Archaeology,land tenure,and Indigenous dispossession in Mexico

Introduction

Representatives of 17 Indigenous Totonac families from San Antonio Ojital, Veracruz lodged a complaint with Mexico’s Comisión Nacional de Derechos Humanos (CNDH) in February 2016. “Currently,” the typed letter reads, “we are informed that our lands are considered national patrimony.” ¹ Beginning in the early 1990s, “we were deceived with incomplete and/or distorted information, [and] threatened that we could be dispossessed, driven off, and have our lands stolen.” ² The letter alleges that the federal government sought to take San Antonio Ojital’s lands because they were part of the archaeological site of El Tajín. The complainants charged that they had been targeted specifically as Indigenous subjects: “We believe that it is unjust that we be dispossessed, threatened, deceived, or robbed of our lands, just because we are Indigenous.” ³

El Tajín is best known for an urban Epiclassic (c. 650-1200 CE) occupation associated with the Classic Veracruz culture of the pre-Hispanic Gulf Coast (Daneels, 2012). In Mesoamerican archaeology, El Tajín is famous for its elaborate architecture, including architectural niches and flying cornices (epitomized in the Pyramid of the Niches), intricate low-relief carvings, and extensive ballcourt iconography (Koontz, 2009; Wilkerson, 1999). Located in the ancestral Totonac territories of north Veracruz, El Tajín has been a key focus for Gulf Coast archaeology since the 1930s. Given the co-occurrence of national(ized) archaeological monuments and diverse property regimes, conflicts with the Totonac communities of the region have become common. This is especially the case because many Totonac residents of the area consider themselves descendants of El Tajín’s builders (Nahmad Molinari, 1998) while most archaeologists do not (Brueggemann, 1991). Official discourses favor the Totonac claim: the region’s Totonac identity, associated with El Tajín, has been an important factor in state-government ideology and tourism promotion (Daneels, 2006; Zúñiga Bravo, 2014).

San Antonio Ojital is a relatively marginalized community in the municipality of Papantla. Located just to the north of El Tajín, the community is at the end of the gravel road that takes tourists from the site installations and museums to the pyramids. Few of San Antonio Ojital’s 193 residents have access to land for subsistence cultivation, the economic livelihood for most of the region. ⁴ This was not always the case. From the imposition of a private property regime in the late 1890s through the 1990s, residents held title to parcels of land located near that road. The loss of those parcels was at the heart of the CNDH complaint.

The institutional responsibility for the alleged dispossession was no mystery. In Mexico, all pre-Hispanic structures and material culture are legally public property, administered by the federal Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia (INAH). State heritage management is well-established in El Tajín: the site’s first guard was appointed in 1886, decades before the INAH was founded in 1939 (Baranda, 1887: 381). A century of research and tourist-oriented reconstruction made El Tajín the most important archaeological site in the state (Daneels, 2006). In the early 1990s, a new archaeological megaproject—Proyecto Tajín—brought around 500 workers, 42 technicians, and 18 researchers to reconstruct 24 hectares of the site’s monumental core (Brueggemann, 1994). This project required access to the land on which some of these monuments sat: “with lies, deceit, and threats, they made us sign a paper that said that we would donate or sell our lands to the government.” ⁵ Many residents did just that and moved elsewhere. One former Proyecto Tajín anthropologist, reflecting on the injustice of the situation, wrote that “with [San Antonio Ojital’s] lands, crops, and houses being unjustly appraised, they protested in writing to different governmental agencies … they finally received a payment, with which they were not satisfied” (Brizuela Abasalón, 2000: 117).

Between 1992 and 1999, through expropriation (one case), sale (four cases), and donation (12 cases), the State Government of Veracruz acquired legal title to portions of parcels 35, 51-52, 74-75, and 90-91. ⁶ Unlike the INAH, the State Government of Veracruz, a co-sponsor of Proyecto Tajín, has no day-to-day representation in the archaeological site. The local INAH officials who received the CNDH complaint thus found themselves in a difficult situation. They did not necessarily disagree that an injustice had been committed. They had heard the stories from San Antonio Ojital and, though some may have suspected the complainants’ motives, the officials were sympathetic. But the alleged dispossession had been completed long before the establishment of the INAH’s offices in El Tajín, and the federal government did not actually hold title to the lands in question.

