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The Management of Church Wealth in Michoacán, Mexico, 1810–1856: Economic Motivations and Political Implications

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 February 2009

Margaret Chowning
Margaret Chowning
Affiliation:
Assistant Professor of History at California State University, Hayward.
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Extract

Nowhere, perhaps, is the often-remarked historiographical bias in favour of social/economic studies for the colonial period and political/ institutional studies for the national period more jarring than in treatments of the activities of the Mexican church before and after independence.1 The position of the church in the colonial economy has been the subject of several specialised works and is widely regarded in broader histories as most significant.2 But students of independent Mexico have usually focused on the church's role in the political arena, characterising the politics of the period from 1821 to 1856 as, in essence, a battle for supremacy betweenthe church and the state, or in a slightly different formulation, as a struggle between liberalism and conservatism.3

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Articles
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Journal of Latin American Studies , Volume 22 , Issue 3 , October 1990 , pp. 459 - 496
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1990

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References

1 In large part these distinct historiographical traditions stem from the fact that the two academic specialisations tend to utilise quite different documentary bases. Early national historians enjoy sources unavailable or not abundant for the colonial period–newspapers and pamphlets, congressional records, reports of government ministries, travel accounts, and biographies and historical accounts written by contemporaries–but at the same time they are cursed by the relative breakdown of statistical recordkeeping after 1810, which has hobbled the effort to determine at an empirical level the impact of insurgency and independence on the Mexican economy and society. For one earlier observation on the differences between treatments of the colonial and modern periods, see Eric Van Young, ‘Recent Anglophone Scholarship on Mexico and Central America in the Age of Revolution (1750–1850)’, Hispanic American Historical Review, vol.65, no. 4 (1985).

2 In addition to the numberous works collected in Arnold. Bauer(ed.), La iglesia en la economia de America Latina: Siglos XVI al XIX (Mexico, 1986), see Bello, Francisco J. Cervantes, ‘La iglesia y la crisis del credito colonial en Puebla (1800–1814)’, in Ludlow, Leonor and Marichal, Carlos (eds.), Banca y poder en México (1800–1925) (Mexico, 1986)Google Scholar; Stein, Stanley J., ‘Prelude to Upheaval in Spain and New Spain, 1800–1808: Trust Funds, Spanish Finance and Colonial Silver’, Bibliotheca Americana, vol. 1, no. 3 (01 1983)Google Scholar; von Wobeser, Gisela, ‘Mecanismos crediticios en la Nueva España: el uso del censo consignativo’, Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos, vol. 5, no. 1 (Winter 1989)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and my article entitled ‘The Consolidación de Vales Reales in the Bishopric of Michoacán’, Hispanic American Historical Review, vol. 69, no. 3 (08 1989).Google Scholar

3 The classic statement is that of Justo Sierra, whose interpretation is accepted by several US writers, for example, Mecham, J. Lloyd, Church and State in Latin America (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1966)Google Scholar; Callcott, W. H., Church and State in Mexico, 1822–1857 (New York, 1965)Google Scholar; Scholes, Walter V., Mexican Politics during the Juárez; Regime, 1855–1872 (Columbia, Miss., 1957)Google Scholar, and by many other Mexican writers of the Reform school. The most recent and most sophisticated treatment along these lines is that of Sinkin, Richard N., The Mexican Reform, 1855–1876: A Study in Liberal Nation-Building (Austin, Tex, 1979).Google Scholar See also those works that deal directly with the church's political role, for example Shiels, W. Eugene, ‘Church and State in the First Decade of Mexican Independence’, Catholic Historical Review, 28 (1942–1943)Google Scholar; Costeloe, Michael, Church and State in Independent Mexico (London, 1978)Google Scholar; Memen, Fernando Pérez, El episcopado y la independencia de Mexico, 1810–1836 (Mexico, 1977)Google Scholar; Costeloe, Michael, ‘The Mexican Church and the Rebellion of the Polkos’, Hispanic American Historical Review, vol. 46, no. 2 (05 1966)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Michael Costeloe, ‘Church-State Financial Negotiations in Mexico during the American War, 1846–47’, Revista de Historia de América, vol. 60 (July–Dec. 196;). Those who emphasise the ideological aspects of politics, thus somewhat de-emphasising the centrality of the church's role, include Jesús Reyes Heroles, El liberalismo mexicano (Mexico, 1957); Hale, Charles, Mexican Liberalism in the Age of Mora, 1821–1853 (New Haven, Conn., 1968)Google Scholar; and Brading, David, The Origins of Mexican Nationalism (Cambridge, 1985)Google Scholar, especially part 3 entitled ‘Creole Nationalism and Mexican Liberalism’.

