Capitalist Accumulations, Landscape Transformations, and Maize Economies in the Purépecha Highlands

The Purépecha communities of highland Michoacán held back from the conflicts of 1810-1820, retrenched on the land during post-revolutionary reconstructions, and negotiated liberal attempts to privatize arable lands through the 1870s, preserving maize based ecologies and limiting capitalist accumulations. Then after 1890, the highlanders faced a new timber capitalism tied to building a national rail network. Industrial loggers cut communal forests as accumulations soared nationwide--until the 1910 revolution halted railway construction, relieving pressures on Purépecha communities. The threat of industrial capitalism gone, communities negotiated state impositions in the 1920s, welcomed land distributions in the 1930s--still facing divisions rooted in pre-revolutionary timnes.