Credit and Kinship

University of Texas Press
Chapter Title: Credit and Kinship
Book Title: Haciendas and Economic Development

Book Subtitle: Guadalajara, Mexico, at Independence
Book Author(s): Richard B. Lindley
Published by: University of Texas Press. (1983)
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7560/720428.7
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2. Credit and Kinship
Credit
The Local Economy's Dependence on Credit

In 1803 Francisco Ordonez, then-manager of the Hacienda de Cuisillos,
wrote an apologetic letter to his commercial agent in Tepic, Jose Martinez
Mestas. Regarding Martinez Mestas's request for a loan, Ordonez wrote that
it seems your misfortune and mine that you should have remembered so late, since I
kept the few funds [medios] that I had for more than five or six years without using
them. And as I've told you in my previous [letters), by hand of the Lord Archdeacon,
there was not a single resource left to me, nor to His Lordship, because he invested
everything at interest. And although you ask me to find you some money among
friends, you may well assure yourself that they have all theirs invested, and it is easier
to turn a friar into a woman than to find a peso among friends, for every one of the
merchants is walking on his uppers ["handan... a la cuarta pregunta"], and anyone
who goes so far as to turn a peso loose wants more conditions and guarantees than he
himself is willing to furnish. So that for the present I have nothing with which to help
you; least of all [credit] with the Lord Archdeacon, when he himself asked me for my
[funds] in order to complete payment to Don Juan Calera of the twenty thousand
[pesos] that he requested at interest This should satisfy you that it is not in my hands
to facilitate your request, since for my part the only principal I have is in agricultural
goods. And although I would like to help you with them, there is no one who will pay
cash for them, for just as it costs you so much trouble to collect the funds that you
lend out to friends, the same happens to me, and money is very scarce . 1
Ordonez was voicing a chronic lament of his time. In spite of the eighteenth-
century boom spurred by the Bolanos mining bonanza, and the establishment
of a mint in Guadalajara in 1793, money was scarce in Nueva Galicia.
36 Credit and Kinship
Scarce currency was only one of a set of interlocking factors that made
credit a particularly crucial resource in the local colonial economy. Then
current production technologies, relatively scattered settlements, weather
cycles, accidents of geography, labor use and payment patterns, natural
resource distribution, and the colonial system itself, with its demand for
expatriation of large capital surpluses, each worked to render colonial
production heavily dependent on high-volume, long-term credit The main
branches of the colonial economy—mining, agriculture, and commerce-
shared all of these problems to one degree or another.
Historians have long recognized credit needs as a critical component of
the mining economy. David Brading has discussed the massive injections of
credit required to excavate and equip the mines, as well as the long delays
miners often experienced before the returns on their investments began to
surpass maintenance and operation costs. 2
Agriculture depended equally, though perhaps less obviously, on credit.

Guadalajara was fortunate in that its growing season permitted two
harvests: one by natural rainfall, usually gathered in November, and an
irrigated crop usually came in during May. Nevertheless, there were many
months when growers faced expenses of repairs, food, and salaries without
any immediate income to cover them. Because irrigated fields, moreover,
represented only a fraction of total land under cultivation, many farmers
harvested only one crop a year. 3
Animal sales yielded income once a year only. Stock raisers had to wait
for the natural increase of their herds and also had to pay close attention to
the weather. Once the annual rainfall had begun (around June), mud made it
difficult to move the animals. There was even a risk in some areas that
animals would bog down in the swamps and die of starvation. 4
A number of problems were common not only to agriculture but to

commercial enterprise, as well. They fell into two general classes: prob-
lems of distribution, and risk of natural disaster. Both export-import
merchants and regional suppliers had to move goods over enormous
distances by primitive means of transportation and along a relatively
poorly developed system of routes. Although the whole society was
astonishingly mobile in the face of these obstacles, time and expense
factors made profits possible only for those who could obtain credit on
good terms. A storm at sea or an attack by highway robbers could wipe out
numerous fortunes at one blow. Plagues (both animal and human),
droughts, floods, and other natural disasters that periodically afflicted
landowners had equally catastrophic effects on merchants. Obviously, a
person whose business was to withstand such acts of God must be able to
amass credit on a long-term basis.
Credit and Kinship 37
Describing the importance of the credit market in Guadalajara involves

more than simply determining who could command loans. In a situation in
which credit was so crucial to the local economy, the sources of loans, the
forms those loans took, the channels through which they flowed, and the
uses to which they were put constituted determining features of the regional
society.
Guadalajara's credit picture on the eve of independence may be roughly
sketched in as follows. Virtually no central public or institutional loan
sources existed, with the significant exception of the church (whose position
as a moneylender is discussed in greater detail later). Borrowers turned
regularly to wealthy individuals or families as a source of credit 5
Merchants, with their relatively more liquid fortunes, fell naturally into
the role of moneylender. The merchants' connections to rural estates,
however, were essential to their lending (and borrowing) capabilities. In
repeated instances, merchants did not amass significant capital sums until
they became associated with a major hacienda. Furthermore, high risk-
levels caused most lenders to insist on the mortgage of income-producing
rural properties as security for large loans.
Since merchants in this period could not count on a very active market for
land, and since no legal or institutional context existed to support the
impersonal money relations characteristic of modern capitalism, marital
alliances between merchants' and hacendados 9
families provided the logical
means to establish credit viability. Such marriages also furnished the major
channels through which loans might flow, even when the money came from
church coffers. With the merchants' liquidity and the hacendados security,
9
family enterprises created by kinship alliances were in the best possible

position to manipulate credit as either borrowers or lenders. Thus the family
enterprises could put capital to productive use in commercial agriculture—
the predominant economic activity of the region—as well as in trade,
manufacture, and mining. With this overall sketch of the credit picture in
mind, let us now explore its features in greater detail.
Sources of C r e d i t
Banks, properly so called, did not begin to operate until the second half of
the nineteenth century. The government began to experiment with the
concept of public banking in the eighteenth century by creating the Royal
Mining Tribunal and giving it certain lending functions, but the government
was still much more likely to borrow from the private sector than to lend to i t
Nor did commercial companies exist that were comparable to the large
European houses that provided many colonial enterprises with investment
capital. Merchants in New Spain formed business partnerships, but they lent
money as wealthy individuals. The responsibility for compliance with the

