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The basic characteristics of Japanese corporations' labour strategies in the 1920s and 1930s were the 'nenko' (or seniority-based) system, lifetime commitment for key workers and paternalism. Starting with Ujihara in Japan in 1953 and Abegglen in the West in 1958 this type of strategy has been conceptualised as traditional, as a semi-feudal remnant destined to be destroyed under the impact of new technology and management practices. However later research has shown that the assumption of historical continuity is false, and that Japanese large firm employment practices were introduced from 1910 to the 1930s during the period of the formation of monopoly capitalism in Japan. Indeed, though ideologically based on traditional values and concepts, in practice the new paternalism adopted a good deal from American and European welfare measures. Suggestion schemes were set up, influenced by the example of the National Cash Register Corporation; works councils were introduced in Sumitomo modelled on the shop committee system of International Harvester, and welfare facilities were patterned on those of Cadbury and Lever Brothers in Britain and Krupp in Germany. We offer individual resume services for all professional fields! Our professional resume service are customized and unique Do not miss this chance! In general, though in Japan paternalism spread later than the limited examples in Britain, when it was introduced, it spread quickly and definitively.

The diffusion of institutionalised paternalism in large Japanese corporations coincided with the international impact of the scientific management movement. The ideas of Frederick Taylor spread to Japan as early as 1911 and gained adherents amongst intellectuals and journalists but had a limited effect in industry itself where the ideas were not clearly understood. Interestingly, given the significance of the railroads in the United States as an institutional base for systematic management, much of the initial work on scientific management was carried out by the Japanese National Railways. However, despite the early (First World War) enthusiasm of the railway engineers in the repair workshops, they delayed adopting time and motion studies until 1929. Rather, they relied upon work group discussions and group problem solving. Moreover, many Japanese industries (engineering, steel, chemicals) largely ignored foreign scientific management ideas during the first twenty-five years of this century, though one area of industry affected was cotton textiles. This development was linked to the decline of competitive capitalism.

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In the central highlands, Porfirian rural labor developed very differently. Earlier decades of agrarian decompression had brought population growth, and the implementation of the liberals' privatization program after 1867 brought both losses of community lands and new concentrations of holdings within villages. The result—with infinite local variations-was that the majority of highland families were increasingly land poor, while growing numbers were landless, creating a large population of disposable labor. Where railroads offered access to expanding national markets, the expansion of estate agriculture might create labor demands and provide essential income to struggling highland villagers. The booming sugar estates of Morelos attracted workers from local villages and from adjacent regions of Mexico State. Across the highlands, wherever estates offered work, villagers were available seasonally seeking earnings to supplement declining subsistence production. Wages remained low; coercion was rare.

 

The rancheros that proliferated under Porfirian development experienced that development in the most diverse ways. Some shared in the boom. Many coffee growers were rancheros families, working their own fields and employing a few seasonal workers for the harvest. In the Bajío, rancheros—both smallholders and estate tenants—produced the foods that sustained the region's commercial and industrial development, again combining family labor with limited seasonal employment of hired hands. Other rancheros mixed subsistence cultivation with the provision of nearby mining zones. Finally, rancheros in isolated areas largely remained subsistence farmers, with limited involvement in the Porfirian commercial boom.

 

By 1900, land and labor regimes across rural Mexico had reached new levels of complexity and diversity. Patterns of involvement in the Revolution that began in 1910 would reflect that history. People locked by combinations of security and coercion into southern export economies would prove least ready to mount insurrectionary challenges to the Porfirian state and its successors. Despite the breakdown of the state and escalating political violence, estate dependents in Yucatán and the villagers of Oaxaca and Chiapas tied to coffee plantations rarely rebelled. The northerners who enjoyed high wages and labor mobility under Díaz, in contrast, persistently joined Revolutionary insurrections. Along the border, the financial crisis and economic collapse of 1907, followed by drought in 1909 and 1910, undermined the prospects of men and families who had taken the risks of building new lives in the north. When the promise of the borderlands was broken, just as the political system was facing challenges by the elite, the north became a region of widespread and enduring Revolutionary insurrections.

