Because of the intolerable problems experienced in agriculture due to the bad faith of the field hands, I cannot but take up the pen to communicate the situation to you in hopes that you, the authority in this situation, can offer remedy.

I have employed at this estate more than two hundred workers from the towns of Tejupa and Coaco for the planting season, and at the time of the planting, only sixty showed up. Because of this, I had to leave six bushels of seed out of ten unplanted. I submitted daily complaints to the leaders of these people that they must come out and work as they had agreed; and when this failed, I had no other recourse but to establish a prison in this estate; I beg you will allow me to continue, and I asssure that this will only serve to contain the workers at night, and not to offer other punishment; With this petition, I offer you my gratitude and consideration.Footnote 1

God and L. Hacienda de Xonaca, September 28 of 1839 [translation by author]

—José María Olivares (Mendoza 1839)

Introduction

In 1839, José María Olivares wrote to authorities in the city of Atlixco to plead for permission to establish a prison (or tlapixquera,Footnote 2 in the local Nahuatl) to house his workers. In his letter Olivares pledges that he will only use the prison to keep the workers overnight and not for “other punishment.” In reading, the frustration of an hacendado watching acres of perfectly good land—his investment—lie fallow can be heard. He has contracted for over 200 workers, but only 60 showed up. He pleads daily with the authorities in the rural pueblos in which his workers live, but to no avail. What is the poor landowner to do? Finances are precarious and land prices volatile. The success of the enterprise rests on the control of labor.

Olivares’s plea was not exceptional. Indeed, during that 1839 fall harvest, six such requests were received in the city of Atlixco over a five-week period. These letters were part of an ongoing negotiation between landowners, villagers, and regional authorities regarding the existence and use of the tlapixqueras and, by extension, the control of labor (Newman 2013). The imprisonment of workers was a management trend that lasted less than 20 years, but it was a symptom of a larger issue. From the moment of its colonization, the Valley of Atlixco had labor problems. Records in local, state, and national archives speak to constant labor disputes and a regular turnover of hacienda ownership as agrarian enterprises failed (Newman 2013, 2014a, 2014b, 2015, 2017).

Investigations into the conditions of rural labor in Mexico have explored how the exploitation of peones, as the workers were known, may or may not have contributed to participation in the Mexican Revolution. Traditionally, the system of debt peonage has been the component of labor management that takes center stage, perhaps because it is the form of labor management that left archival records for historians to trace. Some of these historians have argued that the peonage system was one of virtual slavery, while others argue that debts were, in fact, a form of perks or incentives; e.g., Zavala (1944), Chevalier (1963), Gibson (1964), Bauer (1979), Cross (1979), Knight (1986), Tutino (1986), Brass (1990), Bracamonte y Sosa (1993), González Sánchez (1997), Nickel (1997), Knight (2002), Alston et al. (2009), and Lurtz (2016). The former interpretation explains the importance of tensions between worker and manager in what some have called the world’s first Marxist revolution, while the latter eliminates that tension as a possibility and calls into question whether that revolution was Marxist.

As the letter that opens this article highlights, however, debt was only one component of the relationship between manager and worker. The experiences of laborers and their relationship to management was significantly more complicated. Olivares’s letter demonstrates that management used a variety of tactics to control workers. These tactics shifted frequently, often leaving little to no imprint on the documentary record. The “tlapixquera method,” alluded to above, is identifiable only in a relatively brief correspondence (nine letters in total) held in a small, regional archive. While records explicating methods of labor control are ephemeral, happily, their material remains are often not.

This article addresses the ways in which the ruling classes manipulate the material world to transform peasants into the proletariat and establish a successful business as part of larger programs of modernization and nation building. I use the example of a rural Mexican hacienda and methods drawn from history and anthropology to explore the processes at work, with the expectation that, though this is a case study, the methods used here are applicable elsewhere. I begin by exploring the challenges faced by hacienda owners in the 19th-century Valley of Atlixco with an analysis of written records from the regional archives. If the success of an enterprise is measured by its monetary value, what dictated that success? What social factors seemed to impact the success or failure of that business? If the success of a business was dictated by social factors, how did the business owner control those factors? How were all of these measures linked to larger societal concerns?

To answer these questions, I build on the historical data with a discussion of physical evidence recovered through archaeological investigations at the Hacienda San Miguel Acocotla.Footnote 3 These data illuminate the material tactics employed at one property in the Valley of Atlixco to bring a world, perceived by the hacendado as chaotic, under control.

