Over the first half of the twentieth century the Peruvian highland was a place commonly understood as dominated by immense haciendas.Footnote 1 The vast concentration of land in just a few hands also emerged as one of the era’s most pressing concerns. Indeed, the idea that sprawling estates covered much of the Andean countryside remains a truism even today. Yet, in the highland valley of Antapampa, estate landholding did not easily fit the picture of a grand latifundio. Rather, by the middle of the century, many properties had fragmented into numerous more modest holdings. Others either held very little land at all, found themselves severely restricted by the mountainous terrain, or ceded most, sometimes all, of their possessions to a rapidly growing number of tenant farmers. A small number still resembled the archetypal model. But these were exceptions, not the rule. In Antapampa at least that great rural Leviathan, the highland hacienda, was largely a chimera.
Even the word ‘hacienda’ offered limited explanatory value by the turn of the century. The documentary record, for instance, certainly sought to distinguish between estates, called ‘haciendas’, once belonging to a single titleholder, and the multiple smaller holdings that were legally partitioned from them, referred to as ‘lotes’ (lots) or ‘predios’ (lands or properties). The term ‘hacienda’ appears, albeit much more infrequently, reserved for the largest holdings or original properties from which newer ones gained title. To be sure, the term ‘hacienda’ is useful insofar as it highlights the colonial origins of landed estates. But this article reproduces the wording in the documentary record for it offers more than it obscures: a more historically specific and precise terminology to trace shifting tenancy patterns.
The valley of Antapampa, just northwest of the former imperial city of Cusco, offers an ideal location for such an investigation. Obviously, one cannot cover every possible landholding arrangement within a single case site. Antapampa’s traditional agricultural estates were distinct from the more idiosyncratic cattle ranches of the high plains, agro-industrial complexes on the coast, or export-orientated plantations in the jungle. So too they differed from areas predominantly farmed by independent smallholders who lived in what came to be legally recognised as ‘comunidades indígenas’ (Indigenous communities). Nevertheless, a long-time producer of staple Andean crops and home to some of the country’s earliest haciendas, by our period of study the valley counted among the districts with the most local lands under estate control in all of Peru, consolidating nearly two-thirds of all arable plots.Footnote 2 For the highland, then, it was precisely in places like Antapampa where enormous haciendas were supposed to have reigned. And yet they were few and far between.
Let us be clear from the outset, this article offers no apologia for an unquestionably uneven property regime with a highly exploitative set of labour and social relations. Estates depended on the sale of goods to market as well as on leasing plots to tenants, not just control of land.Footnote 3 Many proprietors, sometimes referred to pejoratively as ‘gamonales’, also wielded significant control over local life.Footnote 4 Hence written here is not a study of the hacienda in whole, but in part. Landholding, however, formed a crucial element. And by showing the scale of concentration as greatly overestimated, it forces us to reconsider the role of a key institution in the countryside. If not for extensive land hoarding, it begs questions such as why did visions of vast territorial extensions prove so enduring? What accounted for the highland’s extreme levels of impoverishment and underdevelopment? And when the nation’s estates were eventually expropriated in 1969, by what one scholar calls ‘Latin America’s most radical agrarian reform’,Footnote 5 just how radical was it really? All these require further research. Still, one cannot possibly hope to comprehend them without first moving beyond the more caricature-like representations of a highland beholden to huge manorial possessions.
Furthermore, although what follows is strictly a Peruvian story, it inevitably raises comparisons with Latin America more generally and possibly even beyond. In particular, across the continent there is a wealth of scholarship on the colonial and early republican hacienda, whereas very little exists for the twentieth-century iteration.Footnote 6 The few available studies, moreover, tend to come from very specific cases, often of genuine latifundia, and so offer a highly incomplete picture of landholding writ large.Footnote 7 At the very least, if the extent of land concentration has been significantly overblown for the Peruvian highland, it strongly suggests the need for revisiting similar assumptions elsewhere.Footnote 8 Perhaps most Latin American estates had more in common with those of Antapampa than, say, with those of Morelos.Footnote 9
Returning to the task at hand, to construct a picture of estate landholding in Antapampa, this article draws upon extensive and original archival materials. It required compiling and processing property titles, probate records, cadastral surveys and inspection reports from roughly 300 Ministry of Agriculture files, rarely, if ever, used before. Taken together, these documents offer a layer of analysis absent from earlier debates and provide the most fine-grained exploration of estate land tenure to date. To tell our tale, initially we turn to the idea behind the highland hacienda as ‘the great agrarian property’, then to changes taking place on Antapampa’s estates over the first half of the twentieth century, and finally to what it all meant for valley landholding by the middle of the century.
The Great Agrarian Property
Not until the end of the nineteenth century did the hacienda surface as a major concern for Peruvian society. Throughout most of its history, according to Pablo Macera, as ‘the predominant unit of agricultural production ever since its implementation by the colonial regime … the hacienda was accepted as a natural fact that need not be explained’.Footnote 10 But Peru’s defeat to Chile in War of the Pacific (1879–83) ‘produc[ed] a change of attitude; it was necessary to revise all concepts … Agriculture was for discontented and marginal intellectuals a social question, the land problem.’Footnote 11 Yet, Macera adds, ‘the characterisations of the problems facing agriculture and among them the role of the hacienda were treated by a literature full of generalities, accurate in essence, but lacking in historic or local reference’.Footnote 12 Short on detail, like many a cause célèbre, the hacienda nonetheless burst forth into the national consciousness as an urgent obstacle to be surmounted. With no less the nation’s future at stake, hacienda delenda est.
Certainly, by the early twentieth century, public figures began to fiercely chastise the highland hacienda for amassing land. The eminent scholar Jorge Basadre, for example, saw in the countryside ‘immense territories hoarded by a small few’.Footnote 13 Likewise, for Hildebrando Castro Pozo, one-time Director of the Office of Indigenous Affairs, the rural population found themselves ‘dispossessed of their properties … [by] enormous latifundia’.Footnote 14 None other than José Carlos Mariátegui also asserted in his magnum opus, Siete ensayos de interpretación de la realidad peruana, that ‘in the highland one observes the phenomenon of concentration of agrarian property’.Footnote 15 ‘The survival of a regime of latifundistas produced, in practice, the maintenance of the latifundio’, which he called ‘the great agrarian property’.Footnote 16 Eloquently capturing the era’s mood, Carleton Beals, a journalist travelling the region in the 1930s, penned the following: ‘In the broad upland valleys stretch enormous haciendas where the Children of the Sun toil … for four centuries Peru has been increasingly proving the maxim of Pliny the Younger: “Latifundia perdidere Italiam.”’Footnote 17 Ergo, the argument went, from the original sin of Peruvian history, the dispossessions of conquest, the ‘great agrarian property’ materialised and prospered unchecked to the present day.
