The Andean Hacienda Revisited

Our current understanding of the Andean estate as it operated between the late nineteenth century and the 1960s owes much to the pioneering work of three economists, Juan Martínez Alier, Shane Hunt, and Geoffrey Bertram.^[127] All three rejected the widespread image of Andean seigneurial estates as feudal or semifeudal enterprises whose inefficiency and apparent waste of resources reflected the social parasitism and lack of entrepreneurial spirit of the hacendados, latifundists who relentlessly and brutally exploited their Indian "serfs." All three authors sought to demonstrate that the persistence of labor tenancy made economic sense from the perspective of both hacendado and colono as long as certain assumptions prevailed. In concluding this chapter, I summarize Bertram's discussion of the hacienda, which draws and expands on the work of Keith Griffin, Martínez Alier, and Hunt, and then highlight how my own discussion goes beyond the 1970s revisionism.

Bertram suggests that because of sociopolitical conditions the opportunity costs of land were lower for the large landholder than they were for the peasant. Andean hacendados attempted to monopolize land in order to manipulate other markets, especially those for labor and credit. Wage labor does not automatically represent a more advanced type of relations of production than labor tenancy does. Because both hacendado and colono were rational actors, the choice between the two systems "rests upon the efficiency and profitability in production for external markets, in the case

of the landowner, and the comparison between the cash wage offered and the value of usufruct access to land for the colono." Labor tenancy will prevail as long as the value of a year's access to a plot of land for the colono is higher than the cash wage for a year's labor on the hacienda, and the value of a year's labor is in turn higher than the opportunity cost of the same plot for the hacendado. Under these conditions both hacendado and peasant are better off than they would be in a system based exclusively on payment by means of a cash wage.

The peasant enterprise, employing the labor of the whole family and redistributing the output, constituted the underpinning of the Andean hacienda. Colonos preferred it to wage labor also because it provided security and employment to all members of the family and a safety cushion in difficult times. "Unless there is full employment in the wider system," guaranteeing "any member of the peasant enterprise employment at the prevailing wage rate," the peasant enterprise will use its members' labor even when its marginal product is substantially below the prevailing wage rate and will tenaciously defend the access to land on which it is based. Bertram, following Martínez Alier, saw proof for this assertion in the fact that expulsion of a colono from a hacienda was often considered punishment.

This system comes under pressure through exogenous change, especially through increases in the price paid for hacienda products. The hacendado will seek to raise productivity and to work more of the land directly, in "demesne." With a sufficient increase in the value of estate lands, the hacendado will try to abandon the labor tenancy regime altogether in favor of wage labor. In an open economy—one in which the landlord does not automatically possess the type of power requisite for keeping his or her opportunity costs for land and labor stable—the balance of class forces ultimately determines the capacity of the landlord to carry out such changes. "The same forces which led the hacienda to seek to expand could also produce a countervailing (though not equal) strengthening of the peasantry's motive and ability to resist." The notorious slowness with which innovations such as enclosures, specialization of labor, new crop types, improved pastures, and new stock breeds have been introduced on serrano estates during the twentieth century was due not to the "feudal" mentality of the large landlords but rather to the strength of Indian opposition. Bertram concludes that the "hacienda has thus been an agent of progress (in the sense of modernization of the rural sector) while the peasantry has been conservative." Peasants calculated that the benefits of modernization would accrue primarily to other groups while they would have to bear the costs.^[128]

How does this analysis fit into the preceding discussion of altiplano livestock estates? In order to stress the economic rationality of the Andean agrarian structure, Bertram and Martínez Alier confound and conflate the issue of the incorporation of peasants into the estate with the issue of alternative labor regimes, labor tenancy or wage labor. The expansion of the hacienda would be explicable by the same shift of relative factor costs as the expansion of hacienda demesne production. Indeed, these authors see both processes as essentially one and the same thing: in reaction to increasing commodity prices hacendados reclaimed old lands of the hacienda to which they possessed titles dating to colonial times but which they had not worked because of a lack of a market. This construct clearly does not explain the great majority of land transfers from peasants to hacendados in the altiplano during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It allows the authors to disregard issues of ideology and culture involved in the incorporation of peasants and their land into haciendas. From the perspective of the peasants, this process represented a totally distinct and much less cataclysmic change than did any attempt to switch from labor tenancy to wage labor, even though, from the perspective of the hacendado, both could be understood as reactions to changing relative prices.