In October 2017, following meetings with the complainants, the INAH, and the State Government of Veracruz, the CNDH issued its ruling. There would be no restitution of lands or compensation for the complainants of San Antonio Ojital. Long ago, the complainants had “acquired the properties in question by private title and in good faith, each of them obtaining the right to dispose of the real estate in whichever legal form.” ⁷ Past underpayment notwithstanding, the fact that the complainants had been paid at all demonstrated the legality of the overall process: “contracts are perfected by mere consent, which means that the legal act is valid and effective from the moment of its creation.” ⁸ The CNDH acknowledged the possibility of undue coercion. However, the statute of limitations that would have enabled the complainants to question the contracts had long since expired. Finally, the ethnolinguistic claims of the complainants of San Antonio Ojital had also failed. The protections offered to Indigenous property by the American Convention on Human Rights did not apply, because “the characteristic element of Indigenous communal property rights is that the exercise thereof corresponds to the community in its entirety.” ⁹ There was no legal category for “Indigenous private property.” The five San Antonio Ojital families who remain inside El Tajín’s boundaries live on land to which they have no legal title. ¹⁰

Conditions for dispossession and the materiality of borders

The legal reasoning for the complaint’s failure was grounded in ideas of property and recognition. In contrast to accounts of “spatial cleansing” (Herzfeld, 2006) and “fortress conservation” (Igoe, 2004: 69-102)—in which areas defined as heritage are “protected” by evicting residents and restricting land use (De Cesari and Dimova, 2019; Escallón, 2019; Meskell, 2011)—there was no apparent top-down project for dispossession. The timing of the dispossession coincided with Latin America’s broader multicultural turn (Hale, 2005; Saldívar, 2014: 100–103). In Mexico, “the focus on cultural rights, self-adscription and politics of recognition” (Saldívar, 2018: 438) would seem to offer the complainants of San Antonio Ojital support for their claim. However, as scholars like Emiko Saldívar, María Fernanda Escallón, and Charles Hale have shown, multicultural policies frequently constrain possibilities for autonomy while failing to address structural inequality. The case-specific outcomes of such reforms are, at best, paradoxical.

The case of San Antonio Ojital illustrates how long-ago liberal land reforms, multicultural recognition, and the gradual development of archaeological research worked together to enable effective land dispossession. ¹¹ Here, I follow the materiality of borders to show how archaeologists and Totonac landowners adopted and reinforced a vision of space structured by a private property regime. This vision of space became a channel for making claims on El Tajín. The results of these claims tended to be pragmatic accommodations between archaeologists and landowners. However, these pragmatic accommodations left Indigenous private property vulnerable to state action. This became clear when a late-1980s megaproject expanded El Tajín as never before, and appropriated private parcels to do so.

I begin by describing the Mexican state’s policies towards the pre-Hispanic past, and the place of contemporary Indigenous communities since the late 19th century. I then discuss territory and land tenure in Papantla, outlining the ideological and economic forces behind the development of private property. I then focus specifically on enrollment and inscription as two means by which the private property regime was made to stick, creating a channel through which state archaeologists and Indigenous landowners could make claims on El Tajín. I then analyze the conflicts that resulted from those claims, and how they led to the loss of lands at the heart of the CNDH complaint.

In her study of Chichén Itzá, Lisa Breglia suggests that a spatial genealogy—“the provenance of the archaeological site [as] a kind of genealogy” (2006: 26)—brings analytical attention to the social production of archaeological spaces together with their surrounding communities. This approach relativizes archaeology as one kind of land-use among many, while calling attention to the co-existence of archaeological sites and modern communities (see also Castañeda and Matthews, 2008). However, relativizing archaeology risks excluding the discipline from the analysis. The unfortunate irony means that the substantial concern of archaeologists—the materiality of the pre-Hispanic past—has little role to play in the analysis (see Armstrong-Fumero, 2018: 1310).

How, then, to acknowledge the social production of archaeological space with a concept of materiality not reducible to traditional archaeological concepts of artifacts and sites? Scholars in both archaeology and anthropology seem to agree on the importance of borders. Questions of delimiting archaeological sites according to material criteria are fundamental (Dunnell and Dancey, 1983: 271–274). At the same time, Mortensen (2007) and Robles García and Corbett (2018) draw attention specifically to the analytical productivity of examining the borders—both conceptual and literal—constitutive of archaeology, archaeological sites, and their contexts. From this spatial genealogy of borders, I will argue that dispossession resulted less from the explicit intention of state heritage management to protect the pre-Hispanic past—or from the unintended outcomes of well-meaning policies—than from longer-term and apparently unrelated processes like multicultural recognition, land reform, and archaeological research.