From mid-century, intellectuals of various stripes also joined the chorus condemning widespread land accumulation by a fistful of highland estates. Cusqueño historian José Tamayo Herrera spoke of how ‘a couple of hundred landowning families exerted influence over the great campesino masses’.Footnote 18 In much the same fashion, Mario Vázquez of the Peru–Cornell Project at Vicos wrote ‘it is well known that the majority of haciendas are of enormous extension … and in the departments of Cuzco and Puno are the largest haciendas in the country’.Footnote 19 The idea disseminated far beyond Peru, too. Frank Tannenbaum, famed scholar of the Mexican Revolution, said of the Andean highland, ‘by one method or another … the large plantation came to be the characteristic feature of rural organisation, and such it has remained’.Footnote 20 François Chevalier, who popularised the study of the Latin American hacienda, similarly stated that ‘in the highland, the large estates of the early decades of the [twentieth] century [were] triumphant’.Footnote 21 These are just some examples among many of scholars envisioning the highland hacienda as ipso facto a vast land consolidation.
The idea of a countryside under the sway of vast properties proved so influential in fact that it even led to the collapse of estate landholding altogether. Facing widespread rural unrest, in 1968 the military seized power, and in 1969 promulgated Agrarian Reform Law No. 17716. In a little under a decade, nearly every last one of Peru’s estates was expropriated and their lands redistributed to the nation’s smallholders.Footnote 22 In a speech announcing the law, the leader of the armed forces, General Juan Velasco Alvarado, uttered what came to be leitmotifs for the era: ‘Campesino, el patrón ya no comerá más de tu pobreza’, and ‘La tierra debe ser para quien la trabaja’.Footnote 23 Enrique Mayer explains the mythos behind the legislation best: ‘the story of the agrarian reform is rather simple … The hacienda system that had developed out of Peru’s colonial society was [seen as] extremely unjust and oppressive … [and] land was extremely concentrated in large estates.’Footnote 24 Like so many others, it seems, the agrarian reform took mass land concentration as an article of faith.
Just as with the hacienda itself, from the late twentieth century and into the early twenty-first interest in estate landholding largely faded into memory.Footnote 25 Past visions, nonetheless, reverberated. In a study of highland agriculture, Jean Piel still argued for the existence of a ‘monopolistic concentration of land and wealth in the hands of a few landowners’.Footnote 26 Along the same lines, several recent monographs on Cusqueño history continue to comment on the predominance of extensive landholdings in the region at the time.Footnote 27 While we are on the subject, Pablo F. Luna has recently written a thoughtful historiographical review entitled ‘Haciendas in the Andean World, Sixteenth–Nineteenth Centuries’, counselling against hasty generalisations. Instead, he highlights ‘the variety of origins and factors that produced … the enduring concentration of the possession of land’.Footnote 28 To be fair, Luna was speaking neither of the highland hacienda in particular, nor of the twentieth century at all, so left the question of estate land tenure in our period unaddressed. But it is a critical one. For evidently the perception of a highland subjugated to sprawling estates remains alive and well today.
To be sure, if one went in search of estates that fitted the prevailing image of the highland hacienda over the twentieth century, they were there to be found. And Peruvian scholarship is rich in studies of just such properties. In Cusco, for instance, Héctor Martínez’s investigation of Ccapana, Maxime Kuczynski-Godard’s of Lauramarca, and even Eric Hobsbawm on several cash-crop plantations in La Convención recorded the life and times on genuinely massive properties.Footnote 29 Similarly, Mariano Valderrama and Patricia Ludmann, in La oligarquía terrateniente ayer y hoy, studied 233 of Peru’s ‘principal mixed-husbandry’ estates and found the ‘existence of a high concentration [of land] in the hands of a few’.Footnote 30 For Cusco, however, the study drew conclusions from just three, albeit massive, holdings.Footnote 31 Immensely valuable insights notwithstanding, a few select cases helped bestow upon highland estates the sine qua non of a large, consolidated property. The outcome: a significant overestimation of land concentration and a missing of the proverbial wood for the trees.
Crucially, a few people did notice claims of massive land monopolies to be overblown. As early as 1913, Luis Valcárcel spotted that, ‘it is general in Cuzco to speak of “our finca” and … this large group of agriculturalists are “small proprietors”’.Footnote 32 Subsequently, Nelson Pereyra Chávez in Ayacucho, Lewis Taylor and Carmen Deere in Cajamarca, as well as Henri Favre in Huancavelica, all cast doubt upon the received wisdom of highland estate landholding.Footnote 33 But the person to document the fact most forcefully was José María Caballero. Using agricultural census data, in 1981 he wrote, ‘one of the most common images of land is that … it was found largely concentrated in the hands of landowners … There was then – and still remains – land concentration in the highland, but much less than what is commonly supposed.’Footnote 34 Later on, Mayer picked up on Caballero’s work, particularly how it challenged claims of an extremely impactful report by the Organization of American States’ Interamerican Committee for Agricultural Development, published in 1966, which estimated that 1 per cent of Peru’s population held 75 per cent of the land.Footnote 35 The report, Mayer writes, ‘so universally accepted, was nonetheless in error for the highlands … Caballero found that the predominant units (98 percent) were small units (unequally distributed between a large number of minifundio subfamily and family units and a smaller group of family farms from 2 to 50 hectares), with about 80 percent of the land’.Footnote 36 So for those that looked closely, the notion of a highland dominated by vast seignorial possessions appeared a dubious one. But to our collective loss only a few did.
The highland hacienda qua mass land concentration thus remains an orthodoxy. One possible explanation, Favre notes, is ‘the weak historic documentation, the lack of cadastral records and the imprecision of the scarce statistical data [which] limit the reach of investigations into the distribution of land and its tenancy’.Footnote 37 Yet this article draws upon just such sources which were not consulted in earlier studies. The archival record, moreover, allows us to go beyond existing challenges to the conventional view. For even the likes of Caballero et al. overestimate the degree of land accumulation by only looking at estates from the outside, in terms of total extension, while this study also views it from within, to show significant possessions ceded to tenant farmers. So even in places like Antapampa, where properties collectively held large tracts of land, individual proprietors directly controlled significantly less than appeared prima facie. Furthermore, the preceding accounts were either abstract national surveys, or questioned the established narrative in passing, whereas here is the most comprehensive localised examination of estate landholding to date. One hopes the following pages are read as adding flesh to the bones of those critiques that come before.