Price History of the Hacienda San Miguel Acocotla

The Hacienda San Miguel Acocotla is located in the Valley of Atlixco in the western portion of Mexico’s state of Puebla (Fig. 1). The ruins of the hacienda’s casco (the architectural core of the hacienda property) sit at the edge of the valley floor, approximately 1800 m above sea level and just east of a line of hills that runs south from the summit of the volcano Popocatépetl. The region has a temperate climate with a rainy season that lasts from late May through late September. When Spaniards began to settle the area in the mid-16th century, they found the conditions ideal for wheat production. In the 30 years following its 1577 establishment, the Hacienda San Miguel Acocotla would become just 1 of more than 90 small haciendas producing wheat in a valley that was ultimately one of the primary production centers for the European-introduced domesticate (Chevalier 1963:64).

Fig. 1
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Map showing the location of the Hacienda San Miguel Acocotla. (Map by author, 2010.)

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From its 16th-century founding until Mexico’s post-revolutionary agrarian reforms in the 1930s, the Hacienda Acocotla would change hands 25 times, through sales, auctions, dowries, and inheritances. Research in the Archivo de Notarías de Puebla, the Centro de Estudios de Historia de México, and the Archivo del Registro Agrario de Puebla produced property values associated with 11 of those transactions made during the 17th (5 values) and 19th centuries (6 values; no data were available for the 18th century) (Table 1).

Table 1 Known values of the Hacienda San Miguel Acocotla
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Throughout the 17th century, Acocotla was a sound business venture. A regression analysis demonstrates that the hacienda’s value was remarkably predictable (R2=0.95825; p-level=0.02430) (Fig. 2, top). During this period, actual property values remained exceedingly close to predicted values; the year of sale predicted 96% of the variation in sale price. Thus, as the hacienda changed hands from owner to owner, buyers and sellers could anticipate a reasonable return on their investment.

Fig. 2
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Regressions for 16th- (top) and 19th-century (bottom) property values, San Miguel Acocotla. (Figures by author, 2019.)

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After Mexico’s establishment of independence in 1821, however, ownership of the Hacienda San Miguel Acocotla became a precarious financial proposition. A regression analysis of Acocotla’s 19th-century values demonstrates the risky nature of the investment (R2=0.02185; p-level=0.21721) (Fig. 2, bottom). The year of sale fails to predict any variation in sale prices. As the property changed hands over the course of the century, some owners would see an unexpectedly high return on their initial investment, while others would suffer significant losses. These data do not allow a prediction of the price of the hacienda or change in value in any given year, they simply demonstrate how unpredictable the investment might be. Indeed, the failure of the regression analysis to offer any predictive power highlights the extreme uncertainty that landowners must have felt.

Mexico’s 19th-century economy was famously volatile, and, as these data clearly show, the Hacienda San Miguel Acocotla was not immune to the chaos. Throughout this period, elites struggled to maintain control, while the poor became increasingly disenfranchised thanks to political and economic struggles taking place on the national stage (Meyer 1973; Reina 1980; Tutino 1986, 2008; Van Young 1988; Kanter 2008). It was a century that would see more than 40 changes in the national government, multiple foreign invasions (including one resulting in the installment of a European emperor), and numerous civil wars, all capped off with a 30-year-long dictatorship that brought political stability at the cost of profound social transformation.

But, what was driving the rise and fall of Acocotla’s value? The hacienda was, of course, a business, and it might be assumed that its value was linked to the value of the goods it produced or its access to market. San Miguel Acocotla’s primary market product was wheat. Like hacienda prices, wheat prices during the 19th century were also extremely volatile and not predictable from year to year (R2=0.06692; p-level=0.15284); perhaps the price of wheat and the value of San Miguel Acocotla were related.

To test whether changes in the price of wheat were related to changes in the price of the hacienda, I calculated correlation coefficients that compared the price of the hacienda with the price of wheat, flour, and bread using Pearson’s correlation coefficients (Fig. 3, top). Because sample sizes for hacienda prices were small, I also used the product-moment correlation coefficient for small-sized samples (Fig. 3, bottom) (Sokal and Rohlf 1981:576–577).Footnote 4 Additionally, I calculated correlation coefficients comparing wheat, flour, and bread prices to each of the others (Fig. 3, top).

