Resettlement as Planned Utopia: Mexican Anthropologists and Rural Development in the Papaloapan, Mexico

This paper examines the ideas and practices of Mexican anthropologists who worked among displaced inhabitants of the Papaloapan River Basin (Mexico) during the mid-twentieth century. In its initial phase, the Papaloapan Project, a multifaceted plan that included Latin Ameirca’s largest hydroelectric dam as its cornerstone, required the displacement of over 20,000 inhabitants of the region, most of whom were indigenous Mazatecs. Mexican anthropologists, working under the auspices of the incipient National Indianist Institute, resettled the displaced population and carried out social, economic, educational, and health programs in the new relocation communities. Their efforts included the development and implementation of Spanish language and literacy programs for the mostly monolingual Mazatecs, rural industrial cooperatives, and new experimental agricultural practices, to name a few.

The paper considers the first years of resettlement and initial development programs carried out by these anthropologists (1954-1959) to create idealized rural communities. It reveals that anthropologists’ ideas about rural economic development and social organization infrequently translated into practice, resulting in ad hoc and improvised action that bore little resemblance to ideas conceived upon high in Mexico City or in the broader international context of social scientific ideation. These findings suggest a paradigm of rural development in which Mexican anthropologists used practice to reconfigure social scientific theory and debates both nationally and beyond.