The sum of Porfirian transformations brought new and more complex diversity to agrarian Mexico, as is evidenced by a survey of Porfirian rural labor regimes. Across the borderlands, workers enjoyed great mobility. The boom development of silver and copper mining, of cattle raising, and of cotton cultivation created an escalating demand for workers that could not be met by the small populations of the vast north. To attract workers, hacienda owners increased wages to levels significantly above those in central and southern Mexico. Men and families migrated in growing numbers, seeking work and new communities in the borderlands. Coercion of workers, once common in the north, was not possible in the Porfirian borderlands. Vast spaces, few people, proximity to the unpatrolled U.S. border, and the need to attract migrants precluded forced labor on a large scale. The Porfirian era made the borderlands a region of rapid growth, labor mobility, and high wages.

 

Very different labor regimes developed in the booming export economies of southern coastal zones. There, established populations of indigenous villagers lived nearby, usually in upland communities that retained significant yet insufficient lands. Export estates aimed to recruit workers and to hold them for a season—or a lifetime. Wage incentives alone would not draw landed villagers into estate labor on a large scale. Instead, export growers generally offered wage advances to bring workers to their fields. Payment included diverse combinations of cash, maize, and other rations. The key was the estates' provision of advance payment and security of sustenance to those who became laborers. This system inevitably created debts owed by workers to estates, as nearly all workers received advances, wages, and rations in excess of prevailing wage levels. Debts in turn created legal pretexts for coercion, and workers who would leave estates could be captured and returned—if they were found. Southern export plantations built a system in which workers were brought to estates by advanced payments and held there by security of sustenance, a system enforced by state-sanctioned coercion.

 

Regional variations reflected local histories and the demands of different export crops. In Yucatán, henequen created large, year-round labor demands. Workers and their families lived in estate communities, dependent on estate lands and advances for security of sustenance. In the coffee zones, labor demands were intense, but seasonal. Estates in the foothills of Oaxaca and Chiapas used labor contractors to offer advances to force highland villagers to come and labor for several months in exchange for wages and rations. In Yucatán, advances offered security to estate residents, and the pretext for estates to hold them permanently. In the coffee zones, advances were essential to force workers to remain for the entire harvest, but after harvest time workers were able to return to the highland villages.

With Diaz regime stabilized and new links formed to the international economy, regions little settled and long peripheral to commercial production suddenly developed. The far northern borderlands, linked to Mexico City and the United States by railroads in the 1880s, saw the last indigenous peoples crushed and their lands claimed. The Porfirian program of surveying and distributing untitled lands created new or enlarged haciendas and many more ranchos. Livestock grazing predominated across arid range lands. But where irrigation was possible, as in the Laguna region of Durango and Coahuila, cotton production boomed to supply manufacturers in Mexico and the United States.

 

In southern coastal zones, coffee emerged as a profitable new export in the foothills of Veracruz, Oaxaca, and Chiapas. There, too, land surveys created both large haciendas and numerous ranchos. On the arid plains of Yucatán, henequen plantations produced fiber to supply the cordage industry in the United States. Where land, climate, and links to markets allowed, the leading agricultural exports of Porfirian Mexico were livestock, cotton, coffee, and henequen, but many other crops—including citrus, tobacco, and vanilla—entered the world market.

 

Porfirian stabilization, railroads, and commercial expansion also brought rapid and often radical changes to the Mexican highlands, regions in which haciendas, peasant communities, and rancheros had mixed conflict and integration since colonial times. The transformations and adaptations in these regions also were complex and varied. Where railroads linked regions of good lands with expanding urban markets, commercial haciendas and ranchos expanded and pressed peasant communities for land and labor. Thus did haciendas boom and villagers struggle in the sugar zones of the Morelos basin, the wheat fields of Chalco, and the pulque zone of Apan—all linked by rail to the nation's largest market in Mexico City. Parallel, if less intense, developments occurred in the environs of other expanding Porfirian cities, such as Guadalajara, Morelia, and Puebla.

 

Where lands were marginal, markets distant, and railroads absent, Porfirian commercial development was less intense and less disruptive. In the highlands of Oaxaca or in the isolated ranchero communities where Michoacón bordered Jalisco, traditional community and family economies endured, mixing subsistence production with limited marketing. There, the Porfirian era continued early national-era developments, and change remained limited.

 

While the primary changes that brought agrarian decompression occurred from 1810 to the 1840s, the middle decades of the century, marked by persistent civil and international wars, saw these transformations continue and deepen. The decades from the 1840s through the 1870s saw the expansion of sharecropping across Mexico. Facing labor difficulties and scarce profits, estates increasingly turned over lands and production to sharecropping villagers seeking additional lands in the central highlands and to rancheros seeking increased holdings across the north. Sharecropping sharply limited the costs, the risks, and the profits of hacienda operation. It increased production by villagers and rancheros and added new costs and risks to their family economies.

