Borderlands Pueblos, Bourbons, and Liberal Republicans: Historical Narratives and Landscape Changes in Northern Mexico, Eighteenth to Nineteenth Centuries

These themes capture the tenor of the valuable insights that I gained from Eric Van Young’s research and mentorship in the formation of my own scholarly career. In this paper I will explore the intersection of narrative and environmental history, focused on northern Mexico during the transition from Bourbon colonial rule to the early republican formation of Mexico.

Over the last quarter century, and especially during the bicentennial commemorations of the Independence movements in Latin America, scholarship has focused on the participation of indigenous peoples with innovative analyses of their motivations and perceptions of the political agendas of liberalism and republican citizenship. Not surprisingly, the thematic matrix of these studies has underscored problems of land tenure and local autonomy, documented abundantly for village-dwelling indigenous peoples with longstanding colonial institutions of internal governance. Eric Van Young has contributed in very important ways to this literature through his many articles and his prize-winning book, The Other Rebellion, by underscoring the cultural and religious matrices through which indigenous communities reworked the Liberal discourses of this period. My contribution to this panel builds on this literature, but shifts the focus to the geographic and ecological conditions of landscape changes provoked by mining enterprises and livestock herding in northern Mexico – exacerbated by drought in the early 19^th century – that, in turn, affected the local political agendas of rural communities and the meanings they ascribed to “liberty” in the waning years of colonial rule and the formative phases of the Mexican Republic.