Casey Walsh

Water infrastructures in the U.S./Mexico borderlands

This article discusses the infrastructures involved in the management and use of water in the borderlands of Mexico and the United States. I maintain that both the physical works and the institutions of water management should be understood as infrastructures, and locate infrastructures within larger political and economic processes. Archaeological, historical and ethnographic literature on irrigation in the borderlands provides data about the evolution and functioning of small- and large-scale infrastructures. Since European contact, water infrastructures have enabled different regimes of accumulation to grow, overlap and decline: mining; ranching; agriculture; urbanization and industry; and the service economy. This process continues into the twenty first century, and changes to infrastructures that respond to current issues of scarcity and conflict must be understood in relation to this material history. I argue that in the present conjuncture new infrastructures must be developed to confront unsustainability, and the management and knowledge of these must be decentralized, democratic, and collective.

Racial and Ethnic Identities in Mexican Statistics

Statistics, generated by censuses, represent knowledge of society and environment used in the government of complex hierarchical societies. In this article we discuss the changing ways that censuses have reflected and constructed corporeal and cultural difference in Mexico. We show that shifts in conceptualizing and identifying racial and ethnic groups in Mexico are associated with larger social dynamics, and our history of these determinations is organized according to a series of periods—colonial, mercantile; Porfirian; revolutionary; and neoliberal—that chart changes in political economy as well as shifts in census categories and statistical tools. Second, we point out a shift in the representational technologies of statistics from encyclopedic forms to enumerative forms that occurred in Mexico in the last decades of the nineteenth century. We trace categories of difference across the transition from encyclopedic to enumerative statistics and also describe a shifting balance in the content of those categories among linguistic, cultural and corporeal qualities.

Working Women into the Borderlands

Book Reviews Katherine Hayes University of Minnesota Minneapolis, Minnesota doi: 10.1093/jahist/jav066 Working Women into the Borderlands. By So- nia Hernandez. (College Station: Texas AM John Mason Hart, Revolutionary Mexico, 1987; Ma- rio Cerutti, Burguesia, capitales, e industria en el norte de Mexico [Bourgeoisie, capital, and in- dustry in northern Mexico], 1983). Hernan- dez continues this research project, present- ing new data on land concentration in Nuevo Leon and Tamaulipas in the hands of Mexican and U.S. elites during the presidency of Por- fi rio Diaz, with its resulting proletarianization, labor abuses, and revolutionary foment. Second, as the title signals, her book recov- ers the half or more of this regional history that has, incredibly, gone almost untold until now: the history of women and gender. Hernan- dez commands the literature on the topic for Mexico, and she has worked dozens of ar- chives and libraries to piece together a com- pelling story about the participation of women in light industries such as ixtle processing and cigar making, their radical labor activism, and their eventual subjection to a patriarchal labor movement co-opted by the postrevolutionary state. Th is research forces us to question the image of a Mexican North characterized by heavy industry (steel and glass), high wages, and “white” unions sponsored by responsible companies for the benefi t of their workers. Th ird, the dynamics of gender intersect with those of race and class in constituting the subject positions and experiences of the women in the book. Hernandez shows great sensitivity to these cultural issues and also to the discourse and rhetoric of protest. Fourth, Working Women is notable for the seriousness and respect with which it engages the work of Mexican historians, and the book features the regional scale and attention to detail of those Downloaded from http://jah.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of California, Santa Barbara on September 15, 2015 and, importantly, churches active in the move- ment, such as African Methodist Episcopal, African Baptist, Quaker, and Presbyterian. Th e second section focuses on the geography of the Underground Railroad, drawing attention to the features such as waterways, caves, hous- es, iron furnaces, and transportation systems that may be regarded as silent witnesses to the movement. Contrasting these static locations, LaRoche then turns to the ways migration and movement through places have defi ned Afri- can American historical experience. Th e third section explores the social components con- necting places and migration: the black fam- ily, free black communities, black social orga- nizations and societies, and black churches. While giving credit to the eff ort and sacrifi ces of white abolitionists, LaRoche seeks to fore- ground the integral yet underrepresented roles of free African Americans in the movement. Th roughout her examples and descriptive mapping of networks, the author is making a critical point about the paradox in tracing a history of movements that by necessity were covert. We have short-changed the stretches of the Underground Railroad crossing over into “free” states (in reality quite dangerous still to the free black communities there), as we have short-changed the sources of history that re- mained in those localities. LaRoche provides poignant examples in the four case studies of how the dispersal of black communities from those locations, often due to ongoing racial hostilities, contributes to the loss of local his- tory. Her exhortation to attend to the remain- ing sites and stories is much appreciated.

Anthropology and the commodity form: The Philadelphia Commercial Museum

Anthropologists working in the political economy tradition have generated a sizeable amount of work that focuses on commodities. This article discusses approaches that focus on the form and structure of the commodity, in particular the work of Lukács, Sohn-Rethel and Benjamin, and uses them to examine the Philadelphia Commercial Museum, an institution where encyclopedic statistics and anthropology were especially conditioned by commodity relations. These authors help the anthropology of commodities to grasp both the relation between political economy and culture, and the influence of commodity on the discipline itself.