 

The long post-Independence era of agrarian decompression limited the power of landed elites, restricted the economic importance of the great haciendas, consolidated peasant village economies, and rapidly expanded the ranchero sector of society. In this context Liberals promoted land privatization: the alienation of church lands and the transformation of community lands into personal properties of residents. The goal was the mobilization of property and the promotion of commercial production. The community cohesion that enabled villagers to contest estate lands and demand higher wages would weaken, while subsistence lands bought, sold, and mortgaged freely could be concentrated among the prosperous, expanding the population of poor, landless peasants. The liberal program would undermine community power and peasant family subsistence autonomy. Many rancheros would benefit, and those leasing community (or church) lands could become proprietors. These changes were formally legislated on a national level by the Ley Lerdo of 1856, but implementation would be contested for decades. Broad implementation began only after 1867 and was never completed. The liberal agrarian program aimed to reform agrarian decompression. It favored elites (with the significant exception of the Catholic Church), rancheros, and the commercial economy, while attacking the power and autonomy of indigenous peasant communities.

 

Only the regime of Porfirio Díaz effectively reversed post-Independence agrarian decompression. State power finally was stabilized; railroads integrated the Mexican economy internally and (along with steamships) linked it to the United States and Europe; and the commercial economy boomed persistently for the first time since the late colonial era. Across rural Mexico, Porfirian development brought new complexities to land and labor regimes. Landed elites and commercial haciendas found new power, peasant communities faced new attacks, and ranchero societies proliferated. These changes inevitably varied from region to region.

If the land and labor regimes inherited from the colonial era were complex and regionally varied, the century after Independence brought new changes, greater complexities, and escalating conflicts. The decades after 1821 brought a long era of agrarian decompression: the commercial estate economy declined and remained uncertain; landed elites struggled financially; and hacienda ownership became unstable. Meanwhile, with landed elites and their haciendas struggling to break even, peasant villagers and rancheros claimed new roles in the agrarian economy. Villagers put pressure on haciendas, often renewing old land disputes. In some notable cases (as in the Toluca Valley in 1826) communities gained substantial new holdings. Villagers also often claimed higher wages for seasonal work at estates after 1821. Other Mexicans responded to the instability of the early national decades by moving into isolated uplands and creating ranchero societies, while still others bought lands from financially weak haciendas, turning colonial estates into new ranchero communities.

 

There were regional variations in all these developments, but across Mexico by the 1840s, the hacienda economy was struggling, peasant communities newly entrenched, and ranchero societies in rapid expansion. The nature of the changes is clear; the causes are debated. Liberals who aimed to transform Mexico after Independence did propose the privatization of church and peasant community lands. Yet while discussion, debate, and regional legislation began in the 1820s, national legislation was not drafted until the 1850s— and implementation came even later. The agrarian transformations of the post-Independence decades were neither planned nor legislated.

 

The crisis of hacienda production and profit resulted in part from the destructive Wars of Independence, the collapse of silver mining, and the consequent weakness of the entire commercial economy. The financial problems of landed elites were worsened by the arrival of new immigrant merchants in control of Mexico's international trade—Britons, French, Italians, and North Americans who were much less likely to invest in Mexican haciendas than their colonial Spanish predecessors. Moreover, constant political turmoil made all investment and commercial activity uncertain from 1810 through the 1870s. All these trends weakened landed elites and the commercial economy in which their haciendas struggled to operate.

 

In that context, peasant villagers and rancheros actively pressed for advantage, seeking local rural societies less dominated by elites and estates and more oriented toward family economies. In the Bajío, the region of most intense and enduring agrarian insurgency after 1810, rebellious estate residents forced shifts from estate production to ranchero economies. After the insurgency, most Bajío estates were limited to collecting rents from ranchero tenants who themselves controlled production. In the central highlands, many villagers renewed land claims, and a few actually won lands. Many more communities used their control over the seasonal labor essential to estate production (and their landed bases and local cohesion) to demand and obtain higher wages. From the 1830s through the 1850s, many central highland estate operators blamed resistant and demanding villagers for their estates' financial woes. They were not wrong.

