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Paper short abstract:

This paper places the notion of environmental agency in historical perspective, focusing on the case of Juátarhu, Mexico, an indigenous region whose ecological control shifted from local producers to industrial loggers in the late nineteenth century.

Paper long abstract:

Reaching back to ancient Mesoamerica, yet zooming in to the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (c. 1820-1920), this paper tells the story of Juátarhu, one of the oldest continuously inhabited regions of what is now central western Mexico. By tracing the history of Juátarhu's peoples (the Purépecha) and landscape, the paper places the notion of environmental agency in historical perspective. For all the talk of "human activity" as the driving force behind the Anthropocene, the truth is that over the past two centuries most humans have gradually lost any significant influence over the local environments they inhabit.

In contrast, as the case of Juátarhu illustrates, until the late nineteenth century, before the second revolution gained momentum, indigenous direct producers were able to build and manage their own landscapes. The Purépechas held decisive sway over land tenure and land use patterns, food production and forest management, labor regimes and market relations. But then, beginning in the late 1860s, the combined expansion of the liberal state and commercial and industrial capitalism began to upend Juátarhu’s longstanding socioeconomic and ecological makeup, including most notably the region’s abundant communal forests.

This paper explores the many ways in which the Purépecha met the challenge and even took advantage of the new circumstances, but also the ways in which industrial operations and state consolidation stripped many indigenous producers of their environmental agency, that is, their ability to have a say in the landscapes they once built and governed.