Hacienda debt-peonage made corporal correction of child laborers routine

Evidence

The hacienda system — the large agricultural estates that replaced the encomienda across the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries — employed indigenous and mestizo families under conditions of debt-peonage. Children worked alongside their parents from approximately age seven or eight. The hacendado (estate owner) or his mayordomo (foreman) held disciplinary authority over the entire workforce, including children. The documentary record — the colonial-era visita (inspection) records, the protector de indios (indigenous-affairs ombudsman) archives, and the contemporary scholarly literature of Eric Van Young’s Hacienda and Market in Eighteenth-Century Mexico (1981) and Arnold Bauer’s Chilean Rural Society (1975) — documents that corporal correction of child laborers was routine across the hacienda system. — , The Rod and the Child, 4965

Categorization

• SEED: Child labor beginning at age seven under debt-peonage, with correction routine, is a potent comparator for modern child-labor and apprenticeship debates.