 The Ecological Research Facility is located in Weichen, the ancestral and unceded territory of Chochenya-speaking Ohlone people. Successors of the historic Han Sovereign Gorona Band of Alameda County. We acknowledge that this land remains of great importance to the Ohlone people and that the ARF community, us, inherits a history of archeological scholarship that has disturbed Ohlone ancestors and made attempts to erase living Ohlone people from the present future of this land. And as therefore our collective responsibility to critically transform our archeological inheritance and practice in support of Ohlone sovereignty and to hold the University of California accountable to the needs of all Native and Indigenous people and people who are doing that work. And I encourage everyone listening to figure out what the relationship is to those kinds of work. So today it is my very great pleasure to introduce Mario Castillo presenting on his PhD research. This is our form of exit talk in our department, right? Doing his work in Mexico, Mario personifies the kind of community, kind of archaeology that we hope to teach here at this University. He comes to us, when he first came to us from Chicago, one of the people there who's famously sparing his praise of anybody, and I've worked for this guy, he said that Mario was one of the very best and he was absolutely right. He's done that work. You may have heard of some of these MacArthur geniuses and stuff, you know, who take a lot of the limelight, but it was Mario's work that made some of those MacArthur geniuses possible, right? And so the work he's going to talk about today is the kind of work that's been flexible, responsible, accountable to the community he's been working in, trying to deal with those curveballs that real world archaeologists deal with, but also in a way that prioritizes the things that community themselves have found really important, the kinds of things that might have stumbled and tripped up a lesser scholar. But for Mario, I think that you'll see that he's managed to not only take that ball and run with it, but really produce something important for us as a discipline, but also for the community with which he's partnered. So please help me in welcoming him back to the archaeological research community before he walks. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you, everyone. Thank you. So early in the program, I did an oral history project in Amalco Municipality in Southern Queretaro. It was in Barrio El Volte and Pueblo San Ilefonso Tultepec. In El Volte, I was based in Colonia 20 de Noviembre, a neighborhood literally inside the Pueblo's namesake Egido. While I was there, I found an abandoned mud brick building. It was said to be one of the Egido's first settlements. This building was the core of one of the farms set up in the mid 20th century after government granted an expropriated territory for an Egido. Well, I go back to the Egido and I survey and map the site with the permission of the owner and produce oral history about the Egido's formation. So here's what I know about the Egido's first settlements. The Egido was formed in 1930s, but it was settled between 1940 and 1960. Those who built farms had working capital to do so. So they set up farms near Oroio. So you see those little green boxes there. So their descendants settled in the Egido's higher elevations in the 80s and 90s when that first generation passed away. And farming continued, but those buildings were abandoned or demolished because they were mud brick buildings. So they were able to handle running water, electricity. So they were abandoned. So archaeology of land reform in the Egido pointed to a bigger problem that I wanted to explore in my dissertation. A problem I call the government-designated land problem. So this is a part of the thesis where I launched into complex theoretical arguments drawing on land rights theory, political economy. So basically the TLDR is the need to frame the study of land reform in archaeology from a more expensive analytic time frame. So basically stretching that green box up there down to this red box. And dissertation aimed to do just that. So although the problem that I theorized is expansive, I decided to take a very narrow chunk of that, which is liberal land reform, 19th century liberal land reform, and the role of haciendas in the pre-revolutionary countryside. So my approach was ethno-historical, combining archival research and oral history. So after rounds of negotiation, I was given access to Amalipus Archives where I reviewed the Presidential Collection boxes labeled 1900 to 1918. In Queretaro, I reviewed the Fomento Agraria Collection from 1915 to 1936. And my approach was to basically read sources for place names and determine how they fit within the land problem that I theorized. And then after that, I would digitize the source, include it in my database, and add keywords and notes. So the work produced an aggregated digital repository of 2,200 sources all related to the land problem. This included information on liberal land reform, case files on the privatization of municipal propios, and tieras de comun repartamento. It also included information on the pre-revolutionary economy and landscape, information on agricultural production and administration. So after that, oral history focused on ex-hacienda state communities. So I'm sending the phone so I got the indigenous side of land reform. And I wanted to balance that out with oral history and ex-haciendas. Particularly, I wanted to know what living descendants knew about their ancestors' reaction to land reform. So my approach was more conversational. First, I got permission from the municipal authority to be there. I sought out the oldest person in the place. I explained my topic and rationale, and if they were interested, I recorded an interview. If they weren't, I moved on. And so I always made a point to return for more conversation. So I talked to 23 individuals in eight different localities. Two