Winner, James Deetz Book Award (Society for Historical Archaeology)

Biography of a Hacienda is a many-voiced reconstruction of events leading up to the Mexican Revolution and the legacy that remains to the present day. Drawing on ethnohistorical, archaeological, and ethnographic data, Elizabeth Terese Newman creates a fascinating model of the interplay between the great events of the Revolution and the lives of everyday people.

In 1910 the Mexican Revolution erupted out of a century of tension surrounding land ownership and control over labor. During the previous century, the elite ruling classes acquired ever-increasingly large tracts of land while peasants saw their subsistence and community independence vanish. Rural working conditions became so oppressive that many resorted to armed rebellion. After the war, new efforts were made to promote agrarian reform, and many of Mexico’s rural poor were awarded the land they had farmed for generations. 

Weaving together fiction, memoir, and data from her fieldwork, Newman reconstructs life at the Hacienda San Miguel Acocotla, a site located near a remote village in the Valley of Atlixco, Puebla, Mexico. Exploring people’s daily lives and how they affected the buildup to the Revolution and subsequent agrarian reforms, the author draws on nearly a decade of interdisciplinary study of the Hacienda Acocotla and its descendant community. Newman’s archaeological research recovered information about the lives of indigenous people living and working there in the one hundred years leading up to the Mexican Revolution.

Newman shows how women were central to starting the revolt, and she adds their voices to the master narrative. Biography of a Hacienda concludes with a thoughtful discussion of the contribution of the agrarian revolution to Mexico’s history and whether it has succeeded or simply transformed rural Mexico into a new “global hacienda system.”

Elizabeth Terese Newman is an assistant professor of history and environmental humanities at Stony Brook University. She received her PhD in anthropology from Yale. Since 2006, Newman has directed a research project at Hacienda San Miguel Acocotla that examines the social and cultural origins of revolution in Puebla, Mexico.

“An insightful analysis that is accessible to a wide audience.”—The Americas

“A compelling read that provides insight not only into the subject of the author’s research but also into the process of archaeological discovery.”—American Anthropologist

“Verily, research and analysis go hand in hand as Newman methodically dissects the mysterious anatomy of the physical structure of the hacienda, its occupants, its use prior to and during the Mexican Revolution of 1910, as well as the context in which haciendas came to be.”—Colonial Latin American Historical Review

“[Newman’s] clear prose coupled with her interdisciplinary approach make Biography of a Hacienda a work that scholars of nineteenth-century rural society in Latin America will want to read.”—Agricultural History

“Newman masterfully combines academic prose with narrative anthropology and anthropological fiction to give the reader not only a vivid picture of the hacienda through time, but to ask a set of serious academic questions about the human condition with which all readers should be concerned.”—Timothy J. Knab, author of The Dialogue of Earth and Sky

“Newman’s conclusions compel us to rethink the social and economic factors involved in the Mexican Revolution.”—Joel Palka, author of Unconquered Lacandon Maya: Ethnohistory and Archaeology of Indigenous Culture Change