In drier northern zones estates primarily grazed livestock and nearly all estate workers were resident employees, allotted monthly salaries along with maize rations. Wages were only an accounting device in regions far from towns and markets. Estates supplied residents with cloth, shoes, candies, and varied foodstuffs and then accounted their goods against their annual earnings. To maintain the system, hacienda managers often brought cloth from Europe, diverse goods from across Mexico, and maize from the Bajío. The system often left workers indebted to estates. In isolated regions where workers were most scarce, such debts might become the pretext to hold families at estates.

 

Ranchos, small landed properties mixing subsistence production with marketing, were the third major agrarian institution inherited from the colonial past. Most ranchos raised maize for consumption and sale or raised livestock for use and market. Many ranchos also kept mule teams to transport produce to market and to earn income by carrying goods for nearby estates or traders. Ranchero economies were also family economies, with women and children engaged in the production of cloth and diverse craft goods, again both for use and sale.

 

Most rancheros were criollos, mestizos, or mulattos, forming an agrarian middle sector between landed elites and indigenous peasant villagers. They produced sustenance for their families, but most also aimed to profit from market production—simultaneously operating as prosperous peasants and modest commercial farmers. Some ranchos were owned by notable families in small towns. They operated as small haciendas, with a manager and seasonal workers. Many rancheros were resident proprietors, living on their lands and working with family labor, seasonally joined by hired hands. Other ranchos were rented from haciendas. Across the central and southern highlands, many were leased from landed communities, which used the rents to support local government and religious life.

 

As the national era began, most ranchos were subordinate institutions, dominated by vast haciendas across most of the north and squeezed among haciendas and landed communities in the central and southern zones. They were integral to Mexico's complex and regionally varied agrarian structure, however. Ranchos leased from communities used lands that might have supported peasant families, while paying rents that did support village governments and religious festivals. Rancheros renting estate lands contributed to hacienda incomes while providing seasonal labor in estate fields. And many independent rancheros spent their adult lives as estate employees, seeking the income to begin independent cultivation. Later they might provide transport services to haciendas as muleteers.

Haciendas were large landed estates oriented to commercial production, seeking profit in urban markets and supporting landed elites. Haciendas produced European goods such as wheat, sugar, and livestock to sustain the emerging nation's urban population. Estates also produced maize, seeking to profit from periodic droughts and famines among the indigenous majority. And they made pulque (the fermented juice of maguey), supplying the indigenous intoxicant to the urban taverns.

 

Haciendas concentrated where fertile lands adjoined urban markets. Around Mexico City, the largest urban market in the New World around 1800, numerous haciendas produced wheat and maize in the valleys of Mexico and Toluca, sugar in the Morelos basin just south, and pulque in the arid zones to the north and east. In the Bajío region of north-central Mexico—where multiple cities and towns engaged in mining, textile production, and trade—fertile and often irrigated lands saw haciendas engaged in wheat and maize production to supply local markets, distant regions of the arid north, and Mexico City (when drought brought scarcity there). Across the dry north, vast estates grazed livestock to supply local mining towns, as well as urban areas of the central highlands. Smaller cities like Puebla, Guadalajara, Oaxaca, and Morelia also were flanked by haciendas oriented to profit local elites by supplying urban markets.

 

Haciendas developed diverse labor regimes depending on their economic activities and the regional societies in which they operated. In central and southern regions, estates inevitably operated among peasant villages. Most estates maintained only small groups of permanent employees there, mostly mestizos and mulattos working as supervisors, craftsmen, and stock herders. Field labor was done by seasonal wage laborers recruited in neighboring villages. Working a few weeks or months each year, villagers produced the commercial maize, wheat, and sugar that generated estate profits. They simultaneously earned the cash essential to sustain families with insufficient lands for subsistence production. Central highland estates could not profit without villagers' labor; villagers could not survive without the wages of hacienda work. Hacienda production and peasant family economies (and thus peasant communities) were inextricably linked. This integration was inherently exploitative, however. Villagers' work at haciendas generated sustenance for urban society and profits for landed elites; villagers, meanwhile, worked long hours for barely enough pay to sustain their families.

 

From the Bajío region of north-central Mexico, haciendas operated in regions with little indigenous population and few peasant communities. Haciendas there were the primary economic and social institutions of rural society. They included large resident populations, mostly of mestizos and mulattos. Depending on the particular region's lands and economies, estates combined different employment and tenancy regimes to organize dependent populations for profitable production. In the Bajío region of north-central Mexico, where cultivation ruled, estates employed many men as permanent, year-round laborers who were paid wages and allotted maize rations in a relationship of dependent security. Other residents rented marginal estate lands. They became estate-dependent peasants, producing limited subsistence, perhaps marketing firewood and charcoal, and providing seasonal labor to plant and harvest estate crops while raising and educating children.