Most authors writing on the Latin American hacienda, including Bertram, Hunt, and Martínez Alier, assume that estates held land far in excess of productive needs, primarily as a mechanism to pry loose labor from the Indian community sector. But this assertion is difficult to prove, and the case of the altiplano seems to contradict it. Land not regularly used by its putative owner was likely to be invaded by peasants or neighboring hacendados. When the market improved for livestock products after the 1850s, hacendados required both more labor and more land. The acquisition of land cannot be explained simply as a ploy to incorporate more labor into the estate. At the same time, the incorporation of more labor cannot be said to have been the consequence of the monopolization of land by hacendados. In fact, by the late 1910s, when the extraordinary expansion of the hacienda sector had largely run its course, additional labor requirements were, it appears, met less by transfers from the communities to the haciendas and more by shifts of colonos from one estate to another.^[129]

During the phase of expansion the willingness of community peasants to work as colonos on estates should not be explained primarily by hacienda monopolization of land. More important factors were the increasing commercial dependence of peasants on gamonales eager to use their credit and compadrazgo relationships as a means to incorporate both the land and the labor of their clients into new or expanding estates; demographic pressures from within the peasant communities, which did not automatically derive

from hacienda expansion itself; and finally the greater concentration of effective force in the hands of provincial hacendado elites. Altogether the significance of the shift from freeholder to colono, from the ideological perspective of the peasant, was perhaps less dramatic than commonly assumed. When peasants passed into the sphere of hacienda control, together with their families, their livestock, and their land, they were changing one patrón, the district governor or some other authority, for another, the hacendado. Gavin Smith has captured this shift aptly for the central Peruvian highlands by suggesting that hacienda expansion may be understood as part of a community coming under the sway of an hacendado, while not necessarily severing ties with and participation in the trunk community.^[130]

Not only did hacienda colonos and community peasants have more in common and, indeed, show a greater overlap than usually assumed, but they also showed a similar kind of internal differentiation. The minority of colonos with no or very little livestock, and no or very little family labor to rely on, enjoyed considerably fewer benefits from their peasant enterprise than most others did. They were more open to the lures of modernizing estate owners when these sought to shift the balance of remunerations from usufruct rights to wage payments. Poor colonos relativize the notion of Martínez Alier and Bertram that dismissal from the estate was considered punishment. A small number of colonos in the altiplano were quite mobile by the early twentieth century, moving between estates in search of the best remunerations. Martínez Alier's argument that the situation of labor tenants was more favorable than that of community freeholders thus has to be specified both in terms of the period and the specific strata of colonos and types of estates.^[131]

Only the massive transfer of land from the peasant sector to the estate sector between the late 1850s and 1920 created more favorable animal/land ratios in the estate sector than existed in communities of peasant freeholders. But even by 1910 or 1920 peasants integrated as colonos into newly formed small estates often had no more pastureland available for their own flocks than they had controlled previously as community freeholders.^[132]

To understand the resilience of seigneurial livestock estates based on labor tenancy, we need to go beyond a consideration of commodity, labor, and land markets. Changes in these markets were a necessary condition for the transition toward capital-intensive agrarian enterprises using wage labor. But they were never sufficient to bring about these changes. The cost of capital, the high-risk environment, the neocolonial mode of constructing power, and peasant resistance to such power "explain" the reluctance of

owners of seigneurial estates to undertake their modernization even when other relative factor costs favored such change.

Long-term credit for capital improvement projects continued to be unavailable in the altiplano during the early twentieth century, except for small amounts raised locally at usurious rates. Hacendados constantly feared attacks on their livestock, invasions of their pastures, and destruction of their installations. The massive transfer of land from peasant communities heightened these risks. Although the Peruvian state had sought to strengthen the legal guarantees for private property after the 1850s, this attempt proved largely ineffective in the altiplano. The same landholders who demanded guarantees for rural property owners relied on clientalism, the peasants' acceptance of charismatic authority, and, as an ultimate resort, violence to expand their holdings.

