Jamay Part 4 of 5: Hacienda San Miguel de la Paz

Tall brick columns line the front of the casa grande. Unlike Hacienda San Agustin, shown in my previous posting, Hacienda San Miguel de la Paz is not in very good shape. Still, it has a fascinating history, as well as a number of interesting architectural features. The people exiting the porch are members of our group. The wall to the right of them is festooned with colorful ads for the political candidates of various parties.

We never know exactly what we will find when we go in search of a hacienda. Sometimes they are in perfect repair and may still function as agricultural operations. At other sites, the buildings may have been converted to other uses, as is the case with this one. Still others are in ruins, slowly crumbling in some remote pasture. However, we have almost always found at least some trace, even if it is only a part of one wall. 

More than 110 years have passed since the Mexican Revolution began. By the end of that struggle, the dominant position that haciendas had occupied in Mexico for hundreds of years was overthrown. Many of the sites that we have been able to find and explore may not exist in another 20, 50, or 100 years. I am glad to have had the opportunity to find these old haciendas, and show them to others before most of them have disappeared. 

How to find Hacienda San Miguel de la Paz.  Head east from Jamay on Highway 35 for about 4.2km (2.5mi). Turn left at an overhead sign pointing north to San Miguel de la Paz. Drive 9.5km (6mi) on the San Miguel-Jamay highway to the outskirts of the pueblo. Once you enter San Miguel, the name of the street on which you are traveling changes to Calle Epigmenio Zaragoza. 

Continue on that street until you reach the Plaza Principal. Turn left on Calle Antonio Ramirez along the south side of the Plaza. Drive one block and then turn right for two blocks on Calle Manuel Dieguez, along the Plaza's west side. On the left corner, you will see a small red, white, and blue auto parts store, with a sign saying Refaccionaria. Down an alley just to the right of the store, you will find the front arcade of the casa grande. Click here for a Google map. 

La Casa Grande

Two of our party walk down the arcade toward the entrance. The columns and walls of the casa grande were built with red brick that was once completely covered by white plaster. On either side of the main entrance, there are four tall windows in the Neo-Classic style. The somewhat shabby condition of the building today cannot conceal its once elegant appearance.

According to a wall plaque, the casa grande was built in 1910, the same year the Revolution broke out. The hacienda for which the casa grande was the centerpiece had been created by joining together two separate haciendas, both of them dating to 1800. One was Hacienda San Miguel, located 2.5km (1.55mi) north of the current pueblo in an area called El Potrero Nopales. The other was Hacienda La Paz. Its site was 4km (2.5mi) to the south in El Potrero Cosme. 

Front entrance of the casa grande. The door seemed a little odd to me, as if it had been designed for a family of very tall and skinny giants. It opens into a foyer called a zaguan, which is a typical feature of a casa grande. This leads into a central courtyard. Red brick is a material often found in haciendas built during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, their most prosperous period. Before that, adobe and stone were more commonly used because of low cost and easy availability.

There were economic and dynastic reasons why the two older haciendas were combined into one, with this casa grande built as the new headquarters. First, the construction of a railroad line through the area in 1910 transformed the local economy, as it did wherever a rail line was built in Mexico. It made good business sense to combine the two haciendas in order to increase production.

Previously, goods had to be transported over unpaved roads on wagons or by pack-trains of burros. A journey to Guadalajara, the largest market in the area, took several days. Transport by rail cut the time to hours. Railroads also created links to national and even international markets. Until the last half of the 19th century, the typical hacienda was modestly profitable at best and often served primarily as a symbol of social status. Now, profits skyrocketed. 

The second reason to combine the two older haciendas was dynastic. The portraits above were taken at the marriage of Miguel Orendáin and Dolores Faustiana Somellera. The joining together of Hacienda San Miguel and Hacienda La Paz into a much larger estate was part of the marital arrangements negotiated by the two families to give the young couple a good start in life.

The Orendáin family appears to have emigrated to Mexico from the Basque town of Orendáin in northern Spain. Among the first to arrive was Vicente Orendáin. He settled in the pueblo of Tequila in the early 1800s and became one of the founders of Mexico's tequila industry. Vicente bought his first tequila-distilling hacienda from José Cuervo in 1836. The Orendáins later sold that property to Don Cenobio Sauza in 1889. Today, Orendáin, Cuervo, and Sauza are major tequila brands. 

All this is to say that the Orendáin family was wealthy and socially connected. From a dynastic point of view, encouraging a marriage between Miguel and Dolores to create a larger and more profitable hacienda was a "no-brainer". I have no information about Dolores' family, but she was certainly from the same social class, since her family had a spare hacienda to contribute as her dowery. 

Casa Grande interior

Remains of a doorway arch where the zaguan opens onto the courtyard. Assisted by his brother Javier, Miguel Orendáin rapidly consolidated the two old properties and built an impressive new casa grande as the headquarters of new hacienda. No doubt, the increased revenues from access to the new railroad line helped pay for it all. 