Fig. 3
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Pearson’s correlation coefficients for 19th-century hacienda values and commodity prices (top), and product-moment correlation coefficients for small-sized samples (following Sokal and Rohlf [1981]) (bottom). (Figure by author, 2016.)

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As the data in Figure 3 demonstrate (unsurprisingly, perhaps), the prices of wheat, flour, and bread were all correlated significantly, and the variance in price among these commodities may be explained by fluctuations in the others. While the prices of these commodities clearly correlate, the data do hold a surprise. The price of the Hacienda San Miguel Acocotla was, without a doubt, uncorrelated with the price of the wheat it was producing, or even the flour and bread that the wheat would become.

If the price of the product was not determinant in the value of San Miguel Acocotla, what, then, of access to market? The second half of Mexico’s 19th century was a period of rapid industrialization. As part of this process, railroad tracks were laid throughout the country, something that increased market access for many rural areas. Regardless of the price of wheat, maybe the ease with which owners of the Hacienda San Miguel Acocotla could transport their products to market impacted the price of the hacienda.

In 1893, rail service between Puebla and Atlixco was regularized to a level that allowed its service to impact the agricultural economy of the region for the first time (Castañeda González 2005:113–114). Acocotla’s higher values for 1896 and 1901 may be the result of market access, but it is interesting to note that the year in which the Hacienda San Miguel Acocotla sold for its lowest price was the very year that rail service became reliable. While this could be due to the necessity of service becoming established well-enough to impact markets, scholars have generally found that land prices rose in anticipation of the railroads, rather than trailing behind (Coatsworth 1974:49–50). Once again, basic assumptions about the factors driving Acocotla’s value prove to be untrue.

In 1974, John Coatsworth demonstrated a clear link between the arrival of regular rail service and social unrest among rural Mexicans. Further, he demonstrated that conflicts anticipated the arrival of railroads; concessions, the promise of railroads, were enough to fuel rural uprisings. Perhaps this dynamic of labor unrest that accompanied the introduction of the railroads is what caused Acocotla’s price to plummet. In fact, I argue that what was most important to the value of the Hacienda San Miguel Acocotla was the social world in which it functioned.

Crime and Its Control in the Valley of Atlixco

In 1814, owners of haciendas in the Valley of Atlixco wrote to the government to request forbearance in regard to their fiscal responsibilities. The valley’s hacendados complained of the impacts of the ongoing wars of independence on their harvest. Compounding the effects of the revolutionary social unrest, a smallpox epidemic was sweeping through central Mexico and, in the Valley of Atlixco, killing significant numbers of Indian laborers. The crops that had not been destroyed by soldiers and rebels went unharvested due to lack of labor. Hacienda after hacienda reported a significant financial loss (Varela 1814).

Business owners throughout Mexico surely let out a sigh of relief when Mexico concluded negotiations with Spain and signed the 1821 Treaty of Córdoba. War and uncertainty were over; calm and prosperity were expected to return with the official establishment of the nation. In the Valley of Atlixco, however, social unrest did not evaporate. Evidence from the municipal archives demonstrates that tensions remained high throughout the 19th century (Newman 2014a). Many of Acocotla’s records from the period deal with the responsibility of the hacienda owner to send men and horses to local authorities to assist in policing the area. Other documents speak frequently of robberies, kidnappings, and murders by and of the local populace. Fluctuations in the number of peones housed in the hacienda’s workers’ quarters, or calpanería, (housed as part of an agreement that they would be employed full time and year round) speak to either economic instability or the difficulty of maintaining a consistent worker population throughout the 19th century.

The impressionistic picture that these records paint suggests that inhabitants of the Valley of Atlixco had to contend with a significant level of social upheaval, but how accurate is that picture? In an attempt to answer this question, I used an index of the municipal archives in Atlixco to catalog all the records that could be identified as relating to the broadly defined topic “public security,” which included any record that might be somehow related to criminal activity (Guadalupe Curi et al. 1984). I subdivided these records into two categories: “crime,” which included any records relating to an actual criminal act, such as the report of a robbery or an account of a criminal trial, and “control,” which included any record related to an official attempt to control crime, such as the construction of a new prison or establishment of a new police force.

