The archive in the field: document, discourse, and space in Mexico's agrarian reform

The Other Green Revolution: Land Epistemologies and the Mexican Revolutionary State

“…As Craib has argued in the case of post‐Revolutionary village land claims, the “precarious legitimacy” of the post‐Revolutionary state drew in no small part on the cultivation of new modes of understanding contested resources. “The process of creating knowledge”, he writes, “intersected with the process of creating the state and, conversely, the practices of rule intersected and shaped how knowledge was produced and used” (Craib :417). The resulting techniques of knowledge production were simultaneously practical and theoretical.…”

“…Long lauded for its relative progressivism, Cardenismo has also come under fire for its practical and ideological failures to achieve its early professed goals. Even so, especially in the area of agrarian reform, the degree to which those goals were achieved is reflective of active and ongoing claims made on the state by rural and working peoples (Cotter ; Craib ). While conceding Cardenismo ’s limitations, this article is concerned with the ways that popular demands succeeded—albeit with contingencies—in reshaping key expert understandings in periods of social transition.…”

The becoming of ancestral land: Place and property in Mapuche land claims

“…Indigenous land programs often lead to the formation of territorial constructs that are at odds with local modes of land use (Fay and James ; Nadasdy ; Wainwright and Bryan ). In Latin America, indigenous land reforms have created administrative units, such as ejidos in Mexico (Craib :413; Nujten :45) and comunidades campesinas in Peru (Nujten and Lorenzo ), where indigenous identity has been dissolved in favor of a rural national identity. The allocation of land grants also shifts the discursive focus from restitution to endowment, allowing the state to co‐opt the rural indigenous population by portraying itself as a donor to which indigenous people should be grateful (Nugent and Alonso :238).…”

Environmental Justice, Environmentalism, and Environmental History in Twentieth‐Century Latin America

“…For instance, Raymond Craib's recent essay, ''The Archive in the Field'' uses a close reading of land petitions in Veracruz, Mexico to illustrate how a historian's consideration of land's varied functions can reveal how villagers engaged in the social production of space themselves. 45 While Craib doesn't explicitly invoke the lens of environmental history or environmental justice, his analysis highlights varied interpretations of the land -a neither static nor self-evident entity -and thus pushes forward our understanding of the past. This classic area of historical research, the conjunction of land and revolution, remains suggestive but surprisingly underdeveloped when it comes to issues of environmental justice.…”