A Confounded Statistics: Agricultural Data as State Making and State Resisting

In 1898, the Mexican Agricultural Society and the federal Department of Fomento, or Development, decided to produce a set of agricultural statistics to send to the 1900 Paris World’s Exposition. Surveys and statistics were nothing new to either party, but both saw the world’s fair as an opportunity to create a comprehensive, commensurate dataset that could elevate the Mexican government’s standing both at home and abroad. This paper looks at how people who received the resultant blank spreadsheets responded to the request for an accounting of their productivity and development. In its column headers and compact cells, the spreadsheet projected Mexican technocrats’ embrace of order and progress onto the countryside and, from there, outward to a global stage. In the hand-written rows of answers, the cramped explanations scrawled crosswise, the amendments and annotations, the returned spreadsheets make clear how municipal officials and the agriculturalists’ whose productivity they recorded revised and confounded that project of legibility and modernity. Few outright rejected the central projects of knowledge gathering and agricultural development. Instead, in providing their own interpretations of what information mattered and what productivity meant, rural Mexicans simultaneously reinforced the state’s right to know its people and territory and undermined the projected coherence of the nation.