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Mexican Rural History Since Chevalier: The Historiography of the Colonial Hacienda
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 October 2022
Extract
Intellectual disciplines, very much like human beings, have life cycles. They are conceived and born, they progress through childhood, adolescence, and youth, they reach maturity, they enter old age, and some even die. Even if in the present case the simile is a grandiose one, and if the field of Mexican rural history can hardly lay claim to the status of being a distinct intellectual discipline, the main point nonetheless holds. After a long period of gestation and a halting but promising infancy, the field is standing firmly on two feet. It has a problemática—a set of questions, something resembling a research strategy, and a conceptual framework (much of it admittedly borrowed); it has an identifiable corpus of literature, and its practitioners recognize one another. Yet how mature is it, and where is it going? The purposes of this article are to review the development of the historiography on rural life in colonial and early national Mexico published during the last thirty years, focusing central attention on the study of the hacienda; to assess some of its findings, problems, and growing pains; and to make some suggestions as to where those working in the field might invest their energies in future. Within the overall topical organization of the essay, the literature on the classic Mexican hacienda is examined from thematic, theoretical, and methodological vantage points. These treatments are complementary rather than redundant because the questions historians ask, the explanatory schemes they use, and the sources and methods they rely upon are intimately interrelated, and such a prismatic analysis of a body of literature helps to point up its strengths as well as its weaknesses.
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- Copyright © 1983 by the University of Texas Press
Footnotes
I would like to thank James Lockhart and William B. Taylor for helpful comments on an earlier version of this article.
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