

Four Major Challenges 219

Policies against Politics 221

Forging a New Relationship: Land Taxes and Conventional Agreements 224

Repurchase Agreements: The Piecemeal Fragmentation of Community Lands 234

Demographic Pressures 239

A Word of Warning and a “Wise Law” 244

Railroads and the Rise of Commercial Forestry 247

Boundary Conflicts over Forest Lands and New Calls for Reparto 255

Lumber Companies and the Opening of Communal Forests 269

CONCLUSION 281

REFERENCES 290

APPENDIXES 316

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“And in all human affairs, he who studies them carefully will notice that one can never remove one inconvenience without causing another to arise." Niccoló Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy

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INTRODUCTION

Paracho. Paricutín. Cherán. Tancítaro. Parangaricutiro. This work examines the events and forces shaping the life and times of a group of highland indigenous communities in central-west

Michoacán, Mexico. In 1800, like most people at the time around the world, these communities lived off the land, communally held land. Legally sanctioned and protected by the Spanish

Crown, communal land holding and usufruct rights were part of indigenous people’s rights as lawful subjects of the monarchy; they were also essential to secure communities’ fulfillment of their tributary obligations. Tellingly, lands were not subject to any form of levy. Lands were the means to obtain the goods and the money to pay the tribute, but not a direct source of royal revenues.

A product of Mesoamerican agrarian arrangements and Spanish colonial policies, communal land holding was by all means a complex land regime. It admitted multiple concurrent land-use rights—including family and individual uses—and permitted numerous forms of gaining sustenance and returns on surplus. In fact, communities in the meseta purépecha1—the home region of these communities—sustained a significantly diversified economy. Corn was by and large the most important crop. Yet cultivation of many other agricultural produces (including wheat and a variety of fruits and vegetables) was also significant. Similar to other mountainous

1 Meseta literally means plateau. I will use the term meseta throughout the dissertation, rather than plateau, because it conveys as much as an environmental as a historical meaning. Purépecha refers to the language and ethnicity of indigenous communities in the meseta and, more generally, of most indigenous people in Michoacán. Scholars sometimes also use the term Tarascan instead of Purépecha. Both terms are problematic since none was used in pre- contact Michoacán exactly the way they are used now. I will adopt Purépecha because, unlike Tarascan, at least one of its connotations refers to a social group, namely, that of the “common people” or “commoner.”

people of the world, people in the meseta broadly engaged in cattle-raising. Roads were often in bad shape, especially during the rainy season, and access was consequently difficult, but participation in local and regional markets was widely extended. People, and not only goods, flowed outside the meseta; they travelled north to the booming silver mines of the Bajío and south to the sugar-producing estates of Michoacán’s tierra caliente (or hot-country) searching for seasonal labor and supplementary income.

Michoacán c. 1899 by Antonio García Cubas

Source: Mapoteca Manuel Orozco y Berra. Encircled, the meseta.

Crucially, estates in the meseta were restricted to the southern and lowermost areas of the region, where water, not coincidentally, was abundant; by contrast, they were entirely absent in the uppermost lands, where water was a scarce resource. Conflicts between landowners and communities were chronic, but almost never sharp. Furthermore, since most estates devoted their lands to corn and wheat, there was little incentive to impinge upon community lands and both sides frequently engaged in unequal but mutually beneficial relationships through sharecropping.

Concentration of lands within communities was also fairly limited. Communities were far from being egalitarian havens. Social differentiation and an uneven distribution of local resources pervaded interactions between community members. Yet, for the most part, competition for lands did not result in systematic appropriations and fragmentation of community lands. The relative modest size of the population—indigenous communities were the home of a little more than 15,000 people—also prevented lands from becoming a scarce resource and therefore the object of escalating disputes.

Part of communities’ land base and one of the region’s most abundant resources, forests also provided community members with important supplies and means of livelihood. Community members collected fuel wood and extensively utilized lumber for house building and craft making—wooden crafts (boxes, furniture, floorboards, and other construction materials) were highly valuable in local and regional markets. Extensive as it was, however, forest use involved no large-scale operations and, significantly, was limited to community members only. Very rarely did community members or communities engage in disputes over forest lands. Broadly speaking, in sum, late colonial indigenous communities in the meseta enjoyed a modest but hard-

earned degree of material security. They did not, on the other hand, enjoy the same degree of freedom vis-à-vis the colonial state. Crown officials—Bourbon officials—had become increasingly intrusive, meddling with how communities spent their funds and made use of their holdings, undermining the relative autonomy they once had under the Habsburgs.

About a century later, in 1910, on the eve of the Mexican revolution, fundamental aspects of the life of communities in the meseta had been significantly recast. People still lived off the land; that would not change for many decades to come. Yet property rights were no longer communal. More precisely, communal land tenure had lost any official and legal recognition.

Authorities no longer protected or sanctioned corporate land rights; they promoted individual property rights instead. Furthermore, communities themselves—and not just land rights—had been divested of legal personhood. Tribute, for its part, had long been abolished. In its place, community members now paid a number of taxes, including—most notably—land taxes.

Community members, much like they did a century earlier, continued relying on a variety of products and activities to secure sustenance and gains. Corn still reigned supreme, not only as the staple, but also as the most profitable product of the meseta for both communities and estates alike. Cultivation of wheat, fruits, and vegetables, same thing as cattle-raising, remained as important as ever. A majority of roads experienced no significant improvements. There was, however, one critical difference: railroads had arrived in Michoacán and the meseta. The volume and pace of goods flowing in and out of the region had increased, although in most cases not spectacularly. Regional trade, not national and even less so international dealings, still predominated. Seasonal labor migration persisted, but had become increasingly more important

to many indigenous families. The Bajío was no longer a primary destination, but demand for labor in the booming sugar- and (now) rice-producing estates in the hot-country was probably greater than ever before.

As in the past, estates and communities in the meseta maintained a conflictive but symbiotic relationship. Yet some meaningful changes had taken place. Sharecropping was now more extended, its terms were less advantageous for sharecroppers, and community members had grown more dependent on it. Roughly estimated in about 37,500 individuals (probably a conservative sum), the indigenous population of the meseta had more than doubled since the early nineteenth century. Competition for lands within communities had gradually become a pervasive and corrosive trait of everyday life. It was not just that families were larger. With the legal end of communal land tenure, buying and selling community lands was now openly permitted. Bit by bit, numerous fragments of community lands had changed hands, almost invariably at the expense of the worse-off and the benefit of the local wealthy (better-off community members, landowners, shopkeepers, moneylenders). Local and internal material disparities had never been greater—they were, at any rate, much greater than a century earlier.

Not surprisingly, although they almost never escalated into violent conflicts, new and long- standing divisions had grown ever bitterer.

Forests also showed the footprints of a notable transformation—perhaps a comparatively more drastic transformation. Not only had a number of community members claimed stretches of forest for themselves. Heated disputes—legal and otherwise—between neighboring communities over forested areas had become recurrent and widespread. Families still extensively relied on

wood for domestic consumption, house building, and craft making, but access to the forest was no longer limited to community members. Communities had signed lease contracts and granted lumber companies permission to extract unprecedented amounts of wood. Forests, in other words, were now the object of large-scale industrial activities. Land use, not solely land tenure, had been significantly refashioned.

Overall, in sum, early twentieth-century communities in the meseta enjoyed a modest but increasingly thinner and uneven material security. While for those at the bottom of the ladder getting by had become ever more difficult and challenging, those at the top within communities, by contrast, had come to control the means and resources not merely to survive but even to thrive. At the same time, communities had lost much ground vis-à-vis the state. Authorities, once more, meddled with how community funds and holdings (especially the new forest revenues) were managed and spent. Any margin of local autonomy that communities achieved or regained after independence had been substantially undermined.

Much change had thus come about in the meseta between 1800 and 1910. Deliberatively provoked, but full of unintended consequences; long in the making, seemingly peaceful, yet deeply divisive, it was a change like no other in the history of the meseta and its communities.

The engine behind this transformation was something that contemporaries in Michoacán and many other parts of nineteenth-century Mexico called reparto. A word that roughly translates into English as “apportionment,” it was intimately (ideologically) linked to nineteenth-century

Mexican liberalism and was used at the time to describe a series of land policies and reforms aiming to end communal land tenure. Yet, as this dissertation aspires to show, reparto also

conveys a different, larger, and more complex meaning. It describes not only a policy or a reform, but a process. That is, a collection of forces (legal, political, economic, fiscal, demographic, social) shaping the way communities in the meseta interacted with the society and the world they lived (and died) in. Explaining how these forces surfaced and combined in specific moments, how they unfolded and acted on each other, such is the purpose and leitmotif of this dissertation.

Understanding the history of the reparto as a process—an intricate combination of forces—is important not only from a methodological, but also from a historiographical point of view. For too long the study of land privatizations and the end of communal land tenure in nineteenth-century Mexico was dominated by a rather crude narrative of greed and plunder.

Beginning in the mid-1850s, so the story was told, liberal elites launched a systematic assault on communal landholding. The main instrument of this assault was a national law that came to be known as the Lerdo law (1856). In doing away with corporate land rights, the enforcement of this law was supposed to stimulate the creation of numerous small and privately-owned rural properties across the country. Yet implementation brought about just the opposite results.

Everywhere indigenous communities were deprived of their lands, but lands did not pass from communities to independent, industrious, and productive freeholders. On the contrary, lands ended up in the hands of powerful and rapacious big landowners. As a result, hundreds of indigenous peasants were pushed to the cities where they became cheap labor force. Many more, dozens of thousands, ended up laboring for the very same landowners that had taken lands away from them. Living conditions in the estates were often dreadful and former community members

(once free indigenous commoners, now peons) were forced to endure near servitude. By 1910, a majority of Mexican rural workers (indigenous and non-indigenous) were landless and oppressed, while former community lands (but also lands in general throughout the country) concentrated in the hands of the very few—in ever large estates. No wonder, the story concluded,

Mexico soon burst out in revolution.

This tight synthesis may seem overly basic and swift. Not every classic interpretation of liberal repartos and community land privatizations was as schematic and straightforward. For the most part, however, accounts tended to fall under the same general canon. They all, at any rate, shared some basic features and premises. Accounts were heavily based on national sources; more precisely, on national laws and (some) federal statistics. Hard to get and often in disarray, regional and local records remained widely unexplored and even ignored. Speculation and theoretical generalizations thus compensated for the empirical gaps. The resulting image was a top-down and centralized perspective of regional and local contexts that often lacked much nuance and missed many of the fine points (the intricacies) of nineteenth-century everyday life in rural Mexico. Hence the tendency to interpret communal land tenure as a monolithic and static form of ownership, communities as undifferentiated collectivities, and indigenous people as passive victims of other people’s actions. No background characters (although they too were often reduced to rough, almost clichéd representations), landowners by contrast were depicted as all-powerful and, therefore, as the almost exclusive winners of land privatizations and outright dispossessions of community lands. Finally, the canonical view also had a tendency to consider land privatizations relevant mainly because they contributed to explain an apparently greater and

more important event, namely, the Mexican revolution. Taken for granted and studied not in its own right but in light of the other events, the actual history of how communal land tenure worked, how communities lived, and how land privatizations came about remained widely unstudied and unexplained.2

The classic canon remained dominant for most of the twentieth century. Yet it did not go entirely unchallenged. Eventually, some of its main premises were questioned. By the 1970s and

1980s, reservations, hitherto unarticulated, began to take a more coherent shape. The enactment in 1856 of the Lerdo law, it was then suggested, probably did not have the immediate and irresistible impact that once it was thought it had; implementation took longer and it was far more erratic than previously supposed. State laws, for their part, should also be taken into account when considering land privatizations; they were often enacted before the federal law and may have played an equally important role in bringing about the end of communal land tenure.

The Lerdo law, in that sense, represented neither the starting point nor the heyday of nineteenth- century liberal land policies. Acknowledging the importance of state laws and policies made the study of regional and local contexts all the more imperative. If the enforcement of land policies had been uneven and inconsistent it was probably because it was conditioned by specific local

2 The roots of what I call here the classic canon can be traced back to the work of Andrés Molina Enríquez, Los grandes problemas nacionales (Mexico: Imprenta de A. Carranza e Hijos, 1909) and Frank Tannenbaum, Tannenbaum, The Mexican Agrarian Revolution (Washington D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1930). A thorough discussion and analysis of how the classic came to be can be found in Emilio Kourí, "Interpreting the Expropriation of Indian Pueblo Lands in Porfirian Mexico: The Unexamined Legacies of Andrés Molina Enríquez," in Hispanic American Historical Review 82, no. 1 (2002): 69-117. Two important works informed, to different degrees, by the classic canon are: Thomas Gene Powell, El liberalismo y el campesinado en el centro de México (1850-1876) (Mexico: Secretaría de Educación Pública, 1974) and Alan Knight, The Mexican Revolution: Porfirians, Liberals and Peasants, Vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).

circumstances and dynamics that could not be easily extrapolated from the study of national sources. Much more research, based on local and regional archives, was thus needed to support old and new assumptions and generalizations. Only by this means could the conventional image of both communities and landowners be confirmed or discarded. Moreover, if circumstances and conditions on the ground turned out to be not as schematic as formerly imagined, then land concentrations may have not been as stark as once suggested; people other than exclusively large landowners perhaps also extensively benefited and profited from the fractioning of communal lands.3

Promising and insightful, these new hypothesis and suggestions generated no great interest for some time. Locally- and regionally-based studies on communal landholding and privatizations continued to be few, intermittent, and little-known.4 It was only until recently, in the last fifteen years or so, that interest has substantially grown and a cohesive body of literature has started to take shape. The image that is emerging from this new literature is still patchy and blurry, but it is one that looks substantially different from that of the classic canon. Buttressed in

3 See, Margarita Menegus, “Ocoyoacac—una comunidad agraria en el siglo XIX,” Historia Mexicana 30, no. 117 (1980): 33-78; Donald Fraser, “La Política de Desamortización en las Comunidades Indígenas, 1856-1872,” Historia Mexicana 21, no. 4 (1972): 615-652; Robert Knowlton, “La individualización de la propiedad corporativa civil en el siglo XIX. Notas sobre Jalisco,” Historia Mexicana 38, núm. 157 (1990): 24-61; Jean Meyer, “La desamortización de 1856 en Tepic,” in Relaciones 13 (1983): 5-30; Jean Meyer, “La ley Lerdo y la desamortización de las comunidades en Jalisco,” in La sociedad indígena en el centro, 189-212; Meyer, Jean. "Haciendas, ranchos, peones y campesinos en el porfiriato. Algunas falacias estadísticas," Historia Mexicana 35, no. 3 (1986): 477-509; Friedrich Katz, “Mexico: Restored Republic and Porfiriato, 1867-1910,” in Cambridge History of Latin America, Vol. 5, edited by Leslie Bethell, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 1-78; Horacio Crespo, Tierra y propiedad en el fin del porfiriato (Mexico: CEHAM / Universidad Aútonoma del Estado de Morelos, 1982); Francie R Chasen-Lopez, “¿Capitalismo o comunalismo? Cambio y continuidad en la tenencia de la tierra en la Oaxaca porfirista,” in Don Porfirio presidente... nunca omnipotente. Hallazgos, reflexiones y debates, 1876-1911, ed. Romana Falcón and Raymond Buve (Mexico: Universidad Iberoamericana, 1998), 153-200. 4 See, Frank Schenk, "Muchas palabras, poca historia: una historiografía de la desamortización de tierras comunales en México (1856-1911),” Cuadernos de Historia Latinoamericana 7, (1999): 215-227.

extensive archival research beyond national sources, it presents the history of nineteenth-century land privatizations in a more fluid, nuanced way. The many intricacies of communal landholding are now thoroughly described. As federal laws lose their once central place, much more energy is spent in analyzing state laws and policies. Communities, for their part, are shown as imaginatively engaging land policies and as active participants in regional and even national politics. Local and internal politics are also the subject of much attention; social differentiation and hierarchies within communities are now widely acknowledged (although not necessarily explained). It is not, to put it bluntly, a soft version of what is still deemed as a very shady episode of modern Mexican history. The new literature is, in fact, far from showing that outright dispossession and illegalities did not happen. If something, it has begun to show that abuses were not exclusively conducted by powerful landowners; many others, including indigenous people, were also involved. The new literature, on the other hand, does show that the history of nineteenth-century land privatizations cannot be reduced to instances of misappropriations and that many community members often saw liberal policies as much as an opportunity as a threat.

In sum, not as crude a story as that of the classic canon, but one full of conflicts and contradictions—and equally, if not more, disruptive.5

5 Probably the finest study of this new historiographaphy is Emilio Kourí, A Pueblo Divided: Business, Property, and Community in Papantla, Mexico (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004). See also, Jackson, Robert H. ed., Liberals, the Church, and Indian Peasants. Corporate Lands and the Challenge of Reform in Nineteenth-Century Spanish America. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1997); Daniela Marino, “La desamortización de las tierras de los pueblos (centro de México, siglo XIX). Balance historiográfico y fuentes para su estudio,” América Latina en la historia económica. Boletín de Fuentes 16, (2001): 33-43; Antonio Escobar Ohmstede, ed., Los pueblos indios en los tiempos de Juárez (Oaxaca: Universidad Autónoma de Oaxaca / Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, 2007); Margarita Menegus, “La venta de parcelas de común repartimiento: Toluca, 1872-1900,” in La desamortización civil en México y España (1750-1920) eds. Margarita Menegus and

There are, however, many gaps to be filled. Important areas of Oaxaca, central Mexico, and northern Veracruz have received comparatively more attention. Yet, while research is growing, entire regions remain unstudied or have been only scarcely examined. Some areas of

Michoacán have been subject to analysis, although in truth the detail and depth of the analysis varies greatly. Studies include the Lake Pátzcuaro region, southern Michoacán, specific parts of the Lake Chapala area, and the region known as Cañada de los Once Pueblos. One of

Michoacán’s and Mexico’s most important indigenous regions to date, the meseta by contrast has almost completely gone unnoticed by the new (and old) literature on nineteenth-century liberal privatizations. There are a very small number of studies (most of them unpublished) on equally small number meseta communities. Well-researched and insightful, these studies are nonetheless limited in scope and depth and offer a very fragmentary picture of the region and its communities.6

Mario Cerutti (Mexico: Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León / Senado de la República, 2001), 71-90; Margarita Menegus, La Mixteca Baja entre la revolución y la reforma. Cacicazgo, territorialidad, y gobierno, siglox XVIII y XIX (Oaxaca: UABJO / UNAM, 2012); Edgar Mendoza García, Municipios, cofradías y tierras comunales. Los pueblos chocholtecos de Oaxaca en el siglo XIX (Oaxaca: UABJO / UNAM, / UAM Azcapotzalco / CIESAS, 2011); Pastor Rodolfo, "Desamortización, regionalización del poder y guerra de castas, 1822-1862. Un ensayo de interpretación," in Poder local y poder regional México, ed. Jorge Padua y Alan Vanneph (Mexico: El Colegio de México-Centre d’Études Mexicaines et Centramericaines, 1993), 89-105; Carlos Sánchez Silva, ed., La desamortización en Oaxaca. México: Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, 2007); Romana Falcón, México descalzo. Estrategias de sobrevivencias frente a la modernidad liberal (Mexico City: Plaza & Janés, 2002). 6 See, Robert Knowlton, “La división de las tierras de los pueblos durante el siglo XIX: el caso de Michoacán”, in Problemas agrarios y propiedad en México, siglos XVIII y XIX, ed. Margarita Menegus (Mexico: El Colegio de México, 1995), 121-143; Brigitte Boehm, “Las comunidades de indígenas de Ixtlán y Pajacuaran,” in Estructuras y formas agrarias en México, del pasado y del presente, eds. Antonio Escobar Ohmstede and Teresa Rojas Rabiela (México: CIESAS, 2001), 145-175; Moisés Franco Mendoza, “La desamortización de bienes de comunidades indígenas en Michoacán,” in La sociedad indígena en el centro y occidente de México, ed. Pedro Carrasco (Mexico, El Colegio de México: 1986), 169-187; Moisés Franco Mendoza, La ley y la costumbre en la Cañada de los Once Pueblos (Zamora: El Colegio de Michoacán, 1997); Paul Friedrich, Agrarian Revolt in a Mexican Village (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1970); Sergio García Ávila, “Desintegración de las Comunidades Indígenas de Morelia,” Estudios de Historia Moderna y Contemporánea de México 15, (1992): 47-64; Sergio García Ávila,

This is thus the first comprehensive study of the reparto and the meseta in the nineteenth century and early twentieth century. It offers a detailed description and analysis of the ecological, economic, and social conditions that gave the meseta and its communities their specific historical patterns. Only by means of identifying and examining these patterns—including land tenure and land use patterns—can we fully grasp the many angles and intricacies of the process of fragmentation and transformation of community lands.7 In adopting this approach, this dissertation aspires to offer more than a mere description of the reparto process. It also aims to provide an explanation of why it came to happen. The reparto, I argue, was the product of an unprecedented combination of factors—ideological, legal, political, fiscal, demographic, and economic factors. It was only when this combination came to fruition, and only then, that the old land tenure and land use patterns of the meseta started to change.

Timing is thus essential in this explanation. Too often the history of nineteenth-century liberal land reforms has been presented as if events leading up to the partition of community lands took place within an unchanging context, without any precise points of reference but the enactment of state and federal laws. Even when the patchiness of reparto policies is acknowledged—the intermittence of its implementation and the unevenness of its impact— seldom is a specific periodization understood. Thus, it is not only important to explain why the reparto came to happen, but also to examine when it came about, and how it evolved and

"Reparto y Desintegración de la Propiedad Comunal Indígena en la Ribera del Lago de Pátzcuaro, Siglo XIX,” (MA diss., Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2001); William Roseberry, “’El estricto apego a la ley.’ La ley liberal y los derechos comunales en el Pátzcuaro del porfiriato,” in Recursos contenciosos. Ruralidad y reformas liberales en México, ed. Andrew Roth Seneff (México: El Colegio de Michoacán, 2004), 43-84. Local studies of communities in the meseta are referred to in the body of this dissertation. 7 This view owes much to Kourí’s, A Pueblo Divided.

changed over time. The factors at play acted differently at different times with very different consequences. In the meseta they gave way to two related but ultimately distinct periods: the first reparto, which went from roughly 1868 to the early 1880s, and the second reparto, which went from roughly 1885 to 1914.

Laws, politics, and taxes combined to instigate the first reparto. State laws against communal land tenure were first enacted in Michoacán in1827-1828 and for a second time in

1851. Then, in 1856, the federal government enacted the Lerdo law. The conventional narrative of land privatization often assumed that the enactment of laws (the Lerdo law to be precise) necessarily meant enforcement. Legal changes alone, however, could hardly spark implementation. Major changes in the political realm also had to come about for this to happen.

It was only after liberal political groups retook power in 1867—after decades of civil strife, political fragmentation, and two major international wars—that prospects of implementing land policies gained momentum. Ironically, it was not the strength, but the weakness of the liberal state that provided the stimulus to advance land privatizations. Wars had left public finances in ruin. In the search for much needed revenues, liberal authorities in Michoacán introduced a new tax on landed properties, including (for the very first time in centuries), the lands of indigenous communities. Decisively, the tax only applied for undivided (that is, communal) lands; if divided and privatized, parcels would be tax exempted.

Land policies thus moved forward, but not in the way the authorities of Michoacán anticipated. An increasing number of community members and tenants of community lands appealed not to the state land laws, but to the 1856 federal law. Scholars, as pointed out, have

progressively come to acknowledge the centrality of state laws in processes of land privatization.

State laws, it has been argued, were as important as the Lerdo law (if not even more important).

Seldom, however, has the literature attempted an analysis of how both sets of laws combined in bringing about the fragmentation of community lands. In the meseta, state and federal laws did not only combine, but they also collided. Both aimed to undo communal land rights. Yet they also promoted two very different visions of how this should happen. State laws (first the 1827-

1828 laws and then the 1851 law) advocated a radical redistribution of community lands: equal land shares for equal number of community members. Significantly, community members had precedence over outsiders. The Lerdo law, by contrast, made no such distinction between community members and non-community members. Those who actually possessed the land had precedence, whether they were community members or not. Tenants, in other words, had the upper hand. Equally important, the Lerdo law did not speak of equal land shares. Broadly speaking, land distribution within communities would remain the same as before implementation of land policies, meaning that existing disparities would not be significantly upset. Tenants and community members clearly understood the advantages and risks of choosing one or another version of land policies. When the time to choose came, they chose the one version that could tip the scales in their favor.

A different combination of factors characterized the second reparto (1885-1914).

Already consolidated in power, liberal authorities utilized land taxes as an instrument of political centralization—and not so much to promote the progress of land policies. Making communities to accept land taxes, and therefore to accept the right and power of the government to collect

them, was now comparatively more important. Thus, the impetus for privatization came from somewhere else. Legal restrictions to buy and sell community lands had been undone during the first reparto; demographic growth increased the pressures and incentives for actually carrying land sales out. Many land sales were driven by necessity and not by the desire to make a profit.

As families grew larger and parcels increasingly inadequate to provide sustenance, numerous community members resorted to local creditors putting up their lands as collateral. Unable to repay the loan, many ended up losing their lands to lenders: the local wealthy.

Two other fundamental developments shaped the second reparto: the introduction and expansion of railroad lines and the spectacular rise of commercial forestry. Railroads connected

Michoacán and the meseta to larger markets; they also created an unprecedented demand for forest products, lumber chief among them. Lumber was a key component in the construction of rail lines. It was used in the making of crossties, the braces that supported the rails on railway tracks. As rail lines expanded in Michoacán and in other adjacent states, more and more crossties were required, dozens of thousands of them. The abundant forests of the meseta thus became, for the very first time, the object of large-scale commercial exploitation. Communities maintained possession of their forests; although liberal laws allowed purchases of community lands, they did not allow purchases of forest lands. Yet, as woodlands turned increasingly valuable, many community members and local lumber entrepreneurs managed to get hold of numerous stretches of forests. Since forests (loosely) delimited mutual boundaries, the rise of commercial forestry also prompted a series of disputes between neighboring communities. Hoping to get the government’s support against rival claims, communities then began to solicit authorities the

enforcement of reparto policies. To a large extent, it was due to these disputes and petitions (and not to the initiative of liberal authorities) that a new state land law was enacted in 1902.

Ironically, the law further extended the power of the government over communities, precisely at a time when communities began to let lumber companies make extensive use their woodlands.

State intervention and a major shift in land use marked the culminating moments of the second reparto. Lumber companies secured ample access rights to the meseta forests and dominated wood extraction and lumber production. Communities, for their part, retained land tenure and old land use rights for domestic and small-scale activities; they also obtained important revenues from lease arrangements with companies. The government of Michoacán, however, took control of forest revenues away from communities: in order to make use of revenues, communities needed first to relinquish communal ownership of forest lands.

This analysis of the reparto in the meseta, needless to say, promotes and participates in the emerging literature on the history of indigenous communities, liberalism, and liberal land reforms in Mexico and Latin America. Hopefully, it will bring some new insights and elements of discussion into an increasingly stimulating conversation. It calls for studying in greater detail the historical link between liberal tax policies and liberal land policies. Such link has been suggested in the past, but rarely analyzed. At least in the meseta, it proved to be of fundamental importance. The analysis of the reparto in the meseta also reveals that much more attention needs to be put on the differences between state land laws and policies, on the one hand, and the federal Lerdo law, on the other. State and federal versions of land reform did not mean the same thing—not on paper and, more importantly, not in practice. In Michoacán they represented two

distinctive and conflicting versions of liberalism. I hope this work can bring attention to this important and thus far unnoticed fact and, by this means, help us to understand whether it also came to happen in other places outside of Michoacán. The dissertation, on the other hand, offers further evidence of the piecemeal nature of nineteenth-century land privatizations that others have come to notice in different Mexican regions. The end of communal land tenure was not caused by a sudden, thorough, and spectacular strike, but by a silent, incomplete, and meandering process. Finally, this dissertation wants to call the attention of researches to investigate the relationship between railroads, commercial forestry, and changes in land use patterns. Presumably, the meseta was not the only indigenous region in experiencing a boom in commercial forestry in the late nineteenth-century and the early twentieth-century in Mexico.

The lumber business, stimulated by railroad construction, may have also been the engine of many other repartos as well.

One final word on the role that indigenous community members played in shaping the history of the reparto. For too long, as pointed out, indigenous communities were portrayed as lethargic and uniform collectivities, averse to change and removed from the rest of society, acting in unison and defensively against external threats. Communities, it is now widely acknowledged, were from the beginning dynamic and changing collectivities connected to everything in colonial New Spain and in the Mexican nation. Not only did they engage changes actively, but contributed to shape institutions, laws, politics, and culture at large.8 Nowadays the

8 The key work advancing this argument for the nineteenth century is Florencia Mallon, Peasant and Nation: The Making of Postcolonial Mexico and Peru (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). See also, Peter Guardino,

question is not whether communities participated in the making of history, but how they did so.

In the case of nineteenth-century liberal land reforms, the analysis often focuses on examining the dilatory strategies and obstacles communities set to impede the implementation of land policies. Such approach, while important, is not entirely satisfactory. It presumes that communities and community members invariably rejected reforms, and it assumes that resistance ultimately left communal land-rights and practices intact. For the meseta purépecha—and surely many other regions—the question is not whether reforms failed or succeeded, but how they came about and what type of changes came with their contested implementation. Communities and community members in the meseta did not conform to one pattern of behavior. The way they engaged liberal land reforms shifted because the circumstances and conditions they contributed to create did not remain unchanged. Their doings resist conventional classifications. Modes of action were many, different and, more importantly, contradictory.

Responses to land policies not only varied over time, but also from one community to another and, equally important, from one group of community members to another. Not all indigenous people wanted the same things, and when they pursued a shared professed goal their reasons to do so often differed. This is far from an obvious point and it needs to be explained if we want to fully understand the impact of liberal land policies and liberalism upon indigenous communities—in the meseta and elsewhere in Mexico. On the ground, land policies instigated

Peasants, Politics, and the Formation of Mexico's National State: Guerrero, 1800-1857 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996); Peter Guardino, The Time of Liberty: Popular Political Culture in Oaxaca, 1750–1850 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005). A recent and insigfhful example is Karen D. Caplan, Indigenous Citizens: Local Liberalism in Early National Oaxaca and Yucatan (Stanford: Stanford University Press, December, 2009).

and responded to many competing interests and purposes. Reasons to support or reject changes in land tenure were to a great extent defined by people’s particular position inside communities.

The consequences and outcomes of land policies, in like manner, were not the same in all communities and for all community members. They proved to be advantageous for the better-off and the local wealthy—including a number of community members—and unfavorable, even bitter, for people at the bottom of the ladder.

Much of this dissertation is thus about how intentional actions often ended up engendering all sorts of unforeseen reactions and outcomes. In pressing new land policies on communities, liberals launched forces they could rarely control. Liberal policies not only served as means authorities used to end communal land tenure; they were also the instruments communities, community groups, and other local actors used to pursue a variety of ends and interests. In doing so, they all bent land reforms in ways liberals did not anticipate, intend, or desire. Communities and community groups, indeed, contributed to the shaping of laws, policies, and the history of Mexican liberalism at large. They too, however, launched forces they could not always control. Land policies, at times, were used to settle old accounts against local adversaries, other community members, and rival communities. Strategies in support and against policies often backfired. Machiavelli was right, but his dictum does not only apply to rulers alone. Indeed, in removing one inconvenience, both liberals and indigenous people caused many others to arise.

CHAPTER 1

THE IMPERIAL ROOTS OF LIBERAL LAND REFORM

Let me introduce you to Manuel Rosales. Chances are that you have never heard of him or the place where he lived. He was neither a renowned writer nor a well-known politician nor a man whose life people care to write about. Manuel had a less fashionable occupation. He was a peasant. At age thirty, Manuel was a married man and father of two. Ireneo was the youngest of his children. He was only two. His sister, Buenaventura, was four years old. The name and age of

Manuel’s wife is for us unknown. The Rosales were a small family living in a small settlement called Agua Nueva (New Water) in the state of Michoacán. With no more than a hundred inhabitants, the settlement did not figure on most maps of Mexico. Not even on most maps of

Michoacán. Agua Nueva, however, was part of a larger community comprising about 3,000

Purépecha-speaking people. The majority of the community lived in and around the villa of

Tancítaro. The Rosales, nonetheless, had put down roots in Agua Nueva. There, Manuel had three pieces of land. One used for housing; the other two for farming. It was 1872. Life seemed to carry on without apparent variation.9

Forces of change, however, had long before been set in motion. In many ways, Manuel lived as his father and grandfather had. Toiling the land had not changed very much from one generation to another. Women and children, as Ireneo and Buenaventura would probably do soon, still collected fuel wood from the surrounding pine and live oak forests. Crops and food

9 Archivo General e Histórico del Poder Ejecutivo de Michoacán (AGHPEM), Secretaría de Gobierno, Gobernación, Hijuelas, Distrito de Uruapan, vol. 14, 183-187 and 192-235.

remained the same. Heavy rains felt during the summer and the ancient peak of Tancítaro was still plainly visible from Agua Nueva.10 Yet while some things looked unaltered, life was hardly the same. The changes were not always noticeable. They came, for instance, in ostensibly innocuous forms. That year of 1872, three men entered Manuel’s name into a book full of other names and numbers. The men also wrote down the amount, size, and estimated value of

Manuel’s parcels. Everybody in Agua Nueva knew the parcels belonged to him. Yet the inscriptions in the book, Manuel was told, were to be the ultimate and tangible proof that he was the absolute and exclusive owner of the lands he toiled. Indigenous commoner no longer, but property owner. It was nothing more than words written in a book. A simple bureaucratic procedure. Yet it took the world to change and empires to fall for this to happen.

This chapter offers an overview of how the core principles—the rationale—behind nineteenth-century liberal land reform came about. The federal Lerdo law of 1856, considered one of the most important pieces of legislation in the history of nineteenth-century Mexican liberalism, is often taken as the starting point of the campaigns to end indigenous people’s corporate land rights. Yet the enactment of several anti-communal land tenure laws in the states

(including Michoacán) shortly after independence under the first federal republic (1824-1836) contradicts this idea. Moreover, many of the key arguments that would later on define liberal stances against indigenous corporate land rights and that would be enshrined in the Lerdo and earlier state laws can be traced back to the late colonial period. It was, indeed, during this period

10 William C. Leavenworth, “A Preliminary study of the vegetation of the region between Cerro Tancítaro and the Río Tepalcatepec, Michoacán, Mexico,” American Midland Naturalist 36, no. 1 (1946): 137-206.

(under the Bourbons) that government officials and intellectuals started to see communal land use and tenure as contrary to the best interest of the state, the economy, and even the well-being of indigenous people; it was then when the bases of future liberal land reform were first established and when its main goals were set.

The predicament of communal land rights

One big after effect of the revolutionary outbreaks that swept Europe and the Americas from roughly 1770 to 1825 was the transformation of land tenure patterns and property rights in large areas of the world. Around 1800 the vast majority of people on earth still lived off the land and continued to have different sorts of common rights over at least parts of the lands they worked and benefited from in a variety of ways (wood extraction, livestock grazing, farming).11

Common rights, in fact, usually entailed a combination of individual, family, and communal forms of possession and usufruct. Land, however, belonged to no one in particular and, thus, in principle, could not be sold to anybody. This did not mean that individual and family lands belonged to everybody and that everybody had exactly the same rights over the lands that others customarily toiled to support their families. Or that there were no mechanisms to transfer land from one hand to another. Land was handed down among family and community members in different manners. Inheritance, for instance, but also marriage and bartering. Ownership was the result of some type of sanction by a higher authority and a number of compromises and

11 C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780-1914: Global Connections and Comparisons (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2004) 27-29. “Peasants [circa 1750],” says Bayly, “broadly understood, must have accounted for 80 percent of that gross population [i.e. global population], though in some areas the emergence of nodes of early capitalist commerce may have pushed the urban population to above 20 percent of the total” (28).

settlements that took into consideration different types of land use and tenancy by the members of a community. Ownership was not the exclusive right of single holders. Individual possession rested on local conventions, implicit agreements, and concrete land uses (all underpinned by power relations and social hierarchies). Common rights, in that sense, depended on preventing individuals or groups of individuals from claiming exclusive rights not over a specific strip of land, but over the shared space at large.12

Over the course of the nineteenth century common rights either came to an end or were widely reshaped in many parts of the globe. Manuel Rosales, the peasant who lived in tiny Agua

Nueva, was one of the many millions of people who experienced this transformation. In truth, the transformation had begun long before the revolutions of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries broke out. Yet attempts to either end or reform common rights gained an unprecedented impetus from the revolutionary period on. This became more evident in some places than others. For most of the nineteenth century, the push to end common rights was greater in areas that gained political independence as a result of the revolutions (as in the

Americas) and in regions still ruled or in the direct orbit of influence of European powers (places like India, Egypt, Ireland, and many corners of Europe itself).

In all places, however, the campaigns against common rights entailed four fundamental premises. The first one held that common rights, as a rule, bred inefficiency and unproductivity.

Sharing access to land and leaving the definition of property rights (at least in part) to customary

12 Rosa Congost, "Property Rights and Historical Analysis: What Rights? What History?," in Past & Present, no. 181, (2003): 73-106.

norms could only limit people’s ability to make the most out of nature and, thus, create wealth— and wealth was, ultimately, wellbeing. The second premise advised granting individuals (and not collectivities) uncontested property rights to specific strips or portions of land. Governments would issue the corresponding attesting documents so that no one but an individual holder could claim a given piece of land. Handing lands to individuals and providing them with exclusive rights had one major corollary: it turned lands into commodities, that is, into articles of exchange just like any other goods bought and sold in the market.

The third premise asserted that full ownership of land by individuals begot rational human beings. Exclusive property rights, so the argument ran, induced individuals to cherish the lands they owned. Caring more also meant taking more interest not only in safeguarding, but in improving the land. This, in turn, demanded ingenuity and planning. Assessing gains and losses, monitoring the market, finding new ways to increase yields; these were the signs of a rational creature. The last premise stated that ending common rights also provided an incentive for rural folks to break away with the bonds of custom and coercion of communities and landlords. The landless and agricultural laborers in bondage, servitude, or in any other dependency tie would become free laborers. This had a double benefit. On the one hand, free laborers would become more efficient and productive and, on the other, they would provide the workforce needed in other commercial activities in the cities and centers of production.13

13 See, Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1996), 149-152; Giole Solari, “La concepción liberal del Estado,” in Política y Estado en el pensamiento moderno, in eds. Gerardo Ávalos Tenoriio and María Dolores París (Mexico: Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, 2001), 86-88; Edward P. Thompson, "The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century," Past & Present, no. 50 (1971), 76-136; Congost, "Property Rights," 80.

Replacing common rights, however, turned out to be a tortured and lengthy process.

Common and other traditional property rights did not just surrender to the implacable rationale of individual property rights. Conflicts and compromises were, in fact, the norm. Technically speaking, exclusive and common rights were incompatible. The differences between their respective guiding principles were big enough so as to make confrontation, if not inevitable, at least very unsurprising. What is more, the drive to substitute property rights, as a rule, came from above and was preeminently a concern of a minority. Imposition from above by the few, predictably, sooner or later would meet some opposition.

On the ground, however, things were frequently less clear and simple. The introduction of absolute individual property rights did drive classes, communities, and families apart. Yet many times support for ending common rights did not exclusively come from the wealthy and government officials, but also from villagers, farmers, and peasants, making what was originally the initiative of powerful minorities into a matter of numerous and overlapping interests. The question, in that sense, was not whether to relinquish old rights in favor of the new and allegedly superior ones. More often than not, the question resided in determining how the new rights would fit into a set of already existing norms and practices. In other words, it was not solely a matter of how individual property rights would change previous land tenure regimes, but a matter of how previous rights would shape the exercise of the newly acquired (willingly or not) property rights.14

14 See, Congost, “Property Rights.”

Revolutionary outbreaks added a different dimension to the way conflicts and compromises over land unfolded. The impact varied from one place to another around the world.

In some cases, the connection between revolutionary outbreaks and land tenure changes was tangible, but somewhat oblique. In England, for instance, piecemeal disintegration of common rights and open-field farming dated back to the thirteenth century. By the mid-eighteenth century, “informal” enclosures (as the shift from common to individual ownership of land was known) had changed land tenure rights of at least half of the land area of England. Subsequent enclosures were sanctioned by the parliament and almost 20% of the remaining land was enclosed between the 1760s and 1830. And yet, although the pattern against common rights was set long before, parliamentary enclosures were not completely independent of the revolutionary episodes of the time. By contributing to raise the prices of corn, wars and revolutions helped to create the conditions that facilitated further enclosures. At least in part, many farmers saw rising food prices as an incentive to end common rights and open-field practices.15

In India, changes in the existing land tenure regimes were also not entirely detached from the revolutions of the Atlantic world. The American Revolution provided the British yet another reason to focus on their interests in Asia and thus promote a more direct rule in the region. In the late eighteenth century, after the thirteen colonies had obtained their independence, the British and their allies established new tax systems in the areas of India controlled by the East India

15 See, John Chapman, “The Extent and Nature of Parliamentary Enclosure,” The Agricultural History Review 35, no. 1 (1987): 25-35; Michael Turner, “Parliamentary Enclosures,” in ReFRESH 3 (1986), accessed January 14, 2013, http://www.ehs.org.uk/ehs/refresh/assets/Turner3b.pdf; Roger J. P. Kain, John Chapman, and Richard R. Oliver, The Enclosure Maps of England and Wales, 1595-1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 1- 46.

Company (the ryotwari and the zamindari systems). The goal was to increase the incomes of the

Crown (one of the reasons that had sparked the American Revolution) and not to end or change common rights per se. Yet, in order to establish certain uniformity and thus theoretically facilitate the collection of revenues, the new systems bypassed the many subtleties of the existing land tenure arrangements and brought about significant alterations in the way people hitherto owned, transferred, and used the land.16

The revolutions had a more direct and important impact in other areas of the world. In continental Europe, for instance, especially in the places taken over by French revolutionary and

Napoleonic armies. And also in the Americas, undoubtedly one of the world regions where revolutions most clearly shaped the transformation of common rights. There, east to west and north to south, the revolutionary outbreaks played an instrumental role in creating the conditions that defined the pace and the way land tenure systems changed during the nineteenth century.

On the one hand, revolutions galvanized long-standing and ongoing conflicts between settlers and indigenous people. The undoing of common rights, indeed, had begun since the very early days of European colonization in the late fifteenth century and continued thereafter even where, as in the Spanish America, common rights over land became a fundamental piece of the empire-building process. The revolutions, however, altered the delicate balance between, settlers, indigenous people, and imperial agents, mainly (but not exclusively) in North and South

16 See, John F. Richards, Edward S. Haynes, and James R. Hagen, “Changes in the Land and Human Productivity in Northern India, 1870-1970,” Agricultural History 59, no. 4 (1985): 523-548; David E. Ludden, An Agrarian History of South Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 130-140; The comparative history of land tenure systems on a global scale during the nineteenth century is strikingly scarce.

America. The balance did not always work, but it often restrained full scale confrontation and, more significantly, always considered indigenous common rights over land a key part of negotiations, alliances, and compromises.17 On the other hand, revolutions took down the very foundations that had made possible the legal existence of common rights, especially in the

Spanish America. There an entire new edifice of norms and institutions came out of the wars for independence of the 1810s and early 1820s. That edifice was expressly created to end the language, conventions, and social relations supporting indigenous common rights over land. At least from a political and legal point of view, the revolutionary period marked a truly epochal shift.

Imperial Reforms

The imperial crises of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were the product of intensified geopolitical rivalries between European powers and the attempts of empires to cope with the burdens of such rivalries. Beginning with the War of Spanish succession (1700-1713),

European transoceanic empires—mainly the Spanish, British, French, Portuguese, and Dutch— periodically waged war against each other throughout the eighteenth century. Two centuries of oceanic trade and colonization had made overseas control of territories, resources, and labor a

17 See, for instance, James H. Merrell, “The Indians' New World: The Catawba Experience,” in The William and Mary Quarterly 41, no. 4 (1984): 538-565; Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Virginia DeJohn Anderson, “King Philip's Herds: Indians, Colonists, and the Problem of Livestock in Early New England,” in The William and Mary Quarterly 51, no. 4 (1994): 601-624; Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron, “From Borderlands to Borders: Empires, Nation-States, and the Peoples in between in North American History,” The American Historical Review 104, no. 3. (1999): 814-841.

fundamental aspect of inter-imperial affairs. Wars, however, covered much larger latitudes than in the past—they were fought in regions spread across the planet from India to New France—and started to grow out of all proportion. Technological developments in killing and navigation devises fueled even more imperial rivalries leading to a military race that, in turn, spiraled war expenditures. More men, firearms, ships, fortresses, and wartime subsidies revealed the fiscal vulnerability of empires. The bigger the wars, the larger the armies, the greater the debts. The predicament soon became clear. In the long-run, sovereigns could not afford the costs of war, but war was the means to either seize or defend imperial domains and maintain geopolitical power.

The Seven Years War (1756-1763) provided the final evidence that wars put an inexorable pressure on imperial treasuries. Thereafter, efforts to reform the running of empires, already in progress, turned all the more the pressing.18

Comparable pressures gave way to similar modes of conceiving the transformation of empires. Broadly speaking, imperial reforms aspired to achieve two sets of fundamental goals.

On the one hand, they sought to reassert the authority of the Crowns over their subjects and against foreign competitors. On the other, reforms attempted to increase imperial revenues and stimulate commercial activities—revenues would support war efforts, commercial profits would boost government returns through taxes. Should these two goals be accomplished empires could continue fighting for global dominance and survival.

18 See, Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 88-92; Gat Azar, War in Human Civilization (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 456-511; David Abernethy, The Dynamics of Global Dominance: European Overseas Empires, 1415-1980 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 45-80; and J. H. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492-1830 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 292-295 and 301-302.

Asserting the authority of kings and central authorities meant assuming direct political and administrative control of the overall machinery of empires. In the case of the Spanish empire

(but also in the Portuguese and French and to a lesser extent the Dutch and British) this implied undermining the ascendancy of a great number of provincial and local authorities and oligarchies. Such was purpose of earlier measures against the autonomy of Aragón, Valencia, and Cataluña after the end of the War of Spanish Succession. Subsequent administrative reforms furthered the centralizing impetus. New secretarías, whose tasks were more clearly defined and specified, gradually displaced the old consejos. In 1749 the Crown introduced new provincial officials, the intendentes (intendants), who were only responsive to Madrid. The new officials deepened a period of administrative rationalization signaled by the implementation of land surveys, a more scrupulous examination of revenue accounts, and the introduction of new real estate and income taxes.19 Carlos III (1759-1788) and his ministers and advisors not only continued, but broadened the extent and scope of previous reforms. Virtually all aspects of government and civic life, from the army and the navy to the education system and dressing codes, experienced some reform. Fiscal and economic policies, in particular, gradually modified much of the legislation and the administrative apparatus built under the Habsburgs—the House of Bourbon had secured the rule of the Spanish empire with the Treaties of Utrecht (1713) and

Rastatt (1714).

19 Stanley J. Stein and Barbara H. Stein, Apogee of Empire: Spain and New Spain in the Age of Charles III, 1759- 1789 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003); and Richard Herr, “Flow and Ebb, 1700-1833,” in Spain: A History, ed. Raymond Carr (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 173-203.

High-ranking officials and advisors close to the king—individuals such as Campomanes,

Bernardo Ward, Jovellanos, Esquilache, the Count of Aranda, and his rival the Count of

Floridablanca—were all familiar with and fond of the economic arguments of the Enlightenment.

Despite the persistence of censorship, enlightened ideas and principles circulated more or less freely among intellectuals and men in power. A utilitarian vision of commerce, industry, and agriculture thus informed the reforms these men conceived and, at least in part, implemented.

The reformers saw political and administrative centralization as a means to sponsor new trades, protect already lucrative enterprises, build roads, loosen commercial restrictions and, indeed, change property rights and land uses. This meant that all individuals, possessions, and activities considered unproductive according to the new standards could no longer count on the favor of the king. In practice, this affected, among many others, the lower nobility (the hidalgos), segments of the Catholic Church and their possessions, entailed estates such as the mayorazgos, and the common rights of villagers and peasants. Royal patronage was now reserved, to an important degree, to the industrious and the diligent, that is, to the money-spinners.20

Reforms in Spanish America

All the major figures behind the reforms knew that any imperial reorganization needed to address the relationship between the Crown and its overseas territories. Hence the fundamental role that the reformers ascribed to the New World. The changes they recommended pursued the very

20 Ibid. See also, Anthony Pagden, Lords of all the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France c.1500-c.1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995) 120-125.

same goals of previous and ongoing reforms in the Peninsula: increase royal revenues and strengthen royal authority. The reforms, accordingly, focused on maximizing the potential of the

Spanish New World to enliven the finances of the empire and on keeping in check the threat of other overseas powers to the Crown’s domains. Protecting the New World was crucial for keeping the Spanish Crown financially viable and politically powerful. The Crown had lost most of its remaining European possessions in the first-half of the eighteenth century to other

European powers. The New World under the Bourbons, now more than ever, was a central piece of the empire. Without the New World the Spanish empire would be no more.21

A reforming impetus thus swept Spanish America during the last third of the century. It was exceptionally strong from 1765 to 1785 and sought to alter the purpose, make-up, and workings of the Spanish New World. As in the Peninsula, the reforms targeted all the major spheres of the economy and the government. There was, of course, the ever indispensable silver—the fuel of the empire. By the mid-eighteenth century it was clear for the Crown and its rivals that silver meant primarily (but never exclusively) New Spain. There, silver mining was an already thriving business. Royal measures came right after production in general slowed down and after a period of decline in Guanajuato (1750s to mid-1760s), the single most important mining center of the empire. The objective was to facilitate as much as possible the extraction and refining of the mineral and to improve the collection of royal excises. The Crown provided mine owners with a new code, financial institutions, low mercury prices, tax breaks on essential

21 See, John Tutino, Making a New World: Founding Capitalism in the Bajío and Spanish North America (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012); and Elliot, Empires of the Atlantic World, 307-308.

supplies, and a mining school. It also established a new mining court and guild, a privilege hitherto reserved only to prominent merchants. The Crown thus would obtain closer supervision over silver production; mine owners, in exchange, would gain a prominent forum to shape the policies affecting their industry.22

Commerce and other major profit-making industries also experienced important modifications. The end of the fleet system and the Cadiz monopoly (1778) terminated a series of restrictions over transoceanic commerce established under the Habsburgs. Instead of periodic and large convoys arriving in few authorized ports (Veracruz, Callao, Cartagena, Portobello), the

Crown permitted small fleets and individual vessels to carry out commerce in a much wider variety of ports spread around the empire. In part, the end of the restrictions was a response to widespread contraband—involving the French and British, among several others—and the growing complexity of transoceanic commercial networks. The reform, in that sense, just sanctioned practices that were rapidly becoming the norm. Yet it also introduced new ground rules and fed emerging rivalries between old and new merchant groups. The powerful merchant houses of Cadiz, Lima, and Mexico City would have to face increasing competition from other merchant guilds. Such competition, the ministers of the king expected, would stimulate commerce at the same it would undermine the ascendancy of powerful cliques. In other words, it would contribute to the program of political centralization ambitioned by the Crown.23

22 See, David A. Brading, Miners and Merchants in Bourbon Mexico, 1763-1810 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971) 129-168; and Tutino, Making a New World, 171-183 and 549-550. 23 David A. Brading, "Bourbon Spain and its American Empire," in The Cambridge History of Latin America, Vol. 1. Colonial Latin America, ed. Leslie Bethell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984) 409-418; Stein and Stein, Apogee of Empire, 119-304.

While some monopolies were broken, others were created. In New Spain, in particular, the Crown assumed control of gambling games such as cards and cock fighting and turned them into state monopolies. It also established new taxes on stamped papers—a mandatory requirement to fulfill countless legal and official procedures. More importantly, the Crown created a tobacco monopoly—the famous estanco. Few agricultural and manufacturing industries in the New World found extensive royal support. The reforms actually discouraged the formation of and provided little incentive to any industry that could threaten the manufactures and commercial activities of the Peninsula. American domains were increasingly considered by officials in Madrid as suppliers of raw materials and markets for products made in Spain.

Enterprises such as sugar mills in the Caribbean (the ingenios of Cuba and Puerto Rico) and tobacco in New Spain were exceptions to this rule. The Crown, in fact, encouraged the development of these trades because they did not pose any challenge to other industries

(peninsular or otherwise). What is more, they offered important stimulus to commerce between

Spain and the overseas provinces and provided the monarchy with important (and needed) returns. In the case of tobacco in New Spain, the Crown did not simply fostered production—as it was doing with mining. In the course of a decade (from 1765 to 1775), it actually took control of each and every aspect of the tobacco industry (from cultivation to sale). The tobacco business and monopoly, indeed, proved to be a remarkable source of revenues for the Crown.24

24 See, Susan Deans-Smith, Bureaucrats, Planters, and Workers: The Making of the Tobacco Monopoly in Bourbon Mexico (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992); Enrique Florescano and Margarita Menegus, “La época de las reformas borbónicas y el crecimiento económico (1750-1808),” in Historia General de México (Mexico: El Colegio de México, 2000), 377-379; Dorothy Tanck de Estrada and Carlos Marichal, “¿Reino o colonia? Nueva España. 1750-1804,” in Nueva historia general de México (Mexico: El Colegio de México, 2010), 323-324; and Carlos

The economic policies envisioned by the ministers and advisors of the king could not conceivably work without extensive administrative and fiscal reform. Effective centralization and tax-collection required a new system of data gathering. Inquire about things and people, condense and sort the information, use tallies and reports to build a set of protocols with which, in turn, to affect the way things work and how people behave: such were the guiding principles cherished by Bourbon reformers—and, for that matter, by increasingly large numbers of administrators around the world. Bourbon ministers saw nothing but disarray in the Habsburg machinery. Bringing order to the administration was thus fundamental if the Crown were to regain full control of the empire and its government.

One chief way to achieve this was through forming a powerful, educated, and technically competent administrative elite, loyal primarily to the king and not to other established powers

(the Church and merchant cliques, for instance). None of the Crown’s envoys to Spanish

America epitomized this new type of official better than José de Gálvez. A determined and resourceful man, protégé of the count of Floridablanca (chief minister of Carlos III from 1777 to

1792), visitor-general to New Spain from 1765 to 1771, and minister of the Indies from 1776 to

1787, Gálvez and men like him (some, his own protégés and relatives) became the main enforcers of the reforms in the New World. Through them and their disposition to embrace

Marichal, “La economía de la época borbónica al México independiente, 1760-1850,” in Historia económica general de México, ed. Sandra Kuntz Ficker (Mexico: El Colegio de México / Secretaría de Economía, 2010), 185- 187.

administrative rationalization, the Crown attempted to expand its authority and tap the resources of the New World all over again.25

The scope of the changes in the government was as wide as the ambition of the Crown and the managerial zeal of its agents. The reforms reshuffled the entire administrative layout of the Spanish America. The viceroyalty of La Plata was created in 1776 with parts of the viceroyalty of Peru—the mines of Upper Peru included. The measure furthered a policy initiated decades earlier with the establishment of the viceroyalty of New Granada in 1739. Both moves attempted to establish a tighter military and commercial grasp over the coasts and fringes of the empire and were designed to limit the threats posed by the Crown’s imperial rivals and the financial losses caused by contraband. The introduction of intendencias during the 1780s, for its part, altered the administrative map of the provinces and localities of New Spain, Peru, and the recently created La Plata. A compact group of intendants (assisted by subdelegados) replaced hundreds of local magistrates and officials known as corregidores and alcaldes mayores. The measure helped to end the common practice of offering for sale public posts to the highest bidder. Equally important, the measure was essential to dismantle the commercial bonds between local magistrates and the merchant houses of Lima and Mexico City. Merchants provided the credit and funds that paid for many local magistrates’ posts. Through them, merchants could place goods on the remotest village and simultaneously get a hold of local produces, thus,

25 Elliott, Empire of the Atlantic World, 302-304.

controlling a great deal of the internal market.26 Local magistrates thus owed allegiance to the merchants as much as to the Crown. The intendencia system was in part meant to end this ambiguity. As in the Peninsula, the Crown attempted to create in the New World a base of salaried and career officials that could provide the king and his ministers with a body of loyal and competent agents against the power of entrenched interest groups.27

Changes in personnel also aimed to support shifts in exchequer matters. The Crown aspired to improve the revenue system and regain responsibilities previously delegated to private hands. Here too old posts were replaced by new ones and filled by fresh officials who were expected to provide the collection and management of royal revenues with a professional foundation. Some steps had been taken towards this goal in the early 1750s when the Crown cancelled some of the contracts that charged merchant guilds with the task of collecting sales taxes in exchange of a previously agreed annual sum. By the second half of the 1770s, a small army of salaried officials and accountants covered large areas of New Spain and Peru directly managing royal revenue affairs. As part of this effort of rationalization, officials retrieved and attempted to consolidate a wide range—and often inconsistent—body of fiscal laws and decrees.