Haciendas, lotes and predios
The genesis of the highland hacienda is a story still shrouded in mystery. A few key details, however, seem clear enough. For starters, Cusco in general and Antapampa in particular saw the appearance of the first prototypical or ‘traditional’ estates.Footnote 38 Additionally, thanks to Donato Amado Gonzales’s careful study of neighbouring Chinchaypucyo, we know how lands came under proprietary control. Of royal grant, purchase from native populations, and sale of ‘leftover lands’ (tierras sobrantes) by the colonial government, the hacienda was born.Footnote 39 As early as 1579, some 45 properties materialised in the valley.Footnote 40 The Spanish ‘founder of Cusco’, Juan Julio Ojeda, claimed lands there, as did Juan Pizarro, son of Francisco.Footnote 41 And so, hand in glove goes the history of the highland hacienda and of Antapampa.
Another dynamic of relative confidence is that estates initially found land relatively abundant. In Antapampa, Jorge Villafuerte writes, ‘regarding the extent of landholdings distributed [by the colonial authorities to Spanish landholders] it appears that there were no defined criteria on behalf of the era’s colonial authorities and that rather it [the distribution of lands] was subject to the fact that lands solicited were found without owners’.Footnote 42 Amado Gonzales noticed the same in Chinchaypucyo, where ‘many open spaces remained’.Footnote 43 In short, as Tamayo Herrera puts it, ‘there were no obstacles to the expansion of the hacienda in a countryside depopulated by epidemics’.Footnote 44 Considering the precipitous demographic collapse of the early colonial years, which left just an estimated 4000 people inhabiting the more than 50,000 ha valley, one struggles to imagine anything other than haciendas emerging in a relatively depopulated space.Footnote 45
Of a similar certainty is the fact that by hook or by crook Antapampa’s estates consolidated large swathes of land throughout the colonial period and into the early republic. Magnus Mörner tells us that ‘in the great majority of Cusqueño doctrinas [rural parishes] haciendas were well ingrained by the 1680s’.Footnote 46 ‘It is from this moment’, Amado Gonzales likewise writes, ‘that the processes of land hoarding became most evident and we can finally observe the establishment and consolidation of agrarian property’.Footnote 47 By the late colonial era, Mörner again comments, ‘the largest properties were found in the regions close to the city of Cusco … [where] one glimpses an impressive concentration of land’.Footnote 48 In particular, he continues, ‘the vast expanse of land held by the “Lords of Abancay”,’ the province to which Antapampa belonged, ‘jumps out from the page’.Footnote 49 To be sure, haciendas were not all of a type. Landholding came in different shapes and sizes.Footnote 50 Yet we do know that as late as the middle of the twentieth century, valley estates held title to about three-quarters of all local land, while what remained belonged to several independent Indigenous smallholder populations.Footnote 51 Put simply, estates had collectively amassed substantial possessions by the eve of our study.
As a word of caution, an obsessive focus on land concentration in a few hands in the colonial and early republican periods is a little misleading. For the chief concern of the highland hacienda over much of its lifespan was not so much access to land, but to labour.Footnote 52 To wit, Amado Gonzales points out, ‘the fact of having a defined territorial expanse [of land] … meant nothing without aboriginal labour’.Footnote 53 Even into the nineteenth century, Mörner notes Cusco appeared ‘very modest in terms of labour’.Footnote 54 A German agronomist, Karl Kaerger, also observed when visiting areas near the valley in 1899, ‘the most difficult thing is to find labour to cultivate the land’.Footnote 55 Some context, then, through which to read the comment by Antapampa’s subprefect at the same time, to the effect that ‘only the tenth part of the countryside is cultivated’.Footnote 56 So for much of the history of the highland hacienda in and around the valley, land concentration appears something of a dead letter. Estates consolidated large territories but lacked sufficient bodies to work most of it, rendering much of the land of little value.
Over the first half of the twentieth century, however, the image of a valley with high land concentration and low labour supply was turned on its head. First off, many estates were divided into numerous much smaller holdings. According to Ramón Gutierrez,
A special form of tenancy was constituted, the mayorazgo, in which the holdings of a family remained held among themselves so that they could not be alienated or dismembered, and they passed in full to the oldest son of the family who would look after the rest. In this manner, property tended to be consolidated and expanded without risk of fragmentation.Footnote 57
But with the prohibition of the mayorazgo under the 1852 penal code in Antapampa, as elsewhere, upon the death of the previous proprietor, many estates were legally partitioned into various independent lotes.Footnote 58 Similarly, landholdings comprising multiple possessions, once of a sole titleholder, were divided into distinct predios. Land titles, of course, require cautious use. De jure landholding is not the same as de facto possession. Yet when Ministry of Agriculture inspectors visited the valley in the mid to late 1960s to determine whether estates were worked directly by proprietors, they found that in most cases those who held title to the land farmed it too.Footnote 59 An article in the national daily El Comercio commented on ‘the importance of the “eyewitness inspection” [inspección ocular] as form of verification in litigations over possession of rural properties, offering to the Juez Agrario [Land Judge] a very valuable element of proof’.Footnote 60 Needless to say, one cannot trust any single piece of evidence alone, but comparing land titles with reports from subsequent independent inspections, we can confirm that many one-time larger estates were split into an assortment of more minor ones, generally possessed and operated autonomously.
A prime example of an hacienda divided into a collection of smaller landholdings is Huancavilcas. Evidence of title dates to at least 1894, when Miguel Álvarez and Juana Evangelina Salas Pinedo purchased the ‘hacienda Huancavilcas’.Footnote 61 Following the death of Miguel in 1909, Juana gained full proprietorship and, some time around mid-century, as the ‘sole property owner’, divvied up Huancavilcas among her heirs. Juana’s children Aleja, Leonor, Felipe, José and Miguel received three plots apiece. Meanwhile two grandchildren, Francisco and Mario, shared three more.Footnote 62 In fact, an unofficial division had possibly occurred even earlier. Declared Juana, ‘Two plots have been in the possession of my son Felipe since 1942 which I gave to him in anticipation of inheritance.’Footnote 63 More conclusively, when Ministry of Agriculture officials inspected Huancavilcas in 1958, they found it as follows: Lote 1, measuring just 27 ha, was worked directly by Felipe. The 19.69 ha Lote 2 belonged to Leonor, who lived in Lima, and rented the holding to four tenants. Lotes 3 and 4, and parts of 6, had been purchased and were being farmed by one Tomás Muños, some 56.84 ha altogether. Lastly, Lotes 5 and part of 6, covering 26 ha, Francisco and Mario leased to another person.Footnote 64 A far cry from a single estate concentrating large quantities of land, Huancavilcas was in reality four smaller holdings toiled separately by an heir, an absentee landowner, an independent proprietor and a lessor.