While some of the largest haciendas, like Atequiza and Mazatepec, had the wealth and power to demand their own railroad stations, Hacienda San Miguel de la Paz doesn't appear to have had one. However, stations at the nearby towns of Ocotlán and La Barca would have been close enough to easily transport their goods for rail shipment. 

Courtyard of the casa grande. The balloons and chairs had been set up for a party to celebrate the birth of a new baby to one of the town's families. The casa grande and other structures were taken over by the ejido (communal farmworkers organization) after the land reform that followed the Revolution. The casa grande now functions as a community center for classes, community events, and parties.

Miguel Orendain and his wife appear to have been generous to the small community that was growing up around their hacienda. They funded the construction of a new church and built housing for the priests. In addition, they built a school for the community's children, supervised by the priests. The Orendains are remembered by elderly residents as reasonably enlightened. 

The meaning of the stork is the same in Mexico as in the U.S.  My good friend Jim B took this shot of me as I explored and photographed the casa grande's interior. Since I am always behind the lens, I seldom appear in my blog's photos. I always appreciate it when one of our group thinks to take a shot of me that I can include.

La Bodega

If you think this bodega looks like a fortress, you're right.  The thick walls are 15m (49ft) high and are supported by massive buttresses. On top of each corner is a circular bastion with gun slits. The railing between the bastions could be used by riflemen to train their weapons on attackers.The only entrances are four large doors along the front. Today, there are metal curtains which can be raised and lowered, but once there were thick, iron-studded wooden doors.  

So, why was a bodega constructed like this? The storehouse is 1000sq m (3281sq ft) and it functioned as a strongbox to protect the most important products of the hacienda. For almost 130 years, from 1810 through the mid-1930s, Mexico was wracked with wars, insurrections, revolutions, and chaos. Groups of armed men roamed the countryside. Some were military units of one faction or another. Others were simply bandit gangs, sometimes made up of former soldiers with no better prospects. 

To maintain themselves, food and horses were vital. The finery to be found in a casa grande was all well and good, but what they needed to keep operating was all stored in the bodega. Since it was the most defensible structure available, the hacendado and his workers could fortify themselves there against these assaults. They could hold out against most attackers using the food the bodega already contained, assuming they had stored an ample supply of water and ammunition.

A small arched structure stands above the entrances. This was the campanario (bellfry). The now-missing bell was used to summon the workers in the morning and dismiss them in the evening. Since few, if any, of the peones would have possessed watches, the bell was an important means of controlling the workday. Another of the bell's functions was to alert everyone to approaching dangers, such as bandit attacks or fires.

Eventually, Miguel Orendain sold the hacienda and his family moved elsewhere. The new owners were Antonio, Miguel and Trino Martinez, three brothers who are not fondly remembered in the community. They attempted to maximize profits by demanding strict twelve hour work days. If a peon's tool broke, they forced him to pay for it through extra unpaid work. These tactics probably succeeded for a while, but the Revolution eventually brought change to San Miguel de la Paz.

Mexico's post-Revolution land reform came in waves. The first was in 1917, with more waves in the 1920s. The final round occurred during the 1934-40 term of Presidente Lázaro Cárdenas. In 1936, the hacienda's workers formed an ejido and land reform finally came to Hacienda San Miguel de la Paz. The three Martinez brothers, seeing the writing on the wall, abandoned the hacienda and left the community in possession of the land and its buildings.

The turret of a corner bastion. Notice the gun slits. The fact that the ejido wasn't formed until the mid-1930s is probably due to several factors. First, it is likely that the relatively benign, paternalistic style of the Orendains made people reluctant to demand land from them. Second, the Martinez brothers, like many other hacendados, would have used every scheme they could think of to fight off the formation of the ejido. 

In the 1920s, during the second wave of land reform, many hacendados tried to fight it by forming alliances with the Cristero forces then rebelling against the government. The Cristeros were Catholic reactionaries who fought against the implementation of the Constitution of 1917, which restricted the power of Mexico's Catholic Church. Some hacendados used Cristero gangs as death squads to assassinate ejido leaders, in return for supplies and hiding places. 

Cristeros were active around San Miguel. They dynamited the tracks of the railroad so they could assault the train for the payroll it carried. Residents of San Miguel were pleasantly surprised that the government soldiers who passed through on their way to fight the Cristeros were polite and didn't abuse or steal from them. While the national government finally suppressed the revolt in 1929, it is likely that efforts at San Miguel de la Paz to win land reform were inhibited until the conflict's end. 

This concludes Part 4 of my Jamay series. I hope you enjoyed it. If so, please leave any thoughts or questions in the Comments section below or email me directly. If you do leave a question, please include your email address so that I may respond in a timely fashion.

Hasta luego, Jim