What Bertram called "class constellations" were closely connected to this high-risk environment; indeed, such constellations underlay the lack of definition of rights in resources. Most colonos resisted the improving landlords' attempts to banish their huaccho flocks and turn them into rural proletarians, and not merely because their own peasant enterprise generated more income than they could trust wages to do. Wealthy colonos such as the Mullisacas in Picotani, original residents of the place who for more than a century had raised their alpacas and sheep and exercised far-flung trading activities under the umbrella of the hacienda, but also many of the thousands of peasants recently incorporated into estates, did not consider the hacendados to be owners of the land they were working. They accepted the right of the hacendados to exploit the resources of their estates and to their family's labor, as long as the hacendados respected their rights to the usufruct of hacienda pastures and crop lands. The hacienda sector was highly successful in expanding its share of resources, including land, between the 1860s and 1920, but estate owners did not have the same free disposition over these resources that a capitalist entrepreneur enjoys.

It is misleading to speak of the hacendado as the progressive, modernizing element in the altiplano's rural economy of the early twentieth century, and the peasant, either in the community or on an estate, as the conservative force. Most hacendados, like most of the peasants, clung to labor-intensive, low-productivity methods of production not because they were intrinsically conservative but because they offered the most secure way to keep a tenuous hold on resources, especially land. Eventually, a minority of peasants, like their counterparts among the large landholders, sought to invest in more intensive exploitation of their estancias. There was no iron law that condemned them to becoming either proletarians or

increasingly archaic peasants on shrinking plots of poor lands; they were not automatically condemned to exemplify the notions of either Lenin or Chayanov, as David Lehman has remarked.^[133] The blocked development of productivity on the altiplano's haciendas, just as among the community peasants, cannot, in the last instance, be explained in terms of relative factor costs. It was the consequence of a neocolonial society in which rights to resources were contested and fragmentary and in which liberal notions of property and contract did not become fully accepted. As long as this colonial heritage remained strong, hacendados and peasants alike would waver between a profit-optimizing, high-risk strategy of investing into more intensive livestock production and the conventional risk-averting path of capital-extensive production embedded in social relations of hierarchy (patron-client relationships) and solidarity (within networks of family and friends). The seigneurial hacienda and the communal peasant economy formed two sides of the same coin.

The implementation of modern stock-raising methods on a broad scale presupposed their acceptance by the majority of hacendados, colonos, and community peasants alike and required multifaceted changes on individual estates. The successful introduction of such improvements as selective breeding, fencing, artificial pastures, and reductions of stocks in order to achieve optimal productivity per animal implied not merely technical changes but a major reorientation in the relations of production, intimately tied to the system of social stratification. Questions concerning the capital intensity of production were intertwined with the labor regime and the land tenure pattern. Selective breeding made sense only if hacendados could separate their own livestock from that of colonos. Providing sufficient fodder for hacienda livestock implied, at a minimum, limiting access of the colonos' huaccho flocks to estate pastures or even switching to a system of wage labor without usufruct rights. Reducing stock capital presupposed a land tenure pattern with universally recognized and respected borders.

Tied up with the capital-extensive agrarian complex of the altiplano was a whole sociopolitical system of domination, a value system and a life-style that gave even rather marginal hacendados a favorable place in provincial society. A livestock economy in which market forces reign unimpeded would have undermined this world, in which hacendados commanded respect as much for their family origin, social status, public office, and patterns of consumption as for their economic resources.^[134] Introducing a system of wage labor would weaken the clientalistic, paternalistic structure of Azángaro's estates and society at large. Although the most affluent hacendados might have benefited from agrarian capitalism, the majority of estate owners would have seen their social status threatened.

