Landscapes of Labor

Summary

During the last quarter of the 19th century, Mexico experienced a period of rapid social and economic modernization under the leadership of dictator Porfirio Diaz. Central to this was the dismantling of community-held lands, a practice that was intended to undermine the social aspects of the agrarian/indigenous lifestyle. The nineteenth century architects of Mexico’s progress believed that by dismantling communal villages lands and thus communal indigenous communities, they were moving Mexico’s indigenous people away from an outmoded past and into modern forms of industrial capitalist production. This paper will explore the ways in which settlement and architecture reflect those transformations in the decades leading up to Mexico’s Revolution of 1910. I integrate archaeological data with archival and oral sources to explore the ways in which the physical transformations of landscape and the structures that marked it impacted Nahua communities in Puebla’s Valley of Atlixco.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• Capital, Craft, and Consumption in Mesoamerica after the Spanish Invasion

Keywords

Spatial Coverage