The arguments presented here draw on a total of 28 months of field research in El Tajín and San Antonio Ojital and an additional six months of archival research, focused on the Isabel T. Kelly Ethnographic Archive ¹² (ITKEA) at Southern Methodist University as well as the Archivo de la Dirección del Departamento de Monumentos Prehispánicos del INAH (ADDMP) in Mexico City. I accessed the CNDH file on San Antonio Ojital via Mexico’s Plataforma Nacional de Transparencia, a platform for the Instituto Nacional de Transparencia, Acceso a la Información y Protección de Datos Personales (INAI). The interlocutors’ names used here are pseudonyms, and translations of quotations originally in Spanish are mine.

From indigenismo to multiculturalism

Since the late 19th century, scientific racism has given way to Revolutionary indigenismo which, in turn, gave way to a current regime of recognition focused on multicultural rights. Across 19th-century Latin America, “when indigenous elements were incorporated into official visions of the nation … they were as representatives of ancient, long-vanished cultures located in the preconquest past” (Earle, 2007: 3). This dynamic is clear in Mexico, where the pre-Hispanic past has held a privileged place in nationalist imaginations. During the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz (1876–1911), the state sponsored excavations in sites like Teotihuacan and Mitla to provide evidence of Mexico’s civilized antiquity abroad; instituted legal reforms to regulate archaeological expeditions; and nationalized pre-Hispanic monuments (Bueno, 2016). The ideological elevation of the pre-Hispanic past did not entail respect for descendent communities. With the exception of elite “acceptable indigenousness” (Sumner, 2019), the Díaz regime considered contemporary Indigenous communities uncivilized, targeting them for “modernization” (through reforms like disentailment, discussed below) and open warfare (as with the Yaqui and the rebel Maya of Yucatán; Earle, 2007: 161–183).

The Mexican Revolution of 1910 ostensibly did away with the Porfirian rejection of contemporary Indigenous communities. Renewed indigenismo ostensibly valorized Indigenous cultures as an integral part of a new mestizo nationalism (Gamio, 2010). ¹³ The Revolutionary state founded institutions like the INAH, the Instituto Nacional Indigenista, and Instituto Indigenista Interamericano to support Indigenous integration along modernizing, capitalist lines. In so doing, the state reproduced a fundamentally racist logic of essential Indigenous deficiency (Brading, 1988; Saldívar, 2014: 93–95). In the 1960s and 1970s, indigenista development efforts came under increasing scrutiny from activist scholars and Indigenous communities, who emphasized the racist logic of assimilation efforts and their failures to produce improved livelihoods (Dillingham, 2021; e.g. Warman et al., 1970). Governmental control of archaeology to materialize the pre-Hispanic past—a key Indigenous contribution to national identity—remained a constant (Vázquez León, 2003).

Combined with Indigenous activism, broader hemispheric transformations like democratic openings, neoliberal economic reforms, and the end of the Cold War facilitated the development of multicultural policies towards the end of the century (Gutiérrez Chong, 2012; Yashar, 1999). Mexico officially recognizes the country’s ethnolinguistic plurality, though the state has been less accepting of demands for autonomy and the redressing of structural inequality (Saldívar, 2014: 100–103). At the same time, the nationalist-indigenista framework for INAH archaeology in Mexico remains resilient (McGuire, 2008: 140–187; Vázquez León, 2003). As the failure of the 2016 CNDH complaint suggests, however, recognition did not mean rights to territory or heritage (compare Escallón, 2019; Hale, 2011; Hooker, 2020).

From pueblo lands to private property

If Mexico’s nationalist-indigenista framework for archaeology has proven monolithic (Navarrete, 2009), questions of territory have not. The state owns archaeological monuments on the nation’s behalf, but others typically own the land on which the monuments sit. This separation results in “archaeological limbos” (González-Robles, 2020), sites administered de jure by the INAH and de facto by third parties: state and local governments, communities, non-governmental organizations, and others. The challenges and opportunities of conducting archaeological research in the collective landholdings known as ejidos (discussed below) have been an important topic (e.g. Ardren, 2002; Cohen and Solinis-Casparius, 2017; Litka, 2013). However, because “the success with which the ‘doing’ of property occurs is always and ever conditional and contingent” (Blomley, 2003: 135), historicizing tenure regimes is key to understanding how they relate to archaeology in specific times and places.

