The archive in the field: Document, discourse, and space in Mexico's agrarian reform

Journal of Historical Geography

Volumn 36, Issue 4, 2010, Pages 411-420

  Craib, Raymond B ^a  

^a Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics   (United States)

Author keywords

Agrarian reform; Epistemology; Peasants; Space; Surveying; Veracruz

Indexed keywords

AGRARIAN REFORM; BUREAUCRACY; PEASANT AGRICULTURE; SURVEYING; VILLAGE;

MEXICO [NORTH AMERICA]; VERACRUZ;

EID: 78149405020     PISSN: 03057488     EISSN: 10958614     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1016/j.jhg.2010.01.005     Document Type: Article

References (52)

1. The source base for this essay is a case file entitled 'Lo relacionado con los límites entre los Municipios arriba indicados - Santiago Huatusco y San Juan de la Punta,' in the Archivo General del Estado de Veracruz, Ramo de Fomento, Tierras, Deslindes. All documentary cites are from this file unless otherwise noted. San Juan de la Punta and Santiago Huatusco were both renamed in the early 1930s: San Juan de la Punta is the current-day municipality of Cuitlahuac; Santiago Huatusco is the current-day municipality of Carrillo Puerto.
2. A. Danto, Narration and Knowledge, New York, 2007 [1985]. The 'always already' comes from p. xi. On narratives and history, see among others I. Craib, 'Narratives as bad faith,' in: M. Andrews et al. (Eds), Lines of Narrative: Psychosocial Perspectives, London, 2000, 64-74; G. Dening, The Death of William Gooch: a History's Anthropology, Honolulu, 1995; and D. LaCapra, 'Rhetoric and history,' in: D. LaCapra, History and Criticism, Ithaca, 1985, 15-44.
3. Craib, Cartographic Mexico, 242-248 (note 3).
4. I have relied largely here on C. Gibson, The Aztecs Under Spanish Rule: a History of the Indians of the Valley of Mexico, 1519-1810, Palo Alto, 1964, 262-266, but see also B. Mundy, The Mapping of New Spain: Indigenous Cartography and the Maps of the Relaciones Geográficas, New Haven, 1996, 183-187 and, more recently, Y. Yannakakis, Witnesses, spatial practices and a land dispute in colonial Oaxaca, The Americas 65 (2) (2008) 161-192. The importance of titles quickly led to a developing industry in the production of 'false titles.' See J. Lockhart, The Nahuas After the Conquest: a Social and Cultural History of the Indians of Central Mexico, Sixteenth Through Eighteenth Centuies, Palo Alto, 1992, 410-418.
5. On the history of the AGN see M. Mariscal, Reseña histórica del Archivo General de la Nación (1550-1946), México, 1996. On the AGN and the subsequent creation of the Archivo General Agrario see G. Palacios, El General de la Nación, el General Agrario, Boletín del Archivo General Agrario 8 (1999) 9-19; G. Palacios, Las restituciones de la Revolución, in: I. Maldonado Salazar, Ismael et al. (Eds), Estudios campesinos en el Archivo General Agrario, Vol. 3, México, 2001, 117-160, and R. Olmedo Gaxiola, Introducción, in: Olmedo Gaxiola (Ed), Catálogo de los Documentos Históricos del Archivo General Agrario, Mexico City, 1998.
6. On colonial archives and epistemology I have found especially useful Stoler, Colonial archives and the arts of governance.
7. For examples of such conflicts, both pre- and postrevolutionary, see Craib, Cartographic Mexico, chaps. 2 and 7 (note 3).
8. M. Aguilar Robledo, Contested terrain: the rise and decline of surveying in New Spain, 1500-1800, The Journal of Latin American Geography 8 (2) (2009) 23-47; see also the examples offered in E. Van Young, Hacienda and Market in Eighteenth-Century Mexico: the Rural Economy of the Guadalajara Region, 1675-1820, Berkeley, 1981, 322-324; and W. Taylor, Landlord and Peasant in Colonial Oaxaca, Palo Alto, 1972, chap. 3.
9. Craib, Cartographic Mexico, chap. 2 (note 3).