The municipal archives in Atlixco hold a total of 16,525 records dating to the 19th century, of which 2,883 (or just over 17%) relate to public security (Fig. 4). Of these 2,883 records, 1,549 (54%) deal with attempts to control crime, 948 (33%) represent actual criminal acts, and the remaining 386 (13%) cannot be identified as one or the other from the index alone.

Fig. 4
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Number of total records and records related to public security, by year, held in the municipal archives in Atlixco, Puebla, Mexico. (Figure by author, 2019.)

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As Figure 4 demonstrates, in most years the total number of records related to public security followed the trends in the total number of records kept in the archives. A regression analysis of the relationship between total number of records and public-security records confirms this, with variation in one dataset explaining the variation in the other more than four out of five times (R2=0.82417; p-level=0). While public security was not something that was predictable over time—it rose and fell dramatically—the correlation between total records and public security illustrates that only rarely was a disproportionate amount of attention being paid to crime and its control. It is worth noting that these records only represent reported instances of crime and official attempts to control it, and that other instances that may have been dealt with unofficially are unrecoverable. For the purposes of this analysis, I assume that reporting of both crime and its control remained relatively steady, and that archival records related to crime are likely representative of the lived experience in the Valley of Atlixco.

Lived Experience and Land Value

While these analyses about prices and analyses about crimes are informative, they only partially elucidate the social and emotional experiences of the people buying and selling the Hacienda San Miguel Acocotla. With 19th-century prices so volatile, 100-year-long trends fail to capture the feelings of individuals faced with decisions about buying and selling property in the valley. Furthermore, it was not only prices that were volatile; the chaos permeated society, as demonstrated by the unpredictability of crime and social unrest. In fact, only the few years preceding each transfer of property likely had the greatest impact on the way the valley’s inhabitants felt about their world and, thus, on their financial decisions.

Archival records offer six price points for the Hacienda San Miguel Acocotla during the century between independence and revolution (1810–1910) (Table 1). These six price points may be broadly grouped into four periods bounded by the prices paid for the Hacienda San Miguel Acocotla (Fig. 5). First, “Period 1,” is a time of declining prices, beginning with Acocotla’s sale for 64,341.00 Mexican pesos in 1825 and ending with its sale for 31,010 Mexican pesos in 1860; a period during which the price dropped by more than half. “Period 2” begins with the 1860 sale and ends in 1885 with the next sale at 42,851; a period during which the price increased by more than 30%. Following that sale, the trend reverses as the price again declines. “Period 3” is bounded by that 1885 sale and the next sale for 30,000 Mexican pesos in 1893, the lowest price of the 19th century and a decline in value by more than 30%. Finally, following that low point, “Period 4” is defined by sales in both 1896 and 1901 for the equal prices of 80,000 Mexican pesos—far and away the highest price fetched by the Hacienda San Miguel Acocotla in its entire history and a dramatic increase in value of more than 150%.

Fig. 5
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(a) Trends in wheat prices for Periods 1–4 (left). Bars represent sales/valuations of the Hacienda San Miguel Acocotla. (As Figure 4 shows, archival holdings are spotty prior to 1836—a number of years have no records at all—so I concentrated only on records from the period 1836–1899.); and (b) number of records related to “Crime” (in black) and “Control” (in gray) over time in the municipal archives in Atlixco, Puebla, Mexico. Gray bars represent sales/valuations of the Hacienda San Miguel Acocotla. (Figure by author, 2019.)

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When these data are juxtaposed with wheat prices broken down by the same periods, the trends in prices appear to be informative (though it should be noted that wheat price data are extremely limited for the earlier periods) (Fig. 5a). In Period 1, wheat prices appear to be trending down, and, at the end of that period, the price of the Hacienda San Miguel Acocotla has dropped. In Period 2, wheat prices trend upward sharply and so, too, does Acocotla’s price. Following that sale, in Period 3, again, wheat prices trend down and Acocotla’s price follows. Period 4, however, breaks the mold. The price of wheat plummets while the price of the Hacienda Acocotla rises to the highest known for a sale in its history.

By adding trends in crime data, the picture can be fleshed out significantly and the dissonance of Period 4 explained (Fig. 5b). In periods during which the price of Acocotla rises (2 and 4), so, too, do documented attempts to control crime. During periods in which the price drops (1 and 3) attempts to control crime also drop. Regardless of what actual criminal activity is recorded, concerns about crime mirror the rise and fall of prices of the Hacienda San Miguel Acocotla.

