LAND, FOREST, AND PUEBLOS IN THE MESETA PURÉPECHA, 1869-1911 (original) (raw)
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H-Net Reviews, 2017
Christopher R. Boyer's insightful new study of the shifting contours of Mexican forestry succeeds in linking environmental history and social histories of state formation in the Mexican countryside. Political Landscapes: Forests, Conservation, and Community in Mexico focuses on indigenous highland villages and the surrounding pine-oak forests of Michoacán and Chihuahua. Boyer chronicles changing strategies on the part of would-be loggers, as well as those that would resist them, in these temperate forests from the reign of Porfirio Díaz in the late nineteenth century through the present.
This project focuses on the intersections of nature, discourse, and capitalist modernity in the production of landscapes. It does this through looking at the historical development of the lower Colorado River borderlands from the mid-sixteenth century to the early twentieth century. During this period, colonizing Euro-American agents posited the region through numerous landscaped narratives that included, but were not limited to, indigenous frontier, desert, and farmland. The focus of this project is to ask, what were the historical processes inherent not only in the production of these narratives but also in how they were legitimated and maintained? How were these narratives used as justifications for the appropriation and dispossession of specific groups? How did such narratives translate themselves into the construction of built environments and the power relations inherent within them? And finally, how were these constructed landscapes and their narratives both formed and formative of larger structural processes? To answer these questions, this project focuses on the concept of landscape. While landscape is a term used differently in the lexicon of numerous academic disciplines, it is used here within the context of political economy and historical sociology, particularly world-systems analysis. On the one hand, world-systems analysis provides us with the tools for understanding historical processes of capitalist expansion, as well as its incorporation and production of physical environments. On the other hand, world-systems analysis provides the conceptual tools for understanding both the structure and role of knowledge, in both its factual and aesthetic forms, in these undertakings. In other words, world-systems analysis provides a historical framework in how landscapes have been produced, maintained, and transformed. By focusing on landscape, however, this project also works in expanding the parameters of world-systems analysis, which has been criticized in the past as being too structural in its approach to historical phenomenon. Instead of seeing the landscape as something produced by a larger world-economy, this study posits the landscape as a historical construct that is not only shaped by larger structures but also shaping of them. To provide this historical account, this project focuses on four distinct, yet interrelated and simultaneous moments through the more extensive history of the lower Colorado River Borderlands. These moments can be described as dispossession, conceptualization, engineering, and legitimation. Dispossession focuses on the various ways through which European agencies not only exterminated indigenous peoples but with them, socio-ecological relationships and worldviews. Conceptualization looks at how the historical worldview of European agents perceived, valued, represented, organized, and conflicted with both geographies and their people. This conceptualization is not only shaped by aesthetical notions of what was beautiful but also on newly forming scientific theories focused on geography, geology, zoology, botany, anthropology, and biology. Engineering looks at the material and conceptual ways through which the European imagination was realized into material structures that networked into larger relations and spatial-temporal scales. Finally, naturalization focuses on the ways through which newly constructed material and conceptual landscapes and the peoples that inhabited them were legitimated and naturalized into new power relations. To look at the ways through which these moments are fully realized and linked to larger structures and processes, this dissertation has been written into three major parts, which are outlined by historical period. The first part focuses on the negotiated incorporation of the region by Spanish and Hispanic agencies from the mid-sixteenth century until the late eighteenth century. While this region had been settled for thousands of years by an interconnected and transforming network of indigenous tribes, these Spanish and Hispanic agencies, unable to fully colonize the region, posited it as an indigenous frontier. The second part focuses on the remaking of the region with the American colonization of the area following the Mexican-American War in 1848. This period not only brought about vast upheaval to the region’s socio-ecological organization, positing it as a “desert,” and integrating it into both national and international networks. The third, and final part, of this project looks at the transformation of this “desert” into a “garden.” While historically-specific, this conversion is related not only to regional and national negotiations but its relationship both to an expanding world market in food and the remaking of environments linked to an export-oriented trade. In all of these parts, the focus is to bring together seemingly disparate processes in a way that provides a more holistic account not only on the historical development of the lower Colorado River borderlands but how this development was both formed through and formative of larger socio-ecological processes.