 

Mexico began the national era as an agrarian society, its rural institutions inherited from the colonial past. The decade of insurgency and Independence from 1810 to 1821 started new conflicts and transformations. The remainder of the nineteenth century brought continuing agrarian changes provoked by sociopolitical conflicts, population growth, liberal policies, and Mexico's changing role in the expanding Atlantic economy.

 

Independent Mexico began the new era with three primary rural institutions—peasant communities, haciendas, and ranchos—that developed and mixed differently in diverse regions to create a regionally varied agrarian Mexico. Peasant communities rooted in the distant pre-Hispanic past had been transformed during the colonial era by depopulation, congregation, and the imposition of Spanish legal forms. Yet they adapted and endured to remain the primary social institutions of agrarian Mexico at Independence. The majority of Mexicans, concentrated in the central and southern highlands, lived in landed communities. Most villagers spoke indigenous languages; most maintained local variants of peasant Christianity adapted under colonial rule.

 

The majority of communities retained land as the national era began, using it to support local government, community religious life, and the subsistence production of resident families. Community lands, however, rarely were distributed equally. Most communities were led by local elites with ample lands for subsistence and limited surplus production. The same elites ruled local government. The majority of villagers held lands insufficient for family sustenance, and a landless minority struggled to survive in most villages.

 

Community lands allowed most villagers a base of subsistence autonomy. The limits on the availability and distribution of those lands led them to develop diversified family economies. Men controlled most land and engaged in subsistence cultivation; the limits of that cultivation led them to seek additional earnings, usually by seasonal field labor at nearby estates. Women made cloth, pottery, and other craft goods; traded those wares and small family crop surpluses in local markets; and maintained gardens, made clothing, and raised children. Thus, integrated family economies combining subsistence cultivation, craft production, and local marketing sustained the agrarian majority of villagers—and the communities that they maintained.

Large-scale indigenous resistance movements, as in the case of the Mixton War, often invoked religiously inspired ideologies embracing elements of millenarian thinking, anticlericalism, virulently anti-Spanish sentiment, and, paradoxically, elements of Christian doctrine. Programmatically rather vague, these movements typically centered on messianic or prophetic leader figures and rarely achieved significant crossclass or crossethnic alliances. Two of the most interesting of such uprisings occurred in the eighteenth century in the far southeast of the colony. The Tzeltal Rebellion ( 1712-13) broke out in the Chiapas highlands among rural indigenous communities suffering increased Spanish tribute demands, a demographic crisis, and internal leadership struggles, coalescing briefly around a messianic hermit and an Indian cult to the Virgin. A half-century later ( 1761) came the turn of neighboring Yucatán. Here the Indian leader Jacinto Canek led a Maya cultural revitalization movement and rebellion centered on the village of Cisteil, ideologically embracing both traditional Maya and Christian elements, and attracting thousands of indigenous followers until defeated by Spanish forces. Nor was central Mexico free of such episodes, although there they often took the form more of religious cults than open rebellion. Exactly contemporaneous with the Canek rebellion arose the religious movement led by Antonio Perez, in the Yautepec and Popocateped areas of central Mexico, in which the prophet preached a mixture of traditional Christian apocalyptic and indigenous religious revival.

 

At virtually the end of the colonial period arose what is unquestionably one of the most intriguing and mysterious of these indigenous conspiracies or rebellions, the abortive indigenous uprising surrounding the almost certainly apocryphal native messianic figure of "El Indio Mariano" in the area around Tepic from 1800 to 1802. The Spanish civil and military authorities uncovered what they believed a widespread Indian conspiracy and rebellious mobilization embracing both coastal and sierra villages in the Tepic area, and including indigenous groups as far away as the sierra of Nayarit, Durango, and even the far northwest. The eponymous Mariano—very probably himself a fabrication of the movement's indigenous leaders—was said to be linked by kinship to the central Mexican indigenous state of Tlaxcala, a symbol of residual native political legitimacy and therefore the locus in several contemporaneous movements of an antiSpanish native shadow-state. Mariano was said to have received rights to govern "the Indies" from the Spanish king Carlos IV, but he also displayed elements of chiliastic identification with Jesus Christ. The program of the movement included the restoration of indigenous village lands and the abolition of tribute payments. After some months the conspiracy and mobilization came to naught, one or two armed skirmishes were fought with Spanish forces, and several hundred Indian conspirators were arrested, although the pretender Mariano was himself never apprehended.

