Instituting Nature: Authority, Expertise, and Power in Mexican Forests

3. The Sierra Juárez of Oaxaca: Mobile Landscapes, Political Economy, and the Fires of War

3 Standing at the crest of the Sierra Juárez, one feels far from cities, governments , and forestry bureaucracies. Range after range of fir and pineclad mountains recede into the distance (see figure 3.1). The air is cool, the tropical sun stingingly hot. At first this might feel like a forest in Arizona or Spain, but the combination of fir trees, cactuses, and flowering agaves quickly reminds one that this is a tropical mountainous place, not a temperate pine forest. How did these mountain forests become entangled in the projects of the Mexican state? What kinds of resistances did bureaucratic projects of legibility and official knowledge encounter from indigenous forest communities and remote forests? This landscape was not a blank slate on which foresters and officials could write freely when the forest service gradually arrived here in the 1940s. On the contrary , the particular history of this landscape produced the political and environmental actors with which the Mexican state had to deal, the changing forests and the unruly indigenous communities that somehow had to be woven into forms, regulations, and official ways of knowing. The Sierra Juárez is the kind of mountainous pine forest that the Mexican state tried to incorporate into modern economies of knowledge over the last century: The predicament of the indigenous Zapotec and Chinantec people who live here resembles that of the indigenous people who inhabit and own much of the forests of Mexico. Beyond Mexico, the ways that environmental history produced legacies that limited and conditioned state power, official knowledge and popular understandings of the state, can help us understand the predicament of expanding state bureaucracies in general. Despite their best efforts to declare a rupture with the past, all knowledge institutions that seek to control landscapes must encounter and somehow domesticate distant spaces, where social and environmental change have produced particular ways of understanding the state and of making a living on the land. The Sierra Juárez of Oaxaca: Mobile Landscapes, Political Economy, and the Fires of War 62 Chapter 3 Figure 3.1 The Sierra Juárez looking north from Benito Juárez. This feels like a remote place; the cold breeze and the hot sun, the forested mountains, and the sound of the wind in the trees seem far from government offices and forms, from traffic-filled cities and noisy markets. Ecological and political histories show something quite different: a history of connection, disconnection, and reconnection that has linked forests and political economies, indigenous communities, and the nation state. An attentive reading of forest ecology and the structure of presentday forests reveals a past of agriculture and mining, of warfare and conquest, of plagues and resettlement. Looking downhill to the north, fir trees and stubby short needle pines drop steeply away toward the steamy heat of the Valle Nacional; only thirty kilometers away, crops of sugar cane, banana, and tobacco can be grown. Up here, it is always more or less cold; on afternoons in the rainy season, towering cumulus clouds sweep in from the north, and often torrential rains set in and no one can go outside. I well remember setting a forest camp with logging technicians at three o’clock on a summer afternoon because it was too wet to go outside until the following morning. Turning to face southward , toward Ixtlán and the densely settled Valley of Oaxaca, rainfall The Sierra Juárez of Oaxaca 63 Figure 3.2 The Valley of Oaxaca looking south from El Punto. drops quickly and the less dense seasonally dry pine forests are more hospitable and inviting to human settlement, to farming, and to sitting outside on a summer afternoon (see figure 3.2). This apparently remote place is not far from large cities, dense human settlements, and powerful state bureaucracies. This chapter describes the history of the landscapes of the Sierra Juárez by thinking through the effects of political economy and state intervention on forests and fields, on indigenous political institutions, and on forms of land ownership. This is a reading that runs largely against the grain of the authors’ intents; such a reading of political economy allows us to trace a broad sweep of landscape change over the last centuries, to account for the advance and retreat of forests, the movements of towns and settlements, and the entanglement of particular local species of animals (cochineal insects), vegetables (pines and oaks), and minerals (gold and...