The 1930 Agrarian Census in Mexico: Agronomists, Middle Politics, and the Negotiation of Data Collection
2007; Duke University Press; Volume: 87; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1215/00182168-2007-004
ISSN1527-1900
Autores Tópico(s)Politics and Society in Latin America
ResumoOn May 15, 1930, nearly a decade after the end of the armed phase of the Mexican Revolution, Mexico's Department of National Statistics carried out the country's first agrarian census. While the revolutionary regime had undertaken a population census in 1921, the country's agricultural realities remained mysteries to Mexico City policymakers long after the inception of an agrarian reform program that lay at the heart of reconstruction in Mexico.2 This article analyzes the 1930 agrarian census to illuminate the role of data collection and data collectors in the Mexican Revolution.Numbers are not neutral, nor are they without political significance. The Soviet economist Nikolai Kondratiev discovered this fact when his statistical study of the Communist economy, detailing the devastation of the 1932 – 33 famine, resulted in his execution.3 In an analysis of state-society relations in mid-twentieth-century Transkei, South Africa, Sean Redding examined colonial government practices such as tax collection. In order to collect taxes, a census was carried out, and it provided colonialists with great symbolic power: "Knowing how many wives or cattle a person had was essential to doing him harm, and knowing a man's name made him easier to kill through magic."4 The "magic" associated with data collection has been analyzed the world over, in multiple historical and cultural settings.5Such studies have focused primarily upon the role of statistics and censuses in extending modern states' domination over their populations. Dipesh Chakrabarty argues that "the systematic collection of statistics in detail and in specific categories for the purpose of ruling seems to be intimately tied to modern ideas of government."6 Edward Higgs adds that data collection has allowed the "modern state to intervene at a minute level in the daily lives of citizens."7 This intervention has served the purposes of domination. Numerous scholars have traced the importance of statistics in the process of nation building, of creating "unitary national identities" through the elaboration of census categories.8 Statistics help advance capitalist relations of production in general, as well as Western rule and forms of governance over colonized states.9 Talal Asad, among others, argues that it is through the use and acceptance of statistical measures that the Western world has had its greatest impact on non-Western cultures.10Not all research on data collection focuses on states' successful extension of dominance and exploitation over the governed. Michel Foucault views statistics as essential tools in the state's capacity to serve as the "good shepherd" and to promote citizens' well-being.11 Edward Higgs notes how data collection stems from states' "duty to introduce change that will create a better society."12 Thus, statistics have been linked historically to the emergence, particularly in nineteenth-century Europe, of social-reform policies that improve the lives of citizens. In England, data collection "became the principal means of investigating and discussing the social question," such as the poverty that seemed to accompany industrialization, and led to a flurry of reform in the 1830s and 1840s.13 In Napoleonic France, public health policies took shape following the publication of incontrovertible statistical studies of sickness.14 In the period of Bismarckian unification and industrialization in Germany, the rise of centralized statistics offices under the leadership of Ernst Engel led to worker-protection legislation, including disability and retirement benefits.15 And since the nineteenth century, census operations have provided a framework for citizens to pressure public officials to improve living standards, especially in the United States. By debating the categories used and the policies to be pursued in censuses' aftermath, citizens around the world have used statistics to "exercise and uphold their rights."16The 1930 agrarian census in Mexico took place at a time of revolutionary crossroads with respect to land-distribution policies. Five million hectares of land had already been distributed to half a million recipients in the form of ejidos (redistributed communal plots). Nevertheless, former president Plutarco Elías Calles (who continued to exercise power behind the scenes during the administrations of his handpicked successors) publicly attacked agrarianism and its results.17 Arguing that ejido productivity was paltry in comparison to that of private property, Calles instructed president Pascual Ortiz Rubio to halt redistribution in 1930. Would the agrarian program be reversed, as Calles wished? Or would land distribution continue or even expand in the years ahead? The answers to these questions emerged