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Cracks and Fugitive Geographies: Agrarian Capitalism and Rural Landscapes in Central Veracruz, Mexico, Nineteenth-Twentyth Centuries

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Abstract

This article reflects on the spatial history of agrarian capitalism in the state of Veracruz, Mexico, through the lens of a French farming colony on the Nautla river. While, during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this region’s rural landscapes were ostensibly redesigned at the hand of liberal state programs and capitalist desires, a closer look shows a more checkered reality. Using textual and geographic archives, my analysis examines the tensions and “cracks” that emerged in this process of economic “modernization,” with an eye for the fugitive histories fashioned by French colonists in the face of capitalist abstraction.

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(Source: after Demard 2013)

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(Source: Google Earth, 2022) (right)

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  1. Department of Anthropology and Department of Race, Diaspora and Indigeneity, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA

    François G. Richard

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Richard, F.G. Cracks and Fugitive Geographies: Agrarian Capitalism and Rural Landscapes in Central Veracruz, Mexico, Nineteenth-Twentyth Centuries. Int J Histor Archaeol 28, 45–63 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10761-022-00687-y

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