The Llamacpampa hacienda had also fractured into numerous distinct properties. In 1896, Javier Urioste inherited the 500 ha estate from a grandfather, and upon his own death bequeathed it to six surviving relatives.Footnote 65 In 1966 they claimed ‘[we] agreed [in 1944] to materially divide the property … among all the heirs and thus by common accord expert appraisers engineer Leonidas Aguilar Astete and surveyor Carlos Astete were named to carry out the professional partition … the contracting party proceeded to draw lots under the supervision of the notary Amadeo Fernández Baca, on the date of 27 August 1947.’Footnote 66 From then on, the family claimed to farm the lands independently. Ministry of Agriculture investigators concurred, in 1970 finding the titleholders directly working their individual possession, and the ‘partition of the hacienda into six lotes’.Footnote 67 Here too, from what was once a single consolidated estate, emerged several independent holdings.
Marquezbamba offers another extreme, albeit no less illustrative, example of an estate carved into various minuscule fractions. First, in 1935, Carlos Pacheco y Pacheco sold 30 ha of Marquezbamba’s 120 ha to four neighbouring smallholders. Then, in 1942, he left what remained to various children. The following year, 11 inheritors officially divided up the landholding, receiving title to about 8 ha apiece (Figure 1).Footnote 68 In a letter to the Ministry of Agriculture in 1967, the heirs wrote that Marquezbamba ‘has been divided … into tiny fractions that number 15 small plots that we work independently and possess autonomously’.Footnote 69 As a matter of fact, the Pacheco y Pacheco clan claimed to have divided the lands much earlier. Of the division, the letter continued, ‘we carried it out in a private form well before the [official] enactment’.Footnote 70 After studying 34 documents and inspecting the various holdings, the Ministry of Agriculture concluded that at the very least ‘the heirs [had] enacted division and partition in the year 1943 and are to be found on the lotes that they work directly’.Footnote 71 The Marquezbamba case, moreover, offers a hint at the logic driving divisions. In other correspondence, some of the proprietors, all residents of Antapampa, stated: ‘We are small property owners … we have divided the estate, by mutual accord … to exercise our act of possession and to direct exploitation, with eminently economic aims to satisfy our numerous families.’Footnote 72 To be sure, these are faint documentary threads. But knowing that the heirs held title to and lived and laboured on their respective properties, we might take them seriously: Marquezbamba was partitioned because it was in fact a set of smaller, distinct holdings.
Figure 1. Marquezbamba, 1969
In a similar vein, multiple holdings, formerly of a single proprietor, were broken apart into several independent predios. As a case in point, upon the death of Marcelino Ponce de León in 1930, Cusco’s Office of Title Registry found several landholdings divided between three heirs: Federico, Francisco and María.Footnote 73 To Federico went the lands of Chacaccollo, to María, Tambo and to Francisco, Bandoja.Footnote 74 Francisco in particular offers some insights into the break-up. He wrote in 1967, ‘given the small size of the estate and to avoid an inconvenient fractioning, I procured and gathered together the shares of my four siblings … [and] I assumed the proprietorship of the predio as its sole owner’.Footnote 75 In another letter he wrote, ‘Bandoja for its situation, size, productivity and the rest of its conditions is a small mixed-husbandry family unit … there is no concentration of land.’Footnote 76 Francisco was exaggerating, though only slightly. By the 1960s he still personally held a reasonable if not exactly grand 50 ha.Footnote 77 Ultimately, whether a single estate was fragmented or multiple-divided, it did not look much different: very little land concentration, just lots of small estates belonging to many titleholders.
Santa Bárbara was also formerly a collection of properties titled to one person. In 1909, the holdings were officially separated between various heirs into distinct fractions called Santa Bárbara, Pucroc, Ccolquemachahuay, Patacalla and Llimpi. Subsequently, one of the inheritors, Clorinda, purchased the various estates from the rest of the inheritors.Footnote 78 In turn, when Clorinda died in 1947, she bequeathed three of the former Santa Bárbara landholdings to her children.Footnote 79 Wrote her heirs, ‘[we are] all married, of age, residents of Zurite [one of the towns in Antapampa] … We have the right to partition the referred-to property in the three naturally divided fractions … We three siblings contractually declare that we are now in possession of our lotes since the death of our esteemed mother.’Footnote 80 Evidently, the siblings’ claims held validity for, by the late 1960s, the Ministry of Agriculture found the 48 ha of Colquemarca, the renamed main Santa Bárbara holding, being laboured by Raúl Medina, husband to Lucrecia.Footnote 81 On the 17.7 ha of Llimpi and 48 ha of Ccolquemachahuay, ‘from the different inspections carried out … it is established that the predio is worked and exploited by Doña Alicia Núñez de la Torre de Santander, along with her husband and children’.Footnote 82 Once again, on what had previously been Santa Bárbara, we find lands no longer consolidated in a single holding, but divided and laboured as separate properties.
So it was, then, that many valley properties were divided over the first half of the twentieth century. Importantly, these were not the only landholdings to break apart. The fragmentation of landholding appears a relatively common trend. Some 15 former haciendas were so fractured: roughly one-third of all Antapampa’s estates.Footnote 83 Further corroborating the archival record, David Guillet, an anthropologist working in the valley in the early 1970s, observed how ‘it appears that the hacienda began to decline in importance … and to fractionalize through inheritance patterns’.Footnote 84 In particular, Guillet documented the break-up of the Tukiwasi hacienda, where a complex web of death, sales and inheritance left the estate, which until 1910 functioned as a single holding, in three separate properties, belonging to different owners.Footnote 85 Naturally, not all lotes or predios were worked directly by the official titleholder. Some clearly belonged to absentee landlords, and perhaps still functioned as a whole property. But they were in a minority.Footnote 86 And even if estates were fragmented between members of the same family, most worked their plots directly, concentrating very little land in individual hands. Conversely, it is also possible that some official and unofficial divisions had occurred much earlier. Alas no evidence at present exists for partitions in the valley prior to the twentieth century. But in the highland of Piura, Alejandro Diez found at the end of the nineteenth century that ‘the hacienda belonging to a single individual did not exist. In general, properties had the character of a “company” with multiple “shares” held by various members of the same family … Within every holding … each one of the proprietors occupied and worked what land they could.’Footnote 87 Still, in Antapampa at least, by no later than the middle of the twentieth century, from many former haciendas emerged an even greater number of much more modest lotes and predios.