The Papantla region is ancestral territory for Indigenous Totonac communities. From the colonial period through the 1870s, the area featured “dispersed settlement, faint urbanity, labor scarcity, geographic isolation, poor communications, subsistence-oriented Totonac agriculture, a lack of internal markets, sluggish ranching, and limited long-distance commerce” (Kourí 2004, 71). The region did not attract Spanish colonists. Bishop Alfonso de la Mota y Escobar recorded only “five Spanish residents” (1985: 72) in his 1610 visit to the town of Papantla. More than a century and a half later, that number had risen to only 15 Spanish families (Villa-Señor y Sánchez, 1746: 318). For much of the colonial era, perhaps half the territory’s lands were held by pueblos de indios—a colonial-era administrative unit governed by an elected council and capable of holding land—and the other half were private estates, mostly dedicated to cattle ranching (Kourí, 2004: 76). Estate owners were typically unable, or unwilling, to enforce their property rights. In practice, Totonac subsistence farmers moved, settled, and cultivated these lands too; the end of the pueblo de indios administration after Independence in 1820 did not result in the loss of access to land (Ducey, 2004: 134). Between rugged geography, low population density, and a lack of external communications, the infamous hacienda system did not develop in Papantla. Most Totonac residents of the area practiced the swidden agriculture common to much of Mesoamerica, with notable interests in the vanilla cultivation (Kelly and Palerm, 1952).

During the 19th century, liberal reformers sought to dismantle this communal tenure regime with a process known as disentailment. ¹⁴ The best-known legal effort to do so was the 1856 promulgation of the Ley Lerdo. The law sought to take real estate out of the hands of the Catholic Church and civil corporations (including Indigenous communities) through the survey, sale, and distribution of lands that they previously controlled. The Ley Lerdo gave legal form to a classical liberal perspective that “the right [to property] was an extension of the individual’s right to life itself. If property … could be freed from corporate, monopolistic, or governmental restrictions, then individual initiative, a natural division of labor, and free exchange between individuals would flourish” (Hale, 1989: 4; Velasco Toro and García Ruiz, 2009: 1–17). The Ley Lerdo was part of a broader series of modernizing liberal innovations known as La Reforma. Elsewhere in Mexico, La Reforma provoked the ire of the Church, threatened Indigenous landholdings, and resulted in a three-year civil war (Thomson, 2018). Efforts at liberalizing land tenure in Papantla met with little success until the expansion of vanilla cultivation during the latter half of the 19^th century, which provided an economic impetus to carry out the division of communal lands (Kourí, 2004).

With the authoritarian methods characteristic of Porfirio Díaz’s dictatorship, disentailment proceeded in two stages between 1870 and 1900: division and subdivision. Initially, local resistance to the process resulted in the survey of large lots, governed as co-ownerships (condueñazgos). Condueñazgos were privately owned and composed of shareholders, and the co-ownerships’ regulation and management were internal. Papantla’s condueñazgos were meant as a compromise between communal and individual landholdings, but they did not last. Though technically private estates—and thus compliant with the Ley Lerdo—they were subject to the same pressure that led to the division of communal lands in the first place.

These condueñazgos were eventually subdivided and parceled out to shareholders over the course of the 1890s, a process met with violent resistance. A popular saying of the time held that “Papantla everywhere is a cemetery” (Salas García, 2008: 235). As Tajín resident Modesto González recalled in 1947:

[The surveyors] said that they were going to divide up the lands. But many did not agree. [In El Tajín] they did; but those from Polutla, Poza Larga, and other places did not want it. So they rebelled … People from here were very scared. They [levied] the men with the federal soldiers to fight with the rebels. The older people and the women and the children stayed. No one wanted to sleep in their houses. At night neighbors got together and went to sleep in the wilderness. ¹⁵

After disentailment, Totonac political leaders and foreign merchants, elite rural families, Indigenous smallholders, and tenant and migrant workers made up the new socioeconomic landscape (Kourí, 2004: 280). Most historical accounts of disentailment—focusing on why and how it happened—end here, around 1900 (e.g. Kourí, 2004: 3; Velasco Toro and García Ruiz, 2009: 47). Papantla’s condueñazgos had been parceled out, and their former shareholders were now individual landowners.

After the Mexican Revolution of 1910, the Constitution of 1917 codified new land reform efforts. Mexico’s land reform granted usufruct rights to agrarian communities to redress the unjust loss of land during disentailment or for reasons of economic necessity (Sanderson, 1984). These rights, and these communities, are known as ejidos. Prior to the end of the reform in 1992, fully half of Mexico’s land was dedicated to ejidos (Perramond, 2008: 357). Despite the importance of ejidos elsewhere, the communities around El Tajín and the ex-condueñazgo of Ojital y Potrero retained control of the land as individual owners.