contract fell not on a legal abstraction or on groups of persons, but on the
individuals who were actually party to the agreement. The natural
institutional framework for such personal obligations rested on that form of
relationship that creates and formalizes personal loyalties and obligations at
their most basic level—kinship. 6
Only the church lent money on a large scale as an institution. Was the
church, then, the bank of New Spain? The church-as-moneylender was not a
single institution. Every convent, sodality, parish, and individual clergyman
followed its or his own financial policy. They were not subject to any central
decision-making body, nor did any of the church's lending arms hold a
license or charter from the state to give it an advantage over other lenders.
The major advantage church bodies had was the amount of capital they
could accumulate in one mass. If we think, however, not of "the church's"
capital, which was a nonexistent abstraction, but of the capital of the actual
lenders, such as the Convento de Santa Maria de Gracia de Guadalajara,
then the sums or advantages may still seem large but perhaps not so much
larger than those of the great family estates. Moreover, the social services
performed by the church (marriage, baptism, burial, education, support of
surplus family heirs in convents) undoubtedly restrained capital accumula-
tion and influenced church bodies to allocate resources in ways that an
ordinary bank would not. For example, the church maintained a huge and
expensive clerical bureaucracy that did not contribute directly to its
"banking" functions and probably tended to deplete them.
The church that appeared so distinct and independently powerful in New
Spain in fact remained largely dependent on local families for personnel and
revenue, as well as for construction and other facilities. New recruits into
the clerical bureaucracy frequently came from landed families and returned
to the family estate after receiving their training. Both the secular and the
regular arms of the church drew most of their income from the tithe (a tax on
commercial agriculture) or from special endowments by landowners,
miners, and merchants. Legacies to the church most often took the form of
chantries secured by the mortgage of some hacienda. Church organizations
always demanded land as a mortgage to secure loans and nearly always
granted large loans on the basis of kinship connections between the borrower
and the clergy.
Thus the church depended on and tended to reinforce the system of elite
kinship alliances I am describing, just as modern banks act to reinforce our
system of government and economic relations. The church was not a single,
central bank, but a series of small, local, unchartered moneylenders tied to
local families and local traditions. In this sense, the church is not an
exception to the rule that there were no "banks" in Nueva Galicia just
before or just after independence. 7
In Nueva Galicia, as in New Spain at large, no formal banking institutions

existed; private individuals or families, then, were key sources of credit. In
order for a credit market to function without banks or in the face of
inadequate banking, the basic preconditions for any type of market must
obtain: people wishing to lend must have sufficient capital available in an
adequately liquid form; those wishing to borrow must be able to furnish
adequate security; the lenders and borrowers must have some means of
finding each other, and both parties must have some means of defining,
structuring, and enforcing mutual obligations. We shall see that creole-
peninsular marriage alliances played a major role in fulfilling all four of
these conditions.
L a c k of L i q u i d i t y i n P e r s o n a l Estates
In an economy heavily dependent on credit operations and short on cash,
personal liquidity was obviously at a premium. An individual might be quite
wealthy in terms of total worth and yet have little readily available capital.
Records of the Juzgado de Bienes de Difuntos, a special court to adjudicate
the fortunes of u l t r a m a r i n o s (people born outside the jurisdiction of greater
New Spain, but within the Spanish realm—literally, people born overseas)
who died intestate in the New World, provide a number of illustrations of
such "frozen" fortunes.
Jose Manuel de Aray[s]aga, a Basque, died in 1786, leaving an estate
valued at more than 100,000 pesos. Fully 74,000 pesos were tied up in
credits, of which only some 13,000 pesos' worth proved recoverable. His
debts to other parties totaled about 30,000 pesos. Assuming that his heirs
paid these debts conscientiously, gave him a funeral service appropriate to
his class, and paid the extravagant legal fees connected with the execution of
an estate, they were lucky if the merchant's death did not plunge them
further into debt. 8
Of Angel Gomez's potential wealth in 1807 of 35,900 pesos, the

following amounts were assigned to credits: 8,900 pesos to recoverable
credits; 2,300 pesos to "doubtful" credits; 15,000 pesos to "lost" or
unrecoverable credits. His cash on hand amounted to only 328 pesos, and
after deducting over 14,000 pesos in debts from his estate, his heirs
divided only about 1,495 pesos—less than 5 percent of his supposed
worth. 9
The Bienes de Difuntos archive (BPE-JBD) reports only the property of

intestate u l t r a m a r i n o s and by its nature may tend to reflect emergency
situations in years such as 1786 or 1810, when famine or war caused an
unusual number of unanticipated deaths. Similar illustrations occur

abundantly in other sources, however, and show that the problems of heavy
indebtedness and short liquid-asset supply were common to other sectors of
society at other times as well. Antonio de Iriarte, for example, a Creole with
significant investments in land as well as in mercantile goods, left a fortune
( c a u d a l ) assessed at 121,800 pesos in 1822. His executors deducted no less
than 109,900 pesos from this amount for payment of debts and expenses.
This left only about 10 percent of the estate in liquid form to be assigned to
Iriarte's heirs. To this amount the executors added a credit for just over
6,000 pesos owed Iriarte's estate by an hacienda. Iriarte's heirs thus divided
about 18,000 pesos, or some 15 percent of his nominal worth, and one-third
of their inheritance was in the form of an unpaid credit 10
In other examples, by 1833 the Hacienda de Mojarras had piled up debts

of over 79,300 pesos, although the hacienda itself was only valued at 51,300
pesos, and the owners of the Hacienda de Valparaiso did not pay a cent of
the interest owed on the hacienda's multiple mortgages during the entire
decade between 1811 and 1821. If this indebtedness was due to
emergencies caused by the wars for independence, then clearly emergency
was an ongoing fact of life during the period under discussion. 11
Types of C r e d i t T r a n s a c t i o n s
Under" the circumstances described above, people had a clear incentive to
reduce their cash outlays to a minimum. To this end they wove a tangled and
precarious web of what modern bankers would call second mortgages,
refinanced and discounted loans, surety bonds, and defaults. When
Anastasio Caiiedo bought an 8,500-peso house from Doctor Jose Maria Gil
in 1827, he paid 1,800 pesos in cash and received credit for payment of the
remaining 6,700 in exchange for assuming service on two previously
existing mortgages. 12
In 1822 Ramon de Alzaga bought all or part of the Hacienda del Humedo,
priced at just over 14,000 pesos, for a total cash outlay of 986 pesos, 5 reals.
The widow who sold him the land deducted 858 pesos from the price for
payment of the a l c a b a l a (sales tax), an unusual measure, since the
purchaser usually paid this tax. In any case, this spared Alzaga another cash
outlay. She also credited him with 2,723 pesos for payment of back-due
interest on mortgages, as well as more than 1,000 pesos corresponding to
debts she owed. Alzaga assumed the service obligation on a previous
mortgage of 5,800 pesos and retained control of the balance of 3,000 pesos
or more "by judicial order, to cover another debt of the seller." Alzaga may
well have discharged this obligation by assuming interest payments on the
debt rather than canceling it—the practice was common enough. 13
Just as people sought to reduce actual cash outlays to a minimum, so they

sought to extend the terms of payment to a maximum and often "refi-
nanced" obligations by assigning them over to third parties. Don Tomas
Serrato of Tequila owed Juan Alvarez several hundred pesos in 1822.
Serrato passed the debt on to his heirs, and Alvarez endorsed his right to
payment over to the merchant, Ventura Garcia Sancho. Garcia Sancho, in
turn, appointed a power of attorney in Tequila to collect the debt. Such 14
practices turned relatively short-term loans into long-term credits, actually

investments. For instance, when Agustin and Joaquin Echaurri borrowed
35,000 pesos from the University of Guadalajara in 1792, it was to pay off a
private debt owed by Agustin's father-in-law, Antonio Colaso, to Manuel
Calixto Canedo. The documents indicate that the university granted the loan
as an income-producing investment—that is, for the sake of the steady
income the interest payments would produce over an extended period of
time. Dr. Rafael Hernandez borrowed 4,000 pesos from the university in
15
1805 to pay off an already outstanding debt to the Convent of Santo