 

Rural (primarily Indian) rebellion on a larger scale erupted periodically throughout the colonial period, sometimes embracing a large segment of a single ethnolinguistic group or a region, but was most likely to occur in the sixteenth or eighteenth centuries. By all odds one of the most spectacular episodes of such indigenous resistance to European encroachment was the Mixton War, which occurred within scarcely a decade of the establishment of an effective Spanish settler presence in New Galicia, in the center-west of Mexico. This Caxcan Indian uprising threatened for a time to extinguish Spanish influence in western Mexico, while its suppression cost the lives and enslavement of thousands of Indians, as well as the lives of the redoubtable Pedro de Alvarado and scores of Spanish encomenderos, settlers, soldiers, and missionaries. Occasioned by the substantial drawdown of Spanish military strength in New Galicia attendant upon the assembly of Francisco Vózquez de Coronado's expedition to the north in search of Gran Quivira and the Seven Cities of Cibola, indigenous rebellion was motivated in part by resistance to encomendero and missionary demands, in part by generalized anti-Spanish sentiments and festering bitterness over the activities in the area a few years previously of the Spanish conquistador Nuño Beltrán de Guzmán. With the partial military vacuum in New Galicia, the unpacified tribal peoples north of the Santiago River, in what is today southern Zacatecas and northern Jalisco, rose in arms against the Spanish settlers, engaging in numerous raids from fortified hilltops in the Sierra del Mixton, eventually threatening the precarious existence of Guadalajara. The major indigenous leaders were the baptized chieftains don Diego el Zacateco and don Francisco de Aguilar, cacique (chief) of Nochistlan. The movement's ideology definitely embraced millenarian elements, including a war of extermination against the Spaniards, the rejection of Christianity, and the return of the old native gods. The uprising eventually was crushed by a Spanish force under the command of Viceroy Antonio de Mendoza himself, giving way to a savage repression including the branding and enslavement of hundreds of captured natives. Other native rebellions in the Mexican north followed in the sixteenth century, and in the seventeenth uprisings by Acaxee, Xixime, Tepehuane and Tarahumara populations, among others.

 

The colonial authorities were in some ways morbidly sensitive to civil violence, importing from Spain and installing in major Mexican cities public institutions designed to prevent it: municipal granaries and elaborate pricing regulations for meat and bread, for example, whose function was to keep supplies and prices more or less stable in order to forestall the consumer riots so common in early modern Europe. Little of this, or much policing of any sort, could be done in the thousands of small towns, villages, and hamlets dotting the vast Mexican countryside, however, where colonial authority was spread thin and compromised by the connections of local power holders, and where interethnic tensions often infused the relations of Indians and non-Indians. Here "bargaining by riot" became a time-honored method for country people to express their disaffection with the colonial regime or with local power holders, although the person of the Spanish king (and perhaps the larger legitimacy of the imperial state) almost always was held above the fray ideologically through the invocation by rioters and rebels of the traditional formula "Long live the King! Death to bad government!" Although they appeared acephalous as to leadership and were fairly short-lived (lasting a few days at most), such localized riots (or tumultos, as they were widely known) often had been simmering for long periods of time, or recurred regularly in the same localities, and just as often did have identifiable leaders, sometimes village women. Village riots might find their origins in disputes over land with neighboring communities or individual landowners (sometimes beginning or ending with land invasions), fiscal extractions deemed excessive or otherwise inequitable, local elections or other sorts of political events, disputes over the disposition of religious icons, or the transgression of implicit or explicit rules of conduct by local power holders such as landowners, priests, or magistrates.

 

Hundreds of these episodes took place during the colonial period, each with its own natural and social history, although they shared certain characteristics. Perhaps one such tumulto will serve as an example, if not exactly a template. In late 1785 the largely Indian town of Cuauhtitlan, a few miles north of Mexico City, erupted in a riot in which the houses of the local priest, the tithe collector, and at least two Spanish merchants were broken into and partially looted, and from which the curate himself barely escaped with his life. The tumulto was occasioned by a public argument during a religious observance over the property of a locally venerated effigy of the Virgin Mary housed in the parish church, the Indian parishioners claiming it as theirs, the Spanish citizens of the town (with the priest's backing) as theirs. As it turned out, the violent confrontation over the possession of the statue was only the tip of the iceberg of local conflict, which also involved shifts in the access to land resources over the long term in favor of local nonindigenous farmers, and within the Indian community from the poor to a more privileged stratum.

