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  • Statistics, Maps, and Legibility: Negotiating Nationalism in Post-Revolutionary Mexico
  • Michael A. Ervin (bio)

“These days, we want to know everything and forget nothing. Life needs to confess to itself and take a test of conscience. Let’s grab life by the neck so that it makes that confession in the elegantly eloquent form of numbers, tables, formulas, and diagrams. This is statistics: the confession that we make life make. One must never forget what Goethe said: my works are merely part of a great confession. We make of statistics the schematic, numerical confession of life. Life should confess to itself.”1

Introduction

Official statistics and maps played crucial roles in the Mexican Revolution, especially in the two decades following its armed phase. In the 1920s and 1930s, Mexico’s federal government sought to increase agricultural production and redistribute land as part of a program of national reconstruction after a decade of civil war. Such efforts depended upon the collection of statistics and the elaboration of maps by public officials. An analysis of the work of data collectors and mapmakers in post-revolutionary Mexico adds to the research on official statistics and maps by demonstrating their multifaceted and often contradictory functions.

Studies of the roles of statistics and maps have focused on their use by nation-states in relationships with subject peoples.2 Statistics and maps represent natural resources—geological traits, water resources, or soil varieties—in terms that are [End Page 155] meaningful to policymakers. Data collection also makes populations—their health conditions, educational levels, or occupational trends—“visible to the state.”3 The result is what James Scott calls “maps of legibility,” which make a land’s natural and human resources known or “legible” to officials. While some maps of legibility might be considered neutral representations of existing realities, scholars have focused on their generation of new realities and relationships of subordination. Maps of legibility enable and legitimize state authority over territory through warfare, trade, and colonialism. J.B. Harley noted that the powerful use maps in “undeclared processes of domination” over the weak. Maps have helped extend the global domination of the Anglo races, and states and elites employ statistics to expand the power of one class over others. States also use statistics and maps to construct nations. In Italy, nineteenth-century liberals enrolled statistics to imagine and create “a new fatherland.” Thongchai Winichakul more recently argued that a Thai nation and sentiments of nationalism were forged by “geography and its prime technology of knowing, mapping.” More to the point, his study is of how “[a] map created a nation.”4 [End Page 156]

The ability of states to use statistics and maps to build nations in their image and control peoples should not be exaggerated. In theory, scholars recognize that official statistics and maps are tied to Enlightenment ideals of good governance. Subjects contest the assumptions of official statistics and maps, especially state efforts to redefine the nation and citizens’ rights and duties. People resist censuses for many reasons, from fears of increased taxation to the biblical consequences tied to census participation. Concerns regarding privacy and racial categorization have sparked significant controversy as well. Thus, peoples negotiate the definitions and uses of census categories, and numbers are deployed to sway public opinion by the authority provided by statistics. The negotiations often result in social reform policies that benefit broad sectors of society. Good governance, it appears, must be forced upon states by subject populations.5

By the early 1920s, Mexico’s federal government created many statistics-collection and mapmaking offices based primarily in the Ministry of Agriculture (Secretaría de Agricultura y Fomento, or SAF). In 1916, the SAF’s National Agrarian Commission and state-level Local Agrarian Commissions began surveying and redistributing land in the form of ejidos (communal plots) that had been stripped from communities during earlier administrations. The SAF’s Office of Geographic and Climate Studies was asked to complete the country’s first official, post-revolutionary national map. In 1922, the SAF created an extension service, whose first mission was to collect agricultural production data. The General Office of Statistics, founded in 1882, continued as part of the SAF until 1922, when...

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