Domingo. His new debt to the university was not canceled until forty-five
years later. In this particular case, failure to collect the principal may have
been due to the political vicissitudes of the university and its eventual
closing. 16
Nevertheless, long-overdue loans were a common feature of the credit

landscape: Matias Calamateo repaid a note in 1839 that had come due in
1825; Bishop Cabaiias's nephew Dionisio took twenty-three years to settle
accounts with Magdalena Cid de Basauri regarding a loan of 21,000 pesos,
which she had originally furnished to him for four years only; Colonel Jose
Antonio Davalos took out a "five-year"loan in 1819 that he still had not
redeemed in 1835 (even at that time, he preferred to subrogate the loan
rather than repay it). Some of these obligations ran into the third and fourth
generations. The Villaseiior family finally canceled in 1837 an obligation
that had first been assumed in 1761. 17
Jose de Arochi, a young merchant, had a particularly difficult time

keeping his head above water in this world where everything was bought and
sold on credit Having once sunk into bankruptcy under the weight not so
much of debts as of uncollectible credits, Jose turned to his family for capital
to start a new business. The set of restraints his mother and siblings imposed
on him speaks eloquently of the painfully human side of the credit market.
Jose agreed to live on no more than a peso per day and to rent a small house
at no more than six pesos a month. He was to reserve at least one-fourth of
his daily receipts for payment of previous debts and promised to remain in
the store during meal times and siesta hour, as well. Also, "with respect to
the fact that he is accustomed to the familiarity or business confidence of
individuals who buy without saying that it is on credit, and take the item
without paying, he will not permit this no matter who the individual is who
wants to do so." Furthermore, no one was to receive any goods on trial
18
without depositing three times the value of the merchandise. Arochi

"expressly has to dismiss from the store any idle gabbler, and any time his
siblings catch him in a lie in matters of commerce, he is to turn over the store
without any objection or contest whatsoever, even if he's left out in the
street." As a final check against Arochi's irresponsibility, his family
19
warned him that his wife was in full cognizance of the 3,000-peso principal
he was to receive from them and instructed him to consult her concerning all
of his business affairs. 20
A burden on the credit market less often mentioned in the literature is that
represented by the ecclesiastical and the civil bureaucracies. We may think
of these bureaucracies as existing principally to collect revenue for the
church and the state. A t this time, the collection of civil taxes and the tithe
were commonly farmed out to contractors. The veritable armies of tithe
collectors, tobacco factors, and other assorted publicans thus created had to
post surety bonds, or f i a n z a s . Guadalajara's daily round of activity would
have come to a complete halt without the footing this kind of bond provided.
Every time a citizen deferred payment on a purchase, took out a loan,
became a party to litigation, assumed a public office that required
manipulation of funds, or helped execute an estate, he or she must post
bond, either by appointing an agent or by mortgaging his or her property. 21
Bondsmen (fiadores) assumed the risk of paying obligations in case of

default It seems reasonable to assume that they received certain
emoluments in return. The documents maintain a surprising silence on this
topic, but hidden in the municipal archives is a hint that the f i a d o r e s who
bonded the city's meat-supplying agency ( a b a s t o ) received the slaughtered
animals' hides in exchange for their services.
Although bondsmen did not normally deposit any actual money when
issuing a bond, the frequency with which borrowers defaulted meant that the
bondsmen often had to draw on the capital they had committed. If bondsmen
mortgaged property to guarantee their obligations, as they commonly did,
this correspondingly reduced the income they could derive from the same
property by further mortgages.
Altogether, the salaries and surety bonds issued in favor of tax collectors
and other parties at risk, the gratuities that bondsmen may have received, the
mortgages they created, and the money siphoned from bondsmen's purses
by frequent defaults and bankruptcies had the effect of sending capital
through a relatively unproductive loop. (Some side effects, such as the appro-
priation of hides, may have had a positive productive effect) In general,
bond making put yet another strain on an already-tight supply of capital

resources.
Contemporaries also felt that the headaches and risks involved in posting
bonds for others were so great that they canceled out any hypothetical
rewards. As Jose Ignacio Gil, of Cocula, felt driven to exclaim in his will,
" M y dear children, I charge you with this my tacit and explicit precept, that
you never be bondsmen for any person in any affair whatsoever, and least of
all for the Royal Treasury or for public interests, because the duty having
been discharged, paid and even years having passed, there is still almost
always a deficit." 22
Don Jose's cry of exasperation highlights another critical feature of

Guadalajara's credit market. The web of tenuously interlocked credit
transactions that financed the region's economy frequently caught local
entrepreneurs in snags such as interminable legal suits over competing
creditors' claims, long-overdue loans, excessive commitments, and outright
bankruptcies. Anyone entering this web as a lender naturally demanded the
maximum security possible to cover the evident risks.
Security t o Underwrite Credit Transactions

Credit, whether in the form of loans, surety bonds, time payments, or
chantries, had to be secured by a mortgage. Merchants could put up the
liquid capital for these transactions, but could not effect them without
proper security, and the only proper security for credit in Guadalajara was
land.
The chapter, or assembly, at Guadalajara's cathedral (and what better
authority could we ask for in these matters?) made this point very clear in
1805. Juan Fernandez de Ulloa, a merchant from Etzatlan, had asked for a
sizable loan. The chapter noted that although he "offers to mortgage the
interests of his commercial [enterprise] without expressing its actual value,
and although mercantile goods are not usually considered sufficient
property for such investments, being subject to easy dissipation, and
[uncertain] sale [by the] creditor, yet as he adds the fianza of Don Jose
Joaquin Basauri, owner of the Hacienda de Frias, of notorious productivity
sufficient to secure even larger principals, the doctoral [canon] believes that
if Don Jose Joaquin will expressly mortgage the above-cited hacienda" the
loan could justifiably be approved. Fernandez de Ulloa was a kinsman of
23
one of the cathedral canons, and that helped his case, too. But the main point
is clear: in order to have access to credit, a merchant must have access to
real property.
Land in the city was much less desirable than haciendas as security for
loans. The Convent of Jesus Maria borrowed from the cathedral in 1822 by
mortgaging a city block of houses. The canons accepted the mortgage of

urban real estate only grudgingly, in view of "the lack that there is of secure
properties in which to invest the said fourteen thousand pesos for income." 24
If credit was indispensable to this economy, the ability to mortgage land

was what gave prospective borrowers access to credit They must be able to
offer an hacienda as security. Prospective lenders, as the cathedral chapter
made clear, needed to find haciendas to invest in because they needed a
secure, productive outlet for their available capital.
The emphasis creditors placed on the income-producing improvements of
landed property might lead to speculation that debtors would mortgage the
income from their property, rather than the land itself. This was not the case
in Guadalajara. In the course of this study, only one mortgage turned up that
specified the income from an hacienda. This writ was issued by the holder of
an entail, who, of course, was forbidden by law to mortgage the landed
portion of his estate. In another instance, Tomas Ignacio Villasenor did not
receive permission to underwrite a loan to Jose Maria Castaneda in 1808,
because the unentailed part of his property, consisting precisely of income-
producing improvements, was considered worthless, since he could not
mortgage the land that went with i t Although it had to be improved to be
desirable as a security, land was what made these mortgages fast. 25
Just as no central banking system existed to make credit readily available,