during the 1934 – 40 presidency of Lázaro Cárdenas. By 1940, one-half of Mexico's cultivated lands had been distributed to poor campesinos.18In order to explain the Cárdenas-led return to redistribution, and Mexico's revolutionary process more generally, scholars have focused on the relations between political elites and popular groups. Earlier populist and revisionist historians debated the continuities and changes associated with Cardenista reforms, but they agreed that revolutionary politics in Mexico were best understood as a collision between the competing interests of state and society.19 More recently, the new cultural historians — who have sought to incorporate notions of continuity and change into a more complete analysis of Mexico's hegemonic revolutionary process — continue to portray political outcomes such as agrarian reform as negotiated settlements between the state and popular groups.20 Most historians seem to agree, in fact, that Cárdenas's return to radicalism resulted from either campesinos pressuring political elites to expand land distribution, or political elites seeking to utilize land reform to create a new kind of mass politics in Mexico.21 But are we to believe that the policies forged in the 1920s and 1930s resulted from the relations between political elites and popular groups alone?Between the "high politics" of the powerful and the "low politics" of campesinos and workers lay a level of "middle politics": a realm occupied by the revolutionary middle class, the professionals who designed the policies, drafted the decrees, and implemented the laws attributed to their superiors. Presumed to be dependent on, and following direction from, the political elite, the experiences of these bureaucrats have been largely ignored. Peter Cleaves argues that although lawyers and doctors achieved some level of independence from the revolutionary state, most professionals (engineers and agronomists in particular) relied entirely upon public employment. Such a dependence upon state jobs, it is assumed, meant an equal dependence upon those providing the jobs, whose bidding the bureaucrats carried out unswervingly.22 Moreover, scholars commonly assume that professionals sought personal gain at all costs. Peter Smith's classic book on political recruitment in reconstruction Mexico firmly established this image of revolutionary professionals as job-seeking, favor-currying bureaucrats who did little more than occupy state posts.23Recently, scholars have begun to uncover the role of the professional classes in the Mexican Revolution. Mary Kay Vaughan, Engracia Loyo, Guillermo Palacios, and Elsie Rockwell have pioneered the study of teachers as crucial intermediaries on the front lines of the state's cultural project of national reconstruction.24 Alexander Dawson details the contributions of anthropologists and other social scientists to the ideological foundations of revolutionary state hegemony.25 Pablo Piccato and Robert Buffington have examined the world of crime, criminality, and criminologists in revolutionary Mexico.26 Others have studied professionals and policymakers such as public health officials, medical doctors, conservationists, and journalists, among others.27 While excellent, such isolated studies tend to treat middle-class ideas and actions as extensions of a more coordinated hegemonic state project, whose interests the professionals served as the "intellectuals" or "spokespersons."28 We have yet to incorporate middle-class interests more systematically into an already-rich historiography of the Mexican Revolution.This article analyzes the activities of agronomists, the agricultural experts who formulated and implemented agrarian and agricultural policy in the 1920s and 1930s.29 Having entered the National School of Agriculture (ENA) as the adolescent sons of the Porfirian middle class prior to the outbreak of the revolution, the young agronomists helped create a broad array of bureaucracies, including the Extension Service, the National Irrigation Commission, the Federal Office for National Defense (to fight pests and blights), local and national agrarian commissions (to redistribute land), the National Bank of Agricultural Credit, agricultural schools, ejido banks, and the Department of National Statistics, the office charged with carrying out the 1930 agrarian census. Through these offices, the agronomists attempted to reconcile the competing goals of politicians and campesinos. On the one hand, they aimed to expand land distribution and respond to the demands of rural Mexicans. On the other hand, they struggled to increase agricultural production and satisfy political elites' desires to feed a nation in the wake of a destructive civil war. The effort to reconcile redistribution with expanded production through negotiation with political elites and campesinos comprises what I refer to as the agronomists' "middle-politics" project.More specifically, this article analyzes the middle politics of data collection and the 1930 agrarian census