Empire, Ecological Imaginaries, and the Environmental Transformation of Northern Mexico’s Forests

• In Event: Ecological Imaginaries and the Making of Trans-regional Landscapes

Abstract

My paper analyzes how capitalist extraction, religious fundamentalism, and settler colonial processes underpinned the transformation of northern Mexico’s forests from the 1880s to 1915. The pine-oak forests of northern Chihuahua and Sonora linked seemingly isolated communities of non-Mexicans, Native peoples, and Mexican mestizo smallholders across the rugged Sierra Madre mountain range. Granted large land concessions and tax exemptions by Porfirio Diaz’s administration, enterprising Anglo Americans such as William Cornell Greene and Mormon colonists incorporated extensive timber extraction and control over the Sierra Madre forests into their visions of industrial and religious empire. Woodlands were sometimes regions of refuge for Indigenous peoples and smallholders, but they increasingly became spaces of encounter and conflict as settlers and lumber companies entered the Sierra Madre. Tracing the origins and overlapping geographies of foreign enterprises in the Sierra Madre forests, with a focus on Mormon colonies and Greene’s Sierra Madre Land and Lumber Company, this paper explores how foreigners arriving from the U.S. West brought their understandings of the natural environment to northern Mexico and how those views transformed the landscape. Using an environmental justice framework, I also consider Indigenous and mestizo smallholders and workers as key environmental stakeholders, uncovering how they engaged with and resisted environmental change and new resource management regimes.
Forests and wood were essential and overlooked factors in consolidating wealth and accelerating natural resource extraction in northern Mexico before the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920). Understanding the Sierra Madre forests as a contact zone for disparate communities and ecological imaginaries underscores the contingent and contested nature of northern Mexico’s nineteenth-century extractive landscapes. These clashing visions of community and environment set the stage for social justice and resource nationalization rhetoric that emerged during the revolution when forestry and usufruct rights were incorporated into broader land reform initiatives.

Author

• Sarah Sears, University of California, Berkeley