gañán.

(a loanword from Spanish)

Headword: 
gañán.
Principal English Translation: 

permanent employee, especially in a rural context (Lockhart); often indigenous community members who had gone to live on nearby estates (SW)
James Lockhart, Nahuatl as Written: Lessons in Older Written Nahuatl, with Copious Examples and Texts (Stanford: Stanford University Press and UCLA Latin American Studies, 2001), 217.

Orthographic Variants: 
ganan, cayanis
Attestations from sources in English: 

ynn alcates oquitlali çequicayanis (Huejotla, 1634)
Frances Karttunen and James Lockhart, Nahuatl in the Middle Years: Language Contact Phenomena in Texts of the Colonial Period, Linguistics 85 (Los Angeles, University of California Publications, 1976), Doc. 7.

Cequicayanis most likely represents not cequi cayanis "one who is a hired man" but, as the Spanish translator also seems to have thought, cequi icayanis "one who is his hired man." Frances Karttunen and James Lockhart, Nahuatl in the Middle Years: Language Contact Phenomena in Texts of the Colonial Period, Linguistics 85 (Los Angeles, University of California Publications, 1976), 141.

"Cayanis," and “cayanixti” are found in Nahuatl records from Tepemaxalco/Calimaya, Toluca Valley in 1658 and 1674), referring to gañanes. (Lockhart)
James Lockhart, The Nahuas after the Conquest (1992), 508.

Note that all of our attestations so far come from the seventeenth century, when haciendas were on the upswing and hired laborers were taking the place of encomienda laborers. (SW)

themes: 
Labor, Work, Labor Concerns
Occupations, Responsibilities