The most extreme example of this is seen in Period 4, when not only does the trend toward increasing control rise, but it does so in a way that is far out of proportion to the reality of crime. Interestingly, this is the very period during which increased social unrest would be expected because of the introduction of railroads (following Coatsworth [1974]), and, yet, while concern over crime is on the rise, social unrest trends downward. Taken together, these data suggest that, while prices of the hacienda’s commodities may have influenced the value of the property, so, too, did elite perceptions of the success or failure of social control. In fact, social control may have been the most salient factor driving the value of the hacienda. When society as a whole moved toward controlling social chaos, San Miguel Acocotla’s buyers felt more confident about their economic investment.

Material Remains of Social Control

How do concerns about public security translate into everyday life? As has been seen, the social and political world inhabited by Acocotla’s owners was unpredictable and ever changing. Society at large was deeply concerned about that unpredictability, and, as the 19th century progressed, Mexico’s elite became increasingly anxious about controlling crime as a method of stabilizing society (Vanderwood 1992; Buffington 2000; Piccato 2001; Garza 2007). However, the project to create a stable and modern nation meant more than simply eliminating crime. It meant transforming the very identities of Mexico’s poor in the most fundamental ways. As far as Mexico’s elites were concerned, society was unstable because of the poor and the crime they brought—reforming the poor would steady the nation and create the good consumers and producers necessary for industrial development (Ruiz 2014:176).

The transformation of Mexico’s poor was not a project peculiar to the 19th century. From the earliest years of colonization, Spaniards set about remaking the identities of the conquered. The reshaping of physical space was understood to be a vehicle for reforming social behavior, for generating a new habitus (Hanks 2010:1–7). The venues for this project were many—from the construction of a missionary church to the wholesale resettlement of communities in Spanish-designed towns. Though ostensibly established for economic purposes, haciendas, too, were prime loci for the control and assimilation of indigenous populations (Wolf and Mintz 1957; Chevalier 1963; Gibson 1964; Wolf 1969; Van Young 1983; Knight 2002; Newman 2013, 2014a)

By 1532, Spanish settlers were colonizing the Valley of Atlixco (Paredes Martínez 1991:40; Gerhard 1993:56). These early settlers used the physical space of the hacienda to accomplish two intertwined goals. First, haciendas became a space to assimilate the local population to Spanish ways of life. Central to the program was the conversion of New Spain’s indigenous population to Roman Catholicism, and the cascos of New Spain’s haciendas allowed for a physical structure within which this project could be implemented. But, of course, most Spaniards came to New Spain seeking more than souls for the church. Many sought wealth and social advancement as well. In this context, haciendas also acted as a structure, both physical and social, for the exploitation of labor and the extraction of surplus (Newman 2017).

Throughout New Spain, the newly arrived colonizers explicitly linked social behavior to the built environment and “the care and presentation of the body” (Hanks 2010:1). Scholars working on colonial period sites throughout North America have identified the ways in which everything from clothing and jewelry to architecture and site planning were used to transform the doxa of the colonized and generate a new habitus (Loren 2001, 2015; Voss 2005, 2008). Loren (2015:144) argues: “The body was at the heart of the colonial project.” I argue here that those methods were not forgotten. Just as 16th-century Spaniards needed to transform Mexico’s rural indigenous population into obedient Catholic taxpayers, the 19th-century elite needed to remake Mexico’s poor into good capitalist producers and consumers, and material culture provided a vehicle for achieving this goal.

Though many classes of material culture may allow a glimpse of the agency of the working classes in defining their identity in defiance of the elite classes, architecture is an ideal category with which to illuminate intent from the top down. This article is concerned with the redefinition of rural identity driven by elite landowners. The built environment, created by and for the elite, reflected their social values, and it dictated how subject bodies moved through space and, thus, how those subject bodies thought and behaved (Rapoport 1969; Bourdieu 1973; Glassie 1975; Foucault 1979; Hillier and Hanson 1984; Blanton 1994). Architecture, quite literally, channeled the body into an acceptable, carefully controlled doxa. Conduct and purpose were embodied as inhabitants moved through their day.

Archaeological investigations at the Hacienda San Miguel Acocotla demonstrate the ways in which the Porfirian elite created a physical world that encouraged the embodiment of capitalist principles as those elite sought to stabilize society. Ideals of industrial capitalist production, such as private ownership, efficiency, and consumption, had to be transformed from heterodoxy to doxa if the elite were to control the poor. During the latter half of the 19th century, Acocotla’s owners and managers tackled this problem by remaking the physical world in which workers lived.