Small Properties and Mountain Ecologies
Not all Antapampa’s estates had broken up. Even so, few constituted the kind of land concentration typically ascribed to the highland hacienda. We know this because Ministry of Agriculture officials mapped all the valley’s landholdings from the mid 1960s. No doubt some lands got misclassified. But most were plotted more than once and at times earlier estimates were corrected. The discrepancies were usually minor too; a few hectares here, a few hectares there. What they found, however, was incredibly revealing. Some were tiny estates, plain and simple. Other estates meanwhile saw the true extent of their properties shrink once one accounts for the types of land they held; often large quantities of low-yield pasture useful for animal grazing but little else. All told, these possessions only further dispel the notion of the highland ancien régime as a landholding colossus.
A few of Antapampa’s estates held very little land at all. Take Chuchuchaca, a tiny plot of just 13 ha.Footnote 88 On or before 8 April 1907, José Francisco and Luis Alberto Hermoza purchased the property.Footnote 89 Then, in 1938, César Rodríguez Lira bought the property, before selling it to his son Aristides.Footnote 90 According to a Ministry of Agriculture official in 1973, ‘as a result of the different inspections … it is confirmed that the predio is worked directly by [Aristides] as his only income source and principal activity, which is carried out efficiently and with the assistance of his family’.Footnote 91 A minor family farm, worked by two generations of the Rodríguez family, no more than that.
Another small landholding was Villa Lucía. In 1954, Julio Ibérico Concha purchased Ccacaypampa and its annex Potrero from the former Huancavilcas hacienda. Subsequently, in December 1958, January 1963, June and July 1965, and January 1967, Ibérico Concha appears in the Public Registry as also acquiring various other small plots.Footnote 92 Once brought together under the same title, the property totalled just 34 ha.Footnote 93 Julio, 65 years old and a state-employed civil engineer, suggests some insights into the administration of the landholding: ‘As you see it’s a small property … these lands have been acquired from savings of more than 30 years and the work of my wife, who is the daughter of a modest campesino from Marcapata. She is the one that works the lands with help from temporary workers only when the agricultural tasks require it.’Footnote 94 Naturally, one cannot just take Julio’s word for it. But the Ministry of Agriculture confirmed the Ibérico Conchas worked the plot directly and found no indication of lands held elsewhere.Footnote 95 So it is plausible enough that Villa Lucía was exactly what it seemed: a minor landholding, operated largely by a single family.
Chimpahuaylla also formed a rather ordinary estate. In 1921, José Isaac Silva Garmendia left two-fifths of the property to his wife Fidelia, two-fifths to a legitimate daughter Graciela, and the final fifth to a son born out of wedlock, Alejandro.Footnote 96 Rather than see the property fragment, however, Graciela apparently kept the landholding intact. She officially leased her mother’s share and likely held onto her half-brother’s fifth part too.Footnote 97 For according to Alejandro, ‘in 1950 the other coinheritors … started a judicial case against me to nullify my paternal recognition … [Fidelia and Graciela] have been and continue to unjustly work the Chimpahuaylla estate.’Footnote 98 Certainly, the Ministry of Agriculture investigators found evidence only of Graciela and her spouse directly labouring the fields by 1970.Footnote 99 The reward for all her trouble was a reasonable, though hardly expansive, 47 ha of land.
Some of Antapampa’s more diminutive landholdings belonged to absentee landlords. In such cases, a renter (arrendatario) leased entire properties on short-term contracts, usually for a fee, and sometimes a share of production.Footnote 100 By way of illustration Sancco, of just 33.8 ha, held in title by the same family since the turn of the century, was by no later than 1970 leased to a renter.Footnote 101 ‘In the visual inspection carried out by technicians’, the Ministry of Agriculture wrote, ‘the latter have verified that the administration is carried out by Don Vidal Salazar Umeres, renter of the whole predio.’Footnote 102 Another Ministry of Agriculture inspection likewise found Chacacuruqi Alto y Bajo, a mere 30 ha property, rented out entirely.Footnote 103 The owners of Yupana also rented 60 ha to a third party to administer.Footnote 104 Worked by titleholder or leased to a renter, the facts of the matter change little: these were landlords in the most literal sense, but of tiny fiefs.
Then there were estates that, to the naked eye, held substantial hectarage. But upon closer inspection much of the land was worth little more than the paper it was recorded on. Large tracts of barren mountain slope dominated several landholdings, while many more mainly comprised poor-quality pasture. In fact, Caballero calculated that roughly 50 ha of pasture were required to match the productive capacity of just 1 ha of irrigated land, while rain-fed plots required twice the hectarage of those under constant irrigation.Footnote 105 Hence, although Chorrillos covered 238 ha, a full 138 ha constituted totally unproductive mountainside and further 57 ha low-yield pasture, leaving just 35 ha of croplands.Footnote 106 A Ministry of Agriculture assessment gives a sense of what it meant to scratch a living on Chorrillos:
The shallow soils in large part show rocky outcrops on an area with high erosion, with limited vegetation on irregular topography [and] high exposure to climactic phenomena adverse to agriculture and ranching. The thin soil has undesirable vegetation, of very poor vigour and density, distributed [and] isolated over small areas. The slopes are quite varied and fluctuate between 60 and 70 degrees [incline].Footnote 107
In the end, Chorrillos’ landholding was much measlier than appeared at first sight.
Campana Orcco, too, was a more trivial landholding than belied by outward appearances. By the 1950s, of the original 13 heirs, only José and Germán were left farming the property.Footnote 108 ‘Successive visual inspections’, the Ministry of Agriculture noted in a report referring to 1968, ‘agree that the owners directly work the land’.Footnote 109 In point of fact, ‘at the moment of carrying out the visual inspection officials found Doña Elsa Santander, wife of joint owner Germán Mormontoy, overseeing the harvesting of potatoes and the owner José Santander inspecting his crops … The owners reside in the town of Zurite 1 km away … from where they direct and oversee their mixed-husbandry activities.’Footnote 110 Of Campana Orcco’s 161 ha, the Ministry of Agriculture classified 64.17 ha as completely unfit for agriculture, leaving José and Germán to share 55.85 ha of pastures, and roughly 40 ha of planting fields. By any measure, a far humbler domain than the land title suggests.