As Mexico's political situation deteriorated, the Liberals argued more and more vigorously that corporately-owned property (by which they meant property owned both by the church and by the indian communities) must be put into the hands of individuals if the country were ever to emerge from its travails. If the numerous, valuable, and (they believed) non-circulating church properties were forced onto the market, their purchasers would form a new class of literate, civic-minded, prosperous, and presumably Liberal yeomen-citizens; the public apathy and ignorance Liberals thought to be at the bottom of the failure of republican institutions would be eliminated, and so also, with the transfer of huge, unproductive church estates into private hands, agricultural backwardness and low productivity. A welcome by-product of secularisation of church-owned property would be the improvement of the Government's wretched fiscal situation, since the now rapidly-circulating property formerly owned by the church would pay sales taxes on each transaction. A few Liberals argued that the church's capital wealth, and not just its property, should be nationalised in order to retire the staggering national debt – eventually (in 1859) this faction prevailed.

5 Costeloe, Michael, Church Wealth in Mexico: A Study of the ‘Juzgado de Capellanias’ in the Archbishopric of Mexico, 1800–1856 (Cambridge, 1967)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Costeloe, Michael, ‘The Administration, Collection and Distribution of Tithes in the Archbishopric of Mexico, 1800–1860’, The Americas, vol. 25, no. 1 (07 1966)Google Scholar; Costeloe, Michael, ‘Guadalupe Victoria and a Personal Loan from the Church in Independent Mexico’, The Americas, vol. 25, no. 3 (01 1969)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lavrin, Asunción, ‘Problems and policies in the Administration of Nunneries in Mexico, 1800–1835’, The Americas, vol. 28, no. 1 (07 1971)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lavrin, Asunción, ‘Mexican Nunneries from 1835 to 1860: Their Administrative Policies and Relations with the State’, The Americas, vol. 28, no. 3 (01 1972).CrossRefGoogle Scholar See also Jan Bazant's background chapter to his detailed study of church wealth during the Reform, Alienation of Church Wealth in Mexico: Social and Economic Aspects of the Liberal Revolution, 1856–1875 (Cambridge, 1971)Google Scholar; and Morales, María Dolores, ‘La distributión de la propiedad en la ciudad de México, 1813–1848’, Historias, 12 (01–03 1986).Google Scholar These historians dispelled numerous ideologically-inspired generalisations about pre-1856 ecclesiastical wealth, ranging all the way from assertions that the church grew immeasurably more wealthy during the period, to insistence that it lost much of its property to excessive government demands. (For a good summary of the many estimates of church wealth, see Knowlton, Robert, Church Property and the Mexican Reform, 1816–1910 (De Kalb, Ill, 1976), appendix 1, pp. 225–38.)Google Scholar In general they agree that the church held its own throughout the period, neither gaining nor losing much of its wealth, despite the attacks on ecclesiastical property in 1833–4 and 1847.

6 Those who accept the 1810–80 periodisation of Mexico's nineteenth-century economic history include most prominently Coatsworth, John, ‘Obstacles to Economic Change in Nineteenth-Century Mexico’, American Historical Review, vol. 83, no. 1 (02 1978)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Cardoso, Ciro (ed.), México en el siglo XIX (Mexico, 1980)Google Scholar; and Tutino, John, From Insurrection to Revolution in Mexico: Social Bases of Agrarian Violence, 1750–1940 (Princeton, 1986).Google Scholar

7 The records generated by the French imperial government in 1866, which reviewed and compiled data on the disposition of church property after the Reform, can be used as a rough measure of the dominance of Morelia-based ecclesiastical institutions: these records indicate that property owned by branches of the church located in the capital constituted 93 % of all ecclesiastical property in the state in 1856 (Memoria de Hacienda de la República Mexicana, 1872–3, Document no. 19, ‘Operaciones presentadas a revisión al llamado imperio, hasta marzo 1866’).

8 On inflation in the late colonial period, see Garner, Paul, ‘Price Trends in Eighteenth-Century Mexico’, Hispanic American Historical Review, vol. 6;, no. 2 (05 1985)Google Scholar; Ouweneel, Arij and Bijleveld, Catrien C. J. H., ‘The Economic Cycle in Bourbon Central Mexico: A Critique of the Recaudación del diezmo liquido en pesos’, Hispanic American Historical Review, vol. 69, no. 3 (08 1989)Google Scholar, and the comments that follow by David Brading, John Coatsworth, and Héctor Lindo-Fuentes.

9 The most concise treatment of the war in Michoacán is Hamnett, Brian R., ‘Royalist Counterinsurgency and the Continuity of Rebellion: Guanajuato and Michoacán, 1813–20’, Hispanic American Historical Review, vol. 62, no. 1 (1982)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ugarte, José Bravo, Historia sucinta de Michoacán, 3 (Mexico, 1964), pp. 40–3Google Scholar; Dávalos, J. E. Hernández y, Colección de documentos para la independencia, 6, no. 27; (Mexico, 1877–1882)Google Scholar, ‘Noticias remitidas de Valladolid, del estado que guardan varias fuerzas independientes’ [dated 31 Aug. and 14 Sept. 1814].

