LATIN AMERICA IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 181
these communal traditions constituted as much of an obstacle to progress as the
Spanish system of castes and special privileges did.
Until about 1870, however, large, compact indigenous populations contin-ued to live under the traditional communal landholding system in Mexico, Central
America, and the Andean region. Then, the rapid growth of the export economy,
the coming of the railroads, and the resulting rise in land values and demand for
labor caused “white” and mestizo landowners and landowner-dominated govern-
ments to launch a massive assault on native lands. The expropriation of these lands
was accompanied by a growth of peonage and tenantry. Employers used a variety
of devices, ranging from debt servitude to outright coercion, to attach laborers to
their estates. In some areas, there arose a type of indigenous serfdom that closely
resembled the classic European model. In the Andean region, for example, Aymara
tenants, in addition to working their masters’ land, had to render personal service
in their households, sometimes at the hacienda, sometimes in the city. During their
term of domestic service, these serfs could be given or sold to their masters’ friends.
This and other forms of serfdom survived well into the twentieth century.
The master class, aided by the clergy and local magistrates, sought to reinforcethe economic subjugation of indigenous peoples with psychological domination.
There evolved a pattern of relations and role playing that assigned to the patrones
the role of benevolent fi gures who assured their peons or tenants of a livelihood
and protected them in all emergencies in return for their absolute obedience. In
countries with large indigenous populations, the relations between masters and
peons often included an elaborate ritual that required natives to request permis-
sion to speak to patrones, to appear before them with head uncovered and bowed,
and to seek their approval for all major personal decisions, including marriage.
But these relationships and attitudes of submission and servility, more char-acteristic of resident peons, were not accepted by all indigenous peoples. In the
Andean area, Mexico, and elsewhere during the second half of the nineteenth
century, the surviving native landowning communities fought stubbornly to pre-
vent the absorption of their lands by advancing haciendas and to halt the process
by which they became landless laborers. They fought with all the means at their
disposal, including armed revolts as a last resort. Such revolts occurred in Mexico
in the 1860s and 1870s and were called “communist” by the landowners and
government offi cials, who crushed them with superior military force.
The greater freedom of movement that came with independence, the progres-sive disappearance of autonomous indigenous communities, and the growth of
the hacienda, in which natives mingled with mestizos, strengthened a trend to-
ward acculturation that had begun in the late colonial period. This acculturation
was refl ected in a growth of bilingualism: indigenous peoples increasingly used
Spanish in dealing with “whites,” reserving their native languages for use among