Disentailment, enrollment, inscription

Focusing on the materiality of borders means emphasizing the durability of disentailment. Contemplating a hypothetical city, Laurent Olivier notes that “the structures that date back to ancient times, the roads and buildings and the networks of fields—have long since disappeared from the face of the earth … And yet, these works of the past still exist in boundaries, orientations, contour, and mass” (2011: 63). Looking back over this synoptic account of disentailment, this perspective asks: what material forms did disentailment take? In what ways did they persist, and with what effects? In this case, enrollment and inscription are two of the processes by which disentailment was made to stick.

The concept of enrollment (Callon, 1986) proves useful for understanding how state surveyors appropriated natural and cultural elements of the landscape and leveraged them to bring a private property regime into being. Enrollment, the process by which related roles are defined and allocated to social and material actors, allowed surveyors to bring together paths that connected communities, creeks that flowed, hills that stood tall, survey crosses, and stone markers to materialize the boundaries necessary for a private property regime. In other words, one reason for the success of disentailment was that state surveyors enrolled a diverse set of materials in the service of remaking the landscape during division and subdivision. To understand how, consider Emilio Kourí’s description of the initial condueñazgo survey process:

These demarcations basically involved walking the outskirts of the congregaciones [rural towns] or rancherías in question, defining in writing their boundary lines by reference to a series of visual landmarks, and placing wooden crosses at selected spots to mark the corners of the new estates. Whenever possible, the borders were made to coincide with established roads and footpaths or with natural features of the landscape, such as rivers, streams, big trees, and marshes. (Kouri 2004: 145)

In February 1876, surveyors enrolled a series of landscape features to make El Tajín a part of Lot 19, the condueñazgo of Ojital y Potrero (see Figure 1).OPEN IN VIEWER

State surveyors used survey crosses to enroll diverse elements to mark boundaries. Surveyors appropriated the pedestrian trail (camino real) that linked Papantla to the neighboring town of Coatzintla to the west to form the northern boundary. Absent a suitable northwestern boundary, surveyors marked a straight line from the Coatzintla camino real to Cerro Laguna, which was also enrolled as the endpoint for the southwestern boundary. That straight line intersected Tlahuanapa Creek, which became the southern boundary. Snaking north, Tlahuanapa Creek met another camino real (likely the one that linked Papantla with the town of Espinal to the south) that became the southeastern boundary. The easternmost boundary of Ojital y Potrero was the western boundary of the city of Papantla.

In other words, the lote grande survey enrolled two caminos reales, Tlahuanapa Creek, and the Cerro Laguna, transforming them from walking paths, a popular fishing spot, and a notable hill, respectively, into the boundaries of the condueñazgo of Ojital y Potrero. The disentailment process thus enrolled residents in boundary maintenance. Each time someone took a camino real from El Tajín to Papantla, or from Papantla to Coatzintla via Escolin, or participated in the regular communal labor that cleared the same, they helped to maintain the camino—and, in so doing, the boundaries of the new tract of land. This process was effective: a half-century later, “the external boundaries of Ojital y Potrero [were] definitive and well known” (Kelly and Palerm, 1952: 55).

The 1896 subdivision of Ojital y Potrero further naturalized these boundaries. Surveyors used them as a reference while transforming the legal status of the tract from a condueñazgo to a set of 205 private parcels and two town centers. Modesto González’s “little signs with numbers on the sides of the camino,” ¹⁶ which had aided in transforming topography into property, did not last long in the semi-evergreen tropical rainforest of Papantla (compare Blomley, 2007). Naturalizing the material dimensions of disentailment—and the private property regime that they helped to bring about—required another kind of intervention: inscription (Latour, 1986, 1999: 306–307).

Inscription materialized the private property regime in cadastral maps and property titles alike. These circulated between individual landholders and governments at all levels, helping the new system of land tenure persist. To do so, inscription put the enrolled landscape features into paper form. As Raymond Craib has highlighted, the process of surveying communally held lands “promised to distill a whole series of opaque, illegible, and contextual practices into a simple (and literal) grid of state comprehension, in the process further facilitating capitalist development” (2004: 98; see Li, 2014). This becomes especially clear in the cadastral maps resulting from subdivision. In the case of Lot 19, Ojital y Potrero, subdivision reproduced the landscape as a set of 205 individually owned parcels of 31 hectares apiece (see Figure 2). By the time surveyors produced this map, it seems to have been unnecessary to inscribe the same landscape features that had marked the condueñazgo. Perhaps the borders were well-known enough that including the Cerro Laguna or marking the camino real to Coatzintla as such was no longer necessary.OPEN IN VIEWER

Each of these parcels had a corresponding title, a necessary reference for future land transactions. During a 2017 interview in the community of Zapotal Santa Cruz (also part of Ojital y Potrero), an interlocutor showed me a two-page copy of such an historic land title. Dated January of 1896, the document consists mostly of printed, boilerplate text under a heading that locates the property in the nested political geography of state-municipality-lot-parcel. The title emphasizes the land’s relationship with the state’s private property regime, rather than anything specific to the territory (Craib, 2004: 119).

