The Only Way: Congregacion and the Construction of Race and Land in Mexico, 1521-2017

Abstract

In 2008, the Mexican government unveiled the Sustainable Rural Cities, a project to concentrate “dispersed populations” living in the “high risk lands” of Chiapas. Marketed as a novel idea, the Sustainable Rural Cities were remarkably similar colonial congregaciones, which sought to convert and care for indigenous people— and to exploit their labor and land—in the wake of the devastation of the Spanish conquest. In fact, the 2008 project in Chiapas was only the latest in a long series of post-independence development schemes to revive this colonial model. In both its material and ideological forms, congregación has figured centrally in key moments of Mexico’s national development. This dissertation, “The Only Way: Congregación and the Construction of Race and Land in Mexico, 1521- 2017,” examines the evolution and variants of congregación through its historical and literary realizations, from the colonial era to the present day. “The Only Way” brings Foucault’s notion of pastoral power into conversation with Critical Race Theory and the Environmental Humanities to show how congregación alienated “nature” from “society” as a means of advancing capitalist modernity. I demonstrate how the Spanish view of the indigenous Americans as “dispersed” over the landscape played a major role in racializing them as “Indian”—that is, subjects in need of constant religious and (agri)cultural conversion. In what I call the race/land remedy, elite imaginations viewed the Indian and their land as mutually constitutive, sharing an essence that, if properly harnessed by the state, could make them all more productive. The resulting “Indian” subjectivity suspended them between “nature” and “society,” making them perpetual targets for transformation and primitive accumulation. This unstable construction made indigenous populations, and later those rendered simply as colorblind “dispersed populations,” the constant targets of pastoral power wielded through variants of congregación. “The Only Way” charts continuity and change in the race/land remedy over four distinct historical moments. The first chapter analyzes Bartolomé de las Casas’s writings to argue that, despite his reservations about the colonial project, his proposals for resettling the Indians paved the way for Vasco de Quiroga’s pueblos hospitales, enshrining congregación as a means of “putting human and non-human nature to work” for the incipient capitalist state. The second chapter uses two nineteenth-century novels, El monedero by Nicolás Pizarro and Navidad en las Montañas by Ignacio Manuel Altamirano, to show how secular liberal elites grafted utopic socialism onto the model of congregación to create model agrarian villages intended to modernize the countryside. When read as didactic proposals for agrarian reform, they expose liberals’ embrace of Mexico’s Catholic colonial heritage, refracted through Enlightenment ideals about natural science and New Spain’s nascent agricultural capitalism. The third chapter shows how the ejido, the twentieth-century institution of land reform, also called upon congregación for its ability to usher Mexico’s peasants away from communal farming to private property. Through José Revueltas’s El luto humano and Rosario Castellanos’s Oficio de tinieblas, I show how violence underwrote pastoral power and the race/land remedy during the so-called “Mexican Miracle” of the mid twentieth century. The final chapter examines the Sustainable Rural Cities which I approach through documentaries, ecotourism promotions, development documents, and government propaganda. Together, these diverse sources generate a racialized discourse of criminality and underdevelopment coupled with dispersion, working to re-territorialize Mexico in the name of “Green Capitalism.”