Embodying Capitalist Ideals

For those who would become the working classes, very little was “natural” about the behaviors and social structure required by modern industrial capitalism, which came with a concept of efficiency that was all its own. The design and organization of physical space, from factories to worker housing, provided one vehicle for transforming peasants into the proletariat. This material manipulation is something that has been well established by historical archaeologists working throughout the world; e.g., Upton (1983), Leone (1984, 1995), Beaudry (1989), Mrozowski (1991), Johnson (1996), Jamieson (2000), Casella (2001), Singleton (2001), Funari and Zarankin (2003), Shackel and Palus (2006), Baxter (2012), Meyers (2012), Nashli and Young (2013), Delle (2014), Whelan and O’Keeffe (2014), and Newman (2017).

The Hacienda San Miguel Acocotla was a rural farming property and, as such, might not be an obvious site for the social transformations that came with industrial capitalism. As I have discussed, however, Mexico’s late 19th-century elites were intent on making their society and nation a productive, stable, unified international power. Rural properties like Acocotla were as much a part of this process as anything else (Miller 1990). It is a process that can be read in the redesign of Acocotla’s 19th-century architecture.

In 1686 and then again in 1859, San Miguel Acocotla was assessed in preparation for its sale. The documentation of these assessments provides detailed descriptions of Acocotla’s architecture and a baseline for the understanding of the transformations to come (Enriquez 1686). Nearly 200 years passed from the first to the second description, and, during that period, social priorities shifted. The first assessment emphasized physical structures like Acocotla’s chapel and material culture associated with performing the Mass (Fig. 6). The second assessment emphasized structures associated with farming and material culture associated with handling livestock and growing crops. Priorities of religious conversion became priorities of capitalist production.

Fig. 6
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Hacienda San Miguel Acocotla’s chapel. (Photo by author, 2005.)

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In spite of this shift in emphasis, however, very little seems to have actually changed in the physical form and layout of Acocotla’s structures. Throughout those two centuries of occupation, the hacienda’s casco would have measured approximately 50 × 50 m. The casco included a couple of bedrooms, living and dining space, a kitchen, some limited storage and work areas, and a henhouse.

The contrast between the ruins encountered today and the descriptions found in the historical record is startling. Acocotla’s casco now measures more than 14,500 m2—an increase in architectural space of more than 12,000 m2 since the 1860 assessment was made. Archaeological study at Acocotla confirms that, in the period after 1860, San Miguel Acocotla underwent a significant and extensive remodel that created a highly controlled, hierarchical space (Fig. 7).

Fig. 7
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Hacienda San Miguel Acocotla today and excavation units (C=Calpanería unit, M=midden, A=randomly chosen unit). (Figure by author, 2014.)

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Acocotla’s 19th-century remodel transformed work space, something that made the hacienda a more efficient business. Areas for housing livestock and storing both tools and harvested crops were dramatically expanded. Access to all of these spaces became increasingly restricted and architecturally hierarchical (Newman 2017). By the end of the 19th century, even food to feed Acocotla’s inhabitants was grown in a walled, protected area accessible only to those who lived inside the walls of the hacienda’s casco (Fig. 7, 1). The casco’s increasing complexity—with separate, controlled, and defined spaces dedicated to particular tasks—increased control over the hacienda’s workers. As a worker moved through the architectural space, task and time could be carefully controlled in ways never before possible.

More insidiously, Acocotla’s redesign also transformed the domestic spaces of all of its inhabitants. Today, upon approaching the ruins of Acocotla’s casco, the first thing the visitor notices is a long row of small rooms, each measuring just 3 × 3 m; each would have housed just one family (Figs. 7, 27; 8). Together, these rooms comprise the calpanería, or “workers’ quarters.” The calpanería was a new architectural form constructed at central Mexican haciendas during the 19th century (Jones 1978; Konrad 1980:313; Trautmann 1981:198; Charlton 1986; Terán Bonilla 1996:307). Archaeological research suggests that Acocotla’s calpanería was built in two phases: first, sometime after the 1859 assessment was written, and then second, during an expansion that took place sometime after 1882 (Newman 2014b:33–34).

