Extraction undone
Indigenous loss of control over landscapes can be reversed. Review: Landscaping Indigenous Mexico, Fernando Pérez Montesinos, by Gavin O'Toole
Landscaping Indigenous Mexico: The Liberal State and Capitalism in the Purépecha Highlands, Fernando Pérez Montesinos, 2025, University of Texas Press
If extractive capitalism in the countryside can expand with a seemingly insatiable appetite, as countries across Latin American have experienced to their detriment, it can also contract.
Indeed, the striking lesson of Fernando Pérez Montesinos’ history of the landscape in the Purépecha highlands of Michoacán is that it can even disappear completely.
This is an area of Mexico once ravaged by industrial logging whose people did not play a particularly prominent role in the Revolution of 1910—yet that Revolution changed everything.
It is not a cautionary tale of insurgent zeal in which brave ideologues responding to the zeitgeist of the era rise up to halt industrial logging controlled by avaricious imperialists in its stead.
It is more of a tale of how the dramatic disruptions to markets and social relations caused by the rapid onset of industrial capitalism—and a flood of neocolonial investment—can, like an unregulated engine accelerating beyond its capacity, spiral out of control and self-destruct.
As a result, after 1920 Indigenous comuneros in the Juátarhu region began to regain much of the control they had enjoyed over a landscape that generations of their ancestors had shaped and been sustained by.
As Pérez Montesinos writes, the revolutionary cocktail of national disruption and local resistance put an end to a destructive form of timber capitalism that had once “seemed to be unstoppable”.
The sierra Purépecha is one of the oldest continuously inhabited regions in western Mexico where, prior to the mid-19th century, the landscape had been progressively shaped by Indigenous subsistence for generations.
Change ultimately came with the slow and patchy incursion of the national state in the decades following Independence, followed by the more rapid transformations that began in the 1860s when liberalism became the dominant ideology.
Until then, Purépecha comuneros had continued to exercise significant control over their environment, and thus over their fate, in a challenge to the narratives that broadly depict the destitution of Indigenous society under the free market yoke.
The author’s focus is the landscape, which as he notes is a tableau of historical change—landscapes are rarely if ever pristine environments that have not been shaped over long periods by human interventions.
During modern Mexico’s founding century, Purépecha comuneros exercised significant command over Juátarhu’s landscape, holding sway over land tenure and land-use patterns, food production and forest management, labour regimes and market relations.
Things began to change as the capitalist dream among national elites of privatizing the land became reality once the liberal state began to consolidate power after 1867.
Privatizations, known as repartos, unfolded in two waves: from 1867 to 1875, the focus was mostly arable lands and the push for concentration; and then, after 1890, the expansion of commercial forest harvesting reflected the incursion of a more rapacious extractive capitalism.
The timber capitalists were backed by the state, a phenomenon we would recognize today in terms of the de facto support received by large extractive corporations across Latin America.
Among Purépechas, industrial logging led to major changes in land-use patterns, a proliferation of disputes within communities over communal woodlands, and the ever-expanding loss of autonomy.
The liberal interregnum was a formative period in Mexican history as elites, inspired by European and North American notions of private property and market freedoms, anchored progress in the end of Indigenous and Church corporate social relations and landholding.
As such, notes Pérez Montesinos, privatizations have shaped the historiography of modern Mexico, with late nineteenth-century land concentrations understood through an established canon that depicts them as precursors to the Revolution.
This historical narrative largely understood land privatizations as driving unchecked political consolidation alongside land grabbing—resulting in explosive social inequality and the establishment of a new ruling, landed aristocracy.
But as Pérez Montesinos points out, with careful archival work this picture has largely proven to be untrue: the enactment of formal federal legislation making repartos possible was not equivalent to the wholesale privatization and consolidation of landholding. In fact, the process was uneven and messier, in which there was considerable Indigenous agency.
The author wites: “Old characterizations of Indigenous people as passive actors who lacked the understanding, the means, and the power to counter land policies gave way to accounts in which comuneros and their allies were shown contesting, negotiating, and even embracing privatizations … The canon posited a single story of national power without regional variations, ignoring local responses and participation.”
His more nuanced history of this period suggests from the analysis of repartos in Juátarhu that land consolidation was incremental, uneven, did not result in mass land grabs, and involved Indigenous actors alongside external interests, even if it stripped Indigenous communities of legal personhood, taxed communal holdings, and limited autonomy.
It was the full-blown industrial capitalism that came next, largely as a result of expansive US and British imperialism—and not liberal policymaking—that really set the cat among the pigeons.
As commercial interests expanded, they set their sights on profitable resources hitherto beyond their reach: the purpose of privatizations extended from small plots of arable land to the commons that had remained outside the market—especially communal forests.
Pérez Montesinos writes: “Most revealing in the story of Juátarhu is that it was not just commercial or even agrarian capitalism, but industrial capitalism, so much more transformative and destructive, that descended upon the region. With it, moderate land consolidation gave way to full-blown capitalist accumulation … Moreover, the case of Juátarhu illustrates that once in motion, capitalist accumulation quickly took over as the main driver of environmental changes, reorganizing existing ecosystems and social landscapes.”
The author illuminates how this reordered political, social, and economic relations in an accelerating dynamic: from changes in labour practices and the coming of new extractive technologies to the generation of competition and conflict between comuneros.
Capitalism literally reshaped the landscape and the minds of its people in order to reproduce itself—“the greater the profit-seeking, technologically driven accumulation, the greater the landscape transformation”.
After 1890 the combination of expanding commercial and industrial operations began to push the environment in which Purépecha producers had survived for centuries to the brink of transformation, literally stripping them of their landscape-making capacity.
Change occurred with remarkable speed: Pérez Montesinos shows how, beginning in 1900, the pattern of forest extraction in the area was transformed as American and British capital displaced the logging operations of local landowners, merchants and entrepreneurs.
Armed with influential national and international connections and deep pockets, the newcomers bought out the locals, built a state-of-the-art industrial sawmill, introduced a new transportation infrastructure, and secured long-term control of abundant timber sources.
The author writes: “In a matter of a few years, they turned a growing commercial business into a vast industrial operation, assembling a large firm with near-monopolistic powers. The area under production expanded, extraction skyrocketed, and productivity levels reached historic highs.”
It was the Mexican Revolution that would pull the plug—a kaleidoscope of civil warfare and insurgency initially conducted with only the limited participation of the Purépecha themselves.
The crisis interrupted capitalist accumulation throughout Mexico, halting the operations and power of oligopolies—ultimately proving fatal for the logging companies of Juátarhu and ending the ecological destruction laying waste to the old agrarian landscape.
Large-scale logging in Juátarhu was suspended and in the 1930s revolutionary legislation would declare the companies’ forest leases with Juátarhu’s pueblos null and void.
These new conditions allowed comuneros and other local actors to regain control of an environment that still offered the thing that they required most: the ability to produce maize to feed themselves.
Pérez Montesinos writes: “Industrial capitalism came to an end in the Purépecha highlands of Michoacán, and with it the ecological regime that had begun to replace the old agrarian landscape. Capitalist accumulation was brought to a halt. It was no longer the engine of social and environmental changes.
“The quantifiable, exploitable, and regimented landscape of industrial logging, the company town, and the factory that had once loomed heavily on the horizon no longer threatened. The liberal state had cracked.”
*Please help the Latin American Review of Books: subscribe for just one month ($5) and support our mission to offer readers more.