While most contemporary historians agree that the use of debt peonage as a coercive labor contract in Mexico was not widespread, scholars still concur that it was important and pervasive in Yucatan state during the henequen boom of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The henequen boom concurred with the long rule of Porfirio Díaz (1876-1910), under whose watch property rights were reallocated through land laws, and Mexico’s economy became much more closely tied to the United States. In the Yucatan, the accumulation of debts by peons rose as hacendados sought to attract and bond workers to match the rising U.S. demand for twine. We examine the institutional setting in which debt operated and analyze the specific functions of debt: who got it, what form it took, and why it varied across workers. We stress the formal and informal institutional contexts within which hacendados and workers negotiated contracts.
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Paper provided by National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc in its series NBER Working Papers with number
13852.
Length: Date of creation: Mar 2008 Date of revision: Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:13852
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Find related papers by JEL classification: J33 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Wages, Compensation, and Labor Costs - - - Compensation Packages; Payment Methods N16 - Economic History - - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics; Growth and Fluctuations - - - Latin America; Caribbean N36 - Economic History - - Labor and Consumers, Demography, Education, Income, and Wealth - - - Latin America; Caribbean N56 - Economic History - - Agriculture, Natural Resources, Environment and Extractive Industries - - - Latin America; Caribbean O54 - Economic Development, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economywide Country Studies - - - Latin America; Caribbean Q15 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Agriculture - - - Land Ownership and Tenure; Land Reform; Land Use; Irrigation
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