Mexico's Hacienda Sotuta de Peon in the Yucatan Peninsula

I don’t usually write “history” lessons in this blog, but I couldn’t resist this one. There's a Canadian connection. On a trip to Merida in the Yucatan, I came to observe a renaissance of the hacienda in progress. Century old, abandoned, great haciendas were being bought by investors, restored, and either being turned into hotels or kept as private residences. We visited two such renovated haciendas. One, called Hacienda Teya is famous around Merida for its restaurant and banquet facilities. The other one, Hacienda Sotuta de Peon, is the subject of my history lesson.

Hacienda Sotuta de Peon is a plantation, hacienda, and antique factory that has been restored, including the machinery, and opened to the public five years ago. It shows what an end-to-end henequen growing and processing facility used to look like before the uniquely Yucatan industry collapsed in the last century. Owner Don Adolpho Lübcke Flores bought the property in ruins twenty-five years ago. Although he would wait decades to restore the hacienda, he immediately began planting agave, the raw material for henequen. Agave takes seven years before its leaves can be first harvested so a haciendado has to be in it for the long haul.

Henequen, also known as sisal, is a natural fibre, clawed out of the sword-like leaves of the agave plant. The restored factory shows visitors how an iron scraper pulled out the fibre. Then it was dried, combed, and woven into rope, mats, and twine. (In recent times, Cuban doctors have started using henequen to make surgical thread for sutures.) All the machinery at Sotuta de Peon has been assembled from salvaged or specially crafted parts to sputter and shake once more, just as they did more than a hundred years ago.

Though henequen has been used for many things, its most important legacy is all bound up with twine. Henequen twine is the strongest in the world and a product that anyone can find in their cupboard at home. As an export commodity, it shaped the economic history of the region, and enriched generations of landowners so they could build their splendid haciendas. It also propelled Yucatan’s capital city Merida into the light age. Merida became the first city in Mexico, ahead of Mexico City, to be completely lit by electricity. Sterling Evens, a professor at Brandon University in Manitoba, tells us in his book, Bound in Twine, that in the Yucatan’s peak year of 1915, just under 1.2 million bales of henequen were shipped to foreign mills. Mills like those owned by International Harvester in Chicago, New Orleans, and Hamilton in Ontario, finished the henequen into twine.

Here’s a little math. If you consider that one bale at the time would have held 400 pounds of fibre, and every pound of dried fibre could produce 500 feet of twine, then Yucatan’s banner year of 1915 supported the equivalent of 45 million miles of twine, just a bit less than half the distance between earth and sun! Yucatecans aim high.

However it took 50 years to get that far. The resource only became indispensable to American and Canadian wheat farmers with the invention of a machine which could reap and bind cut-grain stocks into sheaves. While the technology became available as early as the 1850s, the first generation used metal wire binding making it positively dangerous to livestock when bits of wire were ingested through the feed. Clearly a better solution was to use twine for binding. Twine made from henequen was all natural, digestible and degradable. But how could it be mechanically knotted?

In 1857, John Appleby of Wisconsin was only 18 years old when he solved the problem of how to knot twine by machine so bundles could be tied rather than skirted by metal wire. The legend goes that he was inspired by watching a young girl skipping rope. When she accidentally dropped the rope on her dog’s head, it shook himself and backed away. The rope fell on the ground in a loose knot. Appleby assembled a hook-like device out of wood that could copy the dog’s twisting and turning motion. Then he did what any young man would do at this stage of his life. He abandoned his invention and joined the army. A technological revolution would have to wait until the end of the American Civil War.

Appleby returned safely and overhauled his binder to incorporate a moveable jaw component invented during his absence and eventually sold his patent to William Deering. Writing in the Farm Implement News in the 1890s, Charles Marsh praised the technology saying “no machine ever swept over the world with such overwhelming rapidity – once it got started – as the twine binder”. Canadian historian Merrill Denison in his book about the Massey-Harris company went as far as to link this invention and other labour saving mechanisms to no less than the successful populating of the Canadian west. A farmer’s investment of $350 in 1890, and ten years later, of just $155, could double or triple his productivity. All he needed was a steady supply of twine.