Housing workers at the hacienda’s casco itself was not the traditional way of doing things. Previously, workers in the Valley of Atlixco lived in independent or hacienda-sponsored villages, but, now, with a push toward increasing efficiency and securing a reliable workforce, Acocotla’s owners moved their workers into what might be termed “company housing.” Not only did this new living space eliminate any independence that might have come with the old way of doing things, it did not even address the most essential of domestic needs. The new worker housing was so basic that Acocotla’s peones had to knock at the door of the hacienda’s casco just to obtain water (from a trough shared with the goat herds).

The calpanería, however, did exactly that for which it was designed. It facilitated control, naturalized the social structure, and allowed the hacienda owner to commodify labor across gender lines in ways it had never been before (Newman 2013, 2017). The calpanería was constructed to ensure maximum performance and efficiency, not to ensure domestic bliss.

Acocotla’s calpanería was functionally inadequate (for the workers), but it also eliminated family independence. The small rooms flanked the main entrance of the hacienda. Though the rooms offered some limited privacy, the majority of domestic activities would, in fact, have taken place in the unshielded field fronting the structure (Fig. 8). Further, this shared space was arranged in such a way as to force the inhabitants to collaborate in domestic activities as basic as preparing an evening meal (Newman 2014a). In a world where household identity has long been linked materially and metaphorically to the hearth, the physical organization of Acocotla’s calpanería was a direct attack on family structure (Kellogg 1995; Burkhart 1997; King 2008:1224).

Fig. 8
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Hacienda San Miguel Acocotla’s calpanería and the field in front, view to the southeast. (Photo by author, 2005.)

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Privacy, too, was disregarded. In essence, the workers shared domestic space. The fields in front of Acocotla’s calpanería were the casco’s “front lawn.” The workers and their activities were unshielded from public view. Any owner, manager, or visitor approaching the structure would have had the opportunity to survey the domestic space and behavior of its inhabitants. In this arrangement, the hacienda’s owner or manager could approach from the road or emerge from the hacienda with no warning. Acocotla’s peones and their families would have to behave as if they were always being watched—in anthropological terms, they would have had to engage in a self-reflexive monitoring of their actions (Giddens 1984). Personal time, family time, “downtime” no longer existed.

The calpanería was not the only space that would have acted on the behavior and identity of Acocotla’s workers. Domestic space throughout the newly redesigned casco codified social hierarchy. While Acocotla’s lowest-status, most poorly paid workers occupied the small, bare rooms outside the hacienda’s 5 m high walls, more trusted, better paid, and higher-status workers were allotted slightly nicer, safer, and more private spaces in the interior Goat Patio (Fig. 7, 29). There, families enjoyed the protections of the walls and the nearby guards who controlled access to the casco, as well as amenities like easy access to water.

If one were able to penetrate into the most difficult-to-access portions of Acocotla’s casco, one would finally reach the living quarters of the hacienda’s owner, the Patio of the Lime (Fig. 7, 23). This highly protected, carefully guarded space was filled with flowering lime trees encircling a decorative fountain. The surrounding two stories of rooms included dining, entertaining, and sleeping areas, along with a private kitchen. Today, the rooms are in ruins, but some of the elaborate decorative elements remain in evidence, from pilasters on walls to inlaid mosaics around windows.

The redesign of the Hacienda San Miguel Acocotla’s casco accomplished something new—though perhaps not something wholly unique (Neiman 1986). As elsewhere, the reconfiguration of Acocotla’s domestic and work areas brought multiple classes of worker, manager, and owner into one single architectural space. This space codified the social structure, placing the lowest class of workers at the outermost boundaries, socially and architecturally, while offering increasing levels of space, privacy, control, and protection to higher classes of workers. Even the hacienda-owner’s residence was embedded in this shared work/living structure, with, of course, the greatest amount of space, privacy, control, and protection of any area. Acocotla’s domestic spaces were the new social order made concrete.

Conclusion

In 1860, doña Ana de Treviño de Ruelas purchased the Hacienda San Miguel Acocotla for 31,010 gold pesos. It is not known whether she was excited by the bargain price she paid for the hacienda, or if she were anxious about buying a volatile business in an even more volatile world. At that moment, multiple civil wars raged in Mexico, and, less than two years after her purchase, the French would invade the country and ultimately establish a short-lived empire. Closer to home, 1855 and 1857 had witnessed the highest incidence of crime in Atlixco in two decades. At home itself, Acocotla’s casco was crumbling, infested with rats that had burrowed into its adobe walls (Santa María 1860).

