A history of the PurEpecha people's survival amid environmental and political changes. Landscapes are more than geological formations; they are living records of human struggles. Landscaping Indigenous Mexico unearths the history of JuAtarhu, an Indigenous landscape shaped and nurtured by the PurEpecha-a formidable Mesoamerican people whose power once rivaled that of the Aztecs. Although cataclysmic changes came with European contact and colonization, JuAtarhu's enduring agroecology continued to sustain local life through centuries of challenges. Contesting essentialist narratives of Indigenous penury, PErez Montesinos shows how PurEpechas thrived after Mexican independence in 1821, using JuAtarhu's diverse agroecology to negotiate continued autonomy amid waves of national economic and political upheaval. After 1870, however, autonomy waned under the pressure of land privatization policies, state intervention, and industrial logging. On the eve of the Mexican Revolution in 1910, PurEpechas stood at a critical juncture: Would the Indigenous landscape endure or succumb? Offering a fresh perspective on a seemingly well-worn subject, PErez Montesinos argues that MichoacAn, long considered a peripheral revolutionary region, saw one of the era's most radical events: the destruction of the liberal order and the timber capitalism of JuAtarhu.
Fernando PErez Montesinos is an associate professor at UCLA. A historian of nineteenth-century Mexico and the Mexican Revolution, his work includes the edited volume El ascenso maderista y el fin del rEgimen porfiriano. He is a senior editor of the Hispanic American Historical Review.
List of Illustrations Introduction. Landscaping Indigenous MichoacAn: Ecology and Community, Liberalism and Capitalism in an Indigenous World, 1820-1920 Chapter 1. Making and Remaking the Indigenous Highlands, circa 7000 BC-AD 1820 Chapter 2. A Reliable and Resilient Landscape, 1800-1890 Chapter 3. The Tumultuous Origins of the Reparto Era, 1821-1867 Chapter 4. Contesting the Liberal Landscape, 1867-1875 Chapter 5. Land Concentrations and State Interventions, 1875-1890 Chapter 6. Capitalism Comes to the Uplands: Railroads Invade the Forests, 1890-1900 Chapter 7. Assaulting the Landscape: Timber Capitalism, 1900-1910 Epilogue. The Landscape Survives: Revolution Breaks Timber Capitalism, 1910-1920 Acknowledgments. My Village Notes Bibliography Index
Equal parts natural history, agrarian epic, and dark capitalist parable, Landscaping Indigenous Mexico is an ambitious regional history of Mexican liberalism. It is, too, an impressive study of highland MichoacAn, that land of smoldering fumaroles, pine-clad sierras, PurEpecha pueblos, and lakes. Fernando PErez Montesinos understands MichoacAn's past holistically, as the struggle of an ethnoscaped empire, JuAtarhu, to survive conquest, insurgency, Liberal lawfare, and Porfirian timber capitalism. At stake was the power to landscape; to apply artifice freely to environment. This welcome longue durEe account of PurEpecha adaptation and alienation will force historians to rethink the relationship between ethnicity, the natural world, statebuilding, and capitalism in Mexico. - Matthew Butler, University of Texas at Austin, author of Mexico's Spiritual Reconquest: Indigenous Catholics and Father Perez's Revolutionary Church Focused on the PurEpecha highlands, PErez Montesinos has written an ambitious and lucid retelling of nineteenth-century Mexico that combines environmental perspectives with social and political history. Simultaneously a local, regional, and national story, the book reexamines key themes for Mexicanists, including how Indigenous people confronted independence, the rise of the national liberal state, and the development of commercial and industrial capitalism. With the author's eye for archival detail and without losing sight of the larger context, Landscaping Indigenous Mexico is a moving tribute to the resilience and adaptability of the agrarian landscapes that Mexico's Indigenous peoples built over centuries. - German Vergara, Georgia Institute of Technology, author of Fueling Mexico: Energy and Environment, 1850-1950
