Yucatan's ancient roots.

• Author: Stafford, Kathryn
• Position: Henequen haciendas

ON MEXICO'S YUCATAN PENINSULA, HENEQUEN SPURRED AN ECONOMIC BOOM WHOSE ELOQUENT ARCHITECTURAL REMNANTS SPEAK OF A PROSPEROUS AGE

"Yucatan is the country with the least earth that I have ever seen, since all of it is one living rock," remarked Friar Diego de Landa in his famous 1566 chronicle Relacion de las cosas de Yucatan. Nearly three hundred years later travel writer John Lloyd Stephens would confirm this, observing that "after the magnificent scenery of Central America the country was barren and uninteresting. . . . The soil and atmosphere are extremely dry; along the whole coast, from Campeachy to Cape Catoche, there is not a single stream or spring of fresh water."

But Yucatan's minimalist geography has probably determined the peninsula's history as much as the human societies that have populated it. Separated from the rest of Mexico by swamp and rain forest, Yucatan is essentially an enormous limestone rock jutting into the Gulf of Mexico toward the Caribbean and the United States. Barely covered with soil and scrub vegetation, it has no mountains and only a small group of hills to the south, the Puuc, causing the heat to be undeflected and intense. Very few crops can grow there: Rocks make plowing difficult, and irrigation ditches are impossible to construct because the porous soil cannot hold moisture. However, this spare physical geography is ideally suited to the henequen plant.

A bluish-green, fibrous member of the agave family, henequen is native to Yucatan and has been cultivated there since before the time of Columbus. The Maya used it to produce rope, hammocks, coarse textiles, mats, and sacks. But it wasn't until the late eighteenth century that the Spanish colonists considered the commercial properties of this spiny cactus for twine and cordage. Within the next hundred years, Yucatan, one of Mexico's poorest states, would become one of its richest.

Not long after independence, according to Allen Wells in Yucatan's Golden Age, the Yucatecan government realized the plant's export potential, ordering landowners in 1828 to grow at least ten henequen plants a year on their property. Just two years later, a few hacendados formed a society to promote, perfect, and increase the cultivation of henequen. In 1833 the first commercial-style hacienda was created, with eighty acres of land planted row upon row in henequen. Although henequen grows slowly--requiring eight years to reach its maturity of seven feet--these first attempts...