in Mexico. By the 1920s, state-sanctioned statistics collection in Mexico remained in its early stages. Prerevolutionary governments had collected statistics on a haphazard basis, and it was not until the Mexican Revolution that the federal government dedicated extensive resources to the collection of data for policymaking purposes (see table 1). Statistics collection and the 1930 agrarian census were arenas filled with negotiation. The agronomists not only lobbied political elites to devote resources to data collection in the 1920s but also used the 1930 agrarian census results to pressure for expanded land distribution. They also negotiated with rural Mexicans, utilizing statistics and their collection to convince campesinos to provide state officials with accurate data that could be used to expand agricultural production.Analysis of the middle politics of the 1930 agrarian census advances our understanding of the role of data collection and data collectors in the Mexican Revolution. First, the agronomists' negotiations with campesinos confirm that statistics can be used to extend states' domination over subjects. As servants of the Mexican state's hegemonic revolutionary project, the agronomists hoped to use census data and its collection to expand agricultural production. Convincing campesinos to do so, however, was no simple task. In fact, merely obtaining the accurate details of farmers' production habits was difficult enough. Because many Mexicans questioned the state's motives for collecting statistics, the agronomists were forced to negotiate campesino participation through a discourse that stressed their rights and duties as Mexican citizens. Under certain circumstances, modern states have used the data-collection process itself, and not just the statistics it produced, to help construct national identities and dominate subjects.Second, an analysis of the agronomists' negotiations with political elites over the 1930 census also confirms that statistics and their collection can be used to improve citizens' lives. In the early 1930s, the agronomists cited census results to demand an expansion of redistribution through agrarian reform. Thus, it is incomplete to view the Cárdenas-led 1934 – 40 revival of redistribution as the result of negotiation between political elites and popular groups alone. Agronomists and other professional groups, with interests of their own, served as essential negotiators of revolutionary policy. In this case, the agronomists helped place radical agrarianism back on the agenda of political elites prior to the presidency of Lázaro Cárdenas.State-sanctioned data collection did not begin with the revolution; all of Mexico's centralizing governments, dating back to the Aztec Empire, have collected numbers.30 Statistics were of interest to Spanish colonial governments, especially that of the eighteenth-century modernizers, the Bourbons. In 1741, King Felipe V ordered the mass collection of statistics to obtain "certain knowledge" of the imperial territories, including Mexico.31 Data collection became an even greater priority for nineteenth-century national governments in the wake of independence. In 1833, President Valentín Gómez Farías established the National Institute of Geography and Statistics, a society of experts formed to promote the collection of statistics for national purposes. Later renamed the Mexican Society of Geography and Statistics (SMGE), this institute became what one observer later called "the alma mater of official statistics [collection] in Mexico."32For nineteenth-century Mexican officials, statistics collection served a number of purposes, particularly that of nation building.33 In the aftermath of independence, Mexican states and political elites confronted the crucial question of national viability, and local and federal governments raced to compile data of their territories.34 For José María Gutiérrez, one of the SMGE's founding members, statistics held "extreme importance" for the "prosperity and good governance of the Nation." More than material wealth, however, early nineteenth-century statistics collection focused on the ability to imagine a unified, viable nation. For Mexico's early statesmen, according to Leticia Mayer Celis, statistics' primary role revolved around "the formation of the national imaginary." Statistics were "linked," then, "with the desires and illusions of the forgers of a new nation."35The government of Porfirio Díaz collected statistics not just to imagine, but to help create, the Mexican nation. According to Raymond Craib, statistics were essential for nineteenth-century Mexican states because "with the capacity to measure and compare came the capacity to plan, modify, and transform economies, spaces, and populations."36 Two Porfirian institutions in particular collected statistics to help policymakers create the material basis for national strength. In 1879, the Geographic-Exploration Commission was founded on the belief that statistics were essential for "the future of the Republic."37 