The introduction of new accounting techniques, the double entry method in particular, simplified royal accounts and made them easier to be monitored. The Crown, through Gálvez, even tried to undermine the fiscal powers of the viceroys by means of transferring their treasury

26 In New Spain at least, the practice, known as reparto de mercancías, was banned in 1751 only to be subsequently reestablished and regulated until it was finally prohibited in 1786. 27 Horst Pietschmann, Las reformas borbónicas y el sistema de intendencias en Nueva España (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1996); Brading, Merchants and Miners, 33-92 and “Bourbon Spain and its American Empire,” 401-406.

responsibilities to a group of newly appointed high-ranking officials—if only for a brief period of time, until 1787. All in all, fiscal measures sought to turn exchequer matters into a more specialized and cogent sphere of the government—which in turn, reformers anticipated, would give the Crown unequivocal control over the excises and revenues collected across the New

World domains.28

Fiscal and administrative shifts both reinforced and were motivated by the defensive reorganization of the empire. Fortifying inland and coastal boundaries, as mentioned above, was of critical importance to the Crown—a lesson that Carlos III and his ministers learned only too well after the British besieged and then occupied Manila (1762-1764) and Havana (1762-1763) during the Seven Years War. There were, as well, continuous melées over imperial boundaries in

South America against the Portuguese. Up north, imperial rivalries between the Spanish, French, and British often coalesced with a number of local and entrenched disputes between settlers, missionaries, and indigenous polities and groups. The response of the Spanish Crown was to send permanent regiments to strategic areas particularly vulnerable to foreign attacks. Cuba was first, but then other many locales in New Spain, New Granada, Peru, and La Plata followed suit.

It was, indeed, an unprecedented move. Thus far, the Spanish New World had not had a regular army. The creation of local militias was the other great innovation of the Crown’s defensive reforms. In principle, militias not only would reinforce permanent regiments in case of an occupation, but also would contribute to the policing of the provinces. In other words, militias

28 See, Brading, “Bourbon Spain and its American Empire,” 406-409; Florescano and Menegus, “La época de las reformas,” 366-375; Tanck and Marichal, “¿Reino o colonia,” 321-327; and Marichal, “La economía de la época borbónica,” 187-194.

and regiments intended to increase the powers of coercion of the Crown against both internal and external enemies.29

Overall, the reforms strove to give the Spanish New World a new place within the general framework of the empire. It is still a matter of debate whether they fully managed to instigate the transformations that the Crown and its ministers envisioned. The reforms, indeed, were full of inconsistencies and improvisations.30 Yet they were not entirely deprived of logic and purpose. They were the result of the increasing financial and military pressures posed by world-wide competition between several transoceanic empires. As rulers and high-ranking officials tried to cope with ongoing changes in the world economy and politics, the measures they devised contributed to altering many of the previous assumptions and practices directing the finances and governance of the empire. The changes ended up transforming the foundations of the relationship between the Crown and its subjects. At the heart of this newly reshaped relationship was one central question: how could subjects serve better the Crown and the empire.

Serving the Crown and the empire, indeed, became everyone’s duty. Each subject must contribute to the grand effort of remodeling the empire—and everybody had something precious with which they could collaborate in what reformers saw as the higher task of restoring the power and greatness of the Spanish monarchy. Even the humblest, the ones legally considered

29 J. H. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World, 298-301; Brading, “Bourbon Spain and its American Empire,” 400- 401 and 408; and Peter Bakewell, A History of Latin America: c. 1450 to the Present (Malden: Blackwell, 2003), 285-294. 30 John Fisher, “Soldiers, Societies, and Politics in Spanish America,” in Latin American Research Review 17, no.1 (1982): 217–222.

minors and susceptible to tutelage: indios and their pueblos.31 They too were asked to assist in the process of imperial reform for they possessed one significantly valuable resource, one that most ministers of the king considered the main source of wealth in the empire. Pueblos de indios possessed land.

The Reform of pueblos de indios in New Spain

Imperial fiscal needs and the search for new sources of wealth thus motivated the first comprehensive reform of pueblos de indios in New Spain in many generations. The reform significantly changed how pueblos managed their own funds and possessions; in the process, some new ground rules concerning indigenous people's holdings were established. During the last third of the eighteenth-century and until the imperial crisis of 1808, wars against the French and the British required all possible sources of revenues to be at the disposal of the Crown. The reform of indigenous municipalities limited the spending of pueblos and pressed them to keep savings and augment their incomes. Then royal officials assumed control of the surpluses and diverted the funds to support the defense of the empire. In limiting spending, forcing savings, increasing returns, and assuming control of surpluses, the reform also modified the very basic conditions under which land was held by indigenous municipalities thereafter: it established the principle according to which communal lands became valuable primarily insofar as they could produce wealth and revenues; it linked land and municipal reform to moral reform; and finally, it

31 See, Woodrow Borah, Justice by Insurance: the General Indian Court of Colonial Mexico and the Legal Aides of the Half-Real (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 82-119.

introduced the idea that local indigenous autonomy was counter to the general improvement of society and the management of the government.

From the late sixteenth century, when Spanish authorities implemented a massive relocation policy known as congregaciones or reducciones, indigenous people had not experienced such a full-fledged intervention on the part of the Crown. Under the Habsburgs, internal affairs were mostly left to local officials and indigenous authorities. Conflicts surfaced all the time, but were generally handled through special courts and well-established informal compromises. It was a fragile and knotty order in which the actual capacity of the Crown to assert its authority depended on reinforcing the autonomy of local and regional cliques. The whole empire had been built in that way. That is, by acknowledging that the Crown would only have a limited control over its subjects and admitting that it was impossible to rule without entrusting others many of the burdens and responsibilities of the empire. The power of the

Spanish monarchy thus was the result of a wide network of interdependent interests in which

Madrid comprised but one of its ends.32 A fragile and knotty order, indeed, but not unwieldy. It was operative enough to provide everybody with an incentive to maintain the status quo.

Indigenous authorities, significantly, were legally entitled to manage the funds and holdings of their pueblos.

Pueblos de indios was the name with which indigenous municipalities were known in the

New World. Pueblos held a distinct legal status within the political and administrative organization of the empire. As lawful members of the Spanish monarchy, the Crown endowed

32 Henry Kamen, Empire: How Spain Became a World Power, 1492-1763 (New York: Perennial, 2004).

them with certain prerogatives. Chief among them was the right to possess, use, and derive benefits from lands specially allocated to pueblos by royal instruction. These lands could not be legally sold and were held in common. Yet they were enjoyed and worked in different ways. One portion was designated for the benefit and discrete use of families and individuals, while another one was assigned to the sustenance of pueblos as a whole. Pueblos gave common lands a wide variety of uses and purposes: from grazing and planting to hunting and gathering. Often they also rented common lands to neighboring landowners and other pueblos or to individual tenants that could or could not officially belonged to the pueblo—that is, be considered a tributario, broadly speaking, a taxpayer. The proceeds of these activities supported the local government, provided part of the funds to pay royal taxes, and formed a common reserve utilized in public repairs, periodic civic and religious celebrations, as well as recurrent misfortunes (droughts and epidemics, for instance). Pueblos also invested common proceeds in acquiring new possessions and in making loans to landowners, small cultivators, and cattle-raisers. Together, funds and holdings comprised what late eighteenth-century Bourbon authorities labeled as bienes de comunidad.33

In exchange for having the benefit of handling their own resources, pueblos were obligated to pay tributes and taxes to the Crown. This also meant providing labor for commercial and public enterprises—working in the mines or building roads and aqueducts, for instance.

Spanish authorities policed and supervised pueblos, and provided mediation and justice relying

33 Dorothy Tanck de Estrada, Pueblos de indios y educación en el México colonial, 1750-1821 (Mexico: El Colegio de México, 1999) 17-74; ; Felipe Castro Gutiérrez, Los tarascos y el imperio español (Mexico: UNAM / Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolás de Hidalgo, 2004), 120-132 and 196-208.

on a set of norms and institutions specially designed to deal with indigenous municipalities.

Pueblos assumed responsibility of internal affairs and had direct control of how to use local funds and holdings. Repúblicas and cajas de comunidad, in that sense, comprised the twin pillars of pueblos de indios. Repúblicas were a local council constituted by elected authorities who, among other things, decided over the management of common funds and holdings. Cajas de comunidad were chests in which indigenous authorities kept funds, account records, and documents backing landed and non-landed possessions. Cajas de comunidad, in other words, constituted the treasury of pueblos de indios. Indigenous councils, the repúblicas, often administered the resources of pueblos in consultation with former república members and non- official authorities such as the elders of each pueblo or the priest. Spanish officials could also oversee and interfere with the decisions taken by indigenous authorities. Conflicts among the members of indigenous councils and between councils and their local rivals were common. In spite of this, pueblos generally enjoyed ample economic and administrative autonomy.34

Bourbon reformers began to see the administrative and economic autonomy of pueblos disapprovingly. It stood in the way of the concentration of authority and the search for revenues sought by the Crown’s ministers. Autonomy was no longer seen as a reliable instrument of governance, but as a dubious mechanism thwarting the proper running of the government. A clear evidence of how much terrain the Crown had ceded and how much it would have to reclaim, reformers protested. According to them, administrative independence fostered and even endorsed carelessness. More importantly, it made the supervision of local funds difficult and

34 Ibid.

deceitful. Economic autonomy, for its part, encouraged wastefulness and idleness; resources that may otherwise be put to work and yield returns remained underutilized if not entirely inactive.

This, ministers and high-ranking officials argued, could do nothing but limit royal revenues. The meager the output, the smaller the incomes. The intervention of the Crown was thus deemed necessary. As one of the major intellectual figures influencing the overall reform of the empire,

Joseph del Campillo y Cosío, stated back in the early 1740s: “todo lo que sea aumentar la

Agricultura, las Artes y el Comercio en un Reyno, es darle un nuevo tesoro al Real Erario."35

Everything, and above all, political and administrative centralization.

In New Spain, the two major instruments of centralization and reform of indigenous municipalities were the Contaduría General de Propios, Arbitrios y Bienes de Comunidad and the reglamentos de bienes de comunidad. The creation of the Contaduría General in 1766, under the supervision of José de Gálvez, was part of the larger effort of the Crown to centralize and reorganize the entire imperial revenue system. One key aspect of this effort consisted in giving central authorities direct control of municipal accounts. It was the first time that royal officials had such a wide and penetrating ascendancy over local finances. The measure was initially tried in Spain beginning in 1760, but it soon grew into a universal policy affecting municipalities throughout the New World. The Spanish municipalities of New Spain were the first to experience the reform. Yet beginning in 1773 concrete steps dealing with the financial organization of pueblos de indios were also taken. That year the Contaduría General elaborated

35 Joseph del Campillo y Cosío, Nuevo sistema del gobierno económico para la América. Con los males y daños que le causa el que hoy tiene, de los que participa copiosamente España; y remedios universales para que la primera tenga considerables ventajas, y la segunda mayores intereses (Madrid: Imprenta de Benito Cano, 1779 [1743]), 109.

the first reglmento de bienes de comunidad. By 1784, reglamentos already organized the finances of at least 1,600 pueblos de indios—around 35% of the total.36

The enactment of the Real Ordenanza de Intendentes in 1786—the piece of royal legislation establishing the intendencia system in the New World—furthered the influence of central authorities over indigenous municipalities. The Ordenanza not only endorsed the measures thus far taken by Gálvez and contadores generales, but extended the number of royal officials entitled to oversee the finances of pueblos de indios. The Contaduría General now relied on intendants and subdelegados to implement the reglamentos de bienes de comunidad. The

Ordenanza also created the Junta Superior de Real Hacienda. The Junta Superior became the highest fiscal institution in New Spain. Yet the Contaduría General remained the operative center of royal fiscal policies. Thus, on the eve of the 1810 Hidalgo insurrection, around 70% of the almost 4,500 pueblos de indios of New Spain conformed to the reglamentos de bienes de comunidad—pueblos without reglamento, it should be noted, complied with the requirements of central authorities through alternative channels and regulations.37

The reform of indigenous municipalities was a patent expression of the rationalizing impetus permeating all other imperial reforms. Land surveys, censuses, and tallies were the newfound weapons with which royal officials were equipped to carry out the reform. Collecting, assembling, sifting, and contrasting information provided the Crown with seemingly innocuous, but powerful and insightful tools to keep track of the finances of pueblos de indios. The

36 See, Tanck, Pueblos de indios y educación, 22. 37 Ibid, 27.

procedure did not change significantly during the two main periods of the reform—that is, previous and after the Ordenanza de Intendentes of 1786. Officials in Mexico City instructed local authorities to carry out a detailed inspection of the accounts and holdings of pueblos de indios (in time, this inspection and the resulting reports were supposed to be conducted annually). The inspection involved at least three types of surveys. First, a survey of all municipal holdings, that is, all bienes de comunidad (real estate, livestock, money). Second, a survey of expenses and incomes supplemented by receipts and information specifying whether there were missing funds or surpluses. Finally, a survey of the excises placed upon municipal holdings.

Accountants both in Mexico City and the provinces revised the information, noted down errors or oversights, and then devised individual reglamentos for each pueblo de indios.38 It was, indeed, an echo in the New World of the great survey and census implemented in Spain under

Fernando VI in the late 1740s and early 1750s—the famous Catastro de Ensenada.

Reglamentos marked a significant shift in the management of pueblos de indios resources. They drastically limited and reorganized the spending of indigenous municipalities.

Notably, the funds destined to religious celebrations and some of the prerogatives associated with occupying a seat in the local council (the república) experienced major cuts. The expenses of most pueblos de indios—but also the expenses of most Spanish municipalities—were usually greater than their incomes. Pueblos spent large sums in honoring their patron saints and other religious figures. Some pueblos performed several ceremonies, processions, and feasts during the year—not unlike Spanish towns. Fireworks, candles, compensations given to priests, common

38 Ibid.

meals, and the annual number of festivities were rationed. Pueblos, the new regulations mandated, should instead spend part of their common funds in the establishment of schools. This was, in fact, one of the few expenses authorized by royal accountants outside of the strictly necessary for the running of the local government. Indios, it was established, should learn how to write and read and take lessons on Christian doctrine. Tellingly, lessons should be imparted in

Spanish and not in indigenous languages as missionaries had done ever since the early sixteenth century. Means of communication should too serve the financial ends sought by the Crown; languages must be adapted to the idiom of administrative uniformity.

Decisively, reglamentos established unprecedented forms of policing common lands.

Royal accountants not only specified how funds should be spent. They also set a policy of forced savings and determined how exactly pueblos should employed their common lands. Cutting expenses was not enough. Cajas de comunidad should show positive numbers annually.

Moreover, pueblos ought to increase as much as possible their returns. The reglamentos thus turned to the lands that pueblos typically granted on lease to others and the lands that, from the point of view of royal officials, remained unoccupied or inactive. Indigenous authorities and royal officials should take note and report the existence of all such lands. Once identified and registered, “idle” common lands must be rented out, preferably but not necessarily to the locals.

Tenancy, in any case, was always favored over customary usages, that is, usages that did not render surpluses. As for lands already on lease, pueblos should explicitly notify royal officials

and accountants about their existence and, more importantly, should give written form to what were otherwise customary oral agreements and transactions.39

The reform, indeed, echoed the utilitarian rationale with which the Crown’s ministers and officials had come to measure all lands in the empire. Most reformers agreed with Campillo y

Cosío when he asserted that agriculture was the “matrix and principal key of everything.”40 Yet

Campillo y Cosío, and many others after him, also insistently argued that lands were of no use if standing idle—neither for the Crown nor for the individuals and social bodies holding the lands.

Landed properties were important only on the condition that they created wealth and yielded revenues and this would only occur if they were used and cultivated. Extending as much as possible arable fields became a central motto of the reform both in Spain and the New World.

Lands must be put to work.

This view was in part the result of an effort by royal officials and ministers to make sense out of ongoing changes across the intendencias of Spain—especially, but not exclusively, in the south and center. In particular, the pressures created by demographic growth, increasing grain prices, and demands for more arable land against cattle-raising and livestock right-of-way— pastoralists, grouped in the powerful guild known as Consejo de la Mesta, customarily counted on the favor and protection of the Crown. High-ranking officials and reformers such as Cicilia

Coello, Manuel Sisternes y Feliú, and Pedro Rodríguez Campomanes saw the changes as an opportunity to prompt a more drastic reform of the countryside. They began to see lands in the

39 Ibid. 40 Campillo y Cosío, Nuevo sistema del gobierno económico para la América, 145.

hands of the Church and municipalities (tierras concejiles), not to mention all unclaimed lands

(tierras baldías), as valuable yet neglected resources. Even royal lands (tierras realengas) not yet conceded for its use by the king should be turned active.41

Such were, too, the principles guiding the reform of indigenous municipalities and their common lands. The New World, according to Campillo y Cosío, was a place of plenty “caudales muertos en manos de Comunidades y particulares.”42 Hence the urgency of reform. Carrying out surveys and keeping reliable fiscal and financial records was essential to figure how to make common lands yield more revenues. Insisting on leasing and cultivating the common lands of pueblos was also, according to the reformers, key to make indios valuable members of the empire. The Crown, Campillo y Cosío contended, did not need talented men. "Basta que sepa trabajar el mayor número, siendo pocos los que deben mandar, que son los que necesitan de luces muy superiores."43 The main question thus was how to turn indios into “vasallos útiles.”44 The answer given by Campillo y Cosío and, later on, by the reglamentos de bienes de comunidad was crystal clear: "que ninguna tierra quede sin fructificar, ni el Indio sin el debido fomento ácia el trabajo, ni sin beneficio razonable y seguro."45

The appropriation of the common funds of pueblos by the Crown and the restriction of local autonomy were the corollary of the reform of indigenous municipalities. Not only did

41 Felipa Sánchez Salazar, “El reparto y venta de las tierras concejiles como proyecto de los ilustrados,” 123-141; Sergio García Ávila, Las comunidades indígenas en Michoacán. Un largo camino hacia la privatización de la tierra, 1765-1835 (Morelia: Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas-Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolás de Hidalgo, 2009). 42 Campillo y Cosío, Nuevo sistema del gobierno económico para la América, 147. 43 Ibid, 91. 44 Ibid, 90. 45 Ibid, 95.

indigenous councils face increasing pressures on the part of royal officials to submit detailed reports of all bienes de comunidad; repúblicas also lost significant ground in the management of common funds. Technically, almost no expenses could be made without the sanction of central authorities. Sometimes, not even without the authorization of local officials. Pueblos ought to petition authorities the release of funds specifying how exactly they would employ the moneys.

Accountants in Mexico City and the capital cities of the provinces (intendencias after 1786) assessed whether expenses conformed to the austerity policies of the Crown. The members of the

Junta Superior de Hacienda and the High Court (real audiencia) of New Spain then had the last word. Deciding over the use of common funds was no longer a prerogative of indigenous councils. As a result, pueblos in general lost much of their previous (if always relative and negotiated) administrative and economic autonomy.

From the early 1780s until 1808, the Crown made copious use of the funds coming from cajas de comunidad. In this period, the Crown received from pueblos de indios more than 2.3 million silver pesos. It was a small amount compared to the approximately 250 million sent from all the royal treasuries of New Spain to the Caribbean, the Philippines, and Spain during roughly the same time span. Small, but not irrelevant. Especially considering that the Crown was constantly at pains to secure every possible income to face escalating wars, first against the

British (1779-1783), then against revolutionary France (1793-1795), and then again against the

British (1796-1802 and 1805-1808).46

46 Tanck, Pueblos de indios, 137; Tanck and Marichal, “¿Reino o colonia?,” 327.

The Crown drew on the funds of cajas de comunidad in a variety of ways. The reform gave royal accountants and central authorities ample capacities to retain most of the surpluses produced every year by cajas de comunidad. These surpluses were supposed to be destined to fulfill the needs of pueblos de indios and provide relief in the event of emergencies and crises

(shortages of food, natural disasters, epidemics). With every coming war, however, the Crown experienced major contingencies of its own. Royal officials thus devised various stratagems to get a hold of pueblos de indios moneys. Sometimes the Crown simply resorted to forced loans.

On other occasions, royal accountants invested the proceeds in the newly created Banco de San

Carlos, or the Company of the Philippines, or later on, the Consolidación de Vales Reales. Every so often, pueblos de indios—some willingly, some reluctantly, some against their will or knowledge—formally donated their funds to the Crown.47 Thus, by the turn of the century, as

Dorothy Tanck sums up, “la escuela era más importante que la fiesta religiosa; la obtención de un caudal sobrante tenía prioridad sobre la escuela y la fiesta, y las exigencias financieras de la monarquía predominaban sobre las necesidades de los pueblos en lo referente al uso del dinero sobrante.”48 Practically speaking, imperial conflicts had turned common funds into yet another war excise.

Overall, the reform set three major precedents whose influence lasted for many decades after most of Spanish America had separated from the monarchy. First, the insistence on

47 Natalia Silva Prada, “Contribución de la población indígena novohispana al erario real. El donativo gracioso y voluntario o ‘rigorosa pensión’ de 1781 y su impacto en recaudaciones posteriores,” in Signos Históricos 1, no. 1 (1999) 28-58. 48 Tanck, Pueblos de indios, 336.

transforming the “character” of indigenous people. From the late eighteenth century on, most reforms felt back on the argument that no prosperity could be achieved without simultaneously changing the “ways” and “temperament” of indigenous people. That is, without turning them into useful and industrious members of the polity or, as many reformers considered being the same, economically rational creatures. This, Bourbon reformers argued, required more than just an economic change. It also entailed a moral transformation, a drastic shift in how indigenous people behaved and what they did outside of the workplace. Second, the idea of changing the

“purpose” of indigenous people’s holdings. The lands and possessions of pueblos de indios, reformers stipulated, should primarily serve useful and productive ends. Pueblos, as a whole, must be turned into profitable and revenue-making institutions. Third was the questioning of local autonomy. Who should decide over the holdings of indigenous municipalities? Subsequent reforms and policies cast the same doubt as Bourbon reformers on the managerial and economic convenience of local autonomy. It was not enough to make pueblos profitable and indigenous people industrious. Local governments should also conform to the requirements set by central and regional authorities.

The late eighteenth-century reform of indigenous municipalities also had unforeseen consequences. For all their managerial zeal and penchant for centralization, reformers could not always (and frequently did not even try to) contravene the age-old practices driving the modus operandi of the empire. Asserting the authority of the king and enforcing reforms still depended to a great extent on local and regional cliques. The Crown may have succeeded in creating a stratum of reliable high-ranking officials and accountants, but middling and lower authorities

remained deeply attached to the many compromises that had long shaped governance on the ground. Differences between central authorities and local officials continually surfaced. Many subdelegados (the new and allegedly more trustworthy local officials created by the Ordenanza de Intendentes of 1786) still acted with ample independence. Complaints on the part of royal accountants about the behavior of local officials were, in fact, very common; particularly, regarding the mismanagement of municipal common funds.49

Indigenous authorities, for their part, found a number of stratagems to deal with the new criteria established by municipal reform. Many indigenous councils, when possible, misreported the available funds and holdings in their pueblos. The transference of municipal resources and lands to religious brotherhoods (cofradías) in order to avoid the financial checks of royal accountants also became customary. When central authorities began to regulate cofradías, repúblicas started to allocate common lands to families and individuals, although usage and proceeds remained surreptitiously communal. In general, time-honored bargaining between royal officials and indigenous authorities persisted. Subdelegados and indigenous authorities still exchanged favors and threats, and sometimes kept mutual settlements out of the sight of top- ranking officials. Intendants complied with the mandates of the Junta Superior de Hacienda, but always tried not to upset regional power balances. Thus, in spite of the growing coercive and administrative capacity of the Crown, a great deal of implicit understandings and informal barters continued mediating between the king and its subjects. All in all, the reform of

49 Iván Franco Cáceres, La Intendencia de Valladolid de Michoacán: 1786-1809. Reforma administrativa y exacción fiscal en una región de la Nueva España (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica / Instituto Michoacano de Cultura, 2001), 128-183.

indigenous municipalities accommodated as much as it contributed to change the old local compromises that once had helped to create the empire. Subsequent reforms would follow a very similar pattern. Reformers would dictate a series of policies and local conditions would determine the course and extent of the reforms.50

Seeds of Land Reform

Significantly enough, Bourbon reforms did not question the principle of communal landholding.

They curtailed the right of pueblos de indios to manage their funds and dictated how pueblos should use their lands. Yet the reforms did not alter property rights. Pueblos remained the collective holders of lands and other assets. Plans and initiatives to replace property rights, however, were in no way absent. Intellectuals and reformers, both in Spain and the New World, began to advocate for ending corporate land tenure. Calls for a drastic and comprehensive land reform became stronger. Individual property rights, it was finally argued, was the ultimate and necessary step towards the regeneration of the countryside. The irruption of Atlantic-wide revolutions would offer reformers the chance to turn their ideas into concrete actions. Yet revolutions also precipitated a radical political shift. Powerful forces once contained within the framework of the empire were liberated. Plans of reform would come about against a landscape of major political conflicts and struggles to keep the empire together.

50 See, Tanck, Pueblos de indios; Brian Hamnett, “Obstáculos a la política agraria del despotismo ilustrado,” in Problemas agrarios y propiedad en México, siglos XVIII y XIX, ed. Margarita Menegus (Mexico: El Colegio de México, 1995) 1-21.

Arguments in favor of a profound land reform, first in Spain and later on in the New

World, gradually added more advocates during the second half of the eighteenth century.

Campillo y Cosío had previously recommended distributing in small fractions the uncultivated lands of the New World to indios—including part of the adjacent lands surrounding municipalities and settlements (especially the moorlands or tierras montuosas).51 The Consejo de

Castilla in Madrid had also been gathering information on agricultural matters since at least

1752. Yet reforming ideals really began to take off when a number of intellectual associations known as sociedades económicas de amigos del país (Economic Societies of Friends of the

Country) were formed. Sanctioned by Carlos III and sponsored by Pedro Rodríguez

Campomanes (one of the most influential ministers of the king), the first of these associations appeared in 1764. From then on, sociedades económicas became leading centers of intellectual discussion and promotion. As part of their activities, sociedades económicas sponsored a number of studies and reports on agrarian subjects. The goal was to provide the Crown with a set of recommendations that would serve as the basis of a new agrarian law and a comprehensive land reform.

It was in the midst of this animated intellectual milieu that the idea of replacing existing forms of corporate landholding with individual property rights took hold. Rodríguez

Campomanes himself published in 1765 an uncompromising vindication of “el uso de la autoridad civil, para impedir las ilimitadas enagenaciones de bienes raíces en Iglesias,

51 Campillo y Cosío, Nuevo sistema del gobierno económico para la América, 83-87, 92-99.

Comunidades, y otras manos muertas" (as the long subtitle of his treatise stated).52 Later on, in

1786, the powerful sociedad económica of Madrid (an initiative of Rodríguez Campomanes) published Manuel Sisternes y Feliu’s outline of a new agrarian law. Sisternes y Feliu condensed what was becoming a growing consensus among many intellectuals and officials working for the

Crown. A disproportionate accumulation of lands by few hands, Sisternes y Feliu believed, was the main cause of the ruinous state of Spain’s agriculture. The main purpose of a new agrarian law, he argued, was thus “la división de terrenos en suertes proporcionadas a las facultades del cultivador.”53 Smallholding and individual property would be the twin pillars of a new agriculture. The law, in that sense, should allow individuals to fence their properties. Moreover, the law should grant the right to buy municipal and uncultivated lands. Once acquired, Sisternes y Feliu concluded, “quedarán los dueños de tierras en plena libertad de cultivarlas por sí, darlas en enfiteusin, ó arrendarlas como tuvieren por mas conveniente."54

Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos, head of the sociedad económica of Madrid for some years, took these ideas to a more drastic conclusion. Like most Spanish reformers, Jovellanos considered agriculture as the single most important source of wealth and cultivation as the main and more productive of all agrarian activities. As a result, not unlike Sisternes y Feliu, he saw the project of an agrarian law as a means to foster smallholding and look after the interest of cultivators. Yet Jovellanos conceived this interest in strictly individualistic terms. Drawing on

52 See, Pedro Rodríguez Campomanes, Tratado de la regalía de amortización (Madrid: Imprenta Real de la Gaceta, 1765). See also, Brading, Orbe Indiano, 544-546. 53 Manuel Sisternes y Feliu, Idea de la ley agraria española (Valencia: Oficina de D. Benito Monfort, 1786), 3. 54 Ibid, 44.

Adam Smith, he linked personal fortune to general prosperity. The overall performance of the economy depended upon the pursuance of self-interest. The less restrictions personal interest had, Jovellanos believed, the greater the chances of improving the economy and creating an orderly society. The “continua lucha de intereses,” he asserted, “establece naturalmente un equilibrio que jamás podrían alcanzar las leyes.” As a consequence, an agrarian law should above all encourage cultivator’s “fortuna particular hasta el sumo posible” and “remover los estorbos que se oponen a libre accion del interes de sus agentes.” 55 According to Jovellanos (and most advocates of land reform after him), among the greatest of these hindrances there were all the forms of ownership that maintained limits to the “free” purchase and selling of lands by individuals—that is, the corporate land rights of the Church, aristocrats, and municipalities, as well as the right-of-way and grazing prerogatives of the cattle raising guild of the Mesta. Turning lands into buyable and saleable goods, letting supply and demand dictate the right distribution of lands, and giving individuals full property rights, Jovellanos finally and unambiguously argued, were the Crown’s best chances of revitalizing the agriculture of the kingdom.56

The history of how exactly these ideas—the ideas of classic economic liberalism— circulated across the Spanish empire is yet to be written. It is nonetheless clear that by the last decade of the eighteenth century they had already resonated with many intellectual circles in the

New World. Manuel Abad y Queipo is one of the best and more lucid examples of this. Abad y

55 Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos, Informe de la sociedad económica de esta Corte al Real y Supremo Consejo de Castilla en el expediente de ley agraria (Madrid: Imprenta de Sancha, 1795), 10. 56 Ibid, 141-149. See also, David Brading, Orbe Indiano, 550-551; Aurora Gómez Galvarriato and Emilio Kourí, “Las reforma económica, finanzas públicas, mercados y tierras,” in Nación, Constitución y Reforma, 1821-1908, in ed. Erika Pani (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica / CIDE / Conaculta / INEHRM / Fundación Cultural de la Ciudad de México, 2010), 96-99.

Queipo was familiar with the ongoing efforts of creating a new agrarian law in Spain and was well-acquainted with the writings of Adam Smith and the French physiocrats. His ideas about the economy and agriculture, however, also stemmed directly from having worked many years in

New Spain for the bishop of Michoacán fray Antonio de San Miguel—Abad y Queipo arrived in

New Spain in 1786 and was himself elected bishop of Michoacán in 1810. Like Sisternes y Feliu and Jovellanos had done for Spain, Abad y Queipo concluded that the root of agricultural problems in New Spain was the unequal (and unfair) distribution of lands of the kingdom.

Following Campillo y Cosío, he recommended apportioning to indios and castas all uncultivated royal lands. The unused lands of large estates should also be put to work by means of establishing long-term leasing agreements between landless people and landowners.

Furthermore, Abad y Queipo argued in favor of “la abolicion general de tributos en las dos clases de Indios y castas” and the “libre permision de avecindarse en los pueblos de Indios, y construir en ellos casas y edificios pagando el suelo, a todas las clases españoles, castas e indios de otros pueblos.” Notably, he also recommended dividing and distributing communal lands among the members of pueblo de indios.57

Once situated in the context of the New World, arguments in favor of land reform had thus taken an entire new direction. As Abad y Queipo clearly understood, altering property rights

57 Manuel Abad y Queipo, "Representación sobre la inmunidad personal del clero, reducida por las leyes del nuevo código, en el cual se propuso al rey el asunto de diferentes leyes, que establecidas harían la base principal de un gobierno liberal y benéfico para las Américas y para su metrópoli," in José María Luis Mora, Obras completas, vol. 3 (Mexico: Instituto Mora / Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, 1986), 60-61. Abad y Queipo utilized the general and ambiguous expression of tierras de comunidades de Indios. It is thus unclear whether he meant distributing all communal lands, the communal lands already allocated to families and individuals, or the communal lands devoted to the common use and benefit of the pueblos.

also meant significantly changing the general legal framework regulating the status of pueblos de indios. Practically speaking, the end of tribute, as Abad y Queipo had advised, would make the category of indio useless. The notion of indio was intimately linked to the payment of tribute.

Paying tribute was an obligation and a mark of social subordination. Yet tribute also turned indios into members of the polity entitled to concrete legal prerogatives as lawful subjects of the

Crown. Without tribute, the legal status of indios would drastically have to change. Similarly, the legal end of residence restrictions, conceived by Abad y Queipo as a way to end the isolation of indios, would render the notion of pueblos de indios meaningless—such restrictions, it should be noted, were never entirely observed, especially during the eighteenth century. Finally, by removing corporate rights over land, the division of communal lands would also make the category of pueblos de indios ineffectual. Without corporate rights, the incentive of belonging to a pueblo would gradually disappear. Indios, according to Abad y Queipo, would then be freed from all the constrictions impeding their full insertion into society and would finally be able to come out of indigence and degradation. Together, Abad y Queipo’s propositions entailed the abolition of nearly all administrative and legal distinctions between indios, castas, and españoles. Abad y Queipo never explicitly talked about universal or natural equality in the manner of the American and French revolutionaries. His arguments and reforming ideas, however, clearly pointed in that direction.

By linking land policies to the question of equality, Abad y Queipo suggested that land reform in the New World would also have to be a political and social reform. None of the main reformers in Spain had previously considered such possibility. The peculiar conditions of

Spanish America—the presence of thousands of pueblos de indios—had given the question of land redistribution an unforeseen dimension. Any significant change in land rights would almost certainly require changing the legal status of indios. Agrarian problems were not solely economic, Abad y Queipo implied; they were problems of social and political inequality. Land reform, in that sense, would be more than a matter of creating “vasallos útiles” and turning lands productive. The creation of wealth was not the only issue at stake. Such had been the viewpoint informing municipal reforms in Spain and New Spain.58 At stake was the very nature of the entire legal system that had set indios apart from the rest of society. Land reform would then be a means to achieve higher ends. It would be a tool to mitigate the poverty and material privations of pueblos de indios. Yet it would also be an instrument to offer indios a new status, a new place within the body politic. Indios, Abad y Queipo argued, would lose their old prerogatives, but they would too get rid of the burdens they were forced to endure. Their obligations and entitlements would be those of the rest.59

58 Although some of his arguments coincided with the spirit of the municipal reform of pueblos de indios, Abad y Queipo was very critical of it and he actually saw in the reform yet another reason to implement a thorough land reform: “Circunscriptos en el circulo que forma un radio de seiscientas varas, que señala la ley a sus pueblos, no tienen propiedad individual. La de sus comunidades, que cultivan apremiados y sin interés inmediato, debe ser para ellos una carga tanto mas odiosa, cuanto mas ha ido crecediendo de dia en dia la dificultad de aprovecharse de sus productos, en las necesidades urjentes que vienen á ser insuperables po la nueva forma de manejo que estableció el código de intedencias, como que nada se puede diponer en la materia sin recurso a la junta superior de Real Hacienda de Mejico.” (55). 59 For an example of similar arguments discussed in another area of Spanish America see, Adolfo Bonilla Bonilla, Ideas económicas en la Centroamérica ilustrada, 1793-1838 (San Salvador: FLACSO El Salvador, 1999), 117-214.

Imperial Crisis and the Birth of Land Politics

In the years to come, the nexus between land and political reforms would be definitely established. The great crisis of 1808 gave new life to the arguments in favor of a comprehensive imperial reform. Previous calls for changing property rights and claims for removing the legal distinctions that divided royal subjects into different classes (estamentos) gained a remarkable impetus. Neither an agrarian law nor a coherent land policy came about before the Spanish empire collapsed. Yet the crisis galvanized all previous initiatives in favor of changing the land tenure regime of pueblos de indios. Instructions dictating the partial conversion of communal into private property were finally issued in the fall of 1812 and winter of 1813. Earlier, in March of 1812, unprecedented measures affecting the legal status of indios were also taken. The crisis drastically transformed the political makeup of the empire. A single constitution, meant to rule over all Spanish domains without distinction, was promulgated. The constitution implicitly conferred indios the same status as the rest of the Spanish subjects and granted them the right to become citizens (a measure that applied only to men). Land and politics had inextricably come together.

These measures came about in the middle of the most extraordinary events. From 1793 to

1825, people from all across the Spanish domains experienced a number of conflicts and exceptional circumstances that would eventually lead to the fragmentation of the empire and would bring centuries of Spanish rule over vast areas of the Americas to an end. Years of international warfare resulted in the creation of an extraordinary space of debate and an unprecedented expansion of political participation. Imperial conflicts, also gave way to a struggle

for liberation against an occupying army in the Spanish peninsula and to civil war and widespread popular disobedience in the Americas. Debates and armed conflicts on both sides of the Atlantic caused many to challenge received notions of authority. Equally important, the crisis made politics the business of everyone—intellectuals, military officers, government officials, priests, but also indios, castas, and slaves.

Alternative and competing views of political participation—previously forbidden or unimaginable—thus surfaced. The new alternatives enabled vast possibilities of enfranchisement and popular empowerment. They also brought along a number of dilemmas.

Political agitation had reached nearly all social ranks within the monarchy. Egalitarian claims, representative institutions, and the rights associated with the notion of citizenship resonated very differently with each of the old classes and groups of the empire. Individual property rights over land and enfranchisement turned out to be as much as an audacious solution to the disparities of the old regime as a deep source of disputes and disagreements. The fall of the empire did not settle the question opened by decades of reform, wars, and political struggles. It only marked the beginning of a long history of conflicts around communal property and the place of indigenous people in the new order.60

60 See, Jaime E. Rodríguez O., "We are now the true Spaniards": Sovereignty, Revolution, Independence, and the Emergence of the Federal Republic of Mexico, 1808-1824 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012); Jaime E. Rodríguez O., The independence of Spanish America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); John Tutino, From Insurrection to Revolution in Mexico: Social Bases of Agrarian Violence, 1750-1940 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986); John Tutino, "Soberanía quebrada, insurgencias populares y la Independencia de México la guerra de independencias," in Historia Mexicana 59, no.1 (2009), 11-75; Alfredo Ávila, En nombre de la nación. La formación del gobierno representativo en México, 1808-1824 (Mexico: Taurus / CIDE, 1999); Mónica Quijada, "Una constitución singular. La carta gaditana en perspectiva comparada," in Revista de Indias 58, no. 242, (2008): 15-38; Eric Van Young, The Other Rebellion: Popular Violence, Ideology, and the Mexican Struggle for

In the fall of 1807, a combined army of Spanish and French forces invaded Portugal. The occupation turned out to be a disaster for the Spanish Crown. Taking advantage of ongoing rivalries between Carlos IV and his son and heir Fernando, Napoleon Bonaparte ordered the invasion of Spain. Fernando’s followers rioted in Madrid fearing this was an act in favor of

Carlos IV. As a result, the king renounced to the throne, although he later claimed the abdication was done under coercion. Napoleon, however, made his brother, Joseph Bonaparte, king of Spain after having summoned and captured both Carlos and Fernando (now known as Fernando VII) in

Bayonne, France. The French emperor also ordered the writing and enactment of a constitution for Spain. It was a neat and almost perfectly performed move. An exhibition of power by

Napoleon. But it backfired and gave way to the largest political mobilizations ever witnessed in the Spanish empire.

In May 2, 1808, people in Madrid revolted against the French government and its local allies. The repression of the revolt triggered further uprisings across Spain. Then, something unexpected happened. A number of recently formed regional assemblies, known as juntas, began to argue that in the absence of the king sovereignty reverted to the people. Juntas, so the argument ran, were entitled to govern on behalf of Fernando VII until he could return to Spain.

Different juntas came into contact with one another and formed a general assembly called Junta

Suprema Central Gubernativa. As representatives of popular sovereignty, the members of the

Independence, 1810-1821 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001); Jeremy Adelman, "An Age of Imperial Revolutions," in American Historical Review 113: (2008), 319-340; Jeremy Adelman, "Iberian Passages: Continuity and Change in the South Atlantic," The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c. 1760-1840, eds. in David Armitage and Sanjay Subrahmanyam (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010), 59-82; C.A. Bayly, "The Age of Revolutions in Global Context," in The Age of Revolutions, 209-217.

new assembly proclaimed, the Junta Central was the only legitimate authority of the land and would thus take charge of the government. The emergence of local guerrillas, acting independently from the Spanish army, accompanied the formation of the Junta Central. The foundations of the Spanish monarchy had begun to fall apart.

Equally groundbreaking developments on the other side of the Atlantic pushed even further the rapid transformation of the empire. The crisis in Spain provided many American subjects (especially in the largest cities) with the occasion to advance demands that had hitherto remained publicly undeclared: equality between the American domains and Spain, autonomy in the running of local governments, and greater participation in the management of the monarchy.

From 1809 to 1810, efforts to form regional juntas (comparable to the ones in Spain) came to light in several provinces of Spanish America. These efforts, however, faced increasing opposition on the part of numerous high-ranking royal officials and conservative groups for whom yielding to any change represented a threat to the pre-1808 status quo. Early in 1809, forced by the circumstances, the Junta Central acknowledged the equality between overseas domains and Spain and invited American subjects to send representatives to the Junta. Yet the question of autonomy remained a very contentious point. The seemingly incapacity of the Junta

Central to stop Napoleonic troops from completely taking over Spain, as well as growing official hostility towards autonomist initiatives in America, finally resulted in open armed confrontations. Civil war broke out all across Spanish America.

The strife between autonomist movements and royal authorities unleashed even deeper conflicts. Disputes over the legitimate nature of authority gave local and regional actors a space

in which to advance their own particular claims. Political fragmentation set free long-standing rivalries that once the institutions of the monarchy restrained. Claims for new rights and power struggles came together, sometimes inextricably. Rivalries between regional cliques contributed to shape ongoing calls for provincial autonomy, as well as eventual demands for independence.

In the absence of a strong central authority, a number of competing factions fought one another all across Spanish America for supremacy within their own regions. These factions sometimes opposed any attempts to consolidate insurgent movements under a single command (as it happened in the viceroyalties of New Granada and Rio de la Plata). Such opposition had important political and ideological motivations. At the same time, it also favored the ramification of clientelist networks under control of small groups and strongmen.

Political and military struggles between elites also permitted popular groups to advance their grievances and pursue their own ends. Large numbers of slaves joint both royalist and patriot armies to obtain freedom through military recruitment.61 Deprived of many of the prerogatives of other classes, indios laboríos (indios not legally attached to a pueblo), people of mixed origins (castas), and disenfranchised Spaniards rose in revolt massively (as it was the case in New Spain). The unsettling conditions created by armed conflicts provided pueblos with the occasion to bolster self-rule and settle old accounts. Old antagonisms between neighboring pueblos now tended to burst into violence very swiftly. Numerous pueblos stormed against rival landowners, royal officials, and other local notables. Long-standing conflicts over local

61 Peter Blanchard, Under the Flags of Freedom. Slave Soldiers and the Wars of Independence in Spanish South America (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008).

resources, taxes, and local dominance fed this hostility; wartime uncertainty created the conditions to either act upon deep-rooted grievances or seek personal rewards. Intestine disputes also pervaded many pueblos indios. Often, the defense of community bonds and local autonomy and factional competition over internal rule conflated. The imperial crisis offered exceptional political openings in notably unequal societies; along the way, it also set regions, classes, communities, and families apart.

Major initiatives affecting pueblos de indios transpired amid political turbulence. Forced by the French army, the Junta Central withdrew to southern Spain and finally disbanded in

January of 1810. Before dissolving, the Junta named in its place a regency council and instructed the implementation of elections to a parliament (known as the Cortes). Over the spring, a decree issued by the regency exempted indios from paying tribute. The decree, notably, also gave orders to collect information on the existing state of pueblos de indios and ordered the distribution of lands among the neediest of them—without adding further details about which lands in particular would be distributed. In the following months, in an effort to rally the support of popular groups, royal authorities and insurgent leaders promoted additional measures. In New Spain, the viceroy extended tax exemptions to all castas. The rebels, headed by Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, not only declared the end of tributes, but proclaimed slavery abolished, the equality of all men, as well as the elimination of cajas de comunidad and the restitution of pueblos’ direct control over communal proceeds.62

62 García Ávila, Las comunidades indígenas en Michoacán, 185-195, 213-232.

Earlier plans of wide-ranging imperial reform also crystallized and engendered more political agitation. The call for convening a parliament motivated an impressive wave of political debates and mobilizations. The appearance of a clear alternative to civil war and popular insurrection encouraged many middling groups and elites to partake in the process of electing representatives to the Cortes. The prospect of participating in the making of a constitution for the empire and influencing the running of the monarchy provided a unique stimulus for autonomist claims in the New World. Napoleon had previously attempted (without success) to marshal a similar support in favor of the Bayonne constitution, but his bid was perceived as an act of imposition. The Cortes, instead, represented an independent initiative. They represented the occasion to turn the newfound faith in popular sovereignty into reality and a forum to accommodate the voice of numerous Spanish subjects. In principle, overseas and peninsular subjects could exchange ideas on an equal footing for the very first time. Representation in the

Cortes actually favored delegates from Spain and the upper and middling classes from both sides of the Atlantic. The exceptional opening created by the Cortes, however, could hardly be restricted to few small cleavages. The Cortes offered provincial Americans the chance to defend their autonomist claims and regional interests. Inadvertently, they also provided already mobilized grassroots groups with additional means to pursue their particular aspirations and ambitions.

From September of 1810 to September of 1813, the Cortes devised a number of landmark initiatives that reshaped the administrative and political layout of the empire almost in its entirety. The most ingenious and remarkable of them all was the constitution of 1812 (enacted in

Cadiz while French troops laid siege to the city port and already controlled most of Spain’s territory). Unlike the American constitution of 1787 and the French constitutions of 1793 and

1795, the Spanish chart preserved a monarchical form of government. Yet it established important limits to the power of the king. Significantly, it endorsed popular sovereignty, embraced representative government through elections, and endowed the Cortes with legislative powers. Imperial-wide elections, the constitution mandated, would take place periodically.

Equally important, the celebration of regular provincial and local elections was included. The constitution, in that sense, provided the bases for a notable expansion of enfranchisement and political participation through institutional channels. Decisively, the equality of all parts of the monarchy was also acknowledged. The constitution, moreover, replaced the codes that thus far had ascribed specific obligations and prerogatives to different classes. One code for all the peoples of the monarchy, the constitution established the principle of equality before the law.

The principle of legal equality, as once Abad y Queipo foresaw, was one the main aspects of the constitution that most clearly and directly had an impact upon pueblos de indios. The abolition of tribute in 1810 had challenged the relevance of the category indio; the constitution of

1812 tacitly eliminated it. The chart referred to all legitimate members of the monarchy, from both hemispheres, as españoles. Indios, accordingly, were now Spaniards, members of single

Spanish nation comprised, in principle, by equals. Moreover, as Spaniards and members of the nation, indios potentially qualified as citizens. Being an indio granted no rights for rights were, by definition, a quality not of corporate groups or classes, but a quality of individual citizens. As a result, virtually speaking, the category of indio ceased to have any legal or administrative

effect. It had become incompatible with the new kind of political community envisioned by the

Cortes and of which the constitution was the blueprint.

Pueblos de indios were also divested of their legal powers and prerogatives, but not without alternatives. The constitution recast municipalities according to the principle of legal equality. Since all lawful members of the monarchy were now considered españoles, the constitution made no distinction between indigenous and Spanish municipalities. Many indigenous councils found ways to refashion repúblicas under the new rules marked by the constitution. Many other struggled to retain authority against indigenous and non-indigenous adversaries alike. In yet other instances, subordinated localities (known as sujetos) saw the chance to fight for their own autonomy and become ayuntamientos in their own right against traditionally dominant head towns (cabeceras). Barrios and families also attempted to either assert or subvert the ascendancy and influence of municipal councils. Ayutamientos sometimes reinforced and sometimes undermined the autonomy of pueblos. This depended on factors such as the density of indigenous population in a given area (the constitution stipulated a minimum of residents to form ayuntamientos) and local balances of power. In all cases, however, ayuntamientos became centers of exceptional mobilization. The crisis of 1808 and its consequences had already given long-standing rivalries and conflicts an entire new dimension; the constitution of 1812 added a political significance that local quarrels had never had before.

Political changes had a direct impact on the question of communal lands and plans of land reform. The constitution of 1812, at least in part, blurred the line between communal and municipal holdings. Then, in November of 1812 and January of 1813 respectively, the Cortes

enacted two decrees that further affected communal landholding. The first decree granted lands to indios (the use of the term persisted) who were either married or over 25 years old. Neither private domains (dominio particular) nor community lands (tierras de comunidad) should be used for that purpose, the decree stated. The allocation of lands would draw on the nearby lands surrounding pueblos—a measure that echoed the early suggestion of Campillo y Cosío. Yet, the decree immediately added, up to half of tierras de comunidad may be distributed wherein lands were considered abundant in relation to the local population. The ultimate goal, as the decree asserted, was to foster private landholding among indigenous population and create the material bases to start building civil equality.

The second decree enshrined an initiative long sought by Bourbon reformers. Vacant and common lands (tierras baldías and terrenos comunes), it instructed, must be turned into dominio particular. By “vacant lands,” the decree mainly referred to royal or uncultivated lands and by

“common lands” it primarily referred to propios y arbitrios, that is, lands and holdings destined to the maintenance of municipalities. It also made it clear that ejidos (pasture lands and lands used for other common activities) would remain as a domain of the pueblos. In practice, however, since the constitution had replaced the figure of pueblos de indios by that of ayuntamientos, the distinction between common lands (terrenos comunes), community lands

(tierras de comunidad), municipal lands (propios y arbitrios), and ejidos remained an open question.63

The constitution and decrees (including that of January of 1810) thus introduced significant changes in the formal structure of pueblos de indios and communal land tenure.

Legally, municipal lands were turned into public domains and thus could later on be apportioned to individual owners. The allocation of municipal lands, in addition, depended on provincial authorities and ayuntamientos which were now open to internal and external competition. For the most part, community lands (tierras de comunidad), family parcels included, remained in indigenous hands. These lands, however, may also be converted into dominio particular depending on how sizeable community holdings were in a given pueblo. What is more, given the intricate nature of communal landholding, even ejidos and other common lands could be subject to future claims (and disputes). And now, according to the decrees, land claims could be made by anyone who promised lands would be used for cultivation—pueblo residents, in the first place, but also tenants, landless individuals, and even veterans of war. Finally, the implementation of these changes was left, almost entirely, to regional and local authorities—precisely in a time when regional and local politics had become fiercer. Not only did provincial and local authorities attain wide legal capacities to oversee agrarian measures. Wars had, to an important extent, transferred power from the center to the provinces and localities. Changes in land would thus be settled on the ground, attached to local and regional interests.

63 A transcription of the decrees can be found in García Ávila, Las comunidades indígenas de Michoacán, 383-389. See also, 200-209 for García Ávila’s comments on the decrees; and François-Xavier Guerra, México: del Antiguo Régimen a la Revolución, vol. 1 (México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1991), 263-264.

For the most part, unlike ayuntamientos and the abolition of tribute, land changes

(specifically regarding pueblos de indios) only rarely came to fruition before the breakdown of the Spanish empire. In general, the decrees of 1812 and 1813 remained scarcely known and were not implemented in any systematic way—Félix Calleja, the head of counterinsurgent efforts in

New Spain, chose not to do so in order to preserve the loyalty of pueblos de indios against insurgents. Then in May of 1814, months after returning to the throne, Fernando VII annulled the constitution and declared the Cortes illegal. As a result, all decrees enacted in the absence of the king were too nullified. From 1814 to 1820, Fernando VII tried to reverse things to what they had been before Napoleon. During these years, no major initiative concerning communal landholding and pueblos de indios took place; only the slow and fragmentary restitution of old institutions (including tribute and cajas de comunidad). Yet restoration turned out problematic and ultimately ineffective. In 1820, facing increasing opposition in Spain and unable to eradicate the insurgencies of Spanish America, Fernando VII was forced to accept the reestablishment of the constitution. By then, however, neither the constitution nor the authority of the king seemed as enticing as they had once been. In the following years, with few exceptions, American domains effectively claimed their independence from the Spanish empire.

The years of crisis and civil strife, nonetheless, had outlined land policies and land politics for generations to come. The constitution and the decrees issued by the Cortes had, at last, legally sanctioned the views of Bourbon and American reformers concerning land, corporate landholding, and pueblos de indios. From then on, all across Spanish America land reforms would express the economic, political, and social ideal that later on would be associated with

liberalism—an ideal created during long decades of imperial reform, international warfare, and civil conflicts. Equally important, the legal redefinition of land rights and pueblos de indios came hand in hand with another crucial innovation prompted by the turmoil that began in 1808.

Neither the restoration of 1814 nor independence could contain the forces that had been unleashed by civil wars and political crisis. A revolution of sorts had happened. Not only did land rights have been formally redefined, but they had become debatable and disputable. The link between land and politics became thereafter virtually indissoluble. In the decades to come, land rights would serve a wide variety of interests and goals—including those of indigenous people.

CHAPTER 2

ECOLOGY, ECONOMY, AND COMMUNITY IN THE PURÉPECHA HIGHLANDS

The examination of the ideological and legal roots of liberal land reforms is crucial to understand the rationale and professed goals of the reformers. Yet it does little to explain how indigenous community life and communal land uses and rights actually worked. Earlier analyses of nineteenth-century land reform tended to base their explanations on the content of liberal laws and extrapolate from it the possible impact that the implementation of land policies had on communal land tenure and indigenous communities. Land rights, social dynamics, and material conditions were also inferred not from empirical evidence, but from rough theoretical generalizations. Such approach, naturally, had some important limitations, the most important of which was that it divested communities of their actual complexity. Understanding this complexity is, however, of fundamental importance if we are to explain how land policies came to happen (beyond what reformers and lawmakers imagined them to be) and why they brought about such unexpected and even paradoxical results.