10. 'Social careers' comes from Matthew Hull, Ruled by records: the expropriation of land and the misappropriation of lists in Islamabad, American Ethnologist 35 (4) (2008) 501-518. On ethnicization, see E. Balibar, 'The nation form: history and ideology,' in: E. Balibar, I. Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, London, 86-106 and, for the case of postrevolutionary Mexico, R. López, The india bonita contest of 1921 and the ethnicization of Mexican national culture, Hispanic American Historical Review 82 (2002) 291-328.
11. See note 4. Yanga was an African slave who led a rebellion and created a maroon community around Córdoba in the seventeenth century. On Yanga see J. Laurencio, Campaña contra Yanga en 1608, México, 1974.
12. Despite the prevalence of citations to Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida in work on archives as epistemological sites, some of the best meditations on the archive have been offered, unsurprisingly, by historians, anthropologists, and archivists. See among others C. Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms, Baltimore, 1980; A. Burton, 'Introduction,' in: A. Burton (Ed), Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions, and the Writing of History, Durham, 2005; A.L. Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense, Princeton, 2009; Stoler, Colonial archives and the arts of governance, Archival Science 2 (2002) 87-109; C. Steedman, Dust: The Archive and Cultural History, New Brunswick, 2002; and N. Dirks, Colonial histories and native informants: biography of an archive In: N. Dirks (Ed), Colonialism and Culture, Ann Arbor, 1992; as well as the articles collected in Archival Science 2 (2002), 3-4.
13. P. Carroll, Blacks in Colonial Veracruz: Race, Ethnicity and Regional Development, Austin, 1991, 97.
14. Such discursive strategies serve as a potent reminder of the need to be wary of invocations of 'community,' a point made trenchantly by M. Watts, The sinister political life of community: economies of violence and governable spaces in the Niger Delta, Nigeria, in: G. Creed (Ed), The Romance of Community, Santa Fe, 2007, 101-142. On the tensions in movements that bind themselves to, rather than base themselves in, discourses of place, see D. Harvey, Uneven geographical developments and universal rights, in: D. Harvey, Spaces of Hope, Berkeley, 2000; M. Watts, Collective wish images: geographical imaginaries and the crisis of development, in: J. Allen, D. Massey (Eds), Human Geography Today, Cambridge, 1999, 85-107; and the rejoinder by N. Castree, Differential geographies: place, indigenous rights and 'local' resources, Political Geography 23 (2004), 133-167 as well as D. Massey, For Space, London, 2005. On discursive strategies and political identity in Mexico, see M. Rosa Gudiño y G. Palacios, Peticiones de tierras y estrategias discursivas campesinas: procesos, contenidos y problemas metodológicas, in: A. Escobar Ohmstede et al., Estudios Campesinos en el Archivo General Agrario, Mexico City, 1998, 75-118; C. Boyer, Becoming Campesinos: Politics, Identity, and Agrarian Struggle in Postrevolutionary Michoacán, 1920-1935, Stanford, 2003; and S. Speed, Global discourses on the local terrain, Cultural Dynamics 14 (2) (2002) 205-228.
15. R. Falcón and S. María Morales, La Semilla en el Surco: Adalberto Tejeda y el Radicalismo en Veracruz, Mexico City, 1990, 127-150. On the Veracruz tenant strike see A.G. Wood, Revolution in the Street: Women, Workers, and Urban Protest in Veracruz, 1870-1927, Wilmington, DE, 2001.
16. Falcón and María Morales, Semilla en el Surco, 152-153 (note 22).
17. On the lack of surveyors, see note 3 and M. Ervin, Statistics, maps and legibility: negotiating nationalism in post-revolutionary Mexico, The Americas 66 (2) (2009) 165.