10 de Lejarza, Juan José Martínez, Análisis estadístico del estado de Michuacán [sic] (Morelia, 1975; orig. publ. 1824), p. 96Google Scholar; Fisher, Lillian Estelle, Champion of Reform: Manuel Abad y Queipo (New York, 1955), p. 122.Google Scholar

11 Archivo Generalde la Nación (hereafter, AGN), Alcabalas. Pátzcuaro, 1817, June-Dec. For rural destruction, see Martínez de Lejarza, Análisis, and Dávalos, Hernández y, Colección, vol. 4, no. 70Google Scholar, ‘Edicto de obispo electo, Abad y Queipo, sobre créditos pasivos, y arrendamientos, Mayo 19 [1812]’. See also fn. 12, below.

12 For some examples of haciendas which were at least partially destroyed in the wars for independence, see Archivo de Notarías de Morelia (hereafter, ANM), Aguilar, 1811, 17 June; Aguilar, 1812, 16 April; Aguilar, 1812, 4 Aug.; Marocho, 1812, 31 Dec; Aguilar, 1813, 4 Nov.; Marocho, 1814, 28 March; Aguilar, 1814, 26 April; Aguilar, 1814, 28 July; Marocho, 1815, 24 Nov.; Aguilar, 1817, 8 July; Aguilar, 1819, 22 Jan.; Aguilar, 1819, 15 Dec; Aguilar, 1820, 14 Jan.; Aguilar, 1820, 3 Oct.; Aguilar, 1820, 27 Nov.; Aguilar, 1820, 29 Nov.; Aguilar, 1821, 14 Feb.; Aguilar, 1821, 26 May; Aguilar, 1822, 15 March; Prieto, 1822, 2 Nov.; Prieto, 1823, 2 May; Aguilar, 1824, 26 March; Aguilar, 1824, 15 July; Aguilar, 1824, 11 Oct.; Aguilar, 1824, 13 Nov.; Joaquín Aguilar, 182;, 31 Oct.; Aguilar, 1825, 5 Dec; Joaquín Aguilar, 1825, 13 Mar.; Joaquín Aguilar, 1826, 10 June; Joaquin Aguilar, 1826, 16 Aug.

13 Hamnett, , ‘Royalist Counterinsurgency’, pp. 37–8.Google Scholar

14 Estimates of the amount of currency carried away by Hidalgo in Valladolid, predictably, vary wildly. The well-researched entry for ‘Michoacán’ in the Enciclopedia de México, IX (Mexico, 1987, p. 5369)Google Scholar reports that Hidalgo took 114,000 pesos from the cathedral strongbox and another 298,000 pesos from the royal treasury and the private strongboxes of Spaniards. Fisher, , Champion of Reform, p. 154Google Scholar, believes that Hidalgo took 400,000 pesos from the church alone. The city council of Valladolid, presuming to put right an earlier estimate that Hidalgo liberated 1,200,000 pesos in Valladolid, says that the amount was really no more than 700,000 pesos (Dávalos, Hernández y, Colección, 5, no. 41Google Scholar, ‘Manifiesto de ayuntamiento de Valladolid, hoy Morelia’, p. 90).

15 Prices for basic commodities were not, of course, invariably depressed; a shipment of corn to an urban area that was hungry could command exorbitant prices. But at least until 1817, such shipments were apparently the exception rather than the rule, as most producers and/or distributors were unwilling to accept the attendant risks. One report from a tithe collector stated the problem succinctly: while prices for maize sold to arrieros were very high (29 reales per fanega), the majority of the maize collected in tithe could not be sold outside the district because of the ‘dangers of the road’, and was sold instead on the spot for less than eight reales to the tithers themselves. Archivo Histórico Manuel Castañeda Ramírez (Morelia, also known as the Casa de Morelos; hereafter, AHMCR), Diezmos, Varios, Legajo 1, ‘Cuenta del diezmatario de Ario, Santa Clara, y Urecho correspondiente al año de 1819’. Other comments about low prices and decisions not to produce can be found in de Lejarza, Martinez, Análisis, III, pp. 152, 160, 199Google Scholar; Archivo Histórico del Congreso del Estado (hereafter; AHCE), Varios. 1796–1822. Caja i, ‘Circular sobre Alcabalas no. 775. México 1817’; AHCE, Legislatura I, Caja 2, Exp. 9, Memoria de Gobierno del Estado de Michoacán, 1827, p. 23.Google Scholar