What follows is a comprehensive analysis of the meseta (the first of its kind) and its indigenous communities in the nineteenth century. It shows how communal land tenure and land use were closely connected to the environmental conditions of Michoacán’s central-west highlands, a region characterized by a peculiar combination of flat terrains, mountains, forests, and an uneven distribution of water bodies. The analysis reveals that, in general, communities’ land base was significant enough to cover the basic needs of most community members and to

allow modest to sizeable commercial activities. In fact, communities sustained a significantly diversified economy that included the cultivation of a wide variety of produces and the making of wooden crafts and textiles. The influence of large estates, so prominent in many standard interpretations of liberal land reform, was far from overwhelming. Haciendas had a limited presence in the meseta and in some areas were completely absent, a fact that undoubtedly contributed to the relative soundness and autonomy of community production. There were, however, important material disparities between communities and among community members.

Resources (water, land, forests) were by no means equally distributed and this would greatly contribute to shape future developments when liberal land policies came about.

A Stretch of Hilly Country

Parangaricutiro. Cherán. Charapan. Nahuatzen. Jucutacato. There were around forty purépecha communities in the central-northwest highlands of Michoacán by 1872, the year Manuel Rosales, the peasant from Tancítaro, became an official property owner according to the government of

Michoacán. Around fifty, if some of the nine barrios of the city of Uruapan—the largest settlement of the region and one of the five largest of the state of Michoacán—are counted as separate communities in their own right. Formally, highland purépecha communities were grouped in what at the time was known as the district of Uruapan. Administrative boundaries, however, offered little orientation to the observer before the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Not until then did governmental limits begin to coincide with the more permanent, if also vaguer, natural contours of the highlands and its environs.

The region is, in fact, hard to define. Depending on the emphasis that one wants to put, it is either called a sierra or a meseta, a highland or a plateau. One underlines the presence of numerous hills and mountains; the other stresses the relative flatness of the lands standing in- between natural elevations. Both, in any case, refer to the fact that the region rises more or less abruptly from the contiguous areas (the valleys to the north, the hot-country or tierra caliente to the south) reaching a comparatively higher altitude. Together mountains and upland terrains give this land its characteristic irregular look.

Two other features are essential to understand the makeup (both natural and social) of the region: forests and an unequal distribution of water bodies and streams. Contemporary accounts consistently offered praising descriptions of the meseta. Mountains, waterways, and the forest cover, as rule, stood out. Alfonso Luis Velasco, journalist and author of a number of landmark geographic and economic monographs of several states and populations of Mexico, assured to his readers that the “district of Uruapan occupies one of the most beautiful regions of the world.”

"El bosque,” he eloquently wrote about the district’s landscape in 1895, “se dibuja a lo lejos y el sol quiebra sus rayos sobre la linfa plateada del río, cuyas ondas se mueven en dulce vaivén, como si fueran cuna de gasas trasparentes que se agitasen al soplo del viento."64

Eduardo Ruiz, a lawyer and writer who was born in the meseta and came to be attorney general of the nation (1882-1900), made similar exalting remarks:

64 Alfonso Luis Velasco, Geografía y estadística del estado Michoacán (Morelia: Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolás de Hidalgo / Centro de Investigaciones y Desarrollo del Estado de Michoacán, 2005 [1895]) 164-165. For Velasco’s work see, in this same edition of his monograph of Michoacán, Gerardo Sánchez Díaz, "Alfonso Luis Velasco y sus aportes a la geografía y la estadística en México," xi-xxx, and María Eugenia Arias Gómez, "Alfonso Luis Velasco y su obra histórico-geográfica," Ulúa 10 (2007): 73-98.

Por el sur, el airoso cerro de las ventanas; por el oriente la cuesta de Taretan; por el norte el elevado pico de

la Cruz y por el poniente la inmensa mole de Acahuato [Tancítaro], cuya elevada frente ciñe el invierno con

nívea diadema de luciente escarcha. Allí, sobre un trono de flores, reina soberana la madre naturaleza. El

sol lanza sus rayos de oro, fecundando el prolífico seno de la tierra. Y por la noche, los pálidos rayos de la

luna, se quiebran en las hojas de los árboles y se deslizan en la linfa de los ríos.

The center of this enticing scenery, at which point Ruiz stood, was the city of Uruapan. For him, as for many others before and after, no other place summarized so patently the charm of the meseta. The “paradise of Michoacán,” he called it. Writing in the late nineteenth century, Ruiz used the same words that Juan José Martínez de Lejarza had employed to describe the city back in the 1820s when he finished the first statistical work of Michoacán after independence.65

Beautiful words and an inspiring landscape, however, frequently obscured the intricate and uneven arrangement of watercourses, trees, and surfaces in the meseta. Carl Lumholtz, a

Norwegian explorer and anthropologist who travelled several times to Mexico from 1890 to

1910, noticed an imperfection in the otherwise faultless “Sierra de los Tarascos,” as he called it.

A skeptical and often condescending man, Lumholtz was also enticed by the landscape before his eyes. He described the highland as “a stretch of hilly country […] broader than it is long” and

65 For Ruiz’s quotes see, Eduardo Ruiz, Álbum de Uruapan (Morelia: Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolás de Hidalgo, 2000), 23-24. Ruiz actually republished extracts of an earlier text printed in 1891 in this work. For Eduardo Ruiz’s biographical info see the introduction of this 2000 edition of his Álbum de Uruapan: José Napoleón Guzmán Ávila, "Las raíces uruapenses de Eduardo Ruiz," ix-xxii. See also, Álvaro Ochoa Serrano and Martín Sánchez Rodríguez, Repertorio michoacano, 1889-1926 (Morelia: El Colegio de Michoacán / Casa de la Cultura del Valle de Zamora / Morevallado Editores / Universidad Pedagógica Nacional, 2004), 360. For other praising descriptions of Uruapan see, Francisco Miranda, Uruapan (Morelia: Gobierno del Estado de Michoacán, 1979), 15-26, and Juan José Martínez de Lejarza, Análisis estadístico de la provincia de Michoacán en 1822 (Morelia: Filmax Publicistas, 1974), 139-140.

took notice of the remarkable altitude of some its mountains. The sierra, he pointed out,

“includes the lofty peak of Tancítaro (elevation, 13,669 feet) at its southern extremity, and Pico the Quintzeo (elevation, 10,908 feet).” Overall, however, he found the landscape “more pleasing and idyllic than imposing or magnificent.” On occasions, he concluded, “it seemed as if mountains, fields, and trees had been arranged by some artistic landscape gardener for the express purpose of delighting the eye”. Lumholtz, nonetheless, was a keen observer. He could not help but notice that there was a missing element in the Sierra de los Tarascos “to make its charm perfect.” Up in the highlands, he remarked, “there are no rivers.”66

An Uneven Distribution of Water: The Upper and Lower Meseta

Forest cover, volcanic soils, and escarpments combined to make water distribution fairly imbalanced in the meseta. The rainy season generally started in June and lasted until October, although every now and then it could begin a little earlier and persist a little longer.

Occasionally, there was some precipitation during the winter, but very little by comparison.

During the wet season, rains were frequently heavy and, as a rule, very constant—“every day, commencing about noon” recorded Lumholtz.67 Much of this rainfall, however, did not result in the formation of large bodies of water. Not in the upper lands of the meseta.

66 Carl Lumholtz, Unknown Mexico: A Record of Five Years' Exploration among the Tribes of the Western Sierra Madre; in the tierra caliente of Tepic and Jalisco; and among the Tarascos of Michoacan, vol. 2 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1902), 362. 67 Ibid., 364.

By means of retaining humidity, transpiration, and evaporation, the forest contributed to bring a good amount of rain to the region. Yet the forest (mostly composed of different species of pine and oak trees) also consumed large amounts of the water it helped to generate and, consequently, inhibited the accumulation of groundwater. Tree canopies prevented much of the rain from reaching directly the ground (although the degree of rainfall interception depended on things such as the shape of leaves and the height of trees). The water that managed to reach the forest floor, either because it was not intercepted by tree canopies or because it eventually ran down the stem of trees and plants, was captured by a layer of vegetation that further prevented the surface from being covered by water. Instead, water gradually infiltrated the ground.

Volcanic soils, characteristic of the plateau, facilitated infiltration because of their high degree of permeability, porosity, and drainage. This also contributed to minimize surface runoff and, equally important, soil erosion. Reduction of soil erosion was beneficial when forest trees were cleared for cultivation since soils retained much of their nutrients and minerals. Yet relatively high infiltration also contributed to reduce annual water yields. On sloping lands, also characteristic of the plateau, gravity did the final work. Both leftover water on the surface and underground water ran down eventually reaching the streams, rivers, and lakes that formed on lower lands.68

68 See, Fernando Guevara Fefer, "Los factores físico-geográficos," in Historia general de Michoacán, vol. 1, Escenario ecológico y época prehispánica, ed. Enrique Florescano (Mexico: Instituto Michoacano de Cultura, 1989), 7-34; Ian Calder, Thomas Hofer, Sibylle Vermont and Patrizio Warren, “Towards a new Understanding of Forests and Water,” Unasylva 58, no. 229 (2007): 3-10; Martha A. Works and Keith S. Hadley, "The Cultural Context of Forest Degradation in Adjacent Purépechan Communities, Michoacán, Mexico," The Geographical Journal 170, no. 1 (2004): 22-25; José María Pérez Hernández, Compendio de la geografía del estado de Michoacán de Ocampo (Mexico: Imprenta del Comercio de Nabor Chávez, 1872), 32-35 and 28-31; Roberto Quirós

Bishopric of Michoacán, 1863

Source: Mapoteca Manuel Orozco y Berra

Thus, despite receiving a good amount of rain during the wet season, many areas of the meseta in central-northwest Michoacán could not preserve much of its water and actually lost part of it to less elevated terrains. Upper lands, in this fashion, contributed to recharge the streams and rivers next to places such as the city of Uruapan, Periban, Los Reyes, and

Martínez, "Michoacán, sus elementos de riqueza," Irrigación en México. Órgano oficial de la comisión nacional de irrigación 3, no. 4 (1931): 368-388; Patricia Ávila García, Escasez de agua en una región indígena. El caso de la Meseta Purépecha (Mexico: El Colegio de Michoacán, 1996), 47-88 and 136-138; Jaime L. Espín Díaz, Tierra fría, tierra de conflictos en Michoacán (Zamora: El Colegio de Michoacán / Gobierno del Estado de Michoacán, 1986), 12-13, 33-60; Ralph L. Beals, Cherán: A Sierra Tarascan Village (Washington D.C.: United States Government Printing Office, 1946), 4-7.

Parangaricutiro—places that collected abundant water during the rainy season. Yet loftier localities such as Nahuatzen, Paracho, Cheran or Charapan managed to procure only limited sources of water for themselves. No major water bodies embellished the landscape of the upper lands. Only a cluster of springs spread across the highland, brimming with water during the summer, but slowly drained after the end of the rains. By springtime, the peak of the dry season, many of these mountain springs were notably reduced in size or fully exhausted. When rainfall cycles experienced some disruption and ensuing droughts came, as it inexorably happened from time to time, the upper areas of the plateau were the most hurt.69

A survey conducted in the mid-1880s clearly captured the water imbalance of the meseta.

Although at times fragmentary, overall, the survey provides a comprehensive picture of water courses (from rivers to lakes to marshes and springs) of the state of Michoacán in its entirety.

Eighteen rivers and an almost equal number of streams (arroyos) ran through the district of

Uruapan. According to the local officials that collected the data, most of them flowed continuously throughout the year: none, however, on the higher areas of the plateau. The municipality of Uruapan alone (elevation, c. 5460 feet) encompassed three streams and three rivers—River Cupatizio, located in the city of Uruapan, being the most important. The municipality of Taretan (elevation, c. 3700 feet), southeast of the city of Uruapan, comprised three rivers, one stream, and six springs. Los Reyes (elevation, c. 4320 feet), northeast of Taretan and Uruapan, had at least five rivers and seven springs. By comparison, the northern

69 See, Ávila García, Escasez de agua; Espín Díaz, Tierra fría; and Works and Hadley, “The Cultural Context of Forest Degradation.”

municipalities of Nahuatzen and Cheran (elevation, c. 9100 and c. 8579 feet respectively) relied on about twenty springs, all permanent, but of different sizes and limited capacity. Some places, such as Paracho (c. 6273 feet), reported no water sources, although some neighboring settlements

(Quinceo or Aranza, for instance) did have access to some springs.70

A Three-part Make-up: Urban, Agricultural, and Forest Lands

The distribution of water, flat terrains, and forested areas in the meseta played a significant role in defining settlement patterns of the region. At first appearance, settlements seem not to follow a particular order. They seem arbitrarily scattered across the landscape. Yet a closer examination reveals a more consistent arrangement. Although not all of them managed to benefit from the main water bodies of the region, settlements tended to be located in places where people could at least have some access to the existing water sources. This, in some cases, still meant people

(preponderantly women) had to walk several miles to get water, particularly on the upper lands and during the dry season. There, procuring minimum year-round water requirements was generally a challenge, although some localities experienced more difficulties than others.71

Overall, however, whether water sources were scarce or abundant, the location of settlements

70 “Noticas hidrograficas,” in Memoria sobre los diversos ramos de la administración pública, leída ante el congreso del estado de Michoacán en la sesión del día 25 de mayo de 1886, por el secretario del despacho Lic. Francisco Perez Gil (Morelia: Imprenta del Gobierno, 1886), 39-43, 58-59, and 87-90. There is a facsimile edition of the survey: Noticias hidrográficas de Michoacán 1886 (Morelia: CIDEM / UMSNH / El Colegio de Michoacán / Gobierno del estado de Michoacán / CONAGUA / CEAC, 2007). See also, Vicente González Méndez and Héctor Ortiz Ybarra, Los Reyes, Tinguindin, Tancítaro, Tocumbo y Periban (Morelia: Gobierno del estado de Michoacán, 1980), 35-36; Velasco, Geografía y estadística, 166-167 and Ávila García, Escasez de agua, 60-61 (chart 2.4 in particular). 71 See, Ávila García, Escasez de agua.

responded to the necessity of making the most out of the possibilities and limitations posed by the peculiar natural conditions of the plateau.

Securing access to the forest and agricultural lands, in that sense, was as important as procuring water sources. The arrangement of mountains and relative plane grounds in the plateau thus had an equally important effect on local settlement patterns. As a rule, settlements were located at the base or in the proximities of mountains and hills. This offered a double benefit. On the one hand, people could take advantage of flat terrains and use them as cultivation and pasture lands either by cutting forest trees off or simply by using stretches of land with lesser vegetation.

On the other, mountains and hills could serve as forested areas from which people could obtain basic supplies of wood for construction, cooking, and craftworks.

Pueblo of San Felipe, Municipality of Charapan, c. 1870

Source: AGHPEM, Secretaría de Gobierno, Gobernación, Hijuelas, Distrito de Uruapan, vol. 8, n.p.

The relocation and colonizing policies that gave settlements in the region their shape under the Spanish rule probably took these environmental factors into account.72 The colonial layout of towns and villages, at any rate, turned out to be fairly compatible with the way in which the natural physical features were distributed in the plateau. That explains, in part, why settlement patterns did not change significantly during the nineteenth century and persist, with some variations, until the present day.

Typically, settlements comprised three sets of areas. There was an urban core, the built- up area where public buildings, residences, and the main square or plaza were located. Late colonial and nineteenth-century officials sometimes referred to this area as fundo legal.

Bordering the residential compact and extending outwards in different directions there was a second area of open land planted with crops or pasture (depending on the month of the year and the cultivation cycle). Agricultural lands were divided into multiple plots distributed among families. Characteristically, no fences separated the plots, but often a strip of trees and lesser

72 Many settlements in the meseta had Mesoamerican backgrounds. Before the Spanish arrived in the region, the plateau formed part of the area of influence of one of the most powerful polities in Mesoamerica—a polity that the Spaniards, early on, referred to as the “reino de Mechuacán” (kingdom of Mechuacán) and whose dominant ethnic group they eventually labeled as tarascos (Tarascans). The center of this “kingdom,” however, was located in the Lake Pátzcuaro region. In part because of this, research has tended to neglect the highlands and, instead, has focused on the Lake Pátzcuaro basin. In general, the “Tarascan” region has received much less public attention than, for instance, the Maya or the Aztec. Some important works are: Hellen Pollard, Tariacuri’s Legacy: The Prehispanic Tarascan State (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993); Brigitte Boehm, ed., El Michoacán antiguo. Estado y sociedad tarascos en la época prehispánica (Zamora: El Colegio de Michoacán / Gobierno del estado de Michoacán, 1994); Benedict Warren, The Conquest of Michoacán: the Spanish Domination of the Tarascan Kingdom (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985); Marcia Castro-Leal, Clara L. Díaz, and María Teresa García, "Los Tarascos", in Historia general de Michoacán, vol. 1, Escenario ecológico y época prehispánica, ed. Enrique Florescano, 191-303; Hellen Pollard, “El gobierno del Estado tarasco prehispánico,” in Autoridad y gobierno indígena en Michoacán. Ensayos a través de su historia, vol. 1, eds. Carlos Paredes Martínez and Marta Terán (Mexico: El Colegio de Michoacán / CIESAS / INAH / UMSNH, 2003), 49-60; Rodrigo Martínez Baracs, “Etimologías políticas michoacanas,” in Autoridad y gobierno, vol. 1, eds. Paredes Martínez and Terán, 61-90; Carlos García Mora, “Gobierno de Charápani en el siglo XVI,” in Autoridad y gobierno, vol. 1, eds. Paredes Martínez and Terán, 105-129.

vegetation or human-made ditches marked the boundaries between different portions of land.

Families worked and took care of plots separately, although land as a whole was still considered a possession of the pueblo and the timing of planting, harvesting, and grazing was often coordinated with local authorities. The area, in general, was sometimes referred to as tierras de común repartimiento. Locally, it was known as planes or “plains,” in reference to the relatively even consistency of the surface where lands were situated.

Nineteenth-century Uruapan

Source: Mapoteca Manuel Orozco y Berra

The third area consisted of a combination of more open fields and forested lands. This area was also communally held. Yet unlike the first set of agricultural lands, it was not subdivided to form family plots and was entirely managed by common authorities—in principle, for the benefit of the whole community. Local authorities usually leased supplementary fields

and residents used portions of them as pastureland. These additional lands were often contiguous to family plots, but sometimes they rested behind nearby mountains and hills. Mountainous areas, for their part, concentrated most of the forested areas on the upper part of the meseta.

Forest cover in the lower parts to the south was somewhat more extended and also comprised patches of comparatively flat terrains. A certain legal ambiguity frequently surrounded this common area. Sometimes, the legal term ejido encompassed both ancillary fields and forested lands. On other occasions ejido solely referred to the open fields and forests were considered apart as montes. Further ambiguities came with the reform of indigenous municipalities beginning in the early nineteenth century and the subsequent problem of distinguishing between communal and public holdings—or, in more technical terms, between bienes de comunidad and propios y arbitrios.73

Settlement Hierarchy

A well-established hierarchy structured settlement arrangements across the meseta. Colonial and nineteenth-century officials alike commonly distinguished differences of status between

73 On settlement and land patterns see, García Ávila, Las comunidades indígenas en Michoacán, 49-62; Castro Gutiérrez, Los tarascos y el imperio español, 75-120 and 305-315; Felipe Chávez Cervantes, Antiguo pueblo de Jauaneto, K’umbutsio o Parikutin (Morelia: Morevallado Editores, 2010), 11-34; Carlos García Mora, “La constitución purépecha de Charapan,” accessed September 26, 2013, ; Carlos García Mora, “El ámbito novohispano de Charápani,” accessed September 26, 2013, ; Carlos García Mora, “La continuidad y el cambio cultural en la sierra de Michoacán,” accessed September 26, 2013, ; Rodrigo Martínez Baracs, "Los inicios de la colonización," in Historia general de Michoacán. La colonia, vol. 2, ed. Enrique Florescano (Mexico: Instituto Michoacano de Cultura, 1989), 37-73; Beals, Cherán, 20-21, 59, and 92; Pablo Sebastián Felipe, Cumanchen. Santa María Comachuen, una mirada al pasado (Morelia: Morevallado Ediitores, 2010), 41-47; Claude Morin, Michoacán en la Nueva España del siglo XVIII. Crecimiento y desigualdad en una economía colonial (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1979), 293; Jennie Purnell, Popular Movements and State Formation in Revolutionary Michoacán: The Agraristas and Cristeros of Michoacán (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), 31-32.

settlements by looking at the size of the population—although, as we shall see, political and economic factors were often just as an important. At the bottom, there was a group of localities usually branded as rancherías comprised by a small number of dwellers—few dozens, perhaps few hundreds at the most. Agua Nueva, home of the Rosales family, was the perfect example of this type of settlements. Further up, there were a collection of pueblos and villas which were by definition larger than rancherías (few thousand residents) and concentrated most of the population in the meseta. At the top of this hierarchy was Uruapan, as pointed out the major settlement and, beginning in 1858, sole city of the region with a population of several thousand since at least the beginning of the nineteenth century.

The number and status of pueblos, villas, and ciudades in the meseta remained fairly constant during the nineteenth century and until the breakout of the Mexican revolution in 1910.

Over the decades, only a handful of settlements achieved a different urban status than the one they had right after the end of the wars of independence in the early 1820s. Namely, Los Reyes,

Taretan, Periban, Tancítaro, and Paracho—the five promoted from pueblos to villas and all but

Paracho located in the lower lands of the meseta. Pueblos thus remained the home of most of purépecha communities throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.74

As a rule, smaller and less populated localities gravitated around larger and more populated settlements. The ranchería of Agua Nueva, together with an extensive number of

74 See, Pérez Hernández, Compendio de la geografía, 126-128; Memoria presentada a la legislatura de Michoacán, por el secretario del despacho, en representación del poder ejecutivo del estado, en las sesión del día 31 de mayo de 1883 (Morelia, Imprenta del Gobierno, 1883); and Índice alfabético de la división territorial del estado de Michoacán de Ocampo, en orden de municipalidades, tenencias, haciendas y ranchos comprendidos en la ley de 20 de julio de 1909 (Morelia: Escuela Industrial Militar, 1912).

other minor localities and the pueblo of Apo, for instance, orbited around the larger villa of

Tancítaro. During the first decades after independence, the direct area of influence of the city of

Uruapan (then a villa) encompassed the pueblos of Jicalan, Jucutacato, and San Lorenzo, an area that later on, towards the last quarter of the century, also included the pueblo of Capacuaro and, for a brief period, the pueblos of Parangaricutiro, Paricutin, and Angahuan. Up in the highlands,

Cheran exerted its own dominance over the pueblo of Cheran-Atzicurin, and Charapan did the same throughout most of the nineteenth century over the pueblos of San Felipe de los Herreros, and Cocucho. Overall, from independence to the revolution, between eight to eleven centers presided over the majority of pueblos and many of the lesser localities of the meseta.75

The continuous shifts in administrative and political boundaries, characteristic of nineteenth-century Mexico, did not change the basic structure of settlement arrangements in any major way. Although some alterations did take place over the course of the years, administrative divisions tended to either sanction or simply accommodate to the existing organization of the

75 Martínez de Lejarza, Análisis estadístisco; José Guadalupe Romero, Noticias para formar la historia y la estadística del obispado de Michoacán presentadas a la Sociedad Mexicana de Geografía y Estadística en 1860 (México: Vicente García Torres, 1862), 36-39; “Noticia número.16,” in Memoria leida ante la legislatura de Michoacán en la sesion del dia 30 de Julio de 1869 por el secretario de gobierno del estado, Lic. Francisco W. González (Morelia: Imprenta de O. Ortiz, 1869), 124-125; Anselmo Rodríguez, Índice de los pueblos del estado de Michoacán de Ocampo, con explicación del distrito político y rentístico á que pertenecen, el número de sus habitantes y las etimologías de varios de sus nombres formado por Anselmo Rodríguez (Morelia: Imprenta de O. Ortiz, 1873), 11-138; “División Territorial: Cuadro Número 9" in Memoria presentada a la legislatura del estado de Michoacán de Ocampo, por el secretario de gobierno C. Lic. Nestor López, en la sesión del día 31 de Mayo de 1882 (Morelia: Imprenta del Gobierno en Palacio, 1882); "Noticia estadística número 1: Cuadro que manifiesta el número de habitantes del estado, con algunas clasificaciones importantes," in Memoria sobre los diversos ramos de la administración pública, leída por el secretario del despacho, Lic. Francisco Pérez Gil, ante la diputación permanente del estado de Michoacán de Ocampo, en las sesiones de los días 12, 13, y 14 de septiembre de 1889 (Mexico: Litografía de la Escuela de Artes, 1889); Velasco, Geografía y estadística, 164; Amador Coromina, Recopilación de leyes, decretos, reglamentos y circulares que se han expedido en el Estado de Michoacán formada y anotada por Amador Coromina director del archivo general y publico del estado, vol. 36, (Morelia: Talleres de la Escuela Industrial Militar Porfirio Diaz, 1903) 342-347; Índice alfabético de la división territorial del Estado de Michoacan de Ocampo, 1-3 and 4-9.

meseta. For about five decades after independence, frequent and numerous political conflicts prevented any institutional layout from lasting more than few years in Michoacán (as elsewhere in the country). Not until after 1867, when the last major civil and international conflict of the nineteenth-century ended, did administrative and political institutions begin to take a more regular shape. Thereafter, if only formally, Mexico was ruled according to a republican and federal system of government.

Michoacán then divided into intermediate units known as districts, which, in turn, divided into municipalities. Under this system, traditionally dominant population centers functioned as the seat of municipal governments keeping administrative control over subordinated pueblos.

Such type of organization closely resembled other previous experiments conducted from 1824 to

1835 and then again from 1849 to 1850 and from 1855 to 1864. Furthermore, it resembled the old colonial division between cabeceras and sujetos, that is, head towns and dependent pueblos.

Even the terms coincided, except for the fact that nineteenth-century officials preferred to use the term tenencias instead of that of sujetos.76

Similarly, just as under the Spanish rule, tensions between head towns and tenencias surfaced from time to time over land boundaries, political representation, and margins of autonomy. Sometimes, in part as a result of these tensions, a tenencia could become a

76 See, Juan Carlos Cortés Máximo, De repúblicas de indios a ayuntamientos constitucionales: pueblos sujetos y cabeceras de Michoacán, 1740-1831 (Morelia: Universidad Michaocana de San Nicolás de Hidalgo, 2012); Gerardo Sánchez Díaz, “Introducción. Un acercamiento al Porfiriato en Michoacán,” in Pueblos, villas y ciudades de Michoacán en el Porfiriato, ed. Gerardo Sánchez Díaz (Morelia: Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolás de Hidalgo, 2010), 13-28; Rodolfo Pastor and María de los Ángeles Romero Frizzi, "Integración del sistema colonial," in Florescano, Historia general de Michoacán, vol. 2, 123-160; Gerardo Sánchez Díaz, "Los vaivenes del proyecto republicano," in Enrique Florescano (coordinador general), Historia general de Michoacán. Siglo XIX, vol. 3, (Mexico: Instituto Michoacano de Cultura, 1989), 7-37.

municipality in its own right or simply become part of a different municipality. The pueblo of

Paricutin, for instance, was alternatively a tenencia of the municipalities of Uruapan and

Parangaricutiro from 1869 to 1910. For its part, the pueblo of Tingambato, once subordinated to

Taretan, became a municipality by around 1882 with its own tenencia (the pueblo of San Angel).

The opposite could happen too. The seat of the local government could be taken away from one locality and placed in a different one. Such was the fate of Zacan and Parangaricutiro, although the latter eventually regained its traditionally higher status. This type of administrative shifts, however, did not constitute the rule. While important, they did little to subvert the underlying and enduring organization of the region.77

Three-Part Households

In stark contrast to the surrounding irregularity of the landscape, residential areas in the meseta stuck to a more orderly design. As if looking to a grating, a pattern of vertical and horizontal lines crossing one another to form well-defined squares and rectangles parceled out urban layouts. The grid expanded more or less uniformly across the space, although it tended to get blurrier towards the external boundaries of the built-up perimeter.

Clusters of blocks and houses grouped together to form barrios or, roughly speaking, quarters. Many barrios had their own parish and all of them were named after a patron-saint or a representation of Mary, although ordinarily the main church was located next to the principal square and held the image of the main patron-saint of the pueblo. The autonomy and rivalry

77 See, footnote 12.

between barrios varied from one place to another. Rivalries tended to surface when access to lands, forests, and water were at stake, as was the case at times among the different barrios of

Uruapan—especially against the larger barrio of San Francisco. In contrast, when things remained more or less in balance between barrios, the urge to act independently diminished.78

City of Uruapan, c. 1900

Source: AGHPEM, Secretaría de Gobierno, Municipios, Uruapan, “Portal Florentino,” c.a. 1900.

78 Juan Manuel Mendoza Arroyo, Historia y narrativa en el ejido de San Francisco Uruapan, 1916-1997 (Mexico: El Colegio de Michoacán / Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolás de Hidalgo, 2002), 49 and 55-59; José Napoleón Guzmán Ávila, “Uruapan del Progreso,” in Sánchez Díaz, Pueblos, villas y ciudades, 275-281; Miranda, Uruapan, 64 and 73; Alejandra Ceja Macnaught, Historia gráfica de Uruapan (Morelia: Conaculta / Gobierno del estado de Michoacán / Dirección de Fomento y Desarrollo Cultura de Uruapan / Cocidecur, 2010); González Méndez and Ortiz Ybarra, Los Reyes, 124-126; Beals, Cherán, 92; Jesús Castillo Janacua, Paracho durante la Revolución. Estampas, y relatos, 1890-1930 (Morelia: Balsal Editores, 1988), 9-13; Chávez Cervantes, Antiguo pueblo, 21-24; Sebastián Felipe, Cumanchen, 47-57; Carlos García Mora, “Instauración del orden corporativo,” accessed September 26, 2013, .

The distribution of the space inside households also responded to a well-organized layout. In general, individual families (often extended families) occupied at least one piece of land within the built-up area of pueblos (the fundo legal). There people erected their homes, stored their crops, raised some farm animals, and performed other productive activities including some small-scale cultivation and woodworking. Lotes or lots, as housing lands were known, divided into three distinct sections, each corresponding to specific uses attached to the everyday needs of families.

First, there were the trojes. Carl Lumholtz described them as “squares houses built of heavy pine planks well fitted together and topped with a four-pitched, shingle-covered roof projecting far enough beyond the walls to take in spacious porches on all sides.”79 Trojes were sleeping, storage, and working spots simultaneously. There were no bedrooms inside, only a single room with no windows and one door. Between the wooden ground floor and the wooden ceiling there was usually an attic-like space (known as tapanco) employed for storing grains, generally maize. There was also the porch which usually served as both a social and a working place, especially for handcrafting and woodworking.

A single lot could accommodate up to four generations and, as a result, sometimes encompassed more than one troje. Married sons and their children frequently remained with their parents after marriage and under the relative authority of the father who acted as the main head of the household. When possible, however, land was subdivided to form independent lots for each family. That in part explains the characteristic movable and easily adjustable structure of

79 Lumholtz, Unknown Mexico, 365.

trojes. Ordinarily, it took a minimum of 30 days to build a troje from the scratch—choose and cut the right pine trees, transport the wood, carve out the beams and planks, and put together the house piece by piece. Yet it only took between one to two days to dismantle it and assemble it again in a different place. As with many other things in the meseta, housing rules and construction techniques and materials had been tailored according to a combination of human resourcefulness and the specific environmental conditions of the region.

The kitchen and an open space locally called ekuarho constituted the other two main sections within lots. Ideally, there was a kitchen house for every troje. Cooking was exclusively done by women. During the nights, kitchen houses, always erected independently of trojes, could also serve as sleeping quarters. The ekuarho had many different purposes too. This open space included small enclosures or corrales for confining farm animals such as pigs, sheep, and chickens. Ovens for making charcoal and cooking were also placed outdoors together with water troughs and outhouses or privies. As the other two areas of the household, the ekuarho was an essential working family space. Sometimes woodworking took place there too. More generally, families devoted some space to keep orchards and vegetables gardens—usually overseen by women. Commonly known as solares or tarhetarhu, these small parcels were fundamental for the overall household economy. Even some maize, extensively cultivated in the open fields next to the urban core, was grown in them. Lotes, in sum, together with montes and planes (forested

areas and agricultural fields, respectively), comprised the basic compound upon which most families in the meseta relied to make a living.80

Distribution of Land Shares in Built-up Areas

Pueblos and villas shared a number of core commonalities across the region. Contrasts, however, were also very important. The value, size, and quality of lotes, for instance, differed from barrio to barrio, from one pueblo to another. By the late nineteenth century, according to the standards set by the government of Michoacán, the material conditions of almost five in every ten houses in the district of Uruapan were so precarious that it was not worth assessing an approximate value of these properties for tax purposes. By comparison, the uppermost echelon—properties valued above one hundred, but worth less than five thousand pesos—constituted less than 15% of all houses.

Variations stood out in some places more than others. In the small pueblo of Angahuan, fiscal officials considered the value of all but one property insignificant. The majority of the lots

80 This section draws on: Eugenia María Azevedo Salomao, ed., La vivienda purépecha. Historia, habitabilidad, tecnología y confort de la vivienda purépecha (Morelia: Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolás de Hidalgo, 2008); Ralph L. Beals, Pedro Carrasco, and Thomas McCorkle, Houses and House use of the Sierra Tarascan (Washington D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1944); Berenice Aguilar and Valeria Pacheco, "La Troje: tipología de vivienda Purepecha," in Miles Lewis, et al., Vernacular Architecture (Munich: International Council on Monuments and Sites, 2002), 60-61; Carlos García Mora, El troje purépecha. Asiento, granero y oratorio del grupo doméstico (Mexico: Tsimarhu Estudio de Etnólogos, 2012); Carlos García Mora, La cocina purépecha de Charapan. Espacio femenino (Mexico: Tsimarhu Estudio de Etnólogos, 2013); Juan Fernando Bontempo, "Elementos mudéjares en la arquitectura vernácula de Michoacán: el troje p'urhepecha," in Arquitectura vernácula en el mundo ibérico, ed. Ana María Aranda Bernal (Sevilla: Universidad Pablo Olavide, 2007), 184-192; Juan Fernando Bontempo, “Un análisis del troje purépecha,” in Hacia una antropología arquitectónica, ed. Mari-Jose Amerlinkc (Guadalajara: Unviersidad de Guadalajara, 1995), 145-155; and Eugenia María Azevedo Salomao, “Espacios urbanos comunitarios durante el periodo virreinal en Michoacán,” in Arquitectura y urbanismo virreinal, ed. Marco Tulio Peraza Guzmán (Mérida: Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán, 2000), 109-123.

in Charapan and San Francisco Periban (around 80% and 70% respectively) did not qualify as adequate either. Nonetheless, while comparatively modest in relation to other settlements in the meseta, no major disparities characterized these pueblos. By comparison, in the larger pueblo of

Nahuatzen (comprising 510 lots) six in every ten houses conformed to the standards acknowledged by government officials. The same pattern prevailed in the pueblo of

Parangaricutiro. Housing conditions were perhaps better in these places, but inequalities were also more noticeable. Things were much more even in Cheran wherein nine in every ten lots were considered acceptable. Circumstances were very similar in the villas of Tancítaro and Los

Reyes, except for the fact that comparatively more valuable properties constituted almost 80% of the total in Los Reyes and only 11% in Tancítaro. The city of Uruapan had the single most expensive residential lot in the district worth no more than 10,000, but at least 5,000 pesos—the kind of money that the average inhabitant of the meseta would never see in his life. Nearly all the remaining houses in the city fell in the category of modest, but valuable properties.81

Lotes, and particularly the solares or parcels in them, also differed from family to family.

Whereas the distribution and use of the space inside households was very similar in all places, there were variations in terms of the number of properties one particular family could held. By the time the first comprehensive liberal land reform took place in the district of Uruapan (1872), the Valladares of Tancítaro, for instance, occupied at least 13 solares and the Rodrigues eight.

81 See, "Noticia Estadistica Numero 5. Noticia de la propiedad urbana del Estado [Distrito de Uruapan]," in Memoria de Michoacán de 1889. See, Appendix 2.

These were unusual amounts considering that many other families, such as the Prisingulas,

Morenos, Lucas, or Vasques carried on with only one or two solares.

The number of solares, of course, was not the only thing that varied or mattered.

Differences in dimensions and quality of the properties were common and significant too. The average solar held by a purépecha family in a place like Tancítaro probably was about 66 varas in width and 87 in depth (about 0.40 hectares or one acre). Some families, however, held properties three times the size of this. The Sanchez, for instance, occupied what may have been two of the largest solares held by purépecha families in Tancítaro. One was 158 varas in width and depth, while the second was 140 in width and 148 in depth (about 1.75 and 1.45 hectares respectively or 4.32 acres and 3.58 acres). The solar of Manuel Rojas and his family had similar dimensions, about 234 varas in width, 81 in depth (roughly 1.33 hectares or 3.28 acres). Yet neither the Sanchez’s nor the Rojas’ solares seemed to have been of an extraordinary quality. A much smaller, but sounder solar of about 0.60 hectares (one and half acres) such as the one held by the Torres family could be worth almost twice in cash.82

Seen from above, from a distant and panoramic standpoint, these differences may not seem particularly pronounced. Small inequalities, however, gained greater importance in a context in which people shared almost the same type of resources and lived under more or less the same conditions. Gaps may not have been unbridgeable, not necessarily, not among most

82 These remarks are based on a small sample of 54 families for which data on solares was available. See, "Padron de terrenos de la Seccion 3a del Sur en Tancítaro Año 1872," in Archivo General Histórico del Poder Ejecutivo de Michoacán (AGHPEM , hereafter), Distrito de Uruapan, Hijuela, Tomo 2, ff. 78b-179b; "Padron de terrenos de la Seccion 4a del Poniente en Tancítaro Año 1872," in AGHPEM, Distrito de Uruapan, Hijuela, Tomo 14, ff. 1-65b; and "Padron de terrenos de la Seccion 1a del Norte en Tancítaro Año 1872," in AGHPEM, Distrito de Uruapan, Hijuela, Tomo 2., ff. 14bis-77.

purépecha families. Yet they mattered and, if seen from the viewpoint of local standards, mattered significantly. It was not only that lotes and solares came in a variety of widths, depths, qualities, and numbers. Such variations expressed inequalities in wealth and, equally important, in status—which is to say, they were power differences.

Distribution of Agricultural and Forest Lands

Variations within a general pattern of comparable material conditions also characterized the broader land arrangements of pueblos and villas in the meseta. At the turn of the eighteenth century, a majority of the 254 pueblos de indios of Michoacán still held the minimum allocation of lands granted by the Crown for their maintenance and were in possession of at least some of the ancillary lands also considered in royal ordinances.83 According to a survey including 220 of these pueblos, almost 49% of them preserved the whole (or about the whole) of their residential and family plots, while maintaining partial possession of grazing and other common areas. At the top, pueblos with relatively ample residential, family, and common lands and holdings comprised 26% of the total. The remaining 25%, in contrast, struggled to carry on with an

83 In particular, the royal ordinance of 1695 (in force by the late eighteenth century) stipulated a minimum allotment of 600 varas on each of the four compass points measured from the church of the pueblos (some 100 hectares in total). The ordinance also considered 1100 additional varas (some 85 hectares) for a buffer zone standing between pueblos and surrounding properties. These additional varas, however, were to be measured from the church of the pueblos as well, actually adding only 500 varas (some 17.5 hectares) to the minimum of 600 varas. See, García Ávila, Las comunidades indígenas en Michoacán, 56-57. My calculations. See also, Rodolfo Pastor and María de los Ángeles Frizzi, “Integración del sistema colonial,” 137 and Rodolfo Pastor and María de los Ángeles Frizzi, "Expansión económica e integración cultural," in Florescano, Historia general de Michoacán, vol. 2, 170-171.

inadequate allotment of lands for family parcels and without supplementary lands. The lowermost 3% did so without even enough terrains for residential areas.84

All thirty-nine pueblos in the meseta included in the survey were in possession of at least a basic share of lands, whether it was for housing, cultivation, or other purposes. Some pueblos, however, had a little more. About four in every ten, to be precise, clearly surpassed the minimum allocation of lands specified by the Crown, supplementary lands included. The holdings of these pueblos encompassed ranchos, dozens and sometimes hundreds of heads of livestock, horses, grazing lands on lease, surplus funds, as well as additional holdings managed by cofradías or brotherhoods. Such was the case, for instance, of Tingambato, Tancítaro, Paricutín,

Parangaricutiro, and the barrios of Uruapan (considered as a single unit). By comparison, the holdings of pueblos such as Sevina, Sicuicho, Nurio or Tanaco were more limited. The lands and resources of these pueblos were still enough to secure sustenance and additional funds (at least, in principle). Yet their cultivation fields and pasture lands, the number of horses and livestock

84 My calculations, based on García Ávila, Las comunidades indígenas en Michoacán, 68-71, 75-77, 83-91, and 96- 102 (tables 1, 2, 3 and 4 respectively). García Ávila provides different percentages. According to him, pueblos missing part of their residential and family lands accounted for 22%, pueblos without supplementary lands accounted for 21%, pueblos missing part of their supplementary lands comprised 45%, and pueblos with complete or surplus lands comprised 26% for a misleading total of 114%. His otherwise fine research mistakenly duplicates some pueblos in two different categories. García Ávila also overlooks the possibility that pueblos with apparently insufficient residential plots, for instance, actually could hold relatively large pieces of agricultural and supplementary land. As a result, García Ávila’s tables offer the inaccurate number of 291 pueblos de indios, although his percentages are actually based on a total of 254. His evidence, however, only accounts for 220 pueblos. Hence the inaccuracy of the numbers. For the number of 254 pueblos de indios in Michoacán see, Dorothy Tanck de Estrada, Atlas ilustrado de los pueblos de indios: Nueva España, 1800 (Mexico: El Colegio de México / El Colegio Mexiquense / Comisión Nacional para el Desarrollo de los Pueblos Indígenas / Fomento Cultural Banamex, 2005), 126. See also, Morin, Michoacán en la Nueva España, 286-288.

they owned, and the surplus funds they could normally obtain were comparatively smaller and fewer.85

Fig. 1. Land Values c. 1869 (in pesos)

Quinceo Turicuaro Capacuaro Comachuen Pomacuaran Urapicho Paracho Sevina San Francisco Periban San Felipe Ahuiran Corupo Cheran Charapan Nahuatzen Paricutin Cochuco Tanaco Nurio Cheran-Atzicurin Arantepacua Aranza Angahuan San Lorenzo Parangaricutiro Jucutacato 0 1,000 2,000 3,000 4,000 5,000

Source: “Noticia Num. 16,” in Memoria leida ante la legislatura de Michoacán en la sesion del dia 30 de Julio de 1869 por el secretario de gobierno del estado, Lic. Francisco W. González (Morelia: Imprenta de O. Ortiz, 1869), 124-125.

Although the evidence is unfortunately scarce and patchy, there are some indications that this uneven distribution of resources among the pueblos of the meseta continued throughout much of the nineteenth century. By 1869, right before the first wave of liberal land policies came

85 Based on, García Ávila, Las comunidades indígenas en Michoacán, 83-91 and 96-102 (Tables 3 and 4).

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about, places such as Uruapan, Tancítaro, and Apo were still comparatively more affluent than the rest of the pueblos in the region. According to the rough estimates provided to the government of Michoacán by local officials, agricultural lands in the hands of purépecha families living in seven barrios of the city Uruapan were worth around 36,000 pesos. For their part, Tancítaro and Apo held properties worth the outstanding sum of 40,000 and 25,000 pesos respectively. The average value of the properties of a typical pueblo in the meseta was, however, much more modicum; probably some 2,100 pesos as a minimum. Pueblos that had traditionally depended on limited lands continued having fewer resources. The properties of Urapicho,

Turicuaro, and Capacuaro, for instance, amounted to no more than 1,000 pesos. This type of pueblos comprised at least 15% of the total in the meseta.86

A similar pattern distinguished the tenure of common areas, particularly that of the woodlands. In the mid-1880s, purépecha communities had almost 45% of all forested areas in the meseta. That is, 152,475 hectares of the 349,895—or 376,776 acres out of 864,609—that were officially reported as comprising the woodlands of the region in the first comprehensive survey of the forests of Michoacán.87 Probably all communities in the meseta had access to

86 My calculations based on, “Noticia número.16,” in Memoria de Michoacán de 1869, 124-125. The data includes 28 pueblos and the city of Uruapan as a whole. The estimation of the average value of the properties of pueblos in the meseta does not include Uruapan, Tancítaro, and Apo. See appendix 3 of this dissertation. 87 The number of hectares in indigenous hands was in likelihood greater. The estimation of 152,475 hectares does not include Tancítaro. There, by around 1885 when the survey was conducted, numerous purépecha families and individuals most certainly still possessed a sizeable part of the local woodlands (some 73,571 hectares in total), but possession was in most cases private, in partnerships, or formed part of ranchos managed by the community or some community members—and not, as in most other pueblos, part of communal lands strictly speaking. These estimations and the following section are based on: “Catastro de los bosques y montes del Estado, que se formó en cumplimiento de los dispuesto en la fraccion II del artículo 2° de la ley número 50 de 18 de Diciembre de 1882”, in Memoria sobre los diversos ramos de la administración pública, leída ante el Congreso del Estado de Michoacán de Ocampo, en las sesiones del 21 y 23 de mayo de1885, por el secretario de despacho, Lic.

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forests, but local officials provided data for only thirty one of them. As with lots and agricultural lands, the distribution of forested areas among pueblos was all but even.

In fact, there were three clearly discernible groups. The first one, comprised of a majority of communities (55%), had between less than half and 30 hectares (74 acres) of forest lands. The second group, constituted by a smaller collection of ten communities (32%), held substantially more woodlands—between 900 and 9,000 hectares (or about 2,200 and 22,000 acres). The last group consisted of four or seven communities (13%), depending on whether three of the barrios of the city of Uruapan for which there is data available are counted as one community. The forested areas of this top group ranged between 20,000 and 50,000 hectares (or some 49,400 and

123,550 acres respectively). Thus, by the late nineteenth century 17 communities concentrated nearly all of the montes formally surveyed and recognized by the authorities of Michoacán as belonging to the purépecha population of the meseta. Within this cluster of communities a tight group actually accumulated 80% of the total—some 122,000 hectares or almost 300,000 acres.

These are, of course, approximate estimations; they are, nonetheless, very illustrative.

Some communities may have misreported and local officials may have failed to report on many forested areas upon which people in the pueblos conventionally relied. Loose boundaries between public and communal domains may have also caused some misrepresentation, especially since the management of forested areas was at the time a responsibility of local

Francisco Pérez Gil, Morelia, 1885 (Morelia: Imprenta del Gobierno a cargo de José R. Bravo, 1885), 95-110. There is also a facsimile edition of the survey: Primer inventario de los bosques y montes de Michoacán, 1885 (Morelia: CIDEM / UMSNH / Gobierno del estado de Michoacán / Fundación PRODUCE / CONAPOR, 2006). See, Appendix 4 of this dissertation.

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municipal authorities. Yet it seems that the overall distribution of woodlands among the pueblos of the meseta was, for the most part, very well-defined. A minority of pueblos enjoyed a considerably more advantageous position over the rest, followed by a cluster of pueblos with lesser but still substantial montes, and a majority living on with limited woodlands—of which the ones at the bottom struggled the most. In other words, a community such as Parangaricutiro could hold over 23,000 hectares of forest distributed in 15 fifteen different montes (some 56,834 acres), and one such as Tingambato possess over 2,000 hectares in eight different places (about

5,000 acres), but a community such as Cocucho barely have over one hectare.

The imbalance was no different among privately owned forests. Feliciano Vidales had almost 70,000 hectares of woodlands (a little more than 170,000 acres), distributed in five properties and comprising at least five different montes—mostly in the municipality of Uruapan, but also in his hometown Tanaco.88 No other single pueblo, individual, or group of individuals controlled such a large area of forest in the meseta. Two other prominent landowners concentrated over 50,000 hectares (about 123,550 acres); Juan Yausi was the owner of 40,800 hectares in Uruapan, while Ramon Sotomayor held 11,679 hectares in Taretan (about 100,000 and 30,000 acres each). Combined, the properties of these three individuals accounted for nearly

61% of all privately owned woodlands—the equivalent to almost 80% of all forests held by purépecha communities in the region.

A majority of landowners held significantly smaller areas of forest. Many, in fact, were probably smallholders. In the municipality of Los Reyes, for instance, the average property was

88 Miranda, Uruapan, 31, mentions Vidales was originally from Tanaco.

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less than one hectare per individual, while in Periban it was less than ten hectares (that is, less than 2.4 and 24.7 acres respectively). Aside from Vidales, Yausi, and Sotomayor, few individuals actually held more than 1,000 hectares of woodlands (c. 2500 acres). What is more, most properties over 100 hectares (250 acres), which comprised just about 38% of all private forested areas, were owned by individuals grouped together in partnerships. On the whole, a very small number of landowners individually controlled vast areas of forests, a significantly larger number of partnerships held very sizeable stretches of woodlands, and an even larger number of smallholders owned only small portions of the meseta forests.89

Interestingly enough, most privately owned forests were situated in the lower meseta. As a rule, pueblos in the upper meseta faced considerably less competition from local landowners.

In fact, large landowners were virtually absent there. The exception was, perhaps, Nahuatzen, wherein an individual called Francisco Alvelo held about 30% of the officially registered local woodlands. Things were substantially different in the lower meseta. There pueblos split forested areas with an important number of smallholders and landowners—some of which, the largest forest-owners of the region. Feliciano Vidales and Juan Yausi were certainly the concern of many among the barrios of Uruapan and the surrounding pueblos of Jicalan, Jucutacato,

Arantepacua, and San Lorenzo. Vidales himself and other three major landowners were prominent in the municipality of Taretan, wherein there were no reports of the local purépecha community holding forests.

89 See, Appendix 4.

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Conditions were similar, but less polarized in other municipalities of the lower meseta. In

Periban, Los Reyes, and Tancítaro, pueblos and landowners also competed for forested areas, but concentration was not as pronounced as in Taretan. The pueblo of San Francisco, for instance, held about a quarter of all the surveyed woodlands in Periban, while a group of fourteen individuals (some of them partners) owned the remaining three quarters. The pueblo of San

Gabriel held a modest 4% of the inventoried forests of the municipality of Los Reyes, while a dozen local landowners and smallholders split the rest in relatively even and fairly small fragments—none, as pointed out above, larger than one hectare. In the municipality of Tancítaro, a large collection of smallholders divided up a sizable area of woodlands of almost 74,000 hectares or c. 183,000 acres. The area occupied by common forest comprised but 1.70 hectares

(or 4 acres). Yet many smallholders were in all likelihood local purépecha families who, either on their own or in association with other landholders, collectively held a significant part of all local forest lands.90

Haciendas and Ranchos in Nineteenth-century Michoacán

The relative small number of large landowners and the significant presence of middling and small landholders in the meseta, in fact, corresponded to the general distribution of landed properties in Michoacán. Ranchos, not haciendas, were the predominant and most common form of land tenure across the state—a pattern that probably stretched back to the eighteenth century,

90 The peculiar case of Tancítaro will also be examined in the next chapter.

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despite the fact that during this century (especially its second half) haciendas and large-scale commercial agriculture witnessed an unprecedented growth.91

Fig. 2. Haciendas and Ranchos in Michoacán, 1822- 1910 6000 5000 4000 3000 2000 1000 0 1822 1849 1857 1877 1880-82 1887 1900 1910

Ranchos Haciendas

Sources: Martínez de Lejarza, Análisis estadístico de la provincia de Michoacán; Memoria de Gobierno de Michoacán, 1849; Romero, Noticias para formar la historia y la estadística del obispado de Michoacán; Memoria Fomento de 1865; Memoria del Gobierno de Michoacán de 1869; "Cuadro 47. Haciendas y ranchos existentes en las entidades federativas. Años 1877 a 1910," Estadísticas Sociales del Porfiriato; "Noticia Número 23," in Memoria de Gobierno de Michoacán, 1890; AGN, Fomento y Obras Públicas, Agricultura, Leg. 2, Caja 8, Exp.1, Mich., 1910.

From independence to the Mexican revolution, the number of ranchos in Michoacán remained above the thousand and, in fact, accounted for several thousand towards the turn of the nineteenth century. Indeed, there were substantially more ranchos in 1910 than there were in

1821. For over three decades, since the early 1820s, ranchos experienced a slow but steady increase, reaching the figure of 1,617 by 1857. By the late 1870s, this number had slightly

91 See, Morin, Michoacán en la Nueva España; and more recently Jorge Silva Riquer, La producción y los precios agropecuarios en Michoacán en el siglo XVIII (Morelia: Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolás de Hidalgo / El Colegio de Michoacán, 2012).

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dropped, but it then skyrocketed during the 1880s—the number of ranchos more than doubled that of early 1820s. By the turn of the century there was, apparently, a very significant drop. Yet, on the eve of the Mexican revolution, ranchos reached an historical high of 5,407.

There were more haciendas in 1910 than in 1821 too. Yet, after having peaked during the first two thirds of the nineteenth-century, they could not parallel the extraordinary proliferation of ranchos. In 1822, there were approximately 333 haciendas in Michoacán. Over the next three decades they more than doubled, climbing to an all-time high of 759 in the late 1850s. By 1865, however, haciendas faced a significant fall and were 40% fewer than in 1857. From roughly

1877 to 1900, the number of haciendas experienced a series of fluctuations. In 1880, it dropped to its lowest point since the early 1820s, but then notably recovered by the end of the decade.

There was another drop in the 1890s, followed once more by an increase during the first decade of the twentieth century. By 1910, there were 442 haciendas in Michoacán, about 33% more than in 1822. An important increase, no doubt, but significantly smaller compared to the almost 300% upswing of ranchos over the same period.

Fig. 3. Number of Ranchos and Haciendas in Michoacán

Year Ranchos Haciendas 1822 1,356 333 1849 1,529 752 1857 1,617 759 1865 No data 445 1877 1,527 496 1880 3,695 352

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1887 3,437 503 1900 2,354 359 1910 5,407 442

Sources: See Fig. 2.

Ranchos, indeed, consistently outnumbered haciendas in Michoacán throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the early 1820s, there were approximately four times more ranchos than haciendas. The disparity diminished by 1850, but there were still twice as many ranchos as there were haciendas—a ratio that persisted over the decade. During the 1870s and 1880s, ranchos outstripped haciendas by about 10 to 3 and at some point (c. 1880) by about

10 to 1. By the turn of the century, the imbalance once more lessened, but only briefly. In 1910, for every hacienda there were approximately twelve ranchos—a significantly higher ratio compared to almost a century earlier.

The number of ranchos in Michoacán was also very high compared to other regions of

Mexico. In fact, Michoacán repeatedly ranked among the top three states with the most ranchos in the country. In 1857, for instance, there were 36% fewer ranchos in the state of Mexico than in Michoacán (1,033 and 1,617 respectively). What is more, the ranchos of Michoacán tripled the number of all the ranchos existing in Veracruz, Sonora, and Guerrero together.92 By 1877, only the nearby state of Jalisco eclipsed Michoacán. Almost a quarter of a century later, in 1900,

Jalisco continued to hold the largest collection of ranchos in the republic and Michoacán now

92 See, Memoria de la secretaría de estado y del despacho de Fomento, Colonización, Industria y Comercio de la república mexicana, escrita por el ministro del ramo C. Manuel Siliceo. para dar cuenta con ella al Soberano Congreso Constitucional (Mexico: Imprenta de Vicente García Torres, 1857) 12-13.

