The Social Lives of Landed Estates in the Yucatecan Hinterlands

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Gateways to Future Historical Archaeology in Mexico and Central America", at the 2024 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

For scholars studying colonial Latin America the hacienda institution has become an index for certain sets of land and labor relations. This indexing enables scholars to make broad statements about processes such as indigenous dispossession and commercialization even though estates historically categorized as haciendas are incredibly inconsistent. In the Yucatan Peninsula, hacienda studies largely focus on the growth of industrial, market-oriented sugar and henequen plantations during the late 19th and 20th centuries. While these studies provide important insights into regional political economy and the lived experiences of indebted laborers, by emphasizing these large, market-oriented plantation estates scholars obscure the variable role of this institution in the Yucatan Peninsula. Using haciendas constructed between the late 18th and early 19th centuries around the colonial frontier outpost of Tihosuco, we consider the ways Maya people in the peninsula’s hinterlands have engaged with these land-based institutions from the 1700s to the present.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2024   •
• Gateways to Future Historical Archaeology in Mexico and Central America

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow