This bondage was not strictly legal, but was rendered practically so by a law which required persons without property to render service in payment of debt. Debts could be transferred and inherited by the children. A large share of the peons lived in little villages on the estates, surrounded by their communal lands (ejidos). These, the Spanish overlords had established, conforming to the native custom. Each village had a cachique, native chief, who now acted as a sort of overseer for the owner of the estate, and frequently exploited those under him for himself as well as for his master.
The peons had no political rights and no opportunity for education. They clung with great persistence to the languages, customs, and traditions of the various tribes to which they belonged. As in the days before the Spanish conquest, they manufactured by hand or with the aid of primitive tools most of the scanty clothing, ornaments, and implements which they possessed.[1]
The free working-class, mostly mestizo, was an economic as well as racial mixture, shading at the bottom into peonage from which some of the more enterprising individuals escaped temporarily or permanently; and at the top into the middle class. The main part of the wage workers, however, were farm hands during the busy season, domestic servants in the cities, and miners. The last mentioned were the most highly paid and independent, but were not numerous, as the mines at this time were in the hands of small native owners who were not able to work them extensively. It was from this non-descript wage-earning class and the small property-owning class that most of the revolutionary army was drawn.[2]
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