Landscaping Indigenous Mexico

A history of the Purépecha people's survival amid environmental and political changes.

Landscapes are more than geological formations; they are living records of human struggles. Landscaping Indigenous Mexico unearths the history of Juátarhu, an Indigenous landscape shaped and nurtured by the Purépecha—a formidable Mesoamerican people whose power once rivaled that of the Aztecs. Although cataclysmic changes came with European contact and colonization, Juátarhu’s enduring agroecology continued to sustain local life through centuries of challenges.

Contesting essentialist narratives of Indigenous penury, Pérez Montesinos shows how Purépechas thrived after Mexican independence in 1821, using Juátarhu’s diverse agroecology to negotiate continued autonomy amid waves of national economic and political upheaval. After 1870, however, autonomy waned under the pressure of land privatization policies, state intervention, and industrial logging. On the eve of the Mexican Revolution in 1910, Purépechas stood at a critical juncture: Would the Indigenous landscape endure or succumb? Offering a fresh perspective on a seemingly well-worn subject, Pérez Montesinos argues that Michoacán, long considered a peripheral revolutionary region, saw one of the era’s most radical events: the destruction of the liberal order and the timber capitalism of Juátarhu.

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 was 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 the author's 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

Fernando Pérez Montesinos is an associate professor at UCLA. A historian of nineteenth-century Mexico and the Mexican Revolution, his work includes the edited volume El ascenso maderista y el fin del régimen porfiriano. He is a senior editor of the Hispanic American Historical Review.

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