18. Presidente Municipal de Huatusco al Gobernador del Estado, Sept. 13, 1922.
19. See Acuerdo 004045, insert in the case file. Olivares, earlier that year, had also been ordered to La Antigua, Veracruz, on behalf of the Department of Industry and Agriculture to engage in similar work. See the pamphlet Puente nacional, Jalapa, 1923. Olivares noted in a letter to his superiors that his work was now requiring him to constantly be traveling and he requested that he be paid in advance for the work he had to carry out, presumably to cover the costs he was incurring. Carlos Olivares al Sub Secretario de Gobierno, Oct. 20, 1922.
20. Subsecretaria del Gobierno al Presidente Municipal de San Juan de la Punta, Nov. 13, 1922.
21. Olivares al C. Secretario General del Gobierno, Dec. 6, 1922.
22. Resumen de los testimonios, anexo a Carlos Olivares al Subsecretario del Gobierno, Dec. 6, 1922.
23. I discuss this case in an abbreviated, and somewhat different, fashion in Craib, Cartographic Mexico: a History of State Fixations and Fugitive Landscapes, Durham, 2004, chap. 7.
24. See note 29.
25. S. Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England, Chicago, 1994, xxix.
26. In 'Diario Oficial,' tomo XVI, no. 27 correspondiente al sábado 2 de octubre de 1920, reproduced in Mariscal, Reseña histórica, appendix III (note 13).
27. On how modern states purport to make their processes of governance transparent, and emphasizing how they take their cues from the scientific laboratory, see Y. Ezrahi, The Descent of Icarus: Science and the Transformation of Contemporary Democracy, Cambridge, 1990, as well as P. Dear, 'Mysteries of state, mysteries of nature,' in: Jasanoff (Ed), States of Knowledge: the Co-Production of Science and Social Order, London, 2004. More broadly, on nation-states and archives see Steedman, Dust (note 2).
28. I draw here from Sheila Jasanoff's discussion of 'co-production' in S. Jasanoff, The Idiom of co-production, in: Jasanoff (Ed), States of Knowledge, 3 (note 33).
29. For a similar argument regarding scientific epistemology in early modern England, see Shapin, A Social History of Truth (note 31).
30. Yannakakis, Witnesses (note 12).
31. D. Nugent and A. María Alonso, Multiple selective traditions in agrarian reform and agrarian struggle: popular culture and state formation in the ejido of Namiquipa, Chihuahua, in: G.M. Joseph, D. Nugent (Eds), Everyday Forms of State Formation: Revolution and the Negotiation of Rule in Modern Mexico, Durham, 1994, 209-246 (cited passage on 228-229).
32. M. Ervin, The Art of the Possible: Agronomists, Agrarian Reform, and the Middle Politics of the Mexican Revolution, 1908-1934, Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pittsburgh, 2002 and M. Ervin, The 1930 agrarian census in Mexico: agronomists, middle politics, and the negotiation of data collection, Hispanic American Historical Review 87(3) (2007) 537-570.
33. See Craib, Cartographic Mexico (note 3), for cases specific to Mexico. For similar arguments related to exploration and empire, see B. Belyea, Inland journeys, native maps, Cartographica 33 (2) (1996) 1-16; Belyea, Amerindian maps: the explorer as translator, Journal of Historical Geography 18 (3) (1992); Dirks, Colonial histories and native informants (note 2); D.G. Burnett, 'It is impossible to make a step without the Indians': nineteenth century geographical exploration and the Amerindians of Guiana, Ethnohistory 49 (1) (2002) 3-40; and G.M. Lewis (Ed), Cartographic Encounters: Perspectives on Native American Map Making and Map Use, Chicago, 1998.
34. Malpica al Gobernador del Estado, Feb. 20, 1922.
35. I have taken the notion of 'invisible technicians' from Shapin, A Social History of Truth (note 31), and modified it here somewhat.
