Hacienda

This is about a hacienda, a vast ranch. For the Manchester discotheque, see The Haçienda. In Spanish, Ministerio de Hacienda means "Ministry of Public Finances", or Treasury. The Portuguese language equivalent is fazenda . The equivalent in Argentina, Uruguay is Estancia and in Chile is Fundo

Hacienda is a Spanish word describing a vast ranch, common in the Pampa.

The grand rural estates of the Pampa, dedicated to cattle (Central Argentina, Uruguay, southern-most Brazil) were called Estancia, though. The spanish term Estancia indicating a stationary form of lifestock operation, as opposed to the archaic, nomadic way of catching the cattle which roamed free in the plains.

Uruguay, Departamento Florida, traditionel Estancia

The hacienda system of Argentina, parts of Brazil, Mexico and New Granada was a system of large land-holdings that were an end in themselves as the marks of status, which produced little for export beyond the hacienda itself, which aimed for self-sufficiency in everything but luxuries meant for display, which were destined for the handful of people in the circle of the patrón.

Haciendas originated in land grants, mostly made to minor nobles, as the grandees of Spain were not motivated to leave, and the bourgeoisie had little access to royal dispensation. In Mexico, the hacienda system can be considered to have its origin in 1529, when the Spanish crown granted to Hernán Cortés, the title of Marquis of the Valley of Oaxaca, which entailed a tract of land that included all of the present state of Morelos. Significantly, the grant included all the Indians then living on the land, and power of life and death over every soul on his domains. There was no court of appeals governing a hacienda. The unusually large and profitable Jesuit hacienda Santa Lucia near Mexico, established in 1576 and lasting to the expulsion in 1767, has been reconstructed by Herman W. Konrad (1980), from archival sources, revealing the nature and operation of the hacienda system in Mexico, its slaves, its systems of land tenure, the workings of its isolated, complete, interdependent society.

Fazenda of the 1850s, Paraiba Valley, Brazil

In Mexico, the owner of a hacienda was generally called the hacendado. Aside from the small circle at the top of the hacienda society, the remainder were peons (fieldhands working on foot) or mounted gauchos. The peons worked land that belonged to the patrón. The campesinos worked small holdings, and owed a portion to the patrón. The economy of the 18th century was largely a barter system, for little specie circulated on the hacienda.

Stock raising was central to the haciendas, which were not farms. Where the hacienda included working mines, as in Mexico, the patrón might be immensely wealthy.

The mestizo population on the great estates have always been and remain devoutly faithful and fatalistic followers of the Roman Catholic Church, which has used its political influence to retain the status quo. The Church, and separately its orders, especially the Jesuits, were granted vast hacienda holdings, which irrevocably linked the interests of the Church with the rest of the landholding class. Wealthy tourists now stay at Jesuit haciendas in the valley of Patate, Ecuador, or La Compañia in Pichincha;

In South America, the hacienda remained after the collapse of the colonial system in the early 19th century. In some places, such as Santo Domingo, the end of colonialism meant the fragmentation of the large plantation holdings into a myriad small subsistence farmers' holdings, an agrarian revolution. In Argentina and elsewhere, a second, international, money-based economy developed quite independent of the haciendas which sank into rural poverty.

In most of Latin America the old holdings remained. In Mexico the haciendas were abolished on paper in 1917, during the revolution, but powerful remnants of the system deeply affect Mexico today.

The hacienda system and lifestyle are also prominent in the Philippines, which was also colonized by Spain for over 300 years. Attempts to break up the hacienda system in the Philippines through land reform laws have proven middling at best.

External links

*Hacienda system described
*Haciendas on Yucatan Today
*Hacienda Route on the Yucatan Peninsula
*Historic Hacienda of Mexico
*Historic Haciendas of the Andes ( Argentina, Chile, Peru, Ecuador )
*Fazendas / historic coffee estates of the Paraiba Valley, Brazil