Infrastructures of Race and War: Tracing Historic Roads in Postwar Quintana Roo

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The last half of the nineteenth century was for Yucatan, like much of the Atlantic World, a time of extreme tumult. Having recently gained its independence from Spain, the fledgling nation found itself plunged into numerous violent, political conflicts. None had so lasting an impact as what has become commonly known as the Caste War of Yucatan. Arguably the most successful anticolonial, Indigenous insurrection to have been mounted in the Americas, this war transformed the peninsula. Since 2013, I have been working in collaboration with predominantly Maya community members from the historic parish where the conflict broke out. Through archaeological survey and excavation, archival recovery, and oral history collection, we have traced the ways structural violences underpinned the social and material forms the war took. In this talk, I offer an example of how roads, routes, and negative spaces become key “archives in the landscape,” essential to understanding the material relationship between racial geographies and political violence. Ultimately, I aim to show how the shifting geographies of the long nineteenth century (in this case, roughly the 1780s to 1930s) contributed to both how the Caste War materialized and how its aftermath laid the foundations for today’s social geographies.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37697.0