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ranked third after its neighbor Guanajuato—an still remarkable position considering that the number of ranchos in northern states such as Coahuila or Sinaloa had multiplied by ten since the late 1870s. A decade later, as ranchos mushroomed in most states of the country, Michoacán regained its numerical ascendancy over Guanajuato and once again ranked second after the ever dominant Jalisco.93

Although unquestionable, the predominance of ranchos in Michoacán actually entailed a somewhat more complicated reality than what their extraordinary numerical incidence shows. As many authors have pointed out, the category of rancho was very flexible and even ambiguous.

Many of the ranchos of Michoacán were nothing but small settlements inhabited by a small number of people who may or may not own the small parcels they tilled—that is, they were in reality rancherías. In some other cases, ranchos described individual or family-owned smallholdings of few hectares; independent properties dedicated more often than not to subsistence agriculture and to supply local markets. On occasions, by ranchos people also meant dependent parts of haciendas occupied by a wide variety of people, from peones to sharecroppers to tenants. The opposite was sometimes true as well. Although a minority, some ranchos were virtually undistinguishable from small and middling haciendas; they were individually owned and commercial-oriented productive units with permanent wage laborers, sharecroppers, and tenants of their own. A majority, however, corresponded to the more conventional view of ranchos as middling landed properties ranging between few hundred and

93 See, “Cuadro 47. Haciendas y ranchos existentes en las entidades federativas. Años de 1877 a 1910,” in Estadísticas sociales del porfiriato, 1877-1910 (Mexico: Talleres Gráficos de la Nación,1956), 41.

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one thousand hectares (around 2,470 acres). Ran by individuals, families, and partnerships, commercial-oriented, these ranchos supplied local and regional markets, although with more limited means and workers than most haciendas.94

The haciendas of Michoacán, for their part, tended to be of relatively medium size. By

1910, the vast majority ranged between 1,000 and 10,000 thousands hectares (the equivalent to roughly 2,470 and 24,710 acres), a fairly moderate extent compared to some of the cotemporary latifundia of several northern states of the country, where aridity led to a focus on extensive grazing. In fact, haciendas of less than 5,000 hectares alone (some 12,355 acres) probably comprised 50% of the total in Michoacán.95 There were, of course, a number of extraordinarily large properties there. Most of them, located in areas of comparatively scarce population— especially in the heart of tierra caliente.96 Large haciendas, however, did not necessarily entail

94 See, François-Xavier Guerra, México: del Antiguo Régimen a la Revolución, vol. 2 (México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1991), 473-490; Meyer, "Haciendas, ranchos, peones y campesinos en el porfiriato,” 477-509; Purnell, Popular Movements, 40-44; Juan Carlos Cortés Máximo, El valle de Tarímbaro. Economía y sociedad en el siglo XIX (Morelia: Universidad Michoacana de San Nic olás de Hidalgo, 1999), 94; Christopher Boyer, Becoming Campesinos: Politics, Identity, and Agrarian Struggle in Postrevolutionary Michoacán, 1920-1935 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 58-59; Luis González y González, Pueblo en vilo: microhistoria de San José de Gracia (Zamora: El Colegio de Michoacán, 1995), 71; Herón Pérez Martínez, “El vocablo rancho y sus derivados: génesis, evolución y usos,” in Rancheros y Sociedades rancheras, eds. Esteban Barragan López, Odile Hoffmann, Thierry Linck and David Skerritt (Zamora: El Colegio de Michoacán / Centre d’Etudes Mexicaines et Centramericaines / Institut Français de Recherche Scientifique pour le Développment en Coopération, 1994), 33-55; and also in this volume the brief but insightful contriution of David Brading, “A 25 años del encuentro con ‘rancheros’,” 329-334; John Tutino, From Insurrection to Revolution: Social Bases of Agrarian Violence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 228-240. 95 See, "Cuadro 61. Superficie de las haciendas de algunas entidades federativas. Año de 1910," in Estadísticas sociales del Porfiriato, 64-65. This data is based on a sample of 100 landed properties, about 22% of the total in 1910. In the valley of Tarímbaro, for instance, near the city of Morelia, the largest haciendas did not surpass 6,500 hectares or some 16,000 acres (see, Cortés Máximo, El valle de Tamrímbaro, 61-92. 96 For land tenure in tierra caliente see, Gerardo Sánchez Díaz, El suroeste de Michoacán. Estructura económico- social, 1821-1851 (Morelia: Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolás de Hidalgo, 1979); Gerardo Sánchez Díaz, El suroeste de Michoacán. Estructura económico-social, 1852-1910 (Morelia: Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolás de Hidalgo, 1988).

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steady or ever-expanding large economic operations. Indeed, the performance of haciendas, whether small or big, varied considerably over the decades.

The Ebbs and Flows of a Rural Economy

The preponderance of smallholdings and ranchos in Michoacán was intimately related to the economic ebbs and flows of haciendas. As Margaret Chowning has shown, the overall economy of Michoacán, particularly the one based on rural properties, went through several different cycles: "growth in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; collapse in the 1810s and early 1820s; more-or-less full economic recovery by midcentury; another depression in the 1860s and 1870s; and, finally, the Porfirian boom."97 Indeed, as in many other once thriving former

New Spanish regions, commercial agriculture (and other large-scale activities) in Michoacán emerged from the wars of the 1810s severely damaged. Economic contraction continued during the first decade after independence. Yet signs of recovery began in the early 1830s as mining revived in Zacatecas and accelerated in the 1840s when silver stimulated markets at nearby

Guanajuato). Soon haciendas were once again making substantial profits—to the extent that some of them became even more prosperous than during the late colonial period.98

The economic resurgence of the 1830s and 1840s, however important, did not result in an unchallenged ascent of hacendados. As a matter of fact, a great part of the old colonial landed

97 Margaret Chowning, Wealth and Power in Provincial Mexico: Michoacán from the Late Colony to the Revolution (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 9. 98 See, Margaret Chowning, "Reassessing the Prospects for Profit in Nineteenth-Century Mexican Agriculture from a Regional Perspective: Michoacán, 1810-1860,” in How Latin America Fell Behind. Essays on the Economic Histories of Brazil and Mexico, 1800-1914, ed., Stephen Haber (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 179- 215.

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elite was forced to sell their properties to a rising new generation of landowners of (initially) moderate wealth. Lacking the capital and unable to rely on the Church’s traditional credit (which had been disrupted), the new landowners turned to an also emerging group of local merchants to reestablish the operation of their newly acquired haciendas. Merchants, not landowners, had the upper hand in these dealings. Eventually some landowners managed to overcome their dependence on merchants, but trade constituted to be a much more profitable business than husbandry. Many landowners, in fact, systematically resorted to cash tenancy and sharecropping in order to “bring fields back into production with as little cash outlay as possible.”99 Some others turn to livestock rearing instead of cultivation or simply rented stretches of hacienda lands so others could use them for pasturage. Despite all efforts, some lands often remained without commercial use for relatively long periods of time.100

Moreover, although haciendas became profitable, markets continued to be limited. For the most part, haciendas supplied local and regional markets or specific areas within the neighboring states of Guanajuato, Querétaro, Jalisco, and the state of Mexico—all of which experiencing economic challenges of their own. Trade with Mexico City (a three days’ ride away) was limited to few products (such as red meat and some sugar-based products) and merchants normally took the lion’s share of the business—local merchants, at first, but then large foreign commercial houses based in Mexico City, Guadalajara, Tampico, Colima, and Veracruz.

99 Chowning, Wealth and Power in Provincial Mexico, 165. 100 Ibid., 144-151, 160-197. See also, Mayté Nava García and Ramón Alonso Pérez Escuria, La hacienda de Los Laureles, Michoacán. Siglos XVI-XX (Morelia: Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolás de Hidalgo / Morevallado Editores, 2005); Gerardo García Díaz, "Tenencia de la tierra, agricultura y ganadería," in Florescano, Historia general de Michoacán, vol. 3, 232-250.

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Despite being the largest city of Michoacán and still at the time one of the largest in the country,

Morelia did not become the engine of a state-wide economic transformation. As most other cities in Mexico during the first decades after independence, its population and connections to the wider world were not extensive enough so as to exert a major gravitational pull. The influence of

Morelia was, in reality, fairly regional. Other urban centers of Michoacán such as Zamora or

Uruapan (as mentioned earlier, a city only until 1858) played similar roles, but their influence was even more restricted.101

Transportation and roads also kept a relatively tight rein on the ongoing, but curbed commercial reactivation that began in the 1830s. Secondary roads had changed little since the late colonial period—and thus the means of local and regional trade, as well as their underlying difficulties, remained more or less the same than in past decades. Efforts to create a railroad network in Michoacán began in the 1860s and 1870s, but it was not until the 1880s that rail lines were finally set in place. Furthermore, as one official lamented in 1849, Michoacán had no

“medios de comunicacion directa con algun pais extrangero por la falta de un puerto.”102 Indeed, despite having thousands of miles of coastline on the Pacific, the long-desired project of building a major port to connect the state with the international circuits of commerce had proved to be very elusive. The early 1870s would witness how the last important attempt in many years to

101 Chowning, Wealth and Power in Provincial Mexico, 219-222; José Alfredo Uribe Salas, “Morelia durante el Porfiriato," in Michoacán en el siglo XIX. Cinco ensayos de historia económica y social (Morelia: Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolás de Hidalgo, 1999), 165-205; and José Bravo Ugarte, Historia sucinta de Michaocán (Morelia: Morevallado Editores, 2007), 449. 102 Memoria que sobre el estado que guarda en Michoacán la administración pública en sus diversos ramos, presenta al honorable Congreso del mismo el secretario del despacho Lic. Jesus M. Herrera en 2 de enero de 1849 (Morelia: Imprenta de I. Arango, 1849) 16.

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turn Michoacán into a privileged passage point between the Atlantic and the Pacific fell apart.

Several members of a surveyor team sent by the federal government to conduct preliminary topographic studies for the construction of a rail line ended up sick or even dead as a result of the harsh conditions they encountered on the coast town of Bucería where they were based.

Michoacán still had no major port by 1910 and thus its long-distance trade relations remained limited and dependent on far-off commercial houses and port cities.103

While landowners in general benefited from the recovery, some fared better than others.

During the 1820s and 1830s, high prices of sugar and sugar-based products (sweets and alcoholic drinks, for instance) contributed to reboot production in the southern region of tierra caliente

(the hot-country), a traditionally commercial-oriented area wherein the cultivation of cash crops such as indigo, rice, and cotton (in addition, of course, to sugarcane) had long dominated.

Environmental factors—mid to low altitudes, high temperatures, dry weather, together with humid soils and abundant waterways—had made it more suitable for these crops to be grown than wheat or maize. Cash crops, however, were also more expensive to cultivate. They required more capital, more infrastructure (especially in irrigation projects), and more labor (usually scarce given the traditionally low population of the tierra caliente). Yet, as long as prices remained high (as they did after independence) profits could soon be very high too.104

103 José Alfredo Uribe Salas, "Michoacán y los proyectos de comunicación en el occidente de México, 1850-1874," in Michocán en el siglo XIX, 43-90; and José Alfredo Uribe Salas, Empresas, comunicación interocéanica y ramales ferroviarios en Michoacán, 1840-1910 (Moreila: Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolás de Hidalgo, 2008). 104 Chowning, Wealth and Power in Provincial Mexico, 161-162; and Gerardo Sánchez Díaz, Los cultivos tropicales en Michoacán. Época colonial y siglo XIX (Morelia: Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolás de Hidalgo / Centro de Investigación y Desarrollo de Michoacán / Morevallado Editores / Fundación Produce, 2008).

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Less profitable, but a securer business in the uncertain times that came after independence, wheat and maize cultivation prevailed in much of the upper lands and the valleys of Michoacán. It took longer for the prices of these staples to recover. As a result, tierra fría

(cold-country) landowners lacked the advantages of their peers in tierra caliente. Yet, unlike the cash crops of the hot-country, cereals could be cultivated with relatively modest investment, labor, and infrastructure. Natural conditions also favored cereal production over tropical crops. It was certainly easier to grow wheat or maize when water scarcity made large irrigation projects unfeasible. Where water was abundant, the weather and the altitude made it harder to grow such sun- and energy-demanding crops as sugarcane. Not surprisingly, it was in the cereal-producing regions of Michoacán where sharecropping, cash tenancy, livestock grazing, and joint partnerships became more extended.105

The reactivation of the economy peaked in the mid-1850s. It was enough to reestablish hacienda production and bring plenty of wealth to a new group of merchants and landowners.

Yet, as Chowning points out, it “was not an economy that was obviously poised to move much beyond recovery; there were limits to its potential for expansion.”106 Contraction and depression characterized the following two decades. Not until the 1880s did the economy of Michoacán began to take off again.

105 Chowning, Wealth and Power in Provincial Mexico, 162-168. 106 Ibid., 248.

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A full-scale civil war from 1858 to 1861 and then a major international war from 1864 to

1867 disrupted the bases of the early recovery.107 Triggered by the immediate need for funds to support the war efforts of the liberal federal government, the nationalization of church assets in

1859—including its many unredeemed loans—brought unforeseen negative consequences to many of those who had benefited from the relative prosperity of previous years. Unable to redeem their old debts all at once (now in the hands of the government or second-party creditors), numerous smallholders and landowners faced bankruptcy and foreclosure. The value of landed properties and rent prices dropped. The price of agricultural products and commodities also fell, limiting landowners’ profits and their ability to improve their properties (not to say expand them). Trade was regularly disrupted, transport costs (always high) soared, and capital

(always in short supply) became scarcer. The destruction of property and roads also exacted its economic costs, although probably to a lesser degree compared to the 1810s and 1820s.108

One important consequence of the economic downturn that began in the late 1850s was the fragmentation of haciendas. Indeed, roughly speaking, from 1860 to the mid-1880s dozens of large haciendas were subdivided in smaller sections and sold to hundreds of individuals.

Although this process still awaits a more detailed study, the partition of haciendas in all

107 See, ibid. 261-284 and 292-303; Álvaro Ochoa Serrano and Gerardo Sánchez Díaz, Breve historia de Michoacán (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica / El Colegio de México, 2003), 122-146; Gerardo Sánchez Díaz, "Desamortización y secularización en Michoacán durante la reforma liberal 1856-1863," in Historia general de Michoacán, vol. 3, 39-60; Carlos García Mora, "Guerra y sociedad durante la intervención francesa, 1863-1867," in Historia general de Michoacán, vol. 3, 61-100. Eduardo Ruíz, Historia de la guerra de intervención en Michoacán (Morelia: Morevallado Editores, 2008 [1881]); Bravo Ugarte, Historia sucinta, 412-431, 446-449. 108 Chowning, Wealth and Power in Provincial Mexico, 271-278.

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likelihood contributed to the proliferation of ranchos across Michoacán, perhaps more notably during the late 1870s and early 1880s when the number of ranchos skyrocketed.

The fragmentation did not lead to the entire displacement of the landed elite formed during the 1830s and 1840s. Many of the buyers were already established landowners. Yet hacienda subdivisions probably boosted the formation of a middling rural strata composed by numerous mid-landowners and smallholders. In the mid-run, the partition of haciendas may have also benefited surviving landowners who had first sold parts of their properties to avoid total foreclosure, but then found themselves with more manageable and less indebted properties beginning in the mid-1880s when the economy started to recover again. All in all, however, the two and a half decades that began with the last major national civil war before the Mexican revolution set great limits to the expansion of large-scale agricultural activities in Michoacán.109

The Chronic Limits of Hacienda Dominance and Commercial Expansion

The economic recovery of the 1830s-1850s and the slump of the next two decades were not without consequences for pueblos. Some faced important challenges and experienced drastic changes, especially during the years of commercial recovery. The expansion of commercial agriculture in some cases resulted in the enlargement of landed properties at the expense of pueblos. Such was the case, for instance, of the haciendas of Mariano Villaseñor and Francisco

Plancarte in the Jiquilpan and La Piedad areas in northwestern Michoacán. Both Villaseñor and

Plancarte took advantage of the ongoing reactivation of large-scale economic activities to acquire

109 See, Chowning, Wealth and Power in Provincial Mexico, 285-290; and Purnell, Popular Movements, 26-30.

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pueblo lands, sometimes by means of buying large stretches of lands from individuals who claimed to be spokespersons of a particular pueblo, but mostly through separate and multiple pity purchases of relative small plots over the course of the years.110 During the fall of 1857, in the valley of Tarímbaro near the capital city of Morelia, a group of indigenous dwellers rose in revolt demanding lands and water rights previously lost to the neighboring haciendas of La

Magdalena and Guadalupe.111

Yet, for the most part, these enlargements tended to happen among pueblos that were already facing important difficulties. That is, among pueblos that were already encircled by nearby haciendas and ranchos. Not surprisingly, this was more frequently the case in areas where haciendas and ranchos had established their economic predominance since the late colonial period and sometimes since well before—places such as Jiquilpan, La Piedad, and

Tarímbaro, but also the tierra caliente. In these areas, indigenous populations had been gradually shrinking, constituted a clear minority, and pueblos represented solitary isles amid an archipelago of estates and smallholdings. Overpowered by local landlords and usually internally divided, many of these pueblos faced significant problems or had almost entirely lost the material and moral impetus to prevent the selling and buying of communal lands (be they common areas or family plots), not to mention other perhaps murkier land acquisitions.112

110 Chowning, Wealth and Power in Provincial Mexico, 224. 111 Cortes Máximo, El valle de Tarímbaro, 54-55, 220-231, and 237. 112 See, Castro, Los Tarascos, 305-344; Ramón Alonso Pérez Escutia, “La política de desintegración de la propiedad comunal en la región Oriente de Michoacán,” in Los indígenas y la formación del estado mexicano en el siglo XIX eds. Sergio García Ávila and Moisés Guzmán Pérez (Morelia: Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolás de Hidalgo, 2008), 191-222; Sergio García Ávila, "Reparto y desintegración de la propiedad comunal indígena en la ribera del lago de Pátzcuaro, Siglo XIX" (Masters diss., Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2001).

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Equally important, enlargements and land acquisitions also occurred in great part at the expense of landowners. Wealthy merchants, for instance, sometimes bought landed properties to diversify their economic operations and consolidate some of their fortune in what was generally considered a safe and very stable form of investment. Landowners from tierra caliente purchased additional haciendas and ranchos in tierra fría (and vice versa) so they could expand the range of their marketable crops and thus have a larger share of the agricultural market. During the

1850s, when Church properties were sold and auctioned, many middling merchants, rancho owners, hacienda administrators, and a wide collection of tenants also managed to acquire numerous tracts of hacienda lands. As pointed out above, a similar thing happened during the

1860s and 1870s when economic downturn put haciendas under great duress. 113 Thus, the comparatively modest size of large-scale commercial activities and the fact that land transactions involved a relatively broad range of actors and landed properties may have limited the overall magnitude of hacienda and rancho appropriation of pueblo lands.

Pueblos that managed to keep together their land base (or at least a significant part of it) in the half century after independence tended to share a number of characteristics. First, they formed clusters of settlements usually grouped together so that they constituted relatively large nuclei of population. This gave pueblos certain collective weight and reduced the possibility of being engulfed by neighboring haciendas and ranchos. Second, environmental conditions and the geographical location of these pueblos restricted the expansion of large-scale commercial activities and, thus, the drive to open new lands to production. As suggested earlier, lowlands

113 See, Chowning, Wealth and Power in Provincial Mexico, 222-228.

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and valleys concentrated most large-scale agricultural production in Michoacán, whereas highlands were likely to make more room for small-scale and subsistence agriculture. Finally, these pueblos’ relationship with local landowners was one of mutual advantage as much as it was one of conflict. Pueblos, haciendas, and ranchos were connected through land and labor; many families within pueblos relied on haciendas to supplement their annual income, while landowners relied on pueblos to get the supplementary labor and rent the additional lands that landowners occasionally needed.114

Resourceful Pueblos

The pueblos of the meseta constituted one of the largest concentrations of indigenous settlements in Michoacán—probably only surpassed by the Lake Pátzcuaro Basin, east of the plateau.

Throughout the nineteenth century and until the collapse of the porfirian regime, haciendas never outnumbered pueblos in the meseta. Estates probably occupied more lands in comparison

(although the evidence is fragmentary or unavailable), but pueblos congregated far more population and consistently doubled the number of haciendas. Over the decades, the number of pueblos and haciendas remained fairly constant. The number of pueblos, in fact, experienced virtually no changes (always around 40) since at least the late colonial period. Occasional administrative shifts caused minor variations, but these variations were of formal importance only. The number of haciendas did not experience significant changes either. From 1821 to

114 See the partially passé but still illuminating suggestions of Erwin P. Grieshaber, “Hacienda-Indian Community Relations and Indian Acculturation: An Historiographical Essay,” in Latin American Research Review 14, no. 3 (1979): 107-128. See also, Tutino, From Insurrection to Revolution, 142-144 and 228-240; and Purnell, Popular Movements, 32.

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1910, there were as an average 22 haciendas in the meseta. Right after independence there were

28 of them, as many as they would ever be thereafter. The closest haciendas got to this number was 25 in 1886; a quarter of century later there were only 21. Haciendas, in sum, did not entirely dominate the rural landscape of the meseta.115

In fact, as pointed out earlier, the distribution of landed properties in the meseta closely mirrored that of Michoacán. Decade after decade, ranchos significantly outstripped the number of haciendas and were consistently more numerous than pueblos. In the early nineteenth century there were about two ranchos for every pueblo and almost three for every hacienda. The numeric difference between ranchos, haciendas, and pueblos turned greater during the second half of the nineteenth century and the 1900s. Yet, similar to state-wide trends, the preponderance of ranchos in the meseta needs to be taken with some caution. The majority of ranchos were in all likelihood small properties or small and dependent settlements actually belonging to pueblos, haciendas, and other ranchos. That explains the notable disparities in the available data.

Sometimes, ranchos and rancherías were simply grouped together in the same category. On other occasions, rancherías could or could not be included in the surveys depending on the personal judgment of the surveyors. Independent settlements and small- to mid-size agricultural units, at any rate, were fairly common in the meseta.

115 See, Lejarza, Analisis estadistico, 105, 133, 144, and 154; Rodríguez, Índice de los pueblos del estado, 11-138; "División Territorial: Cuadro Número 9," in Memoria de 1882; Memoria de 1885, 95-110; Índice alfabetico, 1-3 and 4-9; and Archivo General de la Nación (AGN), Fomento y Obras Públicas, Agricultura, Leg. 2, Caja 8, Exp.1, Mich., 1910.

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Fig. 4. Number of Ranchos and Haciendas in the Meseta

Year Ranchos Haciendas 1822 81 28 1873 81 16 1880 170 20 1886 98 25 1909 319 22 1910 193 21

Sources: Lejarza, Analisis estadístico ; Rodríguez, Índice de los pueblos del estado de Michoacán de Ocampo, 1873; "División Territorial: Cuadro Número 9," in Memoria de Gobierno de Michoacán de 1882; Memoria de Gobierno de Michoacán de1885; Indice alfabetico de la division territorial del Estado de Michoacan de Ocampo, 1909; AGN, Fomento y Obras Públicas, Agricultura, Leg. 2, Caja 8, Exp.1, Mich., 1910.

Landed properties spread unevenly across the meseta—a result, to an important degree, of how water was distributed in the region. As mentioned earlier, the upper meseta had no major estates. The absence of rivers and other major bodies of water limited the economic viability of big properties and large-scale agriculture. For the most part, people depended on seasonal rains to grow their crops and rains only came once a year during the summer and early fall.

Subsistence and small-scale commercial agriculture thus tended to predominate. Hence the importance of the ekuarho, the productive space within household lots devoted to orchards and vegetable gardens. Squash was extensively cultivated everywhere, but the harvests in places such as Charapan, Cheran, and Paracho stood out. Peaches were also a staple in Cheran and Paracho, as well as in the smaller pueblo of San Felipe. Nahuatzen was known for its apples and

Comachuen for its pears. In Paracho, people planted modest amounts of berries. All these

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produces were traded in local markets and provided families with essential earnings and, for some, even substantial gains.116

Livestock rearing was also fairly extended in the upper meseta and it too was an important source of income. Sheep were widely held by indigenous families and pueblos; horses, donkeys, mules, cows, and, to a lesser extent, swine were common too. Families kept a small number of animals in corrals within their lots, mainly for domestic consumption and sometimes for local trade. Pueblos kept their sheep and cows in mid-size ranchos and common lands. Some, such as Siciucho, Corupo, Comachuen, and Charapan were actually among the main sheep- raisers in the whole meseta. By the late nineteenth-century, their flocks amounted to several thousand, outstripping the number of sheep held by many ranchos and haciendas. These pueblos also possessed dozens of horses and sometimes several hundred cows.117

By comparison, rivers and streams made the presence of estates in the lower meseta possible and feasible. Most people still depended on yearly rains to plant their crops, but waterways facilitated irrigation and thus increased the chances of having more than one harvest a year. Irrigation also contributed to boost fruit and vegetable production. Pueblos, haciendas, and ranchos split the use of local watercourses. In general, haciendas and large ranchos utilized

116 See, “Noticas hidrograficas,” 39-43, 58-59, 87-90; Romero, Noticias, 123; “Catálogo de la frutas, raíces, tubérculos que se producen y expenden en el estado de Michoacán de Ocampo,” in Memoria sobre la administración pública del estado de Michoacán de Ocampo, leída ante la diputación permanente del congreso del mismo por el secretario del despacho Lic. Francisco Pérez Gil en la sesión del 13 de septiembre de 1892 (Morelia: Talleres de la Escuela de Artes, 1892), 17-18, 38, and 42. [34-35, 42, 45-46, 58-59, 61, 64-65, 71-72]. 117 See, "Noticia Estadistica Numero 3. Noticia sobre ganaderia de las fincas rusticas del Estado," in Memoria de Michoacán de 1889.

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rivers and streams to irrigate their fields and propel wheat and sugar mills. Smallholders and pueblos irrigated their orchards and vegetable gardens.118

Large-scale commercial agriculture and small-scale cultivation thus coincided in the lower meseta in a larger extent than in the upper lands. As a result, competition for land, water and other resources between pueblos, ranchos, and haciendas was also more extended. Clear dominance of haciendas and ranchos over pueblos, however, was for the most confined to specific areas, especially to the lowermost areas neighboring tierra caliente. There, the abundance of water, a lower altitude, and a warmer weather enabled the cultivation of cash crops such as sugarcane and indigo.

Sugarcane was particularly important in the municipalities of Taretan and Los Reyes. By the mid-1880s, these two municipalities concentrated the vast majority of haciendas in the meseta (18 out of a total of 25).119 The two local indigenous pueblos, Ziracuaretiro in Taretan and San Gabriel in Los Reyes, were probably among the few in the meseta experiencing the very same challenges and pressures that other pueblos faced in regions where the dominance of haciendas was more patent. Yet, although haciendas such as Tomendan, Taretan, Santa Clara, or

San Sebastian undoubtedly ruled the local landscape, their economic sway had some limits. They all profited from large-scale cultivation of sugarcane. Yet part of the profits came not from sugar, but from molasses and a sweet known as piloncillo. More importantly, the market for sugar was for the most part restricted to other regions within Michoacán, the Bajío, and other neighboring

118 See, “Noticas hidrograficas,” 39-43, 58-59, 87-90. 119 See, “Catastro de los bosques”, 95-110; and “Noticias hidrográficas,” 39-43.

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states, while sugar sweets also supplied Mexico City. Although important and significantly lucrative, the sugar business never managed to dominate the overall economy of the meseta and did not disrupt the economy of most of its pueblos.120

Coffee became a paramount crop during the last third of the nineteenth century, especially in the city of Uruapan and its surroundings. According to some contemporary accounts there were between 200,000 and 300,000 coffee plants by 1886-1888.121 Unlike sugarcane, however, haciendas did not concentrate coffee cultivation. In fact, coffee was for the most part grown in small- and mid-size properties, including the ekhuaro of many indigenous lots. In 1876 the coffee of Uruapan won some international recognition when it was awarded for its high quality in the Centennial International Exposition held in Philadelphia. This in part contributed to turn coffee into one of the few products of the meseta (if not the sole product) that was sent overseas. Coffee exports, however, were never significant and the vast majority of the production was sold to nearby places and states such as Colima. At its highest point, during the early 1890s, coffee yields reached some 205,000 kilograms, valued in approximately 107,000

120 See, Romero, Noticias, 91; Michoacán de Ocampo: noticias históricas, geográficas y estadísticas, coleccionadas y publicadas por la redacción del Periódico oficial del estado (Morelia: Imprenta de O. Ortiz, 1873), 61; Memoria presentada por el ciudadano general de división Manuel González al Ejecutivo de la Unión, al del Estado de Michoacán y a la Legislatura del mismo sobre el uso de la facultades discrecionales que le fueron concedidas para reorganizar polítca y administrativamente dicho Estado (Morelia: Imprenta del Gobierno, 1877), 160; Memoria presentada al Congreso de la Unión por el secretario de estado y del despacho de fomento, colonización, industria y comercio de la República Mexicana General Carlos Pacheco, correspondiente a los años trascurridos de enero de 1883 a junio de 1885 (Mexico: Oficina Tipográfica de la Secretaría de Fomento de la Secretaría de Fomento, 1887), 801-803; Informes y documentos relativos á comercio interior y exterior, agricultura é industrias, vol. 8 (Mexico: Oficina Tipográfica de la Secretaría de Fomento, 1886), 49-50; Velasco, Geografía y estadística, 174-175; and Sánchez Díaz, Los cultivos tropicales, 269-308. 121 See, Informes y documentos relativos á comercio interior y exterior, agricultura é industrias, vol. 37 (Mexico: Oficina Tipográfica de la Secretaría de Fomento, 1888), 171-175; and Informes y documentos relativos á comercio interior y exterior, agricultura é industrias, vol. 41 (Mexico: Oficina Tipográfica de la Secretaría de Fomento, 1888), 101-104.

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pesos—almost as profitable a business as sugarcane sweets, worth some 114,500 pesos by around the same years. In 1898, however, a plague (apparently aphids) caused severe damages and by 1901 coffee yields fell to about 11,120 kilograms, valued in no more than 5,600 pesos.122

Coffee in the meseta did not recover from this collapse until after the 1910s and it never regained its earlier productivity.123 The boom, at any rate, did not significantly alter the basic agricultural practices of pueblos in the lower meseta since it was mostly the result of cultivation based upon smallholdings. On the contrary, it may have offered important returns to many indigenous families in the city of Uruapan, Jucutacato, Jicalan, and other nearby places.

As in the upper lands, most pueblos in the lower meseta also relied on orchards and vegetable gardens and livestock rearing to supplement their earnings. Fruits and vegetables were sold in local markets and only exceptionally beyond the region. Zirosto and Paricutin cultivated modest, but valuable loads of cherries. Quince was also grown in Zirosto and pears in

Parangaricutiro. A wide variety of produces came from Periban, Tancítaro, Tingambato, and the city of Uruapan (avocados, squashes, peaches, guavas, pomegranates, and sweet potatoes). Fig was particularly extended in Tingambato and mamey in Jicalan and Jucutacato. Capacuaro and

Arantepacua grew different kinds of apples. Some haciendas and ranchos also engaged in fruit

122 Antonio Peñafiel, Anuario estadístico de la república mexicana 1893 (Mexico: Oficina Tipográfica de la Secretaría de Fomento, 1894), 599 and 612; Antonio Peñafiel, Anuario estadístico de la república mexicana 1901 (Mexico: Oficina Tipográfica de la Secretaría de Fomento, 1902), 518. 123 See, Sánchez Díaz, Los cultivos tropicales, 202-237; and Gerardo Sánchez Díaz, Breve historia del café en Michoacán (Morelia: Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolás de Hidalgo / Centro de Investigación y Desarrollo de Michoacán / Fundación Produce, 2006), 33-54.

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cultivation, but only as a marginal activity that did not preclude small-scale production.124 By comparison, livestock rearing among the pueblos of the lower meseta faced greater competition from local haciendas and ranchos. The estates of Los Reyes, for instance, were known for the high quality of their cattle. Still some pueblos such as Angahuan, Zirosto, and Zacan held hundreds of cows and sheep. Angahuan, in particular, was among the largest sheep holders of the lower meseta and was probably one of the few localities there that could compete with the pueblos of the upper lands.125

The Centrality of Corn

Sugarcane, coffee, fruits, vegetables, and livestock. These were all essential pieces of everyday life in the meseta. None, however, had such a paramount place as corn. This was equally true for smallholdings, pueblos, ranchos and haciendas. Landowners relied on corn in times of crisis as much as they did so in more prosperous seasons. As pointed out earlier, when things got difficult corn kept hacienda lands productive at a relatively low cost. When things improved, corn actually became a very lucrative business. Major landowners such as Feliciano Vidales, whose fortune came for the most part from sugarcane estates, also obtained important gains from corn.

Wheat, the other major grain of the meseta, yielded substantially less profits than corn, something that turned out to be even truer in periods of commercial expansion. From 1889 to

124 See, “Catálogo de la frutas,” 42, 45, 58, 64, 71-72; Informes y documentos relativos á comercio interior y exterior, agricultura é industrias, vol. 31 (México: Oficina Tipográfica de la Secretaría de Fomento, 1888), 59. 125 See, Michoacán de Ocampo: noticias históricas, 37-38; "Noticia Estadistica Numero 3. Noticia sobre ganadería;” and Informes y documentos relativos á comercio interior y exterior, agricultura é industrias, vol. 10 (Mexico: Oficina Tipográfica de la Secretaría de Fomento, 1886), 146.

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1910, during the heyday of the Porfiriato, corn profits in the meseta averaged 436,691 pesos, while wheat gains were barely around 77,138 pesos. In 1889, corn was fifteen times more lucrative than wheat. By 1910, the gap significantly shrank, but corn was still three times more valuable. Just three years earlier, in 1907, corn revenues had reached the historical sum of

527,000 pesos—a sum that only sugarcane products combined may have equaled or surpassed.

Fig. 5. Grain Production in the Meseta

Year Corn Wheat 1889 369,850 24,661 1893 360,000 70,000 1895 450,000 28,800 1907 527,015 84,490 1910 476,588 177,740

Sources, "Noticia estadistica numero 2. Noticia de la propiedad rustica del Estado y produccion de la misma. Distrito rentistico de Uruapan. Resumen de los cuadros sobre propiedad rustica del Estado," in Memoria de Michoacán de 1889; Peñafiel, Anuario estadístico 1893, 566; Peñafiel, Anuario estadístico 1907, 471 and 474; and AGN, Fomento y Obras Públicas, Agricultura, Leg. 2, Caja 8, Exp.1, Mich., 1910.

Corn was the single most important crop among mid- and small-scale growers, including pueblos and indigenous families. Not only because it provided them with basic sustenance, but because it was, by far, their comparatively most profitable crop. In the early 1890s, Pedro

Galvan, for instance, produced some 1,500 fanegas of corn in Charapan and San Felipe, worth approximately 3,400 pesos. Antonio Garcia, also a grower from Charapan, produced some 40 loads of wheat valued in the much more modest sum of 100 pesos. Miguel Eiquihua from

Parangaricutiro, harvested around 4,000 fanegas of corn worth 6,000 pesos; by contrast, grower

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Apolinar Leon, also a resident of Parangaricutiro, gained some 150 pesos from his 50 loads of wheat. The gap between corn and wheat profits prevailed all across the meseta.126

Overall, pueblos were responsible for a very substantial portion of corn production in the meseta and thus benefited from its selling in local and regional markets—local corn may have also been sent to other regions within Michoacán. Yet some pueblos and individuals within them benefited more than others. Circa 1889, for instance, Urapicho produced about 200 fanegas of corn equivalent to some 460 pesos, while Paracho and Quinceo produced 900 fanegas equivalent to a little more than 2,000 pesos. By comparison, Aranza, Ahuiran, and Pomacuaron produced between 3,600 and 4,000 fanegas each, priced in about 8,000 and almost 9,000 pesos. Production in Cheran and its tenancy Cheran-Atzicurin was among the highest and more valuable of the meseta; it amounted to 25,000 fanegas worth some 58,000 pesos.127 According to Carl Lumholtz, who was in Cheran in the mid-1890s, “the richest man in town was a full-blooded Indian, worth probably $100,000.” His name was Sebastian Turja. Lumholtz estimated that Don Sebastian, as he called him, “raised corn to the value of $2,000 every year.”128 There is evidence that more or less at the time Lumholtz passed by Cheran, Sebastian Turja, Don Sebastian, cultivated 15,000 fanegas of corn valued in no less than 30,000 pesos.129

126 See, “Catálogo de la producciones agrícolas que se obtienen en el estado de Michaocan de Ocampo,” in Memoria de Michoacán 1892, 94-95, 105, 108, 112, 115, 125, 127, 129, and 134-135. 127 See, "Noticia estadistica numero 2. Noticia de la propiedad rustica.” 128 Lumholtz, Unknown Mexico, 391. 129 See, “Catálogo de la producciones agrícolas,” 95. On the past and present importance of corn in different regions of Michoacán, including the meseta, see, Luis Seefoó Luján and Nicola Maria Keilbach Baer, eds., Ciencia y paciencia campesina. El maíz en Michoacán (Zamora: El Colegio de Michoacán / Gobierno del Estado de Michoacán, 2010).

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Supplementary Activities

Corn cultivation was thus the essential occupation of most purépecha families and individuals in the meseta. For those who did not share the same fortune as Sebastian Turja, however, auxiliary activities remained crucial. A product of the strategic location of settlements and the early colonial missionary campaigns (fray Juan de San Miguel and Bishop Vasco de Quiroga were, in that sense, legendary), woodworking was as widespread as an old practice in the region. As with many other things in the meseta, however, there were some pueblos whose reputation outshone that of the rest. Capacuaro, Sevina, and Comachuen manufactured planks and beams for houses and buildings; those of Capacuaro, in particular, were s Acold in many pueblos across the Bajío.

Paracho was known for its wooden boxes, chairs, and bookcases, but above all for its instruments, especially its guitars. Corupo fabricated wooden containers specifically designed for transporting sugar sweets or piloncillos.

Other pueblos specialized in different trades. San Felipe was actually called San Felipe de los Herreros because of its many blacksmiths. “In order to eke out an existence the women, who are very industrious, do a great deal of textile work,” Lumholtz noted down.130 Women in

Parangaricutiro wove highly prized wool coverlets. Wool garments also came from Paracho.

Ahuiran made tights. The making of handicrafts and other specialized articles was a common activity too. The people of Nahuatzen made fur items and shoes. Quinceo’s saddles were reputed to be of the best sort. Rosaries were crafted in Cocucho and Charapan where small wooden articles such as hand mills were also made. Pottery-making was widely extended in Uruapan.

130 See, Lumholtz, Unknown Mexico, 365.

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Writing in the early 1860s, priest José Guadalupe Romero pointed out that Nurio was celebrated

“por haberse fabricado en él el sombrero del Ilustrísimo Señor Don Vasco de Quiroga después de haber aprendido los indios bajo la pacientísima direccion de aquel prelado, el oficio de hacer sombreros.” Quiroga’s hat, said Romero, was still kept by some nuns in Pátzcuaro and hat- making continued to be a trademark of Nurio.131 Lumholtz noticed that people in meseta were in general very fond of music, but it appears that the musician occupation was especially practiced in Zirosto and Zacan.132

Peddlers and muleteers provided an essential service to the meseta. The late arrival of railways, the uneven state of local roads, and the lack of a major port, turned them all the more indispensable. Peddlers and muleteers were the intermediaries between landowners and merchant houses, between artisans and small growers and retailers in and around the meseta. Peddlers,

Lumholtz observed, were “generally natives of the Sierra” and travelled “on foot as far as to the city of Mexico in the east, Guadalajara in the west, and to the coast towns of Acapulco, Colima, and Tepic.” They carried on “their back enormous crates (huacales) made of bamboo-sticks” packed with merchandise, “chiefly pottery”, “brought in from neighboring villages” and “from considerable distances”.133 Muleteers transported all sorts of items and produces, from tierra caliente to the city of Uruapan to Morelia, the Bajío, Colima, and Jalisco. Groups of muleteers,

131 See, Romero, Noticias, 86. On trades in general see in this book: 86-87, 93-99, and 123. 132 See, Lumholtz, Unknown Mexico, 388; and Romero, Noticias, 96. 133 Lumholtz, Unknown Mexico, 368.

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some of them prominent, came from specific pueblos, namely Aranza, Zirosto, Zacan, Periban,

Parangaricutiro, and Capacuaro.134

Sharecropping and seasonal labor in the sugar- and rice-producing haciendas of the lower meseta and tierra caliente offered yet another means of securing additional income and, for some, plain sustenance. As elsewhere in Mexico and other parts of Latin America, the relationship between haciendas and pueblos was often contentious. Yet the fact that corn played such a central role in the overall economy of the meseta, even for large landowners, actually lessened tensions and reduced frontal hostilities. Sharecropping, in that sense, remained not only feasible, but comparatively advantageous for both parties. Corn-producing haciendas, in particular, offered families and individuals the relative certainty that lands would not be used for planting another crop; landowners, for their part, secured additional workers without having to deal with the expenses of keeping a large base of permanent laborers. The terms could change from time to time, negatively affecting tenants and sharecroppers, but corn turned sharecropping into a relatively stable and valuable system for many in the meseta.

Sugar and rice haciendas in the south did not offer lands, but they did offer attractive wages. Rivers abounded and cash crops could grow conspicuously. Yet workers were always scarce in these areas of traditionally low local population. As a result, landowners tended to offer high payments in an effort to attract the laborers they chronically lacked, especially (but not exclusively) during the harvest season when most hands were needed.

134 Romero, Noticias, 95-96 and 98.

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The cycle of corn in the meseta actually contributed to turn seasonal labor appealing. In most places, corn was planted in March and April and harvested in November and December.

Work in the corn fields thus subsided during the summer and most of the winter, precisely the time when work was available in the sugar and rice fields of the southern lower lands. Sugarcane was planted from May to July and harvested from October to April. Since irrigation allowed more than two agriculture cycles a year, rice was both planted and harvested in the late spring and summer (from roughly April to June) and then again during the fall (especially in November, but in some places also until January). Many people from the meseta thus spent several weeks a year working in tierra caliente and its bordering areas. Some, particularly the youngest who did not possess land of their own yet, probably stayed even longer to earn a little more. Generally speaking, corn, sugar, and rice did not preclude one another. For most families in the meseta, they actually represented supplementary sources of income and not rival crops. That is, as long as corn remained the mainstay of the three.135

Conclusion

Aranza. Paracho. Nurio. Paricutin. Capacuaro. Pueblos in the meseta lived within similar limits and shared more or less the same prospects. Differences and variations, however, characterized this world as much as its commonalities. Settlement patterns did not vary much from one place to another and everywhere a three-part land regime underpinned basic and most auxiliary

135 See, “Catálogo de la producciones agrícolas,” 88, 111, 115, 125, 127, 128; Alfredo Pureco Ornelas, Empresarios Lombardos en Michoacán. La familia Cusi entre el porfiriato y la posrevolución, 1884-1938 (Zamora: El Colegio de Michoacán / Instituto Mora, 2010), 139-182; Sánchez Díaz, Los cultivos tropicales, 240-265 and 268-308. For a general view on sharecropping and hacienda-pueblos ties see, Tutino, From Insurrection, 142-144 and 228-240.

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activities. Yet settlements followed a well-established hierarchy within which the ascendancy of some pueblos was comparatively greater. Pueblos employed their resources in similar ways, but their actual holdings and funds were far from identical and in some cases actually varied greatly.

A minority of pueblos at the top enjoyed comparatively sounder conditions (more land, greater yields, more cattle, more woodlands); another minority at the bottom was forced to get by with significantly fewer means. A majority in the middle managed to cope with everyday challenges and periodic contingencies relying on modest, but well-fitted resources.

A similar pattern characterized the internal composition of pueblos. Social and wealth differences were universal. As a rule, some families and individuals experienced greater difficulties to secure sustenance and thus “auxiliary” activities were for them actually of critical importance. In contrast, a small number of groups and prominent individuals in each pueblo enjoyed a comfortable life and some even a life of ease. The vast majority knew nothing about luxuries or indulgencies and oscillated between modest security and recurring privations.

The physical features of the landscape were in general fairly similar across the meseta. Yet differences in water access, altitude, and climate divided it into two distinct sub-regions. The lower meseta, profuse in waterways, concentrated all large landed properties— a majority of which in fact located in the lowermost areas next to tierra caliente. This offered most pueblos important relief from potential pressures on the part of haciendas and large ranchos. The importance of corn in the region’s economy provided further alleviation. Numerous and variegated crops grew in the meseta, but none had the material and social significance of corn. It

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did not prevent the adverse consequences of large-scale commercial activities, but corn limited and mitigated their impact upon the livelihood of pueblos and families.

Overall, this was a surprisingly stable world. Stable. Yet not impervious to change.

Ongoing transformations stretching back to at least the early nineteenth century came to light beginning in the 1870s. They added further complexity to life arrangements in the meseta and eventually refashioned how pueblos and families related to each other, the government, and the economy. The nature and magnitude of the changes turned out to be of such consequence that they can be regarded as a distinct time in the history of the pueblos of the meseta. The time of the reparto.

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CHAPTER 3

THE FOUNDATIONS OF LIBERAL LAND REFORM IN THE MESETA

A definition

Reparto: A nineteenth-century expression standing for liberal land reform. It comes from the verb repartir which conveys both the act of dividing something into fractions and the act of sharing out the fractions among a finite number of people. The definition of the verb “to apportion” closely communicates what the word reparto means: to divide, assign, and distribute proportional shares of something according to a plan. That something, in this case, was land.

Communal land in particular: the land in possession of hundreds of indigenous communities across Mexico and Michoacán.

An Unconventional Story

The reparto has been traditionally portrayed as a lop-sided clash between liberal authorities, on the one hand, and indigenous communities, on the other. Advocates of land reform came to believe that public good and material prosperity, at least in part, rested upon replacing communal with individual property rights. They then turned their beliefs into laws and made laws the tool of reform, the means for communities to measure up to the reformers’ ideals. Unable to go about their business and unwilling to trade communal land tenure, communities resented land reform and opposed any attempt of enforcement. In sum, a clash between modern and traditional rights.

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There is, no doubt, some truth in this portrait. The reparto did pit two very different forms of understanding property rights against each other. The contest, as well, was certainly unbalanced. It was liberals who wanted to change the ways of indigenous communities and devised policies to replace land rights—and not the other way around. Not a single community or community member was ever consulted in the drafting of reparto laws. Liberal land reform was to an important degree a top-down creation of a small group of men. Lawyers, writers, high- ranking military officers, landowners. All members of the local congress or governors of

Michoacán. Some of them prosperous, other of moderate wealth only. No one indigenous.

A closer examination, however, reveals many more angles to this story. At least in the meseta. There the reparto involved a wide range of overlapping parties and interests.

Communities and liberals did not form two uniform camps or followed one single course of action.136 Enforcing the reparto required the participation of many different kinds of authorities: municipal authorities, district authorities, fiscal officials, high-ranking officials, governors, and federal authorities. Differences and even mutual accusations between them were not uncommon.

Federal and local authorities did not always agree in how and which laws to apply. The Supreme

Court upset decisions of the government of Michoacán. Fiscal officials complained about district authorities and district authorities, in turn, nagged at municipal authorities, while officials in the

136 This point is also emphasized in Brigitte Boehm,“Las comunidades de indígenas de Ixtlán y Pajacuaran”, in Estructuras y formas agrarias en México, del pasado y del presente, eds. Antonio Escobar Ohmstede y Teresa Rojas Rabiela (México: CIESAS, 2001), 145-175; and Jennie Purnell, "With All Due Respect: Popular Resistance to the Privatization of Communal Lands in Nineteenth-Century Michoacan." Latin American Research Review 34, no. 1 (1999): 93-94.

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Minister of Government constantly attempted to balance and make sense out of all the different accounts provided by regional and local authorities.

Communities, for their part, divided into different competing groups supported by middling and lower community members and led by indigenous and non-indigenous notables, lawyers, and legal representatives (known as apoderados). Tenants, independent smallholders, and landowners in close contact with community notables also played a part in shaping the course of land divisions. Authorities sometimes aided the interests of these non-community members, but often they also attempted to keep them in check and on occasions explicitly sided with communities when controversies over the reparto surfaced. The reparto, in sum, entailed an intricate process of negotiation and compromises in which communities and community groups sometimes acted as the instruments and sometimes as the sponsors of land divisions.

Six Conditioning Factors

Larger and varied forces framed and conditioned the actions of all parties immersed in this process. First, and most obviously, an ideology and a set of legal norms that discouraged communal land tenure and supported instead individual property rights. Throughout the nineteenth century liberalism offered a body of principles and pragmatic directives to counter the doctrine established under the Spanish rule which had granted pueblos communal rights over lands. Three times the government of Michoacán enacted laws in accordance with liberal ideals: one in January 18, 1827, one in December 13, 1851, and a last one in June 14, 1902. In June 25,

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1856 the federal government also enacted the first national law affecting communal land tenure all across the country.137

Significantly, the reparto in the meseta brought to light fundamental differences and even contradictions between state and federal mandates, especially between the state laws of 1827 and

1851, on the one hand, and the 1856 federal law (the Lerdo law), on the other. Michoacán’s laws upheld a particular version of liberalism that had stemmed from Cadiz, but gradually grew into a more radical defense of egalitarianism. As enshrined in state codes, land policies thus entailed more than merely undoing corporate rights, but an actual reform of the internal make-up of pueblos by means of redistributing community lands. This sort of egalitarian and reformist bent was absent in the 1856 Lerdo, a piece of legislation that has conventionally been seen as a touchtone of militant liberalism in Mexico.

These differences between two coexisting and competing versions of liberalism and reformism have been almost completely overlooked by students of nineteenth-century land reforms in Michoacán and Mexico. They were, however, fundamental for how land divisions took place in the meseta. Local people, including of course community members, were well aware of this fact. It is true that laws by themselves could not prompt reforms. Yet they did more than simply delineate an ideal or offer a background for real events to happen. On the ground, laws provided people with concrete means to take land policies into their own hands.

137 Secondary norms, known as reglamentos, accompanied these laws and provided specific guidelines to enforce land divisions. The reglamento of the 1827 law was issued in February 15, 1828, that of the 1851 law appeared simultaneously with the law, and that of the 1902 law was enacted in July 4, 1902 (almost a month after the law).

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Second, a combination of political conditions and circumstances favored the enforcement of new land laws. The reparto supposed a firm commitment from its liberal advocates.

Dismantling communal land tenure was certainly one of the most enduring features in the liberal political agenda. Mere commitment, however, was never enough. Enforcing reparto policies entailed getting hold of public power and, more importantly, it entailed having enough leverage to act effectively against political rivals and potential social discontent. Implementation of land divisions involved mobilizing personnel and resources that governments could not always afford.

Only when liberals were able to secure a clear political advantage over their adversaries did land reform start coming to fruition.

Third, a new fiscal policy taxed real estate property. Community lands under liberal governments, especially in the second half of the nineteenth century, became subject to taxation.

This was one of the main and yet hitherto overlooked differences between colonial and liberal land policies. Under the Spanish rule, indios paid tribute in a number of ways. In kind, hard cash, or labor. Land, however, remained nontaxable. Not even the eighteenth-century reform under the

Bourbons altered this principle. The reform forced pueblos to put on lease community lands and took common funds away from the control of repúblicas, but it never established a direct tax on lands. Reparto policies intended to undo communal land tenure as a means to create a large base of taxpaying property owners and alleviate the burdens of constantly struggling public finances.

Fiscal measures—a combination of tax exceptions for individual properties of modest value and

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higher tolls for undivided lands—offered incentives and exert pressures that reparto laws alone could not provide. Fiscal policy and land reform were fundamentally entangled.138

Fourth, local support in favor of reparto policies. Liberal land reform did not engage uniform communities wherein resources and power were distributed evenly. A host of competing interests defined relationships among community members and between community members and other local actors—namely landowners, tenants, landless peasants, municipal authorities (at times community members themselves, at times non-community members), and residents of neighboring pueblos. Confronting communal land tenure, in that sense, necessarily entailed upsetting more than a unified collective ethos. Reparto policies disturbed all the many interests comprised and maintained in and around communal land tenure.139

Land reform, accordingly, did not simply pose communities with a basic choice between resisting and complying with land divisions. Rejecting or supporting land divisions actually depended on numerous consultations and balancing acts between all interested parties. On the ground, the reparto became the means to achieve many, often overlapping and even contradictory, ends. Community members, their lawyers and legal representatives, as well as

138 Margarita Menegus has been particularly emphatic about this point. See, Margarita Menegus, “Ocoyoacac—una comunidad agraria en el siglo XIX,” in Problemas agrarios y propiedad en México, siglos XVIII y XIX, ed. Margarita Menegus (Mexico: El Colegio de México, 1995), 157; Margarita Menegus, Los indios en la historia de México (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica / CIDE, 2006), 52 and 57; Margarita Menegus, "La desvinculación y desamortización de la propiedad en Huajuapan, siglo XIX," in La desamortización en Oaxaca, ed. Carlos Sánchez Silva (Mexico: Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, 2007), 31. 139 See, Emilio Kourí, "Interpreting the Expropriation of Indian Pueblo Lands in Porfirian Mexico: The Unexamined Legacies of Andrés Molina Enríquez," Hispanic American Historical Review 82, no. 1 (2002): 69-117. Kourí brilliantly tested the argument of the internal causes of land divisions in his A Pueblo Divided: Business, Property, and Community in Papantla, Mexico (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004). A similar perspective informs two equally revealing studies of pueblos in Michoacán: Purnell, "With All Due Respect," 85-121 and William Roseberry, "El Estricto Apego a la Ley,” in Ruralidad y reformas liberales en México, ed. Andrew Roth Seneff (Zamora: El Colegio de Michoacán, 2004), 43-84.

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tenants, landowners, and local authorities learned how to use land policies to their favor and against their rivals. Land policies were equally employed to preserve, expand, and acquired community lands. Supporting land reform was the practical result of down-to-earth decisions made in the midst of rapidly changing power equilibriums and shifting circumstances. Practical and short-term reasons (and fears) were behind many land divisions.

Fifth, an upward demographic trend. Short-term decisions were also informed by the fact that many community members began to face increasing challenges to support their growing families with more or less the same land base than that of their grandparents and great grandparents. Population had been growing since the eighteenth century; demographic pressures had already been causing some distress among the pueblos of the meseta and Michoacán.

Population continued to grow throughout the nineteenth century, but community lands only occasionally augmented. In general, the size of lands remained without much change.

Demographic growth affected most pueblos and all community members. Yet increases in population had a greater impact on pueblos and community members with already inadequate land allocations. It also made middling groups more vulnerable. Changes in the size of population and families did not act mechanically, but they certainly played their part when community members faced both pressures and incentives to retain, gain, or hand over their lands.140

140 For the unequal effects of population changes see, Jack A. Goldstone, Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 31-34.

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Sixth, and last, an expansion of commercial activities. Commercial forestry and the introduction of rail lines in the late nineteenth century precipitated one of the most significant shifts in how pueblos and community members possessed and enjoyed their lands. As we have seen, large-scale commercial activities were not absent in the meseta. Yet they were mostly limited to agricultural activities. In general, forest exploitation responded to domestic and small- scale endeavors only. Customary practices started to change with an increase in the demand for turpentine and lumber for construction. The arrival in Michoacán of the railroad, however, gave wood extraction an entirely new dimension.