More importantly, the Ministry of Development's General Office of Statistics — founded in 1882 and the first federal bureaucracy charged with collecting statistics for policymaking purposes — sought to marshal the power of statistics for the cause of national economic development. Of particular interest were statistics regarding agricultural production. In an agrarian nation, sound policy required precise data on the distributions and amounts of agricultural harvests.38The Mexican Revolution, building upon Porfirian precedents, transformed the role of statistics and their collection in Mexico. In the early 1920s, recent graduates of the National School of Agriculture (ENA) targeted the state's limited data-collection capabilities as a principal obstacle to reconstruction and demanded the centralization of federal statistics services. Ramón Corral Soto laid out a long list of the data needed to achieve ample agricultural production: population, climate, industry, minimum subsistence requirements, water resources, and communications, just to name a few.39 Mario Hoyo seconded his ENA colleague, arguing that successful economic reconstruction depended upon the systematic collection of data in numerous realms; agriculture, livestock, and industry topped his list of topics to investigate.40 Of all the agronomists, Juan de Dios Bojórquez made the most determined call for data collection, which became his consuming interest in midlife.41 Bojórquez argued that the state could not continue "to feel [its] way," deceived by the "suppositions or utopias of [its] economists."42 He called for the creation of local statistics offices that would employ extension agents and feed their data to a central office. The Álvaro Obregón administration responded to agronomists' complaints by founding the Department of National Statistics (DEN), the first autonomous federal office devoted to collecting statistics for the Mexican state.43One of the DEN's chief goals was to learn more about rural Mexico and rural Mexicans. Jane Caplan and John Torpey have argued that modern information gathering has served the role of making populations "visible to the state" for the first time.44 In Mexico, such visibility was clearly lacking after the civil war. Extension agent Jesús Rulfo noted in 1922 how little the agronomists really knew about Mexico. "Although it appears to be a lie," he said, "our country is currently unknown; there are regions that remain completely forgotten, due either to their distance or to communications difficulties."45 In 1929, DEN director Bojórquez agreed, arguing that "Mexicans should get to know Mexico better."46 Data collection, then, set in motion an "encounter" between state and citizens, especially between urban and rural worlds.The agronomists marveled at the little-known countryside. During the civil war, the young agriculture students journeyed throughout Mexico to initiate the agrarian reform process among the revolutionary troops, work they referred to as "adventures" into an unknown world.47 Although the young agents donned rural clothing, they were constantly challenged among the Zapatistas of Morelos as outsiders or "catrines."48 Even 15 years later, in the same state, National Irrigation Commission employee René Becerra still viewed himself as a "traveler" in a strange land. On his trip south to the city of Cuautla, Becerra saw wondrous plantations of rice and sugarcane that "appeared to transport us," he wrote, "to exotic places of the Far East."49As with the sights of rural Mexico, so too did the people become the objects of agronomists' attention. The agricultural experts sought to convince rural Mexicans of the state's need to collect statistics. Bojórquez lamented rural Mexicans' lack of cooperation. "The propaganda of statistics has been constant," he said, and "in spite of the efforts realized, we have to continue making the public see the nobility of our labor, to uproot old prejudices and inspire plain confidence among those who provide the data we need."50 Most worrisome was rural Mexicans' propensity to lie to data collectors. Andrés Escalante Enríquez found campesinos skeptical of government intentions and discovered his statistics were "totally plagued by falsehoods."51 The people lied, the agronomists believed, because of "the currently deep-rooted idea that statistics collection aimed to find out what each person possessed in order to determine his corresponding taxes."52 Mexicans would have to be convinced to play their part.Debates raged among agronomists in the 1920s over the best methods of persuasion. Some posted materials in public places to raise awareness of the need for statistics. Some extension agents and rural teachers offered educational sessions. Marco Antonio Durán, however, remained unconvinced. "The campesino," he wrote, "cannot pay attention for long, and the many ideas presented in a lecture go by rapidly and leave no trace in his mind." Durán preferred a multifaceted approach, with lots of one-to-one contact. Propaganda