86 CHAPTER 4 THE ECONOMIC FOUNDATIONS OF COLONIAL LIFE
agricultural commercial production and pressed
ever more aggressively on the shrinking native
sector of the colonial economy. Spanish colonists
used various methods to “free” land from indig-
enous occupation: purchase, usurpation, and con-
gregación (forced concentration of natives in new
communities, ostensibly to facilitate control and
Christianization). Although Spain’s declared pol-
icy was to protect community land, the numer-
ous laws forbidding encroachment on such land
failed to halt the advance of the hacienda. The
power of the hacendados, whose ranks included
high royal offi cials, churchmen, and wealthy mer-
chants, usually carried all before it.
In the seventeenth century, the crown, facing
an acute, chronic economic crisis, actually encour-
aged usurpation of indigenous lands by adopting
the device of composición (settlement), which le-
galized the defective title of the usurper through
payment of a fee to the king. Not only native com-
munities but communities of Spanish or mestizo
small farmers saw their lands devoured by the ad-
vancing hacienda. A striking feature of this process
was that land was sometimes primarily acquired
not for use but to obtain day laborers and peons by
depriving them of their fi elds or to eliminate com-
petition from small producers. The establishment
of a mayorazgo (entailed estate) ensured the per-
petuation of the consolidated property in the hands
of the owner’s descendants, but this feudal device
required approval by the crown and payment of a
large fee and benefi ted only a small number of very
wealthy families.
A more common strategy for consolidation
and preservation of holdings was marriage within
the extended family, often between cousins. In the
majority of cases, however, this and other strate-
gies for ensuring the longevity of family estates
were less than successful. Spanish inheritance laws
that required the equal division of estates among
heirs, economic downturns, and lack of investment
capital as a result of large expenditures for conspic-
uous consumption and donations to the church
were some of the factors that made for an unsta-
ble landed elite and a high turnover rate in estate
ownership. Historian Susan Ramírez studied the
collective biography of colonial elite families who
lived in north coastal Peru over a period of three
hundred years. She found that, contrary to tradi-
tion, this elite was “unstable, open, and in constant
fl ux,” with most families lasting no more than two
or three generations. The historian Lucas Alamán,
himself a member of Mexico’s former colonial elite,
alluded to this instability at the top, citing the Mexi-
can proverb that said, “The father a merchant, the
son a gentleman, the grandson a beggar.”
The tempo of land concentration varied from
region to region according to its resources and prox-
imity to markets. In the Valley of Mexico, for exam-
ple, the bulk of the land was held by great haciendas
by the end of the colonial period. Native commoners
and chiefs, on the other hand, retained much of the
land in the province of Oaxaca, which had limited
markets for its crops. Recent studies of the colonial
hacienda stress the large variations in hacienda size
and productivity from one region to another. This
variety in size and productivity refl ects the great
regional divergencies in productive potential—de-
termined by proximity to water and quality of soil—
and in access to labor and markets, among other
variables, in the vast Spanish Empire in America.
Despite the long-term trend toward land con-
centration, there gradually arose a class of mostly
mixed-blood small farmers of uncertain size. In Mex-
ico such small farmers, typically mestizos, came to
be known as rancheros, and they were interspersed
among the native villages and commercial estates
of the central and southern highlands. Some were
former majordomos, or foremen, of large landown-
ers from whom they rented or leased unused por-
tions of their estates, generally raising products for
sale in local markets. Their limited resources and
dependence on large landowners made their situ-
ation precarious; in prosperous times of rising land
values, their small properties were often swallowed
up by their wealthy neighbors. Less frequently, suc-
cessful rancheros might expand their holdings and
themselves join the ranks of the landed elite.SPANISH AGRICULTURE IN THE NEW WORLD
Spanish agriculture differed from indigenous land
use in signifi cant ways. First, it was extensive, cul-
tivating large tracts with plows and draft animals,