Mayans, Caciques, Farmers, and Forests: Revisiting Migration Theories' Relevance to Frontier Expansion

Nora Haenn, arizona state university

This paper examines how individual decision-making within local socio-political processes helped open Mexico's agricultural frontier. Research on frontiers stresses the national policies which frame colonization and the local economies and ecologies which affect settler land use. Transnational theories emphasize social structure, social identities, and individual decision-making in migratory outcomes. I use both approaches to delineate disjointed colonization processes in Calakmul, Mexico. Calakmul's settlers had to work through a series of sometimes non-comparable issues in order to establish long-term farming operations. In the paper, I describe how people used ethnicity, kinship, and a concept of justice that stressed individual willpower to build a new social structure and shape access to resources. I also challenge a truism of Calakmul's colonization. Local politicians assert that, before the late 1980s, government agents were absent from Calakmul. A transnational perspective reveals how indirect rule and specific forms of governance can figure in frontier colonization.