had to be "intense and continuous" if agronomists hoped to transform rural Mexicans' view of statistics and their obligation to provide them. Like water seeping into a rock, Durán hoped that the need for statistics could permeate the minds of campesinos.53Although it encountered resistance, the DEN nevertheless began the process of representing rural realities. In his work on twentieth-century development projects, James Scott argues that a principal feature of modern states is their need to simplify diverse and confusing rural realities into more meaningful and manageable terms.54 According to this view, states construct "maps of legibility" — such as land surveys and population censuses — to "represent" rural realities in terms that are understandable to the state. In Mexico in the 1920s, the DEN's chief obstacle remained the constantly changing place names of streets, towns, and counties. Thus, one of the first requirements of data collection was the simple act of fixing place names, permanently identifying them so that they might be "counted." Juan Ballesteros, director of the 1930 census, called it a "titanic labor" that finally resulted in a map of Mexico, the first of its kind to list every state and municipality.55 A state like Morelos, with its 27 stable municipalities, was simple. But in Oaxaca, geography and politics conspired to keep municipal names and boundaries inconstant and made completion of an accurate map of usable scale nearly impossible.56 In 1929, Bojórquez reported that the DEN had confirmed the existence of over 30,000 local communities throughout Mexico. Months before the 1930 census, the DEN still had over 40,000 more to confirm.57 Simply labeling the map was daunting, yet essential, work.58The work of representation included dividing Mexico into economic regions for policymaking purposes. Agronomists saw little utility in analyzing agricultural activity according to state lines, when economic ties proved more binding.59 As early as 1921, Gonzalo Robles noted the urgent need to "divide the country, in a tentative fashion, into agricultural zones."60 By 1924, agronomists had demarcated 36 "regions of similar climate," each one the responsibility of an extension agent.61 Another DEN study divided the republic into five economic zones: north, gulf, Pacific-north, Pacific-south, and center.62 Bojórquez claimed that one study, entitled Sonora, Sinaloa y Nayarit, was at the forefront of the DEN's attempts to write the "economic geography of Mexico." He explained: "The object of this kind of work . . . is to point out the zones . . . of equal economic influence in the country, because what interests us most is no longer political geography, but rather . . . the economic aspects of the regions of the Republic that due to their geographic situations and natural boundaries have a similar way of life."63Sonora, Sinaloa y Nayarit, a study describing the natural resources and economic activity in three Pacific coast states with similar climates, began the process, then, of dividing Mexico by economic and climactic zones rather than according to arbitrary political lines.64DEN data collectors sought not just to represent rural realities but to transform them as well. Anthropologist Talal Asad suggests that while modern statistics offer an essential and plausible method for comparing distinct cultural experiences, the real utility of statistics lies in their ability to transform.In other words, statistics are collected for specific purposes: comprehension and representation certainly, but regulation and transformation as well.66 DEN director Bojórquez said it best in 1929: "If for other countries . . . more advanced than ours, a . . . census is only a strange act in their lives, an extraordinary event whose results serve them . . . as a faraway guide, for Mexico it will be the base, the point of departure for all efforts to improve the condition" of the country and its citizens.67The transformation that statistics were hoped to enable started with developing national plans to expand agricultural production. The census law of 1929 suggested that censuses were "of social utility" and could augment "social well-being" by "demonstrating numerical results that [will] serve as a base to control and organize the production, distribution, and consumption of national resources." An internal DEN document reiterated the point: "The most important function of the census consists in giving the federal and [state] governments the bases to form a program of national organization and reconstruction, and especially to stimulate agriculture and industry."68 The agronomists worked to incorporate local production into national reconstruction plans. Raúl Aguirre Benavides, an extension agent in the Laguna cotton district, received instructions in 1929 "to obtain conclusions that permit the formation of a development program for the [Laguna] aimed primarily at the adjustment of production in relation to the national economy."69 Another report noted how DEN's Sonora, Sinaloa