Henequen, native only to the Yucatan, became the fibre of choice by the voracious North American farming industry at the beginning of the twentieth century. Experiments in twine made from hemp and flax only confirmed the superiority of henequen, which, unlike the others, was resistant to being eaten by crickets. The expanding wheat bowls of Canada and the United States were insatiable.

While central Mexico’s wealth was built on precious metal mining, Yucatecans extracted their gold from the pale threads of henequen. At the industry’s height, it satisfied a third of the world’s need, further enriching already wealthy haciendados. At the beginning of the twentieth century, within 80 miles of Merida, there were more than a thousand haciendas. Olegario Molina Solis, the most powerful of all haciendados as well as the Yucatan’s state Governor, addressed any economic challenge of the day with the mantra, “plant more henequen.”

The tour begins at Hacienda Sotuta de Peon with the hacienda itself, its architecture reflecting the common grouping of parallel outdoor and indoor living spaces. The appointments in all rooms are eclectic, or just evidence of the isolation of the region. Nouveau riche sensibilities preferred European goods over domestic or American. There is a layering of styles, as each generation kept the old but added something of the fashion of the day.

Haciendados and their families generally did not live on the plantation, preferring the bustle of the capital city. It’s not hard to imagine the family relegating an outdated settee to the hacienda to make room for a new purchase in their Merida home. There are French inspired salons and art deco conversation areas, a few Austrian pieces, an intricately carved, heavy Canadian pool table, and folk art.

Underneath a marble topped side table on the covered porch, sits a hand carved toy rocking chair. In fact, this miniature isn’t a toy at all, rather, it’s there to be used by a luxe, the Mayan leprechaun that protects or bedevils a farm on whim, and therefore must be kept comfortable.

The lawn is rimmed by trees. A bougainvillea embraces the branches of a variegated fig tree until the two are one. A few brilliant orange flowers show confidently against grey, naked branches of the flamboyant tree, a colourful flourish in the midst of what looks mostly dead in this dry season, Yucatan’s winter.

Our little tour group is boarded on a rail truck for a ride into the 300 acre plantation which will include a visit to a traditional Mayan worker’s home, and a swim in an underground cenote. Our wagon passes a windmill powered well. In bold lettering at the top it says Aeromotor Chicago, a subtle reminder of the once powerful economic ties between this and other Yucatan plantations and Chicago, the home of the old International Harvester company. This modern windmill though is in fact a practical compromise on authenticity since the original had blown down in a hurricane.

Windmills are everywhere on the parched Yucatan landscape. Water exists but is underground, flowing in rivers sandwiched by limestone and occasionally pooling above ground, or in caves. While we prepare to swim in one of these splendid underground pools, our guide Jorge, explains that you only need to look for a ceiba tree to find water on a plantation since it nearly always roots by a cenote. The cenote, or sinkhole, in many cases is like an inverted open chimney giving way to the underground river and an important irrigation source – not that the agave plant needs water. Poor, thin soil over the limestone karst makes the land of little value for most agricultural products, but ideal for agave. Don Antonio, who invites tourists into his family’s traditional Mayan house as part of the tour, takes a small specimen, seemingly rootless, and thrusts it into gravel. “Termindado.” It’s planted. No water. No soil.

Jorge lets us off at the restaurant, pleasantly situated on the edge of the garden, and the tour ends. There is a sudden stampede of hoofs from a dell on the other side of the garden wall. Then, a chorus of goats’ braying, carried on the breeze. As if by some luxe’s trickery, it sounds like a cheering crowd. Not a bad way to end a tour. (by C. Moisse for maturetraveler.blogspot.com)