The headings thus suggest commensurability. Of specific interest are the spaces left to be filled by the notary’s hand, which “contain within themselves all the terms of analysis one would need to understand or complete them” (Riles, 2006: 20). For this title, the terms of analysis all refer to the private property regime: the lot number, its name, the number of shareholders, the name of the lot’s shareholder and heir, the parcel number, its measurements, and its value. Handwritten text is dedicated to describing parcel boundaries in relation to lot number and owner. In combining standard, typewritten text and variable, handwritten entries made according to specific form entries, the state sought to inscribe the private property regime into being and facilitate control at a distance (Porter, 1995: 22).

The plan included in the title further suggests commensurability. A simple rectilinear figure emphasizes clear and mutually exclusive boundaries relative to other parcels (identified only by number in the figure, and owner, in the text). Insofar as the parcel can be abstracted from the surrounding landscape, it can also be purchased, sold, and exchanged accordingly (Blomley, 2003: 132). Empty of topography, vegetation, or dwellings, this kind of inscription sought to homogenize territory characterized by an uneven distribution of semi-evergreen tropical rainforest; Totonac-speaking subsistence cultivators living in a dispersed patrilocal settlement pattern; low, rolling hills; rivers and creeks; and standing pre-Hispanic architecture.

Like the making of property, the process of disentailment was a contingent one (Blomley, 2003; Craib, 2004; Kourí, 2004). In Ojital y Potrero, for instance, the same kinds of trails that proved useful for condueñazgo boundaries could also be enrolled in the service of subdivision. Many of the local trails that crossed Ojital y Potrero became the boundaries for individual parcels. The plan cited above, for instance, includes a reference to the “camino de Zapotal” as the southern boundary for the parcel. Elsewhere, the landscape pushed back. The route to the archaeological site of El Tajín, for example, crossed a steep local hill known as Trakgátlokg. Parcel boundaries do not neatly conform to this trail, and neither do the material remains of the pre-Hispanic past—as I will discuss shortly.

For all the contingency of the project, the logic of private property seems to have made sense in El Tajín. Modesto González recalled El Tajín supporting the division of communal landholdings. ¹⁷ Resident Santiago Simbrón agreed, citing his father and telling Ángel Palerm that “those from here were on the side of Papantla, on the side of the authorities, and in favor of the division.” ¹⁸ Perhaps the residents of late-19th century El Tajín saw private property as the best way to maintain lands and livelihoods. Ramón Ramírez Melgarejo suggests that, for 19th-century Totonacs, “having a field to cultivate [milpa] and forming part of a lineage defined their rootedness or belonging to the community” (2002: 89). For his part, Domingo García García notes that Totonac communities composed of private properties enabled residents to maintain the traditional dispersed settlement pattern, living in extended family groups near their fields rather than in compact settlements. ¹⁹ These possibilities are not mutually exclusive with the richness of Totonac place-thought (see Watts, 2013) on the region’s landscapes (Guadarrama, 1996; Lammel, 1993).

In central Ojital y Potrero, these techniques of enrollment and inscription came up against the materiality of the pre-Hispanic past and another Porfirian imperative: the nationalization, investigation, and guarding of the nation’s pre-Hispanic past (Bueno, 2016: 80–88). The private property regime created by disentailment, instantiated through enrollment and inscription and epitomized in the features of the land title discussed above, divided the landscape into evenly sized, contiguous, individually owned, mutually exclusive, and commensurable parcels. The boundaries of pre-Hispanic El Tajín did not conform to the grid. More importantly, the first actors to evaluate the boundaries of the polity were not archaeologists but surveyors working on subdividing the condueñazgo of Ojital y Potrero. The apprehension of El Tajín as a bounded site (rather than an isolated monument) went hand-in-hand with the emergence of private property.

