The (environmental) landscape has been largely absent from the (historiographical) landscape of nineteenth-century Mexico. Fernando Pérez Montesinos' engaging environmental history offers much to each of these fields. In the 1990s, a generation of historians of nineteenth-century Mexican history including Florencia Mallon, Peter Guardino, and John Tutino countered the image of the post-independence period as dominated by chaos and internecine civil war between Conservative and Liberal factions. Rather, the collapse of colonial rule and the silver economy provided subaltern and Indigenous communities with a degree of autonomy, political agency, and relative prosperity. Pérez Montesinos corrects another misconception of land reform (reparto) as a monolithic and state-directed process by focusing on Indigenous communities' negotiation over the transformations in the landscape during the consolidation of the liberal state. It earns its place among these seminal studies and takes it a step further by historicising humans' relation to the landscape. Pérez Montesinos argues that the landscape created by the Purépechas deserves historians' attention in its own right. Purépecha comuneros (Indigenous persons holding lands communally) centred in Juátarhu (in present-day Michoacán) managed their landscape for sustenance over millennia, a process over which they largely maintained control after the Spanish Conquest and Mexican Independence. Following the consolidation of the Liberal state in the 1860s, the inroads of land privatisation and industrial capitalism gradually contested, while never completely undermining, Indigenous control over their historical patterns of land use. The first two chapters offer a sweeping, nine-millennium overview of the emergence of Purépecha civilization through their construction of the landscape. Agriculture involved unprecedented transformations to the land to forge a human-made habitat consisting of the tripartite structure of maize fields and pastures (planos), urban settlements (lotes), and forests (montes). These basic features were held and managed in common by Indigenous communities; in turn, they sustained the Purépecha's independence and expansionist polities. While Spanish conquest and disease allowed much land to revert to its former state, this fundamental pattern of land management remained largely intact until the mid-nineteenth century. The following chapters provide a chronological account of nineteenth-century land reform and corresponding changes in the Purépecha landscape. Prior to 1867, political instability and economic stagnation largely obstructed the enforcement of land reform, including both the federal Ley Lerdo of 1856 and Michoacán's more radically egalitarian state laws. The reparto occurred in two phases. From 1868 to the 1880s, comuneros negotiated the reparto with the liberal state to privatise their lands while keeping their landscape largely intact. Taxation gave the liberal state an unprecedented foothold in Indigenous lands, and redistribution permitted the wealthy to consolidate lands and further marginalise vulnerable comuneros. The post-1876 liberal regime, seeking stability, neglected to support land redistribution, instead favouring land taxation; comuneros accepted taxation in return for the implicit recognition of their control of communal lands. From the 1890s to 1910, the construction of Mexico's railroad network and industrial sawmills backed by foreign capital marked the large-scale incursion of industrial capitalism into Indigenous forests. For the first time, they threatened the tripartite Purépecha landscape by integrating montes into the industrial landscape, separating them from planos and lotes, which remained in Indigenous control. The epilogue carries into the post-1910 Revolutionary era. The undermining of Indigenous autonomy was insufficient to spark in Michoacán the kind of widespread rebellion seen in Morelos. Instead, logging companies collapsed under the pressure of factional violence and the disruption of Mexico's financial system, restoring to comuneros a measure of control over the environment. The book shuttles between the nation, state, and changing local actors, and draws from regional sources, including reparto requests, arreglos convencionales (conventional agreements), and arrendamientos parciales (lease contracts), to demonstrate how comuneros negotiated different stages of land reform to preserve their hold on the landscape. Juátarhu's landscape and land reform provide the underlying narrative cohesion. Pérez Montesinos compellingly narrates Michoacán's land reform as a process contested by national and state authorities, and local Indigenous communities, in which no party controlled its ultimate course. It thus parallels Mexican scholars' work showing how land reform affected local Indigenous communities in other regions, including Antonio Ohmstede, Ethelia Ruiz, and Romana Falcón. Another innovation is to embed Mexico's liberal land reform within multi-millennial timescales over which the Purépecha's relationship with the land evolved. This strategy stresses just how monumental the consolidation of the liberal state and industrial capitalism were in transforming Mexico's social and environmental relations. While the environment is fundamental here, it features primarily as the product of human agency; the question of how the landscape might have conditioned human action could be further developed. This does not detract from Pérez Montesinos's achievement: the lay of the land is hereby inscribed in nineteenth-century Mexico's history. The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.
Jason Ahlenius (Wed,) studied this question.
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