Hacienda Tabi

Hacienda Tabi is a landed estate of colonial origin, located in the Puuc region of the Yucatán Peninsula of Mexico, about 80 kilometers (50 miles) south of Merida, and 20 km (12.5 mi) east of Kabah. Established as a cattle ranch by 1733, it evolved into a sugar plantation that encompassed more than 35,000 acres by the end of the 19th century. Approximately one-tenth of the old plantation now lies within a state-owned ecological reserve.

Hacienda Tabi was one of several plantations that were owned by descendants of early Spanish colonists, and, like plantations of the same period in the United States, owed its survival to the labor of Indigenous people and immigrants, most of whom were essentially enslaved. Originally established in the early 18th century as a cattle station or estancia, by 1784 the property's production had diversified enough to be deemed a hacienda. Production on the hacienda eventually included a sugar mill in a distillery for producing rum, farm fields for cotton, sugar, henequen, tobacco, maize, and domesticated pigs, cattle, chickens, and turkeys; all of this continued until the Mexican Revolution of 1914–15 abruptly ended the peonage system in Yucatán.

Timeline of Hacienda Tabi

• 1500s - much of the Puuc region is part of the Xiu Maya dynasty
• 1531 - Spanish military forces marched into the Yucatán
• 1542 - city of Merida founded by Francisco de Montejo
• 1547 - first Spanish mission founded at Oxkutzcab
• 1550s - encomienda system established in the Puuc
• 1698 - Juan del Castillo y Arrue petitions for a land grant named "Tavi" to be used as an encomienda
• 1733 - Tabi established as the name of the parcel in the Santa Elena Valley
• 1784 - Tabi designated a hacienda; its owner is Bernadino Del Castillo
• 1815 - Tabi purchased by Francisco Calero y Calero; a land survey commissioned
• 1821 - Mexico achieves independence from Spain
• 1820s - first state laws supporting peonage (debt enslavement) system
• 1847 - Caste War (Resistance movement between Maya and Spanish descendants) breaks out
• 1855 - Tabi bought by Felipe Peon
• 1876 - 1911, Porfirio Diaz rules Mexico
• 1880s - narrow gauge rail established in the Yucatán
• 1890s - industrial sugar mill at Tabi
• 1893 - Tabi bought by Eulogio Duarte Troncoso; extensive renovation of principal buildings undertaken
• 1900 - Tabi encompasses 35,000 acres and 851 resident laborers
• 1908 - Journalist John Kenneth Turner publishes articles describing enslavement on haciendas in Yucatán.
• 1913 - Tabi owned by Eduardo Bolio Rendon Maldonado
• 1914 - Mexican revolution reaches Yucatán, peonage system abolished
• 1915 - Hacienda Tabi's village for laborers abandoned

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Tehuacan Valley

By K. Kris Hirst

The center of the plantation included an area of approximately 300 x 375 m (1000x1200 ft) within a thick wall enclosure of limestone masonry, measuring 2 m (6 ft) high. Three main gates controlled access to the "great yard" or patio principal, and the largest and main entry frames the sanctuary, which held room for 500 persons. The major architecture within the enclosure included a large two-story plantation house or palacio, consisting of 24 rooms and 22,000 ft² (~2000 m²). The house, recently refurbished with long-range plans for the development of a museum, boasts classic architecture, including a double colonnade on the south face and neoclassical pediments on the upper and lower levels.

Also within the enclosure was a sugar mill with three chimney stacks, livestock stables, and a sanctuary based on colonial Franciscan monastery architecture. A handful of traditional Maya residences are also located within the enclosure wall apparently reserved for upper-level servants. two small rooms in the lower West and the plantation house were set aside for jailing peasants who disobeyed orders. A small external structure, called the burro building, was, according to oral tradition, used for public punishment.

Life as a Laborer

Outside the walls was a small village where as many as 700 laborers (peons) lived. Laborers lived in traditional Maya houses consisting of one-room elliptical structures made of masonry, rubble stone, and/or perishable materials. The houses were placed in a regular grid pattern with six or seven houses sharing a residential block, and blocks aligned along straight streets and avenues. The interiors of each of the houses were split into two halves by a mat or screen. One-half was the cooking area including a hearth kitchen and foodstuffs in the second half with the storage bathing area where clothing, machetes, and other personal goods were kept. Hanging from the rafters were hammocks, used for sleeping.

Archaeological investigations identified a definite class division within the community outside of the walls. Some of the workers lived in masonry houses that appear to have had preferential placement within the village settlement. These laborers had access to better grades of meat, as well as imported and exotic dry goods. Excavations of a small house inside the enclosure indicated similar access to luxury goods, albeit clearly still occupied by a servant and his family. Historical documentation indicates that life on the plantation for the workers was one of ongoing indebtedness, built into the system, essentially enslaving the workers.

Hacienda Tabi and Archaeology

Hacienda Tabi was investigated between 1996 and 2010, under the auspices of the Yucatán Cultural Foundation, the State of Yucatán's Secretary of Ecology, and Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History. The first four years of the archaeological project were directed by David Carlson of Texas A&M University and his graduate students, Allan Meyers and Sam R. Sweitz. The last eleven years of field investigation and excavation were conducted under the direction of Meyers, now at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Florida.

Sources

Thanks are due to excavator Allan Meyers, author of Outside the Hacienda Walls: The Archaeology of Plantation Peonage in 19th Century Yucatán, for his assistance with this article, and the accompanying photo.

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