16 For a population estimates, see Boletin de la Sociedad Mexicana de Geografia y Estadistica, IX (1862), p. 270Google Scholar; AHCE, Legislatura I, Caja 2, Exp. 9, Memoria de Gobierno del Estado de Michoacán, 1827, p. 22Google Scholar; Humboldt, Alexander von, Ensayo politico sobre el reino de la Nueva España (Mexico, 1966), p. 162.Google Scholar

17 AHCE, Legislatura I, Caja 2, Exp. 9, Memoria de Gobierno del Estado de Michoacán, 1827, p. 27.Google Scholar

18 The estimate of the volume of trade before 1810 comes from sales tax records in Litle, Marcela M., ‘Sales Taxes and Internal Commerce in Bourbon Mexico, 1754–1821’, unpubl. PhD dissertation, Duke University, 1985, p. 222.Google Scholar The volume of trade in Michoacán fell by over 80% in 1811–12, to about 333,000 pesos a year, according to province-wide sales tax records for those two years (AGN, Alcabalas, vol. 171, ‘Provincia de Michoacán’). The impression of continuing trade paralysis is received in sales tax ledgers for several component tax districts later in the decade: see alcabala receipts for Maravatío in 1811, 1817, 1818, and 1820; for Pátzcuaro in 1817, 1819, 1820, and 1822; for Jiquilpan in 1817 and 1821; and for Valladolid in 1817 and 1819. In the summer of 1988 these were still unclassified, located in boxes in the AGN labelled ‘Alcabalas–Valladolid, Pátzcuaro, Maravatío, Zamora, etc.’ The figure for trade in 1826 comes from AHCE, Memoria de Gobierno del Estado de Michoacán, 1827, anexos 7, 8, and 9.Google Scholar The actual figure for trade for 1826 is undoubtedly higher than this because of contraband and evasion.

19 AHMCR, Libros, no. 235, ‘Libro donde constan las entradas de caudales del ramo de diezmos del Estado de Michoacán’; ANM, tithe contracts for the quincenio 1805–09; Piquero, Ignacio, ‘Apuntes para la corografía y la estadística del Estado de Michoacán [1849]’, Boletin de la Sociedad Mexicana de Geografia y Estadistica, 1 (1861), p. 225.Google Scholar There is a difference between the amounts pledged to the tithe collector (based on production) and the amounts actually collected, and as one might imagine, the gap between the two was relatively high after 1810. For 1829, for example, the amount pledged was 132,502 pesos, but only 86,680 was collected. For 1826, by contrast, only 110,164 pesos were pledged, but 95,425 was collected (AHMCR, Diezmos, Varios, Legajo 9, ‘Cuadrante de diezmos del Estado de Michoacán correspondiente al año de 1825 [… 1833]).

20 In the 1830s, bands of guerreristas were active in all four of the state's departments. Morelia was attacked twice and Zamora fell to the ‘barbarians’ Guerrero, Codallos, and Rosales (whose names were later appended to the towns of Apatzingán, Tacámbaro, and Ario). In 1833 there was a much-commemorated uprising in Morelia, and there is also indisputable evidence from tithe and notary records of guerilla activity in the south and west in the late 1830s, and of another round of ‘revolutions’ in Puruándiro in 1841–3; I have been unable to find any accounts of these actions elsewhere. (AHCE, Varios 111, Caja 6, Exp. 8, Memoria de la Administración Pública del Estado de Michoacán, 1831, pp. 1–2; Ferreira, Melesio Aguilar, Los gobernantes de Michoacán, 1824–1974 (Morelia, 1974)Google Scholar; Ugarte, Bravo, Historia sucinta, III, pp. 83–8Google Scholar, Flores, Jesús Romero, Diccionario michoacano de historia y geografía (Mexico, 1972), p. 44Google Scholar; AHMCR, Diezmos, , Legajo, 929, ‘Tacámbaro, 1833–1880’, for the year 1838Google Scholar; Legajo, 913, ‘Valladolid, 1834–47’, for the year 1838Google Scholar; Legajo, 934, ‘Uruapan, 1833–1864’, for the years 1838 and 1839Google Scholar; Legajo, 889, ‘Ario, 1831–1853’, for the years 1837 and 1843Google Scholar; Legajo, 912, ‘Puruándiro, 1834–1863’, for the years 1836 and 1837–1838Google Scholar; Legajo, 905, ‘Jiquilpan, 1834–73’, for 1837, 1838, and 1839Google Scholar; ANM, García, 1849, 20 Sept.

21 Unfortunately, tithe and sales tax collections cannot be used to estimate agricultural production and commercial activity, since the tithe was no longer mandatory after 1833 and the sales tax was increasingly evaded.

22 The hacienda of Santa Rosalía, rented at 800 pesos in 1850, had still not reached its pre-1810 rent of 1,000 pesos, though this was an improvement over its nadir in 1821 at 400 pesos (ANM, Montaño, 1809, 24 May; Aguilar, 1821, 13 Sept.; Huerta, 1850, 19 Oct.). The hacienda of Itzícuaro rented at 50% more in 1849 than in 1800 (ANM, Aguilar, 1800, 6 June; Garcidueñas (Huerta), 1849, 4 Jan)- The haciendas of Taretan and Chucándiro rented at 14 and 30% more respectively in the 1840s and 1850s than in the decade before 1810 (ANM, Aguilar, 1804, 12 Sept.; Valdovinos, 1842, 10 Oct.; Aguilar, 1804, 10 Oct.; García, 1854, 31 Aug.).

23 Three measures of indebtedness among the elite, none of them perfect, nonetheless all suggest that levels of indebtedness during the late colonial period, already high, were even higher in the period after 1810. The average debt on an hacienda being offered for sale in the period 1790–1810 was 59%; from 1811 to the Reform, it was 71 % these figures, however, include the numerous haciendas which were sold for the amount of their debts and should not be taken as representative of all haciendas either before or after, though particularly after, 1810. The average debt on a property being offered for collateral in the late colonial period was 34%; after 1810 it was 39% (peaking in the 1840s at 51 % and dropping to 23 % in the 1850s). Average personal indebtedness at death among the elite in the late colonial period was 35 %; after 1810 it was 38%, peaking in the 1830s at 41 % and falling to 36% in the 1850s (ANM).

24 ANM, Aguilar, 1814, 29 April; Joaquín Aguilar, 1826, 11 March; Aguilar, 1830, 15 Feb.; Aguilar, 1832, 20 Oct.; Rincón, 1835, 17 Sept. The hacienda stayed in the Ortiz de Ayala family, ancestors of President Pascual Ortiz Rubio, at least until the 1910 Revolution.

25 Dávalos, Hernández y, Colección, 5, no. 41, ‘Manifiesto del Ayuntamiento de Valladolid, hoy Morelia’, p. 90.Google Scholar

26 ANM, Birbiesca, 1812, 3 Nov. The church received an interest-free loan of 40,000 from the Guadalajara cathedral, but as of April 1813 it was still hoping to obtain additional funds (ANM, Birbiesca, 1813, 10 March and 9 April).

27 By 1837 there were six members of the cathedral chapter, eight by 1841, and eleven by 1844; ANM, Valdovinos, 1834, 2 June; Valdovinos, 1837, 5 Dec; Rincón, 1841, 4 Aug.; García, 1844, 22 July; Ugarte, Bravo, Historia sucinta, III, p. 123.Google Scholar On the patronage debate, see Costeloe, Church and State.

28 Bancroft Library Univ. of California, Berkeley [hereafter, BL], ‘Libro de Consultas del Convento de Santa Catarina de Pátzcuaro, 1808–1848’, fols. 52–3. The convent also reasoned that an organ would be a safer investment than precious jewels.

29 ANM, Marocho, 1811, 26 Feb. For other examples of canons who did not receive their prebends, see ANM, Marocho, 1814, 15 Nov.; Aguilar, 1816, 8 Jan.; Prieto, 1823, 10 July.

30 AHCE, Varios III, Caja 6, Exp. 8, Memoria de la Administración Pública del Estado de Michoacán, 1831, anexo no. 12.

31 Ugarte, Bravo, Historia sucinta, III, p. 123Google Scholar; ANM, Salomo, 1845, 21 Oct.; Romero, José Guadalupe, ‘Noticias para formar la estadística del Obispado de Michoacán [1860], Boletín de la Sociedad Mexicana de Geografia y Estadistica, 9 (1862), p. 49.Google Scholar

32 Humboldt, Ensayo politico.

33 ANM, Marocho, 1806, 14 March; Aguilar, 1818, 15 July; Montaño, 1809, 24 May; Aguilar, 1821, 13 Sept.

34 AHMCR, Libros manuscritos, £232, ‘Libro de recibo de este Convento de Santa María de Gracia… 1824 [through 1854]’.

35 Twenty-one cases of composition were notarised in Morelia for debts totalling 485,000 pesos; all are to be found in ANM, and many are cited above, note 12.

36 BL, ‘Libro de Consultas’, fol. 49.

37 BL, ‘Libro de Consultas’, fols. 94, 98, 107, 141; Archivo Histórico Municipal de Morelia [hereafter, AHMM], 1836, ‘Expediente promovido por el Señor General Mariano Michelena sobre la aprovación [sic] de la acta de la junta estrajudicial [sic]…’. The AHMM is in the process of reorganisation. I am very grateful to the Presidencia Municipal of Morelia and to the staff working on the reorganisation, especially Angel Quintana, for allowing me access. All references to documents in the AHMM are intentionally vague, since the present legajo numbers will be superseded by another system. Future researchers will be able to locate the documents to which I make reference by using the date and the name of the individual concerned.