Periodization: The Two Repartos

Combined, these forces substantially recast communal property rights in the meseta. Their influence, however, acted differently at different times. The reparto occurred in two distinct, although related, periods. The first period covered from 1868 to roughly the early 1880s, although some of its consequences lingered for many years afterwards. A major political shift inaugurated this first period of reparto. The end of the main foreign occupation of the nineteenth century—the French intervention—and what proved to be a final victory over their conservative adversaries (c. 1867) gave liberals a momentous occasion to resume the implementation of their reforming program. Reforms, of course, included land divisions, but also and most decisively new fiscal policies over land. Renewed pressures by Michoacán’s liberal authorities to divide communal lands in accordance with local reparto laws, combined with mobilization on the ground in the meseta by indigenous and non-indigenous groups in favor of effecting land

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divisions in accordance with the 1856 federal law. Disputes over land divisions confronted community members, fueling long-standing rivalries and creating new sets of conflicts.

A distinct characteristic of this period was that land divisions were for the most part restricted to family parcels and additional agricultural community lands, although in some cases residential plots or solares and woodlands were also included. One of the most important aftereffects of the first reparto was an increase, beginning in the late 1870s, in the selling and buying of family parcels and apportioned community lands. The old Spanish laws did not allow the alienation of community lands, but transactions often occurred in consonance with customary norms. Liberal land reforms, however, further stimulated land dealings by means of granting them full legal recognition. Land dealings, for the most part, benefitted better-off community and non-community members, reinforcing and even augmenting social differences within pueblos.

Economic difficulties and demographic pressures (as noted, affecting more severely underprivileged families) underpinned many of these trades.

The second reparto period began in the late 1880s and the early 1890s and lasted until after the outbreak of the Mexican revolution in 1910. By then, liberals had already been in power for about two decades and had lost much of their earlier militant impetus. In Michoacán, as elsewhere in Mexico, a narrow group of individuals dominated politics and the economy. Civil strife subsided and so did an important part of long-standing fiscal disarrays, as authorities increased their capacity to collect taxes. Land values steadily rose since the early 1870s. Land taxes followed suit, including taxes on the many still undivided community lands—the first reparto wave notwithstanding. Communities and authorities engaged in a series of negotiations

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apropos land rates—negotiations that were actually permitted and even encouraged by fiscal laws. A compromise of a kind was established. Communities with undivided lands agreed to pay land taxes and authorities agreed to lower rates and, implicitly, tolerate the de facto existence of communal land tenure.

The rise of commercial activities associated with the exploitation of the forest, however, revived the reparto question. Commercial appetite for resins and wood notably grew during the

1890s. The selling and buying of lands by community members now expanded to include communal forested areas—something that the 1851 state law prohibited. Since some of these transactions involved lands located in-between neighboring pueblos, they ended up unearthing old and still unresolved boundary disputes. For a second time, communities promoted land divisions in an effort to win land rights over disputed stretches of woodlands against community members selling forest lands, their buyers, and neighboring pueblos. In 1902, the government of

Michoacán enacted one last reparto law, this time permitting the division of all community lands—forests included. Communities were forced to select one representative whose final appointment must be sanctioned by the government. Rival community groups competed to win official approval from the government—and thus an advantage to organize land divisions.

The lumber economy continued to expand in the 1900s. Initial partnerships of local entrepreneurs gave way to larger companies owned and managed by British and American businessmen with ties in the financial circuits of Morelia and Mexico City. For the most part, companies did not seek to buy or take direct control of communal woodlands. Instead, they signed long-term leasing contracts with some communities. In exchange for regular annual rental

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fees, communities allowed companies to extract large amounts of wood and even build local rail lines and sawmills. Access to the forests and not property rights mattered most in the lumber business. Possession of forest lands remained in the hands of communities. Yet land use, ever since, drastically changed. This second reparto period had one final twist. In some cases, the government prevented communities from obtaining the money lumber companies paid in exchange for using communal woodlands. In practice, authorities decided when and how to use the money belonging to the communities. Lumber revenues were ultimately treated as tax revenues. Local autonomy dwindled away as communal land holding came to end.

Christmas Day, 1868

The governor of Michoacán sent out a notice, circular number 90, instructing local and district authorities to publicize the reparto of community lands. Weeks earlier, in December 9, 1868, the state congress had granted the executive extraordinary powers to promote the “prompt division of indigenous community lands without abiding by the formalities established in the relevant law, but making sure to observe the justly principles enshrined in it.”141 Circular 90 contained three main points to be discussed by communities all across Michoacán: 1) an estimated time within which community members thought they could carry out land divisions; 2) an assessment of possible obstacles impeding land divisions; and 3) an estimation of the reasons to object the

141 Amador Coromina, Recopilación de leyes, decretos, reglamentos y circulares expedidas en el estado de Michoacán, Vol. 19 (Morelia: Imprenta de los hijos de Ignacio Arango, 1887) 158.

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reparto in order to determine whether they were legitimate or based on “systematic and interested opposition.”142

From January to March of 1869, district and municipal authorities met with hundreds of indigenous residents of the meseta in public squares and offices. The content of circular 90 was read out loud both in Spanish and in Purépecha. Before addressing the three main discussion points of the circular, community members were told that land divisions intended to improve the well-being of indigenous people and that the government was “always their friend and protector.” The reparto would provide them with the “indispensable elements to become true citizens” and “represent with dignity the country they belong to”; it would prevent them from being “a class strange to the great interests” of the nation. Resisting land divisions would only deprive community members from these benefits and make them miss the best chance they had ever had to enjoy the “invaluable condition of property owners,” as well as expose them “to suffer the penalties established by the law against those who without reason or justice” refused to accept the “beneficial aims” of land divisions.143

142 Ibid, 162-166. 143 Ibid. For examples of local and district authorities meeting with community members, see: Archivo General e Histórico del Poder Ejecutivo de Michoacán (AGHPEM), Secretaría de Gobierno, Gobernación, Hijuelas, Distrito de Uruapan, vol.3, 206; AGHPEM, Secretaría de Gobierno, Gobernación, Hijuelas, Distrito de Uruapan, vol. 4, 147; AGHPEM, Secretaría de Gobierno, Gobernación, Hijuelas, Distrito de Uruapan, vol. 11 149; AGHPEM, Secretaría de Gobierno, Gobernación, Hijuelas, Distrito de Uruapan, vol. 12, 11, 90, 116-118 and 162-163; AGHPEM, Secretaría de Gobierno, Gobernación, Hijuelas, Distrito de Uruapan, vol. 13, 64; AGHPEM, Secretaría de Gobierno, Gobernación, Hijuelas, Distrito de Uruapan, vol. 15, 14; AGHPEM, Secretaría de Gobierno, Gobernación, Hijuelas, Distrito de Uruapan, vol. 15, 174; AGHPEM, Secretaría de Gobierno, Gobernación, Hijuelas, Distrito de Uruapan, vol. 21, 175; and AGHPEM, Secretaría de Gobierno, Gobernación, Hijuelas, Distrito de Uruapan, vol. 23, 176.

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The Radical Egalitarianism of Early Liberalism

It was not the first time communities heard about land divisions. Back in 1825, the first congress of Michoacán discussed and approved a bill requiring communities to divide their lands. The bill was not enacted until two years later in the winter of 1827. The next winter (1828) the governor issued an accompanying secondary law (reglamento) providing the specific guidelines for land divisions to take place. The mandate of both laws was straightforward. Community lands had to be divided among the “descendants of the primitive families” on equal shares. Depending on the available resources in each community, land divisions should ideally result in every family having a piece of arable land, a portion of pastureland, and yet another share of mountainous land (cerros) or, given the case, even a piece of badland (or malpaís, usually remnants of lava fields not suitable for cultivation). Land shares, at any rate, ought to be equal for all families.

Everybody would get the same portion. Even the landless. As for better-off community members holding larger pieces of land, they would have to either relinquish their extra share to equal that of the rest of community members or pay for it in order to keep it. Ultimately, as the 1828 secondary law bluntly put it, the overall value of community lands had to be divided “in as many equal amounts as there are families.”144

144 For the 1827 law see, Amador Coromina, Recopilación de leyes, decretos, reglamentos y circulares expedidas en el estado de Michoacán, Vol. 2 (Morelia: Imprenta de los hijos de Ignacio Arango, 1886), 61-62. For the 1828 supplementary law see, Amador Coromina, Recopilación de leyes, decretos, reglamentos y circulares expedidas en el estado de Michoacán, Vol. 3 (Morelia: Imprenta de los hijos de Ignacio Arango, 1886), 29-35. The content of these laws are discussed in Moisés Franco Mendoza, "La desamortización de bienes de comunidades indígenas en Michoacán," in La sociedad indígena en el centro y occidente de México, ed. Pedro Carrasco, 169-187 (Mexico: El Colegio de México, 1986) and Juan Carlos Cortés Máximo, "La desamortización de la propiedad indígena en una provincia mexicana. Los fines y efectos de la ley de 1827 sobre reparto de tierras comunales en Michoacán," Relaciones 134 (2013): 263-301.

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In several respects, these laws were the direct offspring of the Cadiz years. After the experiment to create a Mexican empire collapsed in 1822, flourishing efforts to establish a federal republic finally crystalized. The Cadiz Cortes had granted provinces with ample powers to enforce land measures affecting communal landholding (see chapter 1). Under the first federal republic (1824-1835), local congresses, and not federal authorities, assumed the responsibility of planning and implementing the transformation of community lands into individual properties.

The congress of Michoacán was far from being an exception when it enacted its first reparto laws. Its legislations were part of a larger trend across Mexico to continue with the directives outlined by the Cortes’ edicts. More than half of the states in which the republic then divided enacted laws sponsoring land divisions or issued some kind of measures against communal landholding.145

Michoacán’s laws also shared the utilitarian individualism underpinning the Cadiz decrees and the morals of earlier reformers under the Bourbons. Individual property, economic prosperity, and moral reform went hand in hand. Ending communal landholding had the purpose of removing the obstacles impeding indigenous people to pursue their individual interest. As individual property owners, indigenous people would put greater care in keeping their lands busy and productive which, in turn, would have a positive effect on the overall productivity of agricultural activities—considered the main source of wealth by both early nineteenth-century

145 In addition to Michoacán, states included Chiapas, Chihuahua, Coahuila-Texas, Jalisco, Zacatecas, Veracruz, Sonora, Puebla, Sinaloa, Nuevo León, and the state of Mexico. See, Donald Fraser, “La Politica de Desamortizacion en las Comunidades Indigenas, 1856-1872,” Historia Mexicana 21, no. 4 (1972): 623, and Enrique Florescano, Etnia, Estado y Nación. Ensayo sobre las identidades colectivas en México (Mexico: Taurus, 2000), 315-316.

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liberals and eighteenth-century reformers. In turning community members into industrious cultivators, land divisions would also contribute to spark in them civic virtues and responsibilities. Just as Bourbon reformers and Cadiz lawmakers associated land reform with the moral regeneration of pueblos de indios, liberals in Michoacán and elsewhere in Mexico saw land policies as a means to improve the character of indigenous people. Together with education campaigns, European migration, and miscegenation, individual property rights would gradually make indigenous people rise to fulfill liberals’ ideal of equality.146

There was, indeed, a deep and inflexible egalitarian aspiration behind the late 1820s state reparto laws—aspiration that would persist later on when efforts to enforce land divisions resurfaced. The laws took all previous reforming ideas to one of its more radical conclusions.

Parceling out community lands sought to create a rural landscape dominated by numerous smallholders, the basis of the just society sponsored by liberal ideals. Reparto laws, however, prescribed a type of land divisions that essentially erased inequalities between community members. Allocations, as mentioned, would result in almost identical shares of land—to the point of suppressing all existing disparities. Forcing this kind of uniformity upon indigenous communities entailed great difficulties. Not so much because of the thought of becoming smallholders, but because such a radical egalitarianism (and the uniform distribution of resources

146 See, Charles Hale, Mexican Liberalism in the Age of Mora, 1821-1853 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), 215-247; and Florescano, Etnia, Estado y Nación, 310-320. For a general examination of liberals’ understandings of indigenous people across Latin America see, Rebecca Earle, The Return of the Native: Indians and Myth-making in Spanish America, 1810-1930 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 161-183 and 280-291.

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it supposed) did not exist or had ever existed among community members and within communities.

The Limited Impact of Early Land Policies

The enforcement of the 1827 and 1828 laws, however, was limited and inconsistent. Laws established a strict deadline of three months to perform the reparto. Yet almost a year and a half after the enactment of the 1828 reglamento, during the summer of 1829, a high-ranking official moaned about the lack of progress of land divisions. “It seems incredible,” he said, “that the decree of January 18, 1828, concerning the allocation of community lands to the so-called indigenous people has not had its complete observance thus far.” The “ignorance and concerns of those who the law benefit,” he continued, “and the personal interests of many indigenous people who by an inveterate custom almost exclusively take advantage of everyone’s lands” were to a great extent responsible for the “great difficulties” hampering the enforcement of “such a wise measure.” The reparto, he concluded, “has given authorities numerous troubles to the point that the government was forced to threaten one community with sending permanent troops to have allocations done.”147

There is, in fact, evidence that land divisions did take place in some communities.

Landowners in the northwestern Jiquilpan and La Piedad areas affirmed they had acquired lands

147 Memoria sobre el estado que guarda la administración pública de Michoacán, presentada al H.C. por el secretario del despacho en 7 de agosto de 1829 (Morelia: Imprenta del Estado, 1829), 16.

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from local pueblos, probably as a result of previous land partitions.148 In Paracuaro, south of the meseta, the reparto seems to have sparked an important support from some community groups in an attempt to take lands back from rival families and tenants. Community members in

Guarachita, Ario, Capula, Erongarícuaro, Santa Ana Maya, and other pueblos also took formal steps to allocate their lands in accordance to the 1827 and 1828 laws.149 The reparto did not have a major impact on the pueblos of the meseta in this period, although there are indications of land divisions in Los Reyes and San Gabriel. Indigenous residents of Los Reyes constituted a local minority and probably used the new land policy to secure land rights over their holdings in an area that was traditionally dominated by ranchos and haciendas. Community members in San

Gabriel, also in Los Reyes area, may have had similar reasons, but allocations only included part of all community lands—in 1884 community members petitioned an allotment of grazing lands that, according to them, had not been divided by their predecessors fifty years earlier.150

Communities may have found greater problems facing the transition from repúblicas de indios to municipalities. Building upon the rulings of the Cadiz constitution, Mexican authorities integrated repúblicas into tenancies and municipalities after independence. As a result, part of the lands belonging to former repúblicas sometimes ended up incorporated to municipal holdings; especially the grazing and additional arable lands that had been mandatorily rented out during the late eighteenth-century Bourbon reform. The line between community and municipal holdings blurred. This kind of ambiguousness could potentially result in the loss of community

148 See chapter 2, footnote 48. 149 See, Cortés Máximo, "La desamortización,” 280-282; and García Ávila, Las comunidades indígenas, 362. 150 Ibid. Also, AGHPEM, Secretaría de Gobierno, Gobernación, Hijuelas, Distrito de Uruapan, vol. 11, 155.

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lands, depending on whether community members could control municipal posts or not.

Indigenous and non-indigenous tenants could also take advantage of the circumstances and claim lands for themselves. It has been suggested that, in this context, some communities actually upheld reparto laws to limit land claims and municipal influence over the management of community lands.151

Politics against Policies

Partisan politics, primarily, conditioned the enforcement of liberal land laws and policies. In general, continuous political swings prevented land divisions from progressing much further.

Ever since the Napoleonic occupation of Spain in 1808, long-standing power equilibriums gave way to division and confrontation all across Spanish America. In Mexico, competing political elites engaged in countless disputes which often resulted in short-lived national and local governments. Disputes revolved around two main positions, one advocating a federalized form government and another one supporting a centralized republic. Deep-rooted rivalries between provincial and central elites (the latter typically based in Mexico City) underwrote both positions. Years of war during the 1810s conferred military officers and individuals in command of armed men an unprecedented influence in political affairs. Electoral politics, patronage, and

151 See, Cortés Máximo, De repúblicas de indios a ayuntamientos, 241-288; Juan Carlos Cortés Máximo, “La comunidad de Tarímbaro. Gobierno indígena, arrendamiento, y reparto de tierras, 1822-1884,” in Autoridad y gobierno indígena en Michoacán, vol. 2, 441-468; and García Ávila, Las comunidades indígenas, 274-371.

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the use of the force as a method of political persuasion and a means to attain public posts coalesced.152

Events affecting national politics, including uprisings (pronunciamientos) against federal authorities, often resonated locally, as provincial elites divided too into several competing cliques. The first elected governor of Michoacán, Antonio Castro, resigned before finishing his term because of his opposition to ongoing policies in favor of expelling Spanish nationals from the country. Local congressmen forced Castro’s successor, José Trinidad Salgado, who as congressmen had participated in the drafting of the 1827 reparto law, to step down twice because of his allegiance to Vicente Guerrero and radical federalism. Guerrero, one of the most prominent surviving insurgent leaders of the wars of independence, had officially lost the 1828 presidential election, but his supporters managed to oust general Manuel Gómez Pedraza

(Guerrero’s competitor) form office. Reinstalled as governor in 1829 after briefly deposed,

Salgado once again faced political misfortune when an uprising against Guerrero gained momentum and deposed the president less than year after he had taken office. By 1832, the confrontation between rival political factions escalated into civil war. In subsequent years,

152 See, Michael Costeloe, La primera república federal de México (1824-1835). Un estudio de los partidos políticos en el México independiente (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1996); Timothy Anna, Forging Mexico, 1821- 1835 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1998); François-Xavier Guerra, “Mexico from Independence to Revolution. The Mutations of Liberalism,” in Cycles of Conflict, Centuries of Change: Crisis, Reform, and Revolution in Mexico, eds. Elisa Servín, Leticia Reina, and John Tutino (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 129-152; and Fernando Escalante Gonzalbo, Ciudadanos imaginarios. Memorial de los afanes y desventuras de la virtud y apología del vicio triunfante en la república mexicana. Tratado de moral pública (Mexico: El Colegio de México, 1992); Will Fowler, "Entre la legalidad y la legitimidad: elecciones, pronunciamientos y la voluntad general de la nación, 1821-1857," in Las elecciones y el gobierno representativo en México, (1810-1910), ed. José Antonio Aguilar Rivera (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica / Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes / Instituto Federal Electoral / Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología, 2010), 95-120; Andrés Lira, “El estado liberal y las corporaciones en México (1821-1859),” in Inventando la nación. Iberoamérica. Siglo XIX, eds. Antonio Annino and François-Xavier Guerra (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2003), 379-398.

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governments (both national and local) shifted from one political persuasion to another. In 1835 opponents of the federal system finally managed to replace it by a central republic.153

The end of federalism rendered local reparto laws null and void. From 1835 to 1846 centralists legislations took self-governing capacities away from the states and cancelled most previous laws enacted by local congresses. The establishment of a central republic, however, did not end political and armed conflicts. Numerous clashes between centralist authorities and federalist forces took place during this period. While centralist governments in Michoacán managed to keep their opponents in check, federalist bands remained very active and were never completely defeated—especially in the south. In time, federalism and advocates of liberalism regained power. By then, however, the country was already at war with the United States. The war ended in the winter of 1848 and liberals, after disastrous defeat, were left with the daunting task of reconstructing federal institutions in accordance with the 1824 constitution (reinstated in

1846). States recovered their autonomy. Local congresses were restored. Yet internal disputes did not subside and liberal authority remained shaky.154

153 See, Gerardo Sánchez Díaz, "Los vaivenes del proyecto republicano," in Historia general de Michoacán, vol. 3, 7-37; and García Ávila, Las comunidades indígenas, 361-364; and Bravo Ugarte, Historia sucinta, 387-400. 154 Michael Costeloe, La república central en México, 1835-1846. “Hombres de bien” en la época de Santa Anna (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2000); Ugarte, Historia sucinta, 400-408; and Ochoa Serrano and Sánchez Díaz, Breve historia, 114-119.

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A New State Reparto Law

Plans of land reform in Michoacán did not resume but until 1851. During the summer of that year (August 4th) local congressmen gathered to discuss a new reparto bill.155 All of them subscribed to the spirit and general purpose of the new piece of legislation: community lands must be divided. Deliberation lasted some weeks, as lawmakers were simultaneously working on other bills. In addition to technical issues (the phrasing of a particular article, for instance), the discussion focused on the potential effectiveness of the law. A combination of pragmatic concerns and preconceived notions about indigenous people dominated the debate. One lawmaker worried that, since the bill dealt with “a class of persons of such a limited capacity as indigenous people,” it would be “not difficult for somebody to delude them” and turn the law into a question of multiple problems.156 Another lawmaker argued that “influential” individuals,

“often the ones who possess better lands,” would most certainly oppose the reparto because it would challenge their power and interests.157 And yet another one argued that while it was true that “some indigenous people will find themselves in poverty” as a result of being misled by hurtful individuals, this would ultimately be the consequence of their own ill use of the “right to

155 Archivo del Honorable Congreso del Estado de Michoacán (AHCEM), Actas Públicas, Expediente 2, Caja 14, Libro de Actas Públicas del Noveno Congreso no. 8, sesión del día 4 de agosto de 1851, n. p. The last name of the twelve congressmen discussing the bill were: Alsua, Bárcena, Cajiga, Cuevas, Correa, Galvan, Estevez, Anton, Ramirez, Ortiz, Madrigal, and Barrera. 156 AHCEM, Actas Públicas, Expediente 2, Caja 14, Libro de Actas Públicas del Noveno Congreso no. 8, sesión del día 6 de agosto de 1851, n. p. 157 AHCEM, Actas Públicas, Expediente 2, Caja 14, Libro de Actas Públicas del Noveno Congreso no. 8, sesión del día 8 de agosto de 1851, n. p.

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property” and should not lead lawmakers to deprive others from the same right.158 The governor enacted the law by the fall during the second week of December.159

The law specified a period of one year to conclude all land divisions, but very little progress took place during this time or afterwards. Political strife, once more, discouraged systematic enforcement. Opposition to federalism had turned into clear conservative stances against liberalism and republican tenets such as popular sovereignty. Conservative forces gradually gathered force and challenged struggling local and national liberal governments.

Numerous revolts continued to preoccupy authorities in Michoacán. A major uprising burst out in the fall of 1852 in La Piedad area—an echo of a pronuciamiento that had started in nearby

Jalisco. Governor Melchor Ocampo, a prominent liberal and federalist, managed to temporarily weather the crisis, but a greater national crisis soon broke out resulting in the downfall of the second federal republic in the spring of 1853 and the establishment of conservative-oriented government headed by ten-time president Antonio López de Santa Anna. By the summer, in July

18, the 1851 reparto law was repealed and not reinstated until 1856 after liberals, in turn, ousted

Santa Anna from office for one last time.160

158 Ibid. 159 See, Amador Coromina, Recopilación de leyes, decretos, reglamentos y circulares expedidas en el estado de Michoacán, Vol. 11 (Morelia: Imprenta de los hijos de Ignacio Arango, 1886), 195-205. 160 See, ibid (footnote 5). For political developments in Michoacán see, See, Sánchez Díaz, "Los vaivenes;” Ochoa Serrano and Sánchez Díaz, Breve historia, 117-122; and Bravo Ugarte, Historia sucinta, 408-412.

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The Federal Disentailment Law and a Country at War

It was the third time liberals took hold of power since independence. This time a rising new generation led the most comprehensive effort in the century to reform the institutional make-up of the country. Reforms focused on creating a uniform set of rules to regulate the administration of justice, property rights, civil liberties, taxation, and public registers. They were meant in large part to curtail and in some cases terminate the influence of the Church and the army—two of the most powerful actors of the nation—in civil, economic, and public affairs. Conservative circles considered the reforms not only a challenge to the status quo, but a threat to orderly society as a whole. Many moderate liberals also found the reforms too radical to actually be able to govern the country with them. Still liberals such as Benito Juárez, Miguel Lerdo de Tejada, Melchor

Ocampo, and Guillermo Prieto held their ground and defended thorough enforcement.

The first national disentailment law came in this context (June 25, 1856). Conceived by the minister of treasury Miguel Lerdo de Tejada, the law banned civil and religious corporations from administering, holding, or acquiring real estate properties. The goal was to allow buyers and sellers access to entailed lands, that is, lands that thus far had remained outside of the market and, according to liberals, nonproductive. That way the number of property owners would increase and with it, since individual proprietors were expected to invest in their lands, the overall agricultural output of the country. Governments, in turn, would benefit from collecting

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the taxes and fees charged upon land transactions and, eventually, upon the economic activities motivated by the reform.161

The 1856 federal law thus ordered that church properties and community lands (among others) had to be allocated to tenants and de facto possessors within a period of three months—or otherwise properties would be put for public auction or open to private claims. The law, in other words, meant no redistribution of communal lands. In November, in the midst of escalating conservative opposition to this and the other liberal reforms, Gregorio Ceballos, governor of

Michoacán, wrote to federal authorities asking to exempt indigenous communities from the duty to allocate land in accordance with the federal law. The enforcement of the law, he feared, might cause social discontent. Conservatives might capitalize some of this discontent to their advantage. The federal law, in addition, could deprive communities of some of lands. Indeed, unlike the 1851 state law, which specified that community members had the exclusive right to claim community lands, the federal law offered leaseholders the chance to acquire the properties they had thus far rented from communities.

Minister Lerdo de Tejada wrote back to the governor on behalf of the president. His position was clear. “It is unquestionable,” he said, “that the persistence of indigenous communities must not be tolerated” Conceding the governor’s petition would only undermine the spirit and purpose of the law. Furthermore, there was no contradiction between federal and local

161 See, “Ley de 25 de junio de 1856,” in Colección de leyes, decretos, reglamentos, circulares, órdenes, y acuerdos relativas a la desamortización de los bienes de corporaciones civiles y religiosas y a la nacionalización de los que administraron estas últimas, ed. Luis G. Labastida (Mexico: Tipografía de la Oficina Impresora de Estampillas, 1893), 4-5 and 9-13.

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laws. On the contrary, both complemented each other. Little progress had been made, at any rate, since the enactment of the 1851 law despite the fact that it had set a one year period to implement land divisions—Lerdo reproached Ceballos. The governor should not worry about the federal law being a cause of discontent. The law favored indigenous people by means of turning them into property owners. Thus “there is no motive for disorders or riots,” Lerdo assured him.

Concerns about leaving indigenous people without lands were also unfounded. In October 9,

1856, the federal government issued an additional notice giving holders of properties of 200 pesos or lower value direct ownership of their lands without having to pay taxes or any other fees whatsoever—provided they complied with the law. This, Lerdo argued, protected smallholders from losing their lands to large landowners. Moreover, he concluded, it secured indigenous people access to land without depriving leaseholders of their rights.162

Over the next decade, from roughly 1857 to 1867, the country underwent a number of major succeeding crises. Facing increasing pressures on the part of the Church and conservatives forces, liberal governments concentrated on responding to conservative political and armed challenges. Community lands had comparatively less attention. A new constitution was enacted in 1857, a document elevating liberals’ ideals and reforming program to the law of the land. The constitution, however, divided liberal ranks and caused bitter protests among conservatives. Yet

162 Fort he Lerdo-Ceballos exchange see, Coromina, Recopilación de leyes, Vol. 11, 164-166. For the October 9, 1856 notice see, “Ley de 25 de junio de 1856,” 13-14.

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again political disagreements turned into an armed conflict that soon escalated into civil war— the biggest conflict after independence and before the Mexican revolution.163

Liberals won the war (known as War of Reform) after having nationalized Church properties, experienced near defeat, and amassed a hefty debt. Public funds were not enough to cover the payroll and the always critical military expenditures. In the summer of 1861, the

Mexican government declared a temporary suspension of payments on the country’s public debt, which included debts with international creditors. The Spanish, British, and French governments sent fleets to press Mexico into resuming the payment of its loans. Mexican authorities settled with British and Spanish envoys. French troops, however, advanced towards Mexico City revealing Napoleon III’s geopolitical plans to establish a puppet government in Mexico to counter the influence of other European powers and the United States in the Americas.164

The consequences of civil war (1857-1861) had not yet even began to lessen and the country was again at war with a foreign army. The occupation was supported by local conservative forces, still active in spite of recent defeat. The country divided into defenders of the 1857 constitution and republican government, on the one hand, and sponsors of monarchical rule and the creation of a second Mexican empire, on the other. On the ground, in the regions, a number of unresolved local and regional grievances lay beneath republican and monarchical allegiances. Strongmen and pueblos favored one side or the other to counter the power of their

163 See, Lilia Díaz, “El liberalismo militante,” in Historia general de México (Mexico: El Colegio de México, 2000), 592-608; Andrés Lira and Anne Staples, “Del desastre a la reconstrucción republicana, 1848-1876,” in Erik Velázquez García, et al., Nueva historia general de México (Mexico: El Colegio de México, 2010), 448-461. 164 See, Michele Cunningham, Mexico and the Foreign Policy of Napoleon III (New York: Palgrave, 2001); Erika Pani, Para mexicanizar el Segundo Imperio. El imaginario de los imperialistas (Mexico: El Colegio de México / Instituto Mora, 2001); Díaz, “El liberalismo militante,” 608-612; Lira and Staples, “Del desastre,” 464-469.

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rivals and to defend local autonomy.165 More generally, the occupation split the country into two separate governments (1863-1867), an itinerant republican government led by president Benito

Juárez and an imperial government based in Mexico City and headed by the European aristocrat

Maximillian of Hapsburg—chosen by Napoleon III and local conservatives to hold the Mexican

Crown.

In Michoacán, imperial and conservative troops took over Morelia at the end of 1863 and gradually controlled the eastern and northwestern areas of the territory. Republicans remained relatively strong in the south across tierra caliente and some central-west areas, including parts of the meseta. During the war, Uruapan, the main settlement of the meseta, was made the republican capital city of Michoacán. Republicans were several times forced to move around to

Tacámbaro, Ario, and Huetamo in tierra caliente, but Uruapan continued to be one the main republican headquarters and strongholds in the country. In spite of continuous differences within the republican leadership, resistance to the occupation thwarted all attempts to consolidate imperial rule. In the early months of 1865 French troops withdrew from Michoacán. Belgian and conservatives forces assumed the responsibility of suppressing republican resistance. By 1866, however, it was clear that the invasion had become a great political and financial burden to

Napoleon III. His army finally vacated Mexico between November, 1866 and the first months of

1867, leaving conservatives and Maximilian to their own devices. By February of 1867

165 See Leticia Reina, “The Sierra Gorda Peasant Rebellion,” in Riot, Rebellion, and Revolution: Rural Social Conflict in Mexico, ed. Friedrich Katz (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 269-294; Florencia Mallon, Peasant and Nation: The Making of Postcolonial Mexico and Peru (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); and Erika Pani, Una serie de admirables acontecimientos. México y el mundo en la época de la Reforma, 1848-1867 (Mexico: Ediciones EyC / BUAP, 2013).

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Michoacán was under republican control. In the summer, republicans took back Mexico City

(June 21, 1867) and regained control of the country.166 The war ended with yet another republican and liberal victory. For a fourth time, plans of reparto resumed.

A Struggling Treasury

Thus, from 1827 to 1867 land divisions in the meseta remained largely without effect. During this period, 69 individuals were in one time or another in charge of the executive power in

Michoacán (an average of almost two per year). Some, a minority, were elected. Others, a majority, served as interim governors (or heads of departamentos under centralist governments).

Some others seized power as a result of a pronunciamiento. One, Domingo Echegaray, stood in office for about 24 hours and then died in combat (November 24, 1854) during the events that led to Santa Anna’s final downfall. Overall, as the same person could serve in different terms, the executive shifted a total of 76 times. Between 1827 and 1835, when the first reparto laws remained in force, Michoacán had 23 elected and interim governors. There were six changes in the executive after the enactment of the 1851 law until it was temporarily repealed in July 18,

1853. During the second empire (1863-1867), six imperial prefects and five republican governors simultaneously took charge of public affairs in Michoacán, while both sides waged war against each other.167

166 See, Carlos García Mora, "Guerra y sociedad durante la intervención francesa, 1863-1867," in Historia general de Michoacán, vol. 3, 61-100; Ochoa Serrano and Sánchez Díaz, Breve historia, 134-146; Miranda, Uruapan, 180- 192; Bravo Ugarte, Historia sucinta, 419-431; and Eduardo Ruíz, Historia de la guerra de intervención en Michoacán (Morelia: Morevallado Editores, 2008). 167 See, Bravo Ugarte, Historia sucinta, 553-558 (Appendix 1).

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Civil strife and continuous changes in the executive naturally translated in numerous shifts in local authorities and administrative personnel on the ground; most notably, in the middling authorities whose appointment officially depended on governors and whose role in enforcing policies (including land policies) was indispensable. Six years after the establishment of the first federal republic (1830), and shortly after one of many ensuing political shifts, the incumbent minister of government of Michoacán complained before the local congress that “the wheels of the political machine were altered and in the midst of the most terrible oscillations an entire new government was constituted.” “In moments of alarm and uncertainties,” he lamented,

“it was not possible to systematize the administration.”168

A decade and half later, months after the war against the United States began, another minister of government argued that even in good times it was difficult to keep up with administrative affairs. However, he continued, “when the state of society is precarious,” “when the administrative elements are almost in conflict,” and when the question was not simply about having or not “ordinary peace,” but “about shifting from one regime to another […] the administrative machine barely runs without encountering setbacks and the people in charge of the administration barely have time to soothe the principal obstacles.”169 Political and military conflicts absorbed much of the energy of one administration after another. Not surprisingly,

168 Memoria de la administración pública del estado de Michoacán, leída al honorable congreso constitucional por el secretario del despacho en 7 de agosto de 1830 (Morelia: Imprenta del Estado, 1830), 1. 169 Memoria sobre el estado que guarda la administración pública del estado de Michoacán, leída al honorable congreso constitucional por el secretario del despacho en 23 de noviembre de 1846 (Morelia: Imprenta de Ignacio Arango, 1846), 4.

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authorities both in Morelia and all across Michoacán pushed off land reform for a better occasion—which never seemed to come.

Budgetary constraints hindered government plans on a permanent basis. Not only were funds insufficient to invest in public infrastructure, but they were often inadequate to offer proper remuneration to public employees. In 1850, Francisco Anaya, Michoacán’s minister of government in office, declared to the congress that it was unreasonable to expect efficiency from local authorities when “neither the state remunerates their work nor the residents of pueblos provided them with all the support they need.”170

Fig. 6. Michoacán’s Public Finances and Military Spending, 1858-1860

Overall Overall Military Year Military Government Government Spending Spending Income Expenditures % 1858 388,734 357,674 294,510 82.3 1859 1,053,630 987,760 665,143 67.3 1860 1,278,162 1,213,056 816,795 67.3 Totals 2,720,525 2,558,490 1,776,448 72.3 *Average

Sources: “Estado general de los ingresos y egresos habidos en ambas oficinas [Jefatura de Hacienda y Tesorería General del Estado de Michoacán de Ocampo] (Tablas Anexas)," in Lerdo de Tejada, Tesorería general y gefatura de hacienda del estado de Michoacán de Ocampo; and "Noticia Numero 58," Memoria en que el C. general Epitacio Huerta dio cuenta al congreso del estado del uso que hizo de las facultades de 1858 a 1861.

170 Memoria que sobre el estado que guarda en Michoacán la administración publica en sus diversos ramos, leyó al honorable congreso del mismo el secretario del despacho Lic. Francisco G. Anaya, en los dias 2 y 5 de enero de 1850 (Morelia: Imprenta de Ignacio Arango, 1850), 8.

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Defending himself against his critics, liberal general Epitacio Huerta affirmed in 1861 that when he was in charge of the government of Michoacán during the War of Reform (1857-

1861) he found the treasury empty. His administration, Huerta explained, depended on loans for all taxes were already destined to the payment of previous debts. Moreover, everyday needs ate public funds away, especially military ones; from money to recruit troops and the salaries of the people in charge of the armory to the many implements required to continue with liberal war efforts.171 Military spending, indeed, outshone by far all other public expenditures. From 1858 to

1860, for instance, under Epitacio Huerta and other interim governors, war-related expenses represented approximately 72% of the total spending of the government of Michoacán.172

General Huerta asserted that, given the circumstances, Michoacán, unlike other “integrating parts of the federation,” was fortunate to have access to credit. Yet he failed to mention that creditors often demanded the payment of extraordinarily high interests and that credit was often also the product of forced loans obtained from local landowners and merchants. They came, therefore, at an economic and political cost. As Huerta himself acknowledged, the bottom line was that

Michoacán “has no revenues and it needs to create them.”173

171 Memoria en que el C. general Epitacio Huerta dio cuenta al congreso del estado del uso que hizo de las facultades con que estuvo investido durante su administración dictatorial, que comenzó en 15 de Febrero de 1858 y terminó en 1o de Mayo de 1861 (Morelia: Imprenta de Ignacio Arango, 1861), 37-45.. 172 My calculations based on: “Estado general de los ingresos y egresos habidos en ambas oficinas [Jefatura de Hacienda y Tesorería General del Estado de Michoacán de Ocampo] (Tablas Anexas)," in Francisco Lerdo de Tejada, Tesorería general y gefatura de hacienda del estado de Michoacán de Ocampo. Su cuenta é informe por los ingresos y egresos habidos en ambas oficinas, desde 19 de marzo de 1858 hasta 6 de febrero de 1862 en la primera, y 31 de enero del mismo año en la segunda (Morelia: Imprenta de Ignacio Arango, 1864) n. p.; and "Noticia Numero 58," in Memoria en que el C. general Epitacio Huerta, n. p. 173 Memoria en que el C. general Epitacio Huerta, 45.

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An Overlooked Link: Reparto and Fiscal Policy

It was the need to create revenues, in actual fact, which finally stimulated land divisions in

Michoacán and, by extension, in the meseta. During the first decades after independence, revenues from the state tobacco monopoly and a number of sales taxes provided the bulk of public funds in Michoacán—as in many other parts of the country. Both the tobacco monopoly and sales taxes, considered as obstacles to the economy, were officially abolished in 1857 in the midst of liberals’ attempt to enforce their program of economic and political reforms. Necessity, however, forced authorities to maintain sales taxes in force until 1896.174 Still governments continuously tried to diversify their revenues and thus curtail their dependence on the unpopular alcabalas and costly loans. Fiscal officials collected a head tax since the first federal republic, but public finances required further sources of income to at least begin the daunting task of mending years of fiscal unbalances.175 The 1856 Lerdo law had the explicit purpose of creating public revenues by taxing private land transactions and public land sales (articles 32 and 33).

Subsequent nationalization of Church properties in 1859 provided liberal authorities with

174 The minister of government of Michoacán declared in 1896 that “neither the attempt of 1846 nor the law of 1848, nor the ruling of 1855 during the temporary government emanated from the Ayutla revolution, nor the laudable promise of the wise lawmakers of 1857 who set a year for the completion of the [fiscal] reform, were able to erase from our legislation and practices the tributary system that has recently fall without political commotions” (Memoria sobre la administración pública del estado de Michoacán de Ocampo. Gobierno del C. Aristeo Mercado. Segundo bienio septiembre 16 de 1894-septiembre 16 de 1896 [Morelia: Litografía de la Escuela Militar, 1898], 307). 175 See, for instance,"Noticia Num. 4. Ingresos y egresos que tuvo la tesorería general del estado de Michoacán en todo el año procsimo pasado de 1828," in Memoria sobre el estado que guarda la administración pública de Michoacán, presentada al H.C. por el secretario del despacho en 7 de agosto de 1829 (Morelia: Imprenta del Estado, 1829) n. p.

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important revenues, but both disentailment policies and nationalization funds ended up serving short-term goals such as supporting war expenditures and covering public debts.176

Thus, after their triumph in the War of Reform (1857-1861), liberals in Michoacán put in place a new fiscal policy. It included a tax upon urban and rural properties—the law establishing the tax was issued in December 24, 1862.177 The French Intervention, however, rendered the tax without much practical effect. It took about five more years, under even greater fiscal distress, to revive the idea of a land tax. Early in 1868 (February 4th), some eight months after the downfall of the second empire, a new liberal government established for a second time a land tax. The levy was set in 0.8% of the total value of urban properties and 1% of the total value of rural properties (ocho al millar and diez millar, respectively). The tax was imposed on an annual basis, but payments split into three througout the year (one in January, a second in May, and a third one in September).178

The new land tax had several long-term aims. It was meant to provide governments with a constant and reliable source of income. Real estate property was, after all, a secure and durable kind of property. It was also abundant, at least in theory, and therefore could potentially generate

176 See, Robert Knowlton, Church property and the Mexican Reform, 1856-1910 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1976). For a general perspective of fiscal policies and revenues in Mexico see, Aurora Gómez Galvarriato and Emilio Kourí, "La reforma económica. Finanzas públicas, mercados y tierras," in Nación, Constitución y Reforma, ed. Erika Pani (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica / CIDE / INEHRM / CONACULTA, 2010), 62-119; Luis Jáuregui, “La economía de guerra de Independencia y la fiscalidad de las primeras décadas del México independiente,” in Historia económica general de México. De la Colonia a nuestros días, ed. Sandra Kuntz Fischer (Mexico: El Colegio de México / Secretaría de Economía, 2010), 245-274; and Marcello Carmagnani, “La economía pública del liberalismo. Orígenes y consolidación de la hacienda y del crédito público, 1857-1911,” in Historia económica, 353-376. 177 See, Amador Coromina, Recopilación de leyes, decretos, reglamentos y circulares expedidas en el estado de Michoacán, Vol. 17, (Morelia: Imprenta de los hijos de Ignacio Arango, 1887), 9. 178 See, Coromina, Recopilación de leyes, Vol. 19, 21-29; and Purnell, Popular Movements, 35-36.

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extensive resources. In 1869, the overall value of real estate properties in Michoacán was estimated in little less than 18.5 million pesos—some 12 million corresponding to rural properties and about 6.4 million to urban properties. The government calculated that it could obtain at least 114,000 pesos worth in revenues every year, once all expenses from collecting the duties were subtracted.179 Finally, since it required the creation of a public register of all real estate properties within the state, the tax was intended to offer governments a solid base of records to improve the running of administrative affairs.

There were, however, more pressing matters behind the new land tax. As mentioned, public finances needed immediate relief. Most notably, the tax and the general fiscal policy supporting it were in large part designed to instigate the division of lands in possession of indigenous communities. The tax affected anyone with urban and rural properties. Merchants, homeowners, rancheros and hacendados. Yet fiscal laws unambiguously indicated that the tax

“equally included indigenous people who kept in community real estate properties.” Laws required the government to perform proper appraisals of the value of community lands and to put together a public land register. Yet they also specified that since tax collection was a matter of great necessity, given the “grave urgencies of the treasury,” fiscal officials were authorized to offer only rough estimates of the value of lands and enforce the corresponding levy, provided

179 "Noticia Número 15. Estado de productos, gastos y liquido por la contribución de 4 de Febrero de 1868," in Memoria de Michoacán de 1869, 115.

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that estimations would be later on subject to rectification “when the value of the lands in question became legalized.”180

The close link between fiscal policy and land divisions was made explicit in a general report on the state of public affairs in Michoacán read by minister of government Francisco W.

González before the local congress in the summer of 1869. González pointed out that the question of dividing community lands was meant to be one of “great influence” for the creation of a new tax system. Data collected by fiscal officials, he assured lawmakers, showed that the value of community lands was fairly significant. To the extent that leaving community lands undivided would “cause great damage to Michoacán in general and the Government in particular.”181 All previous local administrations since independence, González underlined, had tackled the question and dictated many measures seeking to find a solution to the problem of communal landholding. The federal government, he recalled, had also devoted great energy to the matter, as proven by the enactment of disentailment laws. Some progress had been done, he remarked, “but it is necessary to make a last effort to complete the work.”182

The incumbent administration, González stressed, had “its own ideas on the matter” consisting in prompting land divisions “by indirect means and [by] getting indigenous people interested” in the reparto.183 González’s indirect means allude to the new land tax, but also to the accompanying tax exemptions included in the fiscal law. The law offered a tax-free period of six

180 Coromina, Recopilación de leyes, Vol. 19., 26. 181 Memoria de Michoacán de 1869, 57. 182 Ibid. 183 Ibid.

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years to all divided community lands, as long as land divisions and allotments took place within an period of six months after the enactment of the fiscal law (February 4, 1868)—this period and the grace period were subsequently extended several times.184 Authorities thus intended to lure community members away from communal landholding by simultaneously raising the economic costs of undivided lands and making individual property fiscally desirable. In case this did not work, minister González finally observed, the government would have to resort sometimes to the use of the force, but only because “it was nothing less than about ridding the State of one of the greatest obstacles opposing its prosperity and providing the government resources from which it is wrongly lacking.”185

184 See, Coromina, Recopilación de leyes, Vol. 19., 21-22. 185 Ibid., 58. Significantly enough, although González speech was grounded in fiscal and seemingly practical arguments, he did not miss the opportunity to remark that indigenous communities were “strange associations” with no other purpose than turning indigenous people into “outcasts” and keeping community members “in the ignorance, misery, fanaticism, and degradation to which they were confined since the Conquest era” (57).

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CHAPTER 4

THE FIRST REPARTO: FEDERAL, STATE, AND LOCAL LIBERALISMS MEET

The authorities of Michoacán had figured a way—land taxes (and exemptions)—of forcing communities to comply with the reparto after decades of unsuccessful and erratic implementation. Under the Bourbons, war and the need to increase royal revenues had brought about a comprehensive program of reforms, which eventually led to the single most important reorganization of pueblos de indios’ holdings and finances since the early colonial period— reorganization that, in turn, planted the seeds and provided the foundations of future liberal land reforms. About a century later, once more, war and the precarious state of public finances provided nineteenth-century liberal authorities in Michoacán with the stimulus—the need for more and new revenues—to redouble efforts of implementing their own program of reforms against communal land tenure. Land taxes were not only expected to ease (or at least help to do so) the financial problems of the government, but to achieve what reparto policies alone could not: force communities to relinquish communal land tenure by means of turning individual property more appealing—economically more appealing—than corporate land rights.

Land taxes did contribute to bring about reparto policies. Yet not in the way authorities anticipated. Attempts to enforce the new tax policy triggered a series of striking events that would turn liberal land policies—liberalism—upside down. In trying to take advantage or get around land reform, people in the meseta would discover in it (and then bring to the fore) a decisive contradiction. Namely, that the federal and state versions of land reform differed from

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one another in one fundamental aspect: while Michoacán’s law of 1851, still echoing the radical egalitarianism of early liberalism, promoted land redistribution exclusively for indigenous community members (and even favored poor community members over the better-off), the federal law of 1856, by contrast, entailed no such redistribution and in some circumstances even favored the better-off and non-community members—that is, non-indigenous tenants of community lands. In other words, the state version of land reform involved ending communal land tenure in exchange of redistributing lands among community members; the federal version involved ending corporate land rights, but with no redistribution in return.

Such a crucial difference, thus far unnoticed by the historiography of Mexican liberalism, would be at heart of most debates and conflicts in the meseta when land divisions came about between 1869 and 1875. It would play off federal and state authorities against each other, community members against one another and community members against state and federal officials, tenants, and local landowners (mostly middling landowners). Revealingly, implementation took place almost exclusively in communities where disparities between community members were comparatively greater and where the presence of haciendas, ranchos, and (more importantly) tenants was more significant—and therefore competition for local resources also greater. In other words, it took place in the lower meseta. By comparison, communities in the upper meseta managed to keep land divisions in check. In order to create strong enough incentives and pressures, the evidence suggests, land taxes needed also to combine with ongoing internal divisions and local competition for community resources. Local

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tenants and community members in the upper meseta simply found more to lose than gain in implementing land reform—either version, the state or the federal, of it.

Initial Responses: Qualified Support and Outright Rejection

Communities in the meseta, indeed, followed two different paths during the first reparto. The available evidence indicates that land divisions took place in at least nine pueblos and villas and eight of the barrios of the city of Uruapan. That is to say, in about a quarter of all the settlements of the the meseta wherein purépecha communities and families lived. Pueblos and villas in which the reparto took place encompassed Nahuatzen, Jucutacato, Jicalan, Apo, Tancítaro,

Ziracuaretiro, San Juan Periban, and San Francisco Periban. Barrios in Uruapan included San

Juan Evangelista, San Francisco, San Pedro, Santiago, San Juan Bautista, San Miguel, and La

Magdalena. Together (all but Nahuatzen in the lower meseta), probably concentrated about a quarter of the overall population of the meseta circa 1869, including non-indigenous residents and between 30% and 40% of all purépecha inhabitants.186 It is not possible to determine the extent of the lands at issue, but some of the barrios of the city of Uruapan and communities such as Tancítaro and Apo were in possession of significant holdings—considerable, if compared to the holdings of most other communities and many private holdings (see chapter 2).

The initial responses to the new and first effective attempt of enforcing land reform split communities almost evenly in favor and against land divisions. Early in 1869, for instance,

186 These are rough calculations. The existing data are inconsistent and does not allow a precise estimation. See, “Noticia num. 1,” in Memoria de Michoacán de 1869, 65-68.

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community members in Sicuicho declared that “they completely agree by common consent” to divide their lands among them as required by the government. Similar statements were given in

Apo, Tancítaro, Atapan, Pamatacuaro and many other places.187 Expressions in support of the reparto, however, were typically qualified by a number concerns on the part of community members. Representatives of the barrios of the city of Uruapan affirmed that they “agree and accept the grace that the Supreme Government conceded to them [indigenous people] to perform by themselves and by common consent the division of lands belonging to the Community.” Yet they immediately added that one of the reasons that had prevented them from carrying out land divisions in the past was that many families would probably be left in poverty as a result of letting community members “to freely dispose of the lands they obtain in the reparto” since they would “sell them and misuse the product” of the sale.188

In general, communities showing formal support for land divisions manifested one main difficulty to perform the reparto. Community representatives argued that there were boundary disputes still pending with other pueblos and haciendas. Land divisions, therefore, could not completely take place until after these legal disputes were settled. Legal disputes over boundaries were, indeed, not uncommon among communities in the meseta and other areas of Michoacán. In

1856, the government had appointed special lawyers “to keep track and finish as soon and equitable as possible” the pending and future disputes pueblos had concerning the “possession

187 For Sicuicho see, AGHPEM, Secretaría de Gobierno, Gobernación, Hijuelas, Distrito de Uruapan, vol. 12, 11. For other communities expressing initial support to land divisions see, AGHPEM, Secretaría de Gobierno, Gobernación, Hijuelas, Distrito de Uruapan, vol. 13, 64; AGHPEM, Secretaría de Gobierno, Gobernación, Hijuelas, Distrito de Uruapan, vol. 4, 147. AGHPEM, Secretaría de Gobierno, Gobernación, Hijuelas, Distrito de Uruapan, vol. 11, 149. 188 AGHPEM, Secretaría de Gobierno, Gobernación, Hijuelas, Distrito de Uruapan, vol.15, 14.

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and property of lands.”189 Special lawyers were granted the power of removing community representatives, determining whether land claims were legitimate or not, and preventing further legal actions on the part of community members. A contentious initiative, it was later repealed in

1863 as liberals prepared to engage conservative and foreign troops in the early years of the

French intervention. Communities were again free to choose “lawyers of their trust to conduct all their businesses.”190

The fact that community members commonly alluded to pending boundary disputes has been usually interpreted as a calculated strategy by communities to avoid or delay the reparto. It could certainly have such purpose. Yet in alluding to unsettled disputes, community representatives were first and foremost responding to a specific and explicit request on the part of the government. As pointed earlier, circular 90 (the notice sent out on Christmas Day, 1868) required communities to manifest their opinion on any possible obstacles and objections to implement the reparto. Authorities, in other words, were plainly aware that acceptance of land divisions by community representatives could be merely formal. To be sure, such awareness stemmed from entrenched notions, almost universal among contemporary officials, about the alleged conservative character of indigenous people. One district official asserted that the indigenous residents of the city of Uruapan actually “repulsed the reparto,” but they did not

189 See, Amador Coromina, Recopilación de leyes, decretos, reglamentos y circulares expedidas en el estado de Michoacán, Vol. 13 (Morelia: Imprenta de los hijos de Ignacio Arango, 1887), 55-57. 190 Ibid, 101-103. The government, however, still offered legal assistance to communities that could show prove of their lack of means to contract a lawyer.

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express “a true opposition because it seems that their abhorrence do not come from any other thing than the loss of a custom which they resent.”191

Curtailing any potential maneuvers against the reparto, such as alleging pending court rulings over disputed lands, was also one the reasons the governor had been granted extraordinary powers early in 1868. The 1851 law, in like manner, stated that lands still in legal dispute should await the decision of the tribunals and only then could be object of allocation.

Judges were instructed to speed up trials in which community lands were involved (articles 23 and 24).192 Ultimately, government inquires on possible impediments to land reparto were accompanied by instructions to perform land divisions within a period of maximum nine months after circular 90 had been discussed by community members.193

There were communities—most of them in the upper meseta—which nonetheless explicitly expressed their opposition to the reparto form the very beginning. Representatives from Arantepacua, for instance, stated that theirs was not a “systematic and interested resistance because ever since their forefathers” community members in Arantepacua “have lived, still live, and will live fully and happy with the portions that each acknowledges.”194 Spokespersons in other pueblos argued that the reparto was actually unnecessary since lands were already divided and distributed among community members. In Charapan, community members affirmed that, although allocations were not consistent with the law, their lands were privately held and thus

191 AGHPEM, Secretaría de Gobierno, Gobernación, Hijuelas, Distrito de Uruapan, vol.15, 12. 192 Coromina, Recopilación de leyes, Vol. 11, 199. 193 Coromina, Recopilación de leyes, Vol. 19, 158. 194 AGHPEM, Secretaría de Gobierno, Gobernación, Hijuelas, Distrito de Uruapan, vol. 18, 45.

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should be left in their “present state.” In actual fact, unlike the very first reparto laws of the

1820s, the 1851 law did not require communities to apportion common areas properly speaking.

Land divisions comprised family parcels and additional agricultural lands only. Family parcels were, if not privately held, discretely used and possessed by community members (see chapter

2). The reparto, commoners in Charapan suggested, was therefore pointless: it would defeat what it was attempting to achieve. Commoners, in any case, were persuaded that pueblos that accept the reparto “suffer more miseries than those who reject it.”195

Community representatives in other pueblos made equally perceptive, perhaps more peculiar, but undeniably bolder statements. In one case, residents from Los Reyes contended that neither circular 90 nor reparto laws had anything to do with them. According to them, people in

Los Reyes were not indigenous and had “complete domain” of their properties—district authorities later on affirmed that residents from Los Reyes were, indeed, not indigenous, but actually held at least part of their lands in common.196 Collectively or individually, residents of

Cheran argued, indigenous communities are like private companies. Therefore, just “as companies formed in civilized Nations are not constrained,” communities cannot be constrained either. Experienced has shown to them, Cheran locals continued, that whenever the reparto “took place in other times” indigenous people were left as “foreigners in their own Pueblos” and their lands “monopolized by the greed of the rich.”197 Community representatives in Tanaco used the

195 AGHPEM, Secretaría de Gobierno, Gobernación, Hijuelas, Distrito de Uruapan, vol. 12, 162-163. 196 AGHPEM, Secretaría de Gobierno, Gobernación, Hijuelas, Distrito de Uruapan, vol. 11, 146-147. Los Reyes was one of the few places in the meseta where land divisions took place in the late 1820s and early 1830s. 197 AGHPEM, Secretaría de Gobierno, Gobernación, Hijuelas, Distrito de Uruapan, vol. 15, 174.