Within the interior of indigenous and country life, and heavy with cultural and symbolic meanings, were forms of religious "heterodoxy." The nature and scale of such resistance is by its very nature harder to detect in the historical record since religious reservations, selective appropriation of orthodox Catholic thinking, or outright rejection of the new moral dispensation and ritual life often did not emerge directly into the public sphere. Still, when they did the results could be spectacular. In the 1530s, for example, before cases of Indian heterodoxy were removed from the jurisdiction of the Inquisition ( 1570), a number of indigenous caciques and other men (some of them Nahua priests before the coming of the Europeans), among them Martin Ocelotl and Andres Mixcoatl, were accused of fomenting native cults and curing practices, of prophecy and necromancy, of consorting with the Devil to block the Christian mission, and of other crimes against church and state. There is no question that what the colonial secular and ecclesiastical authorities construed as rejection of Christianity or heterodox blendings of Christian and native religious precepts and practices continued throughout the colonial period, often emerging in the ideological component of violent uprisings. But this also went on among ordinary country people on a daily basis. Sometimes rural priests saw their parishioners' failure to attend mass, observe the holy sacraments, or mute the more unbuttoned aspects of celebratory and ritual behavior as the backsliding of ignorant rustics and indigenous converts forever childlike in their understanding. One rural curate commented not atypically of his indigenous parishioners: "These miserable Indians live and die not like faithful believers in Jesus Christ, but as though they inhabited still the gloomy caverns of paganism."

 

But sometimes the slippage between official religious belief and practice and its "popular" manifestations took on darker hues. Witchcraft, rural fertility cults, and demonic possession were not unknown even at the very close of the colonial period. For example, very near Mexico City as late as 1820 or so a rural priest stumbled upon a crude altar in a cave on which he found unidentifiable small effigies ("dolls") and other icons he believed linked to a "pagan" fertility cult whose celebration included forbidden dancing by both sexes, offerings of native foods, and nonliturgical music. It is clear that there was an element of resistance in such practices, that is, an attempt on the part of Indians in particular to preserve traditional or even recently "invented" ways of life with meanings peculiar to village culture, and oppositional to officially sanctioned colonial religious sensibilities.

The colonial labor regime and the demands it placed upon rural people was an obvious arena for resistance, both passive and violent. In the sixteenth century, while the encomienda primarily mediated the labor and tribute claims made upon indigenous villagers by the Europeans, the murder of encomienda holders by "their" Indians was not unknown, as occurred in the killing of encomendero Salvador Martel in western New Galicia in 1540. More common on rural estates was foot-dragging, malingering, modest levels of sabotage, and the ubiquitous Sunday drinking among working people, which often made of Monday (called "San Lunes," or "Saint Monday") a nonproductive day, much to the disgust of property owners and administrators. Sometimes rural people simply refused to come to work despite economic inducements or the threat of force, as occurred over a span of years in the Puebla countryside at the very end of the colonial era. This was certainly resistance of a sort, although the loss of wages might damage the striker as much as the owner, and the explicit political content is often in doubt.

 

Much less random and individualized, and linked in a more obvious way to identifiable economic and social conditions in the countryside, was the continual litigation supported especially by indigenous communities against neighboring landowners, whether other rural communities or non-Indian property owners. Indians early became adept at the use of the legal system the Spaniards imposed upon them, most notably in the venue of the General Indian Court (Juzgado General de Indios), a specialized organ of the Audiencia of New Spain established in 1591 to handle indigenous legal matters. Since the Spanish Crown recognized Indian community land titles from early on, and since ownership of land became the single most vexed issue in Indian-Spanish relations under the impact of growing rural commercialization and indigenous population recovery in the later colonial period, suits and countersuits over land ownership and boundaries constantly occupied the attention of Spanish officials, villagers, and non-Indian landowners, rising to a crescendo in the eighteenth century. Such litigation was expensive, time consuming (individual suits sometimes lasted for decades and might recur repeatedly between the same parties or their heirs), and on occasion violent. But the behavior was reinforced among rural villages by the fact that suits at law often achieved positive results for them, helping them to confirm title to lands already held, to recover lands occupied illegally by other communities or white landowners, and over the long haul somewhat slowing the drift of land resources from peasant into hacendado hands. This could shore up the social and political integrity of peasant communities threatened by long-term forces of change, although the outcome was not always beneficial to villagers.

