UC Berkeley

In Mexico, archaeologists have often worked inside ejidos because the social property sector contains a significant portion of the government-registered pre-Hispanic archaeological record. In recent years, archaeologists have more closely engaged ejido communities. They have involved them as stakeholders and collaborators to study cultural heritage issues raised by the presence of national patrimony on social property. This study extends this approach with a community-oriented archaeological study of the 20th-century territorial formation of the Revolutionary ejido of pueblo San Ildefonso Tultepec in the municipality of Amealco in southern Querétaro. In this study, the collaborative focus was examining historic agrarian household sites built on ejido territory in the mid-20th century after the declaration of definitive possession to understand the physical formation of social property. These sites, observed in a novel state of archaeological context, allowed the community and I to study how immediate ancestors of community partners, who were the original beneficiaries of Revolutionary land reform, territorialized allotments of social property during the Mexican Miracle (1940-1970). The project found that better-off ejido members, equipped to farm in a period of diminished support for ejido-based agriculture, capitalized on the economic advantage of expanding production into social property, revealing a more complicated image of agrarian conditions in Amealco than previously understood.

Prompted by this finding, a shift to ethnohistory was warranted to explore how pre-Revolutionary agrarian conditions in southern Querétaro might have influenced the systemic context of ejido formation in Amealco. Specifically, the approach situated ejido-community archaeology “upstream” of the municipal history of Amealco in the context of Queretaro’s colonial and post-colonial regional agrarian trajectory. Through digital history and tape-recorded interviews, ethnohistorical research examined the impact of liberal land reform and hacienda-led agrarian production on the pre-Revolutionary landscape of the municipality. This study uncovers aspects of the deeper heritage of land reform in Amealco through community-accountable archaeology and ethnohistory. These reforms presented challenges and opportunities for landholding due to changes to land tenure, enabling individuals and communities to assert their rights to land. In conclusion, this dissertation advances Mexicanist archaeology by emphasizing the archaeology of modern campesino heritage. It builds upon and contributes to interdisciplinary engagements between Mexicanist history and anthropology and regional studiesof Querétaro’s agrarian history.