38 ANM, Valdovinos, 1833, 20 April; Valdovinos, 1840, 14 Dec.

39 ANM, Salomo, 1849, 10 March.

40 Dávalos, Hernández y, Colección, ‘Edicto del obispo Abad y Queipo…‘, p. 185.Google Scholar Average prices for urban property based on 575 transactions notarised in Morelia between 1801 and 1810, and 360 transactions for 1811–25. The average price of an hacienda sold during 1810–29 was 25,000, about half that of the twenty years before 1810, but these averages are based on only 53 sales (34 before 1811 and 19 after). The average rent commanded by an hacienda from 1790 to 1810 was 2,440 pesos (n = 52), and from 1811–29 it was 1,230 pesos (n = 38).

41 ANM, Joaquín Aguilar, 1825, 5 Dec.

42 Although church balance sheets often looked dismal, closely analysed, it is clear that the majority of debtors kept up with their interest payments. For example, the account books of the Sanctuario de la Santa Cruz de Celaya (in the bishopric of Michoacán, though not in the state) for 1805 show that of 19 borrowers, 13 had paid interest on their debts on time and the other six had neglected to pay for an average of eleven years (AHMCR, Negocios Diversos, 1805, Legajo 3, ‘Comprobantes de las cuentas de la administratión de los propios y rentas del Sanctuario de la Santa Cruz de Celaya. Año de 1805’. At the Convento de Nuestra Señora de la Salud in Pátzcuaro in 1807, 47 out of a total of 70 borrowers paid interest on time; of the 23 who were delinquent in their payments, seven were only a year or less late (AHMCR, Negocios Diversos, 1806, Legajo 1, ‘Sobre aprobación de las cuentas del Convento de Nuestra Señora de la Salud de Pazquaro [sic]…’. These rates of on-time payment of interest are fairly impressive in the light of the fact that both examples are taken from accounts during the time that the Consolidation decree of 1804 was in effect, by which the principal on ecclesiastical debt was recalled and the temptation to renege on interest payments must have been even higher than usual. Indeed, the 1807 accounts for the Sanctuario de la Santa Cruz reflect increasing delinquency – by that date eleven borrowers were late with their interest payments, compared to six two years earlier.

43 Dávalos, Hernández y, Colección, ‘Edicto del obispo Abad y Queipo’, p. 186.Google Scholar

44 ANM, Rincón, 1855, 5 Dec.

45 The reluctance to accept cessions of property was probably true in other parts of Mexico. In one case of 1830 cited by Costeloe (Church Wealth, p. 74), a delinquent borrower threatened to cede his hacienda to the church if he was not granted an extension on the debt. The Fiscal of the Juzgado observed that ‘such action would cause considerable harm to the Juzgado, for while the property was in the hands of the court, which would be for many years because of the great scarcity of buyers, the interest would be paralysed for a long period and the hacienda would be completely ruined, as experience had shown constantly happened to embargoed properties’.

46 It is interesting to speculate on the extent to which the new policy was attributable to the appointment of Bishop Juan Cayetano Portugal in 1831 after many years without diocesan leadership, since Portugal, like Abad, was an unusually progressive churchman. As a deputy and then senator from Guadalajara, Portugal was affiliated with the yorkinos. He was given credit by José María Luis Mora for reorganising the distribution of the now-voluntary tithe after its suppression in 1833 along distinctly liberal lines, such as calculating the tithe from net, rather than gross, profits on agricultural production. Unlike Abad, however, Portugal left no written record of his position on credit, and thus we can only guess that his progressive attitudes may have led him to encourage the new policies of foreclosure and cession in the interest of more expedient property turnover. Ugarte, Bravo, Historia sucinta, III, pp. 127, 131Google Scholar; Mora, José María Luis, Obras sueltas (Mexico, 1963), p. 301, note 15.Google Scholar See also Cuevas, Mariano, Historia de la iglesia en México, 5 (Mexico, 1947), p. 219Google Scholar for a rejection of the notion that Portugal was a yorkino.

47 ANM, Aguilar, 1811, 14 Dec; García, 1841, 4 Aug. In 1810 the hacienda had been appraised at 65,000 pesos; by the time it was sold, it was described as ‘bastantemente arruinada’ and commanded a price of only 23,040 pesos. See Costeloe, , ‘Guadalupe Victoria’, pp. 238–9Google Scholar for a detailed example of how such delays occurred. In the case of Victoria's loan, interest payments stopped in 1837, but it was not until 1844 that any action was taken by the church to collect interest or principal, and it was an additional sixteen years before the issue was resolved.

