Landscaping Indigenous Mexico

Equal parts natural history, agrarian epic, and dark capitalist parable, Landscaping Indigenous Mexico is an ambitious regional history of Mexican liberalism. It is, too, an impressive study of highland Michoacán, that land of smoldering fumaroles, pine-clad sierras, Purépecha pueblos, and lakes. Fernando Pérez Montesinos understands Michoacán’s past holistically, as the struggle of an ethnoscaped empire, Juátarhu, to survive conquest, insurgency, Liberal lawfare, and Porfirian timber capitalism. At stake, the power to landscape; to apply artifice freely to environment. This welcome longue durée account of Purépecha adaptation and alienation will force historians to rethink the relationship between ethnicity, the natural world, statebuilding, and capitalism in Mexico. ~Matthew Butler, University of Texas at Austin, author of Mexico’s Spiritual Reconquest: Indigenous Catholics and Father Pérez’s Revolutionary Church

Focused on the Purépecha highlands, Pérez Montesinos has written an ambitious and lucid retelling of nineteenth-century Mexico that combines environmental perspectives with social and political history. Simultaneously a local, regional, and national story, the book reexamines key themes for Mexicanists, including how Indigenous people confronted independence, the rise of the national liberal state, and the development of commercial and industrial capitalism. With an eye for archival detail and without losing sight of the larger context, Landscaping Indigenous Mexico is a moving tribute to the resilience and adaptability of the agrarian landscapes that Mexico's Indigenous peoples built over centuries. ~Germán Vergara, Georgia Institute of Technology, author of Fueling Mexico: Energy and Environment, 1850–1950