The Mexican Hacienda between the Insurgency and the Revolution: Maize Production and Commercial Triumph on theTemporal

Abstract

When Andrés Molina Enríquez wrote his polemical attack on the Mexican hacienda, published on the eve of the Revolution, he was particularly scathing about the cereal estates of themesa central. According to his arguments, these were the properties most typically ‘feudal’, and thus he characterized them as vast tracts of land, under-used and undercapitalized, serving only to legitimize the seigneurial status of an elite class of rentier landowners. The proprietors were similarly castigated for preferring the low-risk security of irrigated crops, and for their withdrawal from the uncertainties of maize production on thetemporallands. As a result of these policies the routine supply of maize, the food grain of the nation, was, or so he argued, left to the efforts and tenacity of a multitude of smallholders and Indian villagers with access to a mere tenth of the cultivable of smallholders and Indian villagers with access to a mere tenth of the cultivable terrain.

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