localities were indigenous barrios. Six were in ex-hacienda state settlements. And all together, I produced about 35 hours of audio. So near the end of field work, I got collections from the Archiva Historico San Juan de Rio. And so the reason I was there is that I was producing oral history in these settlements up there, which were in the municipality. And so it made sense to research the archive on office. And so there I learned that they were going through a digitization initiative, so they no longer let researchers' original sources. But they offered researchers working copies of the work. So I got it through an onsite download of 600 plus PDF files. And so what I got was a full copy of Cabelo from 1600 to 1992. And then up to August 2019, copy of Presidencia from 1820 to 1940. So as you can see, there was a lot. So this blue bar here is what I did in months of research. And that's what I got. So as you can see, orders of magnitude more. So I'm back in Berkeley. In the next slides, I'm going to talk about my post-field work concept analysis methods. So the first thing was the AHSJR digital repository. So what I got from the archive were just a bunch of PDF files with no finding. And so when you look at a PDF file, it looked like the archive had digitized things in the order they came in our couple boxes. So a group of apprentices and I reviewed each PDF file for groups. And we found about 2700 groups. And that essentially became our ad fox finding aid. We performed OCR on the collection, keeping results that were above 85%. And that was the basis of another file maker database. So we're having technology issues here. So I'll show that database at the end of the presentation. So then after was a transcription of oral history interviews. So they were transcribed either by myself or by apprentices. And also we utilize the Google voice API and with a post-correction. I also included interviews from other researchers in Kinecto. So in Kinecto, there's a really, really rich corpus of oral history interviews from ex-Hacienda settlements. And so I thought it was useful to include that because I talked to people's descendants and they actually talked to people that experienced it themselves. So that was a great way to balance the interviews. So the creation of maps was very central to my analysis. And this is basically the generalized diagram of the data that I used. I used a lot of government data. I also used HGIS for colonial stuff, historic maps, published maps, and all this was the basis for derivative vector and raster layers. So one of the last analysis that I did was environmental modeling using the universal soil loss equation and net logo. So the rationale behind this is that I had digitized a collection of property titles from the Pueblos of Amalco. But the maps that they used, you can locate them in geographic space. But these titles indicated general direction from the level. So that's why I decided to do this modeling. And I implemented in net logo. So most archaeologists think of net logo as more agent-based models. This is more deterministic. And so what made this possible was the Mexican drought atlas, which had fine grain information for Amalco. So now I'm going to talk about the chapters that I wrote. And so I have shorthands for them. I call them the Dominguez chapter, the disentailment chapter, and the Hacienda chapter. And these chapters really track my work in Amalco. So the first chapter is about research that I did in the Ijido. And the other two were answers to my dissertation research question. And so the Dominguez chapter is really a history of corporate landholding in Amalco, in sorry, in Pueblos, San Jose, from the 16th century to the Mexican Revolution. So this history starts right after the conquest of Mexico when ancestors moved into the area that is now known as Amalco, which was teacher-mc territory, upon learning of the devastation in Mexico. So those are the green arrows there. And the yellow arrows are entradas at the Spanish state after a decade. So by the 16th century, the area was no longer frontier. And the Pueblos of Amalco municipalities start to form, including San Iida Fonsal. So there's an interesting story about San Iida Fonsal that it was first settled nearby its first church Iglesa Vieja, which was never completed, because ancestors were resettled to a puco in the 17th century. But that church looked like a church. And so ancestors were able to kind of retain possession of the territory nearby. Essentially, what I argue in my dissertation is that this church created the conditions for large territorial consolidation. And so you can see here by the late 18th century, that consolidation was extensive. That's that gray area there. And so a lot of scholars argue that it was big because of the poor quality of the land. And I think that's true. But I also argue that there was a unique jurisdictional situation with the Pueblo. So this is purple, purple circle here. That was its church jurisdiction. And so these are the Pueblos. They went to Amalco to deal with stuff like marriage, baptism. But things that dealt with land, they went to Uichapa. And so that was also a major factor in the large territorial consolidation. So as Etho-Historians know, one's elevated to a buccalina. It's being a Cabeceras not that far along. And so that's what happened to Amalco. And during the War of Independence, the garrison commander of San Juan de Río was ordered by the then viceroy to annex towns to Amalco. So that is how Pueblos-Condizafonso became part of Greta-Tepo. So this was a very consequential decision because during the 19th century as Greta-Tepo settled its boundaries in Mexico State, each jurisdictional demarcation tended to split off pieces of land from the Pueblo. And so by the time Pedro Dominguez is born, which is this chapter is named after, we can see that the Pueblo has a big landhold. But on closer look, we see that only a fraction of the population is able to scratch out a living on the territory. And