Hacienda - Personnel

Personnel

In Spanish America, the owner of a hacienda was called the hacendado or patrón. Aside from the small circle at the top of the hacienda society, the remainder were peones, campesinos (peasants), or mounted ranch hands variously called vaqueros, gauchos (in the Southern Cone), among other terms. The peones worked land that belonged to the patrón. The campesinos worked small holdings, and owed a portion to the patrón. The economy of the eighteenth century was largely a barter system, with little specie circulated on the hacienda. There was no court of appeals governing a hacienda. Stock raising was central to ranching haciendas. Where the hacienda included working mines, as in Mexico, the patrón might be immensely wealthy. The unusually large and profitable Jesuit hacienda Santa Lucía near Mexico City, established in 1576 and lasting to the expulsion in 1767, has been reconstructed by Herman Konrad from archival sources. This reconstruction has revealed the nature and operation of the hacienda system in Mexico, its peones, its systems of land tenure and the workings of its isolated, intradependent society.

The Catholic Church and its orders, especially the Jesuits, were granted vast hacienda holdings, linking the interests of the church with the rest of the landholding class. In the history of Mexico and other Latin American countries, this resulted in hostility to the church, including confiscations of their haciendas and other restrictions.

In the Caribbean, haciendas, mostly in the forms of sugar plantations, were staffed by slaves brought from Africa. In Puerto Rico, this system ended with the abolition of slavery in Puerto Rico on March 22, 1873.