There has for some years existed a debate among scholars as to whether the advent of the Spanish colonial regime loosed a torrent of alcohol into rural society, especially into indigenous villages, and into the cities that quickly grew up as the bridgeheads of European domination of the countryside. There is little doubt that native access to intoxicants, both the ubiquitous pulque (fermented agave) and the new wines and distillates (rum, brandy, etc.) the Europeans introduced, widened and became in large measure desacralized, while at the same time the Christian liturgical calendar provided ever more frequent opportunities for celebratory drinking, and the new nutritional regimen even may have encouraged resort to alcoholic beverages as a source of calories. Certainly it became an article of faith in criollo racialist ideology (as it was of elite views of the peasantry in Europe itself) that Indians were not only lazy, libidinous, sullen, stupid, and suggestible, but also extremely prone to drunkenness. The social reality of this stereotype—that indigenous men, especially, regularly drank themselves into stuporous oblivion and while intoxicated unleashed all sorts of aggressive behavior— is of course open to question. But the evidence in criminal and other records of the colonial period, especially of the eighteenth century, even if discounted somewhat, is sufficient to support the conclusion that there was a good deal of nonritual drinking, and that it may have created a social problem. The question is whether widespread alcohol consumption as a form of self-anesthetization constituted a form of resistance to an oppressive colonial order, or an escape from it; probably it embraced something of both. And when intoxication disinhibited aggressive behavior, whether toward family members, adult peers, or superordinate figures (work supervisors, priests, or officials), it may certainly be viewed as a facilitator of resistance to the demands imposed upon subaltern people by the colonial order, and of externalization of the frustration and impotence experienced on a daily basis, in particular, by humbler men of color. And branching off from alcohol abuse and its associated forms of violence as a type of resistance were banditry and smuggling, by all accounts also endemic in the colonial countryside, although by no means as significant as they were to become in the bandit-ridden nineteenth century.

Complex and controversial as the notion of resistance is, a brief conceptual discussion may prove a useful prologue to a closer look at empirical cases of resistance and rebellion in the colonial countryside. First, there is a distinction to be drawn between conflict and resistance, the latter being a subset of the former, typically involving a power asymmetry between a superordinate and a subordinate social actor. In the colonial situation, however, conflict between actors situated as peers in the social hierarchy—between two indigenous villages contending over disputed land, let us say—which did not on its face appear to involve "resistance" as such, might also be construed as resistance to a third interlocutor, the colonial state, which set the terms of the competition and fostered conditions under which horizontal conflict became a mode of preserving ethnic, communal, and political identity somewhat intact. Second, there is a far from perfect congruence between "rural" and "Indian." Although forms of indigenous resistance and rebellion are emphasized here and have tended to attract most attention in recent scholarship, Indians were not alone in the countryside, nor did they alone engage in resistant behaviors. It is worth remembering that at the close of the colonial period the ethnic composition of New Spain was roughly 18 percent "white" (1,108,000), 22 percent mixed castes (1,338,000), and 60 percent Indian (3,676,000).

 

Third, there are many thorny unresolved interpretive questions relating to resistance itself, which has come much into fashion as a way of representing popular culture, ethnic conflict, and rural-urban friction in Mexican history. For example, are suicide or alcoholism to be seen as forms of resistance, escapism, or pathology, or perhaps some combination of these? And then there is the perennial discussion about banditry, whether of the social or garden varieties: under what circumstances is rural brigandage to be viewed as a form of protest against prevailing social or economic arrangements, if at all, or simply as opportunism? Finally, for some purposes it may be useful to view "resistant" behaviors as distributed along a continuum of intensity, organization, and scale ranging from "victimless" or more passive forms such as suicide, alcoholism, foot-dragging, and sabotage on the job, rumor and aggressive language, and so forth, through religious heterodoxy, endemic litigation in the courts, and civic refusal (to pay taxes, for example), to communal land invasions, riots, localized rebellions, messianic movements, and participation in more generalized insurrection. On the other hand, it would seem appropriate to make an important distinction between the often more anomic, individualized activities at the lower end of the continuum and the often larger scale, collective ones at the upper end, on the assumption that not just resistance but the circumstances of its collective expression are important to understanding how common people negotiated or protested the colonial order.