amandakristi

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.