In what is by now a familiar story, Mantoclla once formed a massive property well in excess of 1500 ha. And even though it was fractured into three lotes at a prior unspecified date, each still covered a sizeable 562 ha apiece.Footnote 111 But then came the harsh realities of highland agriculture. Lote 1, belonging to Víctor Paliza Luna, was cut roughly in two between productive and unproductive lands. Of the productive lands, moreover, the lion’s share encompassed low-yield pasture.Footnote 112 Lote 2 looked much the same. Brother Julio held essentially 30 ha of irrigated land, dwarfed by 319 ha of pasture.Footnote 113 Lote 3, belonging to Juan Julio and Mario Abelardo, comprised some 90 ha of unirrigated land and 232.19 ha of pasture.Footnote 114 One of the proprietors, Julio, gives an insight into Mantoclla’s land base in 1967: ‘The general ecological makeup … is 90 per cent constituted by totally uncultivable rocky mountains and elevated scrubland. Only in the small ravines is there cultivable land that reaches, let’s say, between 5 and 10 per cent of the whole estate.’Footnote 115 On the balance of probabilities, these were not unreasonable statements. Just look at the map of Mantoclla’s topography (Figure 2), made up of archipelagoes of planting fields amidst a sea of rocky mountain outcrops. Here highland ecologies rendered the 562 ha of each proprietor somewhat moot. In short, these were sheep dressed in wolves’ clothing. And microcosms of a valley where many estates, when not outright small properties, crumbled under mountain ecologies.
Figure 2. Mantoclla, lote 1, 1969
Tenant Landholding
Clearly by the middle of the twentieth century many of Antapampa’s estates looked nothing like the highland hacienda as the rapacious hoarder of land. And yet, so far, we have looked at landholding only from the outside. After pulling back the lid and peering within, one also finds that a great many properties ceded vast extensions of land to an often swiftly growing number of tenant farmers. Keep in mind, too, what François Bourricaud wrote of nearby Puno in 1967: ‘[although] the proprietor is in theory the absolute owner … he does not dispose of his lands just as he wishes. Once he has delegated the use of certain lands to the Indians, it is very difficult to retake them.’Footnote 116 To be clear, relinquishing land to tenants did not mean a surrendering of social control or economic forfeiture. Largely Indigenous Quechua-speaking tenants operated under onerous sharecropping arrangements with mostly European-descendant proprietors, who reaped the rewards from hefty amounts of free or underpaid labour or a share of crop production. Without security of title or legal protections tenants also found themselves at the whim of landowner caprice. Ample scholarship has clearly documented the infamous control proprietors held over rural life.Footnote 117 But although the titleholders benefited from exploitative social relations and the extraction of labour and production, plots under their direct possession made up more often than not a greatly reduced fraction of the entire holding.
On several estates one can trace a sizeable century-long growth in tenant populations (Table 1). Read together, an 1857 survey by the Archdiocese of Cusco, known as the ‘Padroncillo de indígenas’ (‘Partial Survey of Indians’), the national censuses of 1876 and 1940, as well as Ministry of Agriculture reports from the 1960s, document the expansion.Footnote 118 Thus, in 1857, about nine tenants lived on the 165 ha Andenes estate.Footnote 119 Roughly 100 years on, the figure had more than doubled to around 21, by which time the tenants also occupied half of the property.Footnote 120 Bandoja, likewise, housed three tenants in 1857 and 11 by the 1960s, when half the lands were in their possession.Footnote 121 So too on Huilque, tenants went from 19 to 37, and eventually controlled 515 ha of the estate’s 517 ha.Footnote 122 Precise numbers aside, tenant populations clearly rose significantly on many properties, and came to hold broad tracts of land.
Table 1. Tenant Population on Antapampa Valley Estates, 1857–1960s
Sources: 1857: Padroncillo de indígenas; 1876: Dirección de Estadística, Censo general de la república, 1876, vol. 4; 1940: Dirección de Estadística, Censo nacional de población de 1940, vol. 8; 1960s: Ministry of Agriculture reports, DRAC, Afectaciones, various.
In other parts of the valley, although over a shorter time span – from the 1940 census to head counts by the Ministry of Agriculture in the 1960s – a steady expansion still applies (Table 2). Some estates witnessed rather modest growth. Pacupata’s tenant population grew from two to three and controlled 140.5 ha of the estate’s roughly 150 ha.Footnote 123 Likewise, Pitucalla, increase from one to four, Miraflores nine to 11, Chinchaypucyo 12 to 16, Anapahua 12 to 17, and Pichoc 20 to 24, saw a steady climb in tenants.Footnote 124 These properties also eventually relinquished anywhere from around a half to nearly the entirety of the property to tenants. Other landholdings, however, experienced more extravagant growth. Sambor saw tenants jump from six to 20. Saratahuaylla, Motoque and Fierrohuasi similarly surged: the first two properties from one, the third from two tenants to 13.Footnote 125 Chumpitay and La Joya also exploded from two to 22 and one to 32 respectively.Footnote 126 As with so many of their counterparts, roughly half of their lands wound up in tenant hands. Even if over a briefer interval, tenants increased on these estates too and claimed large shares of land.
Table 2. Tenant Population on Antapampa Valley Estates, 1940–60s
Sources: 1940: Censo nacional de población de 1940, vol. 8, recording numbers of families and/or tenants; 1960s: Ministry of Agriculture reports, DRAC, Afectaciones, various.
Evidence of a rise in tenant numbers is lacking for other estates. Nonetheless, examples abound of where at the middle of the century most, if not all, lands were possessed not by individual proprietors, but collectively by tenants. Pichoc, for example, was recorded as late as 1973 as being ‘worked directly by the titleholder Roberto Galindo Serrano … who resides on the predio, occupying one fraction, and [the rest is] indirectly worked by [tenants]’.Footnote 127 Roberto directly held about 20 ha of farmland, with the remaining 60 ha split among 24 tenants.Footnote 128 Clearly, Pichoc’s proprietor possessed more land than each individual tenant. But, critically, of the overall estate, he did not directly control that much.
A series of proprietors even saw landholdings practically indistinguishable, in terms of area, from those of individual tenants. In 1971, the Ministry of Agriculture noted the 86 ha Pacca estate unofficially
fractioned into three lotes, whose occupants are the following: Lote 1 of Doña Olimpia Hermoza de Lechuga who lives and personally works [her holding]. Lote 2 of Glauco García Luna, who purchased the estate from Jorge Hermoza Rozas, who lives and works [his holding] permanently. Lote 3 of Eladio Castelo, who bought the estate of Carmela Hermoza Rozas, is administered by their son Jorge Arturo Castel Puente de la Vega.Footnote 129
The three co-proprietors held roughly 23 ha together, while four tenants divvied up the 60 plus ha left. No doubt about it, landlords like those of Pacca had security of title and received financial gains from tenants. In terms of physical landholding, however, little separated proprietor from tenant, master from peon.
