Interpreting spatial struggles in the historical record: Indigenous urbanism and erasure in 20th-century Mexico

Abstract

This article explores a historical struggle for a right to the city in Oaxaca, Mexico, when a mostly Indigenous-run street market resisted an elite-led urban renewal campaign centered on removing the market from city center. Bringing this case of Indigenous urbanism from Latin America in conversation with work on Indigenous productions of space and the settler colonial city mainly produced in Anglophone contexts, it demonstrates the utility of concepts central to settler colonial theory “dispossession and erasure” for the Latin American urban context. It does so through an exploration of the possibilities and limitations of discourse analysis as an interpretive strategy for uncovering the racial dynamics of such socio-spatial struggles using state archives in Mexico during a time period for which racial identifiers were rarely used. The article shows the dispossession of Indigenous lands and lifeways as not only foundational to the colonial city but also ongoing, produced through different mechanisms in different historical moments. At the same time, by foregrounding an Indigenous struggle against peripheralization and erasure, the project is shown to be perpetually incomplete.