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exact same argument with almost the exact same words. Except for one important addition: they respectfully petitioned the governor to be kind and repeal all the provisions instigating the repartición, that is, the division of community lands.198

Buying Time

According to the 1851 law, communities were supposed to form a local commission (comisión repartidora) that would be in charge of practicing land divisions. The members of this commission—three, plus three substitutes—would be appointed by an open election. Together, they had to take a census of all community members, including absent members and minors—all community members had the right to a piece of land as long as they could prove they were indigenous or had been born from at least one indigenous parent. One individual would serve as representative of absent community members and one as representative of minors. The commission was also required to put together a survey of all lands subject to allocation and a register of the resultant land fractions once the reparto had been done. This last register must contain the name of the proprietors, the size of their plot, and its location. The government would then give final approval of land divisions. If the reparto was approved, each community member had the right to solicit their personal records (known as hijuelas) and use the resulting document as property titles. Fiscal officials, finally, would be notified about land divisions in order to make

198 AGHPEM, Secretaría de Gobierno, Gobernación, Hijuelas, Distrito de Uruapan, vol. 12, 19-20.

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the appropriate records and either start collecting the corresponding taxes or begin granting tax exemptions.199

These were arduous and time-consuming procedures. They required technical savvy, but even more importantly they demanded certain degree of local acquiescence and assistance.

Despite some initial expressions of support, few communities had taken steps to form commissions, least at all to take census or survey community lands. In May 17, 1869, district official Dion Catalan reported to the minister of government in Morelia that there was little progress in the implementation of the reparto. The sole community in which land divisions seemed to be in course was San Francisco Periban (in the lower meseta). As for the rest of communities within his jurisdiction,200 he had not much to report. The six-month period granted to most communities to complete land divisions (some were granted up to nine months) was almost done. Yet, Catalan stressed, communities evaded enforcement “with insignificant excuses.” Thus far, he observed, only municipal authorities from Zacan had contacted him. They argued that the lack of a land title proving the exact size of community lands precluded the enforcement of land divisions. The reparto “can never begin for there is nothing to start with.”201

199 Coromina, Recopilación de leyes, Vol. 11, 195-205 (see articles 4, 7, and 18 of the main law, and articles 7 and 8 of the secondary law. 200 Catalan was the head of the district of Los Reyes. In 1869, the meseta comprised the districts of Uruapan and Los Reyes, plus a fraction of the district of Apatzingán. In 1877 Tancítaro and Apo, formerly in the district of Apatzingán, joined the district of Uruapan; the district of Los Reyes was suppressed and incorporated into that of Uruapan. 201 AGHPEM, Secretaría de Gobierno, Gobernación, Hijuelas, Distrito de Uruapan, vol. 22, 55-56.

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State Reparto vs Federal Disentailment

Two events finally triggered land divisions. Fiscal officials had been travelling around the meseta taking notes and doing computations. By July, 1869 they had done appraisals in at least

35 communities—including the barrios of the city of Uruapan.202 Early on, authorities began to require communities land taxes. The unprecedented news rapidly spread across the region. They caused surprise and aroused concerns. For the first time, community lands had been assigned a fiscal value and a corresponding tax rate. In some cases, the surprise was even greater as when community members found out that appraisals had set land values too high—at least higher than what they had expected. Community lands in Apo, for instance, were valued in 60,000 pesos, an amount that even district authorities deemed extraordinary. Fiscal officials were subsequently instructed to lower the estimation, but they were also told not to disregard “the interests of the treasury.”203 In some other instances, as in Tancítaro, officials began to enforce tax liens on community lands after communities failed (or allegedly failed) to pay land duties.204 The new fiscal policy had been set in motion.

The second event that triggered land divisions was an unforeseen consequence of authorities’ attempt to implement fiscal and land policies. Surprisingly, a number of community members and tenants began to claim community lands appealing not to the 1851 reparto law, but to the 1856 federal law. As pointed out, the 1851 law restricted land allocations to community members. It was different from the early reparto laws of 1827 and 1828 in that it did not require

202 See, “Noticia num. 16,” in Memoria de Michoacán de 1869, 124-125. 203 AGHPEM, Secretaría de Gobierno, Gobernación, Hijuelas, Distrito de Uruapan, vol. 13, 70. 204 AGHPEM, Secretaría de Gobierno, Gobernación, Hijuelas, Distrito de Uruapan, vol. 4, 165.

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ejidos (common areas) to be apportioned. It also specified that the built-up area (including solares) should not be included in the reparto and actually insisted on leaving pueblos the conventional area of 600 square varas for fundo legales (article 35 of the main law and articles

13 and 16 of the reglamento). Yet, similar to the spirit of earlier laws, it sought to allocate lands

“in the most possible equality in quantity and quality.”205

Land divisions, the 1851 law thus prescribed, ideally must result in equal number of plots for equal number of persons (article 7). In truth, it also added that individuals could keep the lands they currently held in possession, as long as they could show they were legitimate members of the community (and thus earn their right to be included in the reparto). Yet, as in part previous reparto codes stipulated, it specified that proprietors would be either charged or compensated in cash for the difference, in case the value of their lands turned out to be below or above the average (articles 19 and 22 of the main law). The law also instructed that properties without a particular holder—that was the case of additional arable lands—must too be allocated.

If the resulting value of the individual plots was higher or lower than the average, then community members would pay or get the difference as well (article 20). If one plot was claimed by two or more individuals, then de facto holders of parcels had the right to keep the land. In instances in which there were no specific holders, the winner of a toss would have the right to the disputed parcel (article 23 of the reglamento). Finally, lands that proved to be impractical to divide could nonetheless be allocated among several individuals on condition that they belonged to a same family (article 18 of the reglamento).

205 Coromina, Recopilación de leyes, Vol. 11, 196.

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The 1851 law, to sum up, entailed a veritable and potentially radical redistribution of community lands—and with it an equally drastic redistribution of power among community members. It offered the chance to even out local unbalances. Technically speaking, the law curtailed the capacity of community notables to retain more and larger holdings. It accordingly opened the possibility for disenfranchised community members to acquire lands they had been previously denied or loss or never had. Crucially, the law also prevented tenants from claiming community lands. In other words, on the one hand, the 1851 reparto denied indigenous people recognition and communal land tenure any value or use. On the other hand, however, it prevented concentration of lands by disallowing non-community members from participating in land divisions and limiting the amount of lands that better-off community members could retain or acquire. Thus, in setting these limits and promoting an egalitarian (even inflexible) redistribution of community lands, the 1851 law not only promoted a shift in property rights, but also a sweeping refashioning of the existing asymmetries within communities and between communities and other local actors..

By comparison, the 1856 federal law supposed a less radical approach. It gave certain preference to community members to claim lands, but only insofar as it prioritized tenants and users over other kind of claimers in general (articles 4 and 6 of the main law, and article 3, 4, and

5 of the reglamento). In other words, unlike Michoacán’s 1851 reparto law, the Lerdo law allowed non-community members to acquire community lands. In like manner, it permitted community notables to keep their holdings without having to pay any compensation in case land turned out to be of greater value than the average local plot. And if the holdings were worth 200

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pesos or less, the allocation would also be charge-free206—the costs of allocations, according to the 1851 Michoacán law, should be covered by communal funds. Moreover, the federal law allowed community notables and tenants to keep more than one property, regardless of their value. In the absence of a user or leaseholder, as in the case of some grazing and additional agricultural lands, lands were open to third-party claimers—whether they were community members or not (article 5 and 10).

Thus, the federal law and Michoacán’s law, unlike what minister Lerdo de Tejada asserted back in 1856, did not complement each other. Both intended to dismantle communal landholding, but actually meant different things—sometimes very different things. This is something that landowners, tenants, community members, and their legal representatives learned early enough. Presented with equally challenging alternatives and facing increasing pressures of various kinds, many community members in different pueblos of the meseta began to consider land divisions as a viable and advantageous solution. Their reasons to do so, however, were far from identical. Motives varied and even clashed because community members experienced constraints and enticements according to divergent circumstances. Land divisions fueled existing rivalries, unearthed old grievances, and exposed social differences inside communities. Federal and state laws thus became the means to pursue a wide range of local interests.

206 As instructured by a federal circular enacted in October 9, 1856. See, “Ley de 25 de junio de 1856,” 13-14.

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Communities Split

In the early months of 1869, communities across the meseta had split in two general camps, one expressing rejection and one expressing support (formal support, at least) to the reparto. By the end of that year, most communities that manifested an open opposition remained firm against land divisions—as they would in the next years. Yet communities that expressed initial support experienced growing internal divisions. Fractures openly surfaced by the early fall when the official period to conduct the reparto was coming to an end—land divisions should be done by around December.

In September 3, 1869, Andrés Chávez and Miguel Blanco submitted two of the very first petitions in the meseta requesting the allocation of land shares in accordance with the 1856 federal law. Chávez was a resident of barrio San Miguel and Blanco a resident of barrio San

Francisco, both in the city of Uruapan in the lower meseta. According to the prefecto, although petitions such as Chávez’s and Blanco’s were still uncommon, they revealed that there were many other people willing to carry out land divisions. As stated by the prefecto, “in the indigenous communities of this city there are many individuals that want the partition

[repartimiento] of their lands, but since the majority is not in favor they refrain themselves from soliciting it.”207 In the following weeks, district authorities received a handful of similar petitions. Word about federal laws supporting individual land claims slowly had begun to spread.208

207 AGHPEM, Secretaría de Gobierno, Gobernación, Hijuelas, Distrito de Uruapan, vol. 15, 16. 208 Ibid., 21.

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Yet, early enough, formal protests against these petitions, in particular, and against land divisions, in general, reached the office of the minister of government in Morelia. Speaking on behalf of “the whole community and pan-community [mancomunidad]” of the city of Uruapan, representatives Manuel Blanco and Guillermo Morales argued that community members “neither request nor need” the reparto. In their words, such request was made by “newcomers

[advenedizos] who present themselves as community members [comuneros].” Rancheros, the two representatives contended, wanted “to seize all the land we occupy and kick us out.” “It is not criollos, but newcomers who requested the reparto,” they insisted. Criollos, a word often associated with people of Spanish origins born in Spanish America, was here intended to describe local residents by birth; and criollos, according to Blanco (Manuel) and Morales, “had said nothing” and did not want anything to do with land divisions. Similar things, they added, were also happening in other communities, as in nearby Jicalán.209

The two community representatives bitterly complained about lands taxes as well.

Community members, they stressed, did not earn enough to cover the new duty. It was not that people deliberately wanted to disobey the government; “we want, but cannot comply,” they said.210 Blanco’s and Morales’ complaints arose in response to recent attempts by fiscal officials to seize some community lands. None of the barrios of the city of Uruapan, fiscal officials reported to the minister of government, had paid their taxes on time. Yet, they assured, it was only when community members openly defy the enforcement of fiscal laws that officials were

209 Ibid., 26. 210 Ibid.

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forced to take possession of community lands, “as it occurred with barrio of La Magdalena.”211

The twin pressure of land divisions and taxes had started to take its toll among community members. In the words of Blanco and Morales, both the reparto and property excises were

“eating us alive.”212

Tensions and divisions had too been growing in several other pueblos of the meseta. As a rule, pueblos split in two competing cliques. On occasions, disputes entailed a well-defined divide between one clique sponsoring land divisions and another one opposing them. In

Parangaricutiro (in the lower meseta), for instance, traditional authorities (grouped around a local and traditional institution called cabildo) clashed with a number of community and non- community members backing land reform. The cabildo was accused by its detractors of mismanaging community funds and concentrating power at the expense of younger generations.

Long-standing rivalries between a cluster of notable and affluent local families (indigenous and non-indigenous) were behind these disputes. The question of land divisions provided a new occasion to settle old accounts. For detractors of the cabildo—perhaps fully aware about the fact that liberals considered cabildos and other similar institutions to be the quintessential form of local oppression—, it offered an opportunity to use land reforms against their old rivals and tip the balance of local power to their favor.213

211 Ibid, 25. 212 Ibid, 26. 213 See, Catalina Sáenz Gallegos, "Repercusiones de la política de reparto de bienes comunales en el municipio de San Juan Parangaricutiro (1861-1908)" (MA diss., Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolás de Hidalgo, 2006), 95; Purnell, “With All Due Respect,” 112-113; and Claudio Garibay Orozco, Comunalismos y liberalismos campesinos. Identidad comunitaria, empresa social forestal y poder corporado en el México contemporáneo (Zamora: El Colegio de Michoacán, 2008), 325-329, 333-336, 346-347.

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In some other instances, however, cleavages did not simply revolve around the issue of whether to oppose or support land reform. Divisions, instead, were mostly about when, how, and who would control its implementation. In Tancítaro, one of the southermost communities in the lower meseta, local notables confronted not land divisions, but one another in order to shape the progress and the outcome of land allocations and secure (or augment) their own authority and holdings within the community. As in other communities, there were two rival groups involved.

Both turned liberal policies and laws (first state laws, then state and federal laws alike) into instruments of their internal strife—instruments with which they could overturn rival moves and outdo their competitors. The two cliques also claimed they were acting in the name of the community and for the benefit of the majority. As in Parangaricutiro, their antagonisms dated back to earlier years. Old rivalries underpinned new confrontations.

During the course of 1869, the two cliques continuously maneuvered to displace their rivals and win over district authorities and officials in Morelia. One group was headed by then municipal president Simón Reimundo and different local notables such as Rafael Urbina and

Antonio Álvarez (an individual this latter who would eventually play a central role in how land divisions took place in Tancítaro). Luis Medina, member of a local prominent family, together with other well-known community members such as Lorenzo and Miguel Torres, headed the second group.

Few weeks after the meeting to discuss circular 90 took place, Reimundo and Urbina evicted the Bucio family from rancho El Espinal, a property belonging to the community. The

1851 law gave preference to community members over tenants and, according to Reimundo and

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Urbina, the Bucios had wrongly occupied lands in El Espinal for they were not community members. The Bucios, in turn, argued that the family had been given the lands a long time ago

(c. 1806) as payment for some services provided to the community and that no one had let them know about land divisions and the meeting to discuss circular 90. The Bucios, however, were forced to leave. People associated with Urbina and Reimundo took possession of the lands. It was the first step of a series of moves by Reimundo and his allies intending to prevent rival groups from participating in the reparto.214

The Reimundo clique, however, did not go unchallenged for long. During the summer

(August 1869), Luis Medina submitted a formal complain to the government in which he accused Reimundo of deliberately delaying the reparto—Reimundo had, indeed, attended a meeting wherein several community representatives from different pueblos of the meseta agreed to petition the governor for an extension to conduct land divisions. Medina, moreover, contended that Reimundo had no right to represent the community of Tancítaro for he, Medina, had been appointed apoderado years before. District authorities confirmed that, indeed, Medina had been named legal representative in 1860 and that Reimundo could no longer speak or act on behalf of the community. Medina arranged a new meeting to discuss, once more, land divisions. The meeting, however, did not go as planned. The Reimundo clique mobilized their local supporters and outnumbered Medina and his allies. Medina wanted to conduct land divisions within a period of six of months. The assembly, instead, voted for petitioning a two-year extension.

214 AGHPEM, Secretaría de Gobierno, Gobernación, Hijuelas, Distrito de Uruapan, vol. 4, 149-152. See also, Elsa Dolores Estrada Virgen, "Reparto de tierras comunales y consolidación de la burguesía rural en Tancítaro, Los Reyes y Peribán (1867-1910), " (BA diss., Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolás de Hidalgo, 1998), 28.

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Confrontations between the two cliques all but terminated. On the contrary, clashes finally resulted in the death of one person—the circumstances around the event remained unclear.215

Just when tensions in Tancítaro and other communities seemed about to escalate, ongoing divisions within liberal ranks temporarily halted disputes over land divisions on the ground. The fragile unity that followed the victory over the second empire and conservative forces gradually gave way to fierce competition between liberal militants and leaders. In October, 1869, general

Epitacio Huerta, the former governor of Michoacán, led a revolt in the central-north areas of the

Michoacán. The revolt had a limited impact until it combined with a greater uprising against incumbent president Benito Juárez during the first months of 1870. 216 Although the uprising was eventually defeated, it bought detractors of land reform some time to delay implementation.

Still, despite liberal infighting, opposition to land divisions did not put an end to internal rivalries in many communities. Competition within liberal ranks continued both in Michoacán and the rest of the country. In fact, power struggles between different liberal factions brought about further uprisings—including Porfirio Díaz’s first (and failed) attempt to seize national power in the fall of 1871 (supported in Michoacán by none other than Epitacio Huerta). Yet, unlike in past decades, conflicts did not result in drastic institutional changes. Liberal laws and policies remained in place for many years to come. Discredited and truly defeated, conservatives no longer represented a viable political alternative. In Michoacán, at least, concerns about an

215 AGHPEM, Secretaría de Gobierno, Gobernación, Hijuelas, Distrito de Uruapan, vol. 4, 157-164; and Estrada Virgen, , "Reparto de tierras comunales,” 29-30. 216 See, Bravo Ugarte, Historia sucinta, 474; and José Napoleón Guzmán Ávila, "La república restaurada: en busca de la consolidación de un proyecto liberal, 1867-1876", in Historia general de Michoacán, 101-136.

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alliance between pueblos and conservatives had been dissipated. Church properties had been either disentailed or nationalized. Despite ongoing political conflicts, conditions still seemed favorable to resume land policies. Enforcement of land taxes, in fact, had not halted. Neither did local pressures to carry out land divisions.

Conflict of Laws

February 22, 1872. On behalf of the governor, officials in the ministry of government of

Michoacán wrote to federal authorities asking for advice on how to proceed on a difficult issue.

Days before the head of the district of Uruapan (prefecto) had submitted a communication to the governor with a series of questions about land divisions in the meseta. The questions, the prefecto said, arose in response to what he described as a “large number of written petitions

[ocursos] claiming and soliciting the allocation of a variety of lands and rural properties that belong to the indigenous communities of the district.” The prefecto would not have submitted the communication if it were not for the fact that the petitions were actually made “in accordance with the law of June 25, 1856,” that is, in accordance with the federal disentailment law.217

Officials in the minister of government were uncertain about how to respond to such conundrum. Efforts to enforce land divisions as mandated by the 1851 law were still in progress and land claims based on the 1856 federal law had not been that numerous thus far. The governor, at any rate, decided to turn the matter to federal authorities in Mexico City. The issue revolved around the question of who, in actual fact, had the right to claim community lands. Was

217 Coromina, Recopilación de leyes, Vol. 19, 61-62.

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it possible for community members, the prefecto asked, to claim lands they already have in individual possession? Could community members claim the lands communities rented to third- parties? Did leaseholders and other third-parties have the right to claim these lands too? Did tenants have preference over community members in such claims? Could anyone claim lands over 200 pesos in possession of indigenous dwellers? What about lands under 200 pesos? Were they subject to claims if indigenous holders had not properly requested property rights yet?218

The response of federal authorities (March 2, 1872) was unequivocal. Since “no one person had vested right” over community lands, it was therefore the right of users and leaseholders to claim lands first, including community lands on lease. Properties under 200 pesos must remain in possession of their current holders and were not subject to third-party claims unless holders explicitly relinquished the right to keep their plots. Incumbent holders also had preference to claim properties above 200 pesos—as a rule, in the hands of middling and better- off locals and community members. Decisively, however, federal authorities set a period of three months to make proper claims for these lands before anyone could legally request them on a first-come, first served basis.219

Officials in Mexico City, in other words, considered the petitions for community lands in accordacnce with the federal 1856 law legitimate and legal. In doing so, they caused the reparto to take an unexpected turn in the meseta. Petitioners had won federal support and thus achieved a great victory over detractors of land divisions. Yet they were also forced to act fast (within

218 Ibid. 219 Ibid.

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maximum three months) if they were to succeed in keeping the stretches of community lands they had claimed and prevent other community members from thwarting their plans. As in past occasions, federal authorities had offered a rigid interpretation of the 1856 law. Their decisions overlooked the many ongoing antagonisms that prompted land petitions in the first place. Federal mandates were meant to give property rights uniformity and provide proprietors with legal certainty; instead, they brought about tensions and deepened cleavages within communities.

Hard Choices

The first reparto took place between 1872 and 1875 in the meseta. Most land allotments occurred during the second half of 1872. A majority of them in June and July, during and right after the three-month period set by federal authorities to claim community lands under the 1856 federal law. Communities thus far had weathered government pressures to carry out land divisions. They had begun, however, to experience difficulties coping with new land taxes.

Several communities had faced tax liens or at least the threat of foreclosures. Political circumstances had favored communities’ attempts to delay the reparto. Yet land claims based on the 1856 law had been officially ratified by federal authorities and, as a result, should be observed by authorities in Michoacán.

The news spread quickly all around the meseta. Stakes were now considerably higher.

Community members would have to compete for community lands and secure their family holdings. Official federal sanction could multiply land claims very fast, especially since communities were already divided over the convenience of carrying out land divisions. There

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was the 1851 state law. It was a path that most community members had been unwilling to take.

Yet, under the new circumstances, if compared to the 1856 law, it could at least offer them some guarantees and advantages, namely, keeping lands in the hands of the community and some redistribution to poor community members.

Thus, the seemingly small but actually crucial differences between carrying out land divisions according to the federal law, on the one hand, and adhering to the 1851 law, on the other, became apparent. Land claims based on federal directives favored better-off community members and tenants. As pointed out, the Lerdo law permitted them to keep their present holdings and even acquire additional community lands. If numerous enough—and their numbers had notably grown since 1869—claimants could deprive communities from most of their agricultural lands and take control of a significant share of local resources. This, in turn, would strengthen claimants’ influence over community affairs in general. Individual petitions for community lands, in other words, posed significant challenges and offered few or no concrete benefits in return, especially to middling and disenfranchised community members.

Resorting to state reparto policies entailed significant problems and risks too. Yet state policies at least provided some useful means to counter the greater ordeals posed by federal laws and decrees. Under the 1851 law directives, community lands remained in possession of community members, preventing tenants and third-parties from making subsequent land claims.

If carefully apportioned, moreover, communities as a whole could retain significant control and continue to derive benefits from surplus grazing and farming lands. That is in part why not all community notables and comparatively affluent community members backed individual land

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claims in accordance with the federal law. Their position depended to an important extent on the continuity of community bonds and communal land tenure. Michoacán reparto policies gave community members some margin of autonomy to implement land divisions which community notables and leaders could either use to advance their personal interest or employ to the advantage of communities. The federal law, in contrast, significantly undermined the power of community members to decide over the process and outcome of land divisions. Local autonomy and the ascendancy of at least part of community elites—often two deeply intertwined things— were also at stake.220

Keeping in check individual land claims also ensured that a majority of middling community groups would retain their family parcels intact. In principle, most family parcels could not be legally alienated using federal laws. Since they were worth less than 200 pesos, they should remain in possession of their current holders by default. Yet word of federal authorities supporting claims upon community lands had engendered an atmosphere of uncertainty causing

220 In her groundbreaking and sharp analysis of land privatizations in Michoacán, Jennie Purnell perceptively pointed out that liberal land policies were as much about property rights as they were about power and autonomy. That is, about determining who had the right to decide over internal community affairs and local resources. Yet, although power struggles between rival community factions played a central role in her analysis, Purnell tended to see land divisions mainly as a conflict between the state and the communities or, more precisely, between state intervention and local autonomy. State intervention, however, was not necessarily the central issue at stake in land divisions. Community members responded not solely to state policies, but to pressures from within communities and on the part of other local actors. Purnell also made no distinction between federal and state policies. Her analysis, in fact, tended to assume that it was the Lerdo law and not the 1851 law which mattered most. In like manner, since she also assumed that most communities and community members resisted land divisions from beginning to end, Purnell did not take into consideration the fact that responses to land reform could and did actually change over time according to varying circumstances. Her analysis thus did not account for different actors using different laws at different times to achieve different ends. In other words, her analysis did not account for why a majority of community members in many pueblos ended up supporting state reparto policies. These caveats notwithstanding, her work still represents one of the most insightful and useful to understand the dynamics of liberal land reform in Michoacán. See Purnell, “With All Due Respect,” 93-94; and Purnell, Popular Movements, 25, 33-40.

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alert among community members. In the eyes of many of them, without some kind of official sanction by the government of Michoacán that could counter federal support to individual land claimants, family parcels too could be at risk before long. In the midst of an increasingly tense environment, abiding by state reparto rules provided many community members (including the worst-off) with the legal instruments to fight claimants back and limit all future attempts of defying community members’ traditional rights over family land shares.

As pointed out, Michoacán’s reparto policy had the potential of instigating a drastic redistribution of community holdings. Privileged community members and tenants, therefore, had good reasons to oppose the 1851 law. If enforced à la lettre, redistribution would significantly limit their access to community lands, forcing them to hand down lands to middling and lower community members. Families struggling to cope with everyday sustenance may have a chance to acquire much needed land shares, whereas families with more or less adequate holdings could either secure their current holdings or even obtain some additional acres.

Anticipating this scenario, and well aware of the fact that federal laws entailed no such thing as a reallocation of land shares, a number of tenants and community members thus opted for claiming community lands. Federal sanction of these land claims turned outright opposition to land divisions increasingly difficult and potentially counterproductive. As a result, unwilling to break away from communities, many community principals resorted to state reparto policies. The personal costs of redistributing community lands could be handled by winning over the support of a selected group of families and individuals within the community, as well as by making sure principals played a leading role in how lands shares would be allocated.

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Michoacán policies had one last crucial advantage. Fiscal laws, as pointed out earlier, granted tax exemptions to communities that decided to carry out land divisions. Land appraisals and taxes had become an important cause of concerns across the meseta. Pleas to repeal the land tax had proved unsuccessful. Dividing community lands was one way of canceling out an increasingly worrisome burden. At least for some years. Although the 1851 law granted a ten- year tax relief, the period to apply for the benefit had already expired. A decree of 1862 extended the period for four years, but this concession too expired during the French intervention. The

1868 fiscal law then established a new extension of six years (article 34), an extension that was later on broadened for two more years in 1872 and then again for five additional years in 1875.

Significantly, laws and decrees clearly stated that tax reliefs only applied to indigenous holders.

Equally important, properties below than 100 pesos would automatically be exempted from paying land taxes, as well as lands within the built-up area of pueblos—which included domestic solares.221

Supporting Liberalism against Liberalism

March 22, 1872. The prefecto of Uruapan estimated that, as result of the reparto, he would have to issue between 7,000 and 8,000 property tittles—so many that he asked authorities in Morelia

221 For the 1851 law see, Coromina, Recopilación de leyes, Vol. 9, 200-201 (article 34); for the 1862 decree see, Coromina, Recopilación de leyes, Vol. 17, 23; for the 1868 law see, Coromina, Recopilación de leyes, Vol. 17, 27 (articles 5 and 6); for 1872 see Amador Coromina, Recopilación de leyes, decretos, reglamentos y circulares expedidas en el estado de Michoacán, Vol. 21 (Morelia: Imprenta de los hijos de Ignacio Arango, 1887), 61-62; and for 1875 see, Amador Coromina, Recopilación de leyes, decretos, reglamentos y circulares expedidas en el estado de Michoacán, Vol. 22 (Morelia: Imprenta de los hijos de Ignacio Arango, 1887), 64.

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for funds to employ an extra clerk.222 Meetings took place across the meseta. Community members mobilized. Legal representatives were appointed, lawyers were hired. Representatives and community leaders from different pueblos gathered to discuss the course of action communities should take. Antonio Chapina served as spokesperson for Parangaricutiro, Corupo,

Ahuiran, and San Felipe de los Herreros. Pedro Eiquihua, a well-known lawyer and member of a prominent indigenous family of the meseta, represented Sevina, Sicuicho, and Jucutacato. Justo

Contreras was appointed representative in Aranza, Manuel Perea in Ziracuateriro, Ramon

Treviño in Jicalan, while Pedro Figueroa represented Quinceo and Manuel Gerónimo did the same for Arantepacua. They all agreed to submit joint petition to the governor of Michoacán.

The petition had one central message. Communities disallowed federal land policy and preferred instead to implement land divisions in accordance with state reparto laws.223

The rationale buttressing the petition was as bold as it was cunning. Petitioners argued that indigenous communities had been dissolved as a result of the 1851 reparto law. Ever since the enactment of this law, communities had been considered “as simple farming companies or as a group of individuals enjoying properties in common [pro-indiviso].” These properties, petitioners emphasized, were in no way held in perpetual ownership because community members had the right to freely transfer them and had, in fact, previously “alienated many lands.”224 Given that indigenous people did not form “perpetual communities,” the 1856 federal law could not affect their lands. Moreover, the Lerdo law had only caused confusion and became

222 AGHPEM, Secretaría de Gobierno, Gobernación, Hijuelas, Distrito de Uruapan, vol. 23, 120. 223 Ibid, 180. 224 Ibid., 180-181.

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a hurdle to implement land allocations. The 1851 law had already granted community members the right to solicit their corresponding shares of land. The Lerdo law neglected this right and favored “bastard interests of some speculators who have learned to take advantage of the confusion, assisted by the ignorance of indigenous people, to take from them their lands and leave them in the midst of the most horrible misery.”225

It was a mistake, petitioners insisted, to conflate disentailment with reparto laws. “The government, or rather society,” they argued, “is highly interested in dissolving indigenous communities.” Yet, at the same time, society must have an interest in preventing indigenous people from experiencing poverty and, as a result, being forced to resort to “all sort of crimes.”226 Federal authorities, in fact, petitioners stressed, had acknowledged the difference between mortmain and community lands in the past. In 1856, the federal government agreed that tierras de común repartimiento (family lands) in Tepeji del Rio (a pueblo in the state of Mexico, now in the state Hidalgo) should remain in possession of their indigenous holders since lands were already individually held and enjoyed by community members. Hence, as with Tepeji del

Rio, community lands in the meseta needed not to be disentailed, but merely be granted full recognition as private property. Community holdings, petitioners concluded, had been in possession of indigenous people “since time immemorial” and used not only to cover “common needs, but the particular needs of each individual.”227

225 Ibid., 180. 226 Ibid., 182. 227 Ibid. For the Tepeji del Rio federal decisions see, Coromina, Recopilación de leyes, Vol. 21, 29-30.

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The authorities of Michoacán did not completely consent to conduct land allocations exclusively in accordance with the 1851 law. Yet they agreed to allow communities decide over the most convenient way to divide their lands. This meant that ongoing land claims based on federal laws would not be disallowed, but it also meant that communities were not banned from choosing Michoacán reparto laws. In other words, land divisions would come down to a matter of local politics, a dispute between advocates of federal policy and supporters of state policy within pueblos. Any legal conflicts resulting from land divisions, the authorities of Michoacán resolved, would have to be settled in court in the future. In the meantime, the congress of

Michoacán hurried to renew the extraordinary powers previously granted to the executive power for promoting land divisions.228 It was, after all, the best chance authorities had had in decades to enforce land reform.

Implementation: Compromise and Ruptures

In the end, a compromise between federal and state land policies characterized land divisions in the meseta. In most of the barrios of Uruapan (Santiago, San Pedro, La Magdalena, San Juan

Bautista, San Miguel), a majority of people actually favored federal claims over reparto policies.

Yet since lands were claimed all at once by a majority, and not independently by a clique in particular, communities and community members were able to prevent major land losses. For the time being, most people retained their land shares. The downside was that in maintaining the existing distribution of shares essentially unchanged, land divisions also perpetuated the status

228 Coromina, Recopilación de leyes, Vol. 21, 61-62.

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quo. Former tenants (at least a group of them) and better-off community members maintained an advantage over middling and lower community members. Struggling families, in particular, found no benefit in land divisions and, if something, they were left even more exposed to attempts by their more powerful neighbors to acquire their lands.229

By comparison, some distribution took place in the barrios of San Juan Evangelista and

San Francisco. There, community members chose state reparto policies over federal claims.

Overseen by locally appointed commissions, redistribution caused some opposition and, after lands were allotted, some complaints too.230 A number of discontented community members protested about been left out of the reparto, while some others complained about the way land shares had been assigned. Interestingly, in the barrio of San Juan Evangelista the reparto also comprised one piece of mountainous lands (Cerro Chino) and not merely family and additional agricultural lands. The inclusion of a monte may have been a way to compensate community members lacking lands or a way to compensate friends and allies (or both). Yet, overall, factional disputes in San Juan and San Francisco seemed not to have been especially acute. Redistribution altered land arrangements, but apparently not in a way so as to alienate a majority or upset a powerful local minority. Eventually, most community members came to accept the reparto. By

July, 1873, residents of San Francisco tellingly declared that “the real estate property that we held in common by tradition of our ancestors has ceased to exist.”231

229 AGHPEM, Secretaría de Gobierno, Gobernación, Hijuelas, Distrito de Uruapan, vol. 15, 2, 51-56, 85-86. 230 Ibid., 7-11, 37-39, 42, 86; and AGHPEM, Secretaría de Gobierno, Gobernación, Hijuelas, Distrito de Uruapan, vol. 18, 29-33. 231 AGHPEM, Secretaría de Gobierno, Gobernación, Hijuelas, Distrito de Uruapan, vol. 18, 31.

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A similar pattern characterized land divisions in communities such as Jucutacato, Sevina, and Jicalán, all communities in the lower meseta. There communities relied on the 1851 state law and a majority retained more or less intact its previous land shares, while a number of those who were short of lands received additional portions to make up for previous insufficiencies. There were, as a rule, discontented groups at the bottom and at the top, but disaffected parties could not gather enough support to overturn allocations. Local commissions and apoderados may have taken advantage of their position to secure personal gains or favor close allies, but not to an extent so as to trigger major discontent and antagonisms. Overall, internal social differentiations changed mildly and, crucially, most notables and well-to-do community members preserved their ascendancy and holdings. Land divisions, as a result, took place in relative calm and under the direction of community leaders or local notables such as Pedro Eiquihua (Jucutacato and Sevina) or Dionisio Magaña (Jicalán).232 In March 28, 1874, the government of Michoacán gave its official and final approval to the reparto in these communities.

Land divisions evolved rather differently in Nahuatzen, the only community of the upper meseta that carried out land divisions. There, community members, represented by Abraham

Molina and Antonio Rodríguez Gil, disputed tenant María de Jesús Madrazo rights to hacienda

San Marcos—located in the Los Reyes area. Madrazo argued that she had lawfully acquired the hacienda in accordance with the Lerdo law, but residents of Nahuatzen insisted that the estate still belonged to the community. Eventually, both parties reached an agreement. The details are

232 AGHPEM, Secretaría de Gobierno, Gobernación, Hijuelas, Distrito de Uruapan, vol. 3, 22-23, 26, 29-30, 33-36; and AGHPEM, Secretaría de Gobierno, Gobernación, Hijuelas, Distrito de Uruapan, vol. 8, 105.

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unclear, but it seems that Madrazo maintained possession of at least part of the hacienda, while continued paying Nahuatzen an annual fee for another part of the property. Many years later, in

1888, after the passing of María de Jesús Madrazo, a new apoderado of Nahuatzen accused

Molina and a local notable called Carlos Eiquihua of having mismanaged the revenues derived from San Marcos all those years.233

Nahuatzen’s reparto was also unique in that it was the sole community to extend land divisions to most of its forested areas. The allocation of family parcels and at least part of additional agricultural lands took place during the second half of 1872. Yet the community carried out a second round of partitions in the summer of 1873, this time including mountainous lands. Apoderado Abraham Molina had previously suggested the government (June 1872) turn montes into ranchos and then rent them out. The municipality, not the community, would get the revenues since, according to Molina, the reparto would render the community nonexistent. This, the apoderado argued, was easier than actually distributing mountainous lands among community members. His plan did not succeed, but authorities came up with an alternative scheme. The community set aside one monte to form the ejido of the pueblo. The remaining montes, in part already employed in agricultural activities, split into three different sections. On paper, each community member was granted a share of mountainous land within one of these sections. In practice, as in the past, community members continued using montes as open areas.

There was, however, an important difference. Now, community members could sell the rights to their individual shares, making it easier for wealthier individuals to concentrate sizeable stretches

233 AGHPEM, Secretaría de Gobierno, Gobernación, Hijuelas, Distrito de Uruapan, vol. 12, 104-112 and 131.

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of montes. Over the course of next two decades or so, more and more open areas turned into private holdings in the hands of ever fewer community members, among them Molina and probably Eiquihua, but also Francisco Alvelo who eventually concentrated about 30% of the remaining forested areas of Nahautzen (as pointed out in chapter 2).234

In most cases, one group dominated the process of land allocations relying on the support of a majority or at least on the support of key segments of the community. Yet in a number of instances, as in Apo and Tancítaro (tellinlgy, two of the better-off communities of the lower meseta wherein internal social differentiation was comparatively greater), factional competition characterized land divisions from beginning to end. In Apo, the first local commission in charge of the reparto was loudly contested. Its members were accused of distributing land shares without even putting together a census of all the beneficiaries—as required by the 1851 reparto law—and acting with “animosity” against “many individuals.” There were also harsh complaints about the prefecto for allowing the local commission to proceed with allocations and systematically ignoring any protests against land divisions.235

Opposition to the local commission resulted in an election to form a new comisión repartidora (March, 1872). The new commission, however, did not fare better. Having lost control of how the reparto would take place, the members of the previous commission (led by

Eulogio Vargas) and their allies retaliated. They accused Francisco Guerrero, head of the new

234 Ibid., 113-120. To some degree, events in Nahuatzen foreshadowed what other communities would experience during the late 1890s and early 1900s when forest lands across the meseta became the center of the second reparto wave—the matter of the next chapter. 235 AGHPEM, Secretaría de Gobierno, Gobernación, Hijuelas, Distrito de Uruapan, vol. 13, 73-74. Apo and Tancítaro were at the time part of the district of Apatzingán. The prefecto, therefore, was different from that of the district of Uruapan.

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commission, of acting in league with Antonio Alvarez, resident of Tancítaro and leaseholder of one of Apo’s main properties (El Pilón). According to Vargas, neither Guerrero nor Alvarez actually wanted land divisions to take place because both had debts with the community, debts that they would have to cover if the reparto succeeded. More importantly, Alvarez would be forced to relinquish El Pilón in favor of Apo’s community members. Vargas argued that Alvarez had been operating from the very beginning, “deluding the unwary” in order to protect his personal interest at the expense of the community. In spite of these allegations, officials in

Morelia—against the opinion of the prefecto—ratified the election of the second commission.236

Differences between rival groups were never actually settled in Apo. Yet allocations— conducted in June, 1872 and approved by the government in July 11, 1872—resulted in a compromise of sorts.237 As in other communities, most families retained their holdings, while some received a little more to compensate for previous land shortfalls. Overall, however, only few truly benefited from the reparto. Antonio Alvarez acquired part of El Pilón at a price of 500 pesos—the whole property was valued in approximately 5,000 pesos. The rest of the property was split in half, one to cover some community expenses and the other distributed in equal shares among community members.238 El Pilón eventually became the base of Alvarez’s rise as a major landowner. By 1889, three year after Alvarez passed away, it had 100 workers, one sugar mill, and a liquor (aguardiente) factory—all in possession of María de Jesús Alvarez de Mendez,

236 Ibid., 37-48, 76-79, 85-86, and 89-90. 237 Ibid., 61 and 95. 238 Ibid., 97.

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Alvarez’s daughter. By the early twentieth century, El Pilón was valued in about 33,000.239 The

Vargas clique (Alvarez’s rival), for its part, ended up claiming their holdings relying on the 1856 federal law. In 1877, Francisco Guerrero (who had contributed in selling El Pilón to Alvarez) still bemoaned the fact that Vargas and his partners, “the wealthiest” people in Apo according to him, had managed to keep community lands, “while the wretched from whom they had taken their lands did not have even bread to eat.”240

In no other place were disputes between two rival factions as stern as in Tancítaro. There, as pointed out earlier, rivalries escalated resulting in the killing of one community member in the late months of 1869. Only the discord among liberal national and regional groups prevented things from getting out of hand. The bitterness, however, resurfaced early in the spring of 1872.

By then, Antonio Alvarez himself, together with Simón Reimundo and Rafael Urbina, had been appointed members of the local commission in charge of implementing land divisions (March-

April, 1872).241

Fig. 7. Top 20 individual Holders of Community Land Before the Reparto Value of Land No. Name Group Shares in Pesos 1 Manuel Rojas Against A. Alvarez et al. 885 2 Luis Medina Against A. Alvarez et al. 535 3 Leonardo Reimundo Against A. Alvarez et al. 519 4 Maria de Jesus Lopez Against A. Alvarez et al. 324 5 Alvino Medina Against A. Alvarez et al. 305 6 Ignacio Alvarez Against A. Alvarez et al. 292

239 See, Estrada Virgen, , "Reparto de tierras comunales,” 52-53. 240 AGHPEM, Secretaría de Gobierno, Gobernación, Hijuelas, Distrito de Uruapan, vol. 13, 132. 241 AGHPEM, Secretaría de Gobierno, Gobernación, Hijuelas, Distrito de Uruapan, vol. 4, 178.

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7 Manuel Estrella Against A. Alvarez et al. 269 8 Vicente Mora Unknown 1,001 Encarnacion 9 Montelongo Unknown 833 10 Jose Jesus Rios Unknown 400 11 Eugenio Sanchez Unknown 345 12 Guillerma Navarro Unknown 332 13 Julian Lucas Unknown 298 14 Jose Pardo Unknown 275 15 Epifaneo Velazquez Unknown 256 16 Juan Garcia Unknown 250 17 Apolinario Sanchez Unknown 248 18 Claudio Castillo Unknown 238 19 Antonio Alvarez Against Medina et al. 502 20 Juan Estrella Against Medina et al. 250 Total 8,356

Sources: AGHPEM, Secretaría de Gobierno, Gobernación, Hijuelas, Distrito de Uruapan, vol. 2, 14-179; and AGHPEM, Secretaría de Gobierno, Gobernación, Hijuelas, Distrito de Uruapan, vol. 14, 1-65. Based on 378 instances where land values were provided.

In response, perhaps anticipating retaliation on the part of Alvarez and Reimundo, a group of rival community members and tenants submitted district authorities land claims using federal laws. Supporters of Alvarez and Reimundo, in turn, denounced that some community members in ranchos El Espinal, Cuate, and Arapindo (all part of Tancítro’s holdings) had illegally formed a new community to elude the reparto—apparently, ever since Reimundo and

Urbina evicted the Bucios, El Espinal had become a bastion against state reparto policies. The municipal president of Tancítaro agreed that people in these ranchos were trying to constitute a different community and that therefore authorities should prevent this from happening. The prefecto, however, informed officials in Morelia that such allegations were unfounded and that

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they had been orchestrated by Alvarez and Reimundo. People in Tancítaro, the prefecto added, were willing to carry out land divisions, but Alvarez and his partners had been acting with prejudice against them and thus many community members opted to solicit land shares based on federal laws.242

Fig. 8. Distribution of Land in Tancítaro Before the Reparto Land Shares Value (Pesos) % of Total Top 20 8,356 21

Middling Members 30,654 76

Bottom 90 1,376 3 Total 40,386 100

Sources: AGHPEM, Secretaría de Gobierno, Gobernación, Hijuelas, Distrito de Uruapan, vol. 2, 1-2, 14-179; and AGHPEM, Secretaría de Gobierno, Gobernación, Hijuelas, Distrito de Uruapan, vol. 14, 1-65. Data based on 378 instances where land values were provided.

Meanwhile, numerous other community members began to solicit Alvarez and Reimundo to be listed in the census of individuals with the right to receive community lands in accordance with state laws. Some of these petitions explicitly requested lands that were in possession of either other community members or tenants. Often, petitions came from disenfranchised community members. Secundino Vega’s petition, for instance, stated that “not having possessed thus far land whatsoever I beg the commission consider the share that corresponds me in Rancho

242 Ibid., 179 and 190-192.

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del Reparo in possession of leaseholder citizen Rafael Lomas.”243 In some other instances, petitioners sought redress for previous or ongoing losses. Antonio Balderas said he was deprived of two of the eight fanegas of land he used to have for him and his family. To compensate for this loss, Balderas petitioned the commission lands in possession of an individual called Gerardo

Hernandez.244 Land divisions, petitioners such as Balderas and Vega became aware, entailed an unprecedented occasion to alter local unbalances. Forced to opt between federal and state policies, they picked the one that most favored their interests and could procure security for their families.

Yet not all community members and local residents considered state reparto policies the best means to protect their lands and families. Especially when a rival group controlled the local commission in charge of defining who would get what within the community. Many tenants and community members continued submitting to district authorities land claims based on federal laws; the office of the prefecto, in turn, continued backing the petitions. Unable to negotiate with the prefecto, Alvarez and the members of the local commission, together with municipal president José María del Río, wrote to the governor complaining about district authorities. The community, they argued, had agreed to conduct land divisions in accordance with state laws.

Authorizing individual land claims was not only against the interest of the community, but it was illegal. In validating these claims, they said, the prefecto was protecting “a mob of landholders

(adjudicatarios) who just as vultures, they are everywhere devouring the properties of the

243 AGHPEM, Secretaría de Gobierno, Gobernación, Hijuelas, Distrito de Uruapan, vol. 5, 34. For a similar example in This same volume see, 36-48, and 182. 244 Ibid., 35.

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orphans and widows.” The governor should know, Alvarez and partners argued, that this “mob” was actually comprised by “some indigenous people that have unlawfully been in possession of disproportionate shares of land, taking advantage of their position to maintain the abuse and sanction it with a property title.”245

Officials in Morelia determined that land divisions based on state laws should continue, but they did not reverse individual petitions for land based on federal laws. This fueled ongoing cleavages. Authorities heard news that “a considerable number” of people in Tancítaro had been repeatedly meeting to discuss land divisions and that “feelings were running high,” as if something bad were about to happen.246 Alvarez and the local commission started issuing land titles without previous authorization of the prefecto or the governor. The prefecto then moved to

Tancítaro with a small armed force and spread the word that land titles given by the local commission had no legal value until approved by the government. He also declared land allocations nulled. The minister of government, for its part, required from the local commission all the documentation regarding the reparto to make a final decision. Alvarez submitted the documents, but also solicited authorization of the allocations he and the commission had previously done.247 To the surprise of the prefecto and Alvarez’s opponents, the minister of government decided to approve the reparto in August 31, 1872. The minister, however, also added that the approval only included lands that had been allocated “without prejudice to the

245 AGHPEM, Secretaría de Gobierno, Gobernación, Hijuelas, Distrito de Uruapan, vol. 5, 195. 246 AGHPEM, Secretaría de Gobierno, Gobernación, Hijuelas, Distrito de Uruapan, vol. 4, 214-215. 247 Ibid., 217-228.

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rights of third-parties who had acquired them by virtue of disentailment laws or any other title.”248

Land divisions in Tancítaro caused more problems than they solved. Months after the approval of the reparto, Luis Medina, one of the main opponents of the local commission, took legal action against Alvarez, Del Río, and Reimundo (March, 1873). During the legal process, a number of community members affirmed that the local commission performed allocations without abiding by any of the rules established in the law. Medina and his allies accused Alvarez of manipulating the reparto to his personal benefit. According to Medina and other witnesses, the local commission consistently excluded community members from the list of beneficiaries of the reparto. Moreover, Alvarez promised numerous people lands, only to pressure them into selling their shares to him. Medina also added that Alvarez had acquired an extensive stretch of mountainous land (Cerro Grande), thus violating legal prohibitions to trade or allocate land reserved for the ejido of pueblos.249

In addition to this legal suit, Medina and dozens of other community members simultaneously submitted pleas to the governor requesting the complete cancelation of the reparto. Yet the government replied that in approving the reparto, authorities made sure that allocations had not affected the right of third-parties. The approval, at any rate, could not be undone. Any pending allegations should be channeled to judicial authorities.250 And many community members did so. Especially the ones that had not submitted a claim for land before

248 Ibid., 231. 249 Ibid., 246-249. 250 Ibid., 242-245, 277, and 283.

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the government of Michoacán approved the reparto. Their cases made their way up to the federal

Supreme Court. Plaintiffs argued that the decision of the government of Michoacán to approve the reparto violated the constitution and their “individual rights” [garantías individuales], particularly their right to property. Community members had turned into the very sponsors and defenders of individual rights against a government that promoted land divisions precisely to end communal land tenure and reform the allegedly archaic ways of indigenous people. In June and

September, 1874, two different groups of claimants received the news that the Supreme Court had ruled in their favor.251

The decision did not overturn the reparto altogether, but it did oblige authorities in

Michoacán to reverse numerous allocations in Tancítaro. On the ground, this meant that individuals such as Secundino Vega and Antonio Balderas would have to give back any lands they had received during the reparto. If allocations had brought about at least mild changes in how lands were distributed in Tancítaro, these were substantially undermined. That is, of course, if Alvarez and the local commission showed consideration for at least some of the individuals they had listed as having the right to get a share of community lands. In October, 1874, yet another group of petitioners requested a new reparto, denouncing the members of the local commission for having utilized their position to acquire “the best lands” and favored their friends and local partners.252 Community members continued submitting appeals to the Supreme Court

251 Ibid., 272-273, 286-287, 292-293. 252 Ibid., 293-295.

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and appeals continued to be supported by federal judges (September, 1875).253 In the midst of internal struggles for land and power, redistribution could only instigate grievances and serve as an instrument to settle old and new accounts.

The government of Michoacán acknowledged only in part that land divisions in Tancítaro had been close to disaster. In 1877, the new governor of Michoacán, general Manuel González

(one of Porfirio Díaz’s closest allies), still spoke of land divisions as pending business in most communities of Michoacán. Tellingly enough, he chose Tancítaro as example of the things the government should do better in the future. Land divisions, he said, must seek the wellbeing of

“current holders and proceed with strict justice so as to not give way, as in Tancítaro, to endless complaints.”254 Apparently, it took the intervention of a special official, visitador Bruno Patiño, for things to settle down again.

Fiscal officials knew a little better. Unable to make sense of land allocations in Tancítaro and determine who among community members should pay land taxes, official Juan Romero recommended to authorities in Morelia in the fall of 1877 a complete annulment of the reparto in

Tancítaro. Otherwise, he said, the wealth of indigenous families “will remain forever, as it is now, in the hands of Don Antonio Alvarez and some in the hands of his favorites.” “Being that money is in all times,” he continued, “the sole motive that turns what it is black into white and makes the bad look good,” it was the duty of the government to put an end to the twin evil of

253 AGHPEM, Secretaría de Gobierno, Gobernación, Hijuelas, Distrito de Uruapan, vol. 9, 38-39. 254 Memoria presentada por el ciudadano general de división Manuel González al Ejecutivo de la Unión, al del estado de Michoacán y a la Legislatura del mismo sobre el uso de la facultades discrecionales que le fueron concedidas para reorganizar política y administrativamente dicho Estado (Morelia: Imprenta del Gobierno, 1877), 172.

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“the influence of money, on the one hand, and the insolvency of indigenous people, on the other.” The lack of government action, he remarked, would only let injustices go unpunished,

“because no one represents the rights of the poor for free” and, for that reason, “the powerful always subdue the wretched. Pobre pueblo!!!”255

Ultimately, land divisions in Tancítaro did little to even out the many unbalances liberal land policies were supposed to rectify. On the contrary, land policies instigated cleavages and fueled conflicts among community members. The most vulnerable were left in even a weaker position, while the prosperous either reinforced their power or, as Alvarez, expanded their influence and wealth. Neither the state nor the federal versions of land divisions came to fruition, but both contributed to the disintegration of community holdings. Taking no notice of local conditions, federal authorities stood by an uncompromising scheme which locals turned into a tool to protect themselves from the radical egalitarianism implicit in Michoacán reparto laws.

The authorities of Michoacán upheld a more pragmatic approach which nonetheless ended up restraining any chance of a thorough redistribution of community lands, a goal that authorities allegedly supported and sponsored. State land policies also became an instrument to advance personal benefits, remove local competitors, and only marginally to redressing local imbalances of wealth and power. Land divisions in Tancítaro benefited a very few, after many tribulations brought moderate good to some, and resulted in little or no improvement for many more.

255 AGHPEM, Secretaría de Gobierno, Gobernación, Hijuelas, Distrito de Uruapan, vol. 9, 4-5.

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Conclusion

Reparto: A nineteenth-century expression standing for liberal land reform. A plan to divide community land into fractions. A policy designed to turn communal land rights into individual property rights. An ideal. But mostly a host of unexpected developments. An expression describing how, after decades of failed attempts, when land policies finally took place, they did not come in a way most people at the time could anticipate. Liberal authorities in Michoacán expected communities to refuse land reform, so they devised new forms for compelling indigenous people to relinquish communal land tenure. Namely, a set of taxes and fiscal incentives meant to turn corporate land rights more onerous and less appealing than having community lands divided. As the strategy began to work, a number of communities in the meseta turned opposition into qualified support for land divisions.

Support, however, surfaced not for land reform in general, but for one specific version of it. A group of local tenants and community members realized that, if conducted as enshrined in

Michoacán laws, land divisions entailed a major threat to their position within communities. Not only did federal laws suppose no threats to tenants and many better-off community members, but they actually offered some very enticing advantages to them. The rank and file debated between backing supporters of federal policies and backing supporters of state policies, between securing their current holdings and advocating certain redistribution of lands among community members.

In the process, people in the meseta transformed not only the rhetoric and idiom of liberalism, but its very practice. Official liberal circles in Michoacán instigated land divisions seeking to end customary forms of land tenure and, in return, mobilization on the ground ended

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up turning land policies against liberal authorities. By engaging land reforms, locals revealed the contradictions between state and federal policies. Both were meant to dismantle communal land tenure, but each entailed distinct understandings of how individual property rights could damage or benefit indigenous people and different degrees of commitment to an ideal of a more equal society. These contradictions were not apparent to most contemporary political and ideological advocates of liberalism, but they became very clear to the people of the meseta. Mobilization in the plateau, in that sense, was not restricted to the defense of traditional rights. It gave way to new and unforeseen uses of liberal land policies and actually revealed that reforms, on the ground, could serve many masters and yield many different outcomes.

Local uses of liberal land policies, however, were inevitably embedded in existing social differentiations and rivalries within communities. Reforms were employed by community members not only against authorities, but against one another. The intensity and frequency of the antagonisms (and thus the probability of turning land policies against local rivals) depended on the existence of internal disparities in the amount and quality of land shares and the degree of competition among better-off community members and local elites for controlling access to available resources.256 Tellingly, with one exception, land divisions took place exclusively in the

256 Jennie Purnell was one the first to notice this pattern: “The liberal reparto unleashed intense factional conflict, dividing communities in their response to the reform. The nature and dynamics of this factional conflict depended on the distribution of political power within communities, the extent to which communal resources were allocated in a reasonably equitable fashion, and the existence of factional alliances with powerful outsiders "(“With All Due Respect,” 93-94).Yet, contrary to what this chapter illustrates, she concluded that, as a rule, factional conflicts in most communities in Michoacán “involved a majority faction opposed to the reform, led by the religious and political authorities of the cabildo, united against a minority faction that was attempting to take advantage of the many opportunities for fraud and abuse in the privatization process” (Ibid., 94). See also the equally insightful, Roseberry, "El Estricto Apego a la Ley,” 47-50.

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lower meseta wherein inequalities in land distribution were, if not sharp, at least comparatively greater. There, the incidence of independent smallholders, middling landowners, and tenants was also more pronounced. As a result, competition for local resources, although limited, tended to be higher. In the loftier areas of the plateau, by comparison, differences in land shares were for the most part narrower and the number of tenants and middling landowners smaller. The relative absence of important disparities in power and wealth tended to reinforce a basic (if always contentious) sense of cohesion and, in consequence, limit local internal pressures to enforce either version of land reform.