Even on more sizeable properties, large quantities of land still found their way into tenant possession. Consider Chumpitay, inherited by four Acurio de Olarte brothers in 1935, which by no later than 1966 had come ‘under the charge of the [tenants] and Doña Julia Ugarte, widow of [one of the] Acurio [brothers]’.Footnote 130 Julia occupied just 2 ha, while 22 tenants split nearly 200 ha.Footnote 131 Elsewhere, the proprietor of Ccollcabamba, María Emperatriz Guzmán de Lazo, despite the formidable name, controlled just 40 ha of planting fields by 1969. At the same time her 28 tenants possessed 20 ha of irrigated fields and 315 ha more of natural pasture.Footnote 132 In much the same vein, the 1712.55 ha Ayllaca estate fell largely under tenant possession.Footnote 133 The proprietor directly exploited 100 ha of planting fields and 36 ha of grazing lands. The remaining cultivable land (more than 350 ha) and 1200 ha of pastures belonged to 63 tenants.Footnote 134 The properties undoubtedly benefited from the economic gains of a significant resident population on sizeable properties. Still, they possessed only small fractions of their properties, rather antithetical to visions of a manorial highland hacienda.
All things considered, over the first half of the twentieth century a picture of a pronounced internal division of estate lands takes shape. The pattern of large extensions of land leased to tenants appears true beyond Antapampa too. Jesús Guillén Marroquín has shown in a sample of properties from various provinces in Cusco that by the 1950s a full 76 per cent of all land was held by tenants.Footnote 135 In short, the last few pages reveal that many estates were one or more of the following: fragmented, small, ecologically circumscribed, and with large possessions ceded to tenants. And it stretches credulity to see in them the customary image of the highland hacienda as a mass concentration of land.
Estate Landholding by the Middle of the Twentieth Century
To be fair, perhaps one reason why visions of sprawling haciendas endured is because there existed just enough truth to the myth to sustain it. A few valley properties did indeed hold large quantities of land. The enormous Chillipahua estate, for instance, covered 11,516 ha in 1969.Footnote 136 The titleholder, Alfredo Díaz Quintanilla, a one-time mayor of Cusco, also lived up to the reputation of a large landowner. Tamayo Herrera recalls Alfredo as ‘a very popular man and descendant of a very distinguished Cusqueño family … he was a great host, offering brilliant parties, resplendent and unforgettable in his beautiful mansion … he hosted the current king of Spain, Juan Carlos, when he was still prince of Asturias and midshipman in the Spanish Navy.’Footnote 137 Evidently, Alfredo was a person of great local influence and owner of a substantial agrarian property.
Yet even the mammoth Chillipahua faced restrictions to its landholdings. According to Alfredo,
the hacienda, as is well known in [this region], is eminently a ranching property; and as is logical with ranching … these pastures are found at the high altitude of 4000 m and above, in a completely abrupt zone, full of rocky outcrops, cliffs, without water for irrigation … It is, thus, an unforgiving and difficult landholding, where man has to put all his effort to make it produce … given the environmental conditions and the climate.Footnote 138
One might take Alfredo’s claims seriously, for the Ministry of Agriculture recorded 9000 ha split equally between pasture and arid mountain slope under his direct control. The rest of the estate, roughly 30 ha of irrigated and 50 ha of unirrigated fields, and 2000 ha of pasture, was held by 39 tenants. No two ways about it, Chillipahua clearly fitted the mould of a highland hacienda. But the absolute extent was still significantly curtailed by the quality of its holdings, to say nothing of the large portion ceded to tenants.
A second example of an impressive land consolidation comes from the Silva Álvarez family.Footnote 139 By the 1960s, they held Paropiso, of 3.24 ha, Sallac I, of 141 ha, Sallac II, of 313 ha, and, most importantly, Sambor, of 3570 ha.Footnote 140 With 3250 head of sheep, 750 of cattle, 11 bulls, an hacienda house with 18 rooms, two stables, 6 km of fencing, 3 km of internal roads, plantations, orchards, two silos, two John Deere tractors, one Ford and one Chevrolet truck, as well as a butter-making facility, the family oversaw a meaningful operation.Footnote 141 Landholding, however, followed the usual script: plots comprised largely pasture and unproductive mountainside, while a quarter of all the land fell to 32 tenants.Footnote 142 In absolute terms, the Silva Álvarez family held roughly 10 per cent of the valley. And in relative ones too they managed a notable agricultural enterprise. Nonetheless, even on one of Antapampa’s genuinely large properties, significant pasture and rented holdings reduced greatly the relative size of the land held directly by the property owner.
The Luna family holdings offer a final case of a veritable latifundio. Over much of the twentieth century, the Lunas held extensive tracts of valley land. Tamayo Herrara remembered them as ‘at least three siblings: Ezequiel Luna Guerra, the richest, proprietor of Sullupucyo, Mariano Luna Guerra, proprietor of Chamancalla, Ricarda Luna Guerra, proprietor of the Quiscacancha, Inquilpata and Mantoclla haciendas, all in the very same Antapampa.’Footnote 143 In an incredibly vivid passage, Tamayo Herrera describes the patriarch:
Don Ezequiel Luna … was a veritable and fearsome landlord. According to the affirmation of [an] eyewitness, he carried out ‘rodeos’ or chacos (hunts) of roaming cattle with the help of his armed employees to add to the strength of his herd … the climax for Don Ezequiel, as a gamonal, was during [Augusto] Leguía’s rule [1919–30], in which he was for the duration the representative for Anta[pampa].Footnote 144
Whether we accept every word or not of Tamayo Herrera’s account, that Luna’s notoriety circulated so expressively speaks volumes about his reputation. And some of the details are certainly accurate enough. The Lunas once held title to the estates in question, estimated at 6000 ha.Footnote 145 Ezequiel also served as a senator, as well as head of Cusco’s Departmental Mixed-Husbandry Association.Footnote 146 A cliché of an hacendado and a bona fide hacienda if ever there was one.