Landscapes on the Move: Land-Use Change History in a Mexican Agroforest Frontier
Land
An unprecedented magnitude of land-use/land-cover changes have led to a rapid conversion of tropical forested landscapes to different land-uses. This comparative study evaluates and reconstructs the recent history (1976–2019) of land-use change and the associated land-use types that have emerged over time in two neighboring rural villages in Southern Mexico. Qualitative ethnographic and oral histories research and quantitative land-use change analysis using remote sensing were used. Findings indicate that several interacting historical social-ecological drivers (e.g., colonization program, soil quality, land conflicts with indigenous people, land-tenure, availability of surrounding land where to expand, Guatemala’s civil war, several agricultural development and conservation programs, regional wildfire, Zapatista uprising, and highway construction) have influenced each village’s own unique land-use change history and landscape composition: the smaller village is characterized by a d...
Legacies of Space and Intangible Heritage: Archaeology, Ethnohistory, and the Politics of Cultural Continuity in the Americas, 2017
Library of congress cataloging-in-publication data names: armstrong-fumero, fernando, editor. | Hoil gutierrez, Julio, editor. title: Legacies of space and intangible heritage : archaeology, ethnohistory, and the politics of cultural continuity in the americas / edited by fernando armstrong-fumero and Julio Hoil gutierrez. description: boulder : University press of colorado, [2017] | includes bibliographical references and index. identifiers: Lccn 2016056647| isbn 9781607325710 (cloth) | isbn 9781607326595 (pbk) | isbn 9781607325727 (ebook) subjects: LcsH: cultural landscapes-america-case studies. | cultural property-protectionamerica-case studies. | cultural property-america-Management-case studies. | Historic sites-conservation and restoration-america-case studies. | Historic sites-america-Management-case studies. classification: Lcc gf500 .L44 2017 | ddc 973-dc23 Lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016056647 an electronic version of this book is freely available, thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched. KU is a collaborative initiative designed to make high-quality books open access for the public good. The open access isbn for the pdf version of this book is 978-1-60732-700-4; for the epUb version the open access isbn is 978-1-60732-720-2. More information about the initiative and links to the open-access version can be found at www.knowledgeunlatched.org. front-cover photographs: taperinha plantation (top), cavern of the painted rock, Monte alegre (bottom), courtesy of anna c. roosevelt.
Our aim is to determine continuities and changes in the cañada of Yosotiche environment since the introduction by Spanish conquerors and settlers of new crops, especially sugarcane.A study of the biological modifications of a particular ecosystem allows inferences on changes and continuities in socio-political relations.This particular case study contributes to a discussion of the general model of Mixtec political territoriality.The methodology applied here involves a convergence that integrates the analysis of historical documents, archaeological data, fieldwork and anthropological information, along with discoveries made by earlier research. It offers in- sight into occupational dynamics and their ties to the political, administrative, economic and social structures within the cañada during colonial times. The introduction of foreign crops produced changes in the ecological complementarity system practiced by the villages that possessed lands in the cañada, consequently modifying the labour relations of the inhabitants.An analysis of this situation reveals the singular status of the lands owned by Tlaxiaco, which seemingly fit the regulations dictated by the Laws of the Indies but, in essence, meant the continuity of pre-Hispa- nic traditions.
During the colonial period, Indian republics were formed as were private holdings in the Otomí region of the Mezquital Valley. The indigenous population was deprived of fertile agricultural lands while ranchos and haciendas raised cattle, affecting the fragile semiarid environment of the region. This article analyzes the economic strategies of the indigenous inhabitants of the valley with an ethnoarchaeological and historical perspective. Based on the historical evidence, this article studies the socioeconomic interactions among the Otomí Indians and the haciendas during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The impact of the indigenous marginal survival strategies on the economic success of ranchos and haciendas in the Tula and Ixmiquilpan subregions is analyzed.
By the late eighteenth century, centuries of close and often intimate contact between Spanish colonial and indigenous populations in the Southwest had eroded the "traditional" ethnic groupings (castas) used by colonial authorities to categorize the population. Within this context, colonists began to identify themselves in new ways-and with new terms-as members of specific communities, colonies, or nations. These emerging civic identities created a space in which people of varied ethnic heritage could unite behind common colonial practices and values and distinguish themselves from the "others"-whether Native or Euro-American-who surrounded them. Because these identities were tied to shared practices that, in turn, were shaped by the particularities of the environment and rules surrounding land use and tenure, land-use laws and landscapes both played significant roles in their construction. Drawing on archaeological and historical sources, I explore this relationship between civic identity, land use, and landscape by tracing the evolution of Hispanic identity at San Miguel del Vado, New Mexico through the Spanish colonial, Mexican, and American periods.