there was no open, developed, land market outside the kinship network to
give prospective buyers ready access to haciendas. If a "free" or open
market for haciendas had existed, we would expect to find that new land was
being rapidly developed, or that established properties were changing hands
frequently enough to be readily accessible to new owners through purchase,
rather than inheritance or marriage. Turnover in established haciendas might
proceed from speculation in land value, bankruptcy and foreclosure, the
breakup of older properties, or the migration of traditional landowners into
other, nonagricultural economic pursuits. I found instances of all of these
changes except speculation in Guadalajara, and altogether the turnover in
hacienda ownership has turned out to be considerably greater than I once
thought. But only after independence did the market open up sufficiently to
allow a wholly new, landless group to acquire major estates rapidly with
money without first establishing traditional and ceremonial ties within the
community.
Few titles to land were recorded in the Ramo de Tierras y Aguas from
1800 to 1822. The majority were to properties described as arid,
mountainous, rugged, and uncultivable, which suggests that most desirable
land in the vicinity of Guadalajara had already been deeded out by the late-
eighteenth century. In partial exception to this rule, Doctor Rafael
Hernandez at some unknown date paid 4,000 pesos for the Hacienda del
Potrero. He then opened a new plot for cultivation, fenced it, made building
repairs and bought animals, all of which brought the value of the hacienda to
10,050 pesos in 1805. 26
Two different aspects of Don Rafael's history are worth singling out In
the first place, the doctor's hacienda was worth ten to twenty times less than
some of his contemporaries' were worth. This fits my conclusion that
properties available for new development at this time were likely to be small,
arid, or poorly located. Data now available for the eighteenth century, plus
notarial documents detailing other cases of recent land development in the
early nineteenth century, tend to support the same conclusion. 27
A second aspect of Don Rafael's story worth mentioning is the very small
fraction of the hacienda's total worth represented by the land itself. Since
there were buildings to be "repaired," the initial price of 4,000 pesos
reflected only in part the value of the land itself. In fact, it is doubtful
whether anyone had any conception of what the land was worth apart from
the mentioned improvements.
Nowhere in the notarial protocols of the first third of the nineteenth
century is the value of "land" discussed. By inference, the value of land on
great estates such as Huejotitan, like that of the Hacienda del Potrero,
represented only a fraction of the worth of an hacienda. When Huejotitan
was evaluated in 1808, for example, about one-third of the estate's given
worth was assigned to the stone fencing alone. 28
Haciendas did increase dramatically in value over the course of the

eighteenth century, but real improvements in productivity occasioned this
appreciation, apparently. Fields were enclosed, mills built, dams constructed
or repaired. Landowners neither sought nor offered land in hopes of a quick
turnaround at a higher price.
Bankruptcies and foreclosures played a significant part in making
haciendas available to new owners. In fact, Eric Van Young has shown that
the vulnerability of haciendas to financial collapse led to surprisingly
frequent turnover in hacienda ownership, especially in the first half of the
eighteenth century. He demonstrates that eighty haciendas in the Guadala-
jara region changed hands by sale 375 times between 1700 and 1815. This
revises our understanding of the period considerably, and opens up an
important branch of inquiry. 29
Still, as Van Young says, these figures do not indicate "that properties
changed hands rapidly for speculative purposes." On the average, haciendas
remained in the same hands for about 25 years at a time. If there were 375
sales in 115 years, with the rate of sale twice as high in the first half of the
century, then sales in the second half probably averaged only slightly more
than one a year. Since financial collapse often motivated these sales, many
of these haciendas would have carried a heavy burden of indebtedness. 30
Thus, although they may have attracted some potential buyers as a sort of
investment coup, they must have repelled many others because of their
infection with that most dreaded of colonial plagues—risk. "The over-
whelming majority of these transfers," writes Van Young, "took the
properties out of one family and into another." In other words, although
haciendas were not available for purchase on a moment's notice, they did
change hands often enough to indicate an "endemic instability" of Spanish
land ownership.
Did a steady recruitment of new elements into the landed oligarchy exist,
then? Van Young does not speculate as to the new owners' origins, but many
will wonder whether they were previously landless merchants. We should 31
exercise considerable caution in reaching conclusions on this point. Many of

the peninsular-born "merchants" who came to Guadalajara in the
eighteenth century mentioned v i n c u l o s (entails) that they had left behind in
Spain. Such entails were almost certainly much smaller than and very
different in character from the great colonial entailed estates. Nevertheless,
they show that these peninsulars owned real property before becoming
merchants and suggest that their families enjoyed a fairly long-term
association as residents with a given locality (northern Spain, in most
instances). There are a few hints here and there that peninsular migrants to
the New World were related to Creole families by previous kinship ties. In
other words, these merchants were probably not, like Marx's Jews, "living in
the pores of society." We might more accurately portray them as living "in
the pores" of the imperial elite, since many were nephews to bishops, in-
laws of courtiers, and noninheriting siblings of propertied families. It is
worth remembering, too, that when haciendas failed financially, their
owners or the courts would probably sell them to the estate's creditors or to
someone those creditors trusted to honor their debts, in other words to
someone who was likely a member of the clique already. 32
Another question we must ask before formulating conclusions about

social mobility is, What happened in the long run to the families that lost
haciendas through bankruptcy and sale? When the great sixteenth-century
estate of Luis de Ahumada broke up, we might suppose that his kin allies, the
Henriquez Topetes, who had no entail to guarantee their continuity as
landholders, would drop from sight, victims of "endemic instability." Yet
two centuries later and some seventy-five kilometers away, we find them
intermarrying with the "newly" landed Villasenor family that built its
eighteenth-century empire around the estate of Huejotitan. Did this sort of
historical sequence constitute the exception or the rule? We need more than
the largely anecdotal evidence now available to decide whether this chronic
movement represented a closed rotation of "ins" and "outs" recruited from
essentially the same class (as in many nineteenth-century political systems,
for example) or an open-ended recruitment of middle class elements and
expulsion of aristocrats (into what sociological limbo?). 33
However we ultimately resolve this important historical problem, it seems

reasonably safe to maintain the view that most prospective landowners of
whatever origin had to follow the fairly long and involved traditional route of
establishing or maintaining kinship through intermarriage with landed
families. Eligible landed women may not have come on the "market" much
more frequently than haciendas, but alliance with them offered several
advantages: greater assurance of financial solvency; access to additional
reserves of capital; a broad spectrum of useful civil and social connections;
prestige value; and a good chance for setting up a continuous line of
inheritance.
Inheritance, of course, is the other great avenue to land ownership in this
period. Unfortunately, Van Young offers no comparative estimate of how
often Spaniards joined the landowning class by inheriting property, and I am
not in a position to do so, either. I can only remark that, like marriage,
inheritance is a form of acquisition that implies a complex network of
overlapping social, economic, and ceremonial commitments, and member-
ship in a common class.
Some heirs (not all) acquired direct ownership and control of haciendas;
merchants who intermarried with landowners usually did not, because of the
separation of husbands' and wives' estates. Wives' estates nonetheless did
become integral parts of the family estates based on such haciendas, and
spouses enjoyed the privileges of using the hacienda's resources in their
trading affairs, with a corresponding obligation to supply supporting goods
and services to the agricultural operation.
Perhaps most importantly, merchants or other individuals marrying into
h a c e n d a d o families acquired that invaluable commodity, security. The
ability to mortgage hacienda properties enabled such individuals to enter the
dangerous but essential game of lending, borrowing, posting surety bonds,
making advance payments, taking deposits, funding subordinates, and the
other credit-related maneuvers without which the merchant could not buy
and sell large shipments of goods, nor the h a c e n d a d o finance his stock- and
grain-raising operations.
Marriage Alliances
Neither miners, merchants, nor hacendados were exempt from shortages
of currency, capital, and liquid assets. The frequency with which merchants
acted as bondsmen, trust holders, moneylenders, financiers, and major

