Oil palm as orientalism: the making of plantation hegemonies in southern Mexico’s forest frontiers

This study argues that oil palm in Mexico exemplifies a form of orientalism through which the state sought to modernize 'backward' rural populations to ensure their 'proper' use of natural resources across forest frontiers. Through an archival ethnography of three state projects – spanning import substitution industrialization, Cold War modernization and neoliberalism –, it shows that this monocrop was introduced to develop regions considered 'wasted' by traditional farming. Beyond violence and dispossession, oil palm was central to projects of postcolonial hegemony (based on consent and Western modernization ideologies) that fostered peasant subsumption to capitalist development for nation-building.