Overall, despite their differences on paper, both state and federal land policies strengthened the position of a small number of community members and landholders. For many of those at the bottom of the ladder land divisions came at a significant price and only few occasionally gained some benefits. In the short-run, communities blocked the possibility of a major takeover of community lands. Liberal policies, however, overturned legal restrictions to trade community lands, thus facilitating further concentration within pueblos—even in pueblos that had remained firmly averse to land reforms. At first, as the next chapter recounts, transactions involved mostly traditional agricultural lands. Yet as commercial prospects began to expand, interest in seizing communal woodlands began to rise, giving way to the second wave of reparto in the meseta.

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CHAPTER 5

THE SECOND REPARTO: STATE EXPANSION AND THE RISE OF COMMERCIAL FORESTRY

Signs of a New Era

Manuel Rosales witnessed and took part (perhaps actively, perhaps only passively) in the contentious events that reshaped Tancítaro’s land regime during the 1870s. Unlike many of his fellow community members, he managed to secure lands by means of adhering (whole-heartedly or half-heartedly) to the Alvarez’s clique and the 1851 state reparto law. Although many land allocations in Tancítaro were subsequently contested, no one within the community challenged

Manuel’s right to occupy and use his three pieces of land. In 1880, in fact, Manuel traded part of his holdings with another community member named Antonio Soberano, also a resident of Agua

Nueva. The transaction involved no money or profit. The size and quality of the holdings were actually very similar. Manuel and Antonio solely exchanged locations.

The transaction, however, was not reported to the government. Eight years later, in 1888, ever more meticulous fiscal officials found out about it and sent a note to Antonio Soberano informing him that he was about to face foreclosure for years of tax evasion. Not only did he fail to report having exchanged properties with Manuel Rosales, officials argued, but he also failed to cover land taxes despite the fact that exemptions for former community lands had long expired.

Antonio Soberano eventually settled with the government. He agreed to pay a third of the amount for pending land taxes and cover his part of the transaction costs for the unreported land

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exchange with Manuel Rosales. Officials would notify Manuel Rosales about this settlement and inform him about his (now) pending debt with the government.257

Manuel was then 46 years old, a man of age by late nineteenth-century standards. If still alive, Ireneo and Buenaventura, once his small children, were respectively 18 and 20 years old.

Both would soon have children of their own—if they did not have them already. Time had passed, but echoes from the first reparto still pervaded everyday life in the meseta. These aftereffects, however, started to overlap and interact with new developments. This time, changes did not always come in innocuous shapes. They came in the form of legal disputes over boundary limits against neighboring pueblos and in the shape of groups of men tapping and cutting trees on communal woodlands. As in the past, changes involved bureaucratic procedures and new laws. Yet they also entailed things unlike any other in any preceding time. Changes came in the shape of locomotives, rail lines, contracts, and sawmills. The things of a new rising industrial world.

Four Major Challenges

During the 1880s and until the first years after the outbreak of the Mexican revolution, communities in the meseta experienced four major challenges. The first one concerned an increase in land values and a subsequent raise in land taxes upon undivided lands and individual properties greater than 100 pesos. Fiscal policies did not, as in the past, trigger land divisions, but effectively refashioned the relationship between the government and indigenous communities.

257 AGHPEM, Secretaría de Gobierno, Gobernación, Hijuelas, Distrito de Uruapan, vol. 9, 65-68.

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Compromise, rather than outright confrontation, came to characterize this relationship.

Communities, however, made greater concessions, as the government increasingly expanded its influence at the expense of local autonomy.

The second major difficulty entailed a growth in transactions involving community and former community lands. Initially, these transactions were limited to residential properties, family parcels, and other agricultural lands. Yet eventually they also involved, for the first time in generations, stretches of communal woodlands. Land transfers tended to undermine community members and groups in an already weak position. Correspondingly, transactions strengthened and expanded local land and wealth concentrations by better-off community members, local notables, and landowners.

Appetite for communal woodlands gave way to a third significant challenge, namely, the resurgence of long-standing boundary conflicts between bordering pueblos. These conflicts, in turn, were accompanied by a number of disputes inside communities. As commercial forestry expanded and boundary conflicts escalated, petitions for land divisions resurfaced. Once again, petitions for reparto responded to a combination of concrete pressures and practical reasons. On the one hand, community members solicited new land divisions and allocations to deter further transactions and loss of community lands, especially forested lands. On the other, communities tried to use reparto policies to speed up pending legal disputes with other pueblos and, equally important, outstrip rival claims on the part of their neighbors.

The fourth and last major challenge communities faced also stemmed from the spectacular growth in commercial demand for lumber and other forest products. At first,

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commercial pressures involved, for the most part, modest operations controlled by local and regional actors. The expansion of railroad networks in Michoacán and its surrounding regions, however, turned forest harvesting into a veritable large-scale business. Together, rail lines and commercial forestry instigated two of the most drastic and enduring transformations ever experienced by indigenous people in the meseta. On the one hand, communities were once and for all drawn into larger economic networks whose origin and ramifications stretched far beyond the plateau and Michoacán. On the other, commercial forestry and railroads not only caused land tenure to change, but (perhaps more importantly) altered local land use for generations to come.

Policies against Politics

Unique political conditions helped make possible the first reparto; consolidation of a political establishment equally contributed to bring about the second round of changes in the land regime of communities in the meseta. Consolidation began in 1867, but it only came to fruition after the last major pronunciamiento of the nineteenth century in 1876, the Tuxtepec uprising that took

Porfirio Díaz and his allies to national power. By the time fiscal officials in Michoacán compelled Antonio Soberano to pay land taxes (1888), the men behind the Tuxtepec uprising had already been in power for more than a decade. First with Díaz (1877-1880), then with once governor of Michoacán and Díaz’s secretary of war Manuel González (1880-1884), and then once more with Díaz—who remained in office for about three decades thereafter.

Systematic use of personal connections, patronage, cooption, and selective repression was behind this unprecedented political continuity. Initial efforts to secure the allegiance of a

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compact group of military men and governors grew into a vast political network with ramifications in the federal government, the army, the national congress, the states, and local congresses. In time, as this network expanded, a surprisingly lasting political regime came about.

It was an authoritarian regime that kept liberal and republican institutions in place, but ultimately depended on personal loyalties and ties to subsist. Obedience was thus cherished above anything else and rewarded with privileges, favors, and public posts. Laws and institutions did not undermine personal rule; they framed it and reinforced it.

Power circled around the president, but the authority of the president also rested on granting friends and allies a relatively ample degree of autonomy. Governors utilized this autonomy to procure their own partners and clients (also at the service of the president), as well as to secure a dependable body of officials on the ground—officials who, in turn, sought to maintain good relations with local strongmen and other influential personages. Keeping cities and the countryside quiet was the ultimate measure of trust between the president, governors, and local authorities. Retaining power and autonomy (and all the privileges inherent to them) ultimately depended on that.

The regime did not preclude political competition, but systematically discouraged opposition and suppressed any overt challenges. Elections took place regularly and were often heated. Yet the presidency was one man’s prerogative—Díaz’s prerogative. In the states, electoral politics was part of deeper power struggles between rival regional elites. Votes did not change governors, for that was ultimately decided by the president—from 1881 to 1911, there were only three governors of Michoacán, Pudenciano Dorantes (1881-1885), Mariano Jiménez

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(1885-1891), and Aristeo Mercado (1892-1911). Yet mobilization before, during, and after elections served the purpose of settling accounts without resorting to uprisings and as a periodic means to renegotiate privileges and favors among political elites. Real opposition was treated harshly. Open detractors were repeatedly imprisoned, censured, or drafted to serve in the military, while critics from within liberal ranks were systematically marginalized. Popular mobilization—including independent indigenous mobilizations in the southeast and the north— was unequivocally dealt with repression, at times, ruthless and gratuitous.258

Political dominance brought about notorious changes among liberals in power.

Liberalism gradually lost much of its previous militant advocacy. Interest in political reform diluted as a rising generation of intellectuals, professionals, and officials became part of government circles. Men of letters mostly alien to past political turbulences, conservative liberals

(as they sometimes identified themselves), embraced pragmatism and focused not on altering or replacing existing institutions, but on figuring out ways to strengthen the everyday running of the state. In other words, they turned liberalism into an official and managerial ideology devoted to improve the administrative aspects of governance. Scientific politics, as its advocates called it, contended that transformation of society could not come from political agitation and advocacy, but only from rational management of public affairs. Politics, conservative liberals argued, must

258 For the nature and dynamics of the Porfiriato see, Knight, The Mexican Revolution, Vol. 1; François-Xavier Guerra, México: del Antiguo Régimen a la Revolución. Vol. 1 (Mexico, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1988); Tutino, From Insurrection to Revolution, 277-325; Katz, “Mexico: Restored Republic and Porfiriato,” 1-78; Escalante Gonzalbo, Ciudadanos imaginarios; Allen Wells and Gilbert Joseph, Summer of Discontent, Seasons of Upheaval: Elite Politics and Rural Insurgency in Yucatan, 1876-1915 (Stanford:Stanford University Press, 1996); Carlos Bravo Regidor, "Elecciones de gobernadores durante el Porfiriato," in Las elecciones y el gobierno, 257-281; Leticia Reina, “Local Elections and Regimen Crises. The Political Culture of Indigenous Peoples,” in Cycles of Conflict, 91-125.

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yield to policies. And implementation of policies required both a strong government and a thorough organization of public finances.259

Forging a New Relationship: Land Taxes and Conventional Agreements

Crony politics, of course, never surrendered to scientific politics (as conservative liberals imagined). Yet Díaz and political elites in general clearly understood the importance of attuning policies and the running of public affairs to rational administrative standards. The task rested with a body of tough-minded and technically skilled officials. These officials were responsible for balancing government accounts and assembling the essential data to have clearer records of the population, the economy, and the territory. Often diligent and methodical, these were the men that provided governments with a set of general public registers, different types of surveys and censuses, and periodic statistical annals. The men, for instance, that spent long hours going through stacks of books and documents in order to create a public register of real estate properties in Michoacán. The officials that used these records to determine land values and set land taxes rates. It was them, indeed, who traced back Antonio Soberano’s and Manuel Rosales’ records.

Reorganization of public finances in Michoacán, as previously suggested, began early after the final defeat of imperialist and conservative forces in 1867. The end of liberal infighting

259 See, Charles Hale, The Transformation of Liberalism in Late Nineteenth-Century Mexico (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990); Alan Knight, "El liberalismo mexicano desde la Reforma hasta la Revolución (una interpretación)," Historia Mexicana, 35, no. 1 (1985): 59-91; Guerra, “Mexico From Independence to Revolution,” 129-152; Moisés González Navarro, "Tres etapas del liberalismo mexicano," La Palabra y el Hombre, no. 52 (1984): 69-74.

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and the rise of a political establishment after 1876 further increased interest in a more systematic management of public revenues. In 1877, authorities still bemoaned about the government’s dependency on extraordinary loans to keep up with expenses and about the difficulties to collect taxes in a more orderly fashion. There had been significant improvements, authorities argued.

Yet the lack of organized and up-to-date public records continued to be an obstacle for fiscal officials and tax collectors to perform their jobs. Records on real estate properties, in that sense, needed additional systematization if the government wanted to enforce land taxes (one of several new and increasingly important sources of public income after 1867) in a more consistent fashion. Land values, in particular, required updating for, according to the authorities of

Michoacán, they had remained unchanged or rated too low for many years. Low land values, of course, meant fewer revenues for the government.260

By the mid-1880s, authorities talked about public finances in very different terms.

Collection of revenues had never been greater and prospects of further improvements were very optimistic. Peace, authorities argued, had made the reduction of military expenses a reality. The good shape of public finances, in fact, permitted the government, for the first time in decades, to cope with almost all of its expenditures (including the payroll), as well as to settle better conditions for the payment of Michoacán’s debt. Such favorable circumstances, authorities contended, were to a great extent the result of the reigning “harmony” and the exceptional

“regularity” with which administrative affairs had been conducted.261 The performance of fiscal

260 Memoria presentada por Manuel González, 6-7, 22-27, and 81. 261 Memoria de Michoacán de 1883, 4. Also, Memoria de Michoacán de 1883, 34-41.

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officials, in particular, had been irreproachable. Cases of misconduct were rare and did not affect public finances in any major way. In general, authorities argued, “citizens in all corners of the state considered fiscal employees individuals worthy of all esteem.”262 Fiscal officials, authorities concluded, performed their duties efficiently and industriously, as evidenced by yearly increases in public revenues and the significant improvements made in the register and appraisal of real estate properties across Michoacán.263

Fig. 9. Value of Property in Michoacan, 1869-1896

10 Urban Property

Millions Rural Property 5

Sources: “Cuadro de valores según los datos de la oficina principal de rentas del Estado," in Michoacán de Ocampo: noticias históricas, geográficas y estadísticas, coleccionadas y publicadas por la redacción del Periódico Oficial del Estado (Morelia: Imprenta de O. Ortiz, 1873), 48; “Noticia número 15,” in Memoria de Michoacán de 1869, 120; Memoria presentada por Manuel González, 468-470 and 474; "Documento Número 3. Censo y división territorial del Estado de Michoacán de Ocampo, según los últimos datos oficiales obtenidos por el Ejecutivo, con otras noticias estadísticas," Memoria de Gobierno de Michoacán de 1882, 41; “Noticia número 15,” in Memoria de Michoacán de 1886, n.p.; "Anexo número 35. Noticia pormenorizada que forma la Tesorería general," in Memoria de Gobierno de Michoacán de 1889, n.p.; "Noticia 23," in Memoria de Michoacán de 1890, n.p.; "Noticias número 80 y 81, " in Memoria de Michoacán de 1892-1894, n.p.; and Memoria de Michoacán de 1894-96, 344.

262 Memoria de Michoacán de 1885, 36. 263 Ibid., 34-37.

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Increasing focus on tax collection and land appraisals, indeed, resulted in notable readjustments in the value of landed properties. In 1869, the total value of landed properties in

Michoacán amounted to almost 18.5 million pesos. By 1886, land values came to about 23.5 million pesos. A decade later, they had reached the sum of nearly 31 million pesos. In other words, in approximately a quarter of a century, from 1869 to 1896, land values in total rose nearly 70%. Urban properties were significantly less numerous and, therefore, on average, represented only about 32% of the value of all properties in Michoacán. In 1869, urban properties were valued in about 6.5 million pesos; by 1896, their value amounted to nearly 9.1 million, a total increase of 42%. The value of rural properties, by contrast, rose 81% in the same period. In 1869 rural properties amounted to merely 12 million pesos. By the mid-1880s, they had reached almost 16 million. A decade later (1896) rural properties totaled about 22 million pesos.

Land values in the meseta followed an even more noticeable upward trend. The overall value of rural properties totaled little more than 460,000 pesos in 1869. A decade later, values had already doubled and by the mid-1880s they reached seven digits. Rural properties went from about 1 million in 1886 to approximately 1.2 million pesos in 1890. By the mid-1890s, rural property values came to nearly 1.6 million pesos, that is to say, they were more than three times greater than in 1869. Urban property values, on the other hand, also experienced significant increases. Urban properties amounted to almost 240,000 pesos in 1869. Values steadily augmented thereafter. By the mid-1880s, they summed 377,000 pesos. A decade later, they came to about 545,000 pesos. Urban property values, in other words, had more than doubled in a

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quarter of a century. In total, landed properties in the meseta, urban and rural, amounted to little more than 703,000 pesos in 1869. This amount was three times greater by 1894 (about 2.1 million pesos, a number that represented 7% of all property values in Michoacán).

Fig. 10. Value of Property in the District of Uruapan, 1869-1894 1.80 1.60 1.40

1.20

1.00 Urban Property

Millions 0.80 Rural Property 0.60 0.40 0.20 0.00 1869 1880 1885 1886 1889 1890 1892 1893 1894

Sources: See Fig. 9.

The rise in land values and the increased capacity of authorities to enforce fiscal policies had important consequences for indigenous families and communities in the meseta. Land taxes had been a source of concern and complain in the early 1870s. Some communities, as shown in previous chapters, resorted to land divisions as a way to circumvent the new levy. Fiscal officials continued to apply land taxes after the first reparto. Yet enforcement was sometimes delayed

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because of the lack of coordination between district authorities and tax offices. Fiscal officials often reproached prefectos for not submitting the reports containing the information on land allocations after a reparto had taken place—without these reports fiscal officials could not determine land values, set appropriate tax rates, or grant tax exemptions. Prefectos, for their part, argued that they were frequently overwhelmed by other daily activities and duties. In one occasion, district authorities even affirmed that the reports had been stolen on their way to

Morelia (the capital city of Michoacán) and, therefore, it would take some time for clerks to compile the reports again.264

By the mid-1880s, circumstances had notably changed. Enforcement of land taxes strengthened as issues between prefectos and fiscal officials settled down. New and updated records not only contributed to the regularization of tax collection, but also permitted fiscal officials to broaden the base of taxpayers. Individuals who had thus far remained unnoticed by tax offices were now required to conform to fiscal norms. Significantly, tax exemptions for community members (granted to stimulate the partition of community lands) came to an end. By law, all properties valued in over 100 pesos were now forced to pay land taxes. Since their properties did not reach such value, many community members still remained exempt. Yet, as new appraisals consistently raised land values, many others could not avoid being required tax payments. Community members often solicited from the governor cancellation of land taxes.

Some argued that they had never been in possession of the properties they were charged for.

Others claimed that they had already sold their lands. And yet others declared they had no means

264 AGHPEM, Secretaría de Gobierno, Gobernación, Hijuelas, Distrito de Uruapan, vol. 23, 127-140.

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to cover the taxes. In general, as illustrated by the case of Antonio Soberano, authorities agreed to reduce and sometimes cancel previous debts for unpaid taxes, but only on the condition that community members agreed to pay land tolls thereafter on a regular basis.265

Increases in land values also affected the holdings of communities that had effectively rejected land divisions in the early 1870s—which included the vast majority of communities in the upper meseta. Land values and tax rates were set, to a great extent, depending on the size of properties. The larger the property, the greater the tax load. Since they were treated as one big property, undivided community lands were thus given comparatively high tax rates. What is more, any increases in land values directly caused land taxes to rise—and values, as pointed out, did nothing but increase during the last third of the nineteenth-century.

In some instances, as in the community of Cheran (in the upper meseta), land appraisals conducted by fiscal officials drastically moved land values and taxes up. Circa 1869, Cheran’s community lands had been initially valued in about 1,500 pesos, but this amount was promptly modified as a new land appraisal revealed Cheran’s lands were, in fact, significantly larger. The new value was set in 16,000 pesos. A decade later, in 1879, fiscal officials advised authorities in

Morelia yet another land appraisal. As a result, Cheran’s land values increased to 20,000 pesos.

By then, fiscal officials had already foreclosed some community lands—estimated in approximately 1,350 pesos—to cover years of unpaid taxes (or so did authorities argue). Land values continued to go up in subsequent years, as officials’ ability to track down unreported

265 AGHPEM, Secretaría de Gobierno, Gobernación, Hijuelas, Distrito de Uruapan, vol. 5, 214; and AGHPEM, Secretaría de Gobierno, Gobernación, Hijuelas, Distrito de Uruapan, vol. 9, 71, 77-78, 82-83, 90-91, 95, 103-105, 111, 122, 130, 134, 144, and 175-176.

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properties also improved. Indeed, communities sometimes tried to conceal part of their holdings in an effort to reduce land taxes rates. Every so often, however, fiscal officials found out about unreported properties and proceeded to set new values and rates (and fines). Cheran managed to keep an important amount of lands under wraps until 1886, when fiscal officials learned about the unregistered properties. As it turned out, the addition of these “new” lands more than doubled the overall value of Cheran’s holdings, setting it in about 52,000 pesos.266

Communities did not welcome raises in land values and taxes, but they did not openly resist them either. Instead, they relied on what was known as “conventional agreements.” Tax offices carried out land appraisals and recommended an initial value. Communities, but also all other property owners whether indigenous or not, had the right to object this initial estimation and request a new appraisal or make a counterproposal suggesting an estimation of their own.

Then the executive power assessed both proposals and settled on a new land value. Invariably, the new value was lower than the initial appraisal by tax officials, but also higher than the counterproposal by communities. Once this decision was made land values could not be change for at least the next four or five years.267

Conventional agreements thus became standard procedure in the meseta (and probably elsewhere in Michoacán). Sometimes communities, both in the upper and lower meseta, simply

266 AGHPEM, Secretaría de Gobierno, Gobernación, Hijuelas, Distrito de Pátzcuaro, vol. 12, 6-11 and 37-64. The unreported properties in question were located outside of the district of Uruapan and had been a source of disputes between Cheran and Zacpu (a community located in the neighboring district of Pátzcuaro). The official granting of these lands to Cheran by judicial authorities, ironically, revealed their existence to fiscal officials. 267 See, Memoria de Michoacán de 1885, 7-8; Memoria de Michoacán de 1889, 89-90; 242. Memoria sobre la administración pública del estado de Michoacán de Ocampo. Gobierno del C. Aristeo Mercado. Cuatrienio de 16 de septiembre de 1896 a 15 de septiembre de 1900 (Morelia: Escuela I.M.P.D., 1900), 242.

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solicited the governor the new rate without, for instance, suggesting an estimation of their own or, the less, requesting the full invalidation of land values and taxes. Juan Ramos, a representative from Pamatacuaro (upper meseta), for instance, wrote in his petition (July 1889) that “he would like to avoid all the troubles of a new appraisal” and straightforwardly requested the governor to determine not merely a new value, but to set the amount of the raise.268 Ramos simply cut to the chase for he knew values and taxes would only go up, although almost never as high as fiscal officials recommended.

At times, indeed, communities struck a good deal. Zirosto, an upper meseta community, managed to lower the value of their lands from 6,000 to 1,500 pesos (July 1889).269 More often, however, a great deal of bargaining had to take place before reaching a settlement—not always to the advantage of communities. In 1893, the executive power set land values in Periban (a lower meseta community) in 4,000 pesos after fiscal officials had suggested a value of 10,000.

About two years later, in January 1895, officials recommended raising land values to 8,000 pesos. According to them, representatives from Periban had not provided authorities with accurate information about community holdings. Early enough, representatives solicited a new conventional agreement. The petition, however, backfired. Fiscal officials learned about some additional unreported lands. The new agreement set Periban’s land values in 14,000 pesos (July

1895).270

268 AGHPEM, Secretaría de Gobierno, Gobernación, Hijuelas, Distrito de Uruapan, vol. 11, 150. 269 AGHPEM, Secretaría de Gobierno, Gobernación, Hijuelas, Distrito de Uruapan, vol. 3, 118-120. 270 AGHPEM, Secretaría de Gobierno, Gobernación, Hijuelas, Distrito de Uruapan, vol. 3, 126-129, 142-143, and 148. For other communities see, AGHPEM, Secretaría de Gobierno, Gobernación, Hijuelas, Distrito de Uruapan,

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Thus, in a context of political consolidation, fiscal policies effectively refashioned the relationship between communities and authorities. Land appraisals and taxes were initially meant to force communities to end communal land tenure. They succeeded, in combination with other factors, but only partially. In 1877, the government of Michoacán unambiguously deprived communities from any legal personhood. “Indigenous communities organized in accordance with the old Spanish laws,” stated the decree, “do not exist today with such character and must be solely considered as assemblies [reuniones] of individuals with interests in common.”271

Community members, the decree added, should take this into account when conducting any legal dealings. Such line of reasoning was far from strange to indigenous people in the meseta.

Community representatives and lawyers had made the same case before, as they attempted to show authorities the futility of carrying out land divisions. Authorities, however, took no heed of this fact for they wanted to prove a different point, namely, the futility of communities themselves. Yet, in practice, as it was often the case, authorities could not act in accord with their own sayings. If they wanted to collect taxes, and more importantly, if they wanted to have any ascendancy over communities, authorities would have to come terms with communities’ de facto existence.

A compromise of sorts thus surfaced. Communities all across the meseta agreed to pay taxes for their undivided properties and authorities agreed to tolerate communal land tenure as

vol. 12, 31, 49-54; and AGHPEM, Secretaría de Gobierno, Gobernación, Hijuelas, Distrito de Uruapan, vol. 3, 207- 208. 271 Amador Coromina, Recopilación de leyes, decretos, reglamentos y circulares expedidas en el estado de Michoacán, Vol. 24 (Morelia: Imprenta de los hijos de Ignacio Arango, 1888), 97.

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long as communities complied with fiscal norms. That, of course, did not stop authorities from insisting in the lack of legality of communities or from keeping sustain pressure on communal land tenure by means of raising land values and taxes every now and then. Communities, on the other hand, acceded to fulfill their tax duties on the understanding that this at least offered certain security that they would retain control of most of their holdings. Even so, the terms of this compromise ultimately gave authorities a comparatively more advantageous position. While they were forced to make some real concessions, authorities had greatly expanded their influence over communities. Bargaining land values did not spare communities from paying taxes or prevent officials from conducting new appraisals and foreclosures. It was the greatest sway the government had had since probably the Bourbons. Such sway would continue to grow until the breakout of the revolution.

Repurchase Agreements: The Piecemeal Fragmentation of Community L ands

Land taxes refashioned ties between communities and liberal authorities. Parallel events, also a consequence of the first reparto, recast communities’ internal makeup. Namely, a surge in community land dealings, evident by the late 1870s and early 1880s. Under Spanish rule, laws prohibited the selling and buying of communal lands. This did not prevent the members of pueblos de indios from trading community lands and outsiders from bypassing prohibitions. For the most part, however, land transactions among indigenous residents occurred in accordance with conventional and internal norms; interdictions, for their part, did serve to place some limits to encroaching by outsiders. Liberals saw these prohibitions as a straitjacket for individual

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initiative and as a major obstacle to the unrestricted flow of properties in the market. Liberal land laws thus sought to end the limits to purchase and sell landed properties, including the lands in possession of indigenous communities.

In Michoacán, the 1851 reparto law actually maintained some of these limits. It did not allow the selling of fundo legales, ejidos, and montes—although it did allow the selling of individual properties within the built-up area of pueblos. In like manner, it stipulated that indigenous people (except for individuals over 60 years old without children) could not “sell, mortgage, or alienate in any form” their properties, but until four years after land divisions took place. Properties, as well, could not be sold or mortgaged to institutions holding lands in mortmain. Any infringement of these stipulations on the part of buyers, the law stated, would result in penalizations and the loss of whatever money buyers had advanced.272 The four-year restriction, however, was repealed in 1868 after liberals regained power and plans to implement land reform resumed. “Indigenous people,” the decree declared, “are free to alienate at any time the land they acquired by virtue of the reparto.”273 In time, the license to sell and buy community lands would extend to communities where land divisions did not take place.

Many land transactions of the late 1870s and 1880s were not the result of direct purchases. They were conducted according to repurchase agreements (pactos de retroventa).

Repurchase agreements were probably common practice among community members in the meseta (and also in Michoacán and other parts of Mexico) before liberal land reforms. Yet they

272 Coromina, Recopilación de leyes, Vol. 11, 199-200 (articles 25 to 28). 273 Coromina, Recopilación de leyes, Vol. 19, 158 (article 3).

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were now strictly notarized, sanctioned by formal laws (and not just by convention), and became increasingly numerous. In principle, the main purpose of these agreements was not the acquisition of properties. They served, in fact, as instruments of local credit. Community members in need for ready cash offered buyers one or more properties as collateral in exchange for a certain amount of money (as a rule, equaling the value of the property or properties in question). In a written contract, sellers promised to repay the loan at a later date set by both sides of the transaction. Buyers, for their part, agreed not to sell the property or properties to a third- party until the expiration of the agreed date. They also were obliged to return the collateral to the borrower immediately after repayment. Failure to repay the loan on time, however, automatically gave lenders full ownership of the holdings.274

These were not the kind of land transactions liberal reformers imagined. For the most part, repurchase agreements and other dealings in community lands did not result in the free circulation of properties or the rise in property owners’ numbers. Transactions seldom took place on equal basis. On the contrary, they were carried out by two parties divided by wealth disparities—often, very obvious disparities. Lands, consequently, did not distribute more or less evenly among a relatively ample base of proprietors. Lands, in fact, tended to concentrate in the hands of those with greater purchasing power, that is, in the hands of the local wealthy—better- off community members, rancheros, merchants, hacendados.

274 For a general overview of repurchase agreements in Europe and Mexico, as seen through the specific case of southern Veracruz see, Eric Léonard, “Mecánica social del cambio institucional. Privatización de la propiedad comunal y transformación de las relaciones sociales en Los Tuxtlas, Veracruz” (paper presented at the XVI Congreso Internacional de la AHILA, San Fernando, Cadiz, September 6-9, 2011). For repurchase agreements in other regions of Michoacán see, Moisés Franco Mendoza, La ley y la costumbre en la Cañada de los Once Pueblos (Zamora: El Colegio de Michoacán, 1997).

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Manuel Campos, one of the top landowners of the meseta, repeatedly engaged in repurchase agreements and probably acquired several of his properties by this means. In 1879, for instance, he obtained two properties from Tomas Aviles and Maria Cayetano, two indigenous residents of the city of Uruapan whose properties they had acquired in the reparto of barrio San

Juan Evangelista.275 A year later, in1880, Campos acquired yet another piece of former community land from Pablo Mexicano, resident of barrio La Magdalena (also in the city of

Uruapan). Mexicano, on the other hand, sold a different property to Espiridion Coria, member of a prominent local family and one of the main coffee growers of the district of Uruapan. This was not the sole property that Coria acquired from La Magdalena. Mexicano was one among many others who had sold community lands to him.276 Feliciano Vidales, the main landowner of the region, also got hold of lands once in possession of community members, especially in the surroundings of one of his major properties, the hacienda Santa Catarina.277

Hacendados greatly benefitted from community land dealings. They were neither the only ones nor the most numerous group to do so. Notary records reveal dozens of apparently inconspicuous characters that were closely connected to indigenous communities—much closer,

275 Archivo General de Notarías de Michoacán (AGNM), Uruapan, Colección de Copias de Escrituras, Libro de protocolo del notario Lic. Eduardo Ruíz, 1879, no. 9. Escritura de retroventa otorgada por Tomas Aviles y María Cayetano Confites a favor de Don Manuel Campos," n.p. 276 AGNM, Uruapan, Colección de Copias de Escrituras, Libro de protocolo del notario Lic. Eduardo Ruíz, 1880, no. 8. Escritura de retroventa otorgada por Don Espiridion Coria a favor de Pablo Mexicano, n.p, and no. 42. Escritura de retroventa otorgada por Pablo Mexicano en favor de Don Manuel Campos, n.p.; and AGHPEM, Secretaría de Gobierno, Gobernación, Hijuelas, Distrito de Uruapan, vol. 15, 25-26. On Espiridion Coria and coffee see, Memoria presentada por Manuel González, documento 31. 277 See, for instance, AGNM, Uruapan, Colección de copias de escrituras públicas, Libro de protocolo del notario Lic. Pascual Arias, 1882, no. 23. Escritura de venta de un terreno otorgado por los Ciudadanos [y parcioneros del barrio de San Francisco. Uruapan] Manuel Gonzalez y Clemente Urbina a favor del de igual clase Feliciano Vidales, 34; and no. 32. Escritura de venta de dos terrenos otorgados por Don Atilano López a favor del apoderado de Don Feliciano Vidales," 53-54.

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perhaps, than major landowners. Characters such as Doña Jacoba Alvarez, a resident of the city of Uruapan whose lending activities she took over from her late husband and stretched as far as the pueblo of Cheran in the upper meseta.278 Or Florentino Bravo, also a resident of the city of

Uruapan and lender of community members in San Felipe.279 Vicente Bravo’s repurchase agreements involved properties in Paracho and Cheran-Atzicurin, while those of merchants

Octaviano Ochoa and Pedro Rosas were based in the city of Uruapan.280 There were, as well, more than a few indigenous notables among this locally influential group. The interests and properties of the Eiquihua family, for instance, covered several locations from Uruapan and

Parangaricutiro in the lower meseta to Aranza and Paracho in the upper lands. Miguel Eiquihua was, in fact, a particularly prominent figure in the pueblo of Parangaricutiro.281 The same can be said of Sebastian Tarja in Cheran, Juan Montelongo in Charapan, and Francisco Alvelo in

Nahuatzen (see chapter 2).

Together, these characters (and many other like them) concentrated the bulk of land deals in the meseta. They were lenders, shopkeepers, petty merchants, lawyers, and middling

278 AGNM, Uruapan, Colección de Copias de Escrituras, Libro de protocolo del notario Lic. Vicente de la Peña, 1879, no. 33. Venta de un terreno con pacto de retroventa otorgado por Don Francisco y Don Benito Pahuamba a Doña Jacoba Alvarez," n.p. 279 AGNM, Uruapan, Colección de copias de escrituras públicas, Libro de protocolo del notario Lic. Pascual Arias, 1882, no 78. Escritura de venta con pacto retroactivo, otorgada por el Ciudadano Manuel Aparicio a favor del Ciudadano Florentino Bravo," 136-137. 280 AGNM, Uruapan, Colección de Copias de Escrituras, Libro de protocolo del notario Lic. Vicente de la Peña, 1879, no. 794, n.p; AGNM, Uruapan, Colección de Copias de Escrituras, Libro de protocolo del notario Lic. Eduardo Ruíz, 1880, no. 17. Escritura de rertoventa otorgada por Don Octaviano Ochoa a favor de Casimiro Pirita," n.p. and "no. 18. Escritura de venta otorgada por Casimiro Pirita a favor de Doña Rafaela García," n.p. 281 AGNM, Uruapan, Colección de copias de escrituras públicas, Libro de protocolo del notario Lic. Pascual Arias, 1882, no. 68. Escritura de transaccion otorgada por los ciudadanos Miguel, Pedro, Cayetano, y Doña Luisa Eiquihua," 118-119. See also, Moheno, Las historias, 110-111 and 128-129; Garibay Orozco, Comunalismos, 329, 334, 344, 346, and 349; and Sáenz Gallegos, "Repercusiones de la política,” 112; and Chávez Cervantes, Antiguo pueblo, 159-161.

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landowners. They constituted part of the rural middle-class that, some three decades ago, the prominent historian Friedrich Katz identified and already suspected (the empirical research was lacking) as one of the main beneficiaries of reparto and disentailment policies in Mexico.282 The members of this rural middle-class were not as powerful and wealthy as the hacendado class. Yet their aggregated influence in the process of transformation of community lands into individual properties proved in many cases greater. Especially in the meseta, wherein (as we have seen) big landowners were not particularly numerous and even altogether absent in some areas—the uppermost areas. Unrelenting persistence of petty transactions, not massive encroachment, wore away communal land tenure.

Demographic Pressures

Community members often resorted to repurchase agreements and other land transactions driven not by commercial prospects, but by sheer necessity. Repurchase agreements, as pointed out, were primarily a form of local credit and not of trade. They usually provided relief to face misfortunes, cope with extraordinary expenses, or simply grapple with everyday hardships.

Repurchase agreements, in that sense, offered community members resources that many of them would find otherwise very hard to obtain. They thus presented community members with certain advantages. Yet the risk of losing lands to lenders was also important. Misfortunes could happen more than once before redeeming a property; for instance, two consecutive years of bad harvest

282 Katz, “Mexico: Restored Republic and Porfiriato,” 53-54.

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such as the especially hard years of 1891 and 1892.283 Borrowers, moreover, tended to belong to the most vulnerable segments within communities. For them, adversities represented a greater challenge. Repurchase agreements were not simply an alternative. They were frequently a last resort.

Fig. 11. Population in the District of Uruapan, 1868-1910

Municipality 1868 1880 1890 1900 1910 Charapan N/D 3,476 5,248 8,696 3,414 Cheran 4,245 5,676 3,268 4,395 3,908 Nahuatzen 5,131 4,963 5,042 5,927 7,481 Paracho 8,858 6,529 6,219 8,377 8,087 Parangaricutiro 4,465 6,637 7,742 5,095 5,989 Periban 2,761 3,606 4,587 4,881 4,891 Los Reyes 3,560 3,566 4,206 3,088 10,799 Tancítaro 6,614 11,753 14,037 10,737 11,313 Taretan 11,905 8,464 11,639 7,789 6,309 Tingambato N/D 3,344 3,333 4,700 9,743 Uruapan 11,238 14,333 18,521 16,565 21,619 Total District 58,777 72,347 83,842 80,250 93,553

Sources: “Noticia número 1,” Memoria de Michoacán de 1869, 65-68; "División Territorial. Cuadro número 9," in Memoria de Michoacán de 1882, n.p.; Velasco, Geografía y estadística, 164; Censo y división territorial del estado de Michoacán verificado en 1900 (Mexico: Imprenta y Fotografía de la Secretaría de Fomento, 1905), 16 and 90; and Tercer Censo de población de los Estados Unidos Mexicanos verificado el 27 de octubre de 1910, vol. 1, (Mexico: Oficina Impresora de la Secretaría de Hacienda, 1918), 204 and 206.Tancítaro became part of the district until after 1872.

Demographic pressures may have also contributed to lead many underprivileged community members to risk and sell their lands. Indigenous population across Michoacán had

283 See, Gerardo García Díaz, "Las crisis agrícolas y la carestía del maíz," in Historia general de Michoacán, vol. 3, 251-265.

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been growing since the early eighteenth century and continued to grow during the nineteenth century. The overall population of Michoacán in 1827 was about 370,000 people. Despite civil strives and a particularly harsh cholera epidemic in the 1830s, growth did not halt. By 1840, there were almost 500,000 people in the state. Thirty years later there were at least 120,000 more. The population of Michoacán reached virtually 900,000 by the turn of the century and almost the million on the eve of the Mexican Revolution. Population, in sum, had more than doubled between 1827 and 1910. Probably at least 40% of it was indigenous, the vast majority

Purépecha.284

Regional numbers are not always reliable and, therefore, must be taken with caution.

Still, they can provide us with at least an approximate picture of population patterns in the meseta from 1868 to 1910. It seems that during this period the overall population of the region increased in about 60%. Growth, however, was not entirely uniform. Population grew steadily for two decades until 1890 when, apparently, it began to stagnate and then experienced a mild drop. The slump may be explained by the inherent flaws in how data was collected and reported, but it may also account for an increase in migration during and shortly after the scarcity crisis of the early 1890s—the result, as pointed out, of two particularly bad harvest seasons in 1891 and

1892. Recovery, however, came with the new century. Growth resumed after 1900 and continued the following years. By 1910, official numbers estimated a population of 93,553 people in the

284 For the colonial period, see, Castro Gutiérrez, Los tarascos, 306; and Tanck, Atlas ilustrado de los pueblos, 24. For the independent period until de Mexican revolution, see, De Lejarza, Análisis estadístisco; Ochoa and Sánchez Díaz, Breve Historia de Michoacán, 175-181; Memoria de Michoacán de 1869, 65-68; Memoria presentada al Congreso de la Unión por el secretario de estado y del despacho de Fomento, Colonización, Industria y Comercio de la república mexicana (Mexico: Imprenta y Fototipia de la Secretaría de Fomento, 1908), 160-161; and Estadísticas sociales, 41.

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district of Uruapan. Rough calculations suggest that Purépecha residents comprised between

45% and 55% of the overall regional population.285

Overall growth distributed unevenly across the region. On average, the lower meseta concentrated about 72% of the entire population of the district. Growth, in like manner, tended to be faster and more noticeable in urbanized areas such as the city of Uruapan and the villa of Los

Reyes. In fact, the Uruapan and Los Reyes areas closely mirrored the overall regional pattern.

That is, population grew until 1890, then slowed down and decreased, and then continued growing during the 1900s. In municipalities such as Tancítaro and Parangaricutiro, in the lower meseta, population also dropped until after 1890, but recovery afterwards proved significantly slower—to the point that population in both municipalities was smaller in 1910 than in 1890.

Charapan, a municipality of the upper lands, experienced a similar pattern. Population peaked in

1900, but then experienced a major fall. In the municipalities of Cheran and Paracho, also in the upper meseta, population notably fluctuated. Again, fluctuation probably is due to inherent imprecisions of demographic records. Yet it seems at least clear that population experienced no overall growth from 1868 to 1910. Nahuatzen’s population (upper meseta), by contrast, steadily increased throughout the period and even started to grow at a faster rate after 1900.

The impact of demographic growth upon the indigenous residents of the meseta, thus, must be considered with some prudence. From a general perspective, growth appears not to have been of great consequence. It was, after all, important but relatively moderate. A closer look, however, reveals that its effects could sometimes be, if not critical, very significant on the local

285 See sources in Fig. 11.

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level. Population increases were actually felt differently inside communities. Moderate and even minor changes represented a heavier burden for people at the bottom of the ladder. People such as Cornelio Luna, for instance. A peasant and resident of Jucutacato who sold his solar in repurchase agreement for 27 pesos, equivalent to some nine loads of corn, probably worth half a year of food for his family.286

Examining the case of Paringaricutiro, Claudio Garibay Orozco suggests that, in general, population growth there significantly reduced the average area of lands families could actually work. Since the actual land base of Parangaricutiro experienced no major expansions in decades,

Garibay Orozco argues, people may have had more lands available in the late eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century than in the 1890s. By then, he estimates, numerous families relied on some 4.5 hectares (circa 11 acres) of land, but actually required at least six hectares (circa 15 acres) to have their basic needs covered with relative security.287

Population growth in Parangaricutiro, in truth, dropped after 1890 and this might have offered some relief. Yet the period between 1868 and 1890 still stands as one in which coping with everyday necessities became comparatively harder—in Parangaricutiro, but also in several other areas of the meseta. Not surprisingly, increases in population added new reasons for struggling families at the bottom to opt for repurchase agreements or sell their parcels altogether and migrate in search for labor and income—which might help to explain, in part, the general

286 AGNM, Uruapan, Colección de copias de escrituras públicas, Libro de protocolo del notario Lic. Pascual Arias, 1882, no. 22. Venta de un solar con pacto de retro, otorgada por Cornelio Luna a Jose María Gutierrez Nuñez, 191. Calculation of corn prices is based on Informes y documentos relativos a comercio interior y exterior, agricultura e industrias, vol. 4 (Mexico: Oficina Tipográfica de la Secretaría de Fomento, 1885), 261-262. 287 Garibay Orozco, Comunalismos y liberalismos, 329-330.

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population drop of the 1890s. Population growth thus meant very different things for larger and impoverished families than for the middling and upper segments present in every community of the meseta. Garibay Orozco observes that by 1920—that is, by the end of the Mexican revolution, but before the implementation of revolutionary agrarian reform—half a dozen families in Parangaricutiro may have controlled between 250 and 350 hectares of land each, while a member of the prominent Eiquihua family (Luis Eiquihua) may have held up to 2,500 hectares.288

A Word of Warning and a “Wise Law”

Commercial demand for forest lands, patent by the late 1880s and early 1890s, further stimulated the selling of community lands and the internal transformation of communities in the meseta.

Already in 1873 naturalist Gabriel Hinojosa alerted Michoacán’s lawmakers about the expansion of logging activities in the state and the country in general.289 Forests, Hinojosa explained, provided great services to humankind. They formed natural barriers against harmful miasmas and thus contributed to keep cities and towns healthy. Forests also made the regular coming of rains every year possible and they were instrumental for the nourishment of soils, both essential things for agricultural activities. Unfortunately, Hinojosa lamented, great numbers of trees were cut every year without much control on the part of the government. Landowners, he also

288 Ibid., 349. 289 Hinojosa, Gabriel, Memoria sobre la utilidad de los bosques y perjuicios causados por su destrucción (Morelia: Imprenta de la viuda e hijos de O. Ortiz, 1873).

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stressed, did not have the “slightest concern for replanting trees in the places wherein logging is conducted and allowed with such unskillfulness since time immemorial.”290

People, Hinojosa added, relied on firewood and charcoal on a daily basis to cook their meals and bake their bread and tortillas. Bakeries, brick shops, and blacksmith’s workshops also depended on steady supplies of firewood for their ovens. Lumber, he explained, was an essential material in the construction business. Large amounts of planks, beams, and boards were required to build houses and bridges. Much wood burnt in mining operations, especially in the east of the state and neighboring Guanajuato where, Hinojosa affirmed, Michoacán’s lumber was regularly sent. Wood consumption, he anticipated, would only increase “if, as we all believe, the iron roads are built in the republic.”291 At that pace, only the memory of once existing forests would remain left. Commercial use of the forest, Hinojosa admitted, was unstoppable. Yet, precisely because of that, he argued, forests required some protection from the government. Conservation, he concluded, was not an obstacle but a way to secure the exploitation of forest products in the future. It was thus “an absolute necessity that the congress of the state dictates a wise law on forest conservation and logging to avoid total destruction within some years.”292

It took almost a decade more for this “wise law” to be enacted by the congress of

Michoacán. Its enactment in the winter of 1882 was a sign that, indeed, the importance of commercial forestry had been steadily growing since Hinojosa’s passionate defense of forest conservation. The law gave local authorities much of the responsibility of taking care of the

290 Ibid., 22. 291 Ibid., 25-26. 292 Ibid., 23.

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forests. Municipalities, in particular, were given the task of dealing with conservation and reforestation measures. They were also required to recommend the executive norms to set adequate logging practices “for the better use and exploitation of the forests.” Local authorities, furthermore, were granted the capacity of issuing licenses to cut down trees and were expected to suggest tax rates for logging activities. The law did not prohibit domestic uses of the forest. More precisely, it indicated that “occasional” users did not require license to cut down wood. Slash and burn practices, however, were explicitly banned. Clearing areas of forest, in general, required proper authorization from municipal officials. Tapping trees for the extraction of resin, in like manner, required official approval. Finally, the law obligated loggers to leave a number of trees uncut and replant the areas wherein they carried out the felling and trimming of trees.293

While the law responded to the increasing expansion of commercial forestry, it was nonetheless drafted expecting relatively limited levels of forest utilization. For the most part, it was intended to regulate small- to mid-scale activities similar to the ones Hinojosa had described a decade earlier. Mining and construction were, in essence, the only two industries that employed comparatively larger amounts of lumber and forest products such as tree resins. Agriculture- related activities accounted for additional utilization. Sugar mills, for instance, consumed sizable loads of firewood. The impact of slash and burn farming on forests was also of importance. The authorities of Michoacán considered this practice one major source of risk not only for forests, but for settlements in the vicinity of forests. The governor, in fact, issued one decree several

293 Amador Coromina, Recopilación de leyes, decretos, reglamentos y circulares expedidas en el estado de Michoacán, Vol. 26 (Morelia: Imprenta de los hijos de Ignacio Arango, 1888), 95-101.

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months before the enactment of the forest law prohibiting the burning of grasses and stubble.294

Taken as a whole, these activities put significant pressure on local woodlands. Yet none of them, neither separately nor combined, was suffice to trigger the kind of upswing in commercial forestry that was about to come. That would be the undertaking of, as Hinojosa had foretold, railroad lines.

Railroads and the Rise of Commercial Forestry

Steam and smoke. Coal, iron, and steel. These are the things usually associated with the dazzling expansion of railroad lines throughout the world during the nineteenth century. They became icons par excellence of industrialization and mechanized power, fundamental elements of an economic revolution that connected the planet through thousands of miles of silvery-white metallic train tracks. Forests and lumber are seldom thought as part of this compound and process. The iron road, however, was also the largest wooden road ever built in human history up to that date. The building of railroad networks accounted for the clearance of vast areas of forest throughout the world and was one of the main wood-consuming industries around the globe.

Lumber, indeed, was just as important as iron in the assembling of railroad lines. Millions of wooden beams, known as crossties, rail ties or sleepers, provided the foundation and fastened together the rails of the railroad track. Without crossties, the tracks could not support the weight of locomotives and wagons and trains would simply derail. Crossties, however, needed constant maintenance and replacement. The continuous passing of trains, weather conditions, and the

294 Ibid., 26-27.

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natural decay of the wood undermined the durability of the beams. Chemical treatment to prolong the useful life of crossties only came until the early twentieth century and even then it took some time to be systematically adopted. The life of a crosstie in the track varied greatly from one place to another, but the beams generally started to show signs of deterioration after one year of service. After three years, decay became evident and by the fifth year wear usually forced the removal of crossties from the track—although some ties could last up to seven years without being replaced. Railroad tracks thus required constant supplies of lumber even after they had been set up.295

The first attempts to build a railroad network in Mexico dated back to the late1830s. Yet it took several more decades for the first major line to be inaugurated. The Mexico-Veracruz rail line started operations in 1873 and it was about 424 kilometers long (some 263 miles). Although the extension of the rail tracks experienced an important growth in the following years

(especially if compared to past decades), it remained fairly modest by the end of the decade

(some 1,100 kilometers or 690 miles). From 1880 on, however, railroad lines began to expand at a sustained and very rapid rate. Tracks multiplied by five in the mid-1880s and in 1890 they nearly reached 10,000 kilometers (over 6,200 miles). By the turn of the century there were almost 15,000 kilometers of railroad tracks spread across the country and a decade later, in 1910,

295 See, Hermann von Schrenk, Cross-tie Forms and Rail Fastenings, with special reference to treated lumbers (Washington D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1904); Sherry Olson, The Depletion Myth: A History of Railroad Use of Lumber (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971); and Ramachandra Guha, The Unquiet Woods: Ecological Change and Peasant Resistance in the Himalaya (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 35-61.

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over 19,000 kilometers (circa 12,000 miles), plus almost 8,000 kilometers more (circa 5,000 miles) accounting for secondary and local lines.296

The number of crossties required for every mile of track varied depending on the terrain and other factors—curves, for instance, usually used more. It could be as low as 2,100 and as high as 2,900 per mile. Yet if an average of 2,500 is considered, the Mexico-Veracruz line probably included some 657,500 crossties in total when it first began to work in 1873. It has been estimated that the Ferrocarril Central, one of the largest railroad companies of the country, employed approximately 3.6 million crossties in the building of a little more than 1,200 miles of track by 1883.297 The entire railroad system, local lines included, probably comprised some 42.5 million wooden rail ties right before the downfall of Porfirio Díaz in 1911. And this number does not include additional supplies required for repairs and replacements, as well as for the telegraph poles that ran parallel to the rail tracks. Thus, for instance, up to a quarter of all crossties employed in the rail line of the Tehuantepec region in southeastern Mexico probably needed to be removed every year due to particularly unforgiven local conditions favoring rapid decay.298

296 See, Francisco Calderón, "Los ferrocarriles," in Historia moderna de México. El porfiriato. La vida económica, ed. Daniel Cosío Villegas (Mexico: Hermes, 1985), 483-634; Sergio Ortiz Hernán, Los ferrocarriles de México. Una visión social y económica. La luz de la locomotora, vol. 1, (Mexico, Ferrocarriles Nacionales de México, 1987); John H. Coatsworth, “Indispensable Railroads in a Backward Economy: The Case of Mexico,” The Journal of Economic History 39, no. 4 (1979): 939-960; Sandra Kuntz Ficker, Empresa extranjera y mercado interno: el ferrocarril central mexicano, 1880-1907 (Mexico: El Colegio de México, 1995); Sandra Kuntz Ficker and Priscilla Connolly, eds., Ferrocarriles y obras públicas (Mexico, Instituto Mora, 1999); Sandra Kuntz Ficker, “Mercado interno y vinculación con el exterior: el papel de los ferrocarriles en la economía del porfiriato,” Historia Mexicana 45, no. 1 (1995): 39-66; Stephen Haber, "Assessing the Obstacles to Industrialisation: The Mexican Economy, 1830- 1940," Journal of Latin American Studies 24, no. 1 (1992): 1-32. 297 Kuntz Ficker, Empresa extranjera, 106. 298 Teresa Van Hoy, A Social History of Mexico's Railroads: Peons, Prisoners, and Priests (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2008), 96-97. See also, Teresa Van Hoy, “La Marcha Violenta? Railroads and Land in 19th- Century Mexico,” Bulletin of Latin American Research 19, no. 1 (2000): 33-61.

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Fig. 12. Lumber Production in Mexico, 1893 (Top Suppliers)

State Metric Tons Value (Pesos) Distrito Federal 50,886 1,510,000 Guanajuato 6,463 1,111,000 Zacatecas 542 845,000 Durango 11,955 612,000 Jalisco 26,333 560,332 Guerrero 8,400 312,250 Oaxaca 57,376 289,027 Yucatán 11,506 250,000 Campeche 3,690 180,000 Michoacán 16,952 167,744

Source: Antonio Peñafiel, Anuario estadístico de la república mexicana 1893 (Mexico: Oficina Tipográfica de la Secretaría de Fomento, 1894), 626-627

The first two railroad lines to reach Michoacán were finished in 1883. Earlier plans of turning the state into a strategic passing point between the Atlantic and the Pacific had been abandoned and gave way to more modest and feasible projects. These first two lines connected eastern Michoacán to the neighboring states of Guanajuato and Mexico. Combined, they summed some 211 kilometers (or 131 miles). The railroad arrived in the capital city Morelia until two years later, in 1885, and then extended westward to the Lake Pátzcuaro region. It would take about a decade more for rail tracks to link the western-most areas of Michoacán to

Guanajuato and Jalisco. And it would take even more for the railroad to arrive in the meseta. The tracks that fastened the city of Uruapan to the rest of the railroad network of Michoacán and the country were only finished until 1899. New tracks were subsequently built in the Los Reyes area

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(1902). By 1910, railroad lines in Michoacán may have comprised at least 650 kilometers (about

404 miles), not including some relatively numerous other small local tracks.299 The whole railroad system of Michoacán thus may have employed approximately a million wooden crossties, plus tens of thousands more for replacements, not to mention the lumber used in bridges, stations, wagons, and 4,500 kilometers (about 2,800 miles) of telegraph lines.

Railroad building thus was, to a great extent, responsible for the greatest lumber boom in the history of Michoacán and the meseta to that date. In less than three decades, the boom turned what used to be a relatively modest economic activity into one of the largest business of the state, only surpassed by corn and wheat cultivation, but eventually greater than other major enterprises such as rice and sugarcane. Michoacán, in fact, became one of the most important suppliers of lumber in Mexico. In 1893, the total lumber outputs of the state ascended to almost 17,000 metric tons, the fourth largest in the country in terms of volume and tenth in terms of value. The district of Uruapan accounted for 14% of Michoacán’s total outputs and, if measured in value, it comprised over 30% of total lumber revenues in the state—only surpassed by the district of

Zinapecuaro, located north of the city of Morelia and next to the state of Guanajuato.300

Fig. 13. Lumber Production in Michoacán, 1893 Metric Value District Tons (Pesos) Zinapecuaro 6,328 55,000 Uruapan 2,409 52,350 Morelia 4,602 48,000

299 See, Uribe Salas, Empresas, 59-82. 300 See, fig. 13.

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Jiquilpan 2,554 6,570 Zamora 863 5,250 La Piedad 100 346 Maravatio 37 128 Apatzingan 58 100 Total 16,952 167,744

Source: See Fig. 12. There are, unfortunately, no specific data available for the meseta after 1893. Yet the overall numbers of the state of Michoacán speak for themselves. Lumber outputs and values skyrocketed. The rise in pine lumber was particularly striking (pine was one of the most widely available trees in Michoacán and the meseta). In 1901, pine output alone was six times greater than the total yields of all woods combined a decade earlier. It amounted to almost 105,000 metric tons and was worth about 527,000 pesos—respectively representing 43% of the entire pine production of Mexico and 30% of national pine lumber revenues. By 1907, Michoacán’s pine lumber output reached almost 174,000 metric tons valued in 2.7 million pesos. Michoacán, in other words, had become the single most important supplier of pine lumber in the country. The combined outputs and revenues of the three other major producers (Durango, Chihuahua, and

Puebla) did not equal that of Michoacán, which concentrated 24% of all outputs and 40% of all revenues nationwide.