suppliers shows that they enjoyed a relative advantage with respect to
liquidity. With respect to security to underwrite loans, however, the
merchants depended on their kinship ties to h a c e n d a d o families to obtain
mortgageable properties.
In one other important respect, merchants frequently depended on their
landed in-laws. In spite of their reputation for wealth and monopoly, many
merchants from Spain arrived in the New World with relatively insignificant
sums of capital. Only through marriage into local, wealthy families did they
acquire sufficient capital to take part in large-scale transactions.
The prototype of the powerful peninsular merchant in Mexico's history is
Gabriel Yermo, the man who deposed a viceroy. Yet Lucas Alaman, that
equally prototypical apologist of peninsular merchants and detractor of
Creole landowners, is quite explicit about the origins of Yermo's fortune.
Don Gabriel married Dona Maria Josefa Yermo in Mexico. She was his
first cousin and had inherited from her father, Don Juan Antonio, the rich
sugar haciendas of Temisco and San Gabriel in the Valley of Cuernavaca.
Alaman clearly states that Yermo was "respected for his conduct a n d f o r t h e
very c o n s i d e r a b l e f o r t u n e he h a d r e c e i v e d f r o m h i s wife a n d much
i n c r e a s e d by h i s i n d u s t r i o u s n e s s a n d l a b o r . "
3 4
In Guadalajara, as well, merchants not intermarried with local landed

families were less likely to be wealthy and socially prominent We shall see
cases like that of Francisco Rubio, who began his mercantile career with
little more than two thousand pesos, but who, through his brother's marriage
into the Villasenor family, became one of the city's most prominent
merchants and financiers. Here, as in Mexico City, marriage to a landed
Creole woman provided the peninsular merchant's ticket to social status and
financial success. 35
Kinship
The logic of the local credit market suggests that merchants and
hacendados sought to establish kinship ties through marital union, since
such union permitted sufficient accumulation of capital, combined liquidity
and credit, and brought lenders and borrowers together in an institutional
setting that insured some regularity and predictability in their credit
relations. Were such marriage alliances in fact a common practice in
Guadalajara during the late colonial period? Table 3 details fifty cases in
which peninsular merchants residing in Guadalajara married Creole women
from landowning families. If the ninety-six individuals involved (there were
four who married twice) were members of the local elite, and if they
Table 3
Creole-Peninsular Marriage Alliances
Sociedad
Peninsular Men Consulado Cabildo Patri6tica Creole Wives Haciendas
Ramon de Amati Kin of member Maria Manuela de

Zumelzu
Jose Manuel Araysaga Anna Maria Vallarta
Diego Baz Concepcion Palafox
Fernando Bello y Guadalupe Vizcarra
Prieto
Juan Manuel Member Member Member Juana de Dios San Clemente
Caballero Fernandez de Barrena
Dionisio Ruiz de Kin of Member Kin of Member Member Maria Guadalupe Vinculo de
Cabanas Estrada de Porres Mazatepec
Baranda
Juan Jose Cambero Member Member Marcela de Castro
Fernando Cambre Member Maria Teresa de Casillas
Fernando Cambre Member Maria Simona de la
Ascension
Credit and Kinship

Jose Maria Castanos Gabriela Lazcano Sagaz
y del Llano de Cenizares
Garcia Cerpa Kin of Member Kin of Member Maria Guadalupe Mayorazgo de
Villasenor Huejotitan
Francisco Cerro Member Kin of Member Isabel Ortiz y Sierra
Escudero
Juan Francisco Cor- Member Maria Dolores Vizcarra Santa Cruz
cuera y Landazuri del Castillo y Pesquera
49
Table 3 — C o n t i n u e d
50
Sociedad
Credit and Kinship

Peninsular Men Consulado Cabildo Patri6tica Creole Wives Haciendas
Juan Baudsta Chacon Maria Gertrudis
Benavides
Jose Maria Chafino Member Josefa Vallarta y
Barrionuevo
Jose Maria Chafino Member Dolores Vallarta y Vargas
Josef Domingo Member Member Clara de Castro
Zumelzu
Juan Esteban de Member Member Clara de Castro
Elgorriaga
Francisco Escobedo Member Kin of Member Isabel Ortega
y Daza
Ventura Garcia Member Member Ignacia Servin
Gutierrez de la Mora
Manuel Garcia Member Member Member Ma. Josefa Camila Gdpe. Santa Lucia
Sancho Moreno Sanchez Lenero
Francisco Garcia de Kin of Member Kin of Member Kin of Member Isabel Portillo San Jose and
Quevedo Navajas
Manuel Garcia de Member Member Member Eusebia Portillo San Jose and
Quevedo Navajas
Fernando Gonzalez Kin of Member Kin of Member Maria Manuela de
Velasco
Manuel Gonzalez Member Member Antonia Fernandez
de Vallejo de Castro
Sebastian Gutierrez Member Kin of Member Member Maria Francisca Santa Lucia
de Allende Sanchez Lenero
Sociedad
Peninsular Men Consulado Cabildo Patriotica Creole Wives Haciendas
Bernabe Gutierrez de Kin of Member Maria Dolores Ortiz y
Higuera Sierra
Agustin Gutierrez de Kin of Member Gertrudis Muguiro San Sebastian and
la Higuera San Pedro
Manuel Pacheco Kin of Member Gertrudis Muguiro San Sebastian and
Calderon San Pedro
Domingo Ibarrondo Member Member Member Ignacia Maruri
Jose de la Madrid Member Member Maria Teresa Colsa
Cubillas
Manuel Lavin Member Member Maldonado (first
name unknown)
Antonio Llanos Member Dolores Iraizos y Celis
(or del Llano)
Geronimo de la Maza Ignacia Avendano
Eugenio Moreno Member Member Josefa Sanchez Santa Lucia
de Tejada Lenero

Jose Prudencio More- Kin of Member Member Manuela Sanchez Santa Lucia
no de Tejada Lenero
Ramon de Munia Member Member Member Maria Vitala Gonzalez del Salto
Juan Angel Ortiz Member Member Barbara Sierra
y Escudero
Antonio Pacheco Member Member Maria Guadalupe Marti- Santa Cruz
Calderon nez de los Rios y Ramos and El Xacal
Francisco Xavier Member Member Josefa Garate
Pacheco de Villegas
52
Sociedad
Credit and Kinship

