Abstract
Social life in Mexico’s state of Michoacán is consumed by a crisis of violence. Foregrounding critical planning, this paper presents a grounded local history of the municipality of Tancítaro, Michoacán, which has the largest concentration of avocado production globally. It analyzes violence in Tancítaro in light of the production of space, uneven development, and the spatial politics of land. The distinctive type of Hass avocados that Americans love requires unique and rare agro-ecological conditions, present in a small number of places like Tancítaro and Michoacán’s Tierra Caliente. The story of violence in Tancítaro speaks to politics, culture, and terroir, and specifically the role of scarcity and economic control in shaping dynamics of violence, even within nominally licit commodity chains. This quantitative and archival research, coupled with theoretical explanations on violence, suggests that considerations of crises and planning require situated analyses with ethnographic methods and embedded fieldwork that cross geographic scales and disciplinary boundaries as they foreground perspectives of affected community residents.
Presenters
Stefan NorgaardStudent, PhD in Urban Planning, Columbia University, New York, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Violence, Mexico, Liberalization, Commodity Chains, Political Ecology, Production of Space