Recently historians writing on large landed estates in Latin America during the "age of export economies" have sought to stress how much the institution changed during the decades between the continent's more intensive insertion into world markets through railroad and steamship and the Great Depression of 1929–32. Simon Miller concluded an article on Mexican cereal estates by arguing that "far from being a 'feudal' anachronism of artificial and foreign origins, the arable hacienda of the Mesa Central was in fact a dynamic and appropriate adaptation to nineteenth century Mexico and capable of significant capital accumulation."^[135] Likewise, Michael Jimenez suggests that before 1930 coffee hacienda owners in Colombia's Cundinamarca state were "travelling far in grandfather's car" by consolidating recently formed or expanded estates and adapting them to changing labor and market conditions.^[136]

We have certainly come a long way since the first third of this century, when indigenista, populist, liberal, or Marxist critics of the Spanish American hacienda decried it as feudal and archaic, an obstinate, anachronistic remnant of a long-passed colonial age. I have tried to show how the altiplano estate of the early twentieth century was the product of struggles over land and labor between various strata of hispanized landholders, community peasants, and labor tenants. It adapted to changing markets, transportation systems, commercial hierarchies, and power constellations in the province and nationally. It would not make much sense to view the altiplano hacienda at its apogee, the boom years between the 1890s and the end of World War I, as a mere remnant of the colonial regime. After all, half of the haciendas in 1920 had not existed a hundred years earlier. Most of their owners did not come from a closed, preexisting stratum of colonial large landholders; rather, they were the recent beneficiaries and protagonists of struggles with the peasantry, a self-made group of hacendados who skillfully and often ruthlessly exploited newly arising commercial and political opportunities.

Yet if we look inside the hacienda, at its labor regime and technical-economic aspects, we cannot avoid the conclusion that change came exceedingly piecemeal and slow, that hacendados adapted to new commercial opportunities primarily by expanding the scope of long-standing practices. Why did altiplano livestock ranchers travel less far in grandfather's car than did owners of Colombian coffee fincas or central Mexican cereal haciendas?

Part of the answer may lie in the nature of the production process. Altiplano ranching was highly decentralized, with different flocks and colonos' cabañas often miles apart. Centralized or centrally coordinated labor processes occupied no more than eight to ten weeks every year. Entrenched decentralized production processes such as these would have been difficult to turn around under any circumstances. Altiplano ranchers

also had a certain amount of bad luck. In contrast to their Colombian colleagues, they were hit with a severe crisis and a period of volatile markets immediately on the tails of the great expansion of their landholdings, leaving them little time for internal consolidation and modernization. Hacendados were also hampered by the high cost of capital and difficulties of transportation, even though by the 1920s more roads had been constructed in Puno department than just about anywhere else in Peru.

But the fundamental problem was the very nature of the altiplano's hierarchical and segmented neocolonial society. By neocolonialism I am not referring primarily to any dependence that might have continued to tie the altiplano, now by strings of commerce rather than sovereignty, to an overseas metropolis. Rather, I am referring to the revitalized strength of a colonial mind-set polarizing society into Indians and Spaniards or whites; to the ambiguity, among all social groups in the altiplano, between clinging to the security in hierarchical or communal associations and taking advantage of new commercial opportunities; and to the willingness, or perhaps the perceived inevitability, of actors among all social groups to rely on force and violence in the pursuit of personal or group interests.

This neocolonialism of the altiplano's late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries socioeconomic and political matrix allowed large landholders to expand the land formally under their control but blocked the universal recognition of property rights and, hence, full rights of disposition for the hacendados. It allowed hacendados to integrate Indian laborers into their expanding domains at minimal costs but blocked the transition toward a wage-labor regime. Neocolonialism facilitated the cycle between the 1860s and 1920 in which hispanized landholders came to control an increasing share of altiplano resources, but it also constituted the basis of Indian peasant resistance against that expanded control.

The practices of paternalism, coercion, and violence, through which the hispanized provincial elite defined the community peasants and colonos as Indian and subordinate, reinforced the Indians' own perception of their identity as distinct and taught them the continued usefulness of communal solidarity and of maintaining their peasant livelihoods. In a real sense neocolonialism informed both the strength of the landlord offensive and the strength of peasant resistance against it. The peak of hacienda expansion nearly coincided with the hacendados' attempts to initiate internal transformations on their domain and the peasants' "internal" and "external" resistance against both. When this resistance was followed, in 1920, by the collapse of the booming market for wools, hacendados and peasants, the minority of modernizers and the majority of "traditionalists" among both groups, entered a new phase of stalemate.