Peninsular Men Consulado Cabildo Patriotica Creole Wives Haciendas
Francisco Vicente Member Member Maria Francisca
Partearroyo Sanchez
Francisco de la Pena y Juana del Rio El Xacal and
Alvarado Santa Cruz
Pablo Benito Saenz Maria Luisa Aguirre y
de Tejada Ubiarco
Bias Saliente Ana Maria Megia
Senen Palomar Maria de Jesus Gutierrez
Miguel de Urquijo Maria Francisca Partida
y Lazo
Jose Zabalza Maria Ignacia de Villareal
Ramon Rucabado Member Member Maria Guadalupe El Cabezon and
Canedo La Vega
Baron de Santa Cruz Member Member Ana Josefa Canedo El Cabezon and
(Guillermo Daens La Vega
Stuart de Caserta)
Pascual Fernandez Member Member Maruri (first name
Rubio unknown)
Sources: Archivo Historico Municipal de Guadalajara (AHMG) and Archivo de Instrumentos Publicos de Guadalajara (AIPG) (for detailed list
of citations, see Richard B. Lindley, "Kinship and Credit in the Structure of Guadalajara's Oligarchy" [Ph.D. dissertation, University of Texas at
Austin, 1976], pp. 97-98; Jorge Palomino y Canedo,La casa y mayorazgo de Canedo deNueva G a l i c i a , 2 vols. [Mexico City: Editorial Athenea,
1947]; Jose Ramirez Flores, E l R e a l Consulado de G u a d a l a j a r a [Guadalajara: Banco Refaccionario de Jalisco, 1952]; Ramiro Villasenor y
Villasenor, Bibliografia general del estado de Jalisco [Guadalajara: Publicaciones del Gobierno del Estado, 1958]; and the Gaceta del gobierno
de G u a d a l a j a r a , various dates).
represented a significant fraction of that elite, then the table establishes that
creole-peninsular intermarriage was common, was perhaps even the typical
elite marriage pattern.
Wealth and Privilege

What is meant by the phrase "Guadalajara's elite"? In an abstract
definition of elites, the distinction between wealth and social status is of
theoretical importance. In almost any concrete case of civilized culture,
however, families who enjoy only one of these prerogatives have been the
historical exception rather than the rule. In Guadalajara as well, privilege
and wealth went hand in hand in the region's "best" families. A s in David
Brading's Guanajuato, "possession of public office [a good measure of
social status] closely followed the distribution of wealth." 36
In fact, even if we apply a variety of different criteria for membership in

the elite, such as possession of high public office, enrollment in the royal
merchants' guild, extensive land ownership, exercise of monopolies (such as
the meat market or the collection of public revenues), membership in the
cathedral chapter, high military rank, or even residence near the central
square of the city, the same families qualify again and again for inclusion
among the privileged few. The titled nobility itself was indistinct from the
society of bureaucrats, merchants, and clergymen.
Among this list of elite characteristics, membership in the exclusive Real
Consulado (the royal merchants' guild) and ownership of one or more major
haciendas are particularly applicable to the identification of wealthy
families. In a regional economy based on commercial agriculture, these were
universal conditions for achieving, demonstrating, and maintaining wealth.
Inclusion in the Real Consulado was reserved for the city's uppermost
stratum of merchants, and, as we saw in Chapter l, landholdings did not
usually merit the name "hacienda" unless they were worth the minimum
amount (certainly no less than six thousand pesos) required to mark a person
as having something more than a comfortable income.
Since the primary function of the city government at this time was to
regulate the marketing of local agricultural produce through such institutions
as the a b a s t o , t h e p o s i t o , and the a l h o n d i g a (a monopoly right to supply the
city with meat, the grain stock maintained by the city, and the public grain
market, respectively), control of these institutions was in the best interests of
the commercial and agricultural elite. Elite families assured themselves of
access to these market regulators by placing members in service on the
c a b i l d o , the city's governing council. Thus, we may assume that men who
served as a l c a l d e s and r e g i d o r e s (city council members and officials)
belonged to local elite families.
The aforementioned characteristics, along with membership in the

Sociedad Patriotica, are indicators of elite status (see table 3). The Patriotic
Society was a semiofficial club of eminent local citizens, modeled on
Europe's "enlightened societies," that met to recommend programs to
improve agriculture, mining, and industry. Since it formed in the 1820s, it
provides some continuity from the colonial into the national period as an
indicator of social status. It is also useful in that it included both merchants
and landowners, as well as miners and members of the professions
(principally law and medicine).
P r o o f of E l i t e Status
Twenty-four of the peninsular men listed in table 3 served on the Real
Consulado during its nearly three decades of existence. Another nine were
close kinsmen (by blood or marriage) of Real Consulado members, so that
the families of thirty-three of these forty-eight men were represented in the
most powerful merchants' association. If it were possible to make a more
exhaustive genealogical study, and if I were to include business dependents
of Real Consulado members, it is likely that only a few of the Spaniards on
the list would not be connected to the merchants' guild. 37
Fifteen of these same peninsular men held office on the city council,
either as a l c a l d e s (presiding justices) or r e g i d o r e s (council members) during
some part of the period 1790 to 1821. Perhaps another eight are closely
related (as brothers, in-laws, sons, or fathers) to city officeholders. This
would bring to twenty-three the number who had some intimate connection
to the city government 38
Reviewing the G a c e t a d e l g o b i e r n o de G u a d a l a j a r a for the names of

members of the Sociedad Patriotica, I again found peninsulars with Creole
wives prominently represented. Fourteen of the men in table 3 belonged to
this local version of Europe's "enlightened" societies in 1821 and 1822.
Eleven years of war and economic disruption, and one year of independence,
had evidently done little to alter the underlying pattern linking Guadalajara's
peninsular and Creole oligarchs. 39
If we next ask how many of these merchants had landed interests, the
answer will be more complex. Many, if not most, of these peninsular men
acquired land holdings through their wives. Women's property relations are
more difficult to trace because they appear with less frequency in the
protocols. Nevertheless, it is clear that at least sixteen of the wives listed in
table 3 owned land or were inheritable members of important landowning
families. 40
There can be little doubt that wives often contributed the benefits of
landed interests to the marital partnership. The main landed properties of
such prominent local personages as Juan Manuel Caballero, Juan Francisco

Corcuera, Manuel Garcia Quevedo, Ramon de Munia, Francisco Xavier
Pacheco, Francisco de la Pena, Ramon Rucabado, and the Baron de Santa
Cruz (Guillermo Daens Stuart de Caserta), came to them through their
wives. Further research could probably establish landowning ties for more
of the women, such as the Vallartas or Casillas, since their surnames were
those of regionally prominent families.
To appreciate the significance of wives' ownership of haciendas, we must
know at least the rudiments of Spanish inheritance laws of the time. Women
of the Spanish empire enjoyed considerably greater property rights and legal
standing than did their counterparts in the British possessions: Spanish
women were bearers of property and name, the twin pillars of their
children's social identity. It was in the public realm—that is, in the realm
outside the home and family—that men made their dominance felt Still,
home and family in colonial Guadalajara meant a great deal more in terms
of owning and managing business property than we might guess if we
allowed our own postindustrial experience to distort our views.
Spanish colonial law strongly endorsed women in matters of property and
inheritance. Far from being regarded as "legally merged in the identity of
their husbands," as were their colonial neighbors to the north, New Spain's
wives retained their surnames and their capital throughout marriage. Legal
documents always referred to a woman by her maiden name (usually a
paternal name, to be sure), and whatever dowry or "capital" she brought to
her husband had to be returned to her or to her heirs at the natural end of the
marriage contract Moreover, any gains accrued to the couple during the
marriage (that is, any capital over and above that present on the wedding
day), belonged equally to the estates of both partners. The wills recorded in
Guadalajara's notarial protocols show that maternal and paternal estates
were divided equally among male and female children or heirs. Colonial law
permitted variations from this general rule, but only within severe limits.
When the eldest son inherited an hacienda intact, for example, he had to pay
his sisters and younger brothers a sum equivalent to their natural shares in
the property. Inheritance practice reserved only a small fraction of the estate
for the testator's free disposition, and "primogeniture" would in fact be a
misnomer for a system that gave only a very relative advantage to the oldest
male heir. 41
Practice, of course, modified the dictates of the law considerably, but for
the most part local families honored their women's right to inherit When a
man married a woman from a landowning family, he did not automatically
become an hacienda owner himself (since men's and women's estates were
separate), but he could reasonably expect that his children would become
owners of some fraction of the land. Moreover, the husband presumably