Conflict and accommodation in El Tajín

The conception of landscape that I outline above became a channel for archaeologists and landowners to make claims on El Tajín—without changing the conception of land as property. Archaeologists occasionally requested expropriation and landowners sometimes offered to sell, but the former rarely sought to bring the INAH’s full legal authority to bear, and the latter did not attempt to leverage pre-disentailment claims to communal lands (or, for that matter, solicit an ejido). ²⁰ Rather, the parties tended to reach pragmatic accommodations in the idiom of private property, apparently agreeing on the legitimacy of public pyramids and private parcels. These accommodations—case-by-case compromises that allowed the labor of landowners and archaeologists to continue—are certainly not unique to El Tajín (Armstrong-Fumero, 2018: 1304–1305). But, in this case, Indigenous private property was vulnerable to state action in ways that the archaeological monuments, legally public property since 1897, were not.

The first boundaries of the site came from surveyors grappling with questions of land tenure rather than archaeologists mapping pre-Hispanic material culture. During the 1896 subdivision of Lot 19, Ojital y Potrero, surveyor Ignacio Muñoz left “a hectare in the place that the monument of El Taxín occupies” (Brizuela Abasalón, 2011: 5) in parcel 75. This delimitation, though rarely referenced in site historiography, was salient to residents (Holley-Kline, 2015). For instance, in 1904, guard Leopoldo Armengual reported to Inspector of Monuments Leopoldo Batres that, while clearing the Pyramid of the Niches, landowner Francisco García had approached the guard and told him that he could only clear what belonged to the Pyramid, and to leave any other trees alone. ²¹ Three decades later, the monumental reconstruction efforts of Agustín García Vega (1939) had expanded the site—not without conflict and compromise (Holley-Kline, 2019: 83–85; Salas Landa, 2018: 43–50). By 1937, a map drawn by guard Erasmo Rodríguez depicted parcels 35, 50–52, and 75–76 as part of the site. ²² However, only parcel 75 had “a part taken by the government, for the issue of the pyramid” ²³ in 1947. Elsewhere on parcel 75, residents of parcels 73 and 76 planted their fields without issue. The boundaries of the archaeological site and parcel were not coterminous, but this was not a problem. It seems that archaeologists and landowners came to a pragmatic accommodation that allowed excavation and planting alike to continue.

Beginning in the 1950s, infrastructural improvement, oil exploration, and cattle ranching increased pressures on land (Velázquez Hernández, 1995). The growth of landholding families, the expansion of the archaeological site through excavation, and the development of tourism infrastructure made land more necessary than ever (Holley-Kline, 2022: 199–202). Federal and state governments redoubled efforts to define the site’s boundaries for management purposes. In 1964, the INAH’s Departamento de Monumentos Prehispánicos commissioned Carlos López Mata for a survey of the site. His goal was to bring the archaeological site and the parcels on which it sat into the same frame of reference: “to regularize the legal situation, the boundary survey will be based on the smallest area that contains the largest possible number of archaeological monuments located to date.” ²⁴

Taken together, these maps suggest that the site’s boundaries came to conform more specifically to the boundaries of Ojital y Potrero’s parcels. During the 1920s, it was still possible to consider the Pyramid of the Niches an isolated construction, and the one-hectare boundary sufficient. This was much less the case by the late 1960s (e.g. García Payón, 1954). Nevertheless, the successive boundary surveys do not demonstrate a simple expansion of the site’s area. For example, archaeological surveys conducted in the 1930s by García Vega and Erasmo Rodríguez resulted in irregular polygons, expanding into neighboring parcels; López Mata’s survey of 1964 conforms to the already-established parcels and fractions (see Figure 3). In other words, the long-term effects of disentailment are visible not just in the initial delimitation of the site, but in how its borders developed over the course of the 20th century.OPEN IN VIEWER

Matching site and parcel boundaries did not eliminate conflict. Longtime site archaeologist José García Payón recorded one such example in a 1973 letter:

Since a year ago, perhaps because we have enlarged our field of action in the Zona Arqueológica of El Tajín … or perhaps because the children of the families of Mariano Juárez and Agapito Juárez have grown; owners of the lots 51 and 52 that include all of Tajín Chico, and the lot 75 that includes the Pyramid of the Niches and is property of Mrs. Morales, etc. with the rest of the property owners, not a week passes that we do not have arguments and difficulties with them for the question of planting.

In this letter, García Payón deploys the idioms of lots and parcels, charting his conception of the site not across a generic “landscape,” and not across the spatial distribution of pre-Hispanic structures more common in archaeological discourse. In his role as a heritage manager, he had to contend with—and draw on—a land tenure regime structured by contiguous, mutually exclusive, and individually owned plots of land on which there happened to be archaeological structures. The property owners, too, used this conception of space to attempt to stop what they understood as archaeologists’ intrusions on the land for which they had legitimate title, and for which they paid taxes. These outcomes were a long-term consequence of disentailment: the process that created the channel by which these conflicts could be settled.

