“Guacamole Ecosystems” is the history of how the human and nonhuman inhabitants of a rural region in Twentieth-Century Mexico connected to the world by reshaping the local landscape and economy. Michoacán’s Sierra Purhépecha, in western Mexico, grows thirty percent of worldwide Hass avocados every year. In the 1940s, before being the world’s largest avocado grower, the Sierra Purhépecha was covered by pine tree forests where Purhépecha and nonindigenous peasants collected deadwood and resin. Occasionally, peasants cultivated avocado from the native varieties, Criollo and Verde, with other food crops. Although the avocado is native to Mexico, Rudolph Hass bred the variety that is now ubiquitous in the 1920s Southern California. Mexican bureaucrats, entrepreneurs, and U.S. scientists introduced the Hass avocado to Michoacán in the 1950s, but the avocado belt’s astounding expansion did not occur until the 1980s, when Michoacano returned migrant workers and Purhépecha and nonindigenous peasants abandoned their traditional lifestyle as agriculturalists and lumbermen to become avocado growers. This dissertation asks three questions: What were the ecological factors that enabled Michoacán’s Sierra Purhépecha to grow more Hass avocados than any other region in the world? Who promoted the transformation of Michoacán’s forests into commercial avocado orchards and who resisted it? And how has the U.S. consumption of avocados reshaped Michoacán’s landscapes and rural people’s livelihoods?This dissertation argues that the way we grow and consume food in the present is the result of having created a global food system that commercializes the illusion of distributing a wide range of what, in real terms, is very restricted and homogenous foodstuff throughout the world. By commercializing the idea of an abundance of identical food items for everyone, everywhere, whenever, the modern global food system has reduced our food options and resilience by decreasing rural spaces’ biodiversity, particularly in the global south. Producers are not the principal beneficiaries of this food arrangement, nor are the consumers but transnational food companies that profit the most at the cost of jeopardizing rural people and landscapes’ long-term subsistence.

Abstract

While the subject of native Christianization has been studied in many ways, scholars of early Mexico have seldom read the interaction between Amerindian devotions and Christianity as popular religion. My dissertation explores the rise and development of what I call “Mexican popular religion”—the fragmented bond between native devotional practices and Catholic decorum in early Mexico. I argue that this contentious coexistence generated a continuum of religious conflict from the period following the Spanish conquest to the mid seventeenth century. By exploring four facets of this religious association, the present study underscores two overarching themes. First, persecution unwittingly heightened the perceived efficacy of native pre-Columbian religion and maintained its widespread following. Second, religious conflict influenced the formal policy changes regarding the Christian welfare of Indians and thereby altered the Church’s conversion enterprise in New Spain. By the mid seventeenth century, Mexican popular religion formed a long process fraught with difference, unsuspecting contradictions, and unintended outcomes.This dissertation advances a specific paradigm of popular religion for early Mexico. Mexican popular religion describes the relationship between native ancestral devotions and Catholicism that unfolded in an ad hoc manner. Far from isolated camps, their respective actors traversed and reshaped the institutional boundaries set by Catholic decorum. The present framework, therefore, uncouples conventional binary models of popular religion by deconstructing the mediated exchanges, disputes, and pragmatic adaptations that took place within a shared religious space. Its findings suggest that religious conflict served as a mechanism of change rather than a byproduct of native Christianization in early Mexico.