36. E.P. Thompson, Whigs and Hunters: the Origin of the Black Act, New York, 1975. For examples of what is to be gained by broadening the social lens, in this case in the history of cartography, see among others, N. Peluso, Whose woods are these? Counter-mapping Forest Territories in Kalimantan, Indonesia, Antipode 27 (1995), 383-406; B. Orlove, Mapping reeds and reading maps: the politics of representation in lake Titicaca, American Ethnologist 18 (1) (1991) 3-38; H. Brody, Maps and Dreams: Indians and the British Columbia Frontier, New York, 1998; J. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, New Haven, 1998; Mundy, The Mapping of New Spain (note 12); M. Sparke, Between demythologizing and deconstructing the map: Shawnadithit's New-found-land and the alienation of Canada, Cartographica 32 (1) (1995) 1-21; Lewis (Ed), Cartographic Encounters (note 39); B. Michael, Separating the Yam from the Boulder: Statemaking, Space, and the Causes of the Anglo-Gorkha War of 1814-1816, Ph.D. dissertation, University of Hawaii, 2001; and V. Kivelson, Cartography, autocracy and state powerlessness: the uses of maps in early modern Russia, Imago Mundi 51 (1999) 83-105.
37. Olivares al C. Secretario General del Gobierno, Dec. 6, 1922 (note 28).
38. Vicente Malpica al Secretario General del Gobierno, Nov. 8, 1922 and document fragment dated Nov. 22, 1922 in the same file.
39. Olivares al C. Secretario General del Gobierno, Dec. 6, 1922 (note 28).
40. Subsecretaria del Gobierno al Presidente Municipal de San Juan de la Punta, Nov. 13, 1922 (note 27).
41. Pedro Alguin, Presidente Municipal de San Juan de la Punta, al Subsecretario del Superior Gobierno del Estado, Nov. 8, 1922.
42. The reference to the boundaries from time immemorial is made in Presidente Municipal de San Juan de la Punta Pedro Olguín al Co. Carlos Olivares, Nov. 25, 1922.
43. J. Derrida, Archive Fever: a Freudian Impression, Chicago, 1996.
44. Olivares al C. Secretario General del Gobierno, Dec. 6, 1922 (note 28).
45. Malpica al Gobernador del Estado, Feb. 20, 1922 (note 4). Comunidades or repúblicas de indígenas were legally abolished, in theory, in Veracruz in 1826; the 1856 laws of the reform were federal laws requiring the division of communally held lands in to individual plots. The conflation here by Malpica is revealing: first, it implicitly confirms what other travel accounts and documents suggest: that, despite federal laws to the contrary, the república de indios continued to function as such well in to the nineteenth century; and second, it affirms again how essential communal landholdings were to the very idea of the communidad or república de indios. On the persistence of the república de indios, see M. Ducey, Indios liberales y tradicionales: Tres casos de privatización de la tierra comunal, Memorial: Boletín del Archivo General del Estado de Veracruz 2 (4) (1999) 13-18.
46. On 'texted pasts,' I draw from Dening, The Death of William Gooch (note 10).
47. J. Jacobs, Edge of Empire: Postcolonialism and the City, London, 1996, 158.
48. For an exemplary study see M. Nuijten, Power, Community, and the State: the Political Anthropology of Organization in Mexico, Manchester, UK, 2003. For emphasis on the places in which knowledge is produced see B. Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society, Cambridge, MA, 1988; and D. Livingstone, Putting Science in its Place: Geographies of Scientific Knowledge, Chicago, 2003.
49. Malpica al Gobernador del Estado, Feb. 20, 1922 (note 4).
50. Malpica al Gobernador del Estado, Feb. 20, 1922 (note 4).
51. Malpica al Gobernador del Estado, Feb. 20, 1922 (note 4).
52. A. Danto, 'Narrative sentences,' History and Theory 2 (2) (1962).