could enjoy the benefits of landed property, such as the ability to mobilize
credit on the strength of a productive hacienda, without owning the hacienda
outright.
Creole men also used marital alliances to unite agricultural and
commercial enterprises. The following cases serve as examples. Alfonso
Sanchez Lenero, owner of the Hacienda de Santa Lucia, married Josefa
Moreno Calderon Marin del Valle, who was almost certainly from a large
mercantile family based in Tepic. Alfonso was himself a merchant and a
member of the Real Consulado in Guadalajara. Antonio Iriarte married
Guadalupe Alcaraz, heiress to a share of the Hacienda de Contla. Antonio
was also a member of the Real Consulado. Lie. Crispin Velarde, also a
member of the Real Consulado, married the daughter of Juan Jose de la
Mora y Palma, who owned the Haciendas de Buenavista, Cumuato, and San
Jose. Velarde used his wife's inheritance to begin a "commercial
business." 42
Where the land came from mattered less than the need to combine it,
wherever possible, with commercial enterprise. Among the peninsular men
listed in table 3, there are five who owned haciendas but whose wives did
not Fernando Cambre, Jose Maria Castaiios y del Llano, Jose Maria
Chafino, Francisco Xavier Pacheco de Villegas, and Senen Palomar,
bringing to twenty-one the number of merchants who had landed properties
large enough to be termed haciendas. Many prominent Creole businessmen
also owned haciendas in their own right, which they may or may not have
inherited, but which they apparently did not acquire through their wives.
Matias Vergara, Colonel Jose Maria Lopez, Jose Maria Olague, and
Fernando Sanchez Pareja were all "merchants" (Vergara and Sanchez
Pareja belonged to the Real Consulado), and each owned at least one
hacienda. 43
Clearly, Guadalajara's merchants' guild did not represent merchants to

the exclusion of hacendados, nor peninsulars to the exclusion of Creoles.
Robert Smith has pointed out that the Spanish crown in 1793 expressly
willed that the newly created c o n s u l a d o s include landowners as well as
merchants: the crown was implicitly recognizing the fact of h a c e n d a d o -
merchant intermarriage and defining the c o n s u l a d o not as a guild in the old
sense, but as a kind of representative club of the local society's most
prominent members. 44
Guadalajara's elite at the turn of the nineteenth century could not be

conveniently compartmentalized into merchants, landholders, miners,
Creoles, or peninsulars. A single elite based in the city dominated the
political, commercial, and agricultural life of the region. Three quarters of
the men in table 3 meet one or more of the tests for membership in this local
oligarchy. Twelve of the couples show none of the indicators of elite status,
perhaps because of incomplete data, in some cases. When working in notar-
ial records, it is easy to prove that a particular individual d i d own an
hacienda or hold some office, but it is extremely difficult to prove that some
one did n o t . Impressionistic evidence strongly suggests that most, if not all,
of the above twelve couples were members of Guadalajara's elite. There is
clearly a high degree of correspondence between elite status and creole-
peninsular intermarriage. Is that correspondence significant?
The practice of intermarriage between Creoles and peninsulars, or
between landholders and merchants, may have resulted not from some
social purpose, but from the force of circumstances. Peninsular immigrants
were overwhelmingly male and usually merchants. The available women
were, of course, Creoles and often from landowning families. Thus it was
inevitable that Old World trade should marry New World agriculture. Such
unions would result in the creation of family properties in which commerce
and agriculture functioned not as competitive rivals but as complements of a
single enterprise.
The question remains, nevertheless, of whether intermarriage was in some
respects a necessary condition for inclusion in the elite, of whether in some
respects intermarriage was a consciously sought condition and not simply a
kind of historical accident One way to measure the significance of
intermarriage patterns is to look at the alternatives. Peninsulars in the New
World had the options of remaining single, or of not legalizing their unions.
In the records of the Juzgado de Bienes de Difuntos for the early 1800s there
appear perhaps a dozen peninsulars who never took New World wives.
Some of them remained unmarried and had no children; others had offspring
by concubines or prostitutes, and a few left wives and children permanently
behind in Spain.
Granting the usual exceptions to any rule, most of these unmarried
Spaniards shared two salient characteristics: they resided in provincial
towns and they were considerably less well-to-do then their wedded
compatriots.
Luis Quiros, one-time subdelegado of Tepatitlan and a bachelor, seems
to have become a partner in two small r a n c h o s with Manuel de la Torre
Marroquin, another peninsular who never married (although he sired an
illegitimate family). Both men's careers were violently interrupted by the
wars for independence: Quiros was beheaded by the insurgents in 1810,
and de la Torre Marroquin was killed in the Battle of Zacoalco. Although
Quiros's goods alone were assessed at over three thousand pesos, the actual
(that is, liquid) estate left by both men together amounted to less than a
thousand pesos. 45
Jose Maria Andiasabal, a bachelor from Guipiizcoa, received three

hundred pesos a year as administrator of the Hacienda de la Cienega in La
Barca. The Navarra-born administrator of the Hacienda de Cedros at Real
de Mazapil also died a bachelor, presumably he earned an equally modest
income. A native of Santander who lived in Zacoalco left at his death an
illegitimate daughter and several houses worth approximately seven
thousand pesos. 46
These men clearly were not poor, but neither did they stand in a class with
the great landlords and merchants of Guadalajara's elite. Two other
peninsulars not married to Creole women were wealthy, but belonged more
properly to the peripheral elite of the small outlying towns. Angel Pablo
Gomez had a wife in Spain, and Vicente Sein Terrones remained celibate.
Gomez was worth from fifteen thousand to forty thousand pesos at his
death, depending on whether we count bad debts. Sein Terrones had a
potential estate of more than seventy thousand pesos and an actual one
(after deductions) of around seventeen thousand. In both cases, the men ran
stores in provincial towns (Gomez's in Tepatitlan, Sein Terrones's in
Cocula and Etzatlan) and both were subordinates of major Guadalajara
merchants. Sein Terrones was a nephew and employee of Ventura Garcia
Diego; Gomez was heavily reliant on Antonio Pacheco Calderon for
supplies and credit 47
Juan de Mestas, another unmarried peninsular, operated a store in Tepic

in the name of the powerful Ramon de Munia. Placido de Cazeda, attached
to a "muger que lo cuidava" ("a woman who took care of him"), constitutes
an anomaly to the extent that he resided in Guadalajara. Still, he fits the
pattern to the extent that he was a small-time operator: his entire estate
consisted of two thousand pesos in debts. Also, he was almost certainly a
dependent or employee of Juan Estevan de Elgorriaga. Thus those penin-
sulars not married to Creole women were geographically or commercially on
the periphery of Guadalajara's elite society rather than at its center. 48
To reiterate, at least three out of four peninsular merchants listed in table