so for life, Pedro Dominguez was defined by subsistence and security and modernity. Here, this is a quote from their grandson saying that life early on was characterized by poor harvest and economic opportunities outside the Pueblo. And so venturing outside the Pueblo helped the Pueblo learn how to adapt to new economic conditions. So here you see more optimal cattle and sheep livestock ratios as time went on and engagement in commercial charcoal production. So we get along to land reform and agrarian agents go to the Pueblo. And they see a Pueblo that doesn't fit their model of an indigenous community. And so this was very important because it was a major factor in the denial of their restitution claims. They didn't look indigenous. They looked indigenous, but they acted more like mestizos. So the land granting phase comes along and so the Pueblo gets another chance. And it was people like Pedro Dominguez well to do farmers, people that clearly did not need land that stepped up and helped their community achieve that little sliver of land that I did my research on. So that's the Dominguez chapter. So the next chapter focuses on disentailment. And I split the chapter in two parts. Essentially I talk about disentailment before 1867 and afterwards. So before 1867 to privatize a piece of corporate land holding, you needed to sell it. There's no way to get private property title. You needed to engage in a private real estate transaction. And so there's evidence that I'm out for this happened, but a portion of the corporate property persisted. So after the restored republic, disentailment was really defined by the resurgence of posthumous and the application of federal disentailment mandates would kind of split what disentailment of the process between the headtown and the Pueblo surrounding. So for the headtown disentailing their municipal properties was meant to comply with the federal ban on owning most kinds of real estate. And what they did is they directed the proceeds to fix capital assets like irrigation. As in the case here of Yanar Largo. So Yanar Largo was a large contiguous track of territory that the municipality sold off to fund the construction of a dam in the district. And so after this irrigation piece was a major line item in the municipal treasury. The case of LDL shows how the process could be derailed. So in contrast to Yanar Largo, disentailment was a small plot of land at the center of the headtown's urban fore. And so the case file I digitized documents three failed attempts to privatize this property. And every time the issue came up was possession versus ownership. So it appears that the parcel was a bank it and the municipality just merely asserted ownership of it, but they never got around to issuing a legal title. So every time they moved to sell it, they couldn't. And this is one of the ironies of liberal land reform because the small piece of parcel that municipal ancestors thought would make the street look ugly and they wanted to sell it off. It still belongs to the municipality. Today it's known as Harping Hidalgo. So for the Pueblos outside the headtown, disentailment was defined by the April 20th of 1870 amendments which issued prefects to value and issue titles to community members that had possessions less than 200 pesos. And so while I was in the map, I digitized 240 property titles that resulted from this process. And so what I say in my dissertation is this is not a complete representation of the process. Obviously, limits from my research restricted digitization of more titles, but what I say is that there is enough variation here to treat these titles as artifacts of a particular process, so basically ideal for seriation. And so this is an example of a title. And so there's common elements there that you can just make a basic simple table and track changes over time. And so from this analysis, I show that disentailment happened in two phases, in beginning in San Miguel de Te in 1888 and then being rolled out to the other prebles in 1897. And so the process was streamlined over time and overall participation in disentailment was meant for secure land tenure. So by this time the corporate property regime was kind of on the way out. It became more advantageous to secure private title to your possession and then keep it within the corporate regime. And so there are sharp differences between how it happened in prebles. So here we have San Miguel de Te and you can see that possessions are highly ranked and half the people that disentail had more than one parcel. And so this this this polar chart here counts the direction of the parcel developed to the center of the town. And this polar chart here is erosion estimates. So you can see that most of the disentail parcels were in areas that had very little erosion potential. So one of the reasons why they're so ranked is because you can see San Miguel de Te is well connected on the road to regional markets and to the head top. In comparison, San Pedro de Nango possessions are more equal. People had either one or two parcels to disentail, never more than four. And erosion potential is kind of more distributed around the the Pueblo. And so that kind of explains why the parcels were very small because they're usually located in the small ravines in places where where yearly deposits of sediments can be directed for agriculture. So that that was the disentail in the chapter. So the last chapter really deals with what's been underlying this whole dissertation. This idea that before the revolution, I'm out who was engaged in a very dynamic capital accumulating system that was led by Hacienda. And this idea derived by Simon Miller, a anthropologist that studied Hacienda's in Guerrero during the 80s. And he argued that Haciendas were internally integrated, well organized, and highly profitable production units. And that when the revolution came along, and with land reform, that this system of a political economy had achieved legitimacy in the countryside. And that kind