5 - The formation and economic structure of the hacienda in New Spain

Summary

ECONOMIC TRANSFORMATION

The first revolution to transform the land in Mesoamerica was the invention in prehistoric times of agriculture itself. The second revolution took place some decades after the conquest, when the brutal decline in the native American population coincided with the Spaniards’ penetration of the land and the propagation there of European plants and animals. The swiftness with which this process occurred may perhaps be explained by the previous acclimatization of European flora and fauna in the Canary Islands and the Caribbean. The mainland itself offered many different ecological zones for the reproduction of plants and animals. As early as the middle of the sixteenth century, the valleys of Puebla–Tlaxcala and the basin around Mexico City surprised the traveller with their diversified agricultural landscape, where maize, beans, squash, and peppers alternated with wheat, barley, and European vegetables and fruits.

European grain spread to the irrigated highlands south of Puebla (Atlixco, Tepeaca) and north of Mexico City (Tlalnepantla and Huehuetoca), and then on from there, pushing back the Chichimeca frontier (San Juan del Río, Querétaro). By the end of the sixteenth century, wheat and maize gilded the black soil of the Bajío and were harvested around Morelia and Guadalajara in the west and Oaxaca in the south. Within a relatively short period of time grain transformed the traditional landscape of the native countryside, opening up many hundreds of kilometres of fertile land to cultivation. Wheat farming introduced Spanish techniques of cultivation, such as the plough, the yoke, and irrigation, bringing them into permanent use in New Spain.