The conception of land shared by both parties was artificial, insofar as disentailment represented a project of state simplification (Scott, 1998). Here, the extent to which this conception of landscape is a channel for—rather than the object of—conflict is notable. García Payón does not specifically contest the legality or justness of private land ownership in the archaeological site; he critiques land use. The Totonac landowners do not contest the fact of private property, or refer to the pre-disentailment system of communal land tenure; they emphasize the legality of their ownership and the fact that they pay taxes. This conflict illustrates how the historically contingent understanding of land brought about by disentailment had become naturalized over the course of the century.

By the beginning of Proyecto Tajín in 1983, authorities were aware of the problem of land tenure. While considering that this problem was “a very important aspect for the future of the site,” project co-directors Juergen Brueggemann and Alfonso Medellín Zenil nevertheless describe land tenure as “at the margins of the project” and “a question between the INAH’s legal office and the State of Veracruz and not the responsibility of the professionals that work on the archaeological project.” ²⁶ With this perspective, why would landowners expect anything less than the kinds of pragmatic accommodations that had occurred for the preceding half-century? The result, however, demonstrated the extent to which pragmatic accommodations ultimately depended on the conception of land as property, rendering it vulnerable to dispossession.

A 2017 interview with the matriarch of one dispossessed family illustrated the transition between pragmatic accommodation and outright dispossession. Government officials, she charged, had threatened her family. If they would not sell their land, the army would come and drive them off. María recalled her husband’s response: “look, we don’t want to sell our land, because it’s [private] property and our father gave us ours, how could we sell it?” The family was pessimistic about how the government might respond: “for better or for worse, we’re going to take [the land], because it has [archaeological] stones.” Still, María and her family did not want to sell, especially given the low prices her neighbors were being offered. They continued to resist: “how are we going to give our land away? We have the title and everything.” But, one day, Proyecto Tajín workers arrived. “They cut down all the monte, everything over there, they macheted it, the vanilla plants, the vanilla vines, they cut it all down and we yelled at them: ‘stop working, don’t do this, because [the land] isn’t sold’ and from there it all went bad.” María was not the only one to report the loss of orange, mango, avocado, cedar, banana, and palm trees. ²⁷ In this case, the “accommodation” reached by Proyecto Tajín officials and San Antonio Ojital families resulted in the loss of land titles. Some families accepted the payments and moved elsewhere. Others still struggle to make a living with a combination of small-scale subsistence agriculture—running the risk of being accused of damaging the archaeological site—and sales to tourists (see Salas Landa, 2018: 63–70).

Conclusion

A spatial genealogy focusing on the materiality of borders demonstrates that enrollment and inscription helped establish a private property regime, whose vision of space became a channel for contesting the proper use of El Tajín. This channel allowed for conflicts to be settled with pragmatic accommodations between archaeologists and landowners. But when a state-run megaproject came in, these accommodations resulted in effective dispossession for residents of San Antonio Ojital. Multicultural recognition of Indigenous property rights did not extent to the Totonac landowners of San Antonio Ojital, who had previously been able to leverage a private property regime to their own ends.

Multicultural recognition, the long-running effects of disentailment, and the expansion of archaeological research in El Tajín left the residents of San Antonio Ojital in an impossible situation. The recognition of rights to communal land elsewhere may have been fraught with unintended consequences (Escallón, 2019; Hale, 2005: 14–16), but there was no recognition whatsoever for Indigenous private property in this case. In the hands of the State Government of Veracruz, the land seems unlikely to be sold. Even if local usufruct continues, the INAH’s authority over El Tajín’s material culture and architecture means that land use will ultimately be subject to local INAH officials.

Residents were not wrong to attribute proximate responsibility for dispossession to Proyecto Tajín. Nevertheless, I do not intend to single the institution out for criticism. The processes I have outlined here date back to before the founding of the INAH, and lie beyond the ordinary scope of heritage management. A final point worth highlighting concerns how dispossession can occur as a less-then-intended consequence—not just of well-meaning policies but of archaeologists carrying out their professional responsibilities in a particular political and historical context. Critiquing top-down projects of fortress conservation remains vital, as does further explanation of the discipline’s ties to extractivist projects, past and present. However, careful, contextual examinations of how archaeology works on the ground (Meskell, 2005: 84) are necessary not just to understand but to preempt disciplinary responsibility for land dispossession and other forms of colonial violence.