Fig. 14. Pine Outturns in Mexico 1901 1907 Metric Metric Value State Value (Pesos) State Tons Tons (Pesos) Michoacán 104,174 526,886 Michoacán 174,229 2,669,471 Durango 26,771 445,760 Durango 59,804 902,515

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Chihuahua 60,380 230,468 Chihuahua 27,605 781,310 Veracruz 8,916 182,000 Puebla 86,741 499,767 Nuevo León 20,962 110,153 Veracruz 23,402 387,797 Subtotal 221,203 1,495,267 Subtotal 371,781 5,240,860 Total (national) 242,604 1,732,082 Total (national) 715,042 6,690,471

Sources: Antonio Peñafiel, Anuario estadístico de la república mexicana 1901 (Oficina Tipográfica de la Secretaría de Fomento, 1902), 529-537; Antonio Peñafiel, Anuario estadístico de la república mexicana 1907 (Mexico: Oficina Tipográfica de la Secretaría de Fomento, 1912), 566-580.

Oak output, although comparatively smaller, also experienced a significant grow—oak- trees were also one of the most common types of trees in Michoacán and the meseta. In fact,

Michoacán was also among the top suppliers in the country. In 1901, both the volume and value of the state’s oak lumber amounted to 7% of the overall national production. By 1907,

Michoacán produced almost 40,000 metric tons. Jalisco had very rapidly turned into the largest producer, supplying the outstanding sum of 219,000 metric tons. Yet the total value of its oak lumber was actually lower than that of Michoacán and most of the other top producers— probably because of a poorer quality. In terms of value, Michoacán ranked fourth just behind

Oaxaca, Guanajuato, and Sonora. Its production represented 9% of the national total.

Fig. 15. Oak Production in Mexico 1901 1907 State Metric Tons Value (Pesos) State Metric Tons Value (Pesos) Veracruz 61,120 587,010 Sonora 53,183 583,536 Durango 50,285 574,975 Guanajuato 43,342 489,858 Nuevo León 28,210 315,862 Oaxaca 42,983 397,291 Puebla 52,753 252,801 Michoacán 39,291 365,848

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Michoacán 36,781 243,927 Puebla 50,955 321,262 Chihuahua 12,498 220,345 Jalisco 219,197 255,313 Mexico 112,003 218,329 Mexico 23,417 188,378 Subtotal 353,651 2,413,249 Subtotal 472,369 2,601,486 Total Total 549,813 3,420,884 1,103,854 3,919,770 (national) (national)

Source: See, fig. 14.

Combined, oak and pine revenues added up to a little more than 3 million pesos in 1907.

A remarkable sum considering that the lumber industry had hitherto played a rather discreet role in the overall economy of Michoacán. On the eve of the Mexican revolution, corn and wheat production still concentrated most of the state’s returns. The overall production of corn in 1910 was estimated in 9.6 million pesos and that of wheat in 10.4 million. That same year, however, sugarcane and sugar revenues ascended to 2.1 million pesos, while rice proceeds amounted to 1.3 million.301 The lumber business had established itself as a major commercial enterprise, larger than the southern agribusiness of tierra caliente—home of some of the major landowners and rural businessmen of Michoacán. The porfiriato, indeed, gave birth to a new industry. From that point on, utilization of forests in the meseta and other parts of the state would undergo significant alterations as it shifted away from domestic and mid-scale to large-scale commercial uses. It was, indeed, a momentous shift whose sway (still echoing today) would have major consequences for communities in the meseta—the near death of communal land tenure among them.

301 See, AGN, Fomento y Obras Públicas, Agricultura, Leg. 2, Caja 8, Exp.1, Michoacán, Inventario relativo a Estadística Agrícola, 1910.

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Boundary Conflicts over Forest Lands and New Calls for Reparto

Such a growing business naturally drew ever larger stretches of forest lands into the lumber industry. As explained earlier (chapter 2), Purépecha communities held possession of at least

45% of all woodlands in the meseta—a percentage that was in all likelihood higher as it only includes officially inventoried woodlands and, therefore, does not account for many other unreported forest lands. Communal forests constituted one of three main components of communities’ overall land base. Whereas agricultural lands represented their primary source of sustenance and revenues, community members extensively relied on forests to obtain essential supplies and additional income. Firewood for cooking and heating, for instance, but also lumber for house-building. Communal woodlands were also the object of some commercial exploitation.

Wooden items and crafts, as well as beams and planks were locally and regionally traded and, on occasions, sold outside of the meseta. Communities, in other words, did not consider forests as natural havens to be left untouched by human hands. For the most part, however, domestic and commercial utilization remained limited and, although a crucial supplement of the household economy, did not constitute a source of major profits—not in comparison, for instance, to cattle- raising or corn cultivation.

As forests became the center of larger commercial interests and demand for lumber began to soar, awareness of the new significance and vulnerability of communal woodlands started to grow inside communities. Significantly enough, boundary conflicts between neighboring pueblos burst open during the 1890s. Boundary conflicts were not atypical in the meseta and, given the absence of major landowners in some areas, they were probably more frequent (although not

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necessarily harsher) than conflicts with haciendas. As a rule, disputes over mutual limits (some of them age-old) either resulted in informal and partial agreements or ended up in the tribunals wherein the matter lay to rest for some time. Looming logging activities, however, soon turned periodic and therefore relatively predictable disputes into an extraordinary and urgent question.

As it turned out, large extensions of woodlands were located in between pueblos. Defining clear boundaries was, more than ever, of fundamental importance. It was a means to either maintain or expand extensions of lands that had become increasingly valuable. A way to either limit or encourage commercial prospects. The right and power to prevent others (rival pueblos, but also any other interested parties) from deciding over the management and utilization of forest lands was at stake.

Thus, unexpectedly, two decades after land divisions first took place in the meseta, a number of communities began to file reparto petitions. Liberal authorities played no meaningful role in prompting such petitions. Not, at least, when they first made their way to the minister of government in Morelia starting in 1893.302 Authorities had not completely abandoned efforts to enforce land reform, but prospects of implementation had significantly dwindled. Tax policies and conventional agreements, in fact, had already engendered a new implicit understanding between authorities and communities. Authorities had come to see the persistence of communal land tenure not as a pressing matter, but as one of routine—as a question not yet decided, which nonetheless could wait to be definitely settled in the future. The impetus to promote new land

302 The first petition, as far as it can be tell, was submitted by the pueblo of San San Gabriel. See, AGHPEM, Secretaría de Gobierno, Gobernación, Hijuelas, Distrito de Uruapan, vol. 11, 159-160.

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divisions thus came on the part of communities. As in the first reparto, it responded to very practical and concrete reasons.

Requests explicitly aimed to accelerate the resolution of boundary conflicts between competing communities. Tribunals had proved to be slow and inconclusive in settling disputes.

In the face of the new circumstances created by increasing demands for lumber and forest products, reparto policies represented a potentially more effective and direct way to secure land rights over contested woodlands on the fringes of pueblos. The matter had become so pressing that some communities that had hitherto managed to oppose land divisions (most of them located in the upper meseta) now declared that they were willing to apportion all their undivided lands, as long as forested montes were included in the new reparto. Securing rights over woodlands had become communities’ priority.

“For circumstances that it is not worth explaining here,” Paracho representatives stated,

“we were unable to comply with reparto laws and decrees” in the past. Yet, they immediately added, “now that we are persuaded of their importance and benefit, we have decided to proceed with the apportionment of mountainous lands and terrains that remain undivided and belong to us in property and possession.”303 Persuasion, as a further petition by Paracho representatives made it clear, came not from a sudden understanding of the virtuous nature of liberal land policies, but from the prospect of outmaneuvering competing claims. With the reparto, representatives

303 AGHPEM, Secretaría de Gobierno, Gobernación, Hijuelas, Distrito de Uruapan, vol. 12, 35.

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unambiguously asserted, “we will try to put an end to our quarrels with Aranza.” Tellingly enough, Aranza’s residents were described as “our contenders.”304

A similar tone characterized many other reparto petitions. Time and again community representatives expressed their willingness to carry out land divisions in the hope that this would bring a final solution to ongoing boundary disputes.305 In Tanaco, petitioners argued that never- ending lawsuits and continual lack of funds caused them to desist in pursuing any further legal actions against Cherán-Atzicurin, Ahuiran, Urapicho, and Uren. As a result, petitioners continued, Tanaco’s land had been the object of numerous encroachments and unlawful appropriations. Usurpations, as they called them, sometimes were conducted “at gunpoint.” It was thus the responsibility of the governor, they observed, to bring “peace and quietude” to all neighboring pueblos. “If in our republic there has been a man that has been able to bring peace to its inhabitants,” petitioners provokingly remarked, “why in such an insignificant fraction of the republic must it be impossible to fix the shameful state of some indigenous pueblos due to boundary disagreements.” The government must come to a definite decision and set clear boundaries for each pueblo. “Hasta aquí es lo tuyo,” they concluded.306

Petitions for clearer boundaries and new land divisions, however, did not bring about the desired results—neither for authorities nor for communities. Authorities welcomed and offered

304 AGHPEM, Secretaría de Gobierno, Gobernación, Hijuelas, Distrito de Uruapan, vol. 22, 223. 305 See, for instance, AGHPEM, Secretaría de Gobierno, Gobernación, Hijuelas, Distrito de Uruapan, vol. 15, 187; AGHPEM, Secretaría de Gobierno, Gobernación, Hijuelas, Distrito de Uruapan, vol. 15, 147; AGHPEM, Secretaría de Gobierno, Gobernación, Hijuelas, Distrito de Uruapan, vol. 19, 6; AGHPEM, Secretaría de Gobierno, Gobernación, Hijuelas, Distrito de Uruapan, vol. 12, 142 and 209; AGHPEM, Secretaría de Gobierno, Gobernación, Hijuelas, Distrito de Uruapan, vol. 3, 209. 306 AGHPEM, Secretaría de Gobierno, Gobernación, Hijuelas, Distrito de Uruapan, vol. 12, 58-59;

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explicit consent to reparto requests. Yet, they underlined, boundary lands were not to be apportioned until conflicts were settled. District and local officials would provide proper intermediation for that purpose. Only after having reached a mutual arrangement, authorities instructed, should communities proceed with the apportionment of disputed lands. In the meantime, all other lands must be divided and distributed among community members.

Communities, however, wanted boundary limits to be settled first and then proceed with land divisions. We will withhold the right to implement the reparto, Paracho representatives wrote,

“until property lines of all adjacent lands with Quinceo and Aranza are definitely established, so that land distribution can take place completely and not partially.”307

On other occasions, communities decided to go along with the reparto. That way, properties in dispute could be listed and reported to authorities as part of community holdings and be subsequently apportioned. The maneuver, however, seldom worked, as rival communities soon raised complaints. Authorities then intervened and usually ended up postponing the implementation of land divisions. In yet some other instances, communities simply resolved to take action on their own account. They built fences and made use of the lands in conflict or carried out partitions without official authorization. The government responded by declaring these informal allocations nulled and, here too, by restricting any future attempts of dividing communal lands until further notice.308 For a second time, liberal land policies had been turned

307 AGHPEM, Secretaría de Gobierno, Gobernación, Hijuelas, Distrito de Uruapan, vol. 22, 229. 308 AGHPEM, Secretaría de Gobierno, Gobernación, Hijuelas, Distrito de Uruapan, vol. 11, 190; AGHPEM, Secretaría de Gobierno, Gobernación, Hijuelas, Distrito de Uruapan, vol. 3, 1; and AGHPEM, Secretaría de Gobierno, Gobernación, Hijuelas, Distrito de Uruapan, vol. 19, 7-23 and 27-28.

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upside down. While communities utilized the reparto as a means to settle old accounts and secure property rights of contested lands, authorities struggled to make sense of events on the ground and undo communities’ plans.

Conflicts over boundary limits and reparto petitions engendered other sort of disagreements: internal disagreements. In the winter of 1894, residents from barrio San Bartolo in the pueblo of Charapan solicited the partition of an extension of mountainous lands known as

“El Venado” (The Deer). Authorities in Morelia then instructed the prefecto of Uruapan to persuade community members about including residential and agricultural lands in the reparto.

After many consultations and even a visit on the part of the prefecto in the early summer of

1895, a majority of San Bartolo’s residents decided not to proceed with the reparto—not even with the partition of “El Venado.” The earlier petition had been made by one group and not by all residents of San Bartolo. Community members agreed to receive land titles for residential plots, but wished the rest of their holdings not to be divided.309 As municipal officials explained,

San Bartolo residents feared that in partitioning lands, especially woodlands and grazing lands, people would start selling off their properties “and in the end the pueblo will be left without a place where to retrieve wood and graze their cattle.”310 The prefecto considered this response unfounded and “contrary to the principles of law and political economy.” Yet he recommended

309 AGHPEM, Secretaría de Gobierno, Gobernación, Hijuelas, Distrito de Pátzcuaro, vol. 12, 142, 145-147, 150-153, and 209. 310 Ibid., 155.

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leaving the question to rest for it was very time-consuming and he rather wish to focus on many other important matters.311

The reasons of San Bartolo’s residents were actually based on very down-to-earth concerns. Incentives to get a hold of forest lands were greater than ever. In 1901, community members in Nahuatzen expressly solicited a new reparto to prevent one individual from hanging on to a piece of mountainous land that he was supposed to watch and protect against interlopers.

Indeed, petitioners argued that few years earlier the community had given Darío Pineda the responsibility of taking care of communal forests, but now he was taking advantage of his position to claim Nahuatzen’s possession as his personal property.312 In order to prevent this and other future troubles, petitioners stressed, “we have decided, with the government’s approval, to apportion all still undivided lands, including the extension of land in custody of Pineda.”313

This was neither the sole nor the more serious challenge Nahuatzen’s residents had to face. Nahuatzen, it must be remembered, was the only community that apportioned much of its forested areas in the 1870s. Although communal practices endured and land titles were not always issued, great extensions of forest were already individually allocated. New reparto petitions not only furthered the fragmentation of communal woodlands, but instigated the sale of large extension of mountainous lands. In the spring of 1901, local authorities confirmed unofficial reports of woodland sales in Nahuatzen, “particularly conducted by the needy [clase menesterosa] in favor of local people of wealth, who in turn sold the properties to residents of

311 Ibid, 157. 312 AGHPEM, Secretaría de Gobierno, Gobernación, Hijuelas, Distrito de Uruapan, vol. 12, 147-157. 313 Ibid., 147.

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Tangancícuaro.”314 People from other areas of the meseta also engaged in these transactions.

Othon Hernandez—resident of the city of Uruapan, landowner, and lumber entrepreneur—was the most prominent of them. One piece at a time, from January to May 1902, Hernandez acquired an entire forested hill from dozens of Nahuatzen’s community members.315

In Paracho, in the upper meseta, where boundary disputes had triggered reparto petitions, internal divides also began to surface. Unable to secure property rights over disputed woodlands by means of resorting to reparto policies, community representatives decided to halt land divisions all together. Yet, as it turned out, a number of community members tapped into reparto petitions to acquire sections of communal forest for themselves. Apparently, land appropriations had been going for some time—“since around fifteen years,” declared community representatives. People began to acquire “portions of flat terrains, but “lately they had turned to mountainous lands.” It was perhaps the fact that they were people of means, representatives remarked. Or that many others ultimately followed their example. But “it is no longer possible to contain them.” It would not pass long, representatives reckoned, “before the wretched, which constitute the majority, could not find a single splinter of wood, not even to take back to their homes.”316

Resin extraction as much as appropriations of lands divided community members in

Cheran. By 1902, collection of sap was so extended that local officials reported it might lead to

314 Ibid., 176. 315 Archivo del Registro Público de la Propiedad de Michoacán (ARPPM), Registro de Modificaciones y Traslaciones de la Propiedad Raíz en el Estado de Michoacán, Libro 1, Tomo 18, 1-3, 7-14, 18-21, and 55-56. 316 AGHPEM, Secretaría de Gobierno, Gobernación, Hijuelas, Distrito de Uruapan, vol. 15, 247.

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the devastation of large segments of forest. Whether this assessment was accurate or not, the fact is that the sight of bands of community members penetrating the forest with hacks and buckets had become increasingly common. People working in the woodlands tapping trees became distinctively known as colectores (or collectors). Colectores began to sign contracts with local and regional entrepreneurs promising steady supplies of resin—later on turned into turpentine, the basis of solvents mainly employed in the construction business. These contracts, however, were signed not by the community, but independently by individuals and groups, in spite of the fact that extraction occurred in communal woodlands. Protests eventually burst, forcing municipal authorities to solicit instructions about how to deal with this unprecedented escalation in wood and resin extraction activities.317

The response of the authorities of Michoacán to this and the other many issues engendered by the lumber boom was the enactment of a new reparto law (June 18, 1902) and its accompanying reglamento (July 4, 1902). Both pieces of legislation are often considered as the corollary of longstanding liberal attempts to do away with communal land tenure. Especially because they instructed the wholesale partition of all community lands, including montes— something that the earlier law of 1827 also prescribed. In fact, the laws were to an important degree the result of a decade or so of escalating boundary disputes, reparto petitions on the part of communities, and increasing encroachment of forested areas by community members and outsiders alike in the meseta, as well as in other several regions of Michoacán. The new laws, in other words, were the consequence not the cause of community land fragmentation.

317 Ibid., 220 and 230.

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The main feature of the 1902 laws, in that sense, was not that they widened the scope of the lands subject to partition. Their main characteristic was that they substantially furthered the role of the state in the management of community lands and affairs. Indeed, liberal authorities’ answer to the ongoing conflicts and divisions between and within communities (a product, in turn, of the expansion of rail lines and the market for lumber) was a combination of paternalism and greater government intervention. Authorities’ solution, in other words, consisted in taking away from community members as much control as possible over their holdings and transferring it to state officials and the executive power.

The new laws stipulated that fiscal officials, in coordination with municipalities, would from then on manage all community holdings located in the built-up and common areas of pueblos until the implementation of land divisions. The laws also specified that all transactions in community holdings (including forest lands) must first be approved by the government. Only after proceeding with the reparto did community members acquire the right to their apportioned lands—and this until four years after land divisions had taken place. Tellingly, the funds produced by authorized land transactions must be deposited in the monte de piedad (a type of semi-public charitable institution, which also served as a pawnshop) until authorities, in consultation with community members, determined how to use the money. Equally important, the executive power (and not judicial tribunals) would decide over boundary controversies. And finally, but very significantly, the laws limited communities’ autonomy to appoint their own representatives. Communities kept the right to elect and suggest spokespersons. Yet the laws granted to the authorities of Michoacán the power to endorse or reject communities’ appointees,

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as well as the power to designate and remove representatives without previous consent on the part of community members.318

In truth, the enforcement of the 1902 laws greatly contributed to strengthen and expand state intervention in community affairs—already a reality as a result of land taxes, real estate appraisals, and conventional agreements. At the same time, contrary to authorities’ professed intentions, it did little to prevent disputes inside communities from happening and, in fact, it deepened them even more. In requiring community representatives to have official endorsement, authorities expected to put an end to ongoing rivalries over community representation, as communities split around the issues of land appropriations and the new utilization of forests.

Competing factions often relied on different legal representatives and spokespersons to present authorities their cases. The purpose was to simplify and control the dialogue with communities.319 Rival groups, as it turn out, now began to compete for winning over authorities’ official recognition. Securing the endorsement of the government offered new advantages and the opportunity to do both advance and keep in check reparto policies, land sales, and the selling of lumber and other forest products.

Community representatives, not surprisingly, were often contested and accused of acting against the interests of the community. Representatives, in fact, seldom remained in office for much time. A group of community members from Cheran-Atzicurin, an upper meseta

318 Amador Coromina, Recopilación de leyes, decretos, reglamentos y circulares expedidas en el estado de Michoacán, Vol. 36 (Morelia: Talleres de la Escuela Industrial Militar Porfirio Díaz, 1903), 510-512 and 516-532. 319 See, Memoria sobre la administración pública del estado de Michoacán de Ocampo. Cuatrienio de 16 de septiembre de 1900 a 15 de septiembre de 1904 (Morelia: Talleres Escuela I.M.P.D., 1904), 54.

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community, loudly demanded and eventually brought about the removal of their representative for “the many abuses that he has committed and continues to commit.”320 Esteban Galvan, representative of Charapan (also in the upper meseta), resigned after a year of service citing as one of his main reasons the general “apathy” of local residents.321 In Cocucho (upper meseta),

Francisco Galvan declared he had given up his position because locals were unwilling to cooperate with him. In fact, he was forced out of office after a number of community members protested he was an outsider “completely strange to our interests.” Galvan was replaced by an individual called Anastacio Joaquin who, months after been elected, was challenged by another group of community members.322

Sebastian Turja—the prosperous indigenous landowner that Carl Lumholtz described as

“the richest man in town”—became Cheran’s community representative in the summer of 1903.

Two years later, district authorities accused him of participating in the clandestine extraction of lumber from local forests. Apparently, some fifty individuals, between sellers and buyers, joined in the operation. It is not entirely possible to determine the degree to which Turja personally benefitted from these unreported lumber sales or the extent in which he, as community representative, actually concealed them to avoid government intrusion in the management of community holdings—there was probably a little of both. Yet he too, in spite of his comparatively powerful position, was eventually forced out of office as a result of internal pressures and on the part of district authorities—although it seems that he was never found guilty

320 AGHPEM, Secretaría de Gobierno, Gobernación, Hijuelas, Distrito de Uruapan, vol. 22, 72. 321 AGHPEM, Secretaría de Gobierno, Gobernación, Hijuelas, Distrito de Pátzcuaro, vol. 12, 193 and 248. 322 AGHPEM, Secretaría de Gobierno, Gobernación, Hijuelas, Distrito de Uruapan, vol. 3, 220, 228, and 231.

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of the charges and actually was later on reimbursed for the time he served as community representative.323

District and local authorities, on the other hand, were far from alien to protests. They were especially accused of turning a blind eye to illicit wood extraction. In the fall of 1903,

Paracho’s representative, Cristobal Cano, complained to authorities in Morelia that former municipal president and his son (Vicente and Pánfilo Bravo) had been unlawfully exploiting an extension of forest that was actually part of communal holdings and that, the representative suspected, they were acting in league with the prefecto. The Bravos argued that such accusations were groundless. They had legally acquired the property in question from lawyer and landowner

Tiburcio Contreras who, in turn, had acquired it from several residents of the neighboring pueblo of Aranza. The prefecto, for his part, argued that the woodlands in dispute actually belonged to the pueblos of Aranza and Quinceo. Cano’s complaints, he added, were part of campaign that the representative, together with an indigenous leader called Anselmo Jalapa, had launched in order to claim the properties for Paracho. All wood extraction, the prefecto assured to authorities in

Morelia, had been temporarily suspended until the Bravos could show property titles and other documentation backing their claim over the contested woodlands.

In spite of the relative accord against the Bravos and the prefecto, disagreements divided community members in Paracho. Advocates of a more confrontational approach, Anselmo Jalapa and his supporters opposed Cristobal Cano and promoted his replacement. They eventually forced an election to appoint a new community representative in the spring of 1904. Anselmo

323 AGHPEM, Secretaría de Gobierno, Gobernación, Hijuelas, Distrito de Uruapan, vol. 15, 256-265.

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Jalapa ran against Sebastian Cano, Cristobal’s relative. Jalapa won the election for a close margin. Yet the prefecto decided not to back him and, instead, supported Cano’s appointment.

Jalapa’s militancy proved too disturbing for an official whose main task was to prevent social unrest from bursting. Disputes, however, did not halt. Jalapa and his supporters continued to clash with Sebastian Cano, the Bravos, the prefecto, and residents from Aranza and Quinceo. By the summer of 1905, when the evidence ends, dozens of community members, among them

Jalapa, demanded the resignation of Sebastian Cano.324

Ironically, boundary disputes and internal splits inhibited the full-scale implementation of reparto policies in many communities. Continual deposition of community representatives made it very hard for authorities to attempt any systematic execution of land divisions. Official allocations of community land in general and communal woodlands in particular occurred spasmodically and disjointedly. In 1904 authorities reported only one case of a community in which allocations were actually in progress in the district of Uruapan (Parangaricutiro).325

More often than not, fragmentation took place by other means, that is, by piecemeal incidence of dozens and even hundreds of land transactions. One plot and one portion of forest at a time. Dealings in undivided community land, as pointed out, required by law previous authorization of the government. Authorities even circulated a notice alerting notaries not to sanction these transactions.326 There were, however, ways to circumvent restrictions. For instance, by means of reselling lands and passing them from one hand to another until it became

324 AGHPEM, Secretaría de Gobierno, Gobernación, Hijuelas, Distrito de Uruapan, vol. 12, 263-320. 325 Memoria de Michoacán de Ocampo de 1900 a 1904, 59-60. 326 Coromina, Recopilación de leyes, vol. 36, 515-516.

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either very hard to track down the original holder or unfeasible to undo the transactions (as

Tiburcio Contreras and the Bravos had done in Paracho and Aranza). Government officials, in like manner, sometimes ended up allowing the selling of complete chunks of mountainous lands because, as they acknowledged in considering the case of one of Jicalan’s holdings, the implementation of reparto policies would render the resulting properties almost valueless.327 By

1910, piecemeal transactions of community lands were, if not rampant, common occurrence across the meseta.328

Lumber Companies and the Opening of Communal Forests

Communities underwent one last major shift before the end of the porfirian regime in 1911. As lumber demand expanded and fragmentation of community lands continued, a group of communities began to put on lease large extensions of communal woodlands. Nothing like this had ever happened before. Under the Spanish rule, communities regularly leased some of their lands to local landowners for cultivation and grazing. During the late colonial period, such practice even became mandatory as Bourbon land policies required communities not to leave lands idle and Crown officials took over the management of community holdings (see chapter 1).

After independence, communities often battled against municipal governments to keep possession of grazing and additional arable fields; leasing these lands continued to represent a

327 AGHPEM, Secretaría de Gobierno, Gobernación, Hijuelas, Distrito de Uruapan, vol. 8, 120-131. 328 See, for instance, ARPPM, Registro de Modificaciones y Traslaciones de la Propiedad Raíz en el Estado de Michoacán, Libro 1, Tomo 1, 38, 48-49, 55-56, 67-69, 90, 102-103, 105-106, 107, 114-117, 156-157, 162, 171-172, 180-190, 247-252; and ARPPM, Registro de Modificaciones y Traslaciones de la Propiedad Raíz en el Estado de Michoacán, Libro 1, Tomo 3, 23-28.

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significant source of income. Land leasing, however, seldom included communal forests.

Woodlands, for the most part, were reserved for the exclusive use and benefit of community members. The lumber boom, indeed, led to what was probably the most important transformation of land use (and not merely land tenure) in the meseta in centuries.

During the 1890s and very early 1900s, wood extraction and lumber production were mainly conducted by local and regional landowners and businessmen. People such as Othon

Hernandez, for instance, whose extensive acquisitions of communal woodlands in Nahuatzen provided for his sawmill in rancho Paso Nuevo—rancho that, in turn, Hernandez had acquired from the community of Sevina.329 The Bravos, too, had their own sawmill for the processing of the wood they extracted from Quinceo, Aranza, and Paracho.330 Gabriel Vargas, Francisco

Vallejo, and Domingo Narvarte settled their lumber operations in Tingambato and Comachuen.

Narvarte, the most important of the three, owned one of the largest sawmills in the meseta (Las

Palomas).331

There were two main ways through which these and other similar men carried out logging activities. One, as illustrated above, was by means of direct purchasing of stretches of forest. The other consisted of establishing partial leasing contracts (arrendamientos parciales) in which a group of community members (not the whole community) promised leaseholders

329 ARPPM, Registro de Modificaciones y Traslaciones de la Propiedad Raíz en el Estado de Michoacán, Libro 1, Tomo 18, 6-8. 330 AGHPEM, Secretaría de Gobierno, Gobernación, Hijuelas, Distrito de Uruapan, vol. 12, 310. 331 See, Zumac Tzitziqui Próspero Maldonado, “Tingambato: las tierras comunales y su bosque ante la inversión extranjera (1897-1911),” Tingambato en el 120 aniversario de su elevación a municipio (1877-1997) (Morelia: Jitánfora, 1997), 66-68; and José Napoleón Guzmán, Michoacán y la inversión extranjera, 1880-1911 (Morelia: Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolás de Hidalgo, 1982), 109 and 118-119.

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exclusive access to certain areas of forests. Leaseholders, for their part, pledged only to cut a previously agreed amount of trees and not to impinge upon other sections of woodlands. Both ways entailed a number of problems and conflicts. Numerous land purchases were the product of murky transactions and, as a result, gave rise to competing property rights claims and clashes.

Partial leasing contracts, apparently less contentious because they circumvented the issue of land rights, actually sparked equally conflicting claims over the right of some community groups to decide about the use of common forests. Community members, as in Tingambato and

Comachuen (respectively in the lower and upper meseta), also complained about the fact that leaseholders often violated the agreed terms and cut more trees and extracted more wood than contracts established.332

Partial leasing contracts and piecemeal acquisitions of communal woodlands persisted during the 1900s, but they dwindled as bigger players moved into the meseta and took over the lumber business. In a matter of few years, tree harvesting and lumber production shifted from a relatively mid-size activity to a veritable large-scale industrial enterprise, from an activity run by local entrepreneurs with comparatively limited capital to companies with wider connections and capable of moving large amounts of resources. A firm such as Compañía Explotadora de

Maderas, for instance, started off in 1905 as an association of local entrepreneurs based in the cities of Uruapan and Zamora (the second largest city of Michoacán), but soon turned into a

332 AGHPEM, Secretaría de Gobierno, Gobernación, Hijuelas, Distrito de Uruapan, vol. 18, 41-50, 66-73, and 125- 126.

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major enterprise as it developed links with a prominent lumber businessman and railroad contractor from Mexico City named Juan J. Moylan.

The five original associates of Compañía Explotadora de Maderas (one bank manager living in city of Uruapan, two merchants from Periban and Los Reyes, and two catholic priests respectively living in Uruapan and Jacona) acquired a sizeable extension of woodlands from a group of indigenous people residents of Periban. Once they secured ownership of the woodlands

(the transaction was, apparently, approved by the government) they transferred land-use rights to

Moylan in 1906. The contract gave Moylan complete access to Periban’s former woodlands for the next ten years. In exchange, the partners of Compañía Explotadora de Maderas would receive an annual sum (some 4,000 pesos) regardless of whether lumber extraction proved profitable or not. A man of means and connections, Moylan joined forces with a group of American associates who set eyes on the growing lumber business in Mexico and had recently formed the Central

Lumber Company of Mexico for that purpose. The company was founded in Portland, Maine.

Yet the members of its board of directors (with one exception) were actually based in New York, where they expected to sell 2 million dollars in shares. The evidence is unfortunately scarce, but it seems that efforts to capitalize the company did not go as planned and Moylan ended up buying most of the shares (which, in all likelihood, accounted for substantially less than the projected amount). Still, the Central Lumber Company remained the single largest operating

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lumber company in the Periban area and its surroundings until the outbreak of the Mexican revolution.333

Another company, or to precise, a series of companies managed by the same group of people, truly became the leading lumber manufacturer in the meseta—and one the largest in the country. In 1901, Domingo Narvarte (as pointed out, a prominent lumber entrepreneur based in

Tingambato), decided to sell all his assets to a company called Compañía Nacional de Maderas.

The company’s general manager and most conspicuous operator was an individual named James

Slade Jr., locally known as Santiago Slade. An American engineer born in Columbus, Georgia, he arrived in Michoacán at some point during the late 1890s. He soon developed connections with local elite circles and eventually married to Consuelo Farías, a member of a prominent family in the city of Uruapan (1899) with whom he had three children (James, Florence, and

Maria).334

Acting as general manager, Slade was instrumental in securing Compañía Nacional’s dominance in the meseta from 1901 to 1904. The company acquired sizable holdings from

Narvarte. The most important of them all was Las Palomas sawmill, valued in almost 55,000 pesos—equivalent to the cost of a modest (yet relatively important by Michoacán’s standards) hacienda. Compañía Nacional also got hold of important business commitments with railroad

333 ARPPM, Registro de Modificaciones y Traslaciones de la Propiedad Raíz en el Estado de Michoacán, Libro 1, Tomo 1, 165-170 and 205-213; ARPPM, Registro de Modificaciones y Traslaciones de la Propiedad Raíz en el Estado de Michoacán, Libro 1, Tomo 3, 52-56, 152-161, 213-217, 228-233, 234-248, and 359-370; ARPPM, Registro de Modificaciones y Traslaciones de la Propiedad Raíz en el Estado de Michoacán, Libro 1, Tomo 4, 52-54 and 203-207; ARPPM, Registro de Modificaciones y Traslaciones de la Propiedad Raíz en el Estado de Michoacán, Libro 1, Tomo 2, 1-22. 334 “Slade Genealogy,” accessed September 20, 2013, http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~sladej/nc/index.htm

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and construction companies. The largest of these commitments involved supplying Camino de

Fierro Nacional Mexicano 20,000 crossties. Under Slade’s management, the company greatly expanded its operations and infrastructure. A second and larger sawmill was built in Conuy, nearby Tingambato. The new sawmill would be known as La Maestraenza and it would become the epicenter of the most important lumber operations in the district of Uruapan and, probably,

Michoacán. And in order to facilitate the transportation of lumber, Compañía Nacional also built a local railroad line connecting several pueblos of the meseta and Conuy to the main state and national tracks. 335

“La Maestraenza” Sawmill, 1905.

Source: AGN, Fomento y Obras Públicas, Industrias Nuevas, Leg. 49, Caja, 30, Exp. 4, Junio 15, 1905.

335 Guzmán, Michoacán y la inversión, 115-117; and Maldonado, “Tingambato” 82-86. The company’s president and vice-president were respectively George Kennedy and James Snell. See, AGNM, Uruapan, Escrituras Públicas, Libro de protocolo del notario público Lic. José Uribe, 1903,438-439.

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In 1905, a financial firm based in Mexico City called Mexican Finance acquired

Compañía Nacional. As business thrived, Compañía Nacional apparently could not keep pace with its growing commitments on its own. Mexican Finance formed a new company known as

Lumber and Development of Michoacán. Slade, already a key player with wide local connections, remained in the new company as sales manager. Yet the head of company was an individual called Henry Rudston Read.336 A British subject, Read was involved in mining activities in eastern Michoacán and had run a lumber company in the Lake Pátzcuaro region in the late 1890s. As Juan J. Moylan, he sought the support of international financiers to boost the operations of Lumber and Development. Based in London, a firm known as Trustees Executors and Societies Insurance agreed to invest in Read’s company and began to sell bonds (1906) with which the Trustees and Read expected to raise 100,000 pounds sterling. Although it seems that some funds were obtained in this way, the operation, as with Moylan, did not entirely work.

Lumber and Development never succeeded in attracting enough shareholders. Capitalization, for the most part, seemed to have come from credits granted by local financial institutions, namely the branches in Morelia and Uruapan of the Banco Nacional de Mexico (the major financial institution in Mexico under Porifio Díaz).337

Lumber and Development, in any event, widened the scale and scope of production in

Conuy. From 1905 to 1907, the company imported some 380,000 kilograms in new equipment and material. Everything from screws to a locomotive. According to a federal official who

336 James Walter and Mexican lawyer Rafael Pardo served as head of the board of directors in Mexico City. See, ARPPM, Registro de Hipotecas, Libro de Ignacio Zavala, enero 31 de 1906-abril de 1908, 120-125. 337 Ibid., 120-125 and 171-184. On Rudston Read see, Guzmán, Michoacán y la inversión, 109-111.

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visited Conuy in 1907, machines worked ceaseless. “There is in the courtyards of the buildings,” he wrote, “enough lumber to fill four or five hundred train wagons.”338 In 1907, when Lumber and Development negotiated a new credit from Banco Nacional, James Slade and John Simmons

(also a manager of the company) declared there were about 3.5 million feet of lumber in existence in Conuy.339 Estimations on the part of federal officials in Mexico City affirmed that the company was capable of producing between 6,000 and 7,000 metric tons of lumber every year.340 Lumber and Development even signed a contract with the federal government to create a plant dedicated to produce a new type of fuel based on the treatment of lumber remains.341

Lumber and Development rapid ascension was, however, followed by an equally rapid fall. The company never intended to build the new fuel plant. As federal authorities would later find out, it was just a mere stratagem to take advantage of tax exemption policies in force designed to boost investment in the development of new industries and technologies in Mexico.

In order to evade tariffs, Read imported much of the new equipment used in Conuy as if it were destined for the fuel plant.342 Lumber and Development’s financial commitments with its international and national creditors, in like manner, had become, if not unmanageable, at least of significant concern. The company probably amassed a debt with Banco Nacional de México of a

338 AGN, Fomento y Obras Públicas, Industrias Nuevas, Leg. 49, Caja, 30, Exp. 6, Agosto 16, 1905, 66. 339 ARPPM, Registro de Hipotecas, Libro de Ignacio Zavala, enero 31 de 1906-abril de 1908, 123. 340 AGN, Fomento y Obras Públicas, Industrias Nuevas, Leg. 49, Caja, 30, Exp. 2, 62. 341 See, Memoria presentada al Congreso de la Unión por el Secretario de Estado y del Despacho de Fomento, Colonización e Industria de la República Mexicana, Lic. Olegario Molina. Corresponde a los años transcurridos de 1o de Enero de 1905 a 30 de Junio de 1907 (Mexico: Imprennta y Fototipia de la Secretaría de Fomento, 1909), 225-228. 342 See, AGN, Fomento y Obras Públicas, Industrias Nuevas, Leg. 49, Caja, 30, Exp. 1-12.

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quarter of a million pesos.343 Designed to make fast profits in a booming business, Lumber and

Development finances and relations with the federal government faltered. The company shut down operations at some point between the last months of 1907 and the first months of 1908.

Sawmill Courtyards, 1905

Source: Source: AGN, Fomento y Obras Públicas, Industrias Nuevas, Leg. 49, Caja, 30, Exp. 4, Junio 15, 1905.

By then, James Slade had already formed his own company, first known as Bosques

Mexicanos (1907), but shortly after called Compañía Industrial de Michoacán (1908-1913). This time Slade and John Simmons (as pointed out, one of Lumber and Development managers) would be the holders of a majority of shares. Rudston Read kept business relations with Slade, but he pulled out of the new company to, apparently, focused on his mining businesses.

343 ARPPM, Registro de gravámenes en el Distrito de Uruapan, Libro, Tomo 4, 56-72.

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Compañía Industrial absorbed much of the assets (including La Maestranza in Conuy) and financial obligations of Lumber and Development. Slade renegotiated the company’s debt and even obtained further loans from Banco Nacional de México. Significantly enough, Compañía

Industrial focused not on acquiring more machinery and equipment, but on securing access to new forests and wood. Slade established business relations with well-known local landowners such as Manuel Campos, who on occasions supplied Compañía Industrial wood from some of his properties. Or Ramón Santoyo, who signed a nine-year lease contract allowing Slade’s company access to some of the forests of his hacienda. Compañía Industrial also acquired the businesses of some old middling lumber entrepreneurs such as Othon Hernandez (as shown earlier, influential in the Nahuatzen area).344

More importantly, the company gained access to the woodlands of a large number of indigenous communities across the meseta. Back in 1901, Compañía Nacional acquired from

Domingo Narvarte two contracts he had previously established with the communities of

Tingambato and Comachuen. By 1913, Compañía Industrial accumulated twenty additional deals. Most of them were signed between 1907 and 1908. At least seven took place between

1911 and 1913, that is, after the outbreak of the Mexican revolution. Unlike early partial leases, these contracts actually granted Compañía Industrial permission to extract wood from the whole of communal woodlands. They also established long-term commitments between the company

344 See, Ibid. Also, ARPPM, Registro de gravamenes en el Distrito de Uruapan, Libro 2, Tomo 4, 113-131; and Guzmán, Michoacán y la inversión, 123 and 133. John Simmons sold his shares of Compañía Industrial to Slade in 1909.

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and communities. The span of the contracts ranged from ten to thirty years and, as rule, stipulated that, if agreed by both parties, the period could extend for twenty more years.345

These contracts have been generally interpreted as clearly disadvantageous to the communities of the meseta. The terms of the deals, however, provided certain concrete benefits that help to explain, at least in part, why communities engaged in these transactions in such large numbers. In exchange for full and lengthily utilization of communal forests, Compañía Industrial was obligated to pay every year a previously agreed amount of money over the duration of the contract. The amount differed from one community to another because the extension of woodlands also varied. Yet it could be as high as 215,000 pesos (or 6,900 pesos annually) as in the case of Parangaricutiro. Although most other arrangements involved lower sums, they still entailed meaningful returns. The contracts with Quinceo, Sicuicho, San Felipe, Pomacuaran, and

Urapchicho, for instance, amounted to 20,000 pesos (or 1,000 pesos annually), whereas those of

Pamatacuaro, Arantepacua, Tanaco, or Aranza ranged between 65,000 and 30,000 pesos. To the extent that they constituted an additional source of income that communities could not otherwise attain, these funds did seem enticing and even helpful to many. Particularly when the company advanced part of the money right after the signing of the contracts.346

Even more significantly, the contracts did not strip communities of the possession of their woodlands. Although Compañía Industrial (as the other companies before) did acquire stretches

345 AGHPEM, Secretaría de Gobierno, Gobernación, Hijuelas, Distrito de Uruapan, vol. 20, 1-119; and ARPPM, Registro de gravamenes en el Distrito de Uruapan, Libro 2, Tomo 4, 56-72. See also, Marco A. Calderón, “Un contrato de arrendamiento de los montes de Cheran, Distrito de Uruapan, entre el representante de los indios de ese pueblo y la Compañía Industrial de Michoacán,” Relaciones 72, no. 28 (1997): 215-221. 346 Ibid.

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of community land by different means, direct acquisition was not its main modus operandi, especially when dealing with such a wide number of communities. Land purchases (and even dubious acquisitions) required complex and lengthily procedures that would result in the suspension or postponement of production, additional expenses, and unnecessary tensions with both communities and the government—the selling of community lands and woodlands was, after all, prohibited without previous official authorization. The company thus opted to lease rather than to take over the ownership of communal montes. Wood extraction, not land ownership, was the essence of the business.

Thus, the significance of lumber contracts did not consist in that they deceive communities into accepting blatantly unfavorable deals. These contracts truly marked a far- reaching shift in the utilization of local forests and existing land-use rights. Possession remained in the hands of indigenous communities. Community members did not lose access to the woodlands and kept the right to retrieve wood for their everyday and long-established needs

(collection of fuel wood and craft making). Conversion of forest areas into grazing lands and arable fields was, at least in theory, prohibited. Yet the meaning and purpose of woodlands now depended on something other than local usages—even local commercial usages. The forests of the meseta acquired a different value. One that could be measured in revenues and profits.

Woodlands were now part of a larger network of interests wherein the weight of communities and community members had grown increasingly fainter. In changing land use, the lumber boom also precipitated the last gasp of communal land tenure.

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CONCLUSION

When revolution came in the last months of 1910 and the first of 1911, communities in the meseta did not rise in rebellion en masse. Lumber contracts ended communities’ exclusive rights to use forest lands. Yet the evidence suggests that actual exploitation of communal forests by lumber companies only took place in a handful of communities. As a result, no general opposition against companies and large-scale wood extraction surfaced. In communities where companies carried out tree harvesting more intensively (for instance, Tingambato, Comachuen,

San Ángel, Turicuaro) antagonisms arose, but most revolved around complaints against community representatives and not against wood extraction itself. Everywhere logging activities resulted in further state intervention.

Earlier land laws (the 1851 state law and the 1856 federal law), as well as the 1877 decree, had deprived indigenous communities of legal personhood and prevented them from administering real estate properties. Land taxes and fiscal “conventional agreements,” in like manner, expanded the influence of the authorities of Michoacán over communities. The 1902 reparto laws made community representation subject to prior approval by the government. It also required communities and community members to solicit official authorization when conducting transactions in forest lands and wood extraction for commercial purposes. Little by little, the government asserted its authority and, accordingly, local autonomy eroded. It was not an overwhelming power, but it was enough to guarantee community conformity and prevent grievances from turning into insurrectionary mobilizations.

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Since communities were banned from owning and deriving benefits from real estate, the authorities of Michoacán took over the management of forest revenues—that is, the money from lease contracts with lumber companies. Local access to revenues depended on compliance with reparto policies. In other words, communities could gain the proceeds of lumber until they relinquished communal land tenure. The indigenous people of the meseta faced three possible alternatives. The first one entailed dividing the money in equal and individual shares among all community members. Individual shares, however, would be of no meaningful value and thus would bring little benefit for families and community members. The second alternative consisted of splitting the forest in identical portions, one for each community member. This solution was not only impractical, but it would strip lumber contracts of any value. Communities agreed to open their forest only because lumber revenues, in principle, represented additional funds for common projects. Companies, on the other hand, would have to deal with hundreds and even thousands of community members separately, making wood extraction not only difficult but almost unfeasible. Ironically, for lumbering, the reparto was ultimately bad for business.

The third alternative, the one that prevailed, entailed a hybrid solution. Woodlands remained undivided, but property rights ceased to be communal. Community members were granted not an actual portion of land, but a share representing a portion of ownership of the forest. Shares did not give exclusive access to or absolute property of individual parcels.

Shareholders, in principle, were only entitled to receive their part of the earnings of lease contracts with lumber companies. Presumably, communities would thus function as any other private shareholding association, except for the fact that, in reality, its members could not make

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use of their assets and proceeds as they pleased. Indeed, income derived from woodland rentals, authorities determined, should be deposited in a monte de piedad account or directly transferred to tax offices. In order to use forest revenues, community members (now turned into shareholders) were required to solicit consent from the government, and petitions could only be made through previously authorized community representatives. Authorities presented communities with two main choices, knowing in advance that only one of them was reasonable: to distribute the revenues in equal amounts among shareholders or employ forest income in public works and tax payments. Community earnings—allegedly the product of a commercial transaction between to private parties—were treated as tax revenues, that is, as yet another duty levied on community members.347

This was, indeed, a peculiar arrangement. It fulfilled reparto legal formalities, but gave birth to a land regime that was neither entirely private nor completely communal. It ended corporate land rights and neglected communities’ legal status. At the same time, however, authorities continued to deal with community members not as a collection of free individual smallholders—the members of a shareholding organization—, but as collective bodies.

Maintaining corporate representation, in the end, proved more advantageous to both companies and authorities than dealing with individual property owners. Purportedly designed to “free” indigenous people from the “tyranny” of communal land tenure, liberal land policy curtailed the

347 AGHPEM, Secretaría de Gobierno, Gobernación, Hijuelas, Distrito de Uruapan, vol. 16, 1-16; AGHPEM, Secretaría de Gobierno, Gobernación, Hijuelas, Distrito de Uruapan, vol. 17, 37-197; AGHPEM, Secretaría de Gobierno, Gobernación, Hijuelas, Distrito de Uruapan, vol. 18, 74-200, and 231-329; AGHPEM, Secretaría de Gobierno, Gobernación, Hijuelas, Distrito de Uruapan, vol. 21, 292; AGHPEM, Secretaría de Gobierno, Gobernación, Hijuelas, Distrito de Uruapan, vol. 22, 206-321, 376, and 399-400.

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capacity of communities and community members to decide over their own holdings and earnings. It undermined local autonomy yet offered little or no independence—whether collective or individual. Crucially, community members retained possession of their forests. Yet, to all intents and purposes, they lost control of how community resources were administered. On the eve of the Mexican revolution, liberalism in Michoacán was closer to the Bourbons than to the deeply problematic, but equally ground-breaking egalitarianism of early and mid-nineteenth- century liberalisms.

Similar arrangements surfaced in communities where lease contracts did not result in immediate large-scale logging operations and wherein tree harvesting continued to be conducted by middling entrepreneurs and groups of community members. Much logging remained unreported. Yet when spotted by municipal and district authorities it was closely supervised.

Tree harvesting and wood extraction required official authorization and lumber sales could not be carried out without first being reported to the government. Tax offices, and not communities, handled the product of these sales. Part of the earnings was used to cover pending debts and land taxes. The remainder was employed in construction projects, repairs of buildings and roads, and other local needs.348

This new state of affairs between communities, companies, and the government, however, did not last long. The outbreak of the Mexican revolution did not trigger a massive

348 AGHPEM, Secretaría de Gobierno, Gobernación, Hijuelas, Distrito de Uruapan, vol. 3, 130, 142, 154-156, 164, 168-176, and 186-189; AGHPEM, Secretaría de Gobierno, Gobernación, Hijuelas, Distrito de Uruapan, vol. 22, 363-369 and 402-405; AGHPEM, Secretaría de Gobierno, Gobernación, Hijuelas, Distrito de Pátzcuaro, vol. 12, 196-197.

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rebellion in the meseta, but it did disrupt the expansion of commercial forestry. As power shifted in the nation and the state of Michoacán, small but relentless armed bands carried out regular operations across the region. They claimed different revolutionary affiliations, but most of the time acted independently in constant search for resources with which to fund armed campaigns, personal ambitions, and even mere survival. Their methods were fierce—hijacking, kidnapping, assaults on haciendas, ranchos, and pueblos—and, as a result, relations with the local population were often tense, when not openly antagonistic. Paracho, for instance, was burnt to the ground in

1917 after a group of local residents failed to repel the band of Inés Chávez García, the best- known insurgent-bandit of the meseta and its surroundings. At times, however, armed bands also managed to obtain local support and cooperation, as in the case of Cherán wherein at least some community members declared their sympathies for Chávez García.349

Landowners and businessmen, on the other hand, tried to come to terms with the new revolutionary circumstances and the presence of armed bands by paying money for protection.

Many succeeded, but many others eventually were forced to pull out their businesses, especially after 1913 when the country fell into full-scale war, first as a result of Victoriano Huerta’s coup against president Francisco Madero and later as revolutionary forces split after defeating Huerta.

The downfall of Porfirio Díaz in 1911 did not put a halt to lumber business prospects in the meseta. Compañía Industrial’s last lease contracts with local indigenous communities were signed in 1913. Yet problems multiplied as hostilities escalated. Forced loans, confiscation of

349 See, Castillo Janacua, Paracho, 65-93; and Álvaro Ochoa Serrano, Chávez García, vivo o muerto (Morelia: Morevallado Editores / Instituto Michoacano de Cultura, 2004).

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assets, and assaults on the company’s properties by armed bands intensified. Signs of opposition to wood extraction operations also began to gain impetus in several communities (notably in

Nurio, Paracho, Cherán-Atzicurin, and Cherán).

In an effort to keep production going, James Slade formed his own private security force.

The move, however, backfired. The men hired for the job used violence beyond Slade’s desires, thus alienating an increasing number of community members and undermining the local consent necessary to secure access to communal woodlands. Slade removed the heads of Compañía

Industrial’s security force and offered the position to Eutimio Díaz, one of the indigenous leaders heading the opposition to unrestricted lumber operations in Paracho. A man who understood local and regional dynamics, whose personal and business interests were deeply rooted in the meseta, Slade preferred negotiation over confrontation. Eutimio Díaz, presumably, agreed to collaborate with Slade. It was in the interest of both parties to prevent violence from escalating and, equally important, to secure forest revenues.350

The war, however, rendered this new deal fruitless. Railroad construction halted. The banking system on which large-scale wood extraction and lumber processing depended started to falter beginning in 1912 and collapsed after 1913—recovery only came after 1922.351 Without credit and a regular and reliable demand for wooden products, it made no sense to expand forestry operations or even sustain production. Compañía Industrial, at any rate, could not fulfill

350 See, Guzmán, Michoacán y la inversión, 133-134. 351 See, Stephen Haber, Armando Razo, and Noel Maurer, The Politics of Property Rights: Political Instability, Credible Commitments, and Economic Growth in Mexico, 1876-1929 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 80-123.

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its previous financial commitments, contributing to the downfall of the banking system in

Uruapan and Michoacán. Not surprisingly, there is little evidence about Slade’s activities and the fate of Compañía Industrial between 1914 and 1921. Operations in Conuy, in all likelihood, shut down during these years. Slade did engage again in railroad and forestry businesses in the 1920s.

He founded a new company (called Compañía Michoacana Transportation Company) and built a new sawmill. Yet he moved operations outside of the meseta and settled on the district of Ario in the hot-country. In 1931, the governor of Michoacán, Lázaro Cárdenas, issued a bill declaring

Compañía Industrial’s lease contracts with communities in the meseta null.352 A new land reform emanated from the revolution, also conflictive and contentious, was underway. It began to undo much of what four and half decades of reparto had created.

The consequences of the reparto era were, indeed, significant and unprecedented.

Communal land tenure was reduced to an indeterminate state in which communities—as corporate bodies—were legally entitled to nothing, but obliged to surrender much—including the autonomy to conduct businesses, manage funds, or elect representatives without the supervision and consent of the government. Piecemeal transactions—instigated by the reparto, demographic growth, and new commercial prospects—resulted in the loss of important stretches of agricultural and forest lands. The fragmentation of community holdings, in turn, did not result in any major redistribution of landownership inside communities. It either reinforced existing patterns of social differentiation or contributed to make gaps bigger. The rural middle-class—

352 See, Guzmán, Michoacán y la inversión, 135; and José Manuel Martínez Aguilar, “El aserradero de Zatzio, un caso de la explotación de los bosques de Michoacán,” in Relaciones 32, no. 127 (2011): 195-221.

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people of comparatively moderate means, but wealthy and powerful by local standards—, some landowners, and a group of timber entrepreneurs reaped most of the benefits. For those who already struggled to secure sustenance, changes in land tenure occurred for the worse. Finally, land use experienced a major shift. Access to local woodlands ceased to be an exclusive right of community members. More importantly, for the first time in the history of the meseta communal woodlands were opened to large-scale commercial exploitation.

All in all, the reparto—a combination of human, economic, and political forces—brought much change to the meseta. It did not, however, entirely break some of its long-standing features. Although not without alterations, the three basic components constituting the material base of a majority of indigenous people in the region remained in place. A large number of community members still possessed housing lots where families could plant fruits and vegetables, store grains, and work on wood crafts. Some agricultural lands were lost, some more concentrated in few hands, but many more continued to be in possession of indigenous families.

Access to forest lands, in like manner, was not curtailed in spite of growing wood extraction activities. Community members shared land-use rights with companies and loggers, forest utilization drastically changed, and proceeds were taken over by the government. Yet wood gathering for domestic purposes, crafts, and small-scale commercial uses did not come to an end.

Tellingly, corn remained the single most important commercial and subsistence crop of

Michoacán and the meseta until the very end of the porfiriato. Living conditions deteriorated for an important number of families and did not improve in general as a result of the reparto.

Communities lost autonomy and were perhaps more vulnerable to economic shifts than ever

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before. Most community members, however, still managed to weather material insecurities, preventing many from joining revolutionary uprisings and precluding the formation of a local independent armed movement.

It was neither the world liberals once imagined nor the world most indigenous people in the meseta desired. It was one, however, they both contributed to create. The product of a historical juncture, it would take a different combination of events and circumstances to unravel what the reparto had brought about. The Mexican revolution inaugurated a period of radical changes in the nation’s countryside. Land reform continued to be at the center of national debate.

It was, however, a new and different reform. It would be known as reparto agrario, but the term would no longer be associated with private ownership. Reparto would come to mean exactly the opposite of what it once meant. It would mean the transformation of private ownership into collective land rights. Land reform, once more, would become the instrument of many interests and purposes—including those of indigenous people in the meseta.

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REFERENCES