of that that's kind of a provocative assumption, because most of Mexico's story about land reform is about how Hacienda's created immense inequality. And so it was provocative when it came out, but in Guerrero it makes sense. There was no assault on land and property during the revolution in Guerrero. And there's a well known resistance to land grants in the ex-Hacienda community. So it's a provocative assumption, but it makes sense. So what I do in this chapter is talk about how Hacienda's work capital is in and on the alcohol. And I focused on its largest Hacienda, which is San Nicolás de la Foc. So this is its ruin. And if you ever go there, you'll notice that it's a lot different than the other ruins along the Hacienda roadway. It's bigger. It's more labyrinthian. And it was really the center of a vast farm and non-farm operation. So the core of its operations was agriculture. And that was made possible by the construction of birth and dams. And so the Hacienda split its agriculture into different districts called Hacales. And so you see here, these are geo-reference maps of the different farming districts that it had. So think of the Hacienda as these Hacales as little Hacienda, with a little larger Hacienda. So at the center of each Hacala was this big house where equipment, product, and all the things were stored. So one of the persons I interviewed in Latóvar, owns this Hacala. And so we worked around the property. And they would show me where the thrashing machines were, where animals were kept. And the tracks of private rail lines that the Hacienda had developed to shuttle people, commodities, to the regional markets. So this was a hustling and bustling place, a big industrial farming operation. And so its railroad was in San Pablo. And it branched off from the main Mexican rail line to San Pablo, which was the center of its logging operations. And so this railroad was built in 1860, 1896. And it ran on two foot gauge track. And its locomotives were from the Baldwin Local Motor Works Corporation out of Pennsylvania. So it started transferring, transferring bulk commodities in 1896 and passengers the year later. So by 1900, we see that the estate is the largest population in the municipality, far bigger than the head town. And it was capable of enormous output. It dominated the wheat market. And it produced a lot of maize and a lot of barley. So this is a table of its non-farm operation. So it ran a large non-farm operation, including dry goods retail, ironworks, meat packing, woodworking, logging, the only, the only industry not controlled by the Hacienda were textiles. And it had a whopping 18 horsepower of machinery. And so as you can see here, that although it was an engine of accumulation, it relied a lot on labor. And that was what managers were always, always complaining about the need for reliable workers. And so the Hacienda came up with ways to keep people at the estate, literally, from not going anywhere else. Taken on government functions, so they set up their own graveyard, you know, providing schools, getting doctors and issuing tons of credit. And this is not, this is not debt payment. This is either arrears, meaning that the, the Hacienda issue would issue IOUs to, to workers that the workers would use to pay for the things. And so they had a vibrant credit system. And of course, you know, discipline, if you got to align, you'd be out of jail. So what I argue is that what made Hacienda's legitimate in the pre-revolutionary countryside is that they kind of function like jurisdictions within another jurisdiction. The, the kind of accumulation that they're able to, to get, allowed them to absorb unfunded government endings to respond to the demand of labor, to provision competitors. So farmers around the Hacienda didn't have to go far to get equipment, to get fodder, to get all sorts of things to, to accumulate. It was a remarkably stable place, you know, and I'm kind of painting in a kind of bucolic image, but it wasn't a good place to work, you know, from our perspective. But it was incredibly stable comparison to the peoples beyond the municipality, which were rife with conflict, with administrative instability, because they weren't able to absorb these government-issued mandates like the Hacienda's were. So to conclude, archaeology of Lanham from where this is all started. Anybody know what this is? So these are all the sites William Sanders, Jeff Parsons, and their colleagues located in the base of Mexico between 1955 and 1975. And so this is famous, this is famous work in Mesoamerican archaeology. And if you look at their monographs, you know, social property, sometimes things comes up for not a lot. Because this is, this is the map we typically get to see. And this is the map I want you to see. Notice that there is, this is social property, this green polygon here. Notice how there is a non-trivial, more than a non-trivial association between the sites. Sanders, Parsons located, and the social property sector. And we can see that at least one and out of every two sites was on social property by the time it was studied. And this is a very conservative estimate. Notice that you see kind of more linear lines here. Those are won't flow and, and Sanders actually obscured the location of sites. So there's probably actually more sites located on social property. And so during that time, Sanders talked to some ahida carios. And they said something I, I think I thought it was very interesting. They said between 1940 and 1053, which is a typo, 1953, things were generally bad, that, you know, harvest were pretty crap. And that's how I kind of conclude by my dissertation, saying that, you know, when government basically destroyed this economy on landed property, it provided an alternative. And it left people to basically pick up the pieces of a new agrarian regime. And how they did it, how they settled social property was largely under capitalized and under developed. And that's something that archaeologists have been taking