State fixations, fugitive landscapes: Mapping, surveying and the spatial creation of modern Mexico, 1850--1930.

摘要

The process of state formation in modern Mexico hinged on the ability of the state to "see" at the proper scale. Encompassing the crucial period between the Mexican-American War of 1848 and the postrevolutionary consolidation of the state in 1930, this dissertation examines the critical roles surveying and mapping played in this process of state formation. Mapped knowledge was critical to the state's ability to rule effectively. State-produced maps would assist in the bureaucratic and military administration of disparate regions, facilitate the creation of a private property landscape, property valuation and taxation, and also aesthetically and visually unify a fragmented polity. Plotted points, drawn lines and bounded properties would effectively, in the parlance of the time, "fix" the landscape as a stable and visible entity. Or would they? State officials, surveyors and military mappers did not encounter a blank slate awaiting topographic inscription. Rather, they traversed an inhabited landscape dense with meaning and history, woven together with the social fabric of experience and practice, and riven by class and community conflict. As a consequence, measurement competed with memory, inscription with inheritance, and technical abstraction with social experience as arbiters of reality. Charged with simplifying, codifying, and mapping the land, surveyors confronted the very thing their stable images were designed to erase: a landscape of overlapping jurisdictions and use-rights, of opaque tenure systems and illegible property regimes, of ambiguous borders and shifting place names, and of villagers with their own conceptions of territory and history. At those moments, the landscape must have appeared as more than merely unknown: it must have seemed almost fugitive, as if it were an accomplice in a larger conspiracy undermining their efforts. This dissertation follows the contested and dialectical process by which these fugitive landscapes were defined, codified and naturalized---in a word, fixed---by military mappers, land surveyors, and metropolitan cartographers in negotiation and struggle with the villagers and landowners they encountered in the field.