y Nayarit study was written "with the objective of incorporating" production in the three states "truly and positively into the rest of the Republic."70Expanding national production meant transforming rural Mexicans. In the 1920s, dozens of extension agents traveled throughout Mexico to modernize campesinos' farming methods and increase harvests. Their efforts began with collecting "statistical data concerning the agricultural, economic, and social conditions," including information regarding climates and soils to determine which crops were best suited to each region. Extension agents then disseminated their findings to local farmers by various means. Ministry of Agriculture officials suggested "crop experiments, presentations, demonstrations, [and] cinema exhibitions," but the methods remained "at the discretion of the regional agronomist who chooses the most suitable means according to the intellectual level and mentality of the farmers" of his region.71Most often, the agronomists resorted to the language of nationalism and citizenship to convince campesinos to provide data and expand production. Since the Wars of Independence, rural Mexicans had demanded admittance to the nation as citizens based upon their own blood sacrifices offered during times of political turmoil.72 The 1910 revolution altered the terms of this negotiation significantly. True, the state now recognized the "rights" of campesinos to land as a result of their sacrifices made during the civil war. The right to land, however, did not come without obligation. Land represented not only payment for past sacrifices but also carried with it the future obligation to modernize and expand agricultural production, as well as to defend the regime in times of turmoil. In this sense, the civil war and land reform gave birth to a host of new duties for Mexicans. One such obligation was to provide data. It was the duty of all Mexicans to relate the honest and abundant details of their lives to state representatives.The agronomists used statistics and their collection to help transform campesinos' sense of national identity. Ramón Corral Soto called upon data collectors to include "historical and ethnographic" information that would allow state representatives to discern "the soul of the people," so that they might be not only "understood, esteemed, [and] valued," but also transformed. Corral Soto wanted to study the "traditions, customs, religion, and legends" of rural Mexicans so that agronomists could "form once and for all" a "national soul" that was "strong and indestructible."73 Through data collection, through the encounter that first sought to represent and then transform rural realities, the agronomists aimed to alter what it meant to be Mexican.Rural Mexicans challenged the agronomists' vision of national identity. Florencia Mallon argues that nationalism must be seen "as a broad vision for organizing society, a project for collective identity based on the premise of citizenship." She further suggests that "within such a broad vision there [is] much room for disagreement," in which "nationalism would become a series of competing discourses in constant formation and negotiation."74 By no means did campesinos agree or simply comply with the "duty" to provide their data to the state. Nor did they share the commitment to becoming the modern, technologically advanced farmers that agronomists imagined. As a result, the statistics themselves became points of negotiation between competing nationalisms, between competing visions of the rights and obligations of citizens in revolutionary Mexico.One example of such negotiation comes from San Pedro Mártir, a village located two miles south of Tlalpan in the Federal District.75 As a result of revolutionary violence, the village was destroyed, deserted, and remained unoccupied until peace had been reestablished. By May 1922, 550 people called San Pedro Mártir their home. At this time, the new Federal District extension agent, Manrique González, stumbled upon the pueblo while making his rounds. Over the following weeks, the regional agronomist made three trips to the village to explain his mission, which included the collection of precise population and production figures. In response, the villagers negotiated an exchange of sorts. As long as the regional agronomist agreed to help them solve their two most pressing problems — obtaining potable water and building a road to connect the village to the outside world — they would provide him with the desired data. With González promising "all of his professional help and moral support," San Pedro Mártir's residents, "enthusiastic with the hopes of achieving their goals of more than 150 years, volunteered their cooperation to retrieve more-or-less exact figures."76In the end, the need for data collection imagined by Mexican experts stemmed from international sources as well. By collecting data, the agronomists aimed to include the revolutionary nation "among the tru
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