In spite of all these challenges, the value of the hacienda would increase more than 150% by century’s end, ultimately selling for 80,000 gold pesos in 1896. The price of the wheat it was producing, however, would increase only 5% during that same period. Clearly doña Ana and her successors were doing something right, and their accomplishments cannot be linked exclusively to rises in prices of the goods they were producing.

Doña Ana’s 1860 purchase punctuates the tumultuous century at an interesting moment. It would be 15 more years before Mexico’s famous dictator Porfirio Diaz would take control of the country and introduce his program of rapid modernization, yet Mexico was already laying essential groundwork for this process. The War of Reform, being fought at that moment throughout the region, was, arguably, about economic modernization and the introduction of capitalist values (Powell 1977:296). Though conservatives would ascend during the short-lived French Empire, the nation was irrevocably set on a trajectory of liberal modernization.

If doña Ana and her successors were to reap the rewards of the new economic order, they had to resolve the labor problems that had plagued the Hacienda San Miguel Acocotla and its neighboring properties for centuries. Though her methods are often thought of as those employed by paternal factory owners in urban industrial contexts (e.g., Mrozowski [2000]), rural Mexico was also part of the 19th-century push for modernization and efficiency. Doña Ana was part of a class of rural elites seeking to increase social control and stabilize society. When business owners like doña Ana succeeded, their economic investments flourished.

These business owners did their part to construct a modern Mexico by seeking to create an efficient, reliable workforce. They could not be dependent on rural laborers who would abandon their jobs partway through the planting season, leaving 60% of seeds unsown. Hacendados like José Maria Olivares resorted to constructing prisons—but that was the old way of doing things. Doña Ana and her successors opted to construct homes instead.

At first glance, the decisions of doña Ana and her successors may appear benign—an improvement, even, over the living conditions and labor-management techniques of the previous half century. By the end of the 19th century, Acocotla had a casco designed to function as home and business for the entire community. It was a space that was logical and well organized, with carefully controlled points of entry and exit. The ways in which all members of the community moved through space, completed tasks, and used their time were carefully monitored. And, in creating an “efficient” physical space, hacienda owners and managers were rationalizing the behavior of their workers. Surely such rational, carefully controlled workers would contribute to the construction of a rational, carefully controlled society.

It is hard to argue with doña Ana’s move to make her business more efficient; her more important and more dangerous project, however, was in transforming the domestic lives of her workers. Mexico’s elite identified indigenous villages, with their communal ways of living and ethos of subsistence farming, as a fundamental bar to economic and social progress. Beginning in the 1850s, Mexico’s federal government began passing laws to privatize all communally held land with an eye toward disrupting rural indigenous lifeways.

The calpanería offered another form of disruption. Domestic space may have offered an inducement to families considering employment at Acocotla—the small rooms associated with the grand casco were likely nicer than anything available in their own small villages. Quickly, though, family structure was disrupted and identity transformed as the physical form of the built environment reshaped daily practices. Though inhabitants of Acocotla’s calpanería would have had to function in a communal way, it was not the community structure to which they were accustomed. Instead of independent domestic units sharing in the economic successes and failures of the community, the domestic unit was dismantled and made communal, and economic success became competition within that new community.

The hierarchical structure of Acocotla’s domestic space rationalized the social order. Workers who could be counted on were “promoted” into a nicer, more-private domestic space. Success removed them from the community and provided them with tangible rewards visible to all. These workers enjoyed easy access to necessities like water, and they were protected from bandits and soldiers wandering the countryside. The rewards of reliable work and responsible behavior were there for all to see, but only a few to achieve.

The renovation of the Hacienda San Miguel Acocotla’s casco allowed owners to transform peasants into the proletariat. Its physical space channeled subject bodies into the behaviors necessary to support an industrial capitalist business, while simultaneously disrupting the communal ethos of the past. If Acocotla’s rise in value is taken as proof, this project seems to have been wildly successful; however, a little more than a decade after that final 19th-century sale, the Mexican Revolution would erupt. As the bourgeoisie have found time and again, the hegemonic transformation of peasant identity is a project that carries with it a certain amount of danger. Not all aspects of the doxa are negotiable. By revolution’s end, Acocotla would be nothing more than abandoned ruins, and its workers would return to the lives they had led for hundreds of years.