By mid-century, however, the Luna holdings had been reduced substantially. ‘The Luna Empire lasted three decades more’, Tamayo Hererra writes, ‘when don Ezequiel married a Doña Vargas Taylor, during which [marriage] they had four children: Abelardo, Mario, Gloria and Lourdes. After the death of Ezequiel, when the children were already adults, they wasted their father’s fortune, saw his property diminished.’Footnote 147 The title record confirms the sale of several of the properties mentioned, leaving Ezequiel’s heirs to share two landholdings, Paro and Sullupucyo.Footnote 148 The family retained direct charge over 110 ha of planting fields and nearly 800 ha in grazing lands, while 120 ha of planting fields and over 2500 ha more in pasture were ceded to tenants. Even as late as 1957, Sullupucyo was still considered one of the ‘main haciendas of the plain of Anta’.Footnote 149 But of actual lands, as in so many other cases, the portfolio was much smaller compared to what it once had been.
Before concluding, we should examine the possibility of lands concentrated in the hands of the few over more than one estate. In the nearly 300 files consulted, it seems only a handful of proprietors owned multiple holdings (Table 3). Some possessed somewhat substantial hectarage. Marta Adelina Lorena de Garmendia, for example, as late as 1969 held title to Miraflores and Markjo Chico, altogether roughly 80 ha of irrigated land, 60 ha of unirrigated and 50 ha of pasture as personal plots under direct proprietor control.Footnote 150 Most with title to various properties, however, had much less. Víctor Paliza Luna, to take just one case, possessed Huamantauca and one lote each of the former Mantoclla and Inquilpata haciendas. Under Víctor’s direct control fell just 9 ha of irrigated land, 33 ha of unirrigated land and 82 ha of pasture.Footnote 151 Looking at Table 3, one sees how even multiple estates were mostly not extensive properties, just multiple modest holdings scattered across the valley.
Table 3. Proprietors with Multiple Estates, Antapampa Valley
Source: DRAC, Afectaciones, various; COFOPRI, Valorización, various.
The argument is also commonly heard, though less often substantiated, that highland haciendas began a fire sale of lands on the eve of the agrarian reform.Footnote 152 This might be so but, at least in Antapampa when reviewing case files in Cusco’s Juzgado Agrario (Agrarian Court), one finds very little evidence for it. Most plots sold were very small – usually between 0.3 and 1 ha – and were often sold to tenants. In a review of over 500 cases, less than 100 ha appear as sales with or without an accompanying bill, by people complaining of their eventual seizure by the agrarian reform. Considering that these were significant financial outlays, and the aggrieved parties no doubt wanted restitution of lands or money, we might be confident that the picture is a relatively accurate one.Footnote 153 We can also be sure that sales were not particularly widespread because when the Ministry of Agriculture mapped all Antapampa’s estates, they still collectively covered roughly two-thirds of the valley. Whatever sales happened, likely happened at the margins.
Let us finally turn to a general picture of estate landholding in Antapampa by the middle of the twentieth century. By aggregating Ministry of Agriculture data, one can trace the overall scale of land concentration. And, as ought to be clear by now, the classic image of the highland hacienda swiftly unravels. At the broadest level, estates jointly covered some 45,000 ha. A large portion of that land, however, constituted totally unproductive mountain slope (Table 4). Proprietors directly controlled only around half of the remaining arable plots and pasture, with the other half held by tenants (Table 5). To tell it another way, the general story of estate landholding came in three acts. Proprietors possessed only about one-third of all workable lands under official title, losing another third to the valley’s barren topography, with the final third lost to tenant possession. Furthermore, the image of land concentration only collapses further when we look at estates individually. By standardising hectares to compare estates in terms of irrigated plots, one finds just five properties possessed more than the equivalent of 100 ha.Footnote 154 The overwhelming majority of titleholders, nearly two-thirds, directly held less than 20 ha of fertile farmland (Table 6) – not all that much more than the 4 ha the Ministry of Agriculture estimated as the bare minimum to sustain a family on a smallholding.Footnote 155 With that, we can at last turn the page on the perception of estates in Antapampa as the mass land concentration so commonly posited of the highland hacienda.
Table 4. Total Estate Landholding by Ecology, Antapampa Valley (ha)
Source: DRAC, Afectaciones, various; COFOPRI, Valorización, various.
Table 5. Proprietor/Tenant Landholding Total Ratio, Antapampa Valley (ha)
Source: DRAC, Afectaciones, various; COFOPRI, Valorización, various.
Table 6. Individual Proprietors’ Control in ‘Standardised Hectares’ (Irrigated hectares Equivalent), Antapampa Valley
Source: DRAC, Afectaciones, various; COFOPRI, Valorización, various.
Conclusion
Without doubt, the highland hacienda was always much more than just a landholding institution. Estates also formed, inter alia, a set of social relations as well as a system of production and rent extraction. Local landlords sat atop a socio-racial hierarchy with an ugly record of abuse of the overwhelmingly Indigenous population. Some were influential power brokers as well. Counted among Antapampa’s titleholding class was a public prosecutor, a member of Cusco’s Supreme Court, lawyers, engineers, agronomists, university professors, journalists, and members of Cusco’s Landowners’ Association.Footnote 156 Proprietors similarly built a livelihood on surplus extraction from tenants and the sale of agricultural goods, though most did not appear highly profitable endeavours.Footnote 157 The quantity and quality of lands no doubt went hand in hand with the volume of income generated from rents and production too.Footnote 158 Still, these are topics in need of further exploration. To say estate landholding was overestimated does not deny the exploitative or unequal nature of the enterprise.
What we can say is that Antapampa firmly challenges the rather exaggerated portrayals of mass land concentration in the highland over the first half of the twentieth century. For despite the long history of estates in the valley, and the fact that they collectively held roughly three-quarters of all land, not that much of it was consolidated in single holdings. Instead, many former haciendas had split into numerous much smaller lotes and predios. Others were small either in absolute terms or relative productive ones (irrigated, unirrigated, pasture or barren). And many more saw vast tracts ceded to tenant farmers. Albeit not without limitations, a few estates did consolidate a lot of land. But they were precisely that: a few. The majority more closely fit the description offered by Enrique Chacco Garjeda, a Cusqueño university student who visited Antapampa in 1956: ‘Landowners, although the majority of the time [they] are lauded, do not possess a lot of land for cultivation … [and] generally they live off their plots … Furthermore, some [of these plots] are distributed to indios to work’:Footnote 159 a portrayal that is a world away from the ‘great agrarian property’.
Acknowledgements
My sincerest gratitude to Emilio Kourí, Enrique Mayer, Paulo Drinot, and the University of Chicago’s Latin American History Workshop. Funding for this article was kindly provided by a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad (DDRA) fellowship, the Center for International Social Science Research, Center for Advanced Studies (University of Chicago), and a Mellon Research Travel Fellowship. My thanks also to the Dirección Regional Agraria Cusco for permission to reproduce material from their archive.
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