advantage of for a long time. I already talked about Sanders, but there are scores of ethnoarchaeologists that would go to the countryside and, you know, use the underdeveloped social property as, you know, the place to think through ancient Mesoamerican life ways. And now that this phenomenon has become archaeological, I think it's we're in a position to tell the descendants of social property holders how their ancestors made due in the new regime. So a lot of people and a lot of agencies made this work possible. First of all, I'd like to thank my committee, June, thank you. I know at times I could have been a, a mercurial advisee. And so I really appreciate the latitude you gave me to develop this work. I'd also like to thank Professor Joyce, a font of information about Hacienda, UC Berkeley, and its vast apparatus. And Professor Laura Enriquez for coming in at a very opportune time. I'd also like to thank community partners at, at Sunday the Fonso. The government officials that led me into their archives and San Juan de Río and Amalco, you, you are participants that helped, helped me analyze this data and various funding agencies that made this work possible. So I'll take your questions if you have. Oh yeah, it was. Well, first of all, they weren't, they're, they're the, the Hacienda was higher, higher, hierarchical. And so the, at Alessore, they had a resident workforce, but they also had gangs of laborers that they would draw from the countryside around them. And so they had different obligations and so wage labor, you know, they got, they worked from sun up to sundown, got paid 35 cents and a ration. You know, the people inside the resident laborers got a little bit more benefits. But you know, I caution kind of projecting our kind of ways of thinking about labor in the past, because you know, you know, it's grueling work, no doubt. It was grueling work, but it was, it was stable work. And it was work. And so what scholars argue is that the, kind of quality of life increased, not because laborers got better pay is because the Hacienda was organized in such a way that there was more opportunities to work. So people were working more and earning the same, but, but devote more hours to it as compared to outside the Hacienda. Yeah. Yeah. Thinking about the gloss over it. I was thinking about, you know, to showing folks how these captains, you know, talking to people that are being more or less indigenous and whether or not they recognize themselves, right? And we very much recognize that in the U.S. as well. Right. So those, some of those captains are going to see you talking about things like irradiation systems, right? Can you walk us through a little bit more like that, where you, the irradiation system themselves or something else that's kind of, that somehow relates to some of these things, whether or not somebody is more or less indigenous or more or less entitled to the benefits of originating within that system. Well, that's an interesting question. And it brings me back to suddenly the phone source, a community that, that is, you know, indigenous, but, but because of, because of, you know, the history of dispossession in the 19th century, things that happened, generations before the ancestors of community partners were born, that kind of set them towards a, I used to call it path dependency. And it really defined what life was like before the revolution for them. And so, you know, it was, it was, it was a cultivation. Essentially, they were set up in a way that took culture a lot faster than the other peoples. And so, and so, you know, they, they had very legitimate claims because they had consolidated large territorial possessions, but, but, you know, politics and, and, you know, state politics and the high politics, I guess you want to call it a government kind of foreclose any opportunities for them to get, I get what they had lost in generations before then. So, so, you know, going back to your question, it just, you know, they, they ever just acculturated a lot, a lot faster than other, other peoples. I guess, you know, actually, the irrigation system had a visible thing. Okay. Or the communities, numbers of states, right, either as an industry. And, you know, you don't have to do the same thing, right? Mm-hmm. Yeah, you raised an interesting point. I don't think, I don't think I'm able to answer that right now, but, you know, we should, we should definitely talk about that because, you know, it's something that, that, you know, that's a really good problem that I haven't thought through yet. Yeah. A little bit, a little bit. Not, I'm not quite, I'm not quite well versed in, in that Gordon Willie's work, right, in the Vero Valley, but, you know, they took, Sanders and colleagues took a lot of inspiration from that. And so what I'm trying to point out is, you know, they weren't interested in land reform. And so you can't fault them for not studying it explicitly, you know what I mean? But they, they used it to think through problems that they had. And so now we're at a position where, where that stuff is sufficiently archaeological that we could use it and study it as an object phenomenon itself. Yeah, yeah, sure. Well, Well, what I'm trying to say is that, you know, as, you know, they went with a, with a state permit. And so, you know, the state had really defined this social property. So it was a lot, entree was a lot easier, imagine. Yeah, yeah. But, you know, there, there's also small private property, which, you know, perhaps they can go in there. So that's it. So it is a sample. Yeah. Spatial, even though they called it what I said. Yeah. Yeah. And you're saying, yeah, 100% social. Basically, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Clearly, they couldn't be the perfect center, right? Right. Yeah. Yeah. So I just thought I thought it was interesting point that archaeologists have actually been studying social property much longer than others realize. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you.