3 were definitely members of Guadalajara's elite. Conversely, a number of
peninsulars who are known not to have married Creole women failed to
accumulate enough capital or prestige to be included in the inner circle of the
big-city oligarchy. There thus appears to be a more than casual connection
between membership in the city's oligarchy and m e r c h a n t - h a c e n d a d o
intermarriage. Does the sample in table 3, then, include a large enough
portion of Guadalajara's elite families to constitute a representative sample?
Eduardo Arcila Farias cites a report in the Archivo General de la Nation,
dated 1799, that listed 481 well-to-do individuals in the city. Of these, only
57 qualified as truly "rich persons." Assuming each of the 57 represented a

separate household, Arcila's estimate of the city's elite population would be
even more conservative than my own. If we take the more generous estimate
of elite population offered in Chapter 1, which puts the number of elite
families at 100 to 150, then the couples listed in table 3 may have
represented as much as one-half of the area's most prestigious families. 49
At its most conservative, table 3 shows that twenty-one out of perhaps one
hundred elite families held equally important agricultural and commercial
properties and united Creole and peninsular kinship lines. By adding another
seven examples cited of Creoles with agricultural and commercial interests,
we can conservatively estimate that about one-third of local elite families
combined haciendas with mercantile business. Since this study falls well
short of exhausting the voluminous notarial archive, it seems safe to guess
that this pattern was even more prevalent than present evidence suggests.
K i n s h i p , Credit, a n d the E l i t e F a m i l y Enterprise

Conflicts of economic interest and provincial identity existed within
Guadalajara's elite, but in many respects the kinship system that operated in
the upper layers of local society evolved as a means of subsuming and
mitigating those conflicts. If marital alliances did not always succeed in
dissolving or transcending such conflicts, they did succeed in placing the
diverse economic resources of the region within the bounds of unitary
enterprises controlled by families. A t the micro-economic level of
individuals and families, the distinction between merchant and landholder
interesected rather than coincided with distinctions of social class or
geographical origin.
Even though the elite cannot be divided into discrete and competing
economic sectors, perhaps the colonial macro-economy can. The different
sectors (agriculture, mining, commerce) did, after all, present very different
sets of problems and each had a unique system of organization to fulfill its
needs (the hacienda in agriculture, the two-man partnership in trade, and the
mine with its attached h a c i e n d a de beneficio [ore-processing hacienda]). Is
it possible to discuss such diverse economic functions under the umbrella of
a private family's enterprise without violating the essential diversity of these
various endeavors?
It must be possible, since families such as the Porres Barandas, the
Portillos, and the Villasenores were able to conceive of all the sectors as an
integrated whole and to operate unitary enterprises that cut across sectoral
boundaries. We may contend that they found it necessary to operate
businesses that encompassed all three of the main economic sectors at once.
We must look for some factor that families and economic entities had in
common. In the first part of this chapter, I tried to show that credit was such
a factor in turn-of-the-century Guadalajara. A l l considerations of labor,
social values, or resources internally unique to the mining industry, to
tobacco production, to haciendas, or to export-import operations shared a
peculiar dependency on credit
In a system in which there was never enough capital, and in which no
central banking institution was acting to accumulate and disburse
investment funds, each family had to serve as its own bank. Marital
partnerships that combined agricultural, commercial, and mining interests
fulfilled many of the conditions and performed many of the functions that
banks and corporations now perform in our society. Such partnerships
allowed for sufficient capital accumulation, complemented security with
liquidity in the family's assets, divided large risks into smaller ones,
prevented the family's isolation from any particular productive or lucrative
economic branch, structured patterns of business confidence, and provided
some means of enforcing loyalties.
The setting in which kinship alliances performed these "modern" banking
functions of course differs greatly from our social setting. In a kinship-
dominated society, such functions were much less centralized and the
institutions that performed them necessarily less specialized. Not only did
each family act as its own generator of credit and investor of funds, but the
family's role made it a pillar of religious, cultural, and political life, as well.
In this chapter, I have focused primarily on credit and kinship because the
former is a key to the kinds of needs that Guadalajara's regional society
most urgently felt, and the latter provides the structural lines along which
institutions grew to meet those needs. The most relevant of these institutions
was the elite family enterprise, grounded in marriages that allied landowners
with merchants. In the setting here described—of little centralization and
little specialization—such families evolved far beyond their simple bipolar
base to become miniature societies complete in their own right They
became, in other words, colonial society in microcosm. The merchant and
the landowner's daughter were perhaps key figures in the elite family
tableaus thus created, but so were the clergyman, the military officer, the
bureaucrat, doctor, and lawyer.
Having established the m e r c h a n t - h a c e n d a d o alliance as the bones of the
family enterprise, it becomes necessary to put some flesh on those bones by
looking at the total family enterprise in greater detail. The next chapter
describes a number of prominent local families that typify the internal
structure and functions of the local oligarchy. Profiling these families should
give a more concrete, better-rounded picture of the elite family as a working
institution, of its strategy to survive and maintain position by combining
economic resources and political leverage to reproduce local society in

microcosm, and of its tendency to integrate the regional socioeconomic
structure by transcending the severe dichotomies inherent to the colonial
dynamic—dichotomies such as Creole versus peninsular, landowner versus
merchant, or church versus state. With this image of the local oligarchy
more firmly in place, we can then examine, in Chapter 4, how the events
surrounding the wars for national independence challenged or transformed
this important set of institutions and relations.
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University of Texas Press

Chapter Title: Credit and Kinship

Book Title: Haciendas and Economic Development

The Local Economy's Dependence on Credit

Agriculture depended equally, though perhaps less obviously, on credit.

A number of problems were common not only to agriculture but to

Describing the importance of the credit market in Guadalajara involves

family enterprises created by kinship alliances were in the best possible

money as wealthy individuals. The responsibility for compliance with the

In Nueva Galicia, as in New Spain at large, no formal banking institutions

Of Angel Gomez's potential wealth in 1807 of 35,900 pesos, the

The Bienes de Difuntos archive (BPE-JBD) reports only the property of

unusual number of unanticipated deaths. Similar illustrations occur

In other examples, by 1833 the Hacienda de Mojarras had piled up debts

Just as people sought to reduce actual cash outlays to a minimum, so they

practices turned relatively short-term loans into long-term credits, actually

1805 to pay off an already outstanding debt to the Convent of Santo

Nevertheless, long-overdue loans were a common feature of the credit

Jose de Arochi, a young merchant, had a particularly difficult time

without depositing three times the value of the merchandise. Arochi

Bondsmen (fiadores) assumed the risk of paying obligations in case of

bond making put yet another strain on an already-tight supply of capital

Don Jose's cry of exasperation highlights another critical feature of

Security t o Underwrite Credit Transactions

mortgaging a city block of houses. The canons accepted the mortgage of

If credit was indispensable to this economy, the ability to mortgage land

Just as no central banking system existed to make credit readily available,

Haciendas did increase dramatically in value over the course of the

exercise considerable caution in reaching conclusions on this point. Many of

Another question we must ask before formulating conclusions about

However we ultimately resolve this important historical problem, it seems

acted as bondsmen, trust holders, moneylenders, financiers, and major

In Guadalajara, as well, merchants not intermarried with local landed

Ramon de Amati Kin of member Maria Manuela de