7 - Rancheros

Summary

Although both foreign travellers and native novelists of the last century commented extensively on the manners and life of the rancheros, it was left to the American geographer, G. M. McBride to provide the first systematic survey of this neglected stratum of society in the Mexican countryside. From a brief study of the census returns, he found that the number of small properties in the Republic had risen from 15,085 in 1854 to no less than 47,939 in 1910. By this latter year, about a third of all ranchos were located in the adjoining states of Guanajuato, Jalisco and Michoacán. Strongly influenced by the theories of Luis Wistano Orozco and Andrés Molina Enríquez he ascribed this surprising increase to the Liberal Reform Laws of the 1850s which had effected the auction of corporate property in land and enforced the distribution in separate lots of the communal holdings of the Indian villages. Equally important, he identified the rancheros as an embryonic, rural middle class of predominantly mestizo origin. Confirmation for these hypotheses came from a study of Las Arandas, a district situated among the hills of Jalisco, where in the middle years of the nineteenth century the great estates which hitherto had dominated the zone were broken into small units and sold to a numerous group of local farmers.