48 AHMM, 1809, ‘Sobre arrendamiento de la hacienda de Parota…promovido por Domingo Arechaga’.

49 AHMM, 1822, title page missing, which would probably have read: ‘Expediente sobre la destructión de la hacienda de Parota perteneciente al General Mariano Michelena’.

50 Ibid.

51 AHMM, 1836, ‘Expediente promovido por el Señor General Mariano Michelena sobre la aprovacion [sic] de la acta de la junta estrajudicial [sic]…‘

52 BL, ‘Libro de Consultas’, fol. 141.

53 ANM, Iturbide, 1858, 18 June.

54 ANM, Joaquin Aguilar, 1826, 14 Oct.; Iturbide, 1837, 30 June.

55 ANM, Valdovinos, 1840, 29 Jan.; Rincón, 1840, 15 Feb.

56 ANM, Aguilar, 1831, 29 Feb. These haciendas are located in the state of Guanajuato; their sale is not included in Table 1.

57 By ‘profits’, 1 mean sale prices above the amount of the original capital. If profits are defined to mean sale prices above the amount of the principal plus back interest, virtually all sales of property represented losses.

58 ANM, Rincón, 1839, 27 May; Rincón, 1840, 9 April.

59 Before Consolidation the amount of capital on loan in the bishopric was between 6 and 6.5 million pesos (see my article, ‘Consolidatión de Vales Reales’). Based on the bids of tithe collectors, property in the state of Michoacán accounted for 42 % of the total tithe for the bishopric, which will have to serve as a rough indication of the distribution of ecclesiastical credit within the bishopric.

60 No attempt has been made to adjust for inflation or deflation. First, the sales histories of some 100 haciendas and 200 urban properties, although not complete in every case, strongly suggest that in general property values had returned to pre-1810 levels by 1840. Second, 1 have not found evidence to support the widely-held view that church property was sold during the Reform for dramatically lower prices than equivalent properties bought, say, five years earlier. This is because during the first stage of the Reform church property was not sold in an open market, but was simply transferred to the individual who had rented it from the church (and who would not otherwise have been in the market at all) at a fixed price: the rent capitalised at five percent. During the second, more radical stage of the Reform (and there was much less property involved here) a significant proportion of church property was sold to individuals outside Michoacán – mainly speculators from Mexico City – so that an increase in the amount of property on the market was more or less matched by an increase in the number of buyers, tending to keep prices relatively stable. Furthermore, during the second stage of the Reform there was a built-in tendency to overvalue certain kinds of property. Most clearly overvalued is the approximately 170,000 pesos in ecclesiastical houses and rural property which were adjudicated to the government's creditors in payment of loans or services rendered to the government. Juan Bautista Espejo, for example, was awarded the Episcopal Palace and Gaol in 1863 in repayment of a loan to the government of 40,000 pesos. But Espejo had predictable difficulty in realising anything close to this amount – the gaolhouse was eventually sold for 7,000 pesos. ANM, Valdovinos, 1863, 24 Aug.; Larís, 1892, 24 Dec; Barroso. 1909, 9 July.

61 ANM, Pérez, 1847, 26 Nov.

62 ANM, Valdovinos, 1845, 17 Sept.; Salomo, 1845, 21 Oct.; Salomo, 1850, 25 Jan.; García, 1850, 21 Feb.; Huerta, 1850, 29 Apr.; Huerta, 1850, 19 Aug.; García, 1851, 30 Oct.; Valdovinos, 1852, 1 July; García, 1852, 23 Aug.; García, 1852, 23 Sept.; García, 1853, 28 Apr.; Huerta, 1853, 30 May; García 1853, 13 June; García, 1853, 10 Sept.; Valdovinos, 1853, 21 Oct.; García, 1853, 10 Dec; García, 1854, 15 May; García, 1854, 7 Aug.; Valdovinos, 1854, 23 Dec.

63 Navarrete, Fr. Nicolas P., ‘La Provincia Agustiniana de Michoacán durante los últimos 100 años (1859–1963)’, in de Morelia, Sociedad de Historia y Estadística del Arzobispado, Don Vasco de Quiroga y el Arzobispado de Morelia (Mexico, 1965), p. 337.Google Scholar

64 The Memoria de Hacienda of 1857 contains a list of church property that was sold as a result of the 1856 Ley Lerdo, totalling 702,072 pesos in 131 transactions. (The total given is 935,481 pesos, but 233,409 pesos involved property sold by city councils in 175 transactions.) The properties in the Memoria have been compared to notarised sales and also to the list in AHMCR, Documentos de bienes inmuebles, Año 1856–7, Legajo 4, ‘Cuenta que la Gefatura de Hacienda de Michoacán rinde a la Tesorería General de la Nación por ingresos y egresos que ha tenido el ramo de 5 % de traslaciones de dominio por adjudicaciones de fincas hechas en el Estado conforme a la Ley de 25 junio 1856’, and other lists in the same legajo.

65 Non income-producing property was also sold for 143,000 pesos, consisting mainly of convents, orchards (converted into house lots), the Casa del Diezmo, the Hospital, and the ecclesiastical prisons.

66 Lavrin, , ‘Mexican Nunneries’, pp. 294, 300–1Google Scholar, notes increases in the sales of the property of nunneries in Mexico City during the late 1840s and early 1850s, which she attributes to increased government demands upon the church. Hers is the strongest evidence in support of the often-repeated belief that the church lost property because of these forced loans, although she observes also that the number of houses lost to the nunneries was relatively small. See also Bazant, , Alienation, p. 34.Google Scholar

67 The three years were 1851, when private loans totalled 44,521 pesos and church loans 84,633 pesos; 1853, when private loans were 85,641 pesos and church loans were 84,533 pesos; and 1854, when private loans were 36,640 pesos and church loans were 58,056 pesos. Despite the fact that there was an increase in ecclesiastical paper assets in Michoacán as a result of the divestment of church property after 1845 (and, to a lesser extent, as a result of an increase in the number of liens created in bequests to the church, from approximately 6,200 pesos each year from 1811 to 1840 in wills notarised in Morelia to approximately 7,600 pesos each year from 1840 to 1856), church loans could not increase unless those who had long-standing debts or took on new debt when they purchased a property made a bequest that was regularly paid off or paid down these debts. That is what seems to have occurred: since the mid-1830s, many of the most successful businessmen had begun to take pains to pay down debt they acquired when they purchased property to manageable levels even if such amortisation was not required in the sale contract (ANM).

68 ANM, Valdovinos, 1856, 13 Feb. Some preferential treatment may also have been arranged regarding Gómez's rental of the largest Augustinian hacienda, Taretan, which Gómez had been renting since 1842, though this is not clear from the available documents.

69 The point that clerical divestment was related to a worsening political situation is made more strongly by Costeloe, , Church Wealth, p. 124Google Scholar, who sees the same phenomenon following the earlier attempt at Liberal reform in 1833: ‘It seems likely that the Juzgado's sale of its property was based on the same fiscal policy being followed by the regular orders. The clergy seem to have increased their sale of real estate whenever pressure for clerical reform began to build up’.

70 ANM, Aguilar, 1831, 1 Feb.; Valdovinos, 1842, 10 Oct.

71 AHMCR, Libros manuscritos, no. 268, ‘Libro en que constan las fincas y capitales pertenecientes al S. S. José… 1837–38’.

72 ANM, Valdovinos, 1845, 17 Sept.; García, 1854, 7 Aug.

73 On the church's subversive role during the war, see Costeloe, ‘The Mexican Church and the Rebellion of the Polkos’.

74 Recalling the deliberations preceding the 1856 Reform, Manuel Payno stated that the Lerdo law, like all early Reform measures, was a compromise designed to ‘consolidate peace between Church and State’ (quoted in Sinkin, , Mexican Reform, p. 125Google Scholar). Indeed, Sinkin's chapter 7 is entitled ‘Church and State: Search for Compromise’. The moderates lost out to the radical reformers, the so-called puros, in 1859.

75 Hale, , Mexican Liberalism, pp. 36–7Google Scholar; Navarro, Moisés González, Anatomia del poder en México, 1848–1853 (Mexico, 1977), pp. 374–5.Google Scholar

76 The phrase is used by Brading, , Origins, p. 96.Google Scholar He describes the ‘Liberal Crescent’ as ‘a vast arc of territory stretching from Guerrero through Michoacán, Jalisco, part of Guanajuato, Zacatecas, San Luis Potosí to Veracruz’.

77 The question of whether or not the church was consolidating its position with the elite is related to a larger question beyond the scope of this article, that is, whether or not, and to what extent, the elite was consolidating its own position by the late 1840s. See my PhD dissertation, ‘A Mexican Provincial Elite: Michoacán, 1810–1910’ (Stanford University, 1985), especially chapter 3, entitled ‘The Structure, Acquisition and Investment of Wealth’.

78 During the Porfiriato, the church conducted its economic activities through individuals such as Prebend Manuel Hinojosa, who loaned almost 325,000 pesos in the final decade of the Porfiriato, bought credits totalling 91,000, and also bought and sold considerable amounts of property (ANM). See also Mounce, Virginia N., An Archivist's Guide to the Catholic